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The stock market continues to reach new highs, with the bull market in its ninth year, yet individual investors, especially millennials, are not buying it.

According to a recent survey from Bankrate, 28% of U.S. adults said real estate would be their preferred investment for money they don’t need for more than 10 years. Only 17% picked the stock market, even less than cash, which 23% favored as their long-term investment. The result isn’t necessarily a surprise. Bankrate has been polling people for the past five years, and the stock market has never placed higher than third. (The survey is based on a representative sample of 1,002 U.S. adults living in the continental U.S.)

Stocks are even less popular among millennials -- only 13% of them said they’d invest their money in the stock market, trailing real estate (30%), cash (30%), and even gold (17%). In comparison, their grandparents’ generation, the baby boomers, are much more positive about the stock market. For baby boomers, stocks are No. 2 for preferred long-term investment, behind only real estate.

The love for real estate is somewhat perplexing when you consider the numbers: The S&P 500 has risen over 75% in the past five years, while growth for the Case-Schiller National Home Price Index is just half that.

A study by professors at the London Business School found that from 1900 to 2011 the housing market returned 1.3 percent per year after inflation, while stocks tended to perform more than four times better.

It’s clear that people aren’t making their financial decisions based solely on numbers. The field called “behavioral finance” tries to explain people’s financial decisions and market anomalies through psychology.

To start with, real estate is tangible, people can touch it, live in it, and enjoy it, notes Ric Edelman, chairman of Edelman Financial Services and the author of several personal finance books.

People generally feel more secure when they can see something right in front of their eyes, compared to equity investments, Paper gains from stocks, mutual funds, and ETFs don’t carry the same visceral excitement, at least until they get sold for cash.

The real estate market can also create a false impression of less volatility since the price change is not presented to people everyday, in the form of blinking numbers on TVs and smartphones.

What’s more, people tend to view investment performance through their personal experience rather than from a macro view, Edelman says.

So what’s a typical millennial’s personal experience been like? Folks in their 20s and 30s graduated high school with the tech-bubble bursting in 2000, around the 9/11 attack, or with the financial crisis and stock market crash in 2008. “Their entire adult life is dominated by these three events,” says Edelman, “Plus, the election last year and the division of the country. The last thing they would say is ‘The stock market is a safe place.’”

Contrast that to baby boomers, who have been exposed to the market for 30 to 40 years and have grown more comfortable with its ups and downs. “They saw the crash in 1987 and the bear market in 1992 but also the recovery afterwards,” Edelman says. “They know if just they give it time, it will all work out.”