Young adults and investing for the future: Examining futuring practices and wellbeing through digital brokerage platforms

Abstract

Young adults’ lives are increasingly characterised by uncertainty, which has heightened since the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as an expectation that they transition into adulthood as entrepreneurial, responsible subjects. In this context, greater numbers of young people are participating as retail investors, motivated by the growing accessibility of financial technologies, including digital brokers. Yet this technological accessibility does not explain why or how they decide to invest. Drawing on focus group discussions with Australian young adults (19–30 years) who invest via digital brokers, this article explores their participation as retail investors. Focused on long-term financial ‘horizons’, participants explained how investing requires temporal work to mitigate existing uncertainty and enable their imagined future wellbeing. Drawing on theories of ‘futuring’, we surface their varied practices towards hedging against and with uncertain and risky futures. Such practices weigh up individuals’ circumstances, which are regulated through gender, class and contextual considerations, as well as housing or employment market imaginaries and key (imagined) milestones in one’s life. The article considers the implications of these futuring practices, where not investing becomes a risk for future wellbeing, and how these practices align with the entrepreneurial present that has become a critical aspect of young people’s transitions into adulthood.

Introduction

In the first 12 months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the trading volume in share markets surged across 37 international equity markets (Chiah & Zhong, 2020), related to both increases in investing practices as well as increases in the number of investors. In Australia, for instance, the volume of retail trading by individual investors jumped more than 60% over the lockdown period, compared to before the pandemic (Chiah & Zhong, 2020), and 435,000 Australians started trading on the Australian stock market, bringing the number of active investors to a record high of 1.25 million in 2020 (Vickovich, 2021). Of particular interest for this article has been the rise in young adult investors, dubbed the ‘next generation investors’ (Australian Stock Exchange [ASX], 2020) and the ‘corona-generation’ investors (Zhong quoted in Whitson, 2021). This includes young adults (aged 18–24) and, in particular, young women who have been identified as fast-growing demographic groups engaged in retail investing (Australian Securities and Investments Commission, 2020).

One of the drivers of these shifts has been access to new and emergent fintech technologies. Fintech – finance technologies – includes digital trading platforms, digital payment systems and money management apps for customers, as well as finance infrastructure, business-to-business or enterprise platforms. In this study, we focus on digital trading or brokerage platforms, which are defined by their capacity for enabling and affording the ability to invest in financial products. Brokerage is the process of connecting actors in social, economic and/or political relations to facilitate access to valued resources (Stovel et al., 2011). Brokers, as Stovel and Shaw (2012) argue, have two crucial characteristics, ‘(a) they bridge a gap in social structure and (b) they help goods, information, opportunities, or knowledge flow across that gap’ (p. 141, emphasis in original). Digital brokerage platforms offer new and easy ways to participate in retail (individual, nonprofessional) investing, connect actors across multiple financial infrastructures and services, and promise greater financial democratisation (Tan, 2021). They are notable for both their low costs of entry (Hendry et al., 2021) and low(er) brokerage fees and are often targeted at young adult consumers (van der Heide & Želinský, 2021). Their emergence in the context of this study in Australia, as is similar elsewhere, has been enabled, in part, by low taxes on start-ups, shifts in mobile payments, young adults’ participation in digital banking (Cain, 2020), as well as young people’s engagements across new(er) digital finance products, including cryptocurrency (Auer & Tercero-Lucas, 2021) and buy-now-pay-later credit schemes (Cook et al., 2023; Fisher et al., 2021).

These are practices that are more broadly situated in what has been called the ‘financialisation of daily life’, a term coined originally by Martin (2002), which is now commonly referred to as the ‘financialisation of everyday life’, which refers to ‘the diverse ways in which finance is grounded in practices of everyday life’ (van der Zwan, 2014, p. 102). This transition of finance into everyday life has produced new subjectivities, including the everyday investor and financial asset ownership, which in turn produce new practices (Adkins et al., 2020; Pelladini-Simanyi, 2020; van der Zwan, 2014). In this article, we examine how young people, as ‘next generation investors’ (ASX, 2020), are engaging with and using digital platforms as brokers for retail investing and the future(s) these practices orient towards (and away from). Specifically, we ask how are young people engaging with and using digital brokerage platforms and how are such platforms situated in their broader life projects.

