Half Of Young People Have Traded At Their Broker While Drunk

The investment world is a complicated environment where reason and information play a decisive role in trying to make a profit from savings. But stakeholders don’t always operate under the best possible circumstances. Fear, euphoria and even alcohol are determining factors in some of the decision making that is made with operators.

This is pointed out by a study by Magnify Money , in the US, where it ensures that 32% of investors have ever operated while drunk, while the percentage reaches 59% among the youngest, those belonging to Generation Z, who in the report places them in the age range of 18 to 24 years.

In this sense, it can be seen how the percentage of investing while drunk decreases as age increases , since it is something that 41% of millennials (25 to 40 years old) admit , but only 31% of Generation X ( 41 to 55 years) and 9% of baby boomers (56 to 75 years).

The lack of caution, or the excess of emotionality, also seems to be linked to age. 85% of Generation Z regret having made investment decisions out of emotion , compared to 54% of baby boomers , while 54% of young people admit to having cried over their investments, compared to 8% of those older. And this despite the fact that everyone agrees that you have to leave emotions on the sidelines when money moves.

It seems clear that one of the factors to take into account is the ease now offered by mobile applications , which allow you to buy or sell assets with two or three touches of the screen and at any time of the day. In addition, the low (or non-existent) commissions of several of these platforms encourage you to operate in a more visceral way.

In this sense, it is difficult to think that when you had to pick up the phone to call a broker during office hours, in the era in which mobiles did not even exist or were infrequent, and when commissions were high, decision-making was low. the effects of alcohol were so widespread. This is one of the factors that can explain the strong generational leap reflected in the study.

The results of the same have been obtained through an online survey of 1,116 US investors carried out at the end of June.