Schwab introduced the Schwab Trading Activity Index, offering timely insights into retail trading behavior from one of the industry?s largest retail investor client bases. Building on the success of the TD AmeritradeInvestor Movement Index, launched in 2013, the STAX is a new proprietary, behavior-based index that analyzes retail investor stock positions and trading activity to illuminate what investors were actually doing and how they were positioned in the markets each month. Following an aggregated and anonymized analysis of Schwab?s millions of client accounts, the STAX determines a score, generally ranging from 35-70, that serves as a proxy to gauge Schwab clients?

exposure to equity markets. Over time, changes in this score month-by-month serve as an indirect measure of sentiment, with a higher score indicating greater market exposure and a correlation to bullishness, and a lower score indicating lower market exposure associated with potential bearishness. For example, if the STAX score rises from 40 to 50 from one month to the next, that would indicate that Schwab?s clients, on a whole, increased their exposure to the equity markets and could mark a rise in bullish sentiment.