In the aftermath of the original pandemic lockdowns, tech became even more synonymous with everyday life than it already was.

Prior to, and even after, the approval of vaccines, a combination of virus curbs and voluntary isolation bolstered the investment case for tech shares of all kinds.

Simultaneously, a behavioral shift in investor psychology was conducive to binge-buying of pandemic beneficiaries, some of which were turbocharged by options dynamics, including instances of retail investors engineering gamma squeezes upon discovering the power of collective action.

Fast forward three years, and retail investors who loaded up on single-name tech shares during the COVID “stay-at-home stock” frenzy have now sold twice what they bought. That’s according to Goldman analysts including John Marshall and Isabella Rosenberg, who on Monday described “a milestone in retail trading trends in NASDAQ single stocks.”

Retail investors began to sell individual stocks in February of 2022 and “selling continued until they sold all of their pandemic-acquired NASDAQ single stocks as of November,” Marshall and Rosenberg wrote.

That selling “intensified” early this year, and as of last week, retail investors had unloaded “more than twice what they acquired during the pandemic,” Goldman said.

Of course, as Marshall and Rosenberg went on to say, some of that is attributable to “a secular shift away from stock ownership and toward ETF ownership.”