Weekly S&P500 ChartStorm - 26 October 2025

This week: the rise of retail, leverage and speculation, margin debt, relative strength trends and signals, the great financialization, chaos cycles, and navigating the path...

Welcome to the latest Weekly S&P500 #ChartStorm!

Learnings and conclusions from this week’s charts:

• There has been a surge in retail participation since 2020.

• We’ve also seen a surge in leverage, especially more recently.

• Some leverage indicators are at warning levels.

• Small Tech is ticking up vs Big Tech (after 8-years of losing).

• Studying the history of markets prompts a pondering of “the path”.

Overall, the rise and rise of retail (and scramble to speculate) marks a major shift and extremely significant development in modern markets. If I had to guess I’d say that at least some elements of it are going to end up as a “new normal”, and that it will stay higher for longer… but you also can’t help but think that it is a sign of the times and signal on the stage of the market cycle.

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1. Rise of Retail: There’s an interesting dynamic that continues to playout in markets today — things changed in 2020. Retail (re)discovered stock trading and since then there has been what seems like a desperate scramble of speculation… people feeling like they’re behind and trying to catch-up by taking big risks, people chasing those stories of overnight wealth, and even folk trying to get rich before AI takes over the world.

In simpler terms though, the combination of big bull markets, easy money, and improved access to trading and information has really democratized markets — and the numbers show it clearly. To cite Bloomberg, “One proxy for retail involvement in the market is the volume of stocks executed by off-exchange venues ... Those trades are poised to make up 50% of the total this year for the first time ever.”