Hacker News Reader

Comment by ixacto | Hacker News Reader

They are interested in it due to the pretty charts and slick interface of coinbase and robinhood. Many of the young adults and teens do not understand the concept of compound interest at all. They think stock picking and market timing can actually work for them. All they see is $300 -> $10000 or something. Making 8%/yr is not nearly as interesting.

IMO Fidelity/Vanguard need to figure out a better marketing campaign. Right now it is targeted to east-coast retiring boomers.

View on HN

>They are interested in it due to the pretty charts and slick interface of coinbase and robinhood You got to be kidding if you think Coinbase has a slick interface/user experience. You would need to explain why in-spite of such a terrible interface, people are flocking to Coinbase to buy Bitcoin/Ethereum. In fact, so much so that Coinbase was the top app on the App Store for a day [1].

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/08/coinbase-was-top-of-us-apple...

>Many of the young adults and teens do not understand the concept of compound interest at all

I'll need a source for that. It doesn't seem like humans in general are wired to really grasp the power of compound interest (or exponential functions for that matter), so if you're claiming that young adults today are less likely than average to grasp that concept, I'd need a source for that. I do not believe it to be true, but I am happy to be proven wrong.

I think that a lot of younger people feel that corporations are already too big and there isn't much growth left in them. There aren't many other decent investment opportunities either.

In the current economic environment, saving doesn't make much sense. You have to work hard for 40 years just to buy a decent house. Corporations like Apple have a market cap approaching 1 trillion dollars. Existing shareholders are hoarding all the wealth and they get compound returns on it. The NASDAQ is a cesspool of well-to-dos who do nothing except collect dividends.

At least the cryptocurrency crowd is young and they work hard. They have more time ahead of them to turn the ecosystem into something useful for society. It's definitely a very long term investment.

I got into crypto trading only because I saw these kids getting into it en masse, and realizing that my competition was no longer that same formidable institutional hive mind I would expect to find elsewhere.

I have also seen that Acorns and the roboadvisors seem to be popular with the younger demographic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com