I guess I would want to see the outcomes of the average user. If the median user underperforms the S&P 500, which they likely will, I feel it's misleading to say you're empowering people. The alternative, meme-y yolo stocks, are worse, but is this really better if the informed choice is highly likely to be sitting in an ETF?
> We also wanted to move away from a gamified experience which tends to cause stress and anxiety around investing - so we’ve gone as far as removing red and green from the app entirely
If you're taking material personal financial losses and you're not feeling stressed, I'd say there's a problem
> If you're taking material personal financial losses and you're not feeling stressed, I'd say there's a problem
I disagree. Markets tend to swing around but trend upwards on average. If you are emotionally tied to the big red or green number when you see when you open up your brokerage app, you're bound to make bad, emotionally-based decisions.
(Edit: I guess our disagreement might come down to the definition of "material". In the past few days of market turbulence I've had days where I was up or down by amounts that I would be devastated to have “fall out of my pocket”, but that I can shrug off because I know I can't time the market and I'm better off not trying.)
I guess you're right. But conversely if something you're invested in "for the long haul" has a demonstrated long term negative trend, I'd probably want that to be on my radar.
On some level my concern is that this platform will get people interested in making highly undiversified portfolios, allow them to lose their shirt, and not give an indication that their current strategy is failing and that they should STOP putting more money in.
If everyone's strategy were to buy some collection of assets and sit on them, you would expect some definition of the average individual to earn the average market return. But users of trading platforms are probably trading actively, and making mistakes. It's also likely that the average user would benefit from a diversified portfolio to reduce the risk of losing big all at once. They're less likely to get that picking stocks themselves.
The average professional fund manager actually underperforms the S&P. It wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that the average retail investor does even worse.
However, there's an easy way for people to overcome this - buying an index fund (Vanguard is very cheap), which lets you capture (almost) the S&P's performance.
> We also wanted to move away from a gamified experience which tends to cause stress and anxiety around investing - so we’ve gone as far as removing red and green from the app entirely
If you're taking material personal financial losses and you're not feeling stressed, I'd say there's a problem