Tariff announcements that change by the hour, record-breaking market fluctuations, and stocks flirting with bear-market territory — President Donald Trump’s trade war has thrown the investment landscape into chaos.
It’s left even the most seasoned professionals on Wall Street utterly baffled. But how are the so-called “little guys” handling all the uncertainty?
Here’s how five retail investors are managing their money amid the market volatility.
Some are playing it safe
Nate Thatcher, a 49-year-old small-business owner, is taking a step back as markets gyrate frantically.
“With this kind of volatility, it’s really hard to time it. To me, when you have intraday spikes and troughs of 4 to 8%, that essentially is like the rattling of a rattlesnake,” Thatcher told BI. “Just stay away for now and circle back some other time.”
Thatcher said he isn’t actively making any trades given the current market condition. His portfolio consists of individual stocks and gold ETFs, with a 33% allocation to cash, he added.
Tom Szelag, a 40-year-old engineer, has a similar mindset. He’s investing some money here and there as the market drops but not making any drastic moves. Szelag’s holdings consist of ETFs and mutual funds, he said.
“I’m not too worried about it,” Szelag told BI. “It’s interesting to watch, and the amount of day-to-day swings this past week has been more than I could have imagined.”
Last Tuesday, when the market sold off after Trump announced additional tariffs on China, Szelag decided to add some money to his portfolio.
“It’s been a little bit of opportunistic buying,” Szelag said. But for the most part, he’s not deviating much from his normal investing strategy.
The volatility is also turning away would-be investors, such as Kristen Jauregui. At the beginning of 2025, she made it one of her goals to start investing in the stock market, but the volatile market conditions are making her reconsider.
“I wanted to look into investing my income in certain companies and start growing my portfolio,” Jauregui, a 35-year-old payroll specialist, told Business Insider. “But since everything changed in the last few months, I’ve been like, ‘Okay, hold on. Let’s see how these first few months go, and then maybe we’ll revisit the idea in the summer or the fall.'”
Dialing up the risk
Some retail investors looking to capitalize on the volatility are taking a more aggressive position.
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Amy, a 39-year-old programmer who runs a YouTube channel under the name Ms. Roundhill, has been leaning into high-income and leveraged ETFs. Her channel mainly features unconventional investing strategies she’s trying out.
According to a copy of her portfolio that shows her full identity, half of her holdings consist of bitcoin-related funds based on the performance of Microstrategy, such as the YieldMax MSTR Option Income Strategy ETF (MSTY) and T-Rex 2x Long MSTR Daily Target ETF (MSTU). The other half is allocated to a mix of S&P 500 funds, AI, and Magnificent Seven holdings — including individual stocks and the Roundhill Daily 2x Long Magnificent Seven ETF (MAGX).
Leveraged ETFs use debt to magnify the returns of an underlying asset. For example, MAGX returns twice the performance of the Magnificent Seven basket before fees and expenses.
Leveraged ETFs aren’t for the faint of heart, though. The leverage leads to amplified returns but also amplified losses. These products are often only recommended to more experienced investors, and Amy said investors should do their own research before diving in.
Amy remains bullish on some of the most volatile tech stocks in the market, even after enthusiasm for the AI trade cooled from its highs last year.
“I’m continuing to dollar-cost-average Palantir and AMD. I think a decade from now, I’ll be much better off than if I had been in the S&P 500,” Amy said.
Going nontraditional
Jonathan Goodman, a 54-year-old small-business owner, took Elon Musk’s involvement in the Trump administration as a sign for him to get out of the stock market. He sold his Tesla stock and Dogecoin holdings, as well as various other individual stock positions.
“I feel bad for anyone who has a 401(k) trying to retire now,” Goodman said. “I feel bad for people who got the notification from Donald Trump that the market was going to go up, and so they invested, and then the next day it went down,” he added, referring to the president’s Truth Social post last week telling his followers “this is a great time to buy” before the S&P 500 rose 9.5% in a matter of hours, only to tumble as much as 6% the following day.
Instead of buying other stocks after cashing out, Goodman added some bitcoin to his crypto portfolio, which also includes Cardano, PulseX, and Shiba Inu. Goodman isn’t too concerned about exiting the stock market, as he’s confident in the long-term success of his cryptocurrency holdings.
“I’ll hold those for a very long time,” Goodman told BI.
Goodman is also invested in real estate, which he believes is more stable than the stock market. “I have my house and a couple of apartments, and that’s really what I’m looking for in retirement, to be able to pay off those mortgages before the age of retirement and then just collect on the rental units,” he said.
