This April, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell tried to quell recent sell-offs by downplaying adverse market conditions, saying that the markets were “doing what they’re supposed to do.” Whatever his own intentions, his statement might be truer than he imagined. As 2024 ended, retail trading volume spiked in the lead-up to Donald Trump’s return to office, and not just among the demographics who believed that his victory would bolster the market. Now as pain, fear, and tariffs dictate economic outlooks, the megacompanies losing billions in market cap will someday, and maybe even soon, recover. Yet the millions of small investment accounts that were tied to them may not.

An online survey of over 1,500 American women last year found that 71 percent of them were invested in the market — meaning they own stocks outside of their retirement plan. This number is up from 44 percent in 2018. Much of the meme stock reportage misled the public into thinking that the retail trading phenomena was limited to young men who’d moved back into their mothers’ basements. “They are, most of them, sitting in a dark room, eating Cheetos,” Forbes’s John Egan editorialized in 2021, “trying to figure out how life (and their wife’s boyfriend) passed them by and if there’s any way to get it back.”

That same year, 2021, Robinhood saw a 369 percent increase in the number of women using the platform. Today their user gender breakdown is about 65–35 men to women.