A SMART DEAL?
Noor is whispering so her boyfriend won’t hear her. The 30-something designer from London is down about £14,000 ($19,500) as a result of her decision to get into investing, in addition to another £8,000 profit she made on bitcoin last year, but then lost. Nobody knows the full extent of Noor’s losses – hence the whispering. “I feel so stupid,” she says. “I can’t talk about it to my friends, I can’t talk about it to my boyfriend.” Noor is not her real name.
It started in November 2020, around the time of the US presidential election “People expected Trump to win again,” she says, “and it was a weird time, because it was mid-pandemic, and it just seemed like this financial moment might be happening.”
Noor started reading about cryptocurrencies online, and the more she read, the more ads for trading platforms she was served on her social media feeds. Because of Covid, she hadn’t spent much money over the year. So she bought £10,000 worth of the cryptocurrency bitcoin online, which turned into £18,700 within weeks. “I’d never invested before,” she tells me.
She’d sleep with her phone under her pillow and wake up during the night to check the performance of her bitcoin. (Unlike most listed stocks, bitcoin can be traded 24 hours a day.) All she talked about to her boyfriend was how well her investment was doing. “I’d be telling him, ‘Look, I just made £400 in a day ’,” she says. Noor started to fantasise about a future in which she’d never need a mortgage, where she’d invest her way to extreme wealth.
Flushed with success, she pulled her money out of bitcoin, downloaded the brokerage app Trading 212, and started investing in other cryptocurrencies and stocks: Ripple, a cryptocurrency and platform; companies that invest in the legal cannabis industry; psilocybin research brands; Beyond Meat, makers of plant-based meat substitutes; BioNTech, a German biotechnology company; businesses
