With market-oriented reforms in the economy, the Chinese government has promoted the development of risky financial markets, but evidence on the influence of social trust on risky financial market participation is scarce. Using three-wave longitudinal data from the China Family Panel Survey; and lagged variable, instrument variable, and fixed-effects models to address the endogeneity issues; we investigated social trust’s influence on risky financial market participation. We also estimated the effects of social trust by age, education, sex, and urban/rural resident groups. We found that social trust positively affected the probability of holding risky financial assets and their shares, however its effects were insignificant when addressing unobservable individual heterogeneity. The positive effect of social trust was greater for the youth, the highly educated, women, rural residents and high-income groups than their counterparts.