It's June 11th, 2026, one day before the SpaceX IPO. The most anticipated listing in a decade, and retail has already been trading it for months through synthetic perps, long before TradFi opens the book. That detail tells you more about where markets are going than the IPO itself.

Six years ago, retail accounted for 10% of US equity volume; today it’s 25%. That’s a 2.5x increase over the last six years, and it’s not looking to stop anytime soon. During the April 2025 tariff crash, retail US equity volume reached 35% of total volume. In India, retail already accounts for the majority (52%) of equity volume.

Why am I starting with all this data, you may ask? The answer is fairly simple. The marginal buyer is changing. For decades, direction was decided by institutions. Today, an increasing share of every move is retail. The difference? Retail doesn’t price or trade assets the same way institutions do. It doesn’t check the 10-Ks, doesn't do DCFs, and barely does any due diligence on its own. It acts fast, and it trades the story. When the marginal buyer trades stories, those stories do not describe the markets; they move them. The edge lies in recognizing the catalysts early and trading the narratives before they become consensus.

Nobody changes their future by putting $2k into an index fund. Smaller accounts need bigger moves to matter, and that forces retail higher up the risk curve. As retail appetite for leverage is growing, 0DTE SPX options hit 2.3M contracts/day in 2025, which is a +51% YoY increase and accounts for 59% of total SPX options volume. We can see the same pattern in crypto, where perps have become the primary venue for short-term price discovery and are trading at multiples of spot volume on many major Asian CEXs. The last crypto cycle made that obvious: when appetite for bitcoin went institutional, BTC's small-wallet share collapsed, and most major alts didn't follow the usual cycle trends they once did. We saw huge retail interest in the far end of the risk curve; memecoin sector capital grew over 500% in 2024 alone, with pump.fun reaching $18.6B weekly DEX volume at its late-2025 peak.

With retail risk appetite growing, we can also see that the ideas behind that flow are now tied to timelines. Around 80% of young adults turn to social media for financial advice, and most (69%) don’t even check the source. The story finds you in seconds, but acting on it is where it breaks down.

Retail also acts as a cross-market allocator: 52% of crypto users now hold stocks, 35% hold commodities, and this is rising rapidly, meaning they don’t trade in sectors they know or have an edge in; they trade based on narratives and feelings.

The first problem is that every narrative lives on a different venue: this story needs a CEX account, that one a wallet on some chain, the third a broker. Where do I trade this story? And the second problem is bigger: the gap between the traders and verifiable research. Can I trust the person who posted it? Is he sharing the thesis or exiting into it? Where's the rest of the track record?

Neym is an independent, fully transparent research desk. We find the narrative, and trade it on-chain with our own capital.

Everything happens on Hyperliquid, the future house of all finance: 24/7, permissionless, transparent, and where every story is tradeable.