Retail investors poured $231 million into Meta stock as it tanked after earnings, the highest amount since 2018, research firm says

• Retail investors snapped up $231 million of Meta stock during the social media company's historic rout.
• Vanda Research said that amount of net purchases was the highest since July 2018.
• Meta lost a record $251 million in market capitalization in Thursday's selloff.

Retail investors shelled out $231 million to snap up heavily discounted shares of Meta Platforms during Thursday's selloff, the highest amount in nearly four years, according to Vanda Research.

Facebook's parent company lost $251 billion in market capitalization as the stock sank 26% on Meta's fourth-quarter earnings report, which showed daily users falling for the first time ever. The company also issued tepid first-quarter guidance.

But amateur traders "aggressively bought the dip in Meta," with the $231 million amount a figure not seen since July 2018, said Vanda Research, whose VandaTrack database logs retail flow going in and out of stocks and ETFs in the US.

That amount of buying was more than 25 times what is typically seen. Average daily net purchases of Meta stock since February 2020, when the COVID-19 health crisis started to spread out globally, have been just over $9 million, said the London-based firm.

In fact, retail investors poured more money into Meta shares Thursday than in the popular Invesco QQQ Trust that tracks the Nasdaq 100 index of large-cap growth stocks and the levered tech ETF ProShares UltraPro QQQ.

But the $231 million figure trailed the $269.4 million that retail investors poured into Meta stock on July 26, 2018, when shares tumbled 19% on concerns about revenue expansion.