To examine these practices, we draw on and extend youth studies scholarship on the ‘entrepreneurial self’ (Kelly, 2006, 2017). This work argues that young people in late modernity are expected to make strategic investments in the self and have become ‘increasingly responsible for managing their lives as an enterprise’ (Kelly, 2017, p. 62). While this work focuses on investing in the self, there has been little written on retail investment as part of this enterprising work, and limited engagement with how the entrepreneurial self is situated within broader shifts in the financialisation of everyday life. In this article we focus on young people’s retail investment practices, arguing that digital brokerage platforms extend enterprising work in contexts of neoliberalism and financialisation of everyday life, which creates new contexts of ‘futuring’. We use the concept of ‘techniques of futuring’ (Hajer & Pelzer, 2018), to make sense of the shared practices that are produced by these new emergent platforms and the futures that are imagined through their use(s). We argue this points to a future wellbeing in the imagined lifecourse, where present practices (re)orient to protect, mitigate and (re)create futures that have the possibility of producing greater wellbeing.

Young people: Uncertain lifecourses, the ‘enterprising self’ and ‘futuring’

Young people’s lives are characterised by uncertainty, which scholars have argued has heightened since the COVID-19 pandemic. Before the pandemic, there were already substantive concerns following the global financial crisis (GFC), as Kelly (2017, p. 59) argues:

[T]oday’s young people and young adults, and the generations who will follow and grow up in the unfolding aftermath of the GFC [global financial crisis], will carry a particularly heavy burden in terms of changed education and employment circumstances and opportunities; consequences for physical and mental health and well-being; consumption, housing, relationship and parenting aspirations; and a sense of self in relation to the possibilities for participation in the liberal democracies.

It is well documented within sociology that the global workforce and economy have become uncertain, precarious and flexible spaces (Bauman, 2004; Beck, 2000). Indeed, the pandemic has heightened uncertainty and anxiety about job security and precarious work conditions (Chesters & Wyn, 2019; Cook et al., 2021). This is occurring alongside housing unaffordability, climate change and cost of living pressures, amongst other concerns facing young people. Together, we can think of these as ‘intersecting crises’ as Ang (2021) does, which exist, as Moore and colleagues (2021) suggest, while structural inequalities persist. We might think of these as working together to create a future that is ‘unsettled’ (Gallo Cordoba et al., 2023), where the traditional lifecourse scripts are disrupted and/or made more difficult (Davis & Cartwright, 2019). Such aspects of the lifecourse script associated with the ‘classic markers of adulthood’, include marriage, parenthood, independent living and gainful employment (Blatterer, 2007). Some authors have lamented that these shifts can mean young people are ‘locked out’ of ‘meaningful participation’ in relationships and settings associated classically with being ‘an adult, as a citizen’ (Kelly, 2017, p. 60).

At the same time, in contexts of neoliberalism, young people are also expected to transition into adulthood fashioning an ‘entrepreneurial self’ (Kelly, 2006), a self that is expected to ‘become, rational, autonomous, choice making, risk aware, prudential, responsible and enterprising’ (Kelly, 2017, p. 57). Research has documented how young people have become expected to be more ‘enterprising’ through investments in higher education and training (Holdsworth, 2018; Walsh & Black, 2021). Kelly (2017) notes that young people have become ‘increasingly responsible for managing their lives as an enterprise’ (p. 62) towards an imagined future. A key feature of this framing is its temporality: how the entrepreneurial self is made through a present and a strategically considered and (imagined) future. Williams, for instance, positions students in higher education akin to ‘private investors seeking a financial return in the form of enhanced employability skills’ (Williams, 2016, p. 627) for returns in the labour market. However, there has been limited research exploring retail investing, or stock market investing as an investment activity of the entrepreneurial self and the futures such investment might enable, afford and/or shut down. Indeed, a substantive part of managing oneself as an enterprise is responsibilisation. Under neoliberal logics of individualism, responsibility for long-term financial security and wellbeing, similar to other areas such as health (see Rich, 2018), has shifted largely from the state to the individual. In this context financial risk and uncertainty must be managed by forms of participation in the financial sphere (Langley, 2010; Maman & Rosenhek, 2020). Situated within the financialisation of everyday life this risk and uncertainty is reimagined by investor subjects as opportunities ‘to secure their future wealth and wellbeing’ (Langley, 2020, p. 70), where risk becomes a ‘motivating force’ (van der Zwan, 2014, p. 112) to enter financial markets to mitigate or protect against the impacts of intersecting crises. The entrepreneurial self, as we discuss below, is expected to negotiate and take up such risks to orient to future wellbeing.

