The world has turned upside down.

The nearly 13 percent gain this month means the S&P 500 is now up roughly 30 percent from its March 23 low...
Top Wall Street economists expect the second-quarter economic data to look, well, cataclysmic. J.P. Morgan economists, for example, believe the American economy will shrink at a previously unthinkable 40 percent annual rate in the second quarter. The Congressional Budget Office thinks unemployment could hit 16 percent by the third quarter.

So 30 million lose their jobs, while stocks go up 30%.
Nothing like economic Armageddon to make someone think, "Now is a good time to buy stocks."
That in itself is loony tunes, but it gets even more bizarre when you look at who is buying.

"TD Ameritrade said last week that retail clients opened a record 608,000 new funded accounts in the quarter ended March 31, with more than two-thirds of those opened in March," WSJ reports.
"E*Trade saw a net gain of 363,000 accounts in the quarter — a company record — around 90% of which were retail."
"Charles Schwab Corp. reported a record 609,000 new brokerage accounts in the quarter, including individuals’ self-directed accounts and those managed by financial advisers."

So amateurs are buying. Poor people.
Probably many of the same people getting fired.
Huh!?!

It makes no sense...until you realize what ISN'T happening.

“This shoves us to a strange, but we think useful, conclusion,” Rabe writes. “The rush of retail investors into U.S. equities is at least partly a function of a world with no casinos, no sports betting to speak of (horses and ping-pong aside), and little to do outside the home.”

The dopamine rush of having a full house, she says, is the same as “holding a hat-sized stock into an up 3% open on the S&P.”

It’s pretty far out, but there’s at least one example of this happening. Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy who said he switched from gambling to day trading and is down $647,000.

"I like betting on sports," Portnoy said on his radio show. "Sports ended, and this was something that was still going that I could do during the day."

This unprecedented dynamic creates a couple questions.
First of all, what do retail gamblers buy in stocks?
We have an answer to that.

The top stock right now on Robinhood is literally a penny stock, and 4 of the top 5 stocks owned on Robinhood are less than $7 per share. While there are occasional opportunities in low-dollar stocks, Robinhood customers systematically select stocks that are cheap, simply because they're cheap.

Gamblers like low-priced, risky stocks.
Not a surprise.
The second question we don't have an answer to yet.

But the data also leads him to wonder "what happens when the
US economy starts to reopen, and retail investors can go outside
and to work instead of sit at home trading?"