Harry Temkin is Chief Digital Officer at DriveWealth, a leading financial technology platform providing brokerage as a service.
Modern financial history tells us that investing hasn’t been truly open to everyone. Far from it.
For centuries, Main Street investors have lacked access to the best investment strategies and tools. The global investment system has operated behind invisible but impenetrable gates with minimum balances, geographic restrictions and institutional intermediaries that determined who could participate and was worth managing—often based on the size of the portfolio.
By design, markets were engineered for the biggest and most lucrative accounts and for professional investors, known financial advisory circles, as well as high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs), who helped fuel $2.1 trillion in wealth management funds in 2025.
The unspoken assumption was that ordinary people were stock market spectators who sat in the bleachers, not participants with front-row seats to market strategies and access.
The Retail Investor Has Arrived, For Good
Now, that assumption is becoming obsolete, and at lightning speed.
In 2025, retail trading activity in stocks and ETFs reached approximately $5.4 trillion, a 47% increase over the prior year, with net inflows into U.S. markets surpassing $300 billion, exceeding even the frenzy of the 2021 meme-stock era.
I don’t see this as a temporary spike driven by market volatility or viral momentum. Instead, I think it reflects a durable behavioral shift in how Main Street investors view and relate to the financial markets.
This new generation of investors is approaching markets the way they approach everything else: digitally and through their smartphones, on their own terms. They trade in small but regular portfolio increments, in digital-driven vehicles like micro-investments, fractional shares and other automated tools that invest spare change. According to recent FINRA data, 9.41% of all reported trades included a fractional component.
Generational data only reinforces this trajectory. Roughly 30% of Gen Z began investing while in college or early adulthood, compared to just 15% of Millennials, 9% of Gen X and 6% of Baby Boomers. That trend is accelerating, as each successive generation is entering markets earlier and more confidently than the last.
I believe investing is becoming continuous rather than episodic, embedded in the daily financial lives of a new generation of investors, who don’t view the 2020s investment experience as strictly about quarterly portfolio reviews or major life events.
This architectural change has profound implications for geographical market access as well.
Cross-border investment infrastructure is opening U.S. and global markets to investors abroad who, just a few years ago, had no practical pathway to participate. Today, a retail investor in Southeast Asia or Latin America can access the same stocks and ETFs as someone in New York, not through a work-around but through purpose-built, regulator-approved market infrastructure.
The Infrastructure Behind Inclusion
Real inclusion requires more than a new wave of investment tools and applications. It demands resilient infrastructure and aligned regulators. As retail participation surges, platforms must support cross-border compliance, fractional ownership, real-time settlement and the ability to handle massive, simultaneous trading volumes at scale.
I see the next natural step as tokenization. Moving equities, ETFs and other assets on-chain—where they carry equivalent legal rights—would enable continuous 24/7 trading, shift settlement toward near-real-time or atomic settlement and bring equities and crypto trading models much closer. Tokenized assets could unlock new collateral uses, greater liquidity and easier access to more products, while lowering the barriers to entry that once excluded many investors.
Regulators will be central to this transition as trading platforms support tens of millions of new users, particularly in the convergence of traditional finance and decentralized finance.
That’s not all. What this new investment infrastructure accomplishes, beyond the AI-powered engineering advances we’re already seeing in 2026, is reducing psychological friction for newly empowered retail investors. Traditional investing required a conscious decision to “become an investor” despite not knowing the rules of the road, leading to an intimidation factor that held many Main Street investors back.
Today, modern platforms (full disclosure: like my company’s, but there are many options in this space) integrate investing so naturally into the flow of saving and spending that users often begin building portfolios before they know it and before they would ever describe themselves as investors. That’s the difference between a system designed for the few and one built for the many.
Where We Go From Here
Analysts at JPMorgan expect retail investors to continue buying equities into 2026 and beyond. That sentiment sustains the structural shift toward broader individual participation that has defined the past several years. A case in point: Retail investors now account for roughly 21% of U.S. equity trading volume, representing a historically elevated level. I expect that share to grow as embedded investing reaches new markets across the globe going forward.
That trend is encouraging, but I’d challenge the financial ecosystem to be honest with itself in that breaking down the gates was just the first challenge. Sustaining what we’ve built is the harder one.
The infrastructure that has powered this democratization now has to prove it can scale responsibly. It must remain compliant across jurisdictions, resilient during periods of market stress and inclusive enough to serve investors whose needs look very different from the institutional clients traditional markets were built for.
As a CDO operating in this space, I believe the imperative is clear: We must ensure that the digital rails we’ve built are worthy of the trust being placed in them.
The question is no longer how and whether people can access markets. It’s whether we’ve built something durable enough and thoughtful enough to serve the next generation of investors who are already here, and are trading on the same technology level as the Wall Street titans.
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