Wealthsimple-X deal sparks investor risk concerns

Through the partnership launched this week, Wealthsimple customers who have its app on their phone can click stock tags on X and be taken to a page that shows the share’s performance. It also has a button that leads to the fintech’s platform, where they can trade shares. Experts say the arrangement is likely to expose Wealthsimple, a Toronto-based financial services company increasingly squaring off against larger traditional banks, to an even bigger audience but may also lure customers into making riskier trades hyped by influencers or other social media users.

“It’s a marketing tool, it’s a way to attract revenue and it is a way to reach out to the population of X users, who especially given the recent political shifts, are very much into trading and DIY investing,”  said Marius Zoican, the Canada Research Chair in Financial Technology and associate professor at the University of Calgary.

He reasons investors who aren’t Wealthsimple customers might sign up for the platform because they’re attracted by the partnership, while existing investors could get drawn into making more or quicker trades. The arrangement is just another way Zoican thinks Wealthsimple is positioning itself as “democratizing finance by eliminating frictions.” It’s steadily introduced more trading products since its 2014 founding and recently cleared hurdles toward offering prediction trading, where investors bet on the income of future events.

But when it comes to investments, Zoican said friction that forces consumers to slow down is a good thing because it gives them more of a chance to think and research before risking their money. “The last thing retail investors, individual investors need is one more avenue to essentially act impulsively,” he said.

Experts flag dangers of hype-driven trading

He and others are concerned Wealthsimple’s partnership won’t just get investors trading faster but also making financial decisions based on bad information users post on X.

“These strategies very often lead to losses for individual investors, especially those buying meme stocks … or anything that’s being hyped by influencers because influencers don’t have any fiduciary duty,” Zoican said. “They can say whatever they want on social media and if the stock turns out to be a bad stock, there’s nothing to hold them liable.”

Meme stocks are securities that gain popularity and then rapidly shift in value because of social media hype rather than fundamentals.

Asked about the concerns, Wealthsimple spokeswoman Juanita Leon said in an email that “self-directed traders today are increasingly confident, engaged, want to take control of their finances, and they’re doing their own research.”

Sam Dumcum, a Mississauga, Ont.-based marketing professional who has been a customer of Wealthsimple’s trading service since 2018, said he worries about unsophisticated investors buying or selling stocks based on misinformation on X because a version of the same thing happened to him. He bought plant protein company Beyond Meat’s stock in the COVID-19 pandemic, when it was being hyped on social media platform Reddit. Its share price has since fallen from almost US$195 during the hype to 89 cents US, teaching Dumcum a valuable lesson about the quality of some online advice.

Concerns grow over AI-driven stock misinformation

X, formerly known as Twitter, is owned by divisive entrepreneur Elon Musk and is rife with misinformation and meme stocks, Dumcum said.

“With artificial intelligence, you can make things look like it’s an official research report on what’s going to happen with the stock. You can get 10,000 bots to report a stock and start a fake conversation,” he said. “All of a sudden, this stock looks like the greatest thing since Wonder Bread started slicing bread and then … you’ve got your uneducated young or old user base buying these stocks based on what they’re seeing on Twitter and it’s an easy opportunity for disaster.”

He worries his parents or other less savvy investors could be duped if they stumble across bad information on X and make a trade on Wealthsimple because the two platforms are linked, removing some barriers to trading. “I would hate for them to see a report that looks amazing and just before their retirement years, they try to take a little bit of a risk and it ends up being like a scheme stock,” he said. “That’s my fear.”

Dumcum thinks Wealthsimple could alleviate some of his concerns by notifying users arriving from X to make a trade that everything they read on the social media platform is unverified. He also thinks Wealthsimple should start flagging all of a user’s trades that originate in X in a separate portfolio so the customer can track their socially influenced decisions over time. 

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