From users to co-creators: How social trading platforms facilitate retail investor and trader engagement

Abstract

This article examines how social trading platforms encourage laypeople to become active investors and traders and to deepen their engagement over time. Extending prior research highlighting the role of cultural narratives and platform design, we show how platforms steer users along engagement pathways, transitioning novices into active investors and traders, and ultimately into co-creators, who act as finfluencers and/or provide quasi-fund management. Using a walkthrough method on two major platforms, eToro and Binance, we identify five key elements that shape these pathways: (1) the educational ‘Academy’, which establishes a market ontology; (2) monetary reward systems, which define valued activities; (3) user profile designs, which script specific roles; (4) social reward systems, which guide interactions; and (5) social feed algorithms, which curate user experience. Our comparative analysis shows how these elements are strategically aligned to steer users towards two distinct subjectivities. eToro cultivates an ‘investing-oriented’ pathway focused on building trust for its copy trading feature, while Binance fosters a ‘trading-oriented’ pathway centred on generating content and attention. Our findings contribute to the sociology of finance by detailing the socio-material mechanisms that create and sustain lay investor engagement, and to the literature on consumer co-creation by showing how platforms systematically configure users into valuable producers.