Stats › Active, passive and flows › Retail trading
Retail trading and holding periods
How much of the daily churn in US stocks comes from ordinary people at home, and how long does anybody actually hold anything any more? Those are two simple questions and they get answered badly all the time, usually in the service of a story about reckless small investors. The short version is that retail is roughly 20% of trading volume, up a long way from single digits two decades ago and down from a peak near 24% in 2021. The more striking number is duration. In the late 1950s the average holding period for a US stock was about eight years. Now it's months. That one gets blamed on retail apps, and the timing doesn't support it, because most of the decline happened before those apps existed.
So this page sets out the volume share, the holding period collapse, and the thing that ties them together: retail activity isn't spread evenly. It clusters hard in the fastest instruments. Cboe puts retail participation in same day expiry SPX options at around 53%, which is remarkable for a product institutions dominate at every other expiry. Meanwhile most individual investors barely trade at all.
One honest warning before you use any of it. Nobody publishes a definitive retail volume figure, because most retail orders never reach a public exchange. The 20% is an approximation and I've said so in the note. Three sources at the bottom, each with a date, and I'd rather you read them than trust my summary.
Retail investors account for roughly 20% of US equity trading volume, up from single digits two decades ago and down from a peak near 24% in 2021. Retail self directed assets total about $12 trillion. The more striking shift is duration: the average holding period for a US stock has fallen from around 8 years in the late 1950s to a matter of months. In the most extreme corner of the market, same day expiry index options, Cboe estimates retail participation at about 53%.
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Below this point there are 8 sections, 1 chart and 3 named sources, roughly 1350 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
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