Ayondo, a leading social trading platform regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority and German BaFin, has published the results of a survey about UK equity investors and their motivations for trading. The report found that 60% look for an opportunity to generate a secondary income or to make money to give them a more flexible work life as their biggest driving force.
Mita Natarajan, Chief Business Development Officer at Ayondo, commented:
“We are seeing an increasing number of people look for ways in which they can supplement their income to allow for more flexible working hours and a greater amount of leisure time. One way of making this transition easier is through Social Trading. This allows retail investors to follow Top Traders’ investment moves or signal providers to earn additional income in publishing their trading strategies.”
The survey also found that 30 percent of participants believe that “having a cool head” is the most important attribute to becoming a successful market investor or trader, followed by good timing (28%) and commitment (13%). This doesn’t come as a surprise for anyone within the trading industry.
As retail FX and CFD brokers increasingly look to expand their client portfolio by targeting the relatively untapped market of women, the research study explored the key differences between both sexes. According to the report, men are almost twice as likely to be driven by the ‘excitement’ factor, whereas women are more likely to be motivated by rational led factors such as supplementing income to a part-time job.
35% of men gave the ‘excitement’ factor as their motivator to invest or trade, against only 18% of women. On the other hand, a quarter of women said they were driven by the idea that success in the stock markets feels like money for nothing, whilst only 19% of men were of the same view.
In the year ending May 2018, a third of the 100,000 new traders are millennials and 2 million individuals have put at least one trade during the year in the UK, with a growing number of traders being female, now representing 15% of the market. 87% of the UK’s full-time workforce either have a flexible work life or would like to have so.
