Updated October 2026: rewritten with current data.

For a large company, retail investors are one audience among many. For a small or newly public company, they can be the audience. Institutional funds often can’t or won’t buy stocks below a certain size or trading volume, so individual investors make up a large share of the shareholder base, the trading, and the price discovery.

Many companies still run investor relations as if it were 2005: a press release, a quarterly call built for analysts, and an IR page nobody updates. Retail investors don’t find companies that way, and they don’t stay with them that way. Winning them over takes a different approach, and keeping it compliant takes discipline.

Who today’s retail investor is

Retail investing didn’t fade after the 2021 meme-stock frenzy. It settled into a permanent part of the market. Goldman Sachs estimated in May 2026 that individuals hold about $12 trillion in self-directed brokerage accounts, roughly 10% of the value of U.S. stocks, and account for about 20% of U.S. equity trading volume. Other estimates run higher, and the share is typically far greater in smaller stocks than in the overall market.

The investors themselves have changed too. Research from the FINRA Investor Education Foundation, released in April 2026, found that 60% of investors aged 18 to 34 use social media to inform their investment decisions, compared with 9% of those 55 and older. Those social-media investors consulted nearly twice as many information sources as other investors. They also tended to rate their own knowledge highly while scoring lower on objective tests, and were far more likely to report losses to fraud.

The picture that emerges: a large, active, digitally native audience that researches widely, moves quickly, and is exposed to a lot of noise. For a company, that’s both the opportunity and the risk.

What retail investors want from a company

Institutional investors get meetings, models and management access. Individual investors get whatever you publish. What they need from it:

  • A story they can follow. What the company does, why it matters, how it makes money, and where it’s headed, explained without jargon. If a smart non-specialist can’t summarize your business after five minutes on your website, you’ve lost them.
  • Consistency. Regular updates on a predictable schedule, with the same metrics reported the same way each time. Changing what you measure from one quarter to the next erodes trust quickly.
  • Candor. Bad news delivered plainly and early. Retail investors forgive setbacks far more readily than surprises or spin.
  • Access. A way to ask questions and see them answered, whether on an earnings call, in a Q&A session or through the IR page.
  • Channels they actually use. Mobile-friendly pages, short video, and a presence on the social platforms where they research, not just a press-release distribution list.

A retail investor relations playbook for smaller companies

You don’t need a large IR department to do this well. You need a few fundamentals done consistently:

  1. Rebuild the IR page as your home base. Lead with a plain-language company overview and a short investor presentation, then the latest results, SEC filings, upcoming events, a contact for questions, and an email sign-up. Keep it current; a stale IR page signals a stale company.
  2. Write for two audiences at once. Every earnings release and presentation should work for the analyst and the individual investor. Add a short summary in plain English at the top, and define any metric you rely on.
  3. Open the earnings call to questions from individuals. Collect questions in advance through the IR page or a Q&A platform and answer the most common ones on the call. It shows respect for every shareholder, and it surfaces what people are confused about.
  4. Use video. A three-minute CEO update after each quarter, posted on the IR page and the company’s social channels, reaches people who will never read a 10-Q.
  5. Be present where investors research. Maintain official company accounts on the platforms your investors use, and tell investors which channels you’ll use for company news (more on why below).
  6. Build a direct list. Email subscribers are your own audience, unaffected by algorithm changes. Send every release and event notice to them.
  7. Measure what matters. Track IR page traffic, email sign-ups, questions submitted, event attendance and shareholder mix over time, not just the stock price.

For a company preparing to go public, starting this a year or more before listing pays off. An audience that already knows and trusts you is far easier to build before the bell than after.

Guardrails: where retail IR goes wrong

The same features that make retail investors valuable (speed, enthusiasm, social reach) make this the corner of investor relations where companies most often get into trouble. Four guardrails matter most:

  • Regulation FD. Material information has to reach all investors at the same time. The SEC has confirmed that social media can be used for disclosure, but only if a company has told investors in advance which channels it will use. An executive’s personal post is not a disclosure channel unless investors have been told to look there.
  • Paid promotion. Section 17(b) of the Securities Act requires anyone paid to promote a security to disclose that they’re being paid and how much. The SEC has pursued celebrities and influencers who skipped that disclosure, and in at least one case it also charged the company behind the campaign. If anyone is paid to talk about your stock, make sure the disclosure is complete, or better yet, don’t hire stock promoters at all.
  • Hype. Retail audiences reward excitement, which creates pressure to overpromise. Forward-looking statements need appropriate cautionary language, and anything you say about products, partnerships or projections has to be something you can stand behind under scrutiny.
  • Quiet periods. Companies preparing for an offering face extra restrictions on what they can say publicly. Bring securities counsel in before any campaign in the run-up to a listing or a capital raise.

The common thread is simple: treat every investor communication as a disclosure. A good IR program and a good compliance program are the same program.

The bottom line

Retail investors are no longer a sideshow. For smaller public companies they are often the market, and for companies on the path to going public they’re the audience to start building now. Clear stories, consistent updates, real access and disciplined compliance win their trust and keep it through the inevitable rough quarters.

If you’re building an investor relations program, or getting ready for the public markets, Market Tactics can help.

Sources