(Bloomberg) — In a stock market battered by trade turmoil and growing fears of an economic slowdown, retail investors are doubling down, undeterred as their losses mount.

Most Read from Bloomberg

Individual traders pumped greater than $12 billion into US equities within the week ending March 19, retail-trading data from JPMorgan Chase & Co. showed. The pace of shopping for was significantly higher than the group’s 12-month average, based on Emma Wu, a world equity derivatives strategist on the bank.

Market watchers keep a detailed eye on retail traders as they are sometimes the last to chop their exposure to stocks, so the most recent bout of aggressive buying from mom-and-pop investors may suggest that equities haven’t found the underside yet.

The recent behavior of individual investors is characteristic of a “down” 12 months within the stock market, Wu said. It was also seen in 2022, she noted. That’s when the equity benchmark sank 19%, the one down 12 months of the past six. “That is an indicator of their ‘buy-the-dip’ mentality,” Wu said.

Wu estimates that the group is now nursing a 7% loss for the 12 months, while the S&P 500 has dropped 3.7%.

When the broader market began to unload sharply in late February, retail traders remained avid buyers, marking a pointy divergence from institutional buyers, who rotated out of US stocks at a record pace.

Trading data from Bank of America Corp. showed its private clients have been net buyers of US equities for the past 14 weeks, while institutional clients were net buyers for the primary time in three weeks, and hedge funds were net sellers for a fifth-straight week.

The signal from the retail crowd punctuates the increasingly bearish view Wall Street is taking. Strategists from Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Citigroup Inc. and HSBC Holdings Plc all reined of their expectations for US equities prior to now two weeks. Morgan Stanley’s Michael Wilson told Bloomberg Television on Thursday that there can be no latest highs for the US stock market in the primary half of the 12 months.

There are signs that individual investor sentiment has weakened in recent weeks. A widely followed measure from the American Association of Individual Investors showed bullish views were below the 20% mark for 3 straight weeks, turning up only barely within the week ended March 19.