12 The Times Magazine
he learnt about assessing risk by playing
online poker, which he is clearly rather good
at: he won €10,000 at a European poker tour
and invested some of his winnings in bitcoin.
He even tried becoming a financial adviser
- his dad’s friend got him the job – but didn’t
like it. “I was doing all the work they didn’t
want to do. I thought, ‘Do I want to sit for the
next ten years at this desk and work my way
up to £60,000 a year, or take the risk early?’ ”
At 24, Appleton sees himself as one of the
mature voices out there. He lives in Hove, in
a flat initially bought by his mum, to whom
he pays rent. She paid £50,000 for the home
when she was his age, and he is aware he will
not get onto the housing ladder so easily.
He is reflective about the role of social
media and his videos try to call out scammers.
“People [on social media] show their lives as
better than they are, which is toxic. You are
fed lies – photos of you living your best life,
stocks going up, bitcoin going up. People want
to be rich themselves, and they believe the
claims that it’s easy.”
After looking at what was available on
TikTok, he “came to the realisation that a lot
of people are profiting from the community
rather than helping them. The truth is that
if you have a strategy that can make you
millions, you wouldn’t tell everyone. You would
keep it for yourself and count your millions.”
One thing the influencers do have in
common is their nonstop investment jargon.
For example, Little: “I do a lot of technical
analysis... as well as a small amount of macro
fundamental data looking at things like
geopolitical stuff...”
Lydia Lane – who goes by the moniker
@tldrfinance on her TikTok page, which has
21,000 followers – is 22 and also fluent in this
language. Instead of selling stock, she talks
about “shorting it” (even though shorting is
when you borrow stock to then bet against it
and hopefully sell it back at a cheaper price).
Instead of owning stocks, she “takes a position
in” something. Lydia lives in Derbyshire with
her parents; her dad is a builder and her mum
used to work as cabin crew for Jet2. Lydia
put £2,500 in Tesla last March, as lockdown
started, and sold ten months later for £6,500.
“Selling was hard, but it had seen such
a huge run I thought the price had to come
down soon. Of course it did carry on going up,
but I don’t mind. I’ve still got loads of profit.”
There isn’t much to her TikTok posts, which
describe her decision to leave Tesla – “Sorry
Tesla, I’ve got a new bae [boyfriend] now” - and put her money elsewhere. Then there
is a video where she is running around yelling,
“Mayday!” when her stocks go down.
She has just graduated from Nottingham
Trent University with a first in computer
programming and works as an app developer.
Her plan is to build her channels, which
currently consist of videos of her standing by
a dramatic graph, trying to help people learn
the basics of investment.
“I am interested in becoming financially
independent,” Lane says. “I’m not interested in
materialistic things – it’s more about travelling
and experiences. If you are stuck in a nine-to-
five job, you don’t do everything you want to.
I want time and I want freedom – you need
your money to work for you while you sleep.”
For all these youngsters, who are not going
to win financial security as easily as their
parents or grandparents did – they are not
going to buy their first home in Hove for
£50,000 as Appleton’s mum was able to – life
is about the hustle. “There are hundreds, if not
thousands of examples of so-called investing
influencers on social media. They have been
given a platform that allows people to reach
significantly bigger audiences,” says Bamford.
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has
the job of protecting naive young investors. Yet
Bamford points out that the regulator doesn’t
seem to be taking significant action when
people are quite clearly breaking the rules. The
result is likely to be “an awful lot of people
losing an awful lot of money. There is a degree
of financial anxiety about the future – Covid-
has meant job chances for younger people
are limited – and they are trapped at home.
What is being exploited is the fear of having
to go out and get a job you hate. It’s wanting
a shortcut to success and wealth. But there are
no shortcuts; the only way to get rich is slowly.”
But not all influencers are irresponsible.
Anna Rozanska is known on YouTube as
Anna Panda Boss. Her aim is to become
financially independent by the time she is 35.
She’s 28, lives in a flat she owns in London
and has a nine-to-five job as an accountant.
But in the summer of 2019 she was signed off
work with stress, struggling with changing jobs
and worrying about being £25,000 in debt.
“At school I was bullied about my nose.
I got a loan out to get a nose job. I was told
that if I took out more of a loan then I would
get a lower interest rate. I wasn’t very savvy
back then, so I took out a higher loan than
I needed and I got addicted to this credit
lifestyle, refinancing the loan, adding to it- holidays, laptops, cameras. Having high-
interest credit, it kept building.”
She started her YouTube channel in
December 2019, has 8,700 subscribers and in
January earned almost £1,000 in advertising
revenue. Through taking on extra jobs and
investing, she has paid off her debt and has
built investments worth just under £10,
in a year. Most of her investments are in
individual stocks, including AstraZeneca
and Johnson & Johnson.
“I try to talk to people about the risk and
hope I can help people stop falling into these
supposedly glamorous day-trading traps.
I discourage people from risky investments.
A friend recently lost £30,000 betting on the
US dollar before the election.”
There can be an element of arrogance
to it all, she adds. “Some people hear stories
from people on Instagram boasting about
huge profits and promising huge returns.
I just think: you really can’t.”
Thomas Roddy is also a highly sensible
22-year-old “copy trader” on the investment
site eToro – his followers on the website
opt to make exactly the same investments
as Roddy, whose returns are posted on the
site. His strategy is to hold a large number of
diversified stocks he has confidence in. He is
invested in Apple, Moderna and GM vehicles,
but not Tesla.
Roddy is the opposite of the bragging social
media traders and says he finds advice given
on social media “cringey” and hates Wall
Street films. “How Jordan Belfort [the former
stockbroker jailed for fraud and stock-market
manipulation whose experience is portrayed
in The Wolf of Wall Street] became an idol,
I don’t know. People respond to his rock-star
lifestyle, but forget his character went to
prison.” Roddy has a 2:1 degree in investment
and financial risk management and lives
in Reading. He is about to start a job in a
financial technology company – he hopes
at some point to gain a second income from
investing this way.
“I’m not exactly sure why I got into it, but
I remember thinking I don’t want to put this
in a savings account that will earn 0.5 per cent
a year. Looking at the stock market, knowing
it’s increased by 8 per cent on average since
the Second World War, it’s a no-brainer.”
His investment hero is Buffett, and he
plans to heed his words on getting rich slowly.
“There is a split in the people who do this.
The past nine months we’ve seen people who
aren’t out spending money spending more
time indoors online doing crazy things on the
stock market. If people want to gamble away
their money, that’s fine. But I don’t like the
people on social media who present what
they are doing as regular investment advice
to more naive people. It’s not. Forex trading
is not really a sustainable long-term profitable
strategy – it’s way too complicated. I prefer
the stock market, which closes at 5pm. The
currencies open 24/7 – you have kids who
check their bets around the clock; they can’t
sleep. This is in no way a healthy way to be.” n‘What is being exploited
is the fear of having to go
out and get a job you hate.
But there are no shortcuts’