Households in the U.S. with $5 million to $10 million in investible assets are “confident” about their finances and feel they are knowledgeable about investing, according to a new report by independent data and benchmarking firm Hearts & Wallets.

This demographic has greatly increased in the past two years and now represents 1.8 million households that control $14.4 trillion in investible assets.

These households reported they prefer spreading their assets around by establishing accounts at multiple “stores” (brokerage, banking and retirement firms), with an average of about one in five (19%) having at least six, according to the report.

In addition to the multiple relationships, the report found that these investors tend to move their money. Every year, an average of about four in 10 households in this group “execute a major money movement transaction between stores.”

Hearts and Wallets used data from the Investor Quantitative Database, considered the largest single dataset in history, with more than120 million data points about saving, investing and advice behaviors from 80,000 U.S. households for the past 15 years.

The latest findings were collected last year, from July 17 through August 9, 2024, across 5,989 households.

Investment Knowledge

The vast majority of households in this segment (98%) reported being aware of their investment portfolio allocations by asset class, well up from 70% in 2015.

Unsurprisingly, only 5% of these households said they “don’t know” the costs for their primary and secondary stores, a number substantially lower than the national level of 25% of customers, according to the report.

While these investors do use investment products, they reported that they trade independently and “hold bullish attitudes on artificial intelligence (AI) and technology-driven financial advice,” according to Hearts & Wallets.

Financial Goals

In addition to describing their investing preferences and ranking their favorite firms and stores, the responding households also shared their savings and retirements goals and motivations.

Saving for a vacation is a top life goal for these households (55%), followed by retirement (44%), having enough money to spend their time freely (42%), and building liquidity (having an emergency fund) at 31%.

As for investing goals, the households responded that they had hoped to generate income from their investments (86%), preserve the capital of their initial investments (76%), and gain capital appreciation from their investments (70%).

Brand Loyalty

To earn the business of these households, competition is steep. According to the report, the asset management firms with the most investment products owned by this group were Fidelity, Vanguard and BlackRock/iShares NET.

For loyalty and cross-selling metrics, Vanguard was trusted the most by this group, followed closely by Fidelity. The group also ranked Bank of America Merrill first for “high customer understanding of how it earns money,” said they were most likely to recommend Vanguard to others, and chose E*Trade as the store in which they were most likely to invest more money.