Wall Street or Las Vegas? Entertainment Motives and Purchases of Meme Stocks or Social-Media-Trending Investments Among Young Investors

Abstract

This paper examines whether young investors who see investing as entertainment are more likely to report buying a meme stock or another investment trending on social media. I use the 2024 FINRA National Financial Capability Study Investor Survey, which includes 213 respondents ages 18 to 34. Among 197 respondents with valid motive and purchase responses, weighted purchase rates are 21.9 percent for not at all, 37.5 percent for somewhat, and 45.1 percent for very well. The primary weighted model includes 183 respondents and adjusts for objective investment knowledge, risk willingness, experience, and portfolio value. Entertainment odds ratios are 1.50 and 1.84, with a joint p-value of .386. The very-well estimate has a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.76 to 4.46, leaving H1 inconclusive. The survey cannot establish whether risk willingness precedes entertainment or partly reflects it. The analysis does not support the predicted protective interaction with knowledge or a clear entertainment association with frequent trading. The positive knowledge coefficient is exploratory and is not statistically significant in the alternative-score or unweighted checks. In the primary sample, the 58 purchasers averaged 4.31 correct answers out of ten, compared with 3.68 for the 125 non-purchasers, using WGT1 weights. Purchasers scored higher descriptively, but both groups averaged fewer than half the questions correct; this does not establish high knowledge.

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