Retail Investors Are a Growing Force. Here’s How IR Teams Are Engaging Them.

Rethink Your Earnings Presentation Before January Hits

If you are planning your IR priorities for next year, there is a window right now to get a head start before earnings season kicks off in January. We have been running what we call an Earnings Diagnostic for IR teams that want to rethink how their earnings presentations work.

It is a focused two-to-three-week engagement ($10,000 to $15,000) where we review your current earnings materials, identify gaps in your messaging and design, and deliver a roadmap: where your narrative should go, how the deck should be structured, and what a repeatable earnings system would look like for your company. You walk away with a clear direction and a blueprint for the full build, not the build itself.

A few of our current clients started exactly this way. It is also a practical use of remaining 2026 budget, since the work carries directly into next year.

If you want to explore it, book a session below.

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There are roughly 100 million retail investors in the United States, and that number is growing at about 15% year over year. Retail ownership of equities keeps climbing.

For IR teams, the takeaway is simple: retail investors are already in your stock, or they will be. They hold through volatility more than algorithmic strategies do, which can make your stock more resilient. They vote, and only 10% currently exercise that right, which makes them an untapped voting block. And when a proxy fight arrives, the companies that already have a relationship with their retail base are in a fundamentally different position from those that do not.

Earlier this year, we attended a session at the 2026 NIRI Conference on navigating the rise of retail investors. The panel included Elizabeth Krutoholow (VP of IR, Tempus AI), Matt Joanou (CEO, Stakeholder Labs), Zak Mehan (Managing Director, FTI Consulting), and Grant Bartucci (Autonomous Research).

We organized our notes around the most actionable ideas from that session, whether you are just getting started with retail investor engagement, figuring out how to resource it, or building the case internally for why it matters.

Retail Investors at a Glance

Before getting into tactics, it helps to understand the landscape. A few numbers from the session framed the conversation:

  • 100 million retail investors in the US, growing at roughly 15% year over year.
  • Only 10% of retail investors exercise their votes. That is a massive untapped voting block for companies that figure out how to engage them.
  • Stock trading and investing apps have grown at a 20% CAGR over the past decade (Research and Markets).
  • The top 10% of retail investors hold 93% of all retail-held stock. Not all retail investors are equal, and that concentration matters when you think about where to focus your outreach.

The panel pushed a clear message: stop thinking of retail investors as one group. They are multiple cohorts. A Robinhood user who trades daily is a fundamentally different audience from a Schwab investor who has held your stock for three years. The platform, the timeline, the position size, all of it varies. Knowing the difference matters for how you communicate, what content you produce, and where you show up.

“Segment your retail investors into cohorts. Understand their platforms, their timelines, and their position types. Then tailor your approach.” (Matt Joanou, Stakeholder Labs)

Inside the Playbook of Tempus AI’s IRO

Tempus AI is a roughly $15 billion market cap healthcare technology company with a large retail investor base. Elizabeth Krutoholow, its VP of IR, shared what her team has been doing, and her approach was one of the most practical in the session.

(i) Treat retail investors with the same respect as institutional investors. They want transparency and credibility. Do not talk down to them or treat them as a lesser audience. The psychology is the same.

(ii) Test your content with AI tools before publishing. Her team runs shareholder letters through internal AI agents to check that key messages come through clearly. They also use ChatGPT and Gemini to see how Tempus AI is perceived, asking questions the way a retail investor would. It is a quick way to spot gaps in your messaging.

(iii) Shift from press releases to shareholder letters. Her team has been producing more shareholder letter-style content (three to five pages), which is easier to digest than a traditional earnings release.

(iv) Repurpose content into bite-sized formats. Her team works with communications to turn longer content into short videos and social posts. She is also a believer in podcasts, with snippets pulled for retail-facing distribution.

Resourcing retail investor efforts: She was also candid about internal dynamics. Asking a CEO or board for retail investor marketing budget is a complex conversation. But you can start without budget by collaborating with teams that are already creating content and finding the IR angle in what they do.

“Consider investor communications as a team sport. Lean on your colleagues in comms and marketing. They often have more resources, budget, and channels than IR.” (Elizabeth Krutoholow, Tempus AI)

​Tempus AI also has an AI assistant on its homepage. In this example, we asked it to help us understand the investment thesis. We went deeper into how IR teams are putting AI to work in a previous article.

Actionable Ideas You Can Borrow

(i) Start with measurement. Before building a strategy, know who your retail investors are, how many there are, and how much of your stock they hold. Search your ticker on AI tools and social platforms. Be in the shoes of the investor.

(ii) Not every tactic is for everyone. Not every CEO is comfortable on camera, and not every company needs to be on X. The key is to pick two or three tactics that fit your company and your leadership, put one or two people on them, learn from it, and scale.

(iii) Bring retail investors and influencers into the room. Lemonade invited top retail investors to its investor day. Robinhood has invited YouTube finfluencers to investor meetings and run live streams. Opendoor has done similar live streams. If 30 to 50% of your stock is retail, these shareholders deserve to be in the room.

(iv) Use retail investor Q&A tools. Say Technologies (acquired by Robinhood) lets retail investors submit and upvote questions before earnings calls. We covered this tool in a previous article. It is a structured way to give retail investors a voice, and some companies respond in writing as well.

(v) Make shareholder letters work for both audiences. Focus on things beyond numbers: products, people, strategy. Let regular investors get to know the company, not just the financials.

Why It Matters: A Proxy Fight Can Cost Tens of Millions

Companies usually get serious about retail investor engagement when a proxy fight hits. At that point, the cost is enormous.

Consider the 2017 proxy fight between P&G and Nelson Peltz’s Trian Fund Management. P&G spent an estimated $35 million defending itself, with some estimates as high as $100 million. Trian spent roughly $25 million. Much of that cost came from one fact: retail investors owned about 40% of P&G’s stock. Reaching millions of individual shareholders took outreach across social media, email, direct mail, and robocalls.

Some tools to understand and engage your retail base cost seven figures. That sounds expensive until you compare it to tens of millions spent in a proxy fight, with no retail relationships to lean on.

“Never waste a big crisis. If a proxy fight or challenge comes, use that moment to get leadership to invest in the tools and relationships that should have been built earlier.” (Zak Mehan, FTI Consulting)

For IR teams where retail owns 30% or more of the stock, the panel’s advice was clear: frame this as a board-level conversation about risk management, not marketing spend. The cost of building relationships with retail investors is a fraction of what a proxy fight demands when those relationships do not exist.

Closing thoughts

The companies and IR teams covered in this article are not waiting for a crisis to build relationships with their retail shareholders. They are being proactive: adapting their storytelling, and creating channels for retail investors to engage directly. The idea is that when a vote or a challenge comes, the relationship is already in place.

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