We turn here towards work on ‘futuring’ to make sense of the practices that situate young people’s participation in financial markets as practices oriented to (future) wellbeing. Beckert (2013, p. 220) argues that investment decision-making and motivation is anchored in ‘fictional expectations’: ‘the inhabitation in the mind of an imagined future state of the world’. Using economic decision-making as an example, Beckert argues fictional expectations, as imaginaries, shape and orient present decision-making and influence action. Thinking with fictions surfaces creativity and contingency in contexts of uncertainty, a focus on the young people’s imaginings of the future, and, in the context of this article, the decisions that underpin emergent participation in the stock market and digital brokerage platforms. In discussions about investors Beckert notes the ‘meticulous calculative practices’ that are part of economic decision-making, arguing that calculative assessments of outcomes should be considered fictions, not that they are fake or false calculations, but rather that:

. . . they [calculations] are not instruments that make it possible to anticipate the future, but tranquilizers against the paralyzing effects of having to act in unpredictable environments. Calculation helps in overlooking the profound uncertainty entailed in decisions by increasing commitment to what remain fictional expectations. (Beckert, 2013, p. 234)

Calculative practices (or futuring practices) can thus be thought of as both process and outcome. They allow actors to coordinate and organise action when facing uncertainty. As imaginaries, these ‘future expectations’ are subject to power, as much as they are subject to the capacity or means to engage. As Beckert (2013) reminds us, such practices are also anchored in institutional structures and networks, as well as cultural frames (e.g. shared narratives about investing, digital finance cultures; Hendry et al., 2021), such as the expectation for young people to fashion an entrepreneurial self in late modernity (Kelly, 2017). This is evident, for instance, in relation to youth and indebtedness. Farrugia and colleagues (2022) have shown how fintech loan products (such as buy-now-pay-later tools), which are part of participation in consumer credit, have become routinised into the ways young people speculate and manage present and future debt. In this way, they are obliged to entrepreneurially manage credit and debt into the future, which, as Coffey and colleagues (2023) have shown, impacts on imaginaries of wellbeing, particularly related to the felt shame and stigmas of debt. This article builds on this work, considering futuring practices as they relate to different fintech engagements (i.e. stock market participation and digital brokerage platforms) and the fictions of future wellbeing that emerge in these young people’s narratives and what is made (im)possible through their uses. Hajer and Pelzer (2018) define these ‘futuring’ practices as ‘techniques of futuring’, ‘practices bringing together actors around one or more imagined futures and through which actors come to share particular orientations for action’ (Hajer & Pelzer, 2018, p. 222).

Here we argue that emergent digital platforms and the digital finance cultures that surround their use(s) can be considered a ‘technique of futuring’ that reconfigure possible futures for young people who are expected to fashion entrepreneurial selves for their own wellbeing. This shifts how we typically understand wellbeing as a practice anchored in the present – as a ‘subjective appraisal of quality of life’ (Cahill, 2015, p. 96) for example – or a practice towards a short-term future – such as exercising so we sleep better at night, establishing a wellbeing programme at a school so that students are better prepared to learn, or organising a budget each week to reduce financial stress that week. Instead, by orienting wellbeing as a technique of futuring we stress how investing on the stock market responds to both the actual uncertainty of the future as well as an imagined future expectation where uncertainty may be mitigated through long-term investing. Reviewing how wellbeing is discussed in relation to young people’s lives, Wyn (2009) suggests that wellbeing theories and concepts understand wellbeing as variously a process and/or an outcome. Here we see these techniques of futuring as processes that orient action in the stock market as well as imagined outcomes that reinforce particular future expectations.

Research design and participants

This study focused on the ways young people were narrating investment as a practice, and the reasons for participation in retail investing via digital brokerage platforms. In 2021, we undertook five digital focus groups with 21 young adults (19 to 30 years old) who invested on the Australian stock market and used digital brokers (Hendry et al., 2021). We recruited participants via social media networks, student and university email and newsletter lists, general social media groups (e.g. neighbourhood pages) and finance and/or investing‑focused groups or accounts. Each two-hour focus group was conducted via Zoom. During each focus group discussion, we explored how young people commence stock market investing, their reasons and motivations, and their experiences and practices of investing. Data were co-analysed by identifying emergent themes. We used in vivo (verbatim coding of participants’ language) and process (coding actions and practices), before code landscaping and organising how participants, as a group, talked about investing as a practice (Saldaña, 2015). Alongside this, our analysis was informed by our conceptual frameworks of wellbeing and futuring, as discussed in our introduction. Primary themes included navigating present and future risk, future security and independence, and participation in digital finance cultures. ¹

The 21 young adults all used digital brokerage platforms as their investment brokers. Participants included 9 women and 12 men; eight participants were aged 19 to 24 years, and thirteen were between 25 to 30 years. Two thirds of participants were Anglo or white Australians (n=14), four were Malaysian and/or Chinese (including Australian Chinese) and three were South African or European (19.0%). Of the participants, one third were new investors (>18 months; n=7) and five participants had invested for more than five years. Participants’ approximate annual income varied from under AUD$20,000 (n=2), between AUD$20,001 and AUD$40,000 (n=4), between AUD$40,001 and AUD$80,000 (n=12), and the remainder earned above AUD$80,001. Of note, the median annual income in Australia for 2021 was AUD$41,860 (via census weekly income data; Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2021). Just over half of all participants were studying or had just completed undergraduate or postgraduate courses (52.4%; n=11), with five studying finance‑related degrees.

