Doctor, heal thy portfolio: asymmetric information and equity market participation among High-Income professionals

High-income professionals such as physicians allocate their portfolios as if financial markets were an unsolved lemons market. In the pooled 2022-2024 Survey of Income and Program Participation (5,279 observations, seven occupations), physicians hold about half their financial assets in passive retirement accounts and a tenth in equity mutual funds, against 13 percent for software developers. Of three channels of occupational proximity to finance, formal financial education, coworker exposure, and quantitative-digital fluency, only fluency predicts equity participation; years of education carry no positive association, despite substantial within-occupation variation. The estimates are conditional associations, not causal effects; they survive demographic controls, alternative clustering, and a time-preference proxy. A lemons market model in which institutional solutions to asymmetric information exist but go unobserved accounts for the pattern: agents who do not see the solution withdraw into consumption, transparent assets, or costly delegation. An accounting decomposition places the associated wealth gap at 29 percent of terminal wealth, mostly advisory fees and reduced saving. The mechanism parallels vaccine hesitancy: a physician who cannot evaluate the SEC behaves like a parent who cannot evaluate the FDA. Financial education should target institutional awareness, or credible reassurance where distrust rather than unawareness binds, instead of compound interest.p<0.001