Retail Investors Keep Buying as Insiders Keep Selling

Thanks to inflation, a penny stock today is considered any stock trading under $5 per share. That’s also the price where institutional investors are cut off from owning a stock – it’s just too low a price and it’s too easy for big money to buy shares.

But that isn’t stopping retail investors from buying sub-$5 stocks – and now, true penny stocks trading under $1.00.

Today, a whopping 47% of all market volume is in sub-$1 stocks:

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As mentioned in this morning’s Swan Dive, Regencell Bioscience started the year as a penny stock, trading as low as $0.09, split-adjusted.

It’s now been the best market performer year-to-date – even without any positive corporate developments to point out – just pure retail buying. (We also strongly urged you not to buy the stock.)

In the meantime, company insiders are now picking up the pace of their sales:

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Of course, insiders have many reasons to sell, from putting a kid through college, paying for a messy divorce – or just the good old-fashioned opinion that their shares are overvalued.

These two trends suggest that retail investors are getting ebullient, while the insiders who know their company’s value inside and out are hitting the cash register.

~ Addison

Good News for Stocks

50-year Wall Street veteran, Marc Chaikin is stepping forward to share why history gives him 90% historical confidence that stocks will end 2025 up. However, he also has bad news: the same data also tells him the REAL market crash will likely arrive in 2026. Click here to see the month and day he estimates it will begin.

P.S.: Looking for small-cap companies that are driven by fundamentals and not just retail sentiment?

Consider joining our Portfolio Director Andrew Packer at the Rule Investment Symposium in Boca Raton on July 7-11, 2025. Click here to attend and meet your future cutting-edge resource investments face-to-face.

And for paid-up members: Be sure to join us for Grey Swan Live! tomorrow, June 19, 2025. It’ll be Juneteenth, and we’ll be discussing international investing, value investing, and how to find massive stock winners over time with Chris Mayer. Chris is always a good conversation.

As always, your reader feedback is welcome: feedback@greyswanfraternity.com (We read all emails. Thanks in advance for your contribution.)

But that isn’t stopping retail investors from buying sub-$5 stocks – and now, true penny stocks trading under $1.00.

Today, a whopping 47% of all market volume is in sub-$1 stocks:

Turn Your Images On

As mentioned in this morning’s Swan Dive, Regencell Bioscience started the year as a penny stock, trading as low as $0.09, split-adjusted.

In the meantime, company insiders are now picking up the pace of their sales:

Turn Your Images On

Of course, insiders have many reasons to sell, from putting a kid through college, paying for a messy divorce – or just the good old-fashioned opinion that their shares are overvalued.

These two trends suggest that retail investors are getting ebullient, while the insiders who know their company’s value inside and out are hitting the cash register.

~ Addison

Good News for Stocks

P.S.: Looking for small-cap companies that are driven by fundamentals and not just retail sentiment?

As always, your reader feedback is welcome: feedback@greyswanfraternity.com (We read all emails. Thanks in advance for your contribution.)

The gold standard came into being in the 18th century. It got gassed in WWI. Then, after WWII, it was re-established, sort of. The dollar was made the key financial reserve. And the dollar was linked to gold.

Then, in 1971, the last link with gold was cut. Since then, several efforts were made to re-install some sort of guardrails. In the ‘70s, we were personally part of the drive for a Constitutional Amendment that would make deficits illegal. In the ‘80s, our friend Grover Norquist succeeded in getting prospective members of Congress to sign The Pledge, crossing their hearts and hoping to die if they increased taxes

It’s not a secret that Trump’s mercantilism looks backward. Making America great again is inherently nostalgic, fomenting into dreams of resurrected domestic factories, punishing imports, and using the American consumer as so many poker chips in some post-industrial game of five-card stud.

China’s mercantilism since Deng Xiaoping told his subjects that “getting rich is glorious” in 1978 has been looking forward: capturing tomorrow’s industries — AI, quantum computing, green tech — before anyone else can.

Adam Smith warned that mercantilism’s obsession with trade surpluses was “incompatible with the accumulation of wealth for citizens.”

Today, that warning rings fresh. Investors are no longer betting on markets alone, but on their marriage to state power. Lithium in Nevada, chips in Minnesota, sovereign gold in Shanghai — these are the dowries of the new era.

Soaring AI stocks aren’t just reminiscent of the tech bubble in 1998-2000. Rather, they feel much like a Hollywood remake, nearly beat-for-beat.

Like the fervor for anything with a “.com” after it back then, AI exuberance is pushing stocks to be valued far higher than the reality of what AI will ever be recouped by earnings.

Remember what happened when they conjured $5 trillion out of thin air during the pandemic? Inflation ripped to 9% — the highest in forty years.

Kicking off the next money-printing cycle from $6.6 trillion instead of $4 trillion — with so much pandemic-era cash still sloshing around the system — all but guarantees double-digit inflation. We’re talking about potential currency destruction on a scale — and at a speed — America has never seen.

Position accordingly.

Adam Smith warned that mercantilism’s obsession with trade surpluses was “incompatible with the accumulation of wealth for citizens.”

Soaring AI stocks aren’t just reminiscent of the tech bubble in 1998-2000. Rather, they feel much like a Hollywood remake, nearly beat-for-beat.

Like the fervor for anything with a “.com” after it back then, AI exuberance is pushing stocks to be valued far higher than the reality of what AI will ever be recouped by earnings.

Remember what happened when they conjured $5 trillion out of thin air during the pandemic? Inflation ripped to 9% — the highest in forty years.

Position accordingly.