Findings

Our findings first focus on how investment practices emerged within specific contexts, then we examine how calculated futuring practices rely on future expectations of wellbeing throughout the lifecourse, for both present investment decision-making and as markers of imagined futures.

Becoming an active ‘investor’ via digital brokers

The potential to generate wealth in and for the future via accessible digital platforms and stock market participation was a key motivator for the participants to begin investing. Bank savings accounts were seen as an almost dormant space, delivering minimal or no financial returns, as interest from Australian savings accounts in 2021 was on average 0.5–1% (Its Simple, 2021) and therefore did not offer participants enough active wealth creation. In contrast, investing offered opportunities for wealth to be (re)invested and possibilities for it to compound over time. As Aarini (female, 28) explained: ‘you’ve got this income and want it to be active’. For bank accounts, as Amy (female, 26) said, you want ‘to put your funds outside of the bank, obviously have emergency funds in there, but, you know, create wealth outside of [the bank]’. Dean’s (male, 24) experience is illustrative of this decision-making:

I started thinking about investing [. . .] I was just looking at my bank account and I was like, ‘Where can I save this?’ ‘Where should I put it?’ I don’t know where to put it. And I was looking at options [. . .I thought] ‘I might as well be losing money if I’m putting in there [a high-interest saving account]’, So I was thinking, ‘Is there any other way?’. . . I actually started with micro-investing apps at first because it’s easier to get in. . .

As Dean and others noted, micro-investing apps or low-cost digital brokerage apps (e.g. platforms that allow people to start investing with as little as AUD$5 for example) offered low-barrier access to enter and an opportunity to participate easily. As James (male, 22) explained, the interface and logic of the platforms: ‘makes it so, so easy to invest [. . .] you just make an account and start trading straightaway’. The low-cost, low-barrier accessibility of digital brokers was positioned in contrast with other forms of investment, such as housing, which were perceived as out of reach in the present to participants.

COVID-19 and public health lockdowns in Australia also offered participants a period to explore investing. The lockdown itself was flagged as a time for learning and exploring across popular and news media. James (male, 22) said: ‘It’s just particularly the first, like the first half of 2020. I had a lot more time on my hands to properly look at stocks and actually figure out what’s happening.’ For some participants, lockdowns offered them space and resources to focus on investing while not working outside their homes or travelling to work or studies. This reflects insights from other studies about how lockdowns enabled other forms of exploration, including identity exploration online as well (see Hanckel & Chandra, 2021).

Families, friends, personal relationships and housing as motivators and distractors

Decisions to invest were often foregrounded by conversations with friends and family about investing. These conversations were typically with older male adults who, but not always, influenced investing practices and often provided the impetus for involvement. This included participants being gifted shares or money to invest within the family:

[W]hat got me started was the males in my life and my dad, my partner, some male friends and colleagues. That’s what got me really interested because barely any of my female friends were talking about it. (Amy, female, 26)

Those who did not have family members involved discussed how friends or partners assisted or were supporting their investing practices, and in one case, Dean (male, 24), just decided to invest on his own, espousing its perceived benefits, noting ‘since I started investing I have been [. . .] trying to convince people to learn more about it’.

Immediately evident across these narratives are considerations of class and gender. These were generally middle-class young people, often with some form of economic capital to begin investing in varied amounts. Gender here often played out as it was the (oftentimes) older male who imparted advice, norms of investing and/or provided economic capital for investments.

Others spoke about how their families do not enthusiastically support retail investing, but rather encouraged investments in a home ownership instead. Dean (male, 24) for instance, indicated:

[M]y immediate family or friends would be like, ‘Oh, that’s like a risky thing.’ Or like it’s kind of like straying me away from it [retail investing] [. . .] But the more I learn about it, it kind of makes sense like you know, ‘Oh it’s not as risky as my parents would have thought’ right? Because like [. . .] they’re just like kind of pinned into like property as the number one thing you have to invest in like, ‘Oh once you have a house, it’s like oh you’re successful’, or something like that. Like, yeah. So it’s just my mindset I guess.

