A haunting childhood moment defined how John Kakuk would think about investing his own money when the time came. During the 2008 financial crisis, his mother asked him if he would be willing to contribute the meager savings in his piggy bank to his family’s grocery fund should his father, a lawyer, lose his job.
“She was very anxious,” Mr. Kakuk, then 12, remembered.
His family averted disaster. “As far as I know, we didn’t miss a mortgage payment, we didn’t get a car repossessed, nothing like that,” recalled Mr. Kakuk, 28, who runs Bridger Digital, a marketing firm. But the rattling experience steeled the Montana native against the tumult caused last week by President Trump’s announcement of steep global tariffs.
In response, markets plunged, but Mr. Kakuk, who described himself as “notably invested,” said he felt little alarm about his portfolio, even if it took a few short-term body blows. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump announced that he would pause the tariffs for most countries for 90 days, and the S&P 500 swung in the other direction for its biggest daily gain since 2008.
“People my age are in a very different position from our parents when they were our age,” Mr. Kakuk said. “We don’t have a lot to lose. We just have everything to gain.”
Interviews with young investors — ranging from high school students to entrepreneurs in their late 20s — aligned on a variation of that theme. Helped in part by digital platforms with low bars to entry and enticed by the promise of cryptocurrency, members of Gen Z began investing at 19 — six years before the average millennial and 16 years before the typical baby boomer, according to last year’s Modern Wealth Survey from Charles Schwab.
These younger investors said they were willing to countenance risk — but also to hew to a keep-calm-and-carry-on investing philosophy as the market swung wildly. If anything, the plummeting prices led to discounts unavailable during the years when stock markets were on a relentless climb.
“We’ve become accustomed to instability in a way that older generations are not,” said Alex Tucker, a senior at the School Without Walls in Washington, D.C., who opened a Vanguard account a couple of years ago but began actively investing only late last year. Though he was just a toddler during the 2008 crisis, Mr. Tucker believes the lessons of that crash suffuse his generation’s financial outlook.
“I guess the Great Recession showed that Greenspan can be wrong,” he said, referring to the former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan, widely faulted for facilitating the conditions that led to the mortgage meltdown. “The markets were wrong. The banks were wrong. The entire system can be rotten — and there is a way to go on. There’s a way to make money off of it.”
Mr. Tucker turned 18 on April 2, which the White House had framed as “Liberation Day” from a global trade arrangement unfair to American workers and consumers. Since then, he has become a little wealthier, having purchased put options on Tesla stock, correctly predicting that the association of the carmaker’s chief executive, Elon Musk, with the Trump administration would cause a sell-off.
For guidance these days, Mr. Tucker is following Michael J. Burry, the Cassandra-like investor made famous in Michael Lewis’s book “The Big Short,” and Kyla Scanlon, a 27-year-old who writes and makes videos about investing and has nearly a quarter-million followers on TikTok.
Ms. Scanlon advised a cautious approach known as “risk-off” while much of the world grappled with the implications of Mr. Trump’s protean tariffs plan. She pointed to gold as one potential source of security.
“I think any investor should have a teeny bit of allocation to gold just to have that hedge,” she said.
TikTok is rife with videos about investing in gold, among a flood of advice on how to withstand the turmoil. Just as smartphone-based trading platforms like Robinhood, launched a decade ago, have empowered casual investors, the rise of social media has created an ecosystem of influencers who speak fluently to younger audiences.
“It really is about following people and ideas and narratives,” said Steven Wang, who dropped out of Harvard to start Dub, a platform that allows users to mimic the trades of influential investors. No longer is the Bloomberg terminal, once a Wall Street must-have, the avatar it was to investors of previous generations.
“Younger folks are no longer sitting by screens and just looking at price-earnings ratios,” Mr. Wang said.
While some of the online expertise is dubious (and difficult to identify as such), some advice is savvy and expertly tailored to contemporary sensibilities. A two-minute TikTok video by Derrick Fung, an entrepreneur, about “buying the dip”— investing in the market as prices fall — has more than 750,000 views. The accompanying comments include discussion of retaliatory tariffs, inelastic markets and, well, price-earnings ratios.
Young investors have the luxury of time, and stock markets tend to reward patience.
“A fluctuation of around like 5 to 10 percent — I can most likely weather that in the long run,” said Isaac Chan, 16, a student at the Edison Academy Magnet School in Edison, N.J., and a member of the Young Investors Society. He started investing while learning remotely during the coronavirus pandemic, which left him with plenty of time for other pursuits.
To learn the basics, Mr. Chan said, he read Investopedia and followed the advice of Warren E. Buffett and Charles T. Munger. Now, sailing through his first serious storm, he is able to maintain an old hand’s equanimity.
“What really worries me isn’t necessarily my own portfolio. It’s my parents,” Mr. Chan said. “They don’t have that luxury of waiting out a downturn. For them, this is their retirement security being redrawn in real time.”
“I get excited when I see these kinds of market dips,” said Chris Josephs, 29, a co-founder of a trading platform called Autopilot. He added that while he was certainly not cheering for a recession, the recent market tumble had allowed for discounts on blue-chip stocks like Apple and Nike.
“If these stocks go down 40 percent, that just means I get a 40 percent better price,” he said.
Other young investors are making moves to insulate against future shocks.
“I don’t think my investing goals themselves — saving up money for retirement, preserving wealth in an unsteady economy — have changed as a result of the tariffs,” said Christiana Sung, 17, a student at Mt. Everest Academy in San Diego and, like Mr. Chan, a member of the Young Investors Society. (She learned to trade from its tutorials, she said.)
Also like Mr. Chan, she started trading in the summer of 2020, as the stock market recovered vigorously from the shock of pandemic lockdowns.
“I’ve certainly had to rethink my way of achieving those goals,” Ms. Sung said. “I used to favor international companies before, but now I’m more cautious of those tariff-vulnerable sectors and have begun to look more at domestic opportunities.”
Ms. Scanlon believes that now may be the time for “some international exposure,” as the American economy undergoes a transformation under Mr. Trump’s unpredictable dictates.
“Uncertainty is expensive,” she said, pointing to the relative safety of Germany’s industrial and defense sectors. Overall, European stocks have enjoyed a recent surge in popularity, seemingly thanks to Mr. Trump. The tariffs have also raised the prospects of a decline in the American economy.
“I have some stock but nothing super fancy,” said Abdullah Hassan, 30, a White House spokesman under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. who is set to graduate from Georgetown’s law school next year. Mr. Hassan said he and his peers were more concerned about an “impending recession” and finding jobs.