TD Ameritrade Investor Movement Index

September IMX Score is Highest Yet in 2020

The Investor Movement Index (IMX^SM) increased to 5.71 in September, up 15.82 percent from its August score of 4.93. The IMX is TD Ameritrade’s proprietary, behavior-based index, aggregating Main Street investor positions and activity to measure what investors actually were doing and how they were positioned in the markets.

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TD Ameritrade September 2020 Investor Movement Index (Graphic: TD Ameritrade)

The reading for the four-week period ending September 30, 2020, ranks “Middle” compared to historic averages.

“In September, TD Ameritrade clients took advantage of the market volatility to increase exposure to the highest levels we have seen this year,” said JJ Kinahan, chief market strategist at TD Ameritrade. “While headlines concerning the economic recovery were a mixed bag, our clients saw buying opportunities in the Information Technology and Consumer Discretionary sectors.”

Early in the period, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite reached new highs, but gains were short-lived. Late in the period, losses picked up steam as hopes for additional fiscal stimulus dimmed and new coronavirus cases rose nationally. U.S. employers added 1.4 million jobs in August, pushing the unemployment rate down to 8.4 percent, but unemployment claims also held steady during the period, a sign for many investors that the U.S. labor-market recovery is losing steam six months into the pandemic. As the U.S. death toll topped 200,000, Johnson & Johnson Co. (JNJ) became the fourth company to announce its experimental coronavirus vaccine had entered final-stage testing in the U.S. Federal Reserve officials projected no plans to raise interest rates through 2023 and said they were committed to providing more support to an economy that faces an uneven recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.

Once again, TD Ameritrade clients were net buyers of equities and net buyers overall. Some of the most popular names bought during the period were:

• Tesla, Inc. (TSLA)
• Apple Inc. (AAPL)
• Walmart Inc. (WMT)
• Amazon Inc. (AMZN)
• DocuSign Inc. (DOCU)

Names net sold during the period included:

• Uber Technologies Inc. (UBER)
• Delta Air Lines Inc. (DAL)
• Twitter (TWTR)
• Ford Motor Co. (F)
• Snapchat Inc. (SNAP)

About the IMX

The IMX value is calculated based on a complex proprietary formula. Each month, TD Ameritrade pulls a sample from its client base of more than 13 million funded accounts, which includes all accounts that completed a trade in the past month. The holdings and positions of this statistically significant sample are evaluated to calculate individual scores, and the median of those scores represents the monthly IMX.