10 The Times Magazineo one wants to get rich slow and
that is the main reason investors
lose money, according to Warren
Buffett. This is certainly true of
Finlay Little. Little is 18 and in a
hurry. He lives with his mum and
dad in Northampton, which he
describes as a “fairly working-
class town”. He found it hard to
concentrate at school and didn’t
get brilliant grades. Then at the age of 16 he
stumbled on YouTube videos that appeared
to show a simple way to get rich: investing.
A year later he started ploughing his
earnings from his job at McDonald’s into the
stock market. Now he is out of college and has
a TikTok channel where he says he earns up
to £3,000 a week from, among other things,
foreign exchange trading, or forex for short.
Forex trading, one of the riskiest types
of investments because currencies can be
so volatile, is usually associated with suited
employees of banks, with whole departments
dedicated to this arcane side of investment.
Nonprofessionals are very likely to lose money
trading forex: the European Securities and
Markets Authority says between 74 per cent
and 89 per cent of nonprofessional investors
lose money trading this way.
But this has not stopped Little, who passes
on his wisdom to his 40,000 followers. He
has even set himself up as a mentor to people
who pay to learn from him “clearing up
everything they want to know about trading”,
he says in one video.
This pint-sized Gordon Gekko is not alone.
There are hundreds, if not thousands of others
like him on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and
Reddit, the platform that hosts WallStreetBets,
which recently encouraged amateur investors
to gang up on the hedge fund managers
and sent the stock of GameStop soaring
(see panel). They are a new breed of “Yolo”- you only live once – investors and trading
influencers, usually making some very bold
claims and exploring some extremely high-
risk ways to make money.
They joke about “shorting” Tesla and
casually discuss going long on bets on the yen
against the dollar. Close your eyes and they
can sound like battle-hardened investors, but
open them and you remember that you’re
watching 20-year-olds holding up wads of
cash to the theme tune of Mission: Impossible.
Under lockdown, Yolo investing has
exploded. These young people, many of them
complete novices, are flocking to apps that
allow them to trade with no fees. If you can
install an app and transfer cash, then you can
win big – or lose everything.
About 400,000 new accounts have been
opened on the main trading platforms, such
as eToro, Trading 212 and Freetrade, in the
past year, according to a survey published last
month by Find Out Now, a market research
company. Of those newly opened accounts,
50 per cent are owned by people who are
more likely to get their stock tips from social
media than from established investors. These
investors are often driven by the desire to
obtain “financial freedom”, a concept promoted
by millennials on social media where, if you
have enough money invested providing you
with an income, you don’t have to work.
This clearly appeals to twentysomethings
who don’t want to spend ten years doing
progressively less rubbish jobs to forge ahead
in their careers.
Those who opened an account with
Trading 212 at the beginning of last year
and bought a share, or part of a share, in
Tesla, for example, saw the price increase
by 700 per cent by Christmas. The result:
an army of new millionaires – or Teslanaires,
as they are known.
According to conventional investment
wisdom, it is unwise to put money into the
stock market unless you can leave it there for
at least five years. But that is far too long for
some of these investors, who are hoping to
reach their financial nirvana through day
trades – bets made on a certain outcome
occurring before the end of the day’s trading,
such as a stock or currencies rising or falling
to a certain price.
It’s those day trades that appeal to
Little, who says that children as young as
13 are emailing him to ask how they can
make money. “It’s a weird one,” he says. “With
technology, people are picking up on these
things earlier... I wish I had what they have
at 13.” It’s a struggle knowing what to think
of him, with his rosy cheeks, messy hair andN
In lockdown, Yolo – you only
live once – investing has
exploded and 400,000 new
accounts have been opened
on trading platforms
Keith Gill, an investor behind
the GameStop trading frenzy.
Left, from top: Lydia Lane on
TikTok; Luke Appleton’s YouTube
channel; Finlay Little, on TikTok
where he discusses his forex
trading; Anna, aka Panda BossTIKTOK/TLDRFINANCE, LUKE APPLETON/YOUTUBE, FINLAY LITTLE, PANDA BOSS/YOUTUBE, KAYANA SZYMCZAK