“Investing Should Be Gamified”

In a recent inter­view on CNBC, War­ren Buf­fett com­pared the mar­kets to a church with a casi­no attached.

He was­n’t wrong when he stat­ed that “invest­ing is like a church with a casi­no attached… peo­ple can move between the church and the casi­no.… but the casi­no’s got­ten very attrac­tive to peo­ple.”

Since the launch of Robin­hood in 2013, whose co-founder Vlad Tenev claimed to be giv­ing the “poor” access to the glam­orous domain of rich traders, “democ­ra­tiz­ing finance for all”, there’s been a Cam­bri­an explo­sion of invest­ing apps and ser­vices try­ing to cap­i­talise on the idea of the gam­i­fi­ca­tion of invest­ing. Dopamine-fuelled behav­iour­al dri­vers, the kind that have been the engine of social media and edu­ca­tion­al apps like Duolin­go have been lever­aged in finance to cre­ate stick­i­ness and invest­ing fever.

(Side­note: I just hit my 2,100-day Duolin­go streak this week. The owl owns me. I know exact­ly what dopamine-dri­ven stick­i­ness feels like — and that’s the point.)

We all remem­ber the GameStop trad­ing fren­zy that Robin­hood became the focal point of in 2021.

In 2022, the CFA Insti­tute pub­lished a report called Fun and Games, Invest­ment Gam­i­fi­ca­tion and Impli­ca­tions for Cap­i­tal Mar­kets.

It says that gam­i­fi­ca­tion and the broad­er use of behav­iour­al tech­niques can be a pow­er­ful tool when used well to dri­ve engage­ment and pos­i­tive out­comes — but it can also be lever­aged by firms to dri­ve “exces­sive trad­ing” as well as “induce trad­ing in com­plex or high-risk prod­ucts”.

Even Keynes — back in 1936 — called the share mar­ket a ‘beau­ty con­test’ where investors don’t try to pick the best com­pa­ny, they try to guess what every­one else will pick. Now we just call it Wall­Street­Bets.

CFA goes on to say:

“With social media, it is eas­i­er than ever to infer the aver­age opin­ion in real time, as evi­denced by the suc­cess of such groups as Wall­Street­Bets, or to be led by the opin­ion of the few, as the rise of social influ­encers attests.”

In the Unit­ed States, there have been a num­ber of cas­es that demon­strate the dan­gers in gam­i­fied invest­ing.

In Decem­ber 2020, Robin­hood paid $65M to set­tle SEC charges of mis­lead­ing cus­tomers about how it made its mon­ey (pay­ment for order flow) and the infe­ri­or trade prices that result­ed. In the same month, the Mass­a­chu­setts Secu­ri­ties Divi­sion became the first US secu­ri­ties reg­u­la­tor to file an enforce­ment action explic­it­ly cit­ing gam­i­fi­ca­tion — con­fet­ti ani­ma­tions, push noti­fi­ca­tions, lists of “100 most pop­u­lar stocks” — as the actu­al harm to retail investors.

Six months lat­er, in June 2021, Robin­hood paid $70M to the Finan­cial Indus­try Reg­u­la­to­ry Author­i­ty (FINRA), the largest finan­cial penal­ty FINRA had ever ordered at the time, for mis­lead­ing cus­tomers, sys­tem out­ages dur­ing the GameStop saga, and approv­ing unsuit­able cus­tomers for options trad­ing.

The most trag­ic sto­ry might be the Alex Kearns case from June 2020. A 20-year-old uni­ver­si­ty stu­dent in Illi­nois took his own life after Robin­hood’s UI showed him a $730K neg­a­tive bal­ance that was­n’t real — it was an options-trad­ing dis­play glitch. His fam­i­ly set­tled with Robin­hood in 2021 for an undis­closed sum.

To be fair, these apps have got hun­dreds of thou­sands of Aus­tralians into the mar­ket who’d nev­er have walked into a stock­bro­ker’s office. Whether or not that’s ulti­mate­ly a good thing, remains to be seen.

Clos­er to home, the Aus­tralian Secu­ri­ties and Invest­ments Com­mis­sion has explic­it­ly named gam­i­fi­ca­tion as a reg­u­la­to­ry pri­or­i­ty, list­ing ‘leader­boards, gam­i­fi­ca­tion, induce­ments and oth­er behav­iour­al levers’ as prac­tices it is active­ly review­ing. In 2023, ASIC took its first design-and-dis­tri­b­u­tion-oblig­a­tions action against a retail bro­ker, suing eToro for sell­ing CFDs to Aus­tralians whose “screen­ing test was very dif­fi­cult to fail.”

Side­note: A CFD (Con­tract for Dif­fer­ence) is a deriv­a­tive. You don’t own the under­ly­ing share; you take a lever­aged bet on its price move­ment. If the price moves your way, you col­lect the dif­fer­ence; if it moves against you, you owe it — often more than you orig­i­nal­ly deposit­ed. CFDs are legal for Aus­tralian retail clients but banned for US retail investors entire­ly (SEC won’t allow them). And I thought we were the Nan­ny State?

Across the broad­er sec­tor, ASIC’s most recent review found that 133,000 Aus­tralians — 68% of retail CFD clients — lost more than $458 mil­lion in 2023–24 alone. Robin­hood itself — the orig­i­nal con­fet­ti mer­chant — has­n’t been let into Aus­tralia yet. ASIC has been forc­ing them to accept strict bor­row­ing lim­its and dis­pute-res­o­lu­tion rules first.

At QAV HQ we have more of an old school view of invest­ing.

We like our invest­ing to be real­ly bor­ing.

Our style of invest­ing is more like eat­ing broc­coli, brush­ing your teeth, get­ting eight hours of sleep, or get­ting your 10,000 steps in.

Like sex after you’ve been mar­ried 20 years, it might be a lit­tle pre­dictable, but it works. (Don’t tell Chris­sy I wrote that or I’ll be in all sorts of trou­ble.…)

QAV’s dum­my port­fo­lio — pub­licly tracked and ver­i­fi­able on the web­site — has returned rough­ly 14% CAGR over the past five years against the ASX 200’s 8.6%. Tony’s been run­ning the method for over 30 years and his per­son­al returns track sim­i­lar­ly.

Bor­ing invest­ing deliv­ers long-term results, but it requires a small amount of reg­u­lar dis­ci­pline. Part of that dis­ci­pline is ignor­ing the dopamine. Tony built the check­list pre­cise­ly because intu­ition and emo­tions are unre­li­able.

QAV isn’t a quick solu­tion. It’s the oppo­site of Ozem­pic.

We pre­fer the excite­ment of long-term, reli­able dou­ble mar­ket returns to the short-term, quick-fix plea­sures of leader­boards and check­ing an app every 15 min­utes.

Oliv­er Stone is prob­a­bly not going to make a movie about QAV in a hur­ry. But if he did… who do you think should play Tony?

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QAV Myth Killers is a week­ly col­umn in the QAV newslet­ter, tak­ing apart a piece of
invest­ing con­ven­tion­al wis­dom. Read the series, or
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