Stocks hit a record 48.2% of Americans’ financial assets, Yahoo Finance finds, and the top 10% hold most of them

Stocks made up 48.2% of Americans’ financial assets in the second quarter, the highest share in Federal Reserve records going back to 1945, Yahoo Finance reported Saturday in a calculation from the Fed’s Financial Accounts. Financial assets here means everything from bank accounts to brokerage accounts and 401(k)s, not counting homes. The earlier highs were 38.7% at the dot-com peak and 41% after the 2021 meme-stock run, which puts today’s share about 9.5 points above the first.

The Fed’s Sept. 11 release shows households, a category that also includes nonprofits, holding $74.0 trillion in stocks, counting shares held through funds and retirement plans, against $20.3 trillion in bank deposits and money market funds. That works out to about $3.65 of stock for every $1 of cash, the record Yahoo cites.

Most of the climb came from prices. In the second quarter the Fed shows the value of household stock holdings up $10.7 trillion while deposits fell $0.1 trillion, inside a $12.8 trillion rise in household net worth to $195.9 trillion. That works out to stocks supplying roughly 84% of the rise. A portfolio nobody touches drifts toward whatever went up: Yahoo calculates that an investor who set a 60/40 mix of stocks and bonds at the start of 2023 and never rebalanced, meaning sold some winners to restore the original mix, would now hold about 73% in stocks.

The exposure sits at the top. The Fed’s Distributional Financial Accounts for the second quarter show the top 10% of households by wealth holding about 88% of directly held stocks and mutual fund shares, and the top 1% about 51%, a calculation from the Fed’s table. The bottom half holds about 0.6% of that category. Of the $9.4 trillion the category gained between the first and second quarters, about $8.4 trillion, or 89%, landed in top-10% accounts, a calculation from the same table. That table leaves out pension accounts such as 401(k)s, so it understates how far stock ownership reaches through retirement plans.

Counting everything they own, homes and pensions included, stocks and mutual funds are about 43% of the top 10%’s assets, 12% of the next 40%’s and 3.6% of the bottom half’s, by the same calculation. The Fed says as much in its release: because equities are concentrated among higher-income households, “not all households are equally impacted by changes in asset prices.”

BofA Global Research economist Aditya Bhave wrote on Sept. 24 that household assets have climbed to more than 10 times liabilities, and that even a 20% drop in stocks would only take that ratio to 9.5. With the exposure this concentrated, a fall would reach the budgets of the households with the most room to absorb it first.

Yahoo offers a historical note: using price returns since 1951, the S&P 500 gained a median of about 11% a year over the next decade when stocks were under 20% of household financial assets, and about 5% when the share topped 30%. Yahoo calls it a decade-long signal, not a timing tool. The Fed describes its estimates for the household group as “largely residual, derived from other sectors’ data,” Yahoo notes. The next update is due Dec. 10, with a rough Yahoo estimate near 49%.

The 48.2% is a total across very different balance sheets, so it describes the household sector better than it describes the typical family’s brokerage statement.

Sources

• Yahoo Finance: Americans have never had more of their money in stocks, not even in the dot-com bubble
• Federal Reserve: Financial Accounts of the United States, Recent Developments (Sept. 11, 2026)
• Federal Reserve: Distributional Financial Accounts, household wealth by percentile