Yet participants were concerned that they were not (yet) able to enter the housing market due to the growing average cost of housing in Australia and high interest rates. Investing was imagined as a route to enabling participation in the housing market and home ownership, where retail investment was seen as a viable alternative to purchasing a house. As Aarini (female, 28) asked ‘where else do you invest if you can’t get into the housing market?’ Indeed, that housing and investing in the stock market are seen as both investments and assets, rather than simply a source of secure housing, are examples of the financialisation of everyday life and the subjectivities it produces; such framing is also indicative of what Adkins and colleagues (2020) have termed the ‘asset economy’. Choosing between participating in the stock market or property market responded to an imagined future where retail investing offered a more active return towards financial security later in life. These future expectations were further established through how participants described their imagined lifecourses.

Managing investments and mitigating risk across the lifecourse

Participants spoke about how their perceptions of the lifecourse were important. This influenced how they understood the process of investing at different life milestones as well as where benefits would accrue in an (imagined) future. In all cases, young people felt they mitigated risk because the largest portion of their investment portfolios focused on long-term investing or they were moving towards more long-term investing:

Like I feel like it’s risky if you’re going to need your money out in the next year or two. But because I’m much more of a long-term investor, I’m sort of not worried about it. I’m like, yeah, that that money that I have sitting there might go up, might go down. But I don’t plan on touching it for decades, really, is the idea. So, I don’t feel too worried about the sort of fluctuations, little fluctuations in the market. (Geri, female, 28)

The future expectation of long-term growth was explained to be inevitable rather than risky:

I’m investing long-term, like minimum 10 years. But like, honestly, I’ll probably leave it like 20, 30 years, where it’s just to me, like, I think I was looking at like some stats like over a 30 year period, the stock market has always returned like a positive return. So to me, it’s basically no risk if you’re in for the long run, as long as you’re investing in like ETFs, or like blue chips. (Cali, female, 28)

Long-term growth was seen as inevitable, but there is an important caveat to Cali’s narrative. Similar to other participants, there was ‘basically no risk’ if risk was managed through their choice of investments. This was often explained as participants choosing greater investment in exchange traded funds (ETFs) and/or blue chip stocks in most cases. These are akin to the ‘meticulous calculative practices’ that Beckert (2013) refers to. In this way, this investment method offers a ‘tranquiliser’ against the paralysing effects of the unpredictability of the markets as well as the uncertainty of their own futures, aimed towards a fictional future ‘positive return’ many decades later.

Perceived life stages were used as timepoints to manage current and future investment practices. Age was one factor here, where risk and age had an inverse relationship. Participants described being 30 years old as a generally agreed upon point within the focus groups in which their risk profiles or ‘appetite’ for risk were expected to shift, as Damien (male, 21) explains:

I think once I hit 30, I might be a little bit more risk‑averse you know. . . probably that age.

Thirty was an age marker associated as a culmination of several social and economic changes in their lives: a lifecourse stage of not being able to rely on parents, of starting a family, and settling down in a (hopefully) long-term relationship. As Lance (male, 22) said, without any hesitation, ‘You should have your life together by thirty is kind of like the consensus.’ As Neil (male, 19) explained, ‘I think people tend to be more risk averse as they get older.’ Often participants explained that as certain lifecourse milestones were achieved, they required shifting their investment practices. This included finishing university, securing a full-time job, moving out of family homes or share homes, and starting a family – all lifecourse fictional expectations that were imagined as part of their futures. James (male, 22) considered his circumstances:

Well, I still live at home, I’m still not really incurring a lot of expenses other than really like car, phone, travel, insurance. Once I start, once I start getting more [. . .] independent and move out and start, especially if I start creating a family, then I’m going to [. . .] move a lot more money into the big financials or your big miners or ETFs. So, but for the next, like the next foreseeable future, at least for the next three to five years, I’m happy with my, where my risk is at the moment.

The ‘youthfulness’ of young adulthood is framed here as a time for investment; it was seen as less potentially dangerous to make high‑risk investment decisions during this period. While all participants discussed diversifying their portfolios, many described investments they would call risky (e.g. investing in individual smaller companies rather than ETFs, cryptocurrency or forex [foreign exchange] trading). Age is critical here as a variable for choosing (or not) certain financial decisions for the future. Risky decisions, as Aarini (female, 28) suggested, could also ‘pay off [in] massive dividends’, and if you get ‘burnt’ or lose out, she indicated it was okay because ‘you’ve still got years of work to get it back’. This not only indicates that riskier investments can be a critical enterprising strategy at the beginning of adulthood, but also that the act of losing money (i.e. ‘getting burnt’) was often a welcome experience (at least upon reflection) and part of the narrative of learning, which we heard from multiple respondents.

