Honestly, the standard investment risk questionnaire might be the most soporific thing ever devised. “On a scale of one to five, how would you feel if your portfolio lost 10%?”
Who knows? Ask me on a Tuesday after a good night’s sleep and I haven’t spent an hour in traffic. Ask me on a Friday evening when the news is full of recession talk and I’m trying to run away. Yet for decades, the financial services industry has used these static, multiple-choice snoozefests to determine how to invest trillions of dollars.
We have the technology to build exquisitely sophisticated portfolios, yet we’re matching people to them using a tool with roughly the psychological depth of a horoscope.
As someone who has spent years developing a better way, I can tell you that this must stop. The gap between how investors think they’ll behave and how they behave when the market is doing its best summersault impression is where fortunes are lost.
Enter game-based profiling. And no, I don’t mean making the questionnaire into a slightly more colourful or delightful PDF. I mean real interactive games, adaptive scenarios that reveal your true behavioural fingerprints while you’re too busy having fun to realise you’re being analysed.
The problem is simple: stated intentions are lies. Polite, well-meaning lies we tell ourselves and our advisors. But revealed behaviour? That’s the truth. A recent 2025 Journal article on “jump signals” in investment decisions notes that modern markets are essentially a massive multiplayer game where everyone is reacting to everyone else. Understanding the “distribution of investor types” who panics, who chases, who freezes is critical.
Traditional questionnaires couldn’t capture this if they tried. They’re asking you to imagine what it’s like in front of a bus at speed whilst sitting at your desk. Games throw you in front of the bus.
This is where my work comes in. The profiling tools I’ve developed don’t ask “how do you feel about risk?” They show you. You’re presented with dilemmas, trade-offs, and simulated scenarios. Do you take the guaranteed win or gamble for glory? Push you a little harder here, probe a little deeper there. By the end, we don’t just know your “risk tolerance.” We know whether you’re a loss-averse lemming, an overconfident cowboy, or a recency-biased ostrich with your head in the sand.
And here’s the magic: because this all happens digitally and automatically, we can do it for everyone. Not just the ultra-wealthy client who gets a team of psychologists, but the young professional opening their first account. That’s mass customisation. The game spits out your behavioural profile, an algorithm matches you to a portfolio designed specifically for your particular flavour of financial insanity, and suddenly you have a bespoke investment strategy built on who you really are, not who you told a piece of paper you might be or what your fund manager imagined in their heads.
The cowboy gets a portfolio with guardrails to stop him trading himself into poverty. The lemming gets a strategy that automatically resists the siren song of the latest meme stock. The ostrich gets nudges to actually look at their statements once in a while. Each portfolio is mass-produced in it’s efficiency but customised in it’s psychology.
So, let’s rethink how we do things and embrace innovation. The future of investing isn’t about asking people what they’d do. It’s about watching what they actually do, learning from it, and building portfolios that fit them like a custom-tailored suit. Mass customisation through game-based profiling isn’t just smarter, it’s more fun. And in a world where most financial planning feels like a trip to the dentist, that might be the most valuable innovation of all.
About the Author – Oladayo Oduwole
Oladayo Oduwole is a director at Old Shoreham, a quantitative financial services firm focused on delivering meaningful investment solutions that fit into the lives of its clients. He believes that well-constructed behavioural portfolios will deliver the best returns to investors the world over.
