Artificial intelligence is spreading quickly through modern healthcare, promising to make medical treatment faster, more accurate, and more personalized. But as hospitals and manufacturers adopt the technology, safety records, lawsuits, and regulatory struggles suggest that the transition has not been smooth, a new investigation by Reuters shows.

One example involves Acclarent, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, which added machine-learning software to its TruDi Navigation System in 2021. The company described the update as “a leap forward,” saying it would help ear, nose, and throat surgeons better guide their instruments during sinus procedures.

Before the AI upgrade, the device had generated only a handful of malfunction reports. In the years that followed, however, federal regulators received more than 100 reports involving technical failures or patient injuries. At least 10 patients were reported harmed between late 2021 and 2025, many in cases where the system allegedly gave incorrect information about where surgical tools were located inside the skull.

Some of these incidents were severe. Reports described leaking spinal fluid, punctured skull bases, and strokes caused by damaged arteries. Several patients filed lawsuits, arguing that the device “was arguably safer before integrating” artificial intelligence. Manufacturers and distributors rejected those claims, insisting there is “no credible evidence” linking the AI software to the injuries.

Two Texas cases illustrate how these disputes have played out. In 2022, Erin Ralph suffered a stroke after sinus surgery in which her surgeon relied on TruDi. Her lawsuit claims the system “misled and misdirected” the doctor, who “had no idea he was anywhere near the carotid artery.” A year later, another patient, Donna Fernihough, experienced a similar injury. Her complaint alleges that Acclarent rushed the technology to market and accepted “only 80% accuracy” for some features.

Both cases remain in court, and the company has denied wrongdoing. Court records also show that one surgeon involved had financial ties to Acclarent, though the firm and the doctor’s representatives say those payments were unrelated to patient outcomes.

The Reuters piece notes that concerns about TruDi are part of a broader pattern. By 2025, the FDA had authorized more than 1,300 medical devices that use artificial intelligence, roughly twice as many as just a few years earlier. A review by researchers found that many of these products were later recalled, often within a year of approval. The recall rate for AI-based devices was about double that of similar technologies without machine learning.

Federal safety databases contain hundreds of reports involving these products. Some describe prenatal ultrasound software that “wrongly labels fetal structures,” while others involve heart monitors that allegedly failed to detect abnormal rhythms. Manufacturers have said most of these incidents did not lead to patient harm and were sometimes caused by user error or data-display problems.

Regulators warn that such reports are incomplete and cannot prove that a device caused an injury. Still, former FDA employees say the volume of AI products has strained the agency’s ability to monitor risks. Staffing cuts and recruitment difficulties have reduced the number of specialists available to evaluate complex algorithms. As one former reviewer put it, “If you don’t have the resources, things are more likely to be missed.”

Unlike pharmaceutical drugs, most medical devices are not required to undergo large clinical trials before reaching patients. Companies can often secure approval by showing that a new product resembles an older one, even if the update includes artificial intelligence. Critics argue that this system was designed for simpler technologies and may not adequately address the uncertainties introduced by machine learning.

“I think the FDA’s traditional approach to regulating medical devices is not up to the task,” said Dr. Alexander Everhart. “We’re relying on manufacturers to do a good job… I don’t know what’s in place at the FDA represents meaningful guardrails.”

At the same time, AI is moving beyond hardware into everyday medical practice. Doctors increasingly use automated tools to draft notes and manage records, while patients turn to chatbots for health advice. Physicians say these systems can save time, but they also create new risks when people rely on them instead of professional guidance.

Supporters of medical AI argue that the technology will eventually lead to better diagnoses, safer surgeries, and faster drug discovery. Critics counter that the pace of adoption has outstripped oversight.

Taken together, safety reports, legal disputes, and regulatory challenges suggest that artificial intelligence is reshaping medicine faster than institutions can adapt. While the technology offers significant potential benefits, recent experience shows that errors, oversight gaps, and unanswered questions remain part of its rapid expansion.

You can read the full piece by Reuters here.

Authored by Jeffrey A. Tucker via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Buried in new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is a bearish sign for a college education, the first time we’ve seen this in 50 years. Trade workers without a college education are gaining new advantages in employment stability and even in earnings. On paper, a college degree still earns more but that edge is slipping too.

