How the pandemic made Americans richer
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Illustration: Lindsey Bailey/Axios
Americans have never been wealthier. That's thanks in large part to the way in which they jumped feet-first into the stock market as soon as the pandemic hit.
Why it matters: Retail investors, it turns out, didn't panic when confronted with market volatility, as they were in March 2020.
- Quite the opposite — they bought the dip, and kept on putting in money as stocks then rose. They even increased the riskiness of their portfolios, by buying volatile tech stocks and holding onto them as they rose in value and accounted for an ever-greater share of their portfolios.
By the numbers: Over the past five years, U.S. household financial wealth has risen by 38%, to $120 trillion, per JPMorgan Asset Management — a sum that dwarfs the $35 trillion Americans have in home equity.
- "Investors added more market risk during the pandemic," says a new report from the JPMorgan Chase Institute released Tuesday morning and shared exclusively with Axios.
- "This implies more volatility in wealth holdings in the short term, while potentially leading to greater long-term wealth."
Between the lines: Periods of high volatility are exactly the times when "consumers are most likely to be pushing money into investment accounts," per Chris Wheat, president of JPMC Institute, tells Axios.
- The cohort of investors who opened their accounts between March 2020
and June 2021 had particularly elevated risk appetite — a bet that paid off handsomely as the stock market rose sharply thereafter.
Zoom in: The studies were done on a dataset from Chase Wealth Management covering the portfolios of 500,000 investors in self-directed brokerage accounts.
- In other words, this wasn't the Wall Street Bets crowd downloading Robinhood onto their phones and YOLOing their stimmies on meme stonks.
- All the same, some 70% of the investors opening accounts during the height of the pandemic were men.
Follow the money: Pre-pandemic, Americans had pretty boring stock portfolios on average, with a riskiness (or beta, to use the technical term) barely greater than that of the S&P 500. Then, everything changed.
How it works: Consider an investor who put $60,000 into the stock market in March 2020. Between March 2020 and December 2021, that investment on average would have returned $6,400 more than if that money had been invested according to the pre-pandemic norm.
- In general, for any time period from 2020 onwards, retail investors' stock portfolios will have outperformed the S&P 500 by roughly 15 percentage points.
The bottom line: U.S. investors have become significantly less risk-averse since the pandemic hit, and that's helping their brokerage balances.