Interestingly, retail investing was seen as inevitable in all the discussions. It was considered nonsensical or unimaginable not to be doing this investment work. Kya (female, 23) for instance, suggested it was ‘the biggest mistake’ to not invest now during the period of ‘youth’:

[I am] building my own financial security net. . . the main mistake is people saying I’ll sort it out in my 30s and 40s. I mean, waiting 10, 20 years is probably the biggest mistake most people can make, rather than maybe just losing $500 on a really bad investment.

Indeed the ‘mistake’ here is waiting, which impacts the imagined good life, the good life that is an outcome of an imagined future ‘financial security net’. We suggest that the techniques of futuring that emerge through new digital brokerage platforms, broader digital cultures that promote investing and expectations to fashion entrepreneurial selves, communicate to young adults that the risk of investing is not starting to invest at all. Lance (male, 22) perhaps captures the sentiment that such cultures create:

It just doesn’t make sense to not invest in your own security over time.

Futuring and responding to uncertainty across the lifecourse

As indicated, participants were also investing for the lifecourse as well, and their security and wellbeing across it. This was framed as strategic for their imagined life projects, the fictional expectations that motivated their participation in their work. Investing was about ‘putting my best foot forward [for] my future’ (Kya, female, 23) and ‘set[ting] myself up for the future’ (Neil, male, 19). Importantly this was about ensuring that one’s money will (or hopefully will) ‘be more valuable in the future’ (Jacqui, female, 29) for what it could enable them to do. In part this was about security, as Amy (female, 26) explained:

[A]s long as I’m sort of spending less than what I’m earning, that, that itself will probably set you up for, you know, a future where you, if you, you know, fall out of work for a few months, you’ll be okay, things like that.

This strategic setup to ensure ‘you’ll be okay’ was also reiterated in discussions with participants about what it meant to be financially healthy; who spoke about having a buffer to, as Connor (male, 30) noted, not needing to ‘spend every day thinking about, you know, “Oh I’ve got a credit card payment coming up, am I going to make it?”’ This was also a concern about impact on mental health: as Micah (male, 30) said, good financial wellbeing means ‘you’re not stressed about, I guess income, paycheque to paycheque’. In this sense, investing practices are futuring practices, strategic and calculated moves to secure enough for an imagined sense of ontological security. This was entangled with a sense of future wellbeing, focused on being able to live good lives, or ‘be okay’, as Amy (female, 26) put it.

In most cases, what was sought out aligned with a typical Australian middle-class lifecourse script, which they hoped to enact through this compounded wealth. In part, this was about financial independence, as Kya (female, 23) said:

I’m investing to become financially independent and be able to look after myself in the future, my family, not be dependent on the traditional nine to five.

Kya’s quote above also notes how financial independence is, in her mind, linked to possibilities for job flexibility. This is a middle-class value (Hill et al., 2019) and was rated highly by our participants. It was not about avoiding or embracing precarious or insecure work, but rather about a sense of agency over work conditions and different life stages: ownership of one’s own schedule, the ability to have enough funds to ‘step out of work for a month or two, if required’ (Amy, female, 26), or ‘having a bit of money [. . . to] take an extended break from work’ (Geri, female, 28). Investing as a futuring technique enabled greater job flexibility as a possible outcome of present investing work.

Social and financial independence was important for its capacity to enable job flexibility, but was also a critical aspect of future planning, particularly for women. The women in the focus groups spoke about why women invest (or should invest) as being largely about ‘not wanting to rely on anyone else’ (Geri, female, 28). As Geri (female, 28) further explained:

Financial independence has been a term that’s been used. And I think that really appeals to a lot of women, this idea that we don’t need to have a husband or rely on a man or rely on family members, or whatever we can, we’re just as capable as other people. And that, yeah, we can take things into our own hands a bit.

There was an emphasis from female participants that their future selves needed to be ‘self-sufficient financially’, as a part of their future imagined security. Investing enabled this.

That the different futures imagined by young people varied by gender was also evident in relation to investing for retirement. In part, this was related to their expected ages of retirement. For some, this meant early retirement (e.g. before 65 years in Australia). For instance, Neil (male, 19) noted his desire ‘to retire earlier than 60. So, probably [investing] to set myself up for that.’ However, there were substantive differences in how participants spoke about their future expectations of retirement savings between men and women. Amy (female, 26), for example, noted:

I do want to retire before the normal age. And the way I see that is just to put whatever funds I have additional into, you know, high growth funds or ETFs and things like that. . . I think depending on how the market goes, I don’t have a specific age at the moment [I want to retire], but I don’t want to be working until I’m 70.