The Cleveland Fed explains: “For decades, college graduates have typically faced lower unemployment rates, found jobs faster, and experienced more stable employment than high school graduates without college experience. Combined with higher expected wages, these advantages reinforced higher education as a pathway to economic security. However, some of the long-standing job market advantages offered by having a college degree may be eroding.”

The BLS data is extremely revealing. The unemployment rate for people with no college education has dropped dramatically to 4.0 percent, while those with some college rose just as dramatically to 3.8 percent.

The trend line here is what is instructive. The obvious edge from holding a college degree seems to be slipping while those without such a degree are gaining steam. This is the first time we’ve seen this trend in half a century.

The income advantages are still there for a college education but even here, we are seeing a generational shift. The pace at which income is rising for those who choose trades has more upward energy than those without. The gap is there but narrowing.

The Washington Post explains: “The unemployment gap between workers with bachelor’s degrees and those with occupational associate’s degrees—such as plumbers, electricians and pipe fitters—flipped in 2025, leaving trade workers with a slight edge for six months out of the past year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It’s the first time trade workers have had a leg up since the BLS started tracking this data in the 1990s.”

It’s a bit ironic that this story was posted just days before the Post itself laid off fully one-third of its workers, a gutting of the staff of a major paper that we’ve never seen before. No question that Artificial Intelligence has something to do with it, but, then again, AI is a convenient excuse for what these institutions knew they had to do to regain something approaching profitability.

There are two additional factors at play here.

First, everyone employed in a high-end professional setting knows with absolute certainty that all major corporations are wildly overstaffed and have been for many years, even decades dating back to the advent of artificially cheap credit in 2000. After that point, the banking system subsidized leverage over real capital and earnings. The consequence was a professional hiring boom like we’ve never seen.

Over several days, I spoke to many friends who are employed in these large institutions and asked for their estimates of how much in the way of overstaffing they face. I got estimates that range from 50 to 90 percent. In other words, in their own experience, at least half the workers in large institutions do not actually add value, if they do anything at all.

This is a remarkable testimony. Recall that the “Dilbert” cartoonist Scott Adams recently died. The main import of his column was all about satirizing the sheer waste in corporate America. The amount of bureaucracy is appalling as are the endless demands for meetings, committees, compliance teams, training, and absolute make-work programs that do nothing for the consumer or the profitability of the company.

We’ve seen what has happened to high-end management over the last three years. Most corporations are laying off workers—not those who face the customer but the managerial layers. The lockdown pandemic period essentially proved that these companies might actually perform better if this layer of worker stays home and goofs off. That period essentially convinced owners (stockholders) that vast numbers of people needed to be permanently terminated.

Recall that when Elon Musk took over Twitter, his first actions concerned personnel. He ended up firing an astonishing four-fifths of the legacy employees. He just did not see the need for them. Almost immediately, the platform became better. It is a private company so we don’t have a fix on profitability metrics today but it is easily the number one news app for the world today.

That example sent a signal to the whole of the corporate world. Layoffs were just a matter of time.

The second factor concerns earnings potential of college vs. no college. There has always been a basic fallacy at work in interpreting the data. The fallacy is called Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc, Latin for: after this therefore because of this.

To be sure, a college degree is associated with higher earnings, but is that because of the degree or because of the kind of person who hangs around long enough to earn a degree, can afford a degree, or is in a profession that requires a degree? Once you correct for all these confounding issues, it is not at all clear that the data are telling the truth. Certainly it is far from the case that a degree causes one to make a high income.

Consider the costs of college beyond the outrageous financial expense. We are taking people who are at the height of their learning potential, the very time of life when becoming an adult and a great worker is at a premium, and sticking them in childish environments. College encourages terrible lifestyle choices, finding shortcuts, drugs, drinking too much, and otherwise experimenting with dangerous choices.

And the student does this for fully four years, during the most impressionable early years of adulthood, leaving graduates with no work ethic and a wildly distorted view of what life is all about. It seems nearly unfair to throw such people into professional life. They are ill-equipped.

Compare this reality with someone who leaves high school to learn a trade, whether that is welding, construction, or coding. After four years, such people already have a gigantic advantage over their peers in college. They know what it is to get to work on time, do what the boss says, achieve things, manage money, and so on, essentially skills that kids matriculating in college do not have.

Hence the real cost of college is not even the out-of-pocket expense or the debt. The actual cost is four years lost during the most important years of one’s life. And as for the actual education one receives, times have dramatically changed. You have free access to all the professors and teaching you want. With some discipline, a person with a job can obtain a PhD-level education in any field on nights and weekends with zero financial expenditure.

