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Retail doesn't mean amateur, it means not institutional, not managing money for others. I think the term you're looking for is mom and pop or amateur. Many pr
by gnaritas 11y ago
Retail doesn't mean amateur, it means not institutional, not managing money for others. I think the term you're looking for is mom and pop or amateur. Many pro's are retail investors, as are at home day traders or anyone else working with only their own capital; the tools and brokers you use are completely irrelevant to the term. My use of the term retail is standard as a cursory Google search will easily show. If you only invest your own money, you're a retail investor.
Google's own definition:
"A retail investor is an individual who purchases securities for his or her own personal account rather than for an organization. Retail investors typically trade in much smaller amounts than institutional investors such as mutual funds, pensions, or university endowments."
- kasey_junk 11y agoAnd a cursory examination of this comment thread will show that the definition of "retail investor" is fluid both in the wider world and in people's standard usage. FINRA clearly has a different definition than google. The google definition doesn't seem to hold for high volume professional traders. You yourself said "you're a professional when you're investing other people's money." Largely it quite simply doesn't matter what definition you describe, but when people say things like "HFT is bad for retail investors" or "Flash crashes on Monday really hurt retail investors" it is important to understand the nuance. It is also important to understand the context. When you are sitting in an options arcade and a trader says retail investor, they are quite simply NOT referring to themselves, even though by several definitions they are retail investors. When FINRA uses retail investor in their documents they also mean something different than the google definition.