While the stock market crash sent baby boomers into panic mode, Gen Z was grabbing the popcorn and sharing their plans to get rich. “Forget about the Sephora sale… the entire stock market is on sale right now,” one excited 24-year-old shared on TikTok. Meanwhile, a 22-year-old shared how she made $42K in less than an hour thanks to the volatile market.
The world’s stock markets tanked late last week in response to President Donald Trump’s new tariffs—and baby boomers watched in horror as their dreams of a comfortable retirement briefly went up in flames. Although their Hail Mary’s were answered yesterday, with a 90-day pause on select tariffs, in Trump’s own words, “Nothing’s over yet.”
And Gen Z is here for the ride.
In fact, TikTok was rife with young people sharing excitement over their losses and what the market volatility could mean for their long-term wealth.
“The entire stock market is on sale right now,” the 24-year-old content creator from New York @pipercassidyphillips posted to her channel.
“Forget about the Sephora sale, which is going on right now. The whole stock market yesterday had the biggest single day crash since 2020, which means this is a good time to buy because things are literally on sale. They are cheaper.”
“So this is just your general PSA that if you’ve been sitting on some money that you want to invest, this is the time—I’m doing it,” Piper Phillips said, adding that she consulted ChatGPT for financial advice before investing cash towards her retirement.
“So I will be hitting up the Sephora sale, but I’m going to be prioritizing the stock market sale first.”
Gen Z has time on their side—and they know it
Unlike those in their 60s and 70s who are planning on retiring soon, Gen Zers can withstand the current volatility—and they know it.
Take 24-year-old Mia McGrath for example. Despite having lofty goals to retire by 40, she shared her nonchalant approach to the market’s ups and downs.
“The market is in a bit of a downturn right now, and people are panicking,” she posted in a recent TikTok video. “People’s reaction in a situation like this is to sell, sell, sell, but you have to buy low and sell high. That’s just the way the stock market works.”
Although her stocks were down £5,000 (about ¢6,500) at the end of last week, the London-based account manager wasn’t worried.
“The market has a 100% recovery rate,” she added. “So yes, there have been instances where it hasn’t fully recovered from a crash for 15 years, but that’s why I always say that investing is for the long term. You have to have the next few decades in mind.”
Ryan King, another British financial content creator, shared on his social media channels that he’s “lost £12,959 in 2025.”
“But I’m not worried,” he posted on @makingmoneysimple. “The money that I’ve lost is only lost ‘on paper.’ You don’t lose any money until you lock in your losses and actually sell”
“I don’t need this money for the long term. So I have time for the market to recover,” the 27-year-old added. “This is a good thing. I can now invest at lower prices each month—into the same funds that I was already investing into—as they are now ‘on sale’ and cost less.”
Even with the aim of quitting work and living off their investment portfolio decades earlier than the conventional retirement age range of 65 to 70, Gen Z still has over 20 years to wait for the market to recover.
If anything, they reckon buying into the dip, will accelerate their financial goals and help them retire earlier.
“This is absolutely insane. This hasn’t even happened since COVID,” a 21-year-old American investing influencer who goes by Elap shared on TikTok that he was “down another $1,783 in one day” and “down more than 10% in two days because of Trump’s Liberation Day.”
“If you’re young, this is the biggest opportunity.” In another video, he shared that stock market crashes “can make you rich”—especially if you’re under 25: “2025 stock market crashing is your biggest generational opportunity.”
Trust the process: Some Gen Zers are already seeing huge gains
Since Trump’s tariff pause sent stocks soaring, Gen Z investors have been smugly sharing their huge financial gains.
King even shared screenshots of his various Vanguard funds, which are all now back in the green.
Elap echoed that he made over $2,000 in just 15 minutes—in comparison, most people his age would need to work for nearly three weeks to earn that.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—if you guys weren’t listening to me the past week, saying ‘this is the time you need to be getting into the market.’ This is just proof,” he posted.
“This just goes to show how you need to stay investing long term and on downturns, you need to be putting even more money into the market, which is what I’m doing, and now I am up even more than I even lost,” he added. “Last Thursday, Friday, and this Monday, I put in tons more money than usual and now I’m reaping the rewards.”
Of course, the Gen Zers who invested more in the dip saw even bigger gains.
One 22-year-old made nearly $42,000 in less than an hour. Two days later, Sierra Aaliyah shared that she had made another $39,000 with screenshots of her ballooning portfolio.
“The stock market right now is insane,” she added.
“In my four years of trading, I’ve never seen volatility like this… Never in my four years of trading have I been able to make this much money. This is crazy.”
Although she made the bulk of her money day trading, she gave lots of advice for Gen Zers looking to build long-term wealth.
