Quite the opposite. Many people are acquiring extra in anticipation of a coin split. You would then have coins on two networks!
This doesn't look like a good idea because: If we end up spliting the chain in two, the price will probably go down a lot on both chains. And it's also possible for people to lose its coins if they sell on one chain and buy in the one with lower amount of hash rate.
Most people are actually trading for altcoins to avoid any conflict in this period.
It's also possible that we won't need to do a hard fork in August 1st because miners are starting to work to activate Segwit2x before the this date. Maybe the chain won't need to split after all...