The FCA ran a genuinely large experiment on this: over 9,000 consumers using trading apps built with different “digital engagement practices” – the game-like features increasingly common across investment apps, such as push notifications and prize draws. The results were stark: Push notifications and prize draws increased trading frequency by 11% and 12% respectively, and drove riskier investment decisions by around 12%. Other gamification features raised the proportion of genuinely risky investments people held by 6 to 8%. This isn’t a hypothetical concern about phones being distracting. It’s measured evidence that specific app features change investment behaviour, and not in the investor’s favour.
Who it affects most
The FCA’s research found the effect was strongest among 18 to 34 year olds, people with lower financial literacy, and women – groups that, not coincidentally, are also among the fastest-growing users of app-based investing. The FCA’s own director, Sheldon Mills, put it plainly: trading apps have real potential to broaden access to investing, but “some in-app features might be pushing consumers towards more frequent or riskier trading” than they’d otherwise choose.
Why more frequent trading is rarely the goal
For most long-term investors, frequent trading isn’t a feature, it’s a cost – every unnecessary trade is a chance to buy high or sell low based on a short-term prompt rather than a considered decision, and transaction costs add up regardless of how each individual trade performs. A long-term investment strategy generally works precisely because it doesn’t react to every notification, headline, or market wobble. An app designed to maximise how often you open it is, almost by definition, working against that.
What’s worth watching for in your own habits
A few patterns are worth noticing. Checking your portfolio several times a day rather than at planned intervals is one – the FCA’s research and plenty of behavioural finance evidence both point to frequent checking increasing anxiety and prompting reactive decisions, even when nothing has actually changed about your underlying strategy. Acting on a push notification the moment it arrives, rather than after a pause, is another – the entire design intent of that notification is to prompt an immediate reaction. And if a prize draw, streak, or badge is making a trade feel more like a game than a financial decision, it’s worth asking whether that trade is something you’d have made anyway, notification or not.
Treating prompts as prompts, not instructions
Investment apps themselves are a genuinely useful tool, and using one isn’t the problem. The habit worth building is a deliberate pause before acting on anything a notification suggests, treating it as a prompt rather than an instruction. For decisions that genuinely matter, working through them with a financial planner rather than reacting to an app in the moment tends to produce a very different outcome than a snap decision made between two other things.
Let’s build a strategy that isn’t reactive
We work with clients across Poole, Bournemouth and the wider Dorset area to build investment strategies designed around their actual goals and timeframe, not the next notification. If you’d like a second opinion on your own approach, get in touch and we’re happy to have a no-obligation conversation.
This article is for general information only and does not constitute financial advice, which should be based on your individual circumstances. The information is aimed at retail clients only. All information is correct at the time of writing (September 2026) and is subject to change in the future.
The value of your investments (and any income from them) can go down as well as up and you may not get back the full amount invested. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance.