🤸🏻Retail’s dip skip

Amid recent market turbulence, retail traders are “skipping the dips, selling into rallies, and positioning more defensively,” writes JPMorgan strategist Arun Jain.

• Those headline stats understate how cautious the cohort has been of late. For instance, two products that the retail community stampeded into on Tuesday and Wednesday last week were the ProShares UltraPro Short QQQ (3x leveraged short the Nasdaq 100) and the iShares 0-3 Month Treasury Bond ETF (cash, more or less), according to Jain.

• In single stocks, Tesla, Nvidia, and Microsoft continue to be bought, but tech more broadly is being sold, with retail positioning in the sector “at its most negative level in six months,” Jain wrote. In particular, Micron and Sandisk have been dumped across the past week on concerns over Google’s TurboQuant algorithm.

• Jain’s spotlighting of the newfound risk aversion among retail investors comes roughly a week after Vanda Research said that retail traders had a session in which they sold single stocks, on net, for the first time since November 2023.

Retail purchases in March were roughly cut in half from January and down 40% from February, per JPMorgan.

The Takeaway

Zooming out, the speculative fever that dominated price action for much of 2025 looks to have broken. Call volumes traded across US exchanges (which we highlighted as a key chart to watch for 2026) peaked in October. 

That’s also when the Invesco QQQ Trust, Nvidia, bitcoin, quantum computing stocks, and Goldman Sachs’ basket of stocks beloved by retail traders hit all-time closing (or 52-week) highs. 

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Minnesota’s Xcel Energy has been staring down a future of more electricity demand, customer frustration around raising rates, and the constant challenge of providing for power-hungry new data centers. They’re not alone: the US Energy Information Administration predicts energy use will hit record highs this year.

A new deal between Xcel, Google, and Form Energy, a startup focused on developing a novel type of industrial-strength battery, underscores how the energy storage sector can help solve that challenge — and collect on some of the billions of dollars utilities are spending annually on infrastructure.

In other words: bring on the world’s largest storage battery. 

• Google’s forthcoming Minnesota data center will employ a 300-megawatt iron-air battery that will be able to store 30 gigawatt-hours of energy, enough to power 3,000 average US homes for an entire year. 

• The iron-air batteries will be set inside shipping containers that will be linked together to store power; according to Form, the combined cells could take up a space as big as roughly 110 football fields, end zones included, depending on where it’s sited.

• The battery will, if all goes as planned, power the new data center without raising residential rates.

• Additionally, the batteries serve as a distributed energy solution, which stores power during waning usage and allows strained grids to dispatch power during moments of peak demand. 

• US battery storage installations rose 30% last year, and fully two-thirds of the nation’s new capacity last year was installed in red states. Texas has installed so many batteries, it’s about to overtake California in total capacity.

Big batteries are big business, too: Tesla made nearly $13 billion in revenue from energy generation and storage (aka batteries) last year, and the Korean company LG is seeing so much increased revenue from large-scale battery sales that it mitigated what would have been serious quarterly losses at the end of last year. 

The Takeaway

No matter how much the scales are tilted in favor of fossil fuels due to the Trump administration’s “energy dominance” agenda, the benefits of steady, dispatchable, rechargeable power are sought after by Corporate America.

As Big Tech races to build out massive data centers, “distributed energy resources can be deployed much faster than it takes to build a new power plant,” one expert noted. And whether you’re a manufacturing plant or an AI data center, big storage batteries are a form of insurance: how much is the cost of downtime if the power goes out? 

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The first three months of 2026 were the worst quarter for the S&P 500 since Q3 2022, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine roiled markets. The index’s 4.6% drop was a sharp reversal from last year’s roughly 18% gain, which marked its third straight year of double-digit returns. 

Biggest winners and losers, visualized

• 🏀 NBA: While most will be keeping an eye on the other big hoops game, don’t sleep on Victor Wembanyama’s late surge in the odds for MVP, as the San Antonio Spurs star has pulled off a solid run of superhuman feats as the end of the regular season looms. Tonight he’s taking on Philly, and all eyes will be on Wemby as he tries to advance his case for MVP. Currently he’s got a 20% chance of winning the award, up from 4% two weeks ago, as he attempts to snatch the recognition from Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. 

• 🏛️ AG: With the sudden departure of Attorney General Pam Bondi from the administration, who will be appointed to take the job is an open question. Leading contenders according to prediction markets include EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin (56%) and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche (27%).

• ⛽ Gas: Concerns about the Strait of Hormuz remain pretty acute, and with gas prices finishing last week over $4 per gallon for the first time in years, markets are pricing in more pain at the pump by the end of the month. Prediction markets are even rating a 53% chance gas finishes April at more than $4.50 per gallon.