Retail trading in the United States is now regularly exceeding USD 70 billion a day, with a third of Gen-Z investors starting their investment journey before graduating from university or in early adulthood, double the rate of Millennials at the same age.
As per the Nasdaq, despite the Iran war rattling markets earlier in 2026, retail investors, instead of selling, rotated more than USD 70 billion into ETFs (Exchange-Traded Funds) in Q1 alone, behaving more like institutional allocators managing risk in real time.
“Platforms, infrastructure, and business models now face a different kind of investor, and the industry is working to stay ahead,” the stock exchange noted during its third annual “Global Retail Executive Forum,” held in New York in early June.
The event brought together executives from across the global retail brokerage industry, nearly half from Asia, for two days of panels, working sessions, and special closed-door conversations.
“The goal was to bring together the brokers that are fuelling investing for retail investors and give them the opportunity to hear from each other on what’s working, what’s not working, and what they should be building next,” said Brandon Tepper, SVP and Global Head of Data at Nasdaq.
“What emerged were four interconnected conversations, each reflecting a different dimension of the same underlying shift,” he added further.
The first debate of the event focused on when investors want to trade, where the participants mentioned overnight trading already accounting for approximately 11% of total daily US equity volume, with pre-market activity alone growing 15-fold since 2019. Nasdaq will be launching its exchange-based 23-hour trading in December 2026 amid the increasing demand from the international clients for such services.
“Global investors want to be able to invest in U.S. markets while it’s daylight. That’s what’s pushing the entire industry,” Tepper said.
“Among Gen Z investors, 49% trade weekly and 25% trade daily, behaviour shaped by digital asset markets that already trade around the clock and an on-demand economy where friction still exists. The consumer experience has shifted to always-on. Streaming, same-day delivery, instant payments. Those consumers are becoming investors, and they’re more engaged with their trading platforms than ever. That makes the data and infrastructure underpinning those platforms even more critical,” the senior official mentioned further.
As per Tepper, more than 40% of Gen Z investors are already comfortable having AI manage their investments entirely, compared with 14% of Baby Boomers. Another 43% would trust AI with their financial information.
“But the quality of AI output depends on something less glamorous: the data underneath it. You cannot have good AI without good data. Working with clean, accurate data is the foundation of any AI. It doesn’t have to be financial data; it could be any data. But obviously in our context, that’s what we’re talking about,” he noted.
“As brokerages move to deploy AI-powered capabilities, the competitive advantage may belong less to the firms with the most sophisticated models and more to those investing in the data and information that makes those models useful,” Tepper concluded.