https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7kb4gy/now-would-be-the-time-to-stop-taking-financial-advice-from-tiktok

For the last few years, it’s been easy enough to look smart when picking stocks. That’s how things are when "stocks only go up." The combination of that confidence-inspiring ease and a surplus of cash related to various pandemic forces has led to a huge number of everyday people, known as retail traders, piling into various fashionable stocks, most famously GameStop and AMC, and feeling like geniuses. Robinhood, for one, saw more than 10 million people open accounts over a single recent year-long period.

Over that time, stock-picking has become fashionable as people were drawn in by screenshots of unbelievably large increases in the value of other investors' portfolios. On TikTok, enthusiastic influencers gave exceedingly questionable investing advice, like “I see a stock going up and I buy it and I just watch it until it stops going up, and then I sell it, and I do that over and over.” According to one recent poll, as much as half of Gen Z is getting financial advice from the algorithmic platform, and they are getting a similar amount from Instagram.