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IPFS News Link • Economy - Economics USA

Dumb - And Dumber - Money Keeps Pouring In

• http://www.zerohedge.com

Someday, stock, bond and real estate valuations will matter again.

And the mechanism by which this return to sanity is achieved will probably be the torrent of money now flowing in from people who, for various reasons, don't care about (or understand) the prices they're paying.

Millennials, for instance, seem to have reached the "beginners' mistakes" phase of their financial lives. They're major buyers of recreational vehicles – see The Perfect Crash Indicator Is Flashing Red — and are now opening stock brokerage accounts at a startling pace:

Schwab: "New Accounts Are At Levels We Have Not Seen Since The Dot Com Bubble" As Millennials Rush Into Stocks

(Zero Hedge) – In its Q2 earnings results, [stock broker Charles] Schwab reported that after years of avoiding equities, Schwab clients opened the highest number of brokerage accounts in the first half of 2017 since 2000. This is what Schwab said on its Q2 conference call:

New accounts are at levels we have not seen since the Internet boom of the late 1990s, up 34% over the first half of last year. But maybe more important for the long-term growth of the organization is not so much new accounts, but new-to-firm households, and our new-to-firm retail households were up 50% over that same period from 2016.

In total, Schwab clients opened over 350,000 new brokerage accounts during the quarter, with the year-to-date total reaching 719,000, marking the biggest first-half increase in 17 years. Total client assets rose 16% to $3.04 trillion.

Schwab also adds that the net cash level among its clients has only been lower once since the depths of the financial crisis in Q1 2009:

"Now, it's clear that clients are highly engaged in the markets, we have cash being aggressively invested into the equity market, as the market has climbed. By the end of the second quarter, cash levels for our clients had fallen to about 11.5% of assets overall, now, that's a level that we've only seen one time since the market began its recovery in the spring of 2009."

But wait, there's more: throwing in the towel on prudence, according to a quarterly investment survey from E*Trade, nearly a third of millennial investors are planning to move out of cash and into new positions over the coming six months. By comparison, only 19% of Generation X investors (aged 35-54) are planning such a change to their portfolio, while 9% of investors above the age of 55 are planning to buy in.

Furthermore, according to a June survey from Legg Mason, nearly 80% of millennial investors plan to take on more risk this year, with 66% of them expressing an interest in equities. About 45% plan to take on "much more risk" in their portfolios.

In other words, little by little, everyone is going "all in."


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