Jared Smith represents a new breed of millennial: someone who saw the financial crisis unfold during his formative years but is now ready to step back into the arena and take some risk.

The 31-year-old New Yorker is a big believer in stocks. While that seems like a no-brainer for a market that has skyrocketed 325 percent since the crisis lows, investors in general and millennials in particular have been afraid of equities, worried that another crisis could sneak up and wipe out all those gains.

Not Smith, who has taken a slice of his trust fund and put it to work on Wall Street.

"The market's becoming a little more insulated," he said. "I'm hoping that we learned our lesson from [the crisis] and we have gotten better as a society, especially in the financial and banking world, that we will not allow that again, that certain measure have been put in place since then."

Millennials, born between the early 1980s and early 2000s, have been the most reluctant demographic when it comes to diving into risk assets. For instance, a Bankrate survey in 2017 showed just 13 percent would invest in equities, trailing real estate and cash by large margins.

But with the market showing stunning resiliency, the tide is turning.