When I finally finished opening up my son’s Trump Account, I was shocked at how boring the app was.
Like many parents of babies born since 2025, I signed up for the Trump Account to get the free $1,000.
My wife and I are saving up for a down payment in hopes of finding the one affordable home in all of New York City, so for our little babe, this will be the bulk of his investment portfolio for now.
We’re very boring investors for both personal and professional reasons.
But knowing Trump’s flair for the theatrical and reporting on his record-setting level of stock trading as president, I was expecting something a lot more entertaining than what I got.
My editor and I even joked that maybe I could “yeet” the money into some wild investments: maybe space or robotics stocks.
Whatever was getting the most attention on Wall Street Bets at the moment.
The only Trumpian things about it are the gold design theme and the name.The sign-up process, which I had procrastinated for weeks in fear of being buried in forms, was straightforward.
And once I signed up, my son’s money was automatically placed in $SPYM, State Street’s S&P 500 tracking index for long-term holds, which has lower fees than its popular $SPY fund.
Other than adding more money, looking at my performance or projecting how much money my son would have on his 18th birthday or 60th birthday if I continued to contribute, there was basically nothing to do.The blandness is refreshing in a world where gambling, stock trading, and investing are more accessible and intertwined than ever.
Daniel Crosby, chief behavioral officer at Orion Advisor Solutions, for a previous story on sports betting and investing, he said the apps for both gambling and trading share the same “reward structure: rapid feedback, variable outcomes, and a scoreboard you can check at any moment.” “The product changes from a same-game parlay to a call option on a meme stock, but the behavioral reward is remarkably similar,” he said The Treasury Department announced on Wednesday that it would soon auto-enroll children, guaranteeing that the Trump accounts will be held by less-savvy investors who may not have heard about them before.
Luckily, Trump Accounts, as they are, are more likely to be a gateway to contributing to your 401(k) than making options trades on margin.
For an application whose stated goal is to help spread stock ownership to all Americans, it’s doing a decent job of onboarding. “Everybody deserves a piece of the action,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said this July.
A minimal design separates the Trump Account app from others that intentionally, or implicitly, seek to bring the thrill of the casino to the smartphone.
Smartphone app design has taken many cues from the casino slot-machine industry’s obsession with addictive design, writes NYU Professor Natasha Dow Schüll in her seminal anthropological study of slot-machine gamblers, “Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas.” The same addictive, dopamine-overloading physical gestures of “scrolling, swiping, and clicking” that keep gamblers in front of slot machines now, “pervade the rhythms of everyday life,” through the smartphones in our pockets, she writes.
It’s a refreshing change for the Trump Account app to have so few buttons to press or screens to explore.
You can see everything it has to offer in less than five minutes.
This is all the more impressive, as Robinhood, one of the main partners in developing the Trump Account, has been criticized for blurring the line between prudent wealth management and going all in on red.
Even Warren Buffett has compared it to a casino.
In 2024, it paid a $7.5 million to settle a Massachusetts case over the use of confetti animations, scratch-off stock rewards, and other designs that regulators said encouraged risky trading.
Last year, it added prediction markets, allowing investors to “trade” — Robinhood’s word — on outcomes of sporting events.
The Trump Account app also encourages people to participate in the financial system as investors.
When I spoke to someone who had lost more than $250,000 on heavily leveraged SpaceX bets, they said the roller coaster experience made it impossible to see a world where they could make conservative long-term investments in index funds.
Another behavioral finance expert told me about a friend who lost money trading foreign currencies and came away convinced that “it’s all rigged, and you can’t make money on the market.” “Meanwhile, I put money in and ignore it, and it’s going up and up and up,” the expert said.
The one complaint I have with the application is the way its projections of future wealth work.
When I first opened the app and saw that my son’s $1,000 would be north of $22,000, I thought they were cooking the books.
What I did not notice at first was that this calculation assumed I would be contributing $50 a month, though I could change the amount and frequency of contributions.
It’s healthy investing behavior to continue to put regular sums into the market, no matter the market conditions, but as app design goes, I could easily see this fooling a less sophisticated investor.
Personally, I think they should either have the contribution slider at the top of the screen, instead of underneath the chart, or they should prompt you via a pop-up to enter your own projected contributions.
There will eventually be more investment options, although there are some guardrails: They will have to track a “qualified index,” and fees are capped at less than 0.1% a year.
Much about the future menu has yet to be decided.
I hope the final options are limited and that portfolio composition isn’t infinitely customizable or liquid.
The good thing about the Trump Accounts for now is that they encourage keeping money in one place.
We need more boring apps in our lives.
But if they decide to open it up to the Wild West and my wife and I can open a more traditional investment account for our son, then maybe I can put all of this money into a moonshot bet on a space- and robotics-focused ETF.
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