One in four young men is now trading stocks every single day. But here’s the really surprising part: nearly two-thirds of these daily traders – 64% – say they feel like failures. Is day trading making young men miserable, or are men who already feel left behind turning to the markets in the hope of changing their fortunes?
Is the explosion in retail trading creating a generation of gamblers – or is it a symptom of a generation that feels the traditional path to financial success has disappeared?
Something rather uncomfortable is happening in the world of investing.
Millions of young people are pouring into stocks, options, cryptocurrencies and prediction markets. Retail trading has exploded, options activity has reached extraordinary levels and trading platforms are increasingly making investing feel less like something you do with your savings and more like something you do for entertainment.
But perhaps the most interesting question isn’t why are young people trading?
It is why do so many of them feel they need to?
A recent study of 2,000 young men by the Institute for Family Studies produced some striking results. Among men aged 18-29, around one-quarter said they trade stocks every day. Of those daily traders, 64% said they feel like failures.
A quarter of participants said they felt lonely all of the time, while 30% expressed feeling that way some of the time. The study also found disillusionment with the American dream, even as young men fostered high hopes for the future. Seven in ten respondents said that success is more a matter of who you know than ability or hard work, but 84% still said they had ambitious plans for their futures.
That figure is remarkably close to the 66% of young men who said they gamble daily and reported similar feelings.
At first glance, it is tempting to conclude that day trading is making these young men miserable.
But that may be completely backwards.
The more interesting possibility is that the misery comes first – and the trading comes afterwards.
The New Dream: Make it Big in the Markets
For generations, the conventional formula for building a successful life was relatively straightforward.
Get an education.
Get a job.
Build a career.
Buy a house.
Save money.
Invest for retirement.
Eventually, you become financially secure.
That formula may never have been as easy as it sounds, but it provided something incredibly important: a visible path.
Increasingly, young people don’t believe that path exists anymore.
House prices have risen dramatically in many countries. Rents consume a huge proportion of income. Student debt can be substantial. Wage growth has struggled to keep pace with the cost of living in many areas.
And then there is social media.
Open TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or Reddit and you can find somebody apparently making thousands of dollars from their bedroom.
One person turned $5,000 into $100,000.
Another claims to make $10,000 a week trading options.
Someone else is showing off a Lamborghini.
Crypto made somebody rich.
A meme stock supposedly made another person wealthy overnight.
The message is subtle but powerful:
Why spend 20 years building wealth when you might be able to make it in two?
That is a very seductive proposition.
Eighty percent of Gen Z investors said they’d invested or considered investing in stocks, options, crypto or prediction markets because they feel financially behind and see these investments as better tools to meet their financial goals
Investing has Started to Look Like Gambling
The distinction between investing and gambling has also become increasingly blurred.
Modern trading platforms make buying a stock almost as easy as ordering a takeaway.
Options, leveraged products, cryptocurrencies and prediction markets can sit alongside conventional shares in the same application.
And increasingly, companies are deliberately targeting younger generations.
Robinhood and other trading platforms have helped turn financial markets into highly accessible, highly engaging consumer products.
I also hate how Robinhood lumps crypto / shit coins in with legitimate securities. Then they also throw in straight-up gambling via “event contracts” / prediction markets.
They blur the lines…
The problem is not necessarily that these products exist.
The problem is what happens when speculation becomes entertainment.
If you buy a diversified index fund and intend to hold it for 20 years, watching the price every five minutes is pointless.
If you’ve bought a short-dated option because you believe Nvidia will rise tomorrow, suddenly every tick matters.
The emotional experience is completely different.
One is investing.
The other can start to feel remarkably similar to gambling.
But is Day Trading Actually Causing the Problem?
This is where the debate becomes much more interesting.
The study found a strong relationship between frequent trading and feelings of failure.
But correlation does not prove that trading causes those feelings.
One interpretation is:
Day trading → losses → feeling like a failure.
But another possibility is:
Feeling like a failure → searching for an escape → day trading.
That second explanation deserves much more attention.
If a young person believes that getting a normal job, saving a few hundred dollars a month and eventually buying a home will not give them the life they want, they may understandably start looking for alternatives.
The stock market offers something traditional employment doesn’t:
the possibility of a huge outcome very quickly.
And that possibility is incredibly powerful.
