施瓦布策略师：Z世代转向股市与“小确幸”经济

Kevin Gordon. He's had a macro research and strategy at Charles Schwab. And you know, I look at this and as far as I can see with personal finance and distant retirement, the younger crew, which you're arguably the voice on Wall Street, the younger crew takes us a lot more seriously than I did when I was 30 at the Wobbly Barn way up in Vermont. Yes, it is a definitive shift. I thought that the huge shift was was fascinating because, you know, I said, it's such an interesting exercise, sort of talk about me being the younger voice on this.

You know, all day I'm in the Wall Street world for work, but then I live in the Gen Z world and cusp. But I'm technically Gen Z still. I'm on the I'm on the edge of it. It's a new but older Gen Z younger millennials. Exactly that I'm speaking. But the you know, this whole this whole idea around, you know, you and you see it survey after survey, anecdote after anecdote. But younger people today, especially in Gen Z, they just don't really believe in that classic American dream of a house being a wealth generator.

So they have shifted a lot to the stock market. But that has really important implications for how they think about saving and how they think about building wealth over time. Not, you know, better or worse than what it was before. It's just a different environment than what we've had. They think about income generation through these like fancy schmancy ETFs. Um, that cost a lot of money. But um, also, I guess when it works, it works, but it feels like there's a lot of risk taking involved that they may not be aware of.

Yes, there has been a, you know, a blurring of this sort of investing versus gambling kind of mindset over the past several years. I would sort of data back, I guess, to 2021, when a lot of people were treating that meme stock craze as, you know, new way to wealth, but obviously they didn't. Well, I think I want to interrupt you. This is too important. Your colleague Lizzie and Saunders is leading the way on this. Yes.

She is the number one voice in the racket over what it means for kids in your milieu. When you're a hipster and you're out on the weekend and all that. How pervasive is the gambling? Oh, it's incredibly pervasive. I mean, because, you know, it's it's all in front of us all the time. Uh, you know, that we all see the stats on screen time and how much people are buried in their phones, and it and it gets, you know, larger and larger percentage wise when you so they understand they're losing money.

Is anybody making money? I don't know if. Well, the the statistics on gambling versus investing are definitive in terms of how much money the average person loses for for the former. So investing over the long term is is statistically and empirically it is that's, you know, it's the better way to sort of build wealth. But I think also what has sort of taken hold and this was sort of embedded, I think a little bit in the story that you were discussing earlier, um, is that we have, because of housing being so much at the center of how people view wealth building now and the fact that housing is frozen for a huge chunk of out of reach, out of reach.

We've been living in what has been called this little treat economy, where people are treating themselves to smaller things, not necessarily thinking about saving for a big down payment or a big purchase. Not painting that across the board for millennials, but that is that is increasingly becoming the norm. And the feeling and hence why you see now also a lot more money being put into the stock market. So again, it's not necessarily an outright bad thing.

It's just different in how people are treating their wealth. I mean, this source of demand for equities kind of continues unabated. Um, if people are treating gambling as investing when they really want to go to something safe, what is that safe thing? Well, the I mean, I would argue that, you know, any sort of tried and true and tested asset class, whether it's the bond market, whether it's the stock market, um, you know, those traditional asset classes have have sort of proven their worth over time for millennials investing in bonds.

Um, I wouldn't say that the interest is there yet, especially when I speak to that. But I think that that's still maybe a maybe a more of a kind of enigma and a little bit of a black box in terms of the dynamics of the bond to us as well. Oh, yeah. I mean, to me, I'm, I'm a stock market person. So the bond market to me is still an enigma. But I think, you know, when you when you start to look into the mechanics and the maths of the bond market, especially this week, uh, I mean, when I have people now texting me about bonds, that's when, you know, things are really getting out into the mainstream and getting very, very interesting.

But, um, but I still think that from, from that sort of coupon perspective, in that yield perspective, you know, we've been in the camp that the bond backdrop is favorable, maybe not necessarily out to the long end in the tenure, but if you're focusing sort of right below duration, which is where our guidance is, I love this. This is brilliant, Kevin. This banner that we've got up now, young Americans living in the treat economy are just absolutely brilliant.

Let's bring this up. The writings of Kevin Gordon. He's been writing all summer because Liz and took the summer off the S&P 500 up marginally yet breath improving emphasized most by the fact equal weighted S&P up 8.9%, mag seven uh, down the tubes. So we're learning again about rotation and that bring it back to retirement. If I'm in those ugly middle years where I'm thinking about retirement, I'm scared stiff. I won't have enough money, but I'm paralyzed.

I can't do anything 45, 50, 55 years old. What's the path, given this new breadth? Well, uh, the breadth of the market, I think, in what you've learned over the past several years, because we've been, and I would argue this multi-year rotation process, not necessarily outside of the Mag seven, where those companies just aren't going to be good performers. But you've we often find that there's this conflating, and you run into this where people think just because they're the largest companies, they're going to be the best performers in the market.

That was the case several years ago, but that hasn't been the case in the past several years. So I think that notably 24, 25, that's when you started to see more of a definitive shift. So the fact that they could still be up this year or up over the past year, that that's true. But they're, you know, sort of ceding leadership to a lot of other parts of the market that have been asleep for a good chunk of this bull market.

Small caps is sort of the poster child of that. So I think in a rotational market where you've got north of 70% of companies in the S&P 500 that are trading above their 200 day moving average, that is much more consistent with rotational markets, where leadership can change over time. And it's not necessarily poor tending, you know, some massive drop in the market. Very different backdrop than late 2021, which I think is an important analog, because that's when things started to get way to top heavy breath under the surface was deteriorating.

And then you ultimately had the bear market in 22. I want to go back to what you said about the treat economy and how people are feeling that they want to get, you know, treat themselves a little bit because the big things are so out of reach. The flip side of that is that phenomenon of fire, right? Financial independence and retire early, invest really aggressively. Um, deny yourself everything for now so that by what, 30 or 40 or 50 you can retire and go live your best life?

How much does that come up in your conversations with this generation of investors comes up a lot. Uh, I have a lot of discussions with individuals who, uh, you know, whether it's an a, you know, friend capacity and they're just letting me kn