Musk-Trump feud triggers wave of retail dip-buying

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.

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.