By Bob Bryan, Business Insider
It’s easy to think that the stock market is the playground of hedge funds and day traders, but in reality most of the stock market is owned by the average joe.
In fact, the largest chunk is doing one thing: helping people retire.
In a white paper, Steven Rosenthal and Lydia Austin of the Tax Policy Center have broken out exactly which kind of investors own the stock market. They found that a majority of corporate stock is owned by different types of retirement plans, the largest being IRAs and defined-benefit plans.
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