Looked at this way, it was only a matter of time before the advantages of declining college would become obvious. Believe me, parents are paying close attention. The main reason they spend a quarter of a million to send kids to college is to guarantee a better income in the future.

When that promise is revealed to be a false one, everything changes. Then we are only left with the social and marital advantages of college—which might be enough to keep them open for another 10 years or longer. But the shine is fading fast and the edge is getting ever more dull. The trendline in the data these days is favoring the trades over the dorm room.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is about to pull the rug from underneath climate regulation…

Authored by Lawrence Wilson via The Epoch Times,

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has unveiled new regulations to strengthen the integrity of the Obamacare insurance exchanges and promote innovation.

The new federal rule, released for comment on Feb. 9, will lower the cost of health care, according to Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“At President [Donald] Trump’s direction, [this agency] is driving down costs and rooting out fraud across our health insurance programs,” Kennedy said in a statement, predicting that the policy changes overall will reduce premiums and increase consumer choice.

Eligibility Verification

New anti-fraud regulations will require stronger enforcement of eligibility and income verification, correcting a situation that some observers say allowed unscrupulous insurance brokers to sign up millions of people for the program without their knowledge, particularly in plans with no premiums.

America’s Health Insurance Plans, the trade association for health insurance companies, has disputed that claim. However, 24 had more enrollees in Obamacare zero-premium plans in 2024 than they had qualifying residents, according to data from the think tank Paragon Health Institute.

The new regulations, once finalized, will require agents and brokers to use federally-approved forms for verifying enrollee eligibility and to obtain their consent for enrollment.

The regulations also make it clear what action a consumer must take to review and affirm their personal and eligibility information, and to signify their consent.

The rule would clarify which individuals qualify for Obamacare subsidies as “eligible noncitizens,” and would deny subsidies to those who are ineligible for Medicaid due to their immigration status.

Marketing Practices

A second program change prohibits certain marketing practices for agents and brokers who help customers sign up for Obamacare through the federal and state marketplaces.

Providing cash, cash equivalents, or monetary rebates to influence customers to enroll would be prohibited.

Also prohibited are falsely suggesting that customers would qualify for a zero-premium plan and misleading customers about enrollment deadlines.

“This proposal would ensure consumers are provided accurate information about the Exchange prior to enrollment, maintain the integrity of the exchanges, and foster trust between consumers and agents, brokers, and web-brokers,” according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Payment Tracking

The new rule seeks to create an information security protocol for enrollees of the program as of 2024 to measure improper payments in the state-based exchanges.

Fraud, waste, and abuse costs the program up to $27 billion annually by some estimates, said Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.).

“This fraud can directly impact the legitimate needs of patients, who may face denied claims or delayed care when their providers struggle to verify which insurance is valid due to the chaos created by schemes like people using stolen identities to sign up for multiple plans,” Smith said in November.

Consumer Choice

Other provisions of the rule aim to expand consumer choice and bring down prices.

The draft of the policy permits insurance companies to offer catastrophic plans with terms from one to 10 years. Currently, customers must be either under 30 years old, ineligible for a subsidy for a marketplace plan, or have a hardship or affordability exemption.

The rule would expand hardship exemptions for people aged 30 and above to make catastrophic plans more accessible.

Also, insurers would be allowed to offer Obamacare plans that do not meet the standard plan requirements. Standardized plans have the same deductibles and cost-sharing, which makes it easier to compare various plans based on price and other factors.

The change aims to give issuers more flexibility to tailor plan options to their marketplaces.

“The goal is simple: lower costs, more choice, and exchanges that work as intended,” Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said in a Feb. 9 statement.

The proposed regulations will be published in the Federal Register on Feb. 11 and open for comment for 30 days.

Authored by Vismaya V via Decrypt.co,

The Ethereum co-founder has outlined a four-quadrant Ethereum-AI buildout spanning private AI use, agent markets, and governance.

In brief

• Vitalik Buterin said Monday the very frame of “work on AGI” is flawed and called for AI development guided by decentralization, privacy, verification, and human empowerment.

• He outlined an Ethereum-linked roadmap focused on local LLMs, zero-knowledge payments for private AI API usage, and cryptographic privacy, among other key areas.

• Buterin’s approach contrasts with the AGI acceleration narratives from major AI labs, focusing on safer, Ethereum-based AI coordination.

