While 94 million individual investors, in 55 million households, owned mutual funds in mid-2016, most mutual fund assets are held by baby boomers, according to ICI, a reflection of the decades older generations have had to accumulate savings.
Nearly half of the more than 43 million households headed by a baby boomer owned mutual funds, accounting for approximately half of the U.S. households’ mutual fund assets. Half of Generation X households own mutual funds as well, accounting for 29 percent of the total of U.S. household mutual fund assets.
A little more than one-third of millennials, 35 percent, owned mutual funds at midyear 2016, accounting for just 6 percent of the total U.S. household mutual fund assets.
ICI’s study is based on its “Annual Mutual Fund Shareholder Tracking Survey.” This year, the survey was conducted from May to July and sampled 5,500 U.S. households with landlines and cell phones.