Markets
markets
Luke Kawa

Will retail traders’ option-fueled market stampede keep accelerating?

Retail traders had a great year because they bought the dip, stayed long AI stocks, rode momentum in precious metals, and took risky bets on speculative stocks that paid off.

Goldman Sachs’ baskets of retail favorites, high-beta momentum longs, and nonprofitable tech companies are all handily outpacing the S&P 500’s return year to date.

Retail trading activity is increasingly affecting how stocks trade on earnings releases and crowding institutional investors into their favorite stocks. It’s a force worth paying attention to.

The options market stands out as the place to go to monitor retail sentiment and desire to take risk. Call buying is a critical catalyst behind meme stock rallies and days when quantum computing companies go parabolic on absolutely zero news. The stock market can increasingly be viewed as a temperature check of companies whose long-term operational viability probably won’t be known for many years and whose near-term performance is governed by options with five days or fewer to expiration.

Obviously, not all calls are bought to open; many are sold as part of income-generating strategies. But you’d be hard-pressed to look at trends in call volumes and not see obvious parallels to the period that ran from the end of the pandemic-induced bear market to peak SPAC/GameStop in 2021. This was a stretch where speculative appetite was palpable, bankrolled by stimmies and inspired by Covid limiting most of everything else we’d want to do. We’re in the midst of a multiyear stretch of similar intensity.

So following this chart of median daily call volumes traded across US exchanges over the past three months will likely help answer a ton of questions, while raising others along the way:

Is the boom in speculative stocks still going strong?

If call activity is going down and key US stock indexes still go up, are retail traders really that important after all?

Are other opportunities for speculation (such as prediction markets) cannibalizing options activity?


Caveat: the increased availability of S&P index options, spreading to platforms like Robinhood, has definitely contributed to this boom, particularly for options with zero days to expiry.

(Robinhood Markets Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company subject to certain legal and regulatory restrictions.)

More Markets

See all Markets
markets
Luke Kawa

POET Technologies surges after $50 million purchase order to launch partnership for new AI infrastructure

Shares of POET Technologies are soaring in premarket trading after the company announced a $50 million initial purchase order as part of a joint venture with Lumilens to develop new AI infrastructure.

Specifically, the two parties are aiming to deliver chip-level components that can speed the flow of information by translating electrical signals into photonics (and vice versa) — an Electrical-Optical Interposer.

The target audience is clear:

“Engineering samples from this joint development program are expected in late 2026, with production ramp aligned to hyperscaler customer deployments in 2027,” per the press release.

This initial order could scale to more than $500 million in cumulative purchases over five years, and also sees the privately-held photonics company Lumilens receive warrants that expire in nine years with an exercise price of $8.25 per share to purchase up to 22.9 million shares of POET, with roughly 2.3 million exercisable based on the initial order.

This pact helps reverse the damage to POET's order book from Marvell’s recent cancelation, in which the chip and networking company cited a breach of confidentiality in terminating its (inherited) agreement with POET.

Shortly before that notice, POET CFO Thomas Mika had told Stocktwits TV that the company was a supplier to Marvell.

The orders announced today are contingent on the successful development of these offerings and the ability to manufacture them at scale.

“Honestly, technology doesn’t mean anything unless you can manufacture it,” POET Executive Chairman and CEO Dr. Suresh Venkatesan told Sherwood News during an interview in Q4. “So our focus really this year has been to cross that last hurdle of ensuring that the technology that we’re developing is truly manufacturable at scale and at wafer scale.”

markets
Claire Yubin Oh

Marvell rises after strong Cisco earnings and price target hikes from Bank of America and Goldman Sachs analysts

Marvell Technology is enjoying another bump in its stock in early trading on Thursday following a series of target hikes from Wall Street analysts and strong readacross from Cisco, which is surging after reporting an earnings beat and a boost to guidance.

Ahead of its Q1 2027 earnings, expected to be released on May 27, Bank of America’s Vivek Arya raised the chipmaker’s price target to $200, from $125, while maintaining a Buy rating on Wednesday. Calling the chipmaker a “top pick,” Arya highlighted the growing potential of AI data center’s total addressable market, or future market size, as well as the role of AI networking — the hardware that powers data transfers between chips, optical components, and servers, which MRVL specializes in, and has been bringing in deals from big clients like Nvidia — in that expansion.

Goldman Sachs analysts took a more cautious stance on a Wednesday note, sticking to its Neutral rating despite bumping its 12-month price target to $125, from $100 previously, as well as hiking its FY27/28 EPS estimates by 5%. The analysts, led by James Schneider, expect “upside to Marvell's Datacenter business driven by higher hyperscaler CapEx, upside in its optical networking business, and a potential new Google partnership,” whilst noting the potential risk in a slowdown in overall AI spending, or the loss market share in custom compute, as reasons for the overall neutral rating.

