Robinhood and The Dangerous Side of Gamified Investing

“By delighting users, Robinhood creates players rather than investors. This helps them overlook the fact that speculative investing is very difficult and could cause them to lose lots of money, even if they’re professionals who spend hours and days scrutinizing companies and trades.”

Teaching young people to get started with investing and managing their money is undeniably a good thing. Starting with an app that gamifies the process, however, may be a recipe for disaster. In this review of the popular Robinhood app, Fast Company looks at the many ways in which the app may take its gamification of investing too far and obscure the real life implications of investing poorly or going into extreme debt based on bad investments that seemed like a game.

This is not only a danger for young people either. When losing money seems easy and fun, people will make bad decisions. Just look at the casinos.