Dan Ives says retail investors are now ‘at the adult table’ in the stock market

Retail investors now wield considerable power in the stock market.

And after years of exerting more influence over stock moves, one analyst argues their standing in the financial world has moved up a level.

“Retail investors used to be at the little kids’ table at Thanksgiving, and you’d give them a little cookie,” Wedbush Securities managing director Dan Ives said during Yahoo Finance’s Invest event on Thursday.

“Now, they’re at the adult table — they’re front and center.”

On major companies such as Robinhood (HOOD), Palantir (PLTR), and Tesla (TSLA), retail investors are often highly informed, the noted Tesla bull said, and he’s seen retail investors on many stocks get well ahead of the institutional investing sector.

“If you go back to early days [on Palantir], there were the early believers in retail,” Ives said. “Institutional [investors], they laughed when the stock was a teenager, and then they’re crying when it turns 100 and screaming from the mountaintops at 200.”

Catch up on the latest moments from Yahoo Finance Invest

What business leaders are saying about AI, crypto, and the economy

Retail investors showed their strength for the first time since the 2000 tech bubble during the post-pandemic rally, which crescendoed in the 2021 short squeeze of GameStop (GME). That move drove up the stock price by more than 2,500%, crushing institutional investors with short positions, or bets on the shares dropping, and spawned a major Hollywood film on the incident.

The hedge fund Melvin Capital lost billions of dollars on a GameStop short position, which contributed to the firm’s closure and capital return in 2022.

The result is a market that’s become increasingly deferential to retail, hedge fund manager Eric Jackson told Yahoo Finance. Jackson has been the driving force behind much of the energy in 2025’s rally on retail-tech company Opendoor Technologies (OPEN), which is up by more than 470% on the year.

“The perception is they’re stupid, ‘dumb money,” Jackson said. “When [institutional investors] see certain stocks rise and go up 100%, 200%, they immediately don’t trust that … Retail doesn’t miss it, though.”

Jackson pointed to Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s willingness to engage with retail investors through earnings calls on video, taking retail investor questions during the calls, “treating them as importantly as the sell-side analysts.”

Many of the best conversations Ives has are with retail investors, the Tesla bull told Yahoo Finance. Ives said those investors have developed fully fleshed out theories and asked questions that “only the most sophisticated institutional investors would have asked.”