Are stories more powerful than data? 🤔
As marketers, we would like to believe so.
Is it a good thing? Not necessarily 🙅♂️
Today, I read an insightful piece in Mint by Vivek Kaul on why despite most traders losing money, many young Indians are still getting into trading.
As per a recent SEBI paper, approximately 85 out 100 investors who traded in financial derivatives lost money. If you take trading cost also into consideration, then the figure is 90 out of 100 😢
When it comes to intraday trading, 71 out of 100 intraday traders in stocks lost money.
Interestingly, bulk of those losing the money are on the younger side. Two in every five investors in the stock market are under 30 years of age 😯
But why are so many young people getting attracted to trading when data consistently shows that the success rate is very low?
The author’s hypothesis is that all the chatter of “success stories” end up drowning SEBI’s data on losses. 🌊
Imagine a young person today.
Their feeds are filled with finfluencers constantly over claiming about how easy it is to make money of the stock market. There are WhatsApp / telegram groups buzzing with trading tips promising to make you a millionaire overnight. Media is constantly feeding stories of the great bull run 🔥
Add to that – the fund managers, politicians, corporate leaders and even few institutions are celebrating the buoyancy of the market 📈
When a young person is drowned in all this fake bullishness, they are driven by an intense FOMO.
Even if they are losing money, they end up think that they must be the only ones losing and may be they will crack it if they keep trying. Alas, that rarely happens.
This is a clearly a case of stories overpowering the data- resulting in dangerous consequences, that’s unfolding right before us.
So, while Stories are powerful, they can be manipulative too 💀
