Online trading apps are drawing in novice investors willing to risk everything on volatile stocks. Do they really know what they’re doing?
Noor is whispering so her boyfriend won’t hear her. The 30-something designer from London is down about £14,000 as a result of her decision to get into investing, in addition to another £8,000 profit she made on bitcoin last year, but then lost. Nobody knows the full extent of Noor’s losses – hence the whispering. “I feel so stupid,” she says. “I can’t talk about it to my friends, I can’t talk about it to my boyfriend.” Noor is not her real name.
It started in November 2020, around the time of the US presidential election. “People expected Trump to win again,” she says, “and it was a weird time, because it was mid-pandemic, and it just seemed like this financial moment might be happening.”
