Young investors are making their mark this year.
The pandemic has presented a ton of hurdles for millions of people over the past 18 months, but many smart and savvy young people have been making the most of their time spent indoors by learning to invest in their futures and start working on constructing a solid financial portfolio.
Here’s a closer look at the rise in usage of smart savings apps, young people getting involved in investment through trading platforms, and even the way that wider technology is being leveraged in order to present further investment opportunities.
Smart saving solutions
Using apps and services in the same incremental pattern and way that they would use social media or games on their phones, young people (and smartphone users with similar patterns of usage) have been getting better with savings. It’s common for young people to have little-to-no money stored away — with the BBC reporting in 2018 that around half of ‘twenty-somethings’ have no savings at all — but with apps such as Plum and MoneyBox, a smart solution for rounding up and allocating their funds is helping to simplify the savings process.
Again, with ease-of-access to savings hubs in which users can track their exact spending, setting reminders and specific goals for savings (and even restricting how much they can spend in a certain area), young people are able to gamify the savings process in a sense, and it seems to be working well for some.
Investment at the tap of a button
Prior to the beginning of the pandemic, many analysts predicted growth in the number of young people investing their money for the future — a study reported on by This is Money stated that three-quarters of millennials and gen-z said they were planning to invest within the year — and this certainly seems to have been the case. The steady rise of smartphone trading apps such as RobinHood, Trading212 and eToro has allowed anyone and everyone to get involved with investing in a pinch, putting their capital into stocks and shares or even experimenting with simulated cash before becoming confident enough to commit fully.
Events such as the GameStop share price boom have sparked some investment analysts to warn against the volatile and sporadic nature of some new investors who are putting money into their portfolios, perhaps prior to having done the property research and due diligence.
Largely, however, the opportunity for those perhaps daunted by investment strategies in the past to garner knowledge and learn about a specific market with ease will no doubt prove valuable, provided those getting involved are aware of the risks.
Wider uses of technology
Aside from the growth of the smartphone investor, and the removal of difficult barriers to entry for those wanting to get involved in thriving investment markets around the globe, young people are also quicker to adopt new technologies, and thus able to leverage them more easily in order to find even more investment opportunities relevant to them.
Existing sectors, such as the real estate industry, for instance, have been able to make the most of different tech-driven solutions in order to continue to operate as efficiently as possible during the pandemic. RWinvest, an award-winning property investment company with offices in Liverpool, Manchester and London, have been leveraging virtual reality technology (often abbreviated as VR) in order to continue an adapted version of the viewing process to those stuck within their homes and unable to attend viewings in a traditional sense.
Alongside a first-person, immersive look at a prospective property, investors can also receive podcasts, digital guides and videos in a comprehensive investment pack. Even when the effects of the pandemic are behind us, these sorts of solutions will prove helpful for international investors wanting to get involved in global markets.