Amy’s possibility of not working ‘until I’m 70’ sits in stark contrast to Neil’s plans to retire before 60. Not only was this a concern about age but also, for women, it was a concern about not having enough retirement savings or superannuation in the future:

Well, [there are] lots of studies showing that females retire later, but also with way less super. So working longer, but still earning less and putting, having less away, we’re going to live longer. So we’re going to be living longer with less [. . .] everyone knows that there’s just more of a gender gap, kind of yeah, when you’re older, so they get things a bit more set aside now, obviously, youth is the best time to start building wealth. (Jacqui, female, 29)

Jacqui articulated that to address gendered inequities requires an enterprising orientation, where you utilise the period of ‘youth’ and ‘start building wealth’. These discussions drew on popular narratives in news media in Australia that recirculate stories about the substantial differences in retirement savings and superannuation between men and women and the increasing homelessness of older women in Australia (see for example Adkins, 2018). At the same time, a potential lack of retirement savings was also a dominant concern for participants working in the creative sector or within freelance projects. Millie (female, 28) for instance noted:

[C]ause I’m a freelancer, I’m a photographer and type of stuff like, super [retirement savings] is kind of complicated. And in some ways, I was like, well, maybe using stocks and stuff and looking into that is a bit like a better option for me.

Again, the futuring practices of investing in the stock market were seen to provide future imagined security, which allowed participants to feel a sense of certainty in the present and their career choices, even though their futures were ultimately uncertain. In this way, young people were engaging as enterprising selves to mitigate and foreground future risk.

Investing for individual or collective futures?

Thus far we have presented a picture of young people who are, perhaps in a very Bourdieusian sense playing the game as neoliberal subjects (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). They are enterprising and orienting towards an imagined future, with new actors (fintech apps and digital brokerage platforms, etc.), which enable new opportunities to make futures seemingly more secure. Investing practices point towards self-sustaining futures, and the (potential of the) good life for oneself, which is expected to be managed as they become responsibilised for these processes. Yet at times, participants also discussed how investing concerned contributions to collective social futures. Kya (female, 23), for instance, emphasised she chose certain stocks ‘because it aligns with my values and what I want to be investing in’, and noted that ‘when I’m looking at a company, I would be going, “am I comfortable with what they’re doing?”’ Likewise, Aarini (female, 28) explained:

[I choose] ethical or sustainability-based ETFs, because it aligns with my values and what I want to be investing in. Similar to where you can pick where your super [retirement savings] goes, yeah [. . .] I feel more comfortable knowing that my money is going towards something that I value and believe in. But the second part is that the, some ethical funds have actually been outperforming the market because it’s a new area, it’s a growth area. So that’s, yeah, that’s the other part of it.

It is interesting to note how values-based investing was discussed as a possible fictitious future that aligns with a young person’s values and, at the same time, entangles here with those stocks that are good economic value – ‘a growth area’ – signalling their importance for their ethical value and economic value for contributing to compounding wealth. However, when ethical investing was raised in the discussions, participants also expressed scepticism about the idea of ethical investing. As Geri (female, 28) noted:

I think it’s a bit hard with ethical investing, because I quite like it in theory, but you know, some of these ETFs that sort of say they’re ethical. It’s sort of like, ‘Well, what do you mean, what is, what is ethical mean?’ Because, you know, they’re, sometimes it’s based on, like, exclusion criteria, like sometimes it’s sort of, you know, it’s around things they don’t do. Sometimes it’s around things they do, do. [. . .] But I’m definitely interested in more specific, I guess, more active ethical things like maybe, like specifically focused around climate change, maybe, or specifically focused on renewable energy, something like that. I think there’s a bit of green washing going on sometimes.

There was an aspect of investing, ‘playing the game’ and participating that felt empowering and disruptive to at least some:

And part of it for me, that I’m quite into, is sort of like putting money into things that I really want to invest in as well. And so I kind of like, I like having that sort of very miniscule voice or influence. (Millie, female, 28)

Heightened here in such quotes is a sense of agency in futuring practices that enable some control over broader conditions that create uncertainties, even if it is ‘very miniscule’.

