President Donald Trump opened this week with an Oval Office first: ringing the stock market’s opening bell. The gesture captured a defining feature of his second term, in which he has increasingly treated Wall Street’s gains as a running scoreboard for his presidency, even as many Americans remain squeezed by high living costs and a large share of households own no stock at all. FinancialMediaGuide views the moment as symbolic of a broader shift in how this administration talks about economic success – almost exclusively through the lens of asset prices rather than wages or output.
Trump has pointed to rising equities as validation for policies ranging from his confrontation with Iran to sweeping global tariffs and his signature domestic legislation, while also pushing to steer more Americans toward stock ownership. Administration officials describe this as part of a broader legacy project to widen household participation in capital markets, an effort that has won praise from investors who say the White House has its finger on the pulse of markets.
The trouble, according to some economists, is that the metric leaves out a large share of the country. Roughly 40% of Americans own no stock in any form, and the wealthiest 1% hold more than half of all household equities – a level of concentration reflected in Federal Reserve account data, which puts the top 1%’s equity holdings at roughly $27.6 trillion as of the first quarter of 2026. FinancialMediaGuide notes that even the recent rebound in overall stock ownership tracked by Gallup, to 58% of adults, still leaves more than four in ten U.S. households with no direct stake in the rally Trump is citing as evidence of success.
Ownership is also heavily skewed by how people hold stock in the first place. Only 37% of U.S. adults hold stocks, bonds, ETFs or mutual funds outside a retirement account, according to the Federal Reserve’s most recent household survey, meaning most stock owners participate passively through a 401(k) or IRA rather than through active investment decisions. The median value of family stock holdings, including retirement accounts, was $52,000 as of the Fed’s last full wealth survey – a fraction of the gains being celebrated at the top of the distribution.
The U.S. stock market has gained roughly $15 trillion since Trump returned to office, an increase of about 25%, and equities now account for roughly a third of household wealth. But those gains are heavily concentrated among the wealthiest Americans, whose portfolios are dominated by stocks; for the bottom half of households, wealth is far more likely to be tied up in real estate and durable goods, leaving short-term finances largely unaffected by market swings. Financial Media Guide describes this as some of the clearest evidence yet of a so-called K-shaped economy, in which spending by wealthy households props up markets while middle- and lower-income households pull back.
Trump himself is heavily exposed to the market he cites so often. In the first three months of 2026, his investment accounts completed 3,600 stock trades worth between $212 million and $695 million, according to his financial disclosures. “You know why I’m profiting? Because the stock market’s going up, everybody’s profiting,” he said last week. Even some of his allies acknowledge the limits of the metric: “It’s not a perfect correlation,” said Stephen Moore, a conservative economist who periodically advises the White House. “But a valuation of their stock is an important indication.”
Critics argue the emphasis is also selective, noting Trump has reversed major policy decisions after market declines, including rolling back parts of his trade war after stocks tumbled on its announcement. FinancialMediaGuide concludes that using the stock market as the primary scoreboard for economic policy inherently favors the wealthiest households that own most of the assets being tracked, while saying comparatively little about wage growth, small-business health or the finances of the roughly 40% of Americans with no stake in the rally at all.