The study itself found that 80% of Gen Z investors said they had invested, or considered investing, in stocks, options, crypto or prediction markets because they felt financially behind and believed these investments offered better tools for achieving their financial goals.
Think about what that tells us.
These aren’t necessarily people who woke up one morning and decided they wanted to gamble.
Some are effectively saying:
“I don’t think the traditional system is going to get me where I want to go.”
So they are looking for another route.
The Social Media Effect
There is another enormous factor: the internet has completely changed people’s perception of wealth.
A young person can now spend hours watching videos of other people apparently becoming rich.
The problem is that social media shows the winners.
It rarely shows the thousands of people who lost money.
Nobody makes a viral TikTok called:
“I lost €17,000 trading options today.”
They make one called:
“How I turned €1,000 into €20,000.”
That creates an extraordinary distortion.
Young people can end up believing that everybody else is getting rich while they are falling behind.
One discussion participant described seeing young people constantly exposed to “get rich quick” schemes and feeling that careers are for suckers.
That is a powerful psychological combination:
financial insecurity + social comparison + easy access to leverage + constant exposure to success stories.
It is almost tailor-made to produce speculative behaviour.
The Argument Against Blaming Society
But there is another side to this debate.
Some people strongly reject the idea that young people should be excused for making poor financial decisions simply because economic conditions are difficult.
And that argument deserves to be heard.
The basic formula for building wealth has not changed very much:
Earn.
Spend less than you earn.
Save consistently.
Invest.
Give compounding time to work.
Avoid catastrophic losses.
Repeat.
It is incredibly boring.
And that may be precisely why it works.
The problem is that a 30-year wealth-building strategy is difficult to sell to someone who sees another 22-year-old on social media claiming to have made $500,000 trading meme stocks.
Compounding is powerful.
But it doesn’t make exciting content.
The Boglehead Argument
There is an almost opposite philosophy to day trading that has gained a huge following: simply buy diversified index funds and hold them for decades.
The argument is brutally simple.
You are competing against professional trading firms, sophisticated algorithms, highly educated analysts and enormous amounts of computing power.
Why would an individual investor believe they can consistently outperform all of them by trading in and out of stocks?
For most people, they probably can’t.
The index-fund approach therefore says:
Don’t try to predict the next move.
Don’t chase the next hot stock.
Don’t trade because you’re bored.
Don’t use leverage because you’re impatient.
Buy productive assets.
Keep contributing.
Let time do the heavy lifting.
It is difficult to argue with the mathematics of long-term compounding.
But there is a psychological problem.
“Wait 30 years” isn’t a particularly compelling answer to somebody who feels financially trapped today.
The Housing Problem
This may be the real elephant in the room.
For previous generations, building wealth through property was often relatively straightforward.
Buy a house.
Pay down the mortgage.
Allow inflation and rising property prices to do some of the work.
For many younger people, getting onto that ladder has become considerably more difficult.
And when one of the traditional ways of accumulating wealth appears increasingly inaccessible, people naturally look elsewhere.
The stock market has an obvious attraction.
You don’t need €500,000 to participate.
You can start with €100.
Or €10.
And if leverage is available, you can take positions far larger than your actual capital.
That accessibility is both the market’s greatest strength and potentially its greatest danger.
The Dangerous Feedback Loop
There is a particularly worrying cycle here.
A young person feels financially behind.
They see other people getting rich online.
They start trading.
They make a few successful trades.
Their confidence increases.
They take larger risks.
Eventually, they suffer a significant loss.
Now they feel even further behind.
So they take even more risk trying to recover.
And suddenly investing has become an emotional attempt to repair a financial problem.
That is when things can become dangerous.
The market stops being a place to allocate capital and becomes a place where someone is trying to change their life.
Those are very different things.
The Korean Warning
Look at what has happened in South Korea. As younger people have found themselves increasingly shut out of traditional milestones such as home ownership and financial security, speculative investing has become far more attractive. Leveraged single-stock ETFs and other high-risk products have surged in popularity, with some arguing that this has contributed to extreme market volatility.
South Korea may be further along this path than the USA, but it could also be a warning of what happens when a generation starts to believe that the traditional route to building wealth is no longer within reach. If those pressures continue to build in the US, we could see similar patterns emerge – with more young investors turning to leverage and increasingly speculative products in the hope of getting ahead.
The broader lesson is important.
