(March 30): Academics have quantified what many have long suspected, that retail investors are punching well above their weight in the stock market.

Individual investors had an impact five times the size of their estimated assets in the second quarter of 2020, according to recent research from the Swiss Finance Institute. They added 1% to the aggregate stock market valuation in that period, and 20% to the value of small cap shares, Philippe van der Beck and Coralie Jaunin wrote in a paper published in SSRN, a repository of academic research.