Some younger investors are increasingly dividing their attention between traditional investing and faster-moving activities such as sports betting, options and digital assets. Priyanka Ranjan, CEO and co-founder of PiTrade, argues that this reflects changing expectations around risk, control and immediacy.
Ranjan spent her career in quantitative strategy and portfolio management at Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan before co-founding PiTrade with Harshit Khandelwal. She sees the shift as saying less about recklessness — as gambling so often gets associated with — and more about what this generation has made their reason for investing.
For decades, the on-ramp to financial adulthood followed a predictable sequence: get a job, enroll in the company 401(k), save toward a down payment, and let compounding do the rest. Gen Z is looking at that sequence and asking why they would sign up for a decades-long bet on an employer's default fund menu when the outcome feels both distant and out of their control, Ranjan says. Meanwhile, a parlay on Sunday's games, a call option on a volatile stock, or a position in the latest token offers something the traditional path never did: results in real time. Legal sports betting has expanded into nearly every state since 2018, making a wager as frictionless as ordering a coffee, and retail brokerages responded to the same appetite with options trading, fractional shares, and crypto access built into apps that already resemble a betting slip. The line between speculating and investing has gotten genuinely blurry, and according to Ranjan, it’s the products that blurred it.
Housing tells a related but distinct story. Younger buyers are not necessarily choosing to skip homeownership so they can chase faster returns elsewhere, Ranjan explains. Home prices, mortgage rates, and the math of a first purchase have moved further out of reach than for their parents at the same age, and many Gen Z investors have simply concluded homeownership is not a realistic near-term goal. Rather than wait for the economy to improve, many are redirecting that capital toward markets that feel more responsive to their money. It is less a rejection of the house, in her view, and more a redirection of the down payment.
The 401(k) piece is more nuanced than the headlines suggest, Ranjan notes. Auto-enrollment has pulled young workers into retirement plans earlier than previous generations managed, so participation numbers alone can mislead. The real gap is engagement. A 401(k) happens to a paycheck automatically, with a fund lineup most people never examine and a statement most people never open, asking for patience while offering almost nothing to look at in return. A trading app or a betting platform asks for attention and rewards it instantly with a number that moves. When a generation that grew up with a notification for everything is handed a financial product with no feedback loop, disengagement is not surprising, she says. It is the design working as intended, just not in the saver's favor.
This does not mean Gen Z is bad with money or uninterested in building wealth, Ranjan argues. If anything, the willingness to take on real risk, learn in public, and treat markets as something to participate in now rather than defer to a future self shows an appetite the finance industry should want to meet rather than lecture. The problem is that the tools absorbing that appetite, the parlays and highly speculative trades she refers to may prioritise short-term outcomes over long-term wealth building. What this generation is missing is not risk tolerance, she says. It is a way to take on risk that comes with transparency, community, and a real shot at compounding, rather than a house edge dressed up as opportunity.
That is precisely the gap Ranjan and Khandelwal built PiTrade to close. For Ranjan, it started with a question she kept asking friends who wanted a stock tip instead of a plan: what is this money for? A retirement fund three decades out, a child's education fund eight years out, and money someone plans to spend in eighteen months have nothing in common, she says, yet most platforms, betting apps included, treat every dollar the same way. PiTrade is operated by Pioneer Advisory LLC, an SEC-registered investment adviser, with brokerage and custody provided by Interactive Brokers LLC, a FINRA and SIPC member. SIPC protection does not protect against losses resulting from market movements or investment performance.
The platform says portfolio changes are reflected across participating accounts in real time, subject to market conditions and execution availability.
That, Ranjan says, is the immediacy and social proof Gen Z already responds to, minus the house edge.
Gen Z is not going to return to the slow, invisible version of investing their parents inherited, and Ranjan says the industry should stop hoping they will. The last decade of fintech made the unbanked banked; the next decade should make the un-invested invested, building the transparency and immediacy this generation already trusts into products that compound wealth instead of draining it, so today's risk appetite for parlays and meme trades can redirect toward the financial future parents assumed would simply show up on schedule.
Risk Disclosure: Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. Past performance does not guarantee future results. This article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.