Perhaps it’s a season to sympathize – or even to learn from – the weird habits of the millennial investor. We’re all a little wary these days.
she knows her clientele – and its peculiar neuroses. It makes sense that a financial consciousness molded by manmade crises will be wary of the habits and institutions of old. That’s the key, Bera says, to understanding a generation that’s either squeamish about investing in the stock market, on the one hand, or convinced – wisely or unwisely – that they can “game” it, on the other. My assignment, I tell her, is to get to the bottom of why millennials are weird about investing. Her answer is that, from their elders’ perspectives, millennials are weird about everything . “What seems ‘weird’ makes sense in the context of the work to live, as opposed to live to work, approach to finance and wealth,” she explains. The rhythm of the millennial’s exposure to major market corrections throughout their lifetimes instills a conservative instinct, which Bera doesn’t discourage. But she identifies a more timeless instinct, too: “I have a conservative nature. As a woman, I value security first,” she says. With millennial women twice as likely as their mothers were to outearn their partners, it could be the innately feminine instinct to secure a safe and stable home that’s dictating millennial wealth trends. Bera admits she’s often asked herself in the past if she and her clients were being too conservative, knowing that an older – and, in her field, typically male – adviser would likely be encouraging bolder moves. But, as it turns out, there’s real value in indulging your inner doomsday prepper. “Now we’re seeing that conservatism pay off.” The instinct to stockpile for early retirement, for instance, comes in part from this
generationally endemic desire for security. She finds herself tapping into this instinct in the COVID-19 era when convincing her clients not to panic and move to cash. One, a 38-year-old who’d been preparing to quit his job and take a sabbatical, has been watching his brokerage account go down and his dreams die with it – but, it turns out, he was readier for the unforeseen crisis than he knew. The account is 65% stocks and 35% bonds, a more conservative balance that would have made sense to a more aggressive investor looking at the state of the world a few months ago. Why did they structure it the way they did? “Because we don’t know exactly when or how we’re going to use this money,” Bera says. And, as we all know, now more than ever, we don’t know what we don’t know, if you know what I mean... Perhaps it’s a season to sympathize – or even to learn from – the weird habits of the millennial investor. We’re all a little wary these days. And we will be for a while, until it finally seems fully safe to come out – if it ever does.
Alice Lloyd is a writer and reporter in Washington, D.C., covering culture, politics, and the weirdness in between. Her work has been featured in the New York Times , the Washington Post , the Boston Globe , and the Weekly Standard .
American Consequences
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