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Household equity allocation

Flows/allocation · Fed Z.1 · Q4 2025 · 2 sources · data as of 31 Jul 2026

This one measures how much of what American households own in financial assets is sitting in shares. Directly held shares, plus everything held through funds, ETFs, retirement accounts and life insurance reserves. At the end of 2025 it came to 47.1%, and the Federal Reserve publishes it every quarter as part of the Z.1 release. It turns up constantly as a contrarian indicator. The reasoning is neat. Households collectively are the market, so when they are already fully invested there is nobody left to buy, and when they are not there is plenty of room. The historical record for that is not bad over long horizons, which is why it appears in strategist presentations so often.

What usually goes missing is that the measure moves on its own. The top of the fraction is a market value. If households buy nothing at all and shares rise 30%, this number rises. So a good part of its forecasting record is really a restatement of the fact that expensive markets tend to be followed by weaker long run returns, which is what CAPE already tells you. Treating the two as separate confirming signals counts one fact twice.

I built the page to lay out both halves, why people use it and the mechanical problem sitting underneath. Where the underlying series would not give me a figure I could verify, I left it out and said so in the note. Everything else links straight through to FRED, so you can pull the series and look at it yourself in about a minute.