Understanding student investment strategies

Abstract

Due to the rise in popularity of investing apps, many students are using their limited funds to invest for the first time while still in college. Because of the different experiences each student has when coming to Oklahoma State University, I was interested in how my fellow students were approaching investing for the first times in their lives. My survey was aimed at looking into how students that use these apps are using the information that they learned from their finance courses, or lack thereof, when making decisions. In order to understand the strategies that these students used, I created a survey and distributed it to my classmates. Alongside questions to understand the demographic of the students that use the apps, the survey covered topics such as what finance courses the student had taken, how often they use the app, and having the student rate factors to deem what was the most important when choosing stocks to invest in. The responses gathered from this survey suggest that students prefer to choose cheaper, safer, and low risk methods of investing.