Article by Ben Spencer
For those not already in the know, the stock market might seem impenetrable, somewhere between hard economics and mysticism.
In reality, it’s not that difficult.
Stocks are fragments of ownership in a company, and the performance of that business makes your stock more or less valuable.
Buying and selling those stocks at opportune moments is how traders make money. Of course, it’s a risky business, which is why the ‘wolves’ of Wall Street make such compelling characters in movies.
In January 2025, the House of Lords published an article aimed at encouraging consumers to engage with the stock market.
It cited concerns that a “significant” portion of the British population was actually losing money on their savings due to factors like inflation and, more importantly, simply letting it sit idle in their bank account.
The solution, it said, was to invest it – but just how many Brits feel comfortable enough about stocks and shares to entertain their distant Lords?
The Stock Market in Popular Culture
As hinted at earlier, the stock market naturally holds some allure.
It’s seen as the plaything of high-powered people wearing braces to hold their trousers up, a bit like Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s 1987 movie Wall Street.
The stock market also makes appearances in popular games, and even casino games.
In one example, available on one live casino in the UK is a ‘crash’ genre – Stock Market, which lets players decide when to cash out before the stock market suddenly stops.
Like all casino games, it’s guided by randomness, but shows how awareness of the market appears in popular culture.
However, Brits’ interest in fictional finance doesn’t always translate into reality. Investment firm Hargreaves Lansdown discovered that just 23% of people in the UK had invested in the stock market. Over in the US, that figure balloons to two-thirds.
Why the gulf in stock market investment? The answers were numerous. For instance, the Hargreaves Lansdown study found that Brits don’t like risk compared to Americans, and that there’s simply not as much incentive for British people to invest.
There’s also less of a need for people in the UK to be totally self-sufficient, as at least one potential disaster – healthcare – is covered by taxes.
Barriers to Access
There’s a bigger problem, highlighted by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in 2022.
A fifth of people in the UK have less than £1,000 in savings, with 7%-10% holding nothing at all.
So, it’s not so much that there are true access barriers in the UK, like a certain qualification, but that many people simply have nothing to invest.
The FCA added some other interesting statistics to the debate. Only 9% of people expressed a strong desire to make investments in 2022, while 46% thought that the stock market required a sum of cash they simply didn’t have.
Perhaps more damning for the House of Lords’ desire to get people investing is that 31% of Brits wouldn’t know how.
For would-be financiers in the UK, the statistics paint a bleak picture.
The onus is perhaps on banks to encourage people to take up more stocks and shares ISAs or a similarly ‘automatic’ way of doing things. Sometimes, it’s best to leave the thinking to somebody else.