MRVL is rated as Buy by 86% of the 50 Wall Street analyst recommendations compiled by Bloomberg, with the remaining 7 analysts rating it as Hold. Late Tuesday. Advanced Micro Devices disclosed that it had increased its small stake in Marvell, worth ~$6.5 million at the end of March, in a quarterly filing.

Elsewhere, Cisco jumped on a solid earnings beat and better-than-expected guidance. Both Cisco and Marvell are exposed to the network fabric around AI compute and the data center buildout, but Marvell focuses more on custom chips, while Cisco is exposed to the buildout of switching and routing for AI/GPU cluster networks.

markets
David Crowther

Micron has unseated Nvidia and Tesla as the market’s most heavily traded stock

The breathless rally in memory stocks, driven by optimism about the magnitude and longevity of the data center buildout creating a continued supply crunch across the AI supply chain, has put Micron within spitting distance of the $1 trillion market cap mark and given Sandisk a shot at doing something remarkable — topping the S&P 500 two years in a row.

It’s also reshaped where liquidity is deepest on Wall Street, with MU having taken the place of Nvidia as the most-traded stock, while Sandisk, despite being a fraction of the size, isn't far behind.

Technically, Micron’s daily volumes first exceeded Nvidia’s in a single session back on March 19th, but one session isn’t really conclusive evidence to crown Micron king. However, over the last 9 trading days, Micron’s volumes have eclipsed Nvidia’s on 6 of them — and the rolling 5-day average of their turnover now shows clear daylight between the two, with $47 billion changing hands in Micron, compared to just $34 billion in Nvidia, per data from Bloomberg.

Sandisk — which, with a market cap of close to $200 billion, really has little business being in the conversation — is also picking up heat. The stock’s turnover even briefly surpassed that of Tesla, which swapped the crown back-and-forth with Nvidia for much of 2025.

Indeed, when compared to its peers of a similar size (members of the S&P 500 with a market cap less than $250 billion), Sandisk is quite the exception. The company is turning over more than 10% of its market cap on most trading days. The only stock that comes anywhere close to that level is Lumentum, another AI winner.

markets
Hyunsoo Rim

Nvidia rises on report that the US has cleared H200 chip sales in China for 10 firms, Foxconn's profit beat adds to the optimism

Nvidia rose ~2% in premarket trading Thursday after two early-morning developments added to optimism around the chipmaker’s AI business: a report that the US has cleared H200 chip sales to around 10 Chinese firms, and a profit beat from its key server partner Hon Hai (also known as Foxconn).

Read more

Exclusive: US clears H200 chip sales to 10 China firms as Nvidia CEO looks for breakthrough

Exclusive: US clears H200 chip sales to 10 China firms as Nvidia CEO looks for breakthrough
markets
J. Edward Moreno

Doximity sinks on gloomy full-year revenue outlook, says AI compute costs are weighing on margins

Doximity plunged in premarket trading after it reported quarterly earnings results that missed Wall Street expectations and gave a disappointing full-year outlook as high AI costs weigh on margins.

For its fiscal Q4 2026, which represents the first three months of this year, the company reported adjusted earnings per share of $0.26, below the $0.28 analysts polled by FactSet were penciling in. Doximity said the profit miss was “driven by AI compute costs.”

And those higher AI costs will follow them into the current fiscal year, which ends next March. For FY 2027, it expects adjusted EBITDA to hit between $323 million and $335 million, lower than the $349.5 million analysts were expecting. Doximity expects FY 2027 revenue to come in between $664 million and $676 million — also below the $682 million that analysts had forecasted.

Doximity, which makes digital tools for healthcare professionals, is building AI products for tasks like medical scribing. Last year, Doximity acquired Pathway Medical, a medical AI startup, for $63 million “and now we're spending against the opportunity it unlocked,” CEO Jeffrey A. Tangney told analysts.

Tangney said the company has “forecasted minimal AI revenue contribution this fiscal year, while allowing for a wider range of AI investments and related expenses, meaning higher R&D, compute and marketing spend, that will weigh on near-term margins.”

“We think that's the right trade,” Tangney said. “This is our AI investment year.”

Latest Stories

Sherwood Media, LLC and Chartr Limited produce fresh and unique perspectives on topical financial news and are fully owned subsidiaries of Robinhood Markets, Inc., and any views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of any other Robinhood affiliate, including Robinhood Markets, Inc., Robinhood Financial LLC, Robinhood Securities, LLC, Robinhood Crypto, LLC, Robinhood Money, LLC, Robinhood U.K. Ltd, Robinhood Derivatives, LLC, Robinhood Gold, LLC, Robinhood Asset Management, LLC, Robinhood Credit, Inc., Robinhood Ventures DE, LLC and, where applicable, its managed investment vehicles.
©2026 Sherwood Media, LLC