The Rise - and Fall - of Stocks

It's startling to take a step back and realize that it wasn't so long ago that owning stocks was considered a rare and privileged thing.In 1980, according to figures compiled by the Investment Company Institute, just 19 percent of all U.S. households owned equities. By 1999, fueled by the rise of 401(k)s, nearly half of American households – 48.2 percent – held equities in one form or another, whether that was stocks, mutual fund or annuities.

But it wasn’t just retirement plans; 35.5 percent of households owned stocks outside of an employer-sponsored retirement plan. The bull markets of the 1980s and 1990s brought a huge number of small investors into the equity markets.

Those numbers have been pared back over the past decade, though. Equity ownership climbed to 53 percent of American households in 2001, but has since fallen back to 46.4 percent. The crash of 2008-2009 seems to have scared a lot of people away for good.