“I personally have been buying VOO (Vanguard S&P 500), VTI (Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund ETF), Nvidia, AMD shares since the market’s been dropping,” the Gen Zer said, while adding that Robin Hood is a good app to get started on investing in shares.
“Every single time the market drops, it recovers. So whether it takes three months, six months, eight months, make sure you know in your mind, oh my gosh, if I’m down on my investment, it’s going to come back up—that is long-term investing.”
“This is not something where you put your money in, and you’re like, in an hour, I made $41k. This is, you put your money in there, you sit, you let it grow over time.”
Lee Seung-gun—or “SG” for foreigners unfamiliar with Korean pronunciation—has a classic startup founder story that mixes tenacity, repeated failure, ultimate success…and dental care.
It started in 2011, when Lee left a Samsung-owned private hospital to start Viva Republica. “I started as a dentist, like all the other Asian children whose parents want their kids to be neurosurgeons or dentists,” he says with a laugh.
“When I was 29 or 30, I had no dream. I just wanted to be a famous dentist,” he remembers. But he soon grew restless with just helping people on an individual scale. “To create impact at scale, I quickly realized that I had to focus on technology.”
His push into entrepreneurship had a difficult start. He devoted 150 million won of savings—about $105,000—towards his new venture. “For the first five years, I failed eight times,” he says. He reels off a couple of what he calls “rubbish ideas”: Social media, a voting app.
A Bloomberg report from 2018 noted that, one point, Lee had just 20,000 won ($14) in the bank, and was pleading with the families of employees to let them keep working without pay.
Then, he found an idea that worked: a money transfer service. “Toss was another stupid idea, but we were crazy enough to do it, because we had nothing to lose,” he says with a smile. “And here we are.”
Almost 15 years after its founding in 2011, Toss is now part of a larger fintech “super app,” a single platform that combines banking, insurance, stock trading, and money transfer services.
South Koreans have an average of five bank accounts and four credit cards—which means a lot of different financial accounts to juggle. Lee thinks that’s why Toss has proved so popular, as Koreans have “more occasions to check their finances.”
Viva Republica is now one of Korea’s most prominent startups, worth about $7 billion after a 2022 funding round. The company boasts backers like GIC, Paypal, and Qualcomm Ventures. Lee has also become one of South Korea’s newest billionaires, according to a 2021 estimate from Forbes.
The Toss platform claims to have close to 30 million registered users, which would be equal to around 60% of South Korea’s entire population. Over half of the company’s 25 million monthly active users visit the app at least 10 times a day.
“Our monthly active userbase is actually a little shy of that of Instagram [in Korea],” he boasts.
Super-app success
Asia is covered in super-apps, where platforms like Tencent’s WeChat include services like messaging, payments, food delivery, news, games, and more. Finance is a popular service for budding super-apps, even for non-finance companies, with Singapore’s Grab and Sea, and Indonesia’s GoTo among Asian platforms with fintech divisions.
Super apps keep users on a single platform, rather than sending them off to another company. That allows for cross-promotion, resource sharing, and other support between various services. It also makes it harder to switch to another platform: If everything you ever need is on one app, why would you try something else?
Yet super apps have not taken off in the West, even as the model wins fans like X owner Elon Musk, who hopes to turn his social media network into a financial services platform.
Lee’s theory is that super apps are a better fit for the Asian internet, which initially lacked much of the digital infrastructure that underpins U.S. startups.
In the U.S., a new startup can rely on a plethora of other companies that provide supporting services. In Asia—even in wealthy countries like South Korea—those companies just don’t exist. That means a platform like Toss, or its more established Big Tech peers Naver and Kakao, had to build those services itself.
“When we launched our flagship money transfer service, it was loved by so many users, so we were able to grow very fast. We quickly realized that all the other vertical sectors of finance were not covered by other players,” he explains. “There has been a huge void in the Korea market, so we were able to capture those opportunities.”
Startup milestones
Viva Republica hit a key milestone last year, when it reported its first annual profit since its founding over a decade ago. The company reported a net profit of 21.3 billion Korean won ($15 million) for 2024, compared to a 216.6 billion won ($152 million) loss the year before. Revenue also jumped 43% to hit 1.96 trillion won ($1.4 billion).
Lee says the first-ever profit is due to a focus on growing revenue rather than building market share. “Unlike other fintech players, user growth doesn’t really correlate with revenue. Most of our revenue doesn’t come from users, but instead from our business customers,” attracted to Toss’s point-of-sale program, or its advertising opportunities.
“For the next three to five years, it’s going to mostly be a story around acquiring more business customers,” he says.
Viva Republica’s profit also came from strong growth in Toss Securities, the platform’s stock trading service. Lee notes its the only service that charges users a fee, and contributes about 20% of the platform’s total revenue.
He added that Toss Securities, after its launch in 2021, grew quickly due to the Toss superapp.