When a generation feels locked out of traditional wealth-building opportunities, financial speculation can become much more attractive.
It isn’t necessarily because young people suddenly become irrational.
It may be because the perceived alternatives become less attractive.
And there is another uncomfortable question
Why is this phenomenon apparently particularly strong among young men?
The research suggests that young men are disproportionately represented among frequent traders and gamblers, while also reporting significant feelings of failure and loneliness.
The survey found that 42% of respondents overall said that the statement “all in all, I am inclined to think that I am a failure” described them very or somewhat well.
A quarter said they felt lonely all the time, while another 30% said they felt lonely some of the time.
That suggests the trading story may actually be part of a much larger social story.
Young men are not simply trying to make money.
Some may be trying to prove something.
To themselves… To their friends… To their families.
And perhaps to a society in which they increasingly feel that conventional measures of success are moving further away.
The Biggest Danger Isn’t Losing Money
Ironically, the biggest danger may not be that somebody loses €5,000 trading.
It is what they learn from the experience.
If they lose money and conclude:
“Trading doesn’t work.”
They may stop and move on.
But if they lose money and conclude:
“I just need to take a bigger risk next time.”
That can become a devastating cycle.
The same psychology can apply to gambling, crypto speculation, options and prediction markets.
The individual isn’t necessarily chasing money anymore.
They’re chasing the feeling that the next trade might finally change everything.
So Should Young People Stop Trading?
Not necessarily.
There is nothing inherently wrong with learning about markets.
Trading can teach people about risk, probability, economics, business and human psychology.
And some people genuinely do possess the temperament, discipline and skill required to trade successfully.
But there is a huge difference between:
“I want to learn how financial markets work.”
and
“I need this trade to work because my salary will never make me wealthy.”
The first is curiosity.
The second is desperation.
And desperation is an extremely poor trading strategy.
You can tell people to stop gambling. You can tell them to buy index funds. You can tell them to save more.
All of that may be sensible advice.
But if they believe that working for 40 years, paying rent and saving whatever is left over will never allow them to own a home or achieve financial independence, telling them to “just be patient” isn’t going to solve the underlying problem
The Uncomfortable Truth
There is a growing sense that the traditional path to success simply doesn’t work for everyone anymore. For some young men, that frustration is pushing them towards WallStreetBets, day trading and increasingly risky bets in the hope of making money quickly. Social media only amplifies the problem. When your feed is constantly filled with people claiming to have made fortunes trading stocks, crypto or options, it can start to feel as though everyone else is getting rich while you’re being left behind.
That is what I find particularly sad about this trend. The explosion in social-media-fuelled day trading may be less about a generation suddenly becoming obsessed with gambling and more about growing wealth inequality, a shrinking middle class and the difficulty many young people face in finding a clear route to financial security. They are searching for easy money in an economy where the traditional markers of success – a good career, owning a home and building wealth – can feel increasingly out of reach.
And when young men are saying, on a large scale, that they feel like failures, perhaps we should look beyond the trading itself and ask why so many of them feel that way in the first place.
Social media certainly doesn’t help. Young people can spend hours watching TikTok and YouTube videos promoting get-rich-quick schemes and showcasing people who appear to have made a fortune overnight. The message, whether intentional or not, is that a conventional career is for suckers and that the smart money is being made by those willing to take risks.
What young people need, perhaps more than anything, is a path they can actually see leading towards stability – a career they can build, a home they can eventually afford, financial security and the ability to accumulate wealth over time.
The problem is that this path has become harder to visualise. It isn’t simply a case of telling everyone to “go to college” anymore. Even supposedly reliable routes, such as getting a degree in a high-demand field, no longer guarantee the financial security they once seemed to promise. At the same time, rising living costs, housing prices and economic uncertainty can make a decades-long plan feel almost impossible for someone who is struggling to get started.
But there is another side to the argument that shouldn’t be ignored. There can also be a disconnect between the effort some young people are prepared to put in and the financial rewards they expect in return.
The path to building wealth isn’t particularly complicated. In fact, it is remarkably well documented. Earn more, spend less than you earn, invest consistently, keep improving yourself and give it time. It is boring. It is slow. It requires sacrifice.
But it works.
And perhaps the biggest investment a young person can make isn’t in the next hot stock or cryptocurrency. It’s in themselves.
