Gamification of Private Investment: Features of the Financial Behavior of Novice Young Investors Who Make Transactions on the Stock Exchange through Mobile Investment Applications

This study is an attempt to formulate the main aspects of a new culture of private investment in Russia. New applied investment tools, namely mobile investment applications, due to gamification of interaction processes with the stock exchange, made it possible to simplify market entry for a significant number of private investors. With this change, trading stocks requires less amount of specific knowledge and capital, while most of the technical and legal procedures take place automatically. The ethnographic approach proposed by Mitchel Abolafia was used to find out how this could play out in the investment activities of young, up-and-coming private investors. During the field stage, 15 semi-structured interviews were conducted among both men and women aged 18 to 27, and based on the information collected, two types of ideas about a rational investment strategy were formulated. The first involves long-term investment and minimizing risks. When making a decision to buy or sell an asset, young investors rely on analytics provided by a trusted blogger or other influencer, advice from the people from the close social circle (friends and parents), and their own intuition based on a person's view of a particular company, as well as, in some cases, experience of interaction with it. The second strategy by young investors is high-risk trading based on news evenst, high-profile market turns, and rumors. They, as well as representatives of the first type of strategy, are not interested in using technical analysis and, therefore, in using classical methods of day trading. For this reason, first, their strategy includes an interest in following general trends and responding to the so-called "signals", "leaks" and news analytics in the Telegram channels. This is justified by the desire for quick earnings and unwillingness to delve into investment activities for any period of time longer than time it takes for the high-profile events in the stock and crypto currency markets to run their course. As for the discussion of investments that take place in online or offline social networks, the young investors are primarily interested in finding out how confident others are that the projected about the future rise or fall of a particular asset is likely to really occur.