Always On: Consumers Who Invest

Welcome to Always On. Each week, we’ll dig into a brand or audience trend you need to know about, tapping into Morning Consult Intelligence, our always-on insights platform powered by 15,000 daily surveys across 40+ countries. That means thousands of brands, audience deep dives, and enough fresh data to make your spreadsheets jealous. Sign-up here to get this email sent to you directly every week.

We’ve been hyper focused on understanding how tariffs are affecting American businesses and consumers. Today, we’re going to dive into how market investors are responding, exploring how they feel about the economy and how they differ demographically.

In order to gauge consumer sentiment, we ask respondents five questions relating to personal finances and business conditions in the country as a whole. The results from those five questions are then inputted into the Index of Consumer Sentiment. The higher the index, the more confident consumers are.

As you can see, the general trend is down, particularly in the last 2 weeks. With Morning Consult Intelligence, you can gauge the consumer sentiment of any audience — even your own customers.

During this period of heightened economic uncertainty, we are temporarily publishing a bi-weekly look at consumer confidence data . Daily updates to this data are always available to Morning Consult Intelligence clients, who are also able to access hundreds of demographics and psychographics as well as consumer confidence data layered with brand-specific data. Want access? Let’s talk.

Fast Facts About Consumers Who Invest At Various Levels

With Morning Consult Intelligence, you can build custom audiences of different investment levels — including $50k-$100k invested, $100k-$250k invested, $250k-$500k invested, $500k-$1 million invested or more than $1 million invested. Morning Consult Intelligence clients can explore those audiences by clicking the links. Here’s what sticks out to us:

The more money consumers have invested, the more they feel in control
83% of Consumers with more than $1 million invested feel in control of their future — 13 points higher than consumers with $50k-$100k invested.

Consumers who are investing use social media for different purposes
All of these groups overindex heavily on LinkedIn and Yelp. They are also more likely to use social media to follow the news or journalists.

The consumers with the most amount of investments are streaming less
Consumers with more than $1 million invested are less likely to be on every streaming platform compared to the general population — with the exception of Apple TV+.

Extra Credit

President Trump's tariff actions are rippling through the world of business and politics, and rapidly-shifting developments require real-time data and analysis.

Morning Consult is covering this story from a wide range of angles, including the threats to consumer brands, the immediate and long-term economic implications, as well as global and domestic political reactions. You can see all of our latest research on this topic here. One area to go deep on: Consumers are starting to pull ahead of purchases in advance of impending tariffs.

Exercise equipment and new cars had the largest share of buyers reporting completing their purchases sooner at 42% of buyers. Car dealerships and car shoppers have reported anecdotally that demand has been high in the first quarter as savvy shoppers hope to get their purchases before tariffs impact prices. Explore more in our latest economic report here.