Where the games end and your portfolio begins

In my last piece, I made a case for game-based investor profiling. The idea that watching what people do under pressure tells you more about their financial psychology than any form ever will. Several readers wrote in with a fair question: “This is all lovely in theory. Where can I actually do it?”

Fair enough. Theory without a product is a TED talk. So, I should declare an interest. I built one. The platform is called MyBetterWealth, and what follows is not a pitch but an attempt to show what the ideas from the last article look like when they have to survive contact with real code, real markets, and real people who would rather be on TikTok.

The starting premise is that investors reveal who they are through action, not introspection. People are unreliable narrators of their own financial story, not because they lie, but because the calm version of you and the version watching the market fall 15 percent are, for all practical purposes, different people. The useful data is in what you do, not what you predict you would do.

MyBetterWealth captures that data through two parallel paths, both designed to observe rather than interrogate. The first is a set of four short games. One puts you in the driver’s seat of a keke on Third Mainland Bridge, dodging danfos while the clock ticks. Another asks you, over and over, whether to take the guaranteed money or gamble for more. A third stretches a salary across a month of competing demands. A fourth makes you sapa in Oshodi before you eventually japa to Canada. None of them feel like homework. All of them are generating signals. Every hesitation, every grab for safety, every moment you held your nerve or did not, the behavioural engine is watching.

The second path is video profiling: twenty short scenes, each a narrative moment frozen at the point of decision. You swipe right if you would, left if you would not. There is no time to construct the version of yourself you would like to be. Your reaction time counts as much as your answer. It takes about five minutes, feels like scrolling through content, and measures the same five behavioural axes as the games.

The point of offering both is reach. Some people will play games. Others, particularly an older demographic, would rather watch a scene and react. Either way, by the time you finish, the engine has scored you across five dimensions and placed you into one of twelve archetypes, from Safety Seeker to Opportunistic Explorer, from Certainty Craver to Legacy Builder. The names are labels. What matters is what sits behind them.

Each archetype maps to a distinct payoff profile, the shape of returns that suits how that particular investor thinks, fears, and decides. A Safety Seeker gets a portfolio with a hard floor. You will not lose your shirt, and you will sleep. The upside is modest, because the structure is spending its energy protecting the downside, which is exactly where a Safety Seeker needs the energy spent. A Performance Driven investor gets genuine participation in the upside, with guardrails calibrated to the specific flavour of overconfidence that profile tends to exhibit. A Legacy Builder gets a structure tuned for the next generation, not the next quarter. And so on, twelve times over. Those payoffs are replicated dynamically using bonds and equities, the only two instruments available in real size in the Nigerian market. No derivatives, no opaque wrappers, no structured notes imported from Zurich wearing a local agbada.

There is no shortage of clever portfolio construction in the world. Mean-variance optimisation has been around since the 1950s. Factor models, risk parity, maximum diversification: the toolkit is deep and the backtests are gorgeous. The problem has never been building the optimal portfolio. The problem is that the human holding it cannot live with it. An investor who panics at the first red screen and sells at the bottom does not earn the return the backtest promised. An investor who needs frequent evidence the plan is working will abandon a perfectly sound strategy that only pays off over five years. An investor who chases whatever their cousin’s WhatsApp group is buzzing about will blow up any allocation the moment something shinier appears.

The industry’s traditional answer is education: teach people to be braver, more patient, more rational. A lovely ambition, with roughly the success rate of asking Lagos traffic to improve. MyBetterWealth inverts the question. Rather than asking the investor to change, it builds the portfolio around who the investor already is. If you panic on red screens, your portfolio is structured so they are rare and shallow. If you need the dopamine of regular progress, your portfolio delivers frequent small confirmations. If you are prone to chasing noise, the guardrails are in place before the WhatsApp message arrives. The result is not necessarily the portfolio with the highest expected return on a spreadsheet. It is the portfolio the investor will actually hold, through the drawdown, through the boring middle stretch, through the cousin’s hot tip. A portfolio you hold beats a portfolio you abandon, every time. That is the edge. Not smarter maths. Better fit.

We built the engine in Lagos first because the Nigerian market is a masterclass in behavioural stress-testing. Volatility, currency shocks, inflation, structural change that would make a Swiss private banker reach for the Xanax. If a behavioural profiling engine produces useful, lasting portfolio allocations here, it will travel.

The future of investing is not about building smarter portfolios for an average investor who does not exist. It is about matching real, occasionally irrational humans to portfolios that fit them the way a Savile Row suit fits a body. Not off the rack, not aspirational, but cut to the person standing in the room. A portfolio that fits stays on. A portfolio that stays on compounds. And compounding is the only game that matters.

Visit – Mybetterwealth.com or Contact: [email protected] for more information.