24/7 Wall St. TV: $10 Trillion In Baby Boomer Cash

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Mar 26, 4:08PM EDT · Published Oct 7, 8:00AM EDT

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Baby boomers control $10 trillion in assets. A great deal if not most of that money has been invested in the stock market as this part of the population attempted in increase the size of retirement nest-eggs by riding the great bull market as the DJIA rose from 2,000 after the 1987 crash to 14,000 less than two years ago.

Money management firm Blackrock (NYSE:BLK) says that much of this huge pool of capital will now move into much safer investments as the people born in the late 1940s and 1950s retire.

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Frank Porcelli, who heads U.S. retail for BlackRock, told Reuters that “Baby boomers are increasingly spooked by the turbulent markets of the past year, and concerned with ensuring their funds last through retirements that could last 20 years or more.”

The movement of that much in assets from growth investments, mostly equities, to safer investments in fixed income is likely to take a great deal out of the stock market. Companies which are part of most classic growth portfolios, stocks which represent equity in expanding businesses but pay no dividend, are going to be sold off over the next few years. Firms that fit the growth profile most neatly are corporations like Apple (NYSE:AAPL), Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO), Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), which have been the backbone of the Nasdaq Composite, are the most likely candidates for liquidation.

The conventional wisdom is that the market goes up and down roughly in concert with the economy. That is about to change significantly.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.