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.
The internet has been a thing for a long time. This is hardly an exclusive thing only for zoomers. Hell, internet stock trading had been a thing since before zoomers even existed… it’s been around for almost 30 years and the oldest zoomers are 24 or 25.
Yes but phone apps that make it easy to open a trading account are relatively new.
Hell, internet stock trading had been a thing since before zoomers even existed… it’s been around for almost 30 years
That's true, although calling in your order instead wasn't much trouble. However opening a brokerage account was much more difficult. You had to call the brokerage to have them mail the forms to you, fill out the several page form, and then take the forms to the local brokerage office, if you were lucky enough to have a local brokerage office. Sometimes you also had to have the forms notorized.
And trading partial shares. Don’t need to have $150 to get a whole share of GOOG or AAPL; instead of putting $20 in a 0.5% savings account, it can go into an actual investment.
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.
Also availability. Nowadays you can buy stocks for free on your phone… 20 years ago you had to physically go to your bank, pay extremely high fees, and probably get scammed into buying some expensive fund because you didn’t have the possibility to easily research stuff on your own…