I would argue that the main reason isn’t FOMO. It’s increased awareness, resources to educate yourself, and resources to participate. All of these come from the Internet.
Awareness definitely shouldn’t produce more active traders, since casual daytrading is almost always suboptimal compared to other casual investing strategies, even before you take time overhead into consideration. I’m sure this has more to do with platform access and the ability to skirt day trading rules by having nearly infinite free accounts.
Lack of participation in the stock market is one of the biggest reasons why the bottom 80% have slowly lost their wealth in the last 50 years. In this inflationary scam system, you have to secure your wealth somehow. Stocks are a great way to do that. The government is pumping a large part of the money it stole through inflation into the stock market. That’s one of the biggest reasons why the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.
Ideally you would have a money system where the average person doesn’t have to worry about that stuff. But alas, here we are.
The price of Campbell’s Tomato Soup used to be steady at 0.1$ for 70 years, but its price increased by 10x in the last 52 years since we changed to this reverse Robinhood money system.