Vitalik Buterin is calling for a different path in artificial intelligence—one that rejects a blind “race to AGI” and instead relies on Ethereum-style decentralization, verification, and privacy as guardrails for the AI era.

“The frame of ‘work on AGI’ itself contains an error,” Ethereum co-founder Buterin wrote in a post on X Monday, noting that the goal is often treated as an undifferentiated race where the main distinction is simply “that you get to be the one at the top.” 

He compared the phrase to vaguely describing Ethereum as just “working in finance” or “working on computing,” saying it obscures more important questions about direction and values.

Buterin said AI and crypto are too often approached from “completely separate philosophical perspectives,” and urged builders to integrate them. 

Instead of raw acceleration, AI development should focus on systems that “foster human freedom and empowerment” and ensure “the world does not blow up,” Buterin wrote, echoing his defensive-acceleration, or d/acc, framework.

Joni Pirovich, founder and CEO of Crystal aOS, told Decrypt, “Ethereum becoming the default settlement layer for AI-to-AI interactions is realistic.

It’s less about ‘accelerating AGI’ and more about providing the necessary rails and guardrails for agentic commerce, trade, and investing. 

Trust and coordination, especially at the technology infrastructure and compliance infrastructure levels, are even more important now than ever.”

The comments land as major AI firms continue to publicly push toward AGI and superintelligence, with leading labs describing rapid progress in autonomous agents and advanced models. 

Buterin claims his alternative centers on safer, more verifiable infrastructure rather than larger models, outlining a practical roadmap in which Ethereum plays a central, though not exclusive, role. 

That includes local LLM tooling, zero-knowledge payments that let users call AI APIs without linking identity across requests, stronger cryptographic privacy, and client-side verification of AI services and attestations.

“Using Ethereum as an economic layer for AI-to-AI interaction is also directionally correct, but it will live mostly on rollups and app-specific L2s,” Midhun Krishna M, co-founder and CEO of LLM cost tracker TknOps.io, told Decrypt. 

Decentralized agent economies need programmable deposits, usage-based payments, and on-chain dispute resolution, Krishna said, adding that AI-augmented governance will require “identity, reputation, and stake-weighted accountability, not just better interfaces.”

Breaking it down

Vitalik grouped the Ethereum–AI design space into a four-part framework, illustrated as a 2×2 chart, spanning infrastructure vs. impact and survive vs. thrive outcomes. 

• One quadrant centers on tooling for trustless and private AI interaction, including local LLMs, zero-knowledge payments for anonymous API calls, cryptographic privacy upgrades, and client-side verification of AI services, TEE attestations, and proofs.

• Another quadrant positions Ethereum as an economic layer for AI activity, supporting API payments, bot-to-bot hiring, security deposits, on-chain dispute resolution, and AI reputation standards, such as proposed ERC-based models, aimed at enabling decentralized agent coordination rather than in-house platform control.

• A third focus revives the cypherpunk “don’t trust, verify” vision through local LLM assistants that can propose transactions, audit smart contracts, interpret formal verification proofs, and interact with apps without relying on centralized interfaces. 

• A fourth targets upgraded prediction markets, quadratic voting, and governance systems.

The comments echo a split that surfaced last year between Buterin and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who said his company was confident it knew how to build AGI and that AI agents could soon “join the workforce,” while Buterin promoted crypto-based safety rails and coordinated control mechanisms.

California residents have experienced the steepest rise in electricity costs in the nation, with average bills climbing 39% over the past six years, according to UC Berkeley’s Haas Energy Institute. Researchers link the surge to wildfire-related expenses and long-standing policy decisions that shifted more costs onto consumers, according to the NY Post.

“I represent a working-class district in Orange County, and constant utility rate increases mean incessant pressure for constituents to make ends meet,” Assemblymember Tri Ta told The Center Square.

He added, “I am very concerned about the cost of utilities in California. The main driver of our high costs are public policy decisions that were made long before I joined the Legislature but am tackling now.”

The Post writes that the increases come on top of California’s already high living costs, with families spending about $30,000 more than the national average on basic needs, according to the Transparency Foundation.

Analysts say utilities have been allowed to pass wildfire prevention and recovery expenses, infrastructure upgrades, and renewable energy investments directly to customers. Subsidies for rooftop solar have also shifted costs onto households without panels, according to UC Berkeley professor Severin Borenstein.

