Trading is a losing game: An audit of deceptive choice architecture in demo-mode Contract for Difference (CFD) trading apps

Maira Andrade, , Daniel Costa, Leonardo Weiss-Cohen, Jamie Torrance and Philip Warren Stirling Newall
Additional contact information
Jamie Torrance: Swansea University
Philip Warren Stirling Newall: University of Warwick

No wt6vb, OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Mobile-based trading apps have made investing easier than ever before, but this includes enabling access to risky investments that many investors may not be able to trade safely. The UK financial regulator thereby requires Contract for Difference (CFD) trading apps to make disclosures such as, “89% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider”. However, these disclosures might be counteracted by either their suboptimal implementation, or by other aspects of these apps’ deceptive choice architecture. Therefore, the present study audited choice architecture characteristics of demo-modes of the 14 most-popular CFD trading apps in the UK. A content analysis found for example that 31.6 per cent of risk warnings did not comply with the regulator’s standards, and that only 35.7 per cent of apps contained risk warnings within the app’s main tabs. A thematic analysis suggested that apps’ educational resources could instil users with the hope of winning, by emphasising practice, strategies, and psychological mindset – instead of acknowledging luck as the predominant factor underlying CFD trading profitability. Overall, this study added to previous research highlighting the similarities between certain high-risk investments and gambling, and added to the behavioural public policy literature on deceptive choice architecture.

Date: 2024-07-25
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-acc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/669f717d67add9d4c780d45c/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:osfxxx:wt6vb

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/wt6vb

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().