India’s young tech professionals are investing more—but are they investing wisely?

Introduction

Today, in any technology campus in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune, the 24-year-old engineer is as likely to be discussing SIP returns as crypto wallets as he is discussing sprints and stand ups. This is an entirely new phenomenon. Ten years ago, the average Indian investor was in his late thirties, conservative and mainly invested in fixed deposits and gold. The average investor is just over 30 years old these days, and India's youngest capital markets segment is the fastest growing.

The scale of this shift is striking. Millennials and Gen Z collectively account for almost half of the mutual fund assets in the country and during 2025 alone, investors under 35 years of age opened nearly two out of every five new SIP accounts (IBEF, 2026a). From the start of the pandemic, the share of Gen Z in registered stock exchange investors’ population has grown from approximately 20% to 40% in just five years, and the median age of investors dropped from 38 years to 33 years (IBEF, 2026a). In fact, over 75% of the new sign-ups for trading and investment apps now are from the 18–30 age group, as reported by these apps (IBEF, 2026a). Tech workers, who have the money, familiarity with apps, and access to international markets via their employers, are right smack dab in the middle of all this.

The question this article poses is not whether the young tech professionals are investing, but how they are investing, and whether or not they are doing so with true financial savvy or just by the use of technology.

This article is guided by one general objective and three specific objectives. The general objective is to examine whether the accelerating pace of investment participation among India's young technology professionals is matched by a commensurate level of financial literacy and behavioural preparedness. Specifically, the article seeks to: (i) document the scale and pattern of investment participation among young Indian tech professionals relative to the wider population of young investors; (ii) identify the behavioural biases and information sources that shape their investment decisions; and (iii) propose actionable, evidence-based policy measures, informed by comparative international experience, through which employers, platforms, and regulators can narrow the gap between market access and investment competence.

The numbers behind the boom

The facts presented on the front page were very positive. Equity mutual funds and SIPs continue to be the preferred investment options for young investors, with a Bain and Groww analysis of its platform data indicating that young salaried investors allocate between 55% and 65% of their portfolio to equity mutual funds, indicative of long-term wealth creation, not investments for speculative purposes (IBEF, 2026a). According to StockGro and 1Lattice, a National survey of 50,000 respondents revealed that 81% of Indian youth have invested in the stock market with 45% of the youth under 35 years calling it their preferred investment option (IBEF, 2025). This is a generation that's on paper a financial engaged and market savvy one.

Things are more complex on the national level. However, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) Investor Survey 2025, which polled over 90,000 households—the largest household survey conducted by the stock exchange regulator in a decade—revealed that 63% of households knew at least one type of securities products, but only about 9.5% were engaged in the securities market (TeamLease RegTech, 2025). Only 36% of investors demonstrated high or moderate knowledge of securities market products (Lexology, 2025). Almost 80% of households, including 79% of Gen Z households, indicated that they would prefer to preserve their capital instead of achieving higher returns, a trait which is often at odds with anecdotal evidence of young professionals taking up instruments with high returns and volatility (TeamLease RegTech, 2025). That is, awareness has surpassed literacy and stated risk preferences are not always congruent with revealed behaviour.

Wisdom or wagering? The behavioural gap

The less pleasant part of the story kicks in from here on. Young techies are not just investing in index funds and allowing SIPs to grow silently. More and more of this group are also engaged in cryptocurrency, futures and options and thematic or sector-related wagers, which do not necessarily depend on the enthusiasm of the bettor but rather on information, discipline and risk management. Data indicates that investors aged under 35 years make up the bulk of India's cryptocurrency user base, with some estimates suggesting as high as 72% of the total user base (Analytics Insight, 2026). Many of these investors are the same software engineers and developers who, just because they work in a fintech or blockchain-related position, don't have a problem seeing themselves as being “technology-savvy” enough to assess an asset class that even the most experienced fund managers can't get a handle on.

Academic and practitioner work on this group of students plays a role that supports the concern. Even as they claimed to invest for income generation or stability, a study of investment behaviour of professionals aged 25–35 in Bengaluru revealed that investment decisions were often based on one's perceived competence rather than through structured financial advice (Khanum and Gomathi, 2025). Separately, research on financial literacy and youth investment decisions has repeatedly linked overconfidence, short-term profit expectations, and reliance on informal information sources—social media, peer recommendations, and online forums—to weaker diversification and poorer long-term outcomes (Bala and Jayanti, 2025). This is a common behavioural finance mistake: having a great understanding of a world, a field of software or data or engineering, is not the same as being great in an unrelated world, portfolio construction and risk assessment for example. This pattern is consistent with comparative evidence gathered since 2020: cross-country data show that investor confidence and financial literacy jointly determine participation in risky assets such as equities (Cupák et al., 2022), while India-specific research confirms that financial literacy shapes the risk capacity and risk propensity of millennial investors (Mohta and Shunmugasundaram, 2023). Even where young investors express positive attitudes toward investing, financial literacy has been found to exert a significant, independent influence on the decision to enter the stock market among India's Gen Z investors (Nag and Shah, 2022).

Another, significant aspect of the SEBI survey is the prevalence of peer influence and “finfluencers” (unregulated social media influencers) in the context of investment information for many new investors, even before exchanges, mutual funds, or SEBI's own investor education platforms (Lexology, 2025). Only 0.5% of the respondents to the survey had ever taken part in a formal investor education workshop (Lexology, 2025). For a generation that trusts YouTube explainers and Instagram reels more than prospectuses, the risk is not a lack of financial information but an oversupply of unverified, algorithmically amplified financial opinion.

