Today, trading a share of stock is free. Until 1975, it cost a fixed commission set by the New York Stock Exchange. By 2004, it was about $10 at a discount broker, and by 2019, it cost nothing at all across the industry.
Yet fewer young people are investing than they were a few years ago.
The percentage of U.S. adults under 35 holding investments outside a retirement account fell from 26% in 2021 to 21% in 2024, according to the FINRA Foundation’s latest investor survey.
About four in 10 investors under 35 trade options, a riskier investment strategy that lets someone bet on a price move without owning the stock, compared with one in 10 of those 55 and older.
In the younger age group, six in 10 said they follow recommendations from social media influencers, and about three in 10 have bought a meme stock, a company whose shares went viral online and tend to have large price swings, a very high risk investment.
So, technology did two things at once: It created a solid portfolio of stocks cheap enough for a college student to own, and it made trading frictionless, entertaining and profitable for the platforms that host it.
For Aman Vyas, a 21-year-old UF business administration senior who is simultaneously pursuing a master’s degree in finance and technology, the easiest money to invest is the money his friends send him.
Vyas said he has used multiple investment platforms, but his favorite is Cash App. When friends pay him back for dinner, the money lands in an app that allows him to directly invest that money. “It already has a brokerage, so I might as well just use it to invest my money,” Vyas said.
When he started investing, headlines in The Wall Street Journal provided most of his knowledge. Now he leans on artificial intelligence. Vyas set up Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, to run six research steps and recommend one mid-size stock purchase each day. He doesn’t buy its picks outright, but he treats it as an analyst doing the grunt work so he knows what to verify through his own research.
“You could literally just ask AI, ‘Hey, I have a spare $1,000, what should I do with it?'” he said. “It’s been the easiest now that it’s ever been to invest.”
Easy can also mean impulsive. Vyas does his research on a laptop, but when friends mention a stock that’s climbing, he can just pull out his phone and make the purchase with the press of a button. That’s how he bought into a meme stock after reading about it on the Reddit forum r/wallstreetbets. Now, he’s down about 20% of his original investment.
“If I was on my laptop and I was actually looking through the financials of that company, I never really would have made that bet,” he said. “But because I was on my phone and it was right there, I was just like, ‘Yeah, I might as well.'”
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Fractional shares make those bets feel small because they allow people to buy a small part of a stock for less than a full share.
“I can put in $2 of a company, and I’ll just be like, ‘Yeah, I’m a fractional owner,'” he said.
Social media adds to the pull. The confidence with which TikTok creators talk about where to invest tempts Vyas to skip his own research and take their advice, he said. He called it a trap because most aren’t certified to give financial advice and don’t know a viewer’s finances or how much they can risk.
He worries most about how investing now resembles a game, he said, and the line between investing and gambling is becoming increasingly blurred. Apps display gains in green and losses in red, which he said triggers a dopamine response either way. Green makes users want to do more, and red makes them want to trade until it turns green again.
“It’s green, that’s good, let me do more,” Vyas said. “And if it’s red, they’ll be like, I can try to do more so that way it goes green again.”
He expects Robinhood’s push into prediction markets, where users can bet on a three-hour football game, to make that worse.
The technology revolution
Baolian Wang, a UF associate professor of finance, studies how technology changes the way people trade.
Not long ago, investing took effort. Several of Wang’s colleagues who invested in the late 1980s and early ‘90s had to wait for a monthly statement to learn about the state of their stocks, he said. They would need to call a broker if they wanted to check more often, he added, and the call alone cost money.
Until as late as 2004, when Wang interned at a brokerage in Beijing, most of its individual investors still didn’t own a computer. They traded from a hall of terminals, arriving at 9:30 a.m. and staying until the market closed at 3 p.m. because it was the only way to trade.
Mobile apps erased that friction, giving brokerages an easier way to keep people trading.
“It’s not too difficult to understand why they want people to trade more,” Wang said. “Every trade, they get a slice of that.”
Wang is finishing a paper that puts a number on how much that slice is. After the crypto exchange FTX collapsed in 2022, developers on the Solana blockchain, a public ledger detailing who owns what, launched a meme coin called Bonk and gave it away for free to some accounts meeting certain criteria.
Wang compared accounts that got the coin with those that didn’t and found recipients traded more — and their trading increased in frequency after they’d received Bonk. Their trading more than doubled in the first month before settling around a third higher than where they’d started. The paper has not been published or peer reviewed.
“Basically, my interpretation is that this makes it more gamified,” he said.
Still, he won’t tell students to avoid risk altogether. A 20-year-old’s savings are typically tiny stacked next to what they will earn over a lifetime, he said, so losing it all barely dents their eventual wealth.
A student who invests $1,000 is also buying information about their own skill, he added, giving them a chance to understand firsthand what makes a good investment.
“If you are young, you want to learn,” Wang said.
The unaffected investors
However, technology has not affected all investors. Some choose to largely ignore technology and opt for a human adviser.
Lia Bertelson, a certified financial planner at the fee-based advisory firm Together Planning, sees almost none of the effects of technology
She said she hasn’t seen a drastic shift in what new clients bring her — not in what they hold, not in how often they check, not in the use of AI for advice.
Automated and robo-investing have been around for a long time, she said, and while clients sometimes use AI to compare funds, she doesn’t think it’s making people trade more often.
“The type of investor that is investing based on social media is probably not the same type of investor that is coming to a firm like ours looking for advice,” Bertelson said.
For UF students who choose to use a brokerage, she advises they pick one with low fees that offers the investments they want. The most common mistake she sees is “being too concentrated in one stock and not diversified enough,” she said.
Contact Jessie Yang at jyang@alligator.org. Follow her on X @jessie_yang_22.
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Jessie Yang is a sophomore studying statistics. She’s interested in business, technology, and finance, and is a member of the Caimanes Student-Managed Hedge Fund, where she researches companies and develops investment theses. She’s currently exploring a career in investment banking. Outside of The Alligator, she enjoys playing tennis, golfing, and pretending not to struggle on hikes in pretty places.