“It took Robinhood two years to get two million securities accounts,” Lee says. “We achieved that in five days.”
Toss has higher penetration among younger Koreans, with as many as 90% of those in their twenties using the platform. Lee says that while there aren’t a lot of differences between Toss’s younger and older users, one major divergence is that newer generations are more open to investing in foreign stocks, primarily in the U.S.
Now that Viva Republica has found a profitable business model, is the company on a path to a public debut, the next big milestone for a startup?
Lee says that Viva Republica plans to go public “in the near future,” but declined to give specific details on timing and location.
According to local media, Viva Republica is considering a U.S. IPO, abandoning plans to list in South Korea late last year. The company reportedly believes that Korean equity markets won’t properly value a fintech platform like Toss. (Lee declined to share details when pressed.)
Shares in competing fintech services KakaoBank and KakaoPay have lost around 70% and 80% of their value since their respective 2021 IPOs.
Market confidence
Korean equities often suffer from low valuations—sometimes dubbed the “Korea Discount”. Analysts blame the threat posed by nearby North Korea and poor corporate governance among the country’s chaebols, the massive conglomerates that dominate the economy. The country considered passing market reforms that would unlock value, similar to what was successfully pursued by its neighbor Japan.
Yet reforms have stalled due to a more pressing political crisis.
In December, then-President Yoon Suk Yeol tried to impose martial law. After widespread protests from the public and the opposition, Yoon withdrew his declaration just a few hours later.
Lawmakers quickly suspended and impeached Yoon, spurring months of political instability. Things are now starting to come to a close after the country’s Constitutional Court upheld Yoon’s impeachment, formally removing him from office—the second time a president has been removed in less than a decade. Korea will hold snap presidential elections in early June.
Still, Lee thinks the crisis shows South Korea’s strengths. “I’m gaining more confidence in the market,” he says. “Everything was done by the constitution, and the process was peaceful.”
“This is the tipping point where we really need to focus on economic growth, not only from businessmen, but from politicians as well,” Lee continues.
South Korea is grappling with disillusionment amongst the young, frustrated with high levels of debt, unaffordable housing, and more limited social mobility. That’s partly why many have turned to retail trading in stocks, or even more speculative assets like cryptocurrencies.
The East Asian country, a major exporter, is also frantically negotiating with the U.S. to alleviate tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump, including 25% auto tariffs and 26% “reciprocal tariffs.”
When asked whether uncertainty more broadly is affecting confidence among individual Koreans, Lee points to growth in Toss’s ads business last year as proof that the country’s economy is still strong.
And he remains bullish on South Korea as an attractive market for anyone that wants to get into fintech.
“Despite its limited population,” Lee says, “the Korean market is massive.”
The interview was conducted in collaboration with Fortune Korea.
President Donald Trump said he plans to be “very nice” to China in any trade talks and that tariffs will drop if the two countries can reach a deal, a sign he may be backing down from his tough stance on Beijing amid market volatility.
“It will come down substantially but it won’t be zero,” Trump said Tuesday in Washington, following earlier comments from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that the tariff standoff is unsustainable. Trump added that “we’re going to be very nice and they’re going to be very nice, and we’ll see what happens.”
Trump also said he didn’t see the need to say he’d “play hardball” with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and that during discussions he wouldn’t raise COVID-19, an issue that is very politically sensitive in Beijing. The White House recently launched a website that suggested the virus came from a lab in China, irking the nation’s diplomats.
Trump’s comments come as U.S. stocks and Treasuries have been battered since he rolled out sweeping tariffs on April 2, later announcing a 90-day reprieve for most nations. The 145% duties Trump placed on China this year remain in place, though he’s made exceptions for computers and popular consumer electronics.
“Trump is panicking due to the markets plummeting and still very high U.S. Treasury yields,” said Alicia Garcia Herrero, chief Asia Pacific economist at Natixis. “He needs a deal and quick. China does not need to offer anything big in such circumstances.”
China hasn’t officially responded to Trump’s pledge to play “nice” but the media outlet Cailian called it “a sign that Trump is already softening stance on his signature tariff policies.”
Beijing indicated earlier this month that it wants to see a number of steps from the Trump administration before agreeing to any discussions, especially reining in disparaging remarks by members of his cabinet.
Other conditions include a more consistent U.S. position and a willingness to address China’s concerns around American sanctions and Taiwan, according to a person familiar with the Chinese government’s thinking, who asked not to be identified.
Beijing also wants the U.S. to appoint a point person for talks who has the president’s support and can help prepare a deal that Trump Xi can sign when they meet, the person said.
Beijing had earlier expressed displeasure with comments Vice President JD Vance made about “Chinese peasants,” with one diplomat calling them “ignorant and disrespectful.”
Politics8 years ago