Less financial stability, smaller social safety nets: inside the gen Z investing boom

Ambrico Ranginui first heard of cryptocurrencies when he was 12 years old. By the time he was 16, he had saved enough from birthday gifts and his allowance to invest.“Growing up in a single mum household, it made me quite a determined person to get ahead,” Ranginui said. “I wanted to find new avenues to make money and crypto was so fascinating at the time.”He’s part of a new boom of gen Z investors who have jumped into markets more enthusiastically than previous generations, and are putting money into everything from safe-haven bonds to AI startups, earlier than ever before.Nearly 30% of the generation born between 1997 and 2012 started putting money into markets in early adulthood, before they even entered the workforce, compared to just 15% of millennials and 9% of gen X, according to a World Economic Forum (WEF) report.Crypto taught Ranginui a fast, painful lesson about financial markets’ volatility. Ranginui said he lived in a state of stress and anxiety for about a year, constantly checking his investments instead of living in the moment with his friends or in his classes.He won’t say how much he lost, but it was enough to stop investing in crypto. “There