Goodbye gains: Retail day traders wipe out all pandemic wins

While pretty much no one is a winner in this stock market, there’s potentially a biggest loser: Retail day traders. The meme-stock phenomenon is seeing serious red this year after remarkable pandemic gains.

Crowd-sourced pumps in stocks like GameStop and AMC made these amateur investors rich during the pandemic, but Morgan Stanley estimates they’ve now wiped out all of their wins from the last two years. According to a Bloomberg report, the calculation is based on tallying total profits and losses in the space.

It’s far worse than the market as a whole, and that’s saying something considering the S&P 500 is down about 15% this year. Overall, the basket of stocks favored by these day traders is down more than twice as much at 32%, according to Goldman Sachs. AMC has lost more than half of its value in 2022 and GameStop has sliced off a third.

It doesn’t mean retail trading is dead: The Retail Army has brought aging companies back to life before. But many of these investors entered the field during the pandemic when the market was on a tear and the Federal Reserve was pumping out money. They have yet to do it amid a market downturn and tightening Fed policies.