Elsewhere in the country, electricity prices generally tracked inflation from 2019 to 2025 or even declined. States such as Arizona, Minnesota, Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi, and North Carolina saw increases of just 1%, while rates fell in Nevada, Iowa, Alaska, Kansas, and South Carolina, the study found.

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

This isn’t “Capitalism,” it’s Model Collapse ushering in the inevitable conflagration.

One of the most peculiar hyper-normalized hallucinations about “Capitalism” is that markets and the economy “should always go up” and if they don’t, something is terribly wrong and somebody better do something to fix it.

Remarkably, this hyper-normalized hallucination is the exact opposite of real-world “Capitalism,” which relies on the periodic clearing of excesses of debt, leverage and speculation as its essential mechanism of self-correction and adaptation. If these are stripped out, “Capitalism” fails as a system.

The two charts of the NASDAQ stock index below illustrate the astounding divide between a real-world understanding of “Capitalism” and the hyper-normalized hallucination of always goes up “Capitalism.”

Various justifications are trotted out to support the “markets and GDP should always go up” narrative:

1. There’s always a Bull Market somewhere. In other words, the market and “growth” are always going up somewhere, and so rotating out of flat sectors into growing sectors enables markets to always go up.

2. The economy can no longer survive a market crash or recession, and so we can’t allow either to happen. Spoiler alert: If the market and economy cannot survive self-correction, then “Capitalism” as a system has already failed.

3. The Federal Reserve has mastered the art of manipulating–oops, I mean managing–the market and economy via adjusting the dials of liquidity, stimulus, money supply, cost of credit, etc. As a happy result of their god-like financial powers, markets and GDP will never go down again, barring an alien invasion or asteroid strike.

These justifications overlook the need for systems to self-correct self-reinforcing excesses that reflect the inevitable self-reinforcing human emotions: greed / confidence and doubt / fear: soaring markets generate demand for more credit and leverage to boost higher risk gambles which in the euphoria of the bubble are perceived as guaranteed to win rather than guaranteed to fail.

Given that the core functions of capitalism require feedback that correct / clear excesses, these justifications are incoherent. Dynamic systems such as capitalism don’t remain in a steady state; they are constantly in motion, and humanity’s herd instinct and built-in attraction to windfalls will inevitably generate the madness of crowds which then generate excesses of borrowing, leverage, risk and speculation, all of which must be reset via market crashes and recessions.

If corrective market crashes and recessions are not allowed (via ever higher stimulus, moral-hazard backstops of the biggest gamblers, etc.), then the system becomes increasingly brittle and dependent on hallucinations such as “markets can always go up, and so they should always go up.”

Actually, excesses must be wiped out to enable markets and economies to reset organically rather than kept aloft by centrally organized manipulation. The forest fire analogy explains this: routine, periodic fires burn off the deadwood that piles up in a forest, clearing space for new growth. If these healthy fires are suppressed, the deadwood (debt, leverage, speculation, moral hazard) reach dangerous extremes: when a fire finally ignites, the conflagration consumes the entire forest.

This is how markets clear excesses of speculation and risk: they crash 80% and reset over a period of years. Though the crash is naturally viewed as disastrously bearish by those absorbing the losses, it’s ultimately bullish for the economy and market, as suppressing the self-correction generates system collapse.

This is how the incoherent, system-failure hallucination views this bullish process: quick, do more of what crippled the system to maintain the illusion that “Capitalism” is “markets always go up.”

This isn’t “Capitalism,” it’s Model Collapse ushering in the inevitable conflagration.

*  *  *

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Building on Goldman analyst Scott Feiler’s note last week that consumer trends remain resilient despite ongoing K-shaped concerns, Brooke Roach, a Managing Director in Equity Research at Goldman covering the U.S. retail sector, published a consumer note on Tuesday analyzing recent store-traffic trends across income and ethnicity cohorts.

“We remain constructive on the off-price sector, and believe the industry is structurally well-positioned to benefit from trade down activity, a healthier middle-income consumer, and modest AUR growth as a result of tariff-related pricing increases at full-price retail,” Roach told clients.

She said, “Our checks indicate trends remain solid across the group, though we do note relatively more muted momentum at BURL.” She added, “We see the strongest momentum for ROST and TJX into F4Q results.”

A key chart Roach highlighted showed that off-price store traffic was primarily driven by low-income consumers, but that shifted sharply as trade-down activity accelerated among higher-income shoppers through late 2025.

