Nobody is as aware of the market’s conditions as institutional buyers and the banks that do the dealing for them since they employ hundreds (if not thousands) of qualified analysts and portfolio managers with their fingers on the pulse of global markets essentially all day, every single day. Regardless of experience or awareness of market conditions, an individual investor could never outcompete the scale and information flow these places have access to.
This is why noticing a shift in institutional flows can be massively important for retail portfolios, as it can signal the time to step on the gas or potentially pull back on the market and avoid unnecessary losses. Today, the volatility in the S&P 500 has driven some institutions out of cyclical and consumer discretionary names, as perhaps the underlying economic conditions are worse than everyone thinks.
