Paper short abstract:

The creation of ‘expert knowledge’ about investing is a process that retail investors re-negotiate to legitimise their digitised economic activities and reflect on their positionality. These emerging power relations sanction multi-layered financial literacies that regulators can see as illegitimate.

Paper long abstract:

The curation of fields of knowledge is fraught with political decisions about power, in the case of economic expertise with far-reaching consequences for wealth distribution. The tighter that economic activities are regulated, the more potential there is for investing practices to become labelled as ‘illegitimate’ when carried out by ‘non-experts’. Often investing via banks is sanctioned for retail investors but is considered subversive when carried out through apps. The question of what financial expertise and thus legitimate economic activity looks like in a time when everyone can google information, does not just trouble regulators. Retail investors, whose existence disrupts fault-lines of who is deemed 'expert' enough to wield financial power, search for answers to this too.

To explore how expertise in digitised financial labour is constructed and re-negotiated by retail investors, I will draw on ethnographic material collected in 2023. Retail investors often use social media to expand their knowledge, getting entangled with legitimate and illegitimate ‘experts’ and ‘educators’ through their TikTok and Instagram algorithms. A closer look at these personae and their (parasocial) relations to retail investors reveal that the issue at hand is not just about economic expertise but about what power relations become relevant, what they inscribe, and who they are applied to. In retail investor communities, fiat and crypto alike, this is central to making meaning of the financial activities performed. Exploring how varied digitised financial literacies are constructed, and what expertise emerges is instructive to both understand digitised financial labour and academic knowledge construction better.