Our FIFTH Stocktoberfest is in the books and it was incredible. We had over 400 attendees over the two days and we covered everything from angel investing in fintech to technical analysis on crude oil.
It was our youngest crowd to date.
Of course Stocktwits skews younger than CNBC and mainstream business media, but the high percentage of students who are learning to invest on social platforms like Stocktwits, Robinhood, TastyTrade and financial blogs was staggering.
My biggest takeaway was that younger people are excited about investing. They are smart. They are hungry to not just make money but cut the mistakes on their journey.
I have long been bullish on this next generation of investors, but I now predict that millennials will be the best trading and investing generation of all time.
This is not really an outrageous prediction. The global, social, mobile connected worlds will produce many trillion dollar businesses over the next 30 years that do not exist today. Millennials will be investing earlier because they have the tools and the social networks.
Below are some other thoughts on the subject as this trend really sets in:
The first thing millennials will do is fire their parents brokerage and advisors.
Millennials won’t trade as much as the last generation
Millennials won’t be passive…they know there is no such thing.
Millennials will use ETF’s for sure, but they will be creating their own personalized ETF’s built with lists and fractional shares.
Millennials will let investments become trades. They won’t be as bad as their parents letting trades become investments. They have their social networks and the free commissions to help help them make better decisions for the long term health of their portfolio’s.
Millennials won’t care as much about fundamentals in the public markets. They will focus much more on behavior and the mood of the crowd (I assume the Federal Reserve Board will not be abolished).
Millennials won’t own as many public stocks as previous generations. They will hoard cash and new digital alternatives.
Millennials will invest in their networks along many stages in private companies.
Millennials will not try to beat Warren Buffett and his successors, they will invest alongside.
The old banks are starting to get really serious about this trend. They don’t scare me and they will be pissing hundreds of millions away before they try and buy the winners. With the banks so focused on launching their millennial offshoots, it will get much harder now to start the brands that millennial investors will be choosing. I suspect that most of the big ones (save insurance) are well on their way.