Taking Stock of New Investors: Race, Ethnicity, Gender and Investing Behavior

The AFS Conference will feature speakers, symposia, and several special sessions. Among them, we will introduce a new panel session for PhD students, highlighting how to best navigate the job market.
With the generous support of our sponsors, the Academy has awarded several best paper awards during past meetings and we anticipate continuing Best Paper awards in 2021.
We will continue with our Emerging Scholar Award to a current graduate student for promising research work on a paper or poster presented at the conference.

Keywords

Short Description

2020 saw a surge of new investors enter the market, but little is known about how this group differs from more tenured investors. To learn more about these new account openers, their motivations, the types of accounts they opened, and their investment knowledge and practices, we surveyed 1,291 households, including 460 new investors who began investing with taxable accounts for the first time in 2020, from a nationally representative, probability-based panel.

This paper details the characteristics of new investors, with a special focus on differences based on race, ethnicity and gender. Results of this study indicate that new investors were younger, had lower incomes, and were more racially diverse than investors who entered the market prior to 2020. New Investors held smaller balances in their taxable accounts and reported different goals, motivations, and information sources when compared to more tenured investors.