AS INTEREST rates flat-line and inflation starts to soar, a new tribe of investors is fast emerging: the adventurous millennials.
Digital trading platforms are reporting a marked increase in the number of active young investors using their services. The Share Centre, for example, has reported a 16 per cent year-on-year rise in the number of trades occurring in tax-efficient ISAs held by millennials.
It points to a quiet revolution in how young people are managing their money. Fed up with bad savings rates and adverse economic headwinds, many millennials are taking matters into their own hands and using their smartphone to find - and manage - riskier investments.
Gonçalo de Vasconcelos, co-founder of equity investment platform SyndicateRoom, said: “Many young people are having to look at alternative routes to get the capital growth they need to reach their financial goals in today’s low-yield economic environment. As part of this move, many are willing to take on additional risk in order to meet their goals.”
Part of the shift online is also down to Generation Y’s mistrust of the mainstream banking sector following the financial crash, with many preferring to put their faith in digital-only start-ups.
Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, said these so-called “fin tech” companies have the potential to “democratise” the world of money. Speaking at a conference in London this week, he said: “Consumers can get more choice and keener pricing … and financial services could become more inclusive, with people better connected, more informed and increasingly empowered.”
At the end of March, the mobile bank Monzo attracted funding worth £2.5 million from its tech-savvy investors. It brings the total amount raised by the challenger bank from both private investors and venture capital to £22m.
And BrewDog, Scotland’s most successful crowdfunding story, reached new highs this week, with US private equity firm TSG Consumer Partners investing more than £200mn in the firm for a 22.3 per cent stake, pushing BrewDog’s value to more than £1 billion. An investor who backed BrewDog’s first funding round in 2010 would have seen the value of their stake rise by close to 2,800 per cent, although the craft brewery’s 55,000 crowd-funders will be barred from selling any more than 15 per cent of their shares, up to a maximum of 40 shares.
Recent research from equity investing platform SyndicateRoom found millennials are also twice as likely to choose so-called “early stage” investing, such as venture capital or enterprise investment schemes, than the over-50s, with the vast majority satisfied that a portfolio of diversified early-stage equities would help them achieve their financial goals.
But are millennials getting ahead of themselves by chasing high-risk investments? The Share Centre said that its young ISA investors were increasingly drawn to “get rich quick” trades, investing in volatile mining shares such as Centamin and Kodal Minerals as well as oil stocks like Ascent Resources and 88 Energy.
Graham Spooner, investment research analyst at the Share Centre, said: “Millennials will one day be considered middle-aged and may perhaps question whether this strategy was suitable. When thinking about their future, and of course if they decide to move towards a more balanced portfolio, I would suggest that mid-cap companies could be the answer.
“As the blue chips of the future, mid-caps could provide millennials not only with growth potential, but the element of risk that they are clearly craving, without going to the extremes.”
Adrian Lowcock, investment director at fund management firm Architas, said the problem with making individual trades was that most investors “lose a lot of money before they find success”.
“You need to diversify because you don’t know what will be successful,” he said. “When you trade in high volumes, you introduce lots of chances to be wrong, and even the best fund managers make mistakes, typically only making the correct calls 50 to 60 per cent of the time.”
Mr Lowcock encouraged young investors to seek out small-cap funds rather than ploughing all their cash directly into companies via early-stage investing or equity crowdfunding.
“Most companies don’t get to the FTSE 100,” he said. “Venture capital is hugely risky, and the amount of due diligence has been hugely underestimated. Crowdfunding as a whole has yet to see a recessionary cycle in really tough markets with rising interest rates and tighter monetary policy, so we haven’t seen how this sector operates under pressure.”
He also tipped equity income "so long as it can be locked up for the long-term" but urged caution over technology stocks, a natural fit for young investors, while stopping short of forecasting a recurrence of the dot com bubble that saw highly valued tech stocks fail or crash in the early 2000s.
James Clunie of Jupiter Investments has warned of similar dangers with what he calls “glamour stocks”. Speaking at a recent event, the head of strategy for Absolute Return at Jupiter said stocks such as Tesla and Netflix are superficially attractive, with investors tending to extrapolate growth for years to come, but are at risk of overpaying.
“These companies buy and acquire, buy and acquire, but they are borrowing to acquire growth, and are very fashionable right now, so the valuations are high,” he said.
However, other high-profile fund managers fervently champion cutting-edge technology, most notably James Anderson of Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust. His high-conviction strategy of investing in the likes of Tesla, Amazon and Facebook has seen the trust return 172 per cent over the past five years, with the trust joining the FTSE 100 for the first time in late March.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here