Teenage traders?!

Teenage traders?!

Posted on July 8th, 2021 by Scott Warnock

I saw a story the other day about teenage stock traders.

Teenagers trading stocks? What could possibly go wrong?

I think back to myself as an entrepreneurial teen. What would I have done with my hard-earned cash from my Courier-Post newspaper route or my sporadic lawn-cutting jobs? What kinds of companies would have caught my glittering investor eye?

I would have put a lot of money into eight-tracks, then vinyl, then cassettes, then probably Betamax… yeah, you heard it right: Betamax. I remember someone who I thought was smart telling me it was the next great thing. You get the gist, right?: I wouldn’t exactly have been on the cutting edge of the next big thing in music media.

Electric football. Atari. Jarts.

Ultimate disc leagues. The USFL (!).

I still don’t know a damn thing about fashion, but would that have stopped me? Two-tone jeans. Big banana-shaped back pocket combs.

I might have gone sci-fi. A company promising to reincarnate John Bonham and Jim Morrison? Sold. Inviso dust. Take my money, please.

The problem, man, was I had no vision as a teenager. It was all right in front of me, ready for the taking, it seemed, but in reality it was evanescent whimsy.

Now, admittedly, we didn’t have the Internet back in olden times, so our knowledge sphere was smaller. I couldn’t look at charts and graphs to guide me to the next big thing.

I’d have been forced to stay local. I’d support the nearby 7-11. The clam bar at the Berlin Auction. I would have backed K-Mart, the big store down the street (only the clam bar has survived).

A frenzy of bad decision making.

By the way, teenage stock trading strikes me as coupled, at least conceptually, with the deluge of online betting sites. If you watch sports on TV, you know they’re everywhere. I certainly don’t have the technical knowledge or vocabulary, but both types of endeavors are tapping into a similar kind of rush. Some of us can hit that vein only once in a while. Unfortunately, many can’t.

I was talking to a relative young ‘un in the gym the other day. He works for an online betting company and was reflecting on the similarities between online betting and stocks, noting the significant difference that unlike stocks, in online betting when the game is over, you could be instantly at zero.

I won’t go into how my youthful online betting would have gone, as enough people now live that pain daily, but let’s just say I would have kept ponying up that the Minnesota Vikings were going to win a Super Bowl.

My college sources tell me kids bet on anything because they can do it right on their phones. Don’t get me wrong, I love to play some cards. I’ve enjoyed times in the casino. But betting on the coin flip of the Super Bowl?–never my kind of thing.

To me, it’s hard to imagine that this mindset, especially since it’s manifested with the languid tap of a phone, is good for kids. Tomorrow is far away for them, and a $100 bet on a team to cover the over-under can seem true and inevitable, much like a $500 bet on the next great company. Life is about risk, sure, but there’s a difference between risk and gambling, and for the most part, teenagers imbibe enough risk- cocktail without mixing in the power juice of straight-up gambling.

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Scott Warnock

Scott Warnock is a writer and teacher who lives in South Jersey. He is a professor of English at Drexel University, where he is also the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education in the College of Arts and Sciences. Father of three and husband of one, Scott is president of a local high school education foundation and spent many years coaching youth sports.