More Investing Tools Won’t Solve All Your Problems

New tools for investing—such as online trading platforms, cryptocurrency, private markets, and so on—have energized investing. These tools are opening new doors for investors and promoting engagement. For example, online trading platforms are bringing investing to different people than more-traditional avenues, attracting younger and minority investors. Moreover, with the recent boom of innovative uses of ChatGPT, one can only imagine how investors will use this tool in their finances.

But are all these new investment tools helping people with the primary objective of investing—reaching their financial goals? Or are people still struggling with common behavioral challenges, only now they’re being amplified by the speed, power, and complexity of new innovations?

1 Step Forward

There’s no doubt these new investment tools bring many potential benefits to investors. In some ways, these new tools have democratized investing by expanding access to a wider audience. With a few quick swipes on their phones, more people than ever can engage with their finances, access markets, make trades, try out new asset classes, and, overall, personalize their financial plan. But, with great power, there must also come great responsibility (Spider-Man, anyone?), and some investors may be struggling with this load.

2 Steps Back?

Preliminary evidence suggests some tools may increase investors’ vulnerability to decision-making biases, making it easier to make financial mistakes.

For example, the ease of trading a stock online may be dangerous given previous research, which found individual investors with high trading volume pay a substantial performance penalty. Unfortunately, Morningstar research found online investors were twice as likely to trade one or more times a week than investors who are not online, and others found trading volume generated by individual investors has almost doubled since 2010.

Investor motivations also show signs of behavioral biases taking a toll. For example, 48% of online investors showed signs of returns-chasing, a common consequence of the availability bias (that is, the tendency to overweight recent events, also called recency bias), reporting they made a trade because they thought it would “make me a lot of money.”

Online accounts also allow more investors access to sophisticated investing vehicles, such as options, leverage, and short-selling. However, investors may be overconfident about their knowledge of more-complex financial instruments. In a study conducted by Finra, 62% of options traders were unable to answer a basic question related to options trading and were less likely than investors who did not trade options to admit they didn’t know the answer. Investors who purchased options were both less informed and more confident—a dangerous combination that can lead to poor risk management.

Innovations and Challenges

Although new investment tools present clear benefits for investors (diversification, tax management, lower fees, transparency), they may also exacerbate well-known behavioral pitfalls such as overconfidence, recency bias, confirmation bias, and regret aversion. In some ways, these new tools have reduced guardrails that may have prevented investors from acting on those biases.

Only time will tell whether AI tools such as ChatGPT will also act as a mixed blessing. One thing is clear: Regardless of all the tools investors now have at their disposal, it is worth remembering that investors benefit by understanding how their choices today promote progress toward their long-term investing goals.