The economy is collapsing and unemployment is expected to soon exceed 15%, but Mr. and Mrs. Joe Blow thinks that this is an excellent time to buy stocks.

Jeffrey Kleintop, chief global investment strategist at Charles Schwab, points out that through the end of last week, passive equity ETFs had seen a net $20 billion in inflows.
"Obviously selling is big among traders, institutions, computer algorithms ... but the one stabilizing factor in this market has been individual investors," he tells Axios.
"That has never been true before, and it’s a very unique aspect of this downturn."

The contrast between professional and amateur investors could not be more stark. As the pros sold out of risky assets like stocks and oil and even safe havens like gold and Treasury bonds, amateur traders were "maintaining a long-term perspective despite the market turmoil," Vanguard said.
Google Trends data show that throughout the month of March, searches for “how to buy stocks” and "Dow Jones" are soaring.

So let's get this straight. The professionals are selling during a global economic depression, but people that had to Google “how to buy stocks” think that the pros are wrong.
I wonder who's more likely to win this bet?

Over the past 30 years, like clockwork, retail investors have sold as the market hit its floor and a recovery was underway, and bought when the market was at or near its zenith and began to fall.

There's a reason why people on Wall Street use the term "dumb money", but hey, maybe this is the very first time in history that the insiders are wrong.
Joe Blow is bullish, but not as bullish as Asian retail investors.

Crashing markets are driving the biggest rush from Asian retail investors into stocks in a decade or more, brokers say, as bargain-hunting and a fear of missing out prompts a scramble to “buy the dip”.
...Google searches for the bargain-hunter’s catchcry, “buy the dip,” hit an all-time high on Wednesday, Google Trends data shows.

And where Asian indexes have fallen the furthest, interest from mum-and-pop investors has jumped the most as they deploy long-held savings or draw down loans to buy shares.

Ah, yes. FOMO. No bad investment decision has ever been made while under the influence of the fear of missing out. Let's not forget borrowing to buy stocks.

Earlier this year, 31-year-old insurance agent Heng Kai Sheng got advances on three separate credit cards to the tune of $150,000. With the money, he opened a share financing account at a local bank and pledged the lot as collateral.

He was granted leverage of around 3.5 times, a $500,000 kitty that he is ploughing into the stock market.

Yeh, that'll turn out well.

This week is the first real test of this "damn the economic fundamentals, I'm gonna get rich buying stocks" strategy is being tested.
Late last week oil crashed, and the retail investor rushed in to buy with both hands last week.

But unperturbed, ETF investors continue to pile on despite the fact around 58% of all U.S. oil ETF holdings are positions in June WTI. Now, if June WTI rolls down to end-May WTI levels, i.e. lower teens over the next fortnight, as is appearing likely, investors in ETFs tracking front-month WTI long would lose substantial sums of money, possibly by as much as half of their original position.

This was the news on Monday morning.

Adam Masten, a freight broker who also grows corn and soybeans, has no formal training in trading oil. But when he started reading headlines this month about the market’s historic plunge, he figured a crash of that magnitude couldn’t last forever. So he pulled up his TD Ameritrade account and spent $2000 buying options on two bullish exchange-traded funds, betting that oil would go up.

“I had never traded oil before and I don’t like to put my money to work until I read about it,” he said.

Then Tuesday happened.

On Monday, as oil markets crashed through the floor, the United States Oil Fund LP USO an exchange-traded fund that tracks the futures markets to give investors direct exposure to the oil price, tumbled 12%. On Tuesday at midday, USO was down another 30%, taking its loss over the course of its 14 years in existence to about 96%.

Which brings us to this very appropriate headline.