Retail Investors
- Total US market (not only Tesla specific)
- Retail moving out of single stocks
- Institutional options extremely long
- Confirms my analysis of last week
Vanda’s latest US equity positioning chart (below, Aug 14) is one of the cleaner signs I have ever seen.
Retail single stocks (excluding ETFs) are all the way down at a –4 z-score. That’s the most underweight they’ve been in years.
Retail is still extremely active, just net selling hard and getting a lot more selective instead of blindly buying everything.
Meanwhile the other side of the market, institutions, looks completely different: Systematics are net long, institutional options are the most long of the group, and CTAs (trend-following managed futures funds) are also solidly positive. L/S hedge funds are mildly short, but nothing dramatic.
So you’ve got retail dumping single names while the systematic and options crowd is leaning long. Retail isn’t abandoning equities overall — they’re just rotating harder and shifting more into ETFs. Extremes this big in one cohort usually end up mattering for flow dynamics over the next few weeks/months.