Feiler recently noted, “It seems like consumer trends are still solid. It’s not a clean sweep, but we’re seeing January growth as strong, or stronger than December for most companies we have heard from.”

On Friday, the latest data from the Federal Reserve showed 2025 closed with a surprising surge in consumer credit. However, retail sales data for December, released on Tuesday, disappointed, as fears about a fragile consumer economy returned.

Roach’s key takeaway: off-price retailers should remain solidly performing this year as consumer trade-down behavior persists and K-shaped fears mount.

Read more about Feiler’s consumer spending trends (here). And of course, Professional subscribers can learn more about the consumer trends on our new Marketdesk.ai portal​​​​.

Via American Greatness,

Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) has broken ranks with Democratic leadership and has come out in favor of requiring photo ID for voting in elections across the nation.

Fetterman appeared on the Fox News program “Sunday Morning Futures” yesterday and told host Maria Bartiromo that voter ID wasn’t an “unreasonable” requirement, saying, “It’s not a radical idea for regular Americans to show your ID to vote.”

Fetterman’s right

Who agrees? https://t.co/vFUfyQgFPQ

— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) February 9, 2026

Fetterman pointed to states like Wisconsin that have similar protections requiring proof of citizenship for federal voter registration and photo ID at the polls.

He noted that 60% of voters in Wisconsin support such safeguards, despite having elected liberal justice Susan Crawford in 2025 to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

House Republicans plan to vote this week on the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act with national polls showing 83% of Americans support the measure, including 71% of Democrats.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries continued to decry the SAVE America Act as “voter suppression” and accused President Trump and GOP leadership of trying to steal the upcoming midterm elections by nationalizing them.

Dana Bash: 71% of your fellow Democrats support requiring an ID to vote. Why are they wrong?

Hakeem Jeffries (D): Republicans are engaging in voter suppression!.. Trump is trying to steal the election!

Elected Dems oppose the will of Americans.pic.twitter.com/tFoNR5Kv2T

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 8, 2026

Fetterman rejected comparisons of the SAVE America Act to resurrecting Jim Crow laws as Democratic leaders have claimed.

The Pennsylvania Senator also broke with his party leadership on the issue of funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) which is expected to run out on Friday unless lawmakers can break a deadlock.

Fetterman came down on the side of border enforcement and said he does not support shutting down the government, saying, “I don’t ever want to vote to shut our government down again.”

Fetterman told Bartiromo that he expects Democrats and Republicans to remain divided beyond Friday’s funding deadline.

🚨 HOLY SH*T! Senator John Fetterman just WENT ROGUE on his own party and DROPPED TRUTH BOMBS about voter ID!

On Fox with Maria Bartiromo, Fetterman straight-up said:

“And now me, as a Democrat, I do not believe that it’s unreasonable to show I.D. just to vote.”

He kept… pic.twitter.com/AR9P2AZLEx

— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) February 8, 2026

Starting on Friday, we have seen a sudden reversal from panic-selling to panic-buying in tech stocks, which has lifted Nasdaq back above its 100DMA…

The headline-grabbing culprit for much of the pain to the downside was Software stocks (IGV as an example of an ETF that tracks the sector), which collapsed as specifically SaaS firms faced ‘existential threats’ from AI disruption.

That snapped Software valuations down dramatically…

And, suddenly – starting Friday morning – buyers appeared to snap up these newly cheap stocks…

Inflows into IGV – the Software ETF – have soared…

But, the question has been – who’s buying?

Well now we have the answer, thanks to Vanda Research:

1M rolling net retail inflows into the iShares Software ETF (IGV) surged to a record $176mn as of close yesterday, more than double the prior peak seen during the late-2024 software drawdown.

This is one of the more aggressive episodes of retail dip-buying in tech, and especially software, that we’ve observed in our dataset.

Vanda also notes that Amazon ranked as the most bought US stock by retail investors, displacing Nvidia in the last few sessions.

Last Friday, AMZN recorded its largest single-day of net retail buying since Aug 2024.

We also saw decent follow-through buying throughout the session yesterday.

This is in keeping with the theme that retail investors have been opportunistically buying the dip in mega-cap tech after any earnings-driven sell-offs (also seen in MSFT, GOOGL etc.).

The question is – can retail maintain this momentum long enough to get hedgies re-engaged in Software from their near-record low exposure levels