November 16, 2021

In ‘What has a rise in day trading and online betting to do with Covid-19?’ (The Straits Times, 2021), Professor Chew Soo Hong, Associate Professor Liu Haoming, and Associate Professor Alberto Salvo (NUS Department of Economics) explain how in times of adversity, demand for “hope products” such as stocks and lottery tickets, which involve small chances of sizeable winnings at low prices, increases.

During the outbreak of the pandemic in early 2020, the rate at which people were partaking in retail investing and online recreational gambling increased greatly. In Singapore, the number of Google searches for investing jumped by 53 percent from 2019 to 2020. During the same period, the daily trading volume on the US Nasdaq, a stock market, increased by 88 percent. This could possibly have been due to boredom felt during lockdown, or people having decided to seek good news by spending their extra stimulus cheques on retail investing and recreational gambling.

While retail investing is more deliberate and consequential as compared to leisure gambling, which is more impulsive, a degree of risk-taking is present in both activities. According to Prof Chew, A/P Liu, and A/P Salvo, lottery products and lottery-type stocks allow people to experience hope by prolonging uncertainty and delaying resolution.

This adversity-hope hypothesis was similarly reflected in different countries around the world. For example, in China, lottery ticket purchases were 5 percent higher on severely polluted days than on days with clean air. In the United States, there is a positive relationship between the state’s unemployment rate and lottery sales. In Iceland, an increase in gambling participation was reported after the 2008 economic collapse.

Read the article here.