CLE Seminar: Gabriele Iannotta

Seminar Series

Friday, 21 March 2025, 12 p.m.

Room G.125

Gabriele IANNOTTA, Politecnico di Milano

Pop-up Fiction: A Trading App Simulation to Boost Financial Competence

Abstract: This paper investigates a financial education intervention that uses a trading app simulation to enhance financial literacy and decision-making among bachelor’s students at Politecnico di Milano. In a randomized controlled study involving 485 participants, students were divided into three groups: a control group with no intervention, a treatment group (T1) that engaged in an online simulation with basic financial information, and a second treatment group (T2) that received additional real-time educational pop-up feedback during the simulation. The simulation mimicked modern trading app environments by requiring participants to allocate an initial endowment among several investment options with varying risk and return profiles. Both self-reported intentions and actual portfolio performance — measured by the Sharpe ratio — were analyzed. Preliminary findings show that while both intervention groups improved their post-test financial knowledge and portfolio construction compared to the control, the T2 group exhibited the greatest gains. These results suggest that integrating real-time feedback into financial education can more effectively translate theoretical knowledge into practical investment behaviors in digital finance contexts.