Much has been made of the idea that retail investors comprise a bigger share of cash equity trading and options activity in the post-pandemic world.

There’s certainly some truth to the overarching narrative, but like all market narratives, a lot depends on what metric you employ. In this case, pretty much all relevant measures attest to the idea that the “YOLO” crowd, so to speak, is indeed engaged in a way they weren’t pre-pandemic, and there are psychological and socioeconomic factors which help explain why.

If you listen to Ezra Klein’s recent interview with Kyla Scanlon (whose star continues to rise, so much so that she was on Jon Stewart this week), the word “nihilism” comes up a dozen times in the context of younger Americans, whose economic outlook, it’s fair to say, worsened dramatically beginning in 2020.

If there’s no meaning to any of this (where “this” is everything) and all things which might’ve imbued life with an artificial sense of meaning (e.g., homeownership) are out of reach, then you may as well — you know — plow everything you have into whatever meme coin’s poppin’ this week or buy OTM calls on Tesla. Because who cares? There’s no such thing as a “bad” decision. To speak in normative terms is to traffic in nonsense.

Before I delve too far down the rabbit hole, that’s all just a long-winded setup for the figure below, from a new note by Scott Rubner, who recently left what I can only assume was a highly lucrative job at Goldman for what I imagine is an even more lucrative position at Citadel.

That shows you the firm’s estimate of retail’s share of the market. It’s 20% right now, but it was more than 21% in May, the highest since February of 2021. Who remembers what was going on in markets in February of 2021? GameStop, that’s what.

Rubner cited “increased and broad-based participation, especially in lower-priced shares,” for the recent uptick, noting that retail still exhibits a penchant for high volatility shares, crypto, IPOs and leveraged ETFs.

According to Citadel’s data, retail flows are generally “robust in the summer months,” as Rubner put it, adding that retail traders “have deployed their largest amount of capital in July over the last two years and 2025 is no different.”

In the options space, retail’s been bullish for 11 consecutive weeks, which is to say every week since the post-“Liberation Day” lows in April. “There have been only six other times in the history of our dataset since January 2020 that the bullish option streak was 11 weeks or longer,” Rubner observed.

“We believe in nothing, Lebowski.” GenZ’s too young to get that joke.