Robinhood traders bought the dip — and that one, that one, and that one
Everyone wants to know what Robinhood traders are doing. Subscribe to EntryPoint to find out.
Main Street used to be desperate to know what professional portfolio managers and investors were buying.
But, since the retail revolution, the investing tables have turned; hedge funds now pay for signals about sentiment from everyday traders, investment banks track retail investor flows, and popular posts and memes on forums like Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets are pored over, dissected, and analyzed by MBAs and CFAs, while management teams make appeals — of varying quality and results — directly to the average joes.
Now, for the first time ever, Sherwood Media, an independent subsidiary of Robinhood Markets, Inc., is launching EntryPoint — a free newsletter that’ll be published every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday before the opening bell. Packed with market insights, macro themes mapped to micro ideas, technical signals, screens, and charts, EntryPoint will also have data about what Robinhood traders are actually doing, which is unavailable anywhere else.
(Robinhood Markets, Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company.)
With the frenetic pace of the AI boom — which if anything seems to have accelerated this year — the geopolitical volatility of March and April, the “SAASpocalypse,” and the fact that we’ve had 15 record closes for America’s flagship index, there’s been a lot of opportunity for retail traders in 2026.
Here are the most traded symbols on Robinhood:
Tracking how Robinhood traders have positioned themselves throughout the turbulence of the US-Iran conflict has been insightful, too.
As the markets slid in the wake of the violence, and traders priced in a world where oil lives above $100 a barrel for a while and inflationary risks flip to the upside, Robinhood customers started to punctuate their typically bullish order flow with days of heavy selling. In January, there was just one day when aggregate sell volumes through Robinhood outpaced buy volumes — in March there were six.
So, that’s what Robinhood traders have done in aggregate this year: they’ve generally gotten net long exposure, as expected, understanding that stocks in the long run tend to go up. And with big holdings in tech and the AI trade, many of those positions have run pretty hot this year.
But the 10,000-foot view misses the nuance; the rotations beneath the surface of the US-Iran conflict, the tactical trades, and the buying the dip and selling the rip of it all.
Because if there’s one thing Robinhood traders love to do, it’s pick up winners trading at a short-term discount. And who can blame them when markets have rewarded buying the dip so heavily, bouncing back from every tariff-induced drawdown, AI-inspired sell-off, and war-driven inflationary dive?
Take Nvidia as an example.
Across every day of trading from the last three years, one day in particular stands out: DeepSeek day, when the market was briefly extremely concerned that we’d need less AI compute, not more, over time. Nvidia shed almost $600 billion in market cap, dipping 17% in a single session. On balance, Robinhood traders thought the risks were overblown.
They were, in hindsight, right.
By the time the dust settled on January 27, retail investors on Robinhood had waded heavily into the carnage, with 2.2x as many buys as sells through the platform — the highest net buy ratio of any single day from the last three years.
That’s a theme that carries through on the other days when net buying was strongest, too:
November 25, 2024. Net buy ratio: 1.86x. NVDA was down 4.2%.
January 2, 2024. Net buy ratio: 1.83x. NVDA was down 2.7%.
December 13, 2024. Net buy ratio: 1.82x. NVDA was down 2.2%.
OK, you might be saying, that’s Nvidia, the world’s most innovative company at the center of the AI boom — of course traders want to pick it up when it’s on sale. But the proclivity for dip-buying has been strong in a host of other tickers, too.
With the price action of the last few days, there haven’t been many dips to buy, but the data from last Thursday, April 30, is instructive of how nimble retail investors can be. Within the most traded names, of the 10 stocks hardest hit, which all dropped somewhere between 2.6% and 8.6%, Robinhood customers were net buyers of all of them.
From the same day, the desire to pick up stocks at a discount, while taking some profits in positions that are up, can be seen pretty strongly. Traders were net sellers of high-profile names like Oklo, Lucid, Walmart, and Novo Nordisk, while picking up names under pressure such as Meta, Plug Power, Mastercard, and Salesforce.
Right here, right now
In recent weeks, the bulls have been in full control of the market. Despite concerns about valuations, the longevity of the AI boom, and the potential inflationary impact of the US-Iran war taking up a lot of column inches and screen time, the reality is that the markets are screaming to new highs on an almost daily basis at the moment.
Hedge funds have heavily unwound their exposure to the US stock market, per data from Goldman Sachs, taking their exposure to “the lowest levels on record” in North American stocks heading into this week, and there aren’t that many dips to buy for retail.
So, what are Robinhood traders buying on days like that?
Subscribe to EntryPoint to find out.
