- During pandemic lockdowns, scores of IT-savvy Indians took to trading and cryptocurrencies to pass the time, and a slew of retail-facing trading apps catering specifically to the Indian retail investor took off.
- According to Vested Finance, total buy volumes for all U.S. stocks in the quarter ended June were twice that of sales, as Indian retail investors snapped up and held on to their favorite U.S. equities.
Considering the price of food and fuel is skyrocketing in India, it may come as a surprise that retail investors struggling with cost-of-living expenses have the spare capacity to plonk some money down on U.S. tech stocks, yet that is precisely what they are doing.
During pandemic lockdowns, scores of IT-savvy Indians took to trading and cryptocurrencies to pass the time, and a slew of retail-facing trading apps catering specifically to the Indian retail investor took off.
And now, those Indian retail investors are taking advantage of a sharp correction in U.S. tech stocks to snap up what appears to them to be bargains, beefing up stakes in the likes of Tesla (+0.54%), Amazon (+0.21%) and Apple (+2.05%), according to Vested Finance, a platform which helps Indians buy and sell offshore stocks and ETFs.
According to Vested Finance, total buy volumes for all U.S. stocks in the quarter ended June were twice that of sales, as Indian retail investors snapped up and held on to their favorite U.S. equities.
While the Indian economy has been roiled by high commodity prices, it’s been said that India continues to buy heavily discounted oil and other commodities from Russia, which has helped to alleviate the worst of price increases.
Nevertheless, Indian retail investors haven’t yet been able to move the needle on U.S. equity markets, with shares of some of the biggest names in technology, including Microsoft (+0.54%), Apple, Amazon and Tesla having fallen anywhere between 15% to 40% over the last quarter, because of the U.S. Federal Reserve’s aggressive policy tightening measures.
The Nasdaq 100, an index that tracks primarily technology stocks and has a strong correlation with Bitcoin, plummeted by over 22%, its biggest quarterly decline since the 2008 Financial Crisis.
Although the massive selloff has meant that many Big Tech stocks are now available at better valuations than six months ago, U.S. markets are driven primarily by institutional flow and until the path for interest rates is clearer, markets may have yet to bottom out.
The U.S. Federal Reserve is struggling with the fastest pace of price increases in over four decades and markets are now pricing in the possibility of a 1% rate hike later this month, with headline inflation hitting 9.1%.
