Personal devices: investing apps and the selectively self-directed digital-financial subject

Across the world, a growing number of financial non-professionals are investing in stocks through mobile and web-based trading apps that are designed to be ‘convenient’ and ‘easy’ for non-expert investors to use. What new kinds of investor subjects are being formed through the use of these devices, which bring the opportunities and uncertainties of the financial market into the layperson’s smartphone and laptop computer? Drawing on interviews with twenty trading app users in Singapore, this article argues that app-using investors commonly conduct themselves as selectively self-directed digital-financial subjects. In contrast to the paradigmatic neoliberal subject, who strives to be as informed, calculative and controlled in investing their money as possible, the app-using investor aims to understand and control only some aspects of their investing practice, while in other aspects allowing their practice to be shaped and determined by digital designs and operations that are opaque and even threatening to them. App-using investors selectively choose to go along with arrangements in which their autonomy and agency are compromised, on the chance of profitable outcome. With the proliferation of consumer ‘fintech’ applications that invite lay users to enter such arrangements, the selectively self-directed subject will likely become a more commonly encountered figure.