Vanda Research What Equity Flows Are Telling Us Under The Hood 16Sep2026

VR Patel - What Equity Flows Are Telling Us Under The Hood 16 Sep 2026 Viraj Patel · Vanda Research · Chief Innovation Officer & Global Market Strategist, Partner Tue 16 Sep 2026, 11:28am ET

Retail are starting to load up on calls across cyber stocks

1. INSTITUTIONAL INVESTORS HAD LOADED UP ON SEMIS & SOFTWARE... BUT BUYING IS STARTING TO SLOW. Institutional positioning across the AI complex had turned increasingly bullish ahead of Monday's sell-off, but the pace of buying has faded in recent sessions. The chart below shows how the improvement in call-put ratios across Mag 7 and SOXX names has started to stall of late – a sign that institutional investors are taking a breather for now.

2. RETAIL'S NEWEST OBSESSION APPEARS TO BE CYBER... PARTICULARLY CROWDSTRIKE. Retail option activity across cyber stocks has picked up sharply from a low base, with the call-put ratio

seeing its biggest 5-day improvement in our data. CRWD accounts for 53% of all retail call activity across the basket, while 1M call buying now sits in the 97th percentile of its own history. Importantly, CRWD is also the one major cyber name where retail are buying the underlying stock alongside the calls. This increasingly looks like a new theme catching the attention of retail investors, particularly after Dario's weekend AI warning.

3. THAT DOESN'T MEAN RETAIL HAVE TOTALLY GIVEN UP ON SEMIS... FAR FROM IT. Retail cash buying across SOXX names has swung by more than $2bn over the past month, with NVDA accounting for 63% of all semi inflows. Over the past two weeks, NVIDIA alone has more than accounted for all net retail single stock buying. So in theory, retail would've been net sellers of single names without this NVDA buying! But there is some breadth underneath the retail bid in semis: 19 of 30 names have seen positive retail buying over the past month, led by Intel and Broadcom. The 2026 retail investor is still looking to buy dips in their favourite AI names, just increasingly selectively.