Millennial Women Are Catching Up to Men by Leaps and Bounds When It Comes to Wealth, Report Finds
A survey of people with at least $1 million in investable assets found women in their 30s and 40s look nothing like older generations in terms of assets and priorities
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Millennial women’s wealth is outpacing men’s as a new generation inherits and grows their assets at a wider scale than ever before, according to RBC Wealth Management.
In a survey of roughly 2,000 men and women with at least $1 million in investable assets, millennial women respondents had an average of $4.6 million, compared with $3.8 million for women of all age groups and $4.5 million for all men.
Inheritance is one part of the picture, as baby boomers are expected to transfer $124 trillion to the next generation, but so is the progress millennial women have made in the world of business, investment and lucrative professional careers as they close the gap with men.
“Millennial women are catching up, or have outpaced the males as far as their wealth building,” said Angie O’Leary, head of wealth strategies at RBC. “We know that’s coming from a more diversified set of investments, such as entrepreneurship, real estate and of course, investments [in financial markets].”
Millennial women, now in their 30s and 40s, tend to differ from earlier generations of women more than they do from men in terms of their source of wealth. While investments were the largest driver of wealth across all categories, millennial women cited business ownership, innovation, and executive roles far more than Gen X or boomer women.
More than 60% of millennial women cited business ownership and more than 40% mentioned executive roles, but neither exceeded 22% for either Gen Xers and Boomers. Younger women also grew their fortunes from professional sports or arts 39% of the time, compared with just 6% and 1% for Gen Xers and Boomers, respectively.
In terms of inheritance, the gap between generations was smaller. About 37% of men and 35% of women cited family money as a source of wealth overall, breaking down to 44% of millennials, 30% of Gen X and 33% of boomer women.
With women controlling so much wealth, their spending and investments as a group are evolving and extending into areas previously considered stereotypically male such as real estate, cars and watches, O’Leary said. “Women are starting to look a lot like their male counterparts when it comes to investments, real estate, philanthropy,” she said. “That’s a really interesting emerging female economy.”
In real estate, for example, single women made up 20% of home buyers in 2024 up from 11% in 1981, when the National Association of Realtors began tracking the data. By contrast, single men make up 8% of the market and have never exceeded 10%, according to NAR.
While men and women shared largely similar priorities overall in terms of well-being, relationships, legacy and personal drive, younger generations of women were successively more likely to value drive and personal power, and successively less likely to rank relationships and social bonds—though that could also be a function of age and stage of life.
“This generational shift suggests evolving societal norms and responsibilities, where younger women seek personal achievements, while older cohorts value nurturing connections and community stability, affecting their financial and lifestyle choices,” the report said.
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Nvidia’s earnings will test Wall Street’s confidence in the AI boom.
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Chip makers are fighting to assure investors that the artificial-intelligence boom is racing forward. Wall Street might not believe it until Nvidia’s NVDA -0.98%decrease; down pointing triangle Jensen Huang says so.
When Huang steps up to the mic for his company’s earnings call Wednesday, he will have the world’s attention. What he says about Nvidia’s present will preview the future of AI, dictate the path forward for a tech-crazed stock market and influence an American economy increasingly tethered to hopes that the boom won’t go bust.
The $5 trillion chip maker has provided the key building blocks for AI since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022 set off a race for dominance among OpenAI, Anthropic and established Silicon Valley giants. Now, as Nvidia backstops sprawling data-center projects and an exotic money pipeline to boost chip demand, the company’s influence is arguably bigger than ever.
But there are signs of trouble ahead. Political pushback to AI is growing. A bond selloff propelled borrowing costs to their highest levels in years. The hyperscalers that include some of Nvidia’s key customers—once cash-printing machines—are relying more on debt. OpenAI recently told investors its revenue rose by a tepid 18% in the second quarter while its losses deepened.
Nvidia is increasingly stepping in to shore up potential weak points across the market. Earlier this month, the company teamed up with six of Wall Street’s biggest firms on a $500 billion AI-financing plan, pledging to backstop lending to customers that can’t afford its chips otherwise. The chip maker last week also took a stake in Cloverleaf Infrastructure, which arranges power for data centers, and struck a $6 billion deal with startup Poolside aimed at developing a powerful open-weight AI model.
After watching shares in other chip makers and the so-called Magnificent Seven tech companies swing wildly in recent months, Wall Street is hoping Nvidia can beat expectations—again. The countdown is on.
“It’s kind of becoming more and more like the World Cup final than the Super Bowl at this point,” said Brian Mulberry, chief market strategist at Zacks Investment Management. “It’s just gotten to be that big.”
The company has smashed analysts’ earnings estimates for each of the 14 quarters since the AI boom kicked into high gear. Nvidia posted 210% annual growth in net income in its last three-month period, according to FactSet, making Wall Street’s 126% projection look pedestrian.
Expectations for a blowout second quarter have risen rapidly over the course of this year. All Nvidia will have to do to beat this target: outrun 95% annual earnings growth to more than $51.5 billion. Analysts project the chip maker will report record sales of $92 billion for the period, up from a forecast of $78 billion at the start of this year.
In July, big-tech earnings sparked volatility. Concerns about runaway capital spending spread across the sector after Alphabet’s and Tesla’s results, driving a $890 billion wipeout that contributed to the unwind of hedge fund Situational Awareness. Microsoft posted the largest one-day gain in market capitalization by any company, ever, after a quarter proving that it could still show investors the money. SpaceX rocketed higher after a record-breaking initial public offering, only to see $1 trillion in value evaporate.
Surging memory prices and borrowing costs have fueled fears that those and other companies will be unable to keep plowing more money into supplies including Nvidia chips. Shaia Hosseinzadeh, founder of OnyxPoint Global Management, has recently bought dips in AI-infrastructure stocks when Wall Street has strained to absorb massive debt issued by Silicon Valley.
“The macro data is really quite robust,” he said. “Of course, there’s a level at which everything breaks.”
Investors have kept pumping money into the AI trade despite concerns around chip consumers—and to the benefit of chip producers. That is why Nvidia’s outlook for semiconductor demand could send ripples through counterparts such as Micron Technology and Sandisk, developers of the data centers in which their chips reside, and a supply chain of power producers, contractors and other specialists that underpin the globe-spanning AI build-out.
“We joke internally that we’re all Nvidia analysts now,” said David Lefkowitz, head of U.S. equities at UBS Global Wealth Management.
The irony is that investors have tended to sell Nvidia stock immediately after blockbuster earnings, with shares falling each trading session after its four past quarterly reports. Some are betting that will be the case this time around, too.
The options market is pricing in a 5.3% swing, higher or lower, in Nvidia shares during the session following earnings, according to Option Research & Technology Services. That is higher than the 4.8% average move in Nvidia’s stock over the last 12 months after the company reports quarterly results.
In recent days, some of the most actively traded Nvidia options have been put contracts tied to the stock falling from its Friday value of $214.75 to $205 and $210 apiece, according to Cboe Global Markets data. Put options give the right to sell a stock by a set price and typically represent a bearish wager.
Many analysts remain optimistic. Frank Lee, global head of tech hardware and semiconductor research at HSBC Global Investment Research, recently raised his price target for Nvidia shares to $360 from $325, citing, among other things, Nvidia’s strategic partnerships with suppliers and its role as a top contributor to open-source AI.
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