Why Retail Investors Are Abandoning the Wait for Market Crashes

The Dip-Buying Threshold Is Shrinking — And That Changes the Signal Game

Meanwhile, fewer are holding out for a true crash — only 11% would wait for a 20%-plus drop, down from 13%. The signal here isn't just about sentiment. For anyone running or following copy strategies, this behavioral shift reshapes how we should think about entry timing, allocation frequency, and what kind of signal providers actually survive the next few quarters.

Smaller Bites, More Often — The Automation Fingerprint

eToro's own platform data backs this up with activity numbers. Capital markets trades climbed 59% year over year to 64 million in May, while the average trade size dropped 36% to $201. eToro pointed to copy trading and automation as partial drivers of that shrinkage. If you're allocating across multiple signal providers, this tracks: the copy-trading model naturally fragments capital into smaller, repeated positions rather than concentrated bets. What the survey doesn't measure — and what I'd want to see before drawing hard conclusions — is whether this is new money entering the market or existing capital being redeployed more frequently. That's a critical distinction for managing your equity curve. A provider showing a smooth upward line could simply be riding high frequency on the same pool of capital, not generating real net inflows.

What This Means for Signal Provider Selection

Here's where I get practical. If investors genuinely lower their dip-buying threshold, brokers will see buying spread across more ordinary pullbacks rather than clustering around rare crash events. That's good for platforms — steadier activity, steadier revenue. But for us as copy traders, it means the bar for signal providers shifts too. A strategy built around "wait for the big one, then load up" may underperform a systematic approach that scales in during routine 5%-8% wobbles. Think about it: if your provider's edge is timing rare dislocations, but your own behavior (and everyone else's) is pulling the trigger earlier, you're fighting the flow. I'd rather follow someone who has skin in the game on frequent, smaller allocations — with stop-losses that don't require a 15% drawdown before kicking in. The survivorship bias in "wait for the crash" providers is brutal; the ones who blew up just don't show up in the rankings anymore.