Well-known investor Michael Burry thinks you don't know what you're investing in.
"95% of investors likely have no idea what they really own," Burry, who is known for predicting the 2008 financial crisis, said on social media. "Let me re-phrase that. 95% of investors like to have no real idea of what they own."
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Burry, whose story was adapted into the film The Big Short, didn't provide any other context in his post; he didn't say why he thinks that's the case, how he came up with 95% as a figure, or even if he thinks this is a problem.
So it's up to us to decide: Is he right? Are almost all investors unaware of what they're investing in, and is that even a bad thing?
Here's how the numbers break down.
Everyone invests for different reasons, which mean everyone's investment strategies are necessarily different.
A study by Empower asked over 1,000 American adults about their investing habits. Only around 44% of said they were confident that they were able to make good investments. Around 30% said they went to financial advisors for investing information.
As for why people invested, over 85% of respondents said they invested with specific goals in mind; the most popular goal was "retiring on time," at 40%. Only 12% said they invested without any specific goal, while 10% said they didn't invest at all.
Not every goal Empower listed was long-term. For example, "affording experiences that bring joy" got 30% of the vote, while "building an emergency fund" got 29% of the vote. Those are generally considered short-term goals; investing strategies for short-term goals can differ pretty strongly from investing strategies for long-term goals.
For example, it's likely that people who are investing for retirement will use a tax-advantaged retirement account to do so. But a retirement account is not generally a great place to keep your emergency fund, because it isn't liquid. (In fact, it's generally a good idea to keep an emergency fund in something more accessible than an investment anyway.)
That being said, retirement accounts are a common way that people invest. Almost 60% of U.S. adults said they have a retirement account, according to a 2025 Gallup poll The poll found the overlap between people who own stock and people who own a retirement account is high: 89% of retirement fund owners have stocks, while 86% of stock owners have a retirement account.
Source: Yahoo Finance Top News — This article was automatically imported from the source. Read full article at original source →
