(Sydney) TikTok may be the go-to platform for sharing innovative choreographies or recipes, but you can also find young financial influencers there who have found their audience.
StockTok, the keyword that serves as a rallying point for stock marketers and other market fans on TikTok, has already garnered 1.7 billion views, while its cousin FinTok has more than 500 million.
The variations around the word “invest” on the platform can bring together millions, even billions of views depending on the language.
In Australia, financial influencer Queenie Tan, 25, has nearly 100,000 subscribers for her “Invest with Queenie” account, and tens of thousands more on YouTube and Instagram.
For her, it’s about sharing the advice she would have liked to have found 6 years ago, when she herself embarked on investing in the financial markets and when she was looking for her tips in books.
Financial lessons from Squid Game
Shot in his living room in Sydney, his videos offer education on the different investment vehicles, and more fun content such as the financial lessons that can be learned from Squid Game, Netflix’s flagship series combining social allegory and extreme violence and which has been a worldwide hit for weeks.
As a good influencer, Queenie Tan shares her life experience, which includes a period below the poverty line, at the age of 19. It encourages its public to live frugally and to invest in a thoughtful and wise way, in order to gradually accumulate heritage.
“I really learned to control my expenses and know the value of money”, she says, stressing that she “has no intention of buying a mansion”.
Queenie Tan does not hide that she has no financial qualifications, like many financial influencers.
But Mexican Andres Garza is a certified financial advisor. Like Tan’s, his videos perfectly suited to TikTok are very popular with young people, happy to find advice from someone their age.
“People like me make complicated things fun,” said the 22-year-old, interviewed from his home in Monterrey.
For Andres Garza, social networks and applications that make it possible to buy and sell stocks and financial products democratize access to wealth. “The financial system has always left the ordinary investor behind,” he says. But “more and more anyone can participate. ”
This taste of young adults for investment corrects the image of lightness that sometimes sticks to these generations.
“It’s great” that so many people “feel they can start investing,” says Queenie Tan.
“On the other hand, there is a lot of shady stuff too,” she says, referring in particular to the maneuvers of certain influencers to push titles up and then sell them at a profit.
Many regulators around the world have called on young investors to be cautious about financial influencers.
And Plaxful, a cryptocurrency exchange, recently tested a sample of FinTok videos: one in seven was spurious.
Make up your own mind
To combat this phenomenon, TikTok has banned users from posting sponsored content on cryptocurrency and investment services.
Benjamin Schliebener, a 24-year-old German who has more than 50,000 subscribers on TikTok with videos like “why did Apple and Tesla split their titles?” ”, In general recommends investing in index funds (ETF) diversified, and not in shares of companies.
“The message is clear”, this choice “is not for everyone”, underlines the young man, who is remunerated through advertising cooperation with financial players, commissions when his subscribers click on links and advice to regional banks looking to create their own image on social networks.
Like Queenie Tan, Benjamin Schliebener emphasizes that all apprentice investors should learn to do their own research before placing any money.
“I often give my opinion, but I always insist that everyone has to make their own, because one of the most important things in investing is that you understand what you are investing in,” he explains. he.