Why Young People Are Afraid of Stocks

I don't know many people who love clowns, but some of my friends downright hate them. They think clowns are creepy and menacing and awful. When I ask why, the answer is almost always the same: I had a bad experience when I was a kid.

Well, American Millennials: the stock market is your new clown. We've all had bad experiences as a kid. Some of us graduated from high school into the tech bubble. Others graduated from college into the Great Recession. But all of us saw the stock market race past 14,000 before falling off a cliff into the sevens. Who's surprised that we're not itching to invest?

Nancy Cook reports that young people -- my people -- are staying out of the stock market. In fact, according to a new report from Merrill Lynch, "affluent millennials and 30-somethings say their tolerance for risky investments is much lower than it was a year ago, rivaled only by people over the age of 65."

It's not hard to see why. As Cook says, we're a generation "whose financial coming-of-age has been bookended by the dotcom bubble and the subprime-mortgage meltdown."

I agree with Ezra: business journalists have every reason to manage their money carefully. You would, too, on a journalist's salary spending all day reading about this economy.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/09/why-young-people-are-afraid-of-stocks/62751/