Conclusion: Enterprising for an (imagined) future wellbeing

This study has explored how young people are ‘enterprising’ through retail investing and emergent practices of the ‘entrepreneurial self’ (Kelly, 2006, 2017). Using new digital brokerage platforms as an example of the financialisation of everyday life, young people are engaging in futuring practices – practices that orient with digital technologies towards imagined futures. Financial participation in investing, enabled by digital platforms and the digital finance cultures (Hendry et al., 2021) that surround their use(s), are ‘techniques of futuring’, practices that bring together actors around fictitious future(s), through which actors come to share orientations for action (Beckert, 2013; Hajer & Pelzer, 2018). These practices are calculative and responsive to the unpredictable conditions of both young adulthood and retail investing, which enable decision-making in/for the uncertain present and future. They are also responsive to the (im)possibilities of lifestages, and it is notable that riskier versions of these practices are embraced and acceptable by young people for a period, often until the next life stage emerges at age 30. These practices set up and secure imagined futures as the fictional expectations they aspire to. Such imaginings are often about (re)shaping or establishing ontological security for the self across the lifecourse: independence, security for self and family, job flexibility, travel and retirement, and ultimately are about wellbeing. These fictitious futures are particularly noteworthy for what they are imagined to extend and (could) make possible, such as job flexibility, low(er) income from salaries from creative or more enjoyable employment, and orientations towards early or more secure retirement. This extends how we understand young people’s enterprising practices of the self. Such concerns respond to uncertain imagined futures, which these practices hedge against, by creating investment actions in the here and now, that are anticipated to result in positive outcomes – only if they just wait for the perceived inevitable growth of their investments over time through compounding interest and riding out the ups and downs of the market.

The ‘techniques of futuring’ (Hajer & Pelzer, 2018) provide a useful frame to explore temporality. Here, an interesting temporality emerges for this version of wellbeing in our findings and discussion. Wellbeing is seemingly directed towards future wellbeing, which is not about being idle, but about tinkering with investments at key stages as you manage risks in the lifecourse and keep investments ‘active’ according to key lifecourse stages. The period of ‘youth’ is an imagined opportunity to take on additional risk for greater benefits in the fictitious future; not investing in this way is considered a missed opportunity for sustaining middle-class lives. Our work adds to the work examining youth and wellbeing and challenges how we might understand wellbeing’s temporality. Our findings show wellbeing is thus both a process that orients the ongoing actions of young people in the present through the strategic ‘leveraging’ of technologies (see Devito et al., 2019; Hanckel, 2023), as well as in the imagined outcomes that reinforce particular future expectations. We might think of this as akin to routine and less-than-enjoyable physical exercise or regularly seeing a doctor: these actions might be justified for their perceived future payoff towards a more active or comfortable life in one’s late adulthood years. In this study, wellbeing is an investment itself, where the payoff emerges from long-term investing and waiting patiently. It sits in contrast to the feelings of wellbeing generated from debt, such as shame (Coffey et al., 2023). Wellbeing here is oriented towards an imagined good life of security and independence if such investments occur now. Wellbeing is not a short-term goal, but rather is an orientation towards long(er)-term wellbeing. This extends other productive recent work that often focuses on young people and short(er) term wellbeing (see Ennis & Tonkin, 2018). These emergent fintech technologies as well as the current contemporary uncertainties are likely shifting imaginaries of wellbeing for young people towards these long(er)-term horizons and, in turn, invite researchers to theorise wellbeing in terms of its future orientations or long-term trajectories.

While the fictional expectations of the future take on new meanings as digital investment and other financial or technology products offer new(er) possibilities – such as a focus on retirement – there are gendered implications of these emergent practices. Our work extends work on youth and biographical futures, supporting scholarship where gender norms are often sustained through future imaginaries (Bulbeck, 2005; Patterson & Forbes, 2012). There are two points to add to the literature here. The first point considers how our female participants were using retail investing to counter how gender norms and inequities might disadvantage them in the future, such as using it as a tool for future independence or establishing sufficient retirement savings. Second, paradoxically we have shown that the focus on these futures results in distinct future expectations between the men and women in our study. Our findings show, for instance, that young men generally are more focused on retiring early and job flexibility, while young women focus on securing retirement savings, retiring early (but later than men), and are focused on creating forms of independence away from being dependent on a partner, which men do not largely have to concern themselves with. The enterprising self must navigate persistent inequities to (attempt) to achieve the desired futures, where they will hopefully be better off. However, as these findings suggest, rather than shifting such inequities, differing actions and expectations are varied by gender, which is paradoxically sustained through the futuring techniques used to disrupt such futures.

To progress this work, future studies must ask how these fintech technologies are being used across contexts and structures of class, race/ethnicity and sexuality. We must consider the varied intersectional subjectivities that situate different strategies towards future selves, and how fintech and digital brokerage platforms are opening up new (im)-possibilities for young people as they transition into adulthood. This requires interrogating the role of emergent financial products, their availability and accessibility, and their capacity to produce varied fictional future expectations and actual futures over time. This also prompts further exploration of fintech as part of young people’s broader digital and money practices and how we might situate fintech in the broader digital finance cultures and learning that take place in everyday spaces (Hendry et al., 2021). Focusing on these practices as situating broader futures is critical to understanding how young people navigate uncertainty in new and innovative ways as they transition into uncertain futures.