Are Robinhood Retail Traders Fueling The Rally? It Depends Who You Ask

Wall Street pros and traders are playing a game with novice Robinhood users and other retail investors, according to CNBC's Jim Cramer.

Yet this stance isn't supported by a deep dive look into retail trading by Barclays.

Cramer Says Wall Street Pros Prey On 'Stupid' People: Professional traders are simply picking a few beaten-up stocks like airlines, bidding them up in the premarket trading and then hope "people are stupid enough" to buy them later on in the day, Cramer said Friday morning.

A case in point: American Airlines Group Inc AAL guided its second-quarter revenue to be down 90% year-over-year.

Yet the airliner's stock was up 15% Friday, as a lot of "suckers" are "thinking that there's something going on," Cramer said.

See Also: Why Investors Shouldn't Ignore Thursday's Stock Market Plunge

Barclays Sees No Relationship To Robinhood: Data from Barclays shows no clear relationship between what Robinhood investors are doing and the S&P 500 index.

The deep-dive did find that some of the most-traded stocks on the Robinhood app are among the biggest stock market winners, but correlation does not imply causation, according to Barclays. 

"Just because two things happen at the same time doesn't mean one causes the other," analyst Ryan Preclaw was quoted by CNBC as saying in a note.

"And while it's true that many high-return stocks have had a substantial increase in retail ownership, low-return stocks have also had a big increase."

Robinhood investors as a whole are underperforming the market, according to Barclays.