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Tesla Musk Trump Feud Retail Dip Buying
The dip (Steve Russell/Getty Images)

Musk-Trump feud triggers wave of retail dip-buying

A wide range of retail favorites and meme-ish stocks soared Friday, as traders saw no reason for the dust-up between Elon Musk and Donald Trump to dissuade them from their favorite strategy.

Matt Phillips

Some of the most speculative parts of the stock market soared on Friday, as retail traders swamped the market in search of favorites beaten down by Thursday’s dust-up between Elon Musk and President Trump.

Unprofitable tech firms, crypto-adjacent stocks, retail faves, and meme standbys all outperformed broader indexes as everyman traders appeared to embrace a strategy they first adopted during the Covid market collapse of 2020.

Buy the dip!

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— Sandy Parker (@sandyparker.bsky.social) June 5, 2025 at 5:26 PM

Goldman Sachs’ themed “retail favorites” basket was up 2.1% shortly after 2 p.m. ET, outperforming the S&P and the Nasdaq. Large constituents like Tesla, Palantir, and Robinhood Markets posted impressive gains, but more speculative retail playthings like Rocket Lab, SoundHound AI, and IonQ did even better. (Sherwood News is an editorially independent subsidiary of Robinhood.)

Of course, it’s hard to say with absolute certainty that these gains are being driven solely by individual investors. Professional investors are also trading today.

But it would be consistent with the recent behavior of individual investors, who swallowed hard and snapped up shares of top stocks like Nvidia amid the market’s plunge in April, helping to both put a floor under prices and improve their lagging performance against the market.

For the record, despite their dedication to dip-buying, retail investors are still underperforming the market indexes, JPMorgan analysts say. In a note earlier this week, they estimated that retail portfolios were down 2.6% in 2025 through the end of May, while the S&P 500 had a gain of about 1% over that period.

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Robinhood Q4 revenue misses estimates, but earnings beat

Robinhood Markets posted fourth-quarter revenue that fell short of analysts’ estimates, but earnings topped Wall Street’s forecasts.

(Robinhood Markets Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company subject to certain legal and regulatory restrictions. I own Robinhood stock as part of my compensation.)

The stock, crypto, and options trading platform reported:

  • Q4 earnings per share of $0.66 vs. analysts’ consensus estimate of $0.63, according to FactSet.

  • Sales of $1.28 billion vs. expectations of $1.35 billion.

  • Transaction-based revenue of $776 million vs. expectations of $797.6 million. 

Shares of the company were down 5.4% shortly after the report.

Robinhood shares notched gains of 193% and 204% in 2024 and 2025, respectively, though they’ve recently given up some of those gains amid volatility in the crypto markets.

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The tech sector’s biggest winners and losers are swapping places

It’s bizarro world for the tech sector.

Software stocks, the market’s collective whipping boy in 2026 in light of the presumptive threat of AI disruption, are continuing to recover on Tuesday. Meanwhile, the biggest winners of the AI boom this year — memory stocks, benefiting from intense shortages — are taking their turn in the red.

The iShares Expanded Tech Software ETF’s gains are being led by Datadog, a rare case of a software stock rising after reporting earnings this season, with heavyweights Oracle and ServiceNow outperforming the industry. Figma, which isn’t in this product, is also up double digits.

On the other side of the spectrum, Micron, Sandisk, Seagate Technology Holdings, and Western Digital are selling off.

The seesaw of modern markets often requires that as one group’s fortunes inflect positively after a long drubbing, so too must a high-flyer have its wings clipped.

That is, if you’re a portfolio manager long memory and short software stocks, and enough investors are willing to catch a falling knife and buy the beaten-down group, staying market-neutral and reducing this position would require you to purchase software and dump some memory stocks.

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