When I finally completed setting up my son’s Trump Account, I was surprised by how unexciting the app felt.
Like many parents of children born since 2025, I registered for a Trump Account to receive the free $1,000.
My wife and I are saving for a down payment while hoping to find the one affordable home in New York City, so for our infant, this will likely make up most of his investment portfolio for the time being.
We are very conservative investors for personal and professional reasons. But given Trump’s theatrical style and reports of his record-setting stock trading as president, I expected something far more dramatic than what arrived.
My editor and I even joked that I might “yeet” the funds into some wild investments: perhaps space or robotics stocks, or whatever was drawing the most attention on Wall Street Bets at the time.
Instead, it is surprisingly plain. The only Trump-like elements are the gold design theme and the name.
The signup process, which I had put off for weeks because I feared being buried in forms, was simple.
After registering, my son’s money was automatically placed in $SPYM, State Street’s S&P 500 tracking index for long-term holding, which has lower fees than its well-known $SPY fund.
Aside from adding more money, checking performance, or projecting how much he would have at 18 or 60 if I kept contributing, there was essentially nothing else to do.
That simplicity is refreshing in a world where gambling, stock trading, and investing have become more accessible and intertwined than ever.
When I spoke with Dr. Daniel Crosby, chief behavioral officer at Orion Advisor Solutions, for an earlier story about sports betting and investing, he said gambling and trading apps 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 Wednesday that it would soon auto-enroll children, ensuring that Trump accounts will be held by less-experienced investors who may not have heard of them before.
Fortunately, as they stand, Trump Accounts are more likely to serve as a gateway to contributing to a 401(k) than to making options trades on margin. For an application whose stated goal is to help expand stock ownership to all Americans, it is doing a reasonable job of onboarding.
“Everybody deserves a piece of the action,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said this July.
Tapping, swiping, and scrolling
A minimal design sets the Trump Account app apart from others that deliberately or implicitly try to bring casino-like excitement to smartphones.
Smartphone app design has borrowed heavily from the casino slot-machine industry’s fixation on addictive design, writes NYU Professor Natasha Dow Schüll in her landmark anthropological study of slot-machine gamblers, “Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas.”
The same dopamine-flooding physical actions of “scrolling, swiping, and clicking” that keep gamblers glued to slot machines now, she writes, “pervade the rhythms of everyday life” through the smartphones in our pockets.
It is a welcome shift for the Trump Account app to have so few buttons to press or screens to explore. You can see everything it offers in under five minutes.
That is all the more notable because Robinhood, one of the main partners in developing the Trump Account, has been criticized for blurring the line between careful wealth management and chasing aggressive, high-risk trades.
Even Warren Buffett has compared it to a casino. In 2024, it paid $7.5 million to settle a Massachusetts case involving confetti animations, scratch-off stock rewards, and other designs that regulators said encouraged risky trading. Robinhood denied any wrongdoing. Last year, it added prediction markets, allowing investors to “trade” — Robinhood’s term — on the outcomes of sporting events.
The Trump Account app also encourages people to take part in the financial system as investors. When I spoke with someone who had lost more than $250,000 on heavily leveraged SpaceX bets, they said the roller-coaster experience made it hard to imagine making conservative long-term investments in index funds.
Another behavioral finance expert told me about a friend who lost money trading foreign currencies and left 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.
Drawbacks
The one criticism I have of the app is how its future-wealth projections work. When I first opened it and saw that my son’s $1,000 would grow to more than $22,000, I thought the numbers were being manipulated.
What I initially missed was that this calculation assumed I would contribute $50 a month, although I could change the amount and frequency of contributions. Continuing to invest regular amounts in the market, regardless of conditions, is healthy investing behavior, but from an app-design perspective, I can easily see this misleading a less sophisticated investor.
Personally, I think the contribution slider should be at the top of the screen rather than below the chart, or the app should prompt users with a pop-up to enter their own projected contributions.
More investment options will eventually be available, though there are guardrails: they will have to track a “qualified index,” and fees are capped at under 0.1% a year. Much of the future menu remains undecided.
I hope the final options stay limited and that portfolio composition is not infinitely customizable or liquid.
For now, the good thing about Trump Accounts is that they encourage keeping money in one place. We need more boring apps in our lives.
But if they eventually open things up to the Wild West and my wife and I can open a more traditional investment account for our son, then perhaps I can put all of this money into a moonshot bet on a space- and robotics-focused ETF.