Retail investors rotated out of mega-cap tech names like NVIDIA, Microsoft and Oracle to help fund bets tied to SpaceX, strategist says

Retail investors have spent much of the last decade using a straightforward approach to mega-cap technology stocks, buying on pullbacks and clustering around the biggest, most widely held names, according to a strategist speaking on June 24.

On CNBC’s Squawk Box, JJ Kinahan, Senior Vice President of Retail and Alternative Investments at Cboe Global Markets, said the same playbook is being tested again as attention appears to be moving beyond today’s top technology leaders and toward fresh, high-profile bets. In the interview, Kinahan pointed to retail selling in NVIDIA, Microsoft and Oracle as part of the rotation, framed as capital being redirected to fund SpaceX-related buying.

Kinahan’s comments were aimed less at identifying a single “best” stock and more at describing how retail flows can shift when a new theme captures investor imagination. The discussion characterized SpaceX as the latest magnet for incremental retail interest, with the implied effect that some money that might otherwise have stayed in mega-cap tech is being redeployed.

The point is notable because Microsoft is both a core mega-cap holding and a major technology platform company, while NVIDIA and Oracle are also frequently treated as bellwether names for AI compute demand and enterprise software spending. In that sense, any retail-driven rotation away from them would be consistent with theme-based investing, where the dominant narrative can matter as much as the company fundamentals in the short run.

While Kinahan’s remarks describe the direction of retail selling and the theme consumers are attaching to it, the post does not provide the magnitude of those sales, the specific products or venues retail investors used to make the SpaceX-linked purchases, or whether the shifts represent changes in long-term allocations or only near-term trading activity.

For Microsoft specifically, investors typically watch the company’s performance through its cloud and AI-related offerings, plus broader market expectations for enterprise technology spending. However, in the available material, Microsoft itself did not make any new disclosure and no Microsoft-specific operational update is described as part of this retail-rotation narrative.

In markets, these kinds of rotations can be amplified by the same characteristics that attract retail investors to mega-caps: high liquidity, clear branding, and extensive media coverage. If retail interest pivots quickly, prices of the most heavily held names can move even when there is no new fundamental catalyst, making sentiment and flow data more visible in the short term.

Still, several uncertainties remain because the cited discussion does not break out detailed statistics, timelines beyond the interview date, or the data sources used to connect retail selling in those three stocks to SpaceX-linked buying. The story is therefore best read as a behavioral snapshot rather than a quantified audit of retail fund flows.