J.P. Morgan: “We find little evidence to suggest that retail investors have played a big role in this month’s equity correction, at least up until last week. If anything, small option traders saw last week’s correction as an opportunity to add to their call option buying, especially on individual equities.

We thus suspect that institutional investors have played a bigger role, in particular momentum traders such as CTAs, which, as we highlighted last week, had reached extremely overbought levels on Nasdaq futures on Wednesday last week, inducing triggering of mean reversion signals”