The finfluencer effect and the illusion of access

In principle, app-based investing is a democratizing force; after all, it has lowered the barriers that previously kept young earners out of the market, including zero commissions, fractional investing and instant KYC. But ease of access should not be mistaken for ease of judgment. The same no-friction interfaces that allow an inexperienced 26-year-old developer to start a SIP in 90 s will allow him to open a leveraged options position or pivot into one of the more speculative tokens, with no more friction, and far less understanding of the underlying risk. Technology-related assets are increasingly under the microscope of investment professionals, and deeper industry surveys of these investment professionals bear this out, too, reflecting a greater demand for more transparency and for making decisions based on evidence, not on momentum, in the broader investment industry (PwC, 2025). I'm not just talking about institutional investors with billions of dollars in assets, who are reportedly demanding “more discipline” with their bets on technology; there are personal reasons for retail investors with a much smaller stake in all those assets to take things slow.

Toward wiser investing

None of these are reasons to deter India's young technologists from investing—it's quite the contrary. The youth-led capital formation is one of the key structural strengths in the Indian market, as a large share of the population is below the age of 35 and the digital economy is growing at a fast pace (Invest India, n.d.). The argument here is more constrained: participation is to be matched with proportionate financial education and this is a shared responsibility of three actors.

In the tech industry, companies are already incentivising technical upskilling, so they should take the same approach with financial education, and add structured and employer-approved financial education material to onboarding and benefits programmes, instead of relying on a financial education ecosystem of unchecked influencers. Platforms and brokerages should treat friction as a feature, not just a bug, building in cooling-off periods, risk disclosures, and mandatory literacy checkpoints before users access higher-risk products such as derivatives or leveraged crypto positions. For its part, regulators have already pinpointed the problem, as their own survey data indicates that it is the formats that young investors consume, like short video explainers and “mobile first” content, and not “seminars and static disclosures” (Lexology, 2025) that they encounter.

Conclusion

No one doubts that the youth of the nation is investing more than any generation in the past and this trend towards long-term, disciplined saving instruments like SIPs and equity mutual funds, deserves real credit! The data, however, also reveal a gap between market participation and market understanding—one that can be seen in low scores on financial literacy, the high number of people who remain dependent on finfluencers to make investment decisions, and the fact that a significant number of people are interested in assets with high volatility even though they say they value preserving capital. Bridging that gap is not a matter of dampening enthusiasm; it is a matter of channeling it. India's tech generation also has the analytical acumen to achieve the same, too, if the institutions it operates in—from employers to exchanges to regulators—take financial education as seriously as they do digital adoption.

Learnings from international experience provide useful pointers for India's policy response. The MoneySense programme is a three-tiered financial education pathway which was introduced in the schools by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), in partnership with the Central Provident Fund Board (CPFB) and the Ministry of Manpower since 2003, and offers a set of three distinct financial education pathways: basic money management, financial planning and financial know-how. Since 2003, the MoneySense programme has been coordinated by MAS in partnership with the Central Provident Fund Board (CPFB) and the Ministry of Manpower, and provides a three-step financial education pathway, namely basic money management, financial planning, and financial know-how, which is being integrated into school curricula and extended to young adults through workplace and campus outreach (Monetary Authority of Singapore, 2024). By contrast, Australia's fourth National Financial Capability Strategy (2022), developed under the OECD's 2020 Recommendation on Financial Literacy, illustrates the risk of a strategy without sustained delivery: independent reviews found financial literacy falling among 15-to-24-year-olds even after the strategy's adoption, a decline attributed to weak institutional ownership and the absence of mandatory school-based financial education (OECD, 2020; Social Ventures Australia, 2024). Taken together, these cases indicate that it is a multi-layered, coordinated and consistent strategy, and not just disclosure or awareness raising, that sets apart successful national financial education systems, and that should guide India's response to financial education.

For India, this comparative evidence points toward four concrete policy actions. First, SEBI and the RBI could establish a tiered, product-specific literacy check with all investors having to pass through a short, verified set of modules before they are allowed to buy derivatives, leverage up or crypto-related products. Second, instead of leaving the space for unregulated finfluencers, a formal relationship between the Ministry of Finance and the National Centre for Financial Education (NCFE) with technology-sector employers to integrate investment-literacy modules into the onboarding and benefits programmes of employees could be established. Third, regulators could mandate the creation of short-form, mobile-centric investor education materials, co-developed with SEBI-registered advisers, that directly compete with informal content that is amplified by algorithms, as SEBI's survey indicates that young investors are more likely to pay attention to these types of materials than to seminars and static disclosures (Lexology, 2025). Fourth, India could periodically review financial literacy, with periodic, publicly reported financial literacy audits, anchored to instruments like the OECD's INFE measurement toolkit, to monitor progress over time compared with peer economies and include a research and learning dimension, so that interventions are and are not working as intended over time (OECD/INFE, 2022). None of these measures involve slowing down the rate at which young people enter into capital markets; they involve an equivalent launch into capital markets in the form of literacy education.

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Footnotes

Edited by: Peter David Tolmie, University of Siegen, Germany

Reviewed by: Alieu Gibba, Advanced Research and Training Institute, Gambia