No, the retail investor has not stepped back into the stock
market.  According to Gallup, only 52% of Americans (alone or
with their spouse) are in the game as of April 2013. That's the
lowest percentage since Gallup started tracking this information
in 1998 (via Blackrock, h/t Reformed Broker).  As Blackrock
points out, this doesn't jive with the traditional idea that
confident consumers are more likely to invest. Recent surveys of
consumer confidence have actually come in strong, but 48% of
Americans are still sitting this one out.  "It is possible that
this has to do with the impacts of emotional investing or
peoples' decreasing appetites for risk since the recession,"
said the BlackRock report.  That's probably putting it gently.