37% of Americans Don't Own Stocks. 3 Easy Ways to Become an Investor Today.
You may never be as rich as the uber-wealthy, but you can still reap the same percentage returns that they do on their money.
If you've decided the stock market is a rich man's game... well, there's actually bit of truth to the idea. The wealthiest 1% of families living in the United States own about 50% of the entire U.S. stock market, while the richest 10% of the country's households own about 87% of all its stocks. The other 90% of people living in the United States are collectively holding the other 13% of the stock market's total value of around $60 trillion. But not even all of those families are equity investors. As the Motley Fool's in-house research arm highlights, 37% of Americans -- or roughly 40 million households -- don't own any stocks at all.
Don't be too quick jumping to conclusions based on these numbers though. In many ways, they paint a misleading picture of what non-investors could be doing and arguably should be doing. Although you may never join the 1%, you can still tap into the reasons why they're so heavily invested in the market.
Rich investors make a point of making the most of their money. That usually means owning stocks, plugging them into an average inflation-beating annual gain of about 10%.
