00:00 Speaker A
Investors are remaining confident in the broader market. For more, let’s welcome in now Caleb Silver, editor-in-chief of Investopedia. Caleb, always great to see you, especially on set. So, you have a great line of sight to retail investors. The folks that invest in Investopedia, Caleb, how are they feeling right now? It sounded like the bottom line was okay, a bit nervous, who can blame them, but not selling.
00:30 Caleb Silver
Yeah, I think they’re copy-trading high anxiety, but they don’t want to stop believing, especially in their favorite stocks. So they’ve been freaked out by a lot of the volatility in the stock market, the steep drops, a lot of them, I would say 30%, have been trying to catch the falling knives or trying to dollar cost average in, or buy dips on their favorite stocks. Others are just paralyzed, kind of by the, “We just don’t know how this is going to play out, but something seems amiss.” And one thing that we watch really closely here is, not only are 44% extremely worried, which is a high mark for us, but folks who are trusting the capital markets less and less. And one big question we ask them is, “Has your deterioration in your faith in the capital markets been impacted by this administration and by this tariff policy that kind of, they can’t depend on right now?” 55% say they trust this administration less when it comes to preserving the integrity of the capital markets, and I think that’s pretty serious.
01:44 Speaker A
It was interesting to see, you know, typically when people get risk averse, they might move into the bond market, trying to get some capital appreciation, but maybe tied to that concern about the faith in the capital markets, what we’re seeing is that investors are basically shunning anything other than, you know, cash under the mattress.
02:09 Caleb Silver
Yeah, so cash, you see one in 10 going to cash here. And when you see what they’re buying with their cash, some of it is just straight cash, some of it is high-yield savings accounts and CDs. They’re trying to get a good rate on that. Others are trying to chase individual stocks. We see a little bit of ETF buying. We ask them this question always, “What would you do with an extra $10,000 if you had it to invest?” And it’s still individual stocks because there’s that promiscuity, and they have this, you know, long love affair with the biggest stocks in the market, right? The herd loves the big stocks. But the next selection under that, they were talking about money markets, they were talking about CDs. So that shows you that there’s some risky people here that are willing to go out on the deep end. Others just are uncertain right now and want to see what happens before they make any big moves with their portfolio.