Retail Investors Face Three New Threats to Their Edge
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- SEC backed President Donald Trump's proposal in May for public companies to report earnings biannually instead of quarterly; Siebert Financial's Mark Malek called removing quarterly reports losing 'the gold standard' and likely to create an information vacuum retail investors can't fill.
- New Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh has trimmed the central bank's policy meeting statement, removed forward guidance, and floated holding fewer meetings altogether, prompting analysts to anticipate more volatility after policy decisions.
- Truth Media & Technology Group launched Truth API this month, a paid feed offering faster access to Truth Social posts; a Fundstrat analysis found multiple of the S&P 500's best and worst days during Trump's second term were driven by his Truth Social activity.
- Trump Media reported more than $230 million in net losses in the second quarter, with Trump's family as its largest shareholders — raising investor concerns about incentives to generate market-moving posts that promote the new API.
- Retail investors bought the dip during 2025's tariff-related selloff while institutional counterparts pulled back, helping fuel one of the longest bull markets on record; Citadel found individual trader activity hit a record in June.
- Wall Street firms have built AI-powered Fed-tracking tools and employ economists — often Fed alumni — to navigate the lower-communication environment, resources that retail investors typically lack.
Why it matters: Each change disproportionately benefits institutions with analyst teams, proprietary AI, and subscription budgets, while retail investors lose audited information without comparable substitutes. Fundstrat's Hardika Singh warned this could harm broader 'price discovery' as soon as this year — and retail dip-buying has provided critical inflows to recent bull markets.
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