Total health of US Investors

October 10, 2012 9:20 AM

How would you measure the total health of individual investors? So the U.S. has a large number of individual investors actively managing their money. Does anyone measure that for both number of accounts and total amount in them? Trying to see if we can track are people more actively investing or less actively investing as opposed to parking their money in mutual funds.
posted by monkeywithhat to work & money (4 answers total)

You can look at mutual fund flows but that doesn't really answer your question. People can buy and hold stocks for their own accounts and don't necessarily need to do so through mutual funds.

I'm not sure what you mean by "the total health of individual investors".
posted by dfriedman at 9:26 AM on October 10, 2012

Have you already been through the info available from the EBRI?
posted by mullacc at 10:33 AM on October 10, 2012

You can get some of the information you want through the fed's Flow of Funds data, which repays careful study. See, for example, page 4 of this report, especially lines 13-18.
posted by shothotbot at 11:57 AM on October 10, 2012 [1 favorite]

Another data source is the Investment Company Institute, the national organization of mutual fund companies. For example, Figure 1.2 on p.10 in their factbook is Share of Household Financial Assets Held in Investment Companies. It increased steadily from 3 percent to about 20 in 2000 and has been pretty stable since. But funds not in mutual funds are not all actively invested, so the flow of funds is probably better for the big picture.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 12:49 PM on October 10, 2012