‘That Caught Our Attention’: Wall Street’s Just Turned the Most Bullish Since 2022, But Robinhood Says Its Own Customers Are Quietly Selling

‘That Caught Our Attention’: Wall Street’s Just Turned the Most Bullish Since 2022, But Robinhood Says Its Own Customers Are Quietly Selling

Mon, September 7, 2026 at 8:00 PM GMT+3 4 min read

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Robinhood's (HOOD) customers are, on average, in their early thirties, and they buy. That is the whole shape of the business: a young base with decades of investing ahead of it, adding to positions through almost everything. So when the firm's own data showed two consecutive weeks of net selling at the end of July, it registered internally as strange.

"At the end of July we saw two weeks of net selling," Steve Quirk, Robinhood's chief brokerage officer, told CNBC on Tuesday. "And when you look at the average age of our customer, which is early 30s, they're almost always net buyers. I mean, they're in that phase where they're going to have a long investment duration. So they're accumulators of stocks, generally speaking. So when we saw that, that caught our attention."

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The timing is what makes it worth a second look. This was not a cohort selling into a decline. The anchor put the point to him directly, "I wasn't sure if they were selling. I mean, that was basically as stocks were heading back towards all-time highs", and asked whether that was part of what was going on. Quirk's answer was: "That's part of what's going on."

He is not reading a warning into it, and the piece should not either. Asked what he thought was behind it, Quirk offered the ordinary explanation. "I just think they just got to a point where they said, you know what, we've seen significant gains on the back of the gains we've seen in the last couple of years," he said. "And we're going to trim some of that exposure and look for opportunities to get into other things." That is profit-taking and rotation, not fear.

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There is also a number that keeps this from being read as money walking out the door. Net selling of equities is not the same thing as withdrawal, and Robinhood's July operating data was reported to show net deposits still running at roughly $4 billion excluding inflows to the new federal Trump accounts. Customers were putting cash in while trimming stock. Both things are true at once, and only one of them sounds dramatic. Robinhood's own shares are the cleanest read on how the market weighs that combination.

What gives the two-week window its edge is what professional money was doing in roughly the same period. The CNBC anchor cited Bank of America's August fund manager survey as the second most bullish reading since 2022, with essentially no bears left, and said that was why the retail data stood out. Barchart covered that survey and its record "no landing" expectations as Fed Chair Kevin Warsh prepared for his Jackson Hole debut. So the youngest and most reliably bullish money in the market got a little cautious in the window professional allocators went all in.

The rotation detail came from the anchor's read of Robinhood's own most-traded data rather than from Quirk, who did not confirm the specific names: selling SK hynix (SKHY) and Western Digital (WDC) even as those stocks rebounded, buying Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL), Apple (AAPL), Broadcom (AVGO), and SpaceX (SPCX). Out of memory and storage, into large-cap platforms and the year's biggest new listing. Quirk's "look for opportunities to get into other things" is consistent with it, but he never endorsed the list.

The most durable statistic in the segment had nothing to do with July. Robinhood lets customers automate purchases on a schedule, and Quirk said the pattern has not changed in half a decade. "We have something called recurring investments. So in other words, if I want to put $50 in the market on a monthly, weekly, annual basis, I can set it and it'll happen on a continuous basis," he said. "For the last five years, the most popular instrument to be acquired is Bitcoin." The money this cohort commits without thinking about it is not going into stocks at all.

Two caveats belong on the whole thing. This is one brokerage's data, described on television by an executive of that brokerage, and Robinhood benefits commercially from the impression that its customers are thoughtful rather than reckless. And two weeks is two weeks. Barchart has separately laid out the case for caution over the coming months, which is an argument on its own merits and not something Quirk made.

The test is straightforward, and it is already running. If August flows have reverted to net buying, the end of July was a fortnight of housekeeping after two strong years. If the selling continues into a second month, the most structurally bullish cohort in the market has changed its mind about something — and it did so while the professionals were at their most confident since 2022.

On the date of publication, Caleb Naysmith did not have (either directly or indirectly) positions in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. This article was originally published on Barchart.com