It’s a day of reckoning for the stock market’s retail favorites and speculative high flyers

Not content with generating money through digital assets, BitMine Immersion Technologies is also attempting to cash in on another largely incorporeal industry: the attention spans of young people.

The ethereum treasury company announced a $200 million equity investment into Beast Industries, the holding company for the various ventures of YouTube star Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast. While most of these operations revolve around digital content, we’d be remiss not to note that this also includes Feastables.

“MrBeast and Beast Industries, in our view, is the leading content creator of our generation, with a reach and engagement unmatched with GenZ, GenAlpha and Millennials,” said BitMine Chairman Tom Lee. “Beast Industries is the largest and most innovative creator based platform in the world and our corporate and personal values are strongly aligned.”

Beast Industries CEO Jeff Housenbold added that the company was looking forward to “exploring ways to further collaborate and incorporate DeFi into our upcoming financial services platform.”

However, in my personal view this is hardly the most eye-catching collaboration MrBeast has been involved with in the past 24 hours...

“This past week was exceptional for retail, sustaining the momentum from earlier this year,” writes JPMorgan strategist Arun Jain of the period ended January 14. “Retail investors bought $12.0B in cash equities — the largest weekly inflow since the post Liberation Day V-shape recovery. ETF activity was steady and strong at $7.1B, but notably, retail purchases of single stocks surged to their highest level in nearly 9 months” at $4.9 billion.

Among those single stocks, the Magnificent 7 (ex Apple) got a lot of love, accounting for a little more than one-third of inflows, led by Nvidia and Tesla. The iPhone maker, on the other hand, saw an exodus of about $185 million. Year to date, however, the Mag 7 is negative, lagging the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100.

Tech stocks excluding Magnificent 7 stocks also enjoyed elevated buying activity.

Per Jain, trends from the past five years suggest retail traders’ appetite for stocks should stay robust for about another month.

The underperformance of bitcoin versus gold and other speculative assets last year was a head-scratcher.

However, bitcoin’s strong start to 2026 leaves it well positioned for a potential catch-up trade with soaring precious metals, according to Brent Donnelly, president of Spectra Markets — so long as the crypto asset is able to break through near-term resistance levels that loom.

The shaded area in the below chart shows “an important series of supports that I had focused on back in the summer of 2025 and again in November 2025. The level broke somewhat cleanly and we have not been back above since,” he wrote in a note to clients on Wednesday. “Broken megasupports like that tend to become important resistance on the way back up so bears can get busy as we near the 98400/99400 zone, or bulls can add on a break of 100k. I would think a move through 100,000 would trigger a strong psychological response from the market given the laggy nature of bitcoin vs. gold, silver, and stocks.”

“In a world where there is a shortage of good places to park your money if you’re worried about counterparty risk, it makes sense that gold and silver would be rallying,” he concluded. “Then again, it would have made sense that bitcoin would be rallying too, and it went straight down for the second half of 2025.”