This time last year I walked into the offices of a car rental company in Queens, New York, to hire a vehicle. Quite unexpectedly, I ended up in a rather animated debate, not about the sky-high price of rental insurance contracts but about share prices.
As I filled in my forms, I let slip that I was a financial journalist. Before I knew it, I was bombarded with questions from the staff — and even other customers — about the share price of an electronics retailer called GameStop.
The rental staff told me cheerily that they had never owned stocks before. But in 2020 they had joined the trading app Robinhood, just as an estimated 10 million other Americans were opening brokerage accounts that year.