Welcome back. Every generation is told it invests differently from the one before it, but Gen Z's version of that story is unusually well documented — because most of it happened on an app, in public, on a phone screen. Today's issue looks at how the youngest cohort of investors is actually behaving, what's driving it, and what it might mean for the rest of the market as this generation's share of investable wealth keeps growing.

One caveat before we get into it: "Gen Z invests differently" is true in aggregate, but this is still a wide generation spanning teenagers to people in their late twenties with full-time jobs. The patterns below describe a trend, not every individual in it — worth keeping in mind as the numbers get more dramatic.

Gen Z started earlier than anyone else.

The single clearest difference between Gen Z and every generation before it isn't what they invest in — it's when they started. A FINRA-backed international study found that roughly a quarter of Gen Z investors in the US began investing before they were even legally adults. Millennials and Gen X, by contrast, mostly didn't touch the market until their mid-to-late twenties, if then.

JPMorgan Chase's own account data tells a similar story from a different angle: the share of 25-year-olds actively using investment or savings-linked accounts jumped from 6% in 2015 to 37% by 2024. That's not a gradual drift — that's a generation treating "having an investing app" as a normal part of adulthood the way a checking account used to be.

The data behind the shift.

Crypto isn't the only new frontier. A Northwestern Mutual survey found that 32% of Gen Z investors have already participated in prediction markets — platforms where users bet on the outcomes of real-world events — a category that grew to roughly $12 billion in monthly trading volume in 2025. The same research found 94% of Gen Z investors expressed interest in collectible or speculative digital assets, a striking number for what used to be considered a fringe interest.

How investing habits actually changed.

Why crypto and prediction markets, specifically.

None of this happened in a vacuum. Gen Z came of age watching housing become unaffordable, wages lag behind cost of living, and traditional retirement timelines feel increasingly distant. Analysts studying the trend have repeatedly linked younger investors' appetite for high-risk, high-reward assets to that same economic backdrop — when the "safe, slow" path feels out of reach, a faster and riskier one can look more rational than it would to someone with a pension already in motion.

There's also a simple accessibility story underneath the psychology. Crypto exchanges, fractional-share apps, and prediction-market platforms all removed the traditional friction of investing — minimum balances, paperwork, a broker on the phone. For a generation that already expects to do everything from its phone, that lower friction mattered as much as any single asset's returns.

The part worth watching.

Final Thoughts: Earlier, riskier, and not going away.

Gen Z isn't rejecting investing — it's redefining the starting line. Beginning earlier, favoring crypto and speculative assets over traditional funds, and researching through creators and communities instead of advisors are all part of a generation adapting to an economic environment that looks meaningfully different from the one their parents entered. That adaptation comes with real upside: more people building investing habits sooner than ever before. It also comes with real risk: more people learning about volatility and loss with real money, at a younger age, often without the guardrails older investors had time to build. Whichever side of that trade-off ends up mattering more, one thing is already certain — as Gen Z's share of investable wealth keeps growing, its habits won't stay a side story. They'll become the market's habits.