While the COVID-19 pandemic hit millions of Americans in their wallets, it also created a surge of new retail investors looking to capitalize on stock market volatility.
A survey conducted by the FINRA Investor Education Foundation and National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago found that 57% of respondents opened a taxable investment account in 2020. Those who never had an investment account before were generally younger, earned lower incomes and were more racially or ethnically diverse than established investors.
With retail investing becoming more popular, the financial website SmartAssets used the most recently available data to identify and rank the top places in the U.S. where people have been investing more.
Among 198 metro areas analyzed by SmartAssets, Chattanooga ranked No. 20 with a 25% gain in reported ordinary dividends and a 14.6% gain in the amount of capital gains reported compared with four years ago.
The top metro areas where residents are investing more are:
1. Nashville
2. Fort Walton Beach, Florida
3. Wilmington, North Carolina
4. Boulder, Colorado
5. Charlottesville, Virginia
6. San Francisco
7. Naples, Florida
8. Ann Arbor, Michigan
9. Charleston, North Carolina
10. Birmingham, Alabama
Source: SmartAssets