How TikTok’s GenZ financial influencers are changing finance

This is Jim Cramer, in the early days.

This is his performance relative to the S&P 500. It is not higher than the index.

Lots of people have villainized Mad Money, the show on which Jim talks about stocks and markets, and makes investment recommendations. It is easy to pick on the style, substance, and investment returns of the show. But in the end Jim is right, and you are wrong, because he is not providing investment advice. He is providing edu-tainment. He is providing financial literacy. Cramer is a fantastic, intuitive performer, and the $150 million net worth that he has earned is related to the ability to read an audience and press their buttons — not to quietly outperform numbers in a PDF.

Now, Mad Money and its angry charismatic host are part of a legacy media industry structure; one which has been melted down by technology. Old media requires intermediation by human curators. You’ve got talent on one side, looking to get access to an audience. You’ve got the channels, stations, and websites on the other side, looking for talent. Some well-paid people select the talent and plug them into a large distribution machine, and take a cut.

If you’ve been paying attention, that stuff in the middle has been — structurally — getting cut out for a while now. Creators are much, much closer to their audience than ever before.

We can use the simple example of YouTube.

There are about 2 billion YouTube users and 40 million channels. While most of those channels have very little engagement, you are still looking at hundreds or thousands of channels with more than a million subscribers. Creators are intermediated by YouTube and its algorithm, sure, but there is no barrier to getting started and no credential or prestige signaling required to do so. You don’t need a resume or a recommendation. Just upload.

For comparison, Mad Money has a Nielsen rating / audience measure of about 200,000 people per day.

So that’s like a YouTube channel with 1 million subscribers. YouTube is not all about money and financial literacy, and Cramer still has a good grip on the financial imagination of Gen X and Baby Boomers. But he can be roughly compared to a crypto influencer like BitBoy, a YouTuber with 850,000 subscribers and 150,000 views per video. The below video gives you a flavor.

If BitBoy comes in a too hot for your finance take, take a look at Roaring Kitty. This is the soft-spoken destroyer of Melvin Capital’s short position in GameStop. If you are trying to understand who the next Jim Cramer is, how they behave, and what messages are being put out, look no further.

But all this is Gen X and Millennial stuff. We barely got our head around the idea that video creators are our generation’s financial advisors, and that you can get more financial literacy education of out Roaring Kitty and the long tail of free finance videos than you could out of your Goldman Sachs wealth manager. We barely figured out that distribution links are now direct between one person and another person, and the emotional labor is no longer work for hire but done for passion.

And yet, we have to contend with more. Because the amount of content on tech platforms trends towards infinity, curation is still needed, but it must be super-human. Things are super-human through algorithms and automation. You take your rubric and judgment to achieve some particular goal (e.g., clicks, scrolling, existential anxiety), put it into code, and run it at scale. After a while, you tweak your robot with machine learning, so it can mass-personalize that judgment for each and every one of the 2 billion people consuming content. Before you know it, the entire feed of information and education is put together by our artificial intelligence overlords.

Welcome to TikTok, says Gen Z.

This next generation has abandoned Facebook (usage of 32% for Gen Z vs. 84% Millennials) and adopted TikTok (35% vs 19%).

You don’t have to be a teenager to appreciate that teenagers determine youth culture and the direction of technology, which then boils up to the rest of the economic fashions. Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft when he was 19 years old. Steve Jobs was 20 for Apple. Zuckerberg was 19 for Facebook. Vitalik was 21 during the launch of Ethereum.

Let that stand as a reality check about the value of experience.

The Rise of FinTok and StockTok

Being interested in financial marketing, we have to follow these demographic changes, and the twisting nature of financial advice. And in particular, the trend of financial product recommenders on TikTok.

First, there is an important distinction to make between (1) new media and platforms and (2) recurring human nature. Cramer and BitBoy represent human nature — their catchy, interesting content will grab emotions and attention no matter if it is packaged like a TV show or an API into our cranial neurolink implants. There will always be people selling financial hope wrapped in the language of expertise.

As TikTok becomes the medium of choice, however, that content makes its way to new form factors. The new form factors define how the content is presented, and how it impacts those that are consuming the content. Specifically, how it warps your brains into some particular financial action.

Videos range from 15 to 60 seconds, and are built for virality as determined by our artificial intelligence overlords. The machine filters content in front of its audience, and uses magical engagement voodoo to surface the interesting stuff over and over again. As a creator, you are no longer doing stuff to please a media studio that controls a generic channel. And you are not even doing it to optimize for YouTube search discovery. Rather, you are working on behalf of the all-mighty algorithm, which is trained by its constituent audience to deliver the juice.

Not surprisingly, some old people (sort of like us and also the regulators) and young people with old souls (those that invest in index funds) find a bunch of this stuff objectionable. Here is a flavor:

• Warnings over TikTok influencers. The regulator is trying to tackle the growth of financial tips on social media, but it may be a losing battle
• Welcome to FinTok, Where Day Trading, Options Investing, and Misinformation Reign, from Institutional Investor. Notably from the article, the #fintok tag on TikTok has 42.6 million views. #Stocktok has even more: 97.4 million.
• 5 TikTok creators explaining the stock market to a new generation of investors. The hashtag #investing has received over 1 billion views, while #Stocktok has drawn in over 254 million views.
• Meet the fin-fluencers: Raised on social media, fueled by boredom and flush with stimulus checks — scores of newly-minted ‘zillennials’ are shaking up the stock market on TikTok

Each of the articles is fascinating for different reasons. We can ponder how regulators are trying to stop teenagers from talking about stock trading by law, while fintech founders get excited for the Robinhood IPO on which those teenagers are levering up their savings. Or we can finger-wag about all this dangerous financial misinformation, in a world where a reasonable portion of the American population believes in the QAnon conspiracy, with those believers elected into Congress. Or structurally, the zombie interest-rate economy that pushes risk-seeking into penny stocks and crypto under the threat of never-ending hundred-thousand-dollar student debt.

What perhaps jumps out the most is that many different TikTok personalities have followings of 100,000+ and videos that routinely hit visibility on par with Roaring Kitty’s YouTube presence, and yes, Jim Cramer’s CNBC presence. Some of those audiences were built up during the pandemic merely in the last 12 months.

It has never been easier to grab financial attention. For creators, this is a profound responsibility in a country and economy where profound responsibility has become a sin, and not a virtue. It is *lame* to be risk-averse and focused on the long term. Instead, lever up and double down.

The Way Forward and Out

To read more, check out the rest of this article on the Blueprint website here.

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