Retail investors dumped US stocks on Thursday at one of the fastest rates since the Covid crash, breaking with their long habit of buying every sharp decline.

Individual investors sold a net $257 million in single stocks on Thursday 5 November, according to Vanda Research, which tracks retail order flow. At one point in the afternoon, net selling had exceeded $350 million, and an intraday tally put the figure at $338 million. The benchmark for comparison is 17 March 2020, when retail investors sold about $502 million of individual stocks in a day as the pandemic crash deepened.

The dip buyers stayed away "On a typical sell-off, retail buy the dip. Today, that bid has effectively disappeared from individual names," Viraj Patel, global macro strategist at Vanda Research, wrote in commentary shared with MarketWatch. He described the session as a rare buyers' strike, with institutional investors also stepping back just as retail and systematic sellers were selling aggressively.

There was one exception. Some retail investors kept buying leveraged exchange-traded funds, chiefly the ProShares UltraPro QQQ and the Direxion Daily Semiconductor Bull 3X Shares, which magnify daily moves in the Nasdaq-100 and chip stocks. That suggests some traders were still willing to speculate on a rebound, even as confidence in individual shares weakened.

A day of heavy losses The selling came as the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1,833 points, or 3.44 percent, the Nasdaq Composite dropped 5.52 percent into correction territory, and the S&P 500 slid 4.36 percent to 7,353.73. Each index recorded its largest one-day percentage fall since April 2025. Not every small investor joined the exit: some younger traders told MarketWatch they were buying the Invesco QQQ Trust on Thursday, betting that big down days and big up days tend to cluster together.

[Source: morningstar.com](https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20261105321/buy-the-dip-or-wait-it-out-young-investors-react-as-retail-stock-selling-hits-one-of-its-highest-levels-since-covid-crash) | [Source: europesays.com](https://www.europesays.com/3355630/)