Wall St. Euphoric; Investors Grim
What if Wall Street gave a party and everybody showed up - but almost nobody had any fun?
As the great stock bull market of the 1990s plows onward, the tens of millions of American shareholders are richer by a collective $1.6 trillion in the past year alone. Yet their mood seems to move inversely with their ballooning portfolios.
Instead of excitement, hoopla and the smugness that comes with being “in the know” about stocks, investors’ emotions run more to guilt, anxiety, apathy and even mild disappointment.
Among professional money managers, the past 13 months have been a continual and mostly losing battle to keep up with the Dow Jones industrial average, which soared 33.5 percent last year and is up an additional 8.5 percent this year.
Many fund managers “don’t understand what’s going on” with the economy or the market, says Alfred Kugel, strategist at the investment firm Stein, Roe & Farnham in Chicago. “That’s why it’s not fun.”
And then there are new investors such as Elise McMullin. The 25-year-old Washington paralegal plans to join an investment club with a dozen friends. They each will pool at least $20 a month to buy stocks they will research themselves.
“I think that for many people the stock market is such a mystical and confusing thing, and it is for me too,” she soberly admits. Then why bother? “I really don’t believe Social Security is going to be any kind of security for my future.”
That a bull market so spectacular in magnitude should be greeted with so much angst and apprehension, and generate so little overt excitement, marks a strange chapter in the American economy and sets this powerful move in stocks apart from surges in the mid-1980s, the 1950s and ‘60s, and the 1920s.
It can be argued that stocks in the 1990s are rocketing for all the wrong reasons: strong corporate profits achieved at the expense of workers’ job security; falling interest rates that reflect an anemic economy, and, most important, a record and rising level of investment by aging Americans who own stocks not necessarily because they want to, but because they feel as if they have no choice - with retirement approaching and stocks touted as the only true path to financial security.
Also, mutual funds - which allow small investors to pool their money in a diversified portfolio of stocks under the stewardship of a professional manager - have become the principal vehicle of stock ownership for individuals.
In 1995, gross purchases of stock mutual funds totaled a record $310 billion, up more than 300 percent just since 1990, when purchases were $71 billion, according to the Investment Company Institute, the funds’ chief trade group.
There are more than 2,200 stock funds today holding assets of more than $1.2 trillion, up from 288 funds holding a $44 billion in 1980.
The public’s rationale for choosing mutual funds over individual securities is easy to understand. For convenience and diversification the fund concept is hard to beat, especially for people with relatively small sums to invest.
But the ascendance of the funds also explains why many investors who are directly responsible for stocks’ bull market feel no strong linkage to it - unlike in previous bull markets when pride in knowing about individual stocks, or at least pretending to know, was an integral part of investing.
What’s more, for the past decade Americans have been conditioned by the media and by an army of financial advisers to be “buy-and-hold” stock fund investors.
That has fostered a sense that fund investors needn’t pay close attention to the market; everything will work out in the long run, people are assured, because the stock market always goes up over time.
The high degree of trust in that promise is most apparent in the avalanche of cash entering mutual funds each month through 401k savings plans and other such retirement accounts.
But if this is history’s first largely emotionless bull market, the reason may be less the style of investment people have chosen than what has motivated them to invest in the first place.
Lacking job security and constantly reminded about the tottering state of Social Security and Medicare, many Americans - especially the 76 million-member baby boom generation - believe that investing “is not discretionary - it’s now necessary,” says Susan Sterne, economist at Economic Analysis Associates in Greenwich, Conn.
Moreover, with interest rates near 20- or 30-year lows and home values rising slowly the stock market more than ever is considered the only logical route to building a decent nest egg.