Daily Brief - Elon is Person of the Year

Like often in the past, Time Magazine’s Person of the Year award was met with criticism.

Readers often forget that the nomination recognizes the individual’s influence, not their ethical merits. Being Person of the Year is not a form of praise.

This year the honour falls on Elon Musk, and the choice is entirely understandable.

Musk is tackling hard problems that can change the future of humanity - EV and space travel - and succeeding brilliantly.

“clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, cad”

Elon is also the world’s richest person, and that is in no small way due to the WSB cult he garnered around himself.

As we discussed on Nov 24th, Tesla options represent a staggering 50% of all options traded in the US Stock Market.

With the majority of these options traded by retail investors, TSLA is the ‘meme stock to end them all’, and that has real consequences for the bull market.

To a good degree, TSLA and AAPL have double-handedly lifted the stock market. So when the WSB crowd responded with this meme, that got us thinking.

When it comes to financial markets, the person of the year is indeed the retail trader.

From Gamestop onwards, retail participation has steered markets higher and changed the rules of the game.

Fortunes have been made and lost. And the bull market (arguably) has received an extended lease of life.

Now there’s one thing to remember about retail traders: their participation drops when markets fall. So all investors should keep an eye on retail flows and make sure they follow how they evolve in 2022.

Stay tuned for an announcement about this from us, as we add more data to track retail investing flows.