Casinos in your pocket: The blurring line between investing and gambling

Over the last four years, legalized sports betting has become a massive industry in Canada. In Ontario alone, people placed bets worth a total of around $11-billion in 2024. It’s simple to do: Open an app, bet a few bucks and watch the scoreboard.  At the same time, trading apps have made investing quicker and easier, and the process feels very similar. We’re not saying gambling and investing are the same, but the lines are blurring thanks to app design and the sheer amount of time we spend on our phones.

Roma speaks with Shannon Lee Simmons, a certified financial planner and author based in Toronto, about how she’s seeing a gambling mentality bleed into investing, particularly among young people. Then, The Globe’s personal economics reporter Erica Alini speaks with Perry Wright and Hans Frech, behavioural researchers at the Common Cents Lab at Duke University, about the behavioural similarities between gambling and speculative investing, what tactics these apps are enforcing and how to set up guardrails to protect your finances when using these apps.

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