Gallup Has Never Seen So Many Americans Sitting Out Of The Stock Market

No, the retail investor has not stepped back into the stock market.

According to Gallup, only 52% of Americans (alone or with their spouse) are in the game as of April 2013. That's the lowest percentage since Gallup started tracking this information in 1998 (via Blackrock, h/t Reformed Broker).

As Blackrock points out, this doesn't jive with the traditional idea that confident consumers are more likely to invest. Recent surveys of consumer confidence have actually come in strong, but 48% of Americans are still sitting this one out.

"It is possible that this has to do with the impacts of emotional investing or peoples' decreasing appetites for risk since the recession," said the BlackRock report.

That's probably putting it gently.