When the Nasdaq shed more than 1,100 points on Friday — its worst single-day drop in over a year — the instinct for retail traders was to buy the dip.
- AAPL stock is down. See the chart and price action here.
A hotter-than-expected May jobs report spooked the market into rate-hike mode, chipmakers collectively vaporized roughly $1.3 trillion in market value and the FOMO crowd on Robinhood Markets Inc. (NASDAQ:HOOD) scrambled to buy names they recognized on the way down.
But not every ticker got the love.
The Dip-Buying Data
Data from Robinhood’s 25 most-traded stocks on June 5 reveals a clear hierarchy of conviction — and a telling list of names investors quietly walked away from while everyone else was buying.
At the top of the list, retail traders leaned hard into the dip on CoreWeave Inc. (NASDAQ:CRWV), Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA), and Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA), with buy/sell ratios of 1.52x, 1.49x and 1.43x respectively — all meaningfully above their 30-day averages.
Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ:META) and Applied Optoelectronics Inc. (NASDAQ:AAOI) rounded out the most aggressively bought names.
The logic seemed straightforward: big AI names down big, buy the brand you know.
The more interesting story sits at the bottom of the list.
Six stocks saw retail investors become net sellers on Friday despite the broader urge to “buy the dip."
- Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) at 0.87x
- ServiceNow Inc. (NYSE:NOW) at 0.79x
- Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) at 0.69x
- Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) at 0.67x
- Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) at 0.65x
- Credo Technology Group Holding Ltd. (NASDAQ:CRDO) at 0.63x — the most net-sold name on the entire list.
The Magnificent Seven — except Tesla, Nvidia and Meta — was being sold into the chaos, not bought.
Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet all had buy/sell ratios well below 1.0x, meaning more shares were being sold than bought even as those stocks declined.
ServiceNow and Credo, despite holding 30-day buy ratios above 1.0x (1.12x and 1.08x respectively), saw sharp single-day reversals, suggesting traders were locking in gains rather than adding exposure.
The Bottom Line
The pattern points to something deeper than a simple “buy the dip” narrative.
Retail money was rotating — out of mega-cap software and cloud names that had run hard during the Nasdaq’s nine-week winning streak, and into beaten-down hardware and AI infrastructure plays that looked cheaper on Friday afternoon.
Whether that rotation holds remains the question. But for at least one brutal session, the biggest names in tech were not the ones retail traders wanted to own.
Photo: richeri / Shutterstock
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