Welcome to our exchanges of Goldman Sachs markets update for Friday, January 29th.

We're taping this on Thursday, January 28th, and each week we check in with leaders across the firm to get a quick

take on what they're watching in markets. I'm Jake Seaward, Globalhead of

Corporate Communications here at the firm and today we're joined again by

Scott Rubner of our global markets division to talk about

inflows we've seen to the global equity markets this January. Scott last joined us back in November

and made a rather prescient call on the presence and importance of retail investors in the market.

Scott, welcome back to the program.

Thanks for having me, Jake.

So Scott, I mentioned that on our last podcast just a couple months ago you talked about the fact

that retail investors were real structural force in the market and you said it's here to stay.

Well, January certainly has seen a lot of proof of that theorem. What exactly has been happening?

Retail trading activity has been the largest story in the marketplace this year period.

So let's get a few stats straight. According to the Federal

Reserve Board, households own 36% of the 57 trillion US equity market

while hedge funds just own 3%. Retail owns 12 times more

market cap than hedge funds do. And now the most active owner of the equity market has become the most active trader and we have not seen that since 1999 and we have a basket of

GS retail trading favorites.

It's something I follow every day.

This is the stock positions which show up most often on Twitter,

the trading apps, and the message boards.

This basket is up 14% year to date. It's up 90% last year and

...