After years of no one in my household taking an interest in how I make a living, my 12-year old caught me off guard recently with a barrage of questions about investing.
“What do you know about Elon Musk? How much money do I need to invest? How long will it take me to be a millionaire, billionaire if I start with $500? What about $1,000?” I briefly wondered how my kid had heard about the electric-car maker Tesla’s TSLA, -1.57% chief executive, who has made some faithful investors very wealthy.
But while we should have been playing board games and learning stuff during 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic meant my family was online a lot, especially during the claustrophobic seven-week lockdown in our Madrid apartment.
Enter videosharing app TikTok, whose popularity has soared amid demand for quick entertainment by its youthful audience, with 689,174,209 global monthly active users as of last July (from over 54 million in January 2018).
My kid took interest in Musk and his billions via an early January post from the account @ac2alityespanol — all the news you need in a minute. With simple language and colorful presentations, a team of young presenters are piquing his interest on lots of topics — a good thing.
Read: The newest frontier for financial advice: TikTok
But when it comes to investing, the sheer number of TikTok videos on offer — two billion global downloads as of August 2020 — means any budding Warren Buffett (legendary investor and chairman of Berkshire Hathaway) would likely be overwhelmed.
While the app’s algorithm loses no time in figuring out your search desires, there is a ton of potential hashtags, with #investing at the top with 1.6 billion views, along with #investingforbeginners with 43 million. As of late, there is a whole crop of new hashtags and content following the retail frenzy for videogames store GameStop GME, -30.64% — that name alone was searched over 600 million times on Thursday.
Watch: Three things you can do in 2021 to set your kid up to become a millionaire
The “laughs only” Twitter TWTR, +1.45% handle @TikTokInvestors offers up a mix of the sometimes savvy and often outrageous TikTok posts.
Danny Tran, the 21-year old behind the above account, @someasianontiktok, has over 480,000 followers (@deepvoicedanny on Twitter). While his followers lob lots of questions at him, Tran tells MarketWatch in emailed comments that he’s “fairly new and just showing what I do myself.
“My intentions of posting my TikToks with Robinhood was to let the people decide what my money would go in, so I took some of their ideas and just played with that, the recent TikToks are to add to the narrative of what WSBs [the sub-Reddit forum WallStreetBets] started” says Tran.
He says TikTok helped him catch an early wave of gains for special-purpose acquisition corporation Churchill Capital CCIV, -3.13%, which has been the subject of speculation it could acquire an electric-vehicle company. Tran points to @trading101 as one useful account.
As for other viable TikTokers for young investors, @calltoleap has California-based former math teacher Steve Chen at the helm and over 600,000 followers. Joining the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement at 33, his TikTok account was started last year.
Tapping into those teacher skills, his videos focus on investing for the long term, such as lessons in compound growth, and he regularly answers follower questions. Lately, Chen’s videos have also addressed the WallStreetBets volatility, such as the “when-do-we-sell?” question. Advice can also be found on his Instagram account.
Chen tells MarketWatch that he learned to invest with the help of Google searches and YouTube. TikTok, he says, offers plenty of content from those who are savvy with their investment tools and market timing.
“What worries me is sometimes when the younger generation watches this they might think, ‘Oh yeah, maybe I can do this too,’ and maybe they’re kind of misinformed and they jump on it and they lose money,” Chen says. Some of his favorite TikTok accounts are @delyannethemoneycoach, @nobudgetbabe and @johnefinance.
Financial analyst Austin Hankwitz (@austinhankwitz on Twitter) has nearly 470,000 TikTok followers — a recent GameStop-themed post got 2.7 million views.
“It’s hard to find accounts with the smartest advice — some would look at follower count, but even that’s not a good metric. It comes down to recommendations and feedback at the end of the day,” Hankwitz tells MarketWatch in emailed comments.
Encouragingly, Hankwitz says he has seen many young people develop an interest in investing during the pandemic and stick with it. “I made a video talking through how to open a Roth IRA [individual retirement account] with Betterment, a reputable robo adviser, and after going viral, they’ve acquired tens of thousands of new users who funded their accounts and still use the product today,” he says.
His favorite accounts are @robinhoodkid and @acouplecents, which show “the perspective of someone new to learning about the markets and a veteran who has made a career on Wall Street.”
As for the recent retail frenzy, Hankwitz says “TikTok does a lot already to combat misinformation and ‘scams’ but this one was going to be hard to keep straight,” he says.
Investor and entrepreneur Humphrey Yang, under the handle @humphreytalks (his Twitter handle is the same), does have a huge following — 1.5 million. Among his popular posts are one explaining a call option to a fifth-grader, and one that debunks after-hours trading.
“Younger people need to focus on going through that TikToker’s content and making sure they are aligned with them. It is good to not take anything at face value and do your own research especially when it comes to investments,” Yang tells MarketWatch in emailed comments.
The pandemic, he says, has “accelerated the amount of people that stay on the platform to learn and invest. I can see and hear it everyday from the followers, they are very engaged into learning how to better their financial future.” He suggests accounts such as @admani_explains, @logicalfinance, @mainstreetwolf and Austin Hankwitz’s.
As for the GameStop saga, Yang says he’s seen lots of younger investors “just getting on a hype train,” when they should really be “sticking to longer-term investing since time is on their side.”
Read: Investors set to jump into GameStop frenzy until financial advisers talk them off the ledge
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