Once upon a time, young adults aspired to have a steady job, buy a car and own a home. Today, the average twenty-something thrives in a gig economy, has Uber on their phone and most likely rents a house.
With that kind of backdrop, it hardly comes as a surprise that Millennials are now living up to their flaky reputations by ditching their office jobs with big banks to set up crypto operations.
Specifically, Wall Street banks such as Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs have lost young talent to crypto exchanges where rewards are higher. Indeed, some of these young workers have been able to make more money trading crypto part-time than working at their prestigious banking jobs on a full-time basis.
Young British banker Asim Ahmad is one such fellow, whose relaxed Millennial life was laid out by Business Insider recently.
Ahmed was employed at giant investment firm, Blackrock Inc. in London, and used to trade crypto during his spare time. He eventually quit his job before he even turned 30 and invested $13,000 of crypto proceeds in Ethereum at a time when a single ether was going for a mere $10 a pop.
As luck would have it, Ethereum made a prodigious run, reaching an all-time high of nearly $1,400 in early 2018--just one year later.
(Click to enlarge)
Ether prices, along with the rest of the crypto market, later tumbled to the current $496.
Still, Ahmad has managed to multiply his investment nearly 50x thus turning his seed fund into cool $6.5 million. Not a bad return at all for a year's worth of mostly waiting, and it’s little wonder that Ahmad has now established a fund that invests in crypto projects.
And, he's in good company, too.
Former Deutsche Bank, New York-based Adrian Xinli Zhang quit his lucrative post and set up a crypto-trading platform using his Bitcoin profits. The grapevine has it that the 29-year old is already a millionaire.
The fact that these huge banks so easily lost their budding talents not to rival banks but to the cryptocurrency industry underpins the theory that they have been too slow to react to the crypto threat.
Although some have started embracing cryptos, there's still a ton of luddism and resistance to change in the industry as underscored by some of their policies, such as the ongoing reluctance allow customers to use credit cards to make crypto purchases.
And … History Repeats Itself
Though it’s all digital, Millennials are now making the same poor investing mistakes as their parents did when they unwittingly jumped down the dotcom rabbit hole two decades ago.
Back then, Dotcomers took up E*TRADE on its advice to boot their brokers, quit their jobs and started trading online. For the vast majority, this adventure didn’t end well.
But's that's only part of the folly.
TD Ameritrade has unraveled the investing habits of these much-chronicled Millennials as they continue to replace baby boomers in the economic center stage. Related: IMF Warns Of Doom And Gloom After G7 Circus
And, there are no surprises here.
Just like their contemporaries Ahmad and Adrian, as well as their parents 20 years ago, Millennials prefer investing in “cool” stocks such as Apple, Netflix, Amazon and Tesla as well as a couple of hip losers like Snap and Twitter.
Just like their Dotcom parents, Millennials are head over heels in love with the new economy and the giddy potential of new opportunities like cryptos.
And, as you probably already suspect, millennials have been giving old and “boring” dividend stocks a wide berth, with none of their Top 10 stock picks being a dividend payer. Hedging your bets isn’t part of the Millennial vocabulary.
By Alex Kimani for Safehaven.com
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