A study of 1,764 finance videos published on September 3, 2026 found that 29 percent carried at least one misleading signal, and that the misleading clips drew markedly more attention than the accurate ones. The research, from the licensing advisory firm Legalaes, was shared with PPC Land on September 10, 2026. Its central number for platform risk points at YouTube, where 41.8 percent of the sampled videos met the study's threshold for misleading content, the highest share of the four platforms examined.

In Short

A company that helps businesses get financial licences watched 1,764 short finance videos on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook, and judged how trustworthy each one was. Nearly three in ten were misleading, and those misleading videos got more views than the honest ones, so bad advice spreads further than good advice. If you run ads or manage creators, it means the people giving money tips online mostly have no financial qualifications and rarely warn viewers, which is a problem regulators and platforms are starting to act on.

What the study measured

Legalaes analysed 1,764 English-language clips: YouTube shorts, TikTok videos, and reels from Instagram and Facebook. According to the firm, the sample was collected between July 1 and July 13, 2026, gathered through finance-related hashtags, keywords, and channel searches. Together the videos attracted a combined 692.6 million views and 34.8 million likes, which works out to an average of 392,616 views and 19,746 likes per clip.

The scoring did not rely on manual fact-checking. According to the methodology, each video was assessed through rule-based text analysis of its description, title, transcript, and creator identifier. A clip was flagged as misleading when it sold a paid product or service, promised a specific return or dollar amount, used bold-certainty phrasing such as guaranteed or risk-free, recommended a specific amount or share of income to invest, or was separately flagged as inaccurate or potentially damaging.

Advice quality carried its own set of labels. A video was rated accurate when its guidance reflected established investment principles, inaccurate when it made unreliable or false-certainty claims, and potentially damaging when it encouraged high-harm behaviour such as extreme leverage or going all-in. One design choice in the methodology matters for reading the headline figure: a video could be both accurate and misleading at once. Educational content grounded in sound principles still counted as misleading if it also promoted a paid product, suggested a specific outcome, named an investment amount, or used guaranteed-return language.

A missing disclaimer, on its own, did not push a video into the misleading bucket. According to Legalaes, the absence of a disclaimer was tracked as a separate metric to avoid overstating risk. The firm also noted that some clips carried no advice-quality label at all, because they conveyed neutral information or taught concepts rather than offering explicit, evaluable financial advice. Percentages were weighted by sample size rather than averaged across platforms, meaning each figure reflects the count of videos meeting a criterion divided by the total.

Where the misleading content concentrated

Of the 1,764 videos, 511 were classified as misleading. Those 511 clips averaged 555,547 views and 26,780 likes each. The 1,253 videos judged non-misleading averaged 326,170 views and 16,878 likes. On the view metric, that is a gap of roughly 70 percent in favour of the misleading material, a pattern that places the more questionable content in front of larger audiences.

The platform breakdown put YouTube at the top for risk, with 41.8 percent of its sampled videos deemed misleading. Instagram followed at 26.8 percent, then Facebook at 23.3 percent and TikTok at 23 percent. Across all four, the aggregate misleading share settled at 29 percent.

YouTube's position is not one-directional. According to the study, the same platform that produced the highest misleading share also produced the highest share of accurate content, at 38.3 percent. TikTok ranked second on accuracy at 36.3 percent, followed by Instagram at 32 percent and Facebook at 28 percent. Across the full sample, 34.4 percent of videos were rated accurate. The share of content judged inaccurate or potentially damaging was small everywhere: 3.4 percent on YouTube, 3.2 percent on Instagram, 2.7 percent on Facebook, and 2.5 percent on TikTok, with a cross-platform figure of 3 percent split between inaccurate at 1.1 percent and potentially damaging at 1.9 percent.

Sorting the videos by subject rather than by platform surfaced a sharper concentration. Of the 143 clips categorised as Trading Tips and Technical Analysis, 40.6 percent were misleading, and only 9.8 percent were accurate. Legalaes set that accuracy rate against other categories: 57.8 percent for Financial Literacy Education, 45.4 percent for Stock Market Basics, and 43.2 percent for Market News and Trends. The firm attributed the category's elevated risk to two overlapping factors, a low rate of professional qualifications among its creators at 0.7 percent, and a high rate of self-promotion, with 36.4 percent of creators in that space promoting paid products or services.

Qualifications and disclosures

The credential figure is the study's starkest. According to Legalaes, only 2.2 percent of the 1,266 unique creators behind the sampled videos held demonstrable relevant financial qualifications such as Certified Financial Planner, Chartered Financial Analyst, or Certified Public Accountant. By that measure, 97.8 percent of the sampled creators may lack the credentials typically expected of someone giving investment advice.

Disclaimers were nearly as scarce. Only 11.7 percent of videos displayed a disclaimer, either within the content or on the creator's profile. The firm framed the combination as a source of misplaced confidence, arguing that the shortage of visible caveats can create a false sense of security that leads viewers toward misguided decisions.

Qualification rates varied by platform in a way that tracks the accuracy findings. YouTube held the largest share of qualified creators at 5.1 percent, ahead of Instagram at 1.6 percent, Facebook at 1 percent, and TikTok at 0.7 percent. That relative advantage came with a countervailing trait. According to the study, 32.8 percent of YouTube creators promoted their own paid products or services, a figure the firm said was higher than the combined 32.7 percent across the other three platforms and close to double the 16.6 percent overall share of promotional posts across the full sample.

The firm's own framing of the pattern was blunt. Much financial content on social media, Legalaes wrote, "seems to have been created to induce retail investors into acting, without full transparency on possible adverse consequences, to draw customers into marketing funnels to generate leads and sales." A smaller slice of the sample was flagged for content quality directly: 1.9 percent provided potentially damaging advice and 1.1 percent offered inaccurate advice.

The regulatory frame the study invokes

Legalaes positioned its findings against the consumer-protection regimes that govern investment advice in major markets. The firm pointed to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Financial Conduct Authority, and the European Securities and Markets Authority as the bodies whose frameworks apply. Among the specific instruments it cited were the SEC's Investment Advisers Act of 1940, the FCA's Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 and its prohibition on unauthorised persons promoting financial products, and the European Union's Markets in Financial Instruments Directive, which requires individuals giving investment advice to hold the necessary knowledge and competence.

On promotions and conflicts, the firm noted that the FCA requires financial promotions to be clear, fair, and not misleading, and that ESMA requires the objective presentation of investment recommendations and the disclosure of relationships or conflicts that could impair objectivity. The study's read of its own data was that video advice on largely unregulated social platforms can expose retail investors to non-objective information and potential losses.

Why this matters for the marketing community

The study lands in a period when disclosure exposure has been moving toward advertisers rather than resting with creators. Industry guidance summarised in the ANA's influencer measurement research has converged on the position that the brand, not the influencer, tends to face scrutiny first when a material connection goes unlabelled. That report also recorded consumer sentiment that bears directly on the disclaimer gap Legalaes measured: 71 percent of surveyed consumers said clear sponsorship disclosure increases trust, while 70 percent reported feeling misled when partnerships were hidden.

Enforcement has been arriving at modest financial scale but in a consistent direction. Australia's competition regulator fined PhotobookShop 39,600 dollars in March 2026 for instructing influencers to conceal paid partnerships, then penalised Hismile 138,600 dollars in June. A restitution claim raises the stakes further. A class action filed against Sephora on September 4, 2026 placed undisclosed creator pay at the centre of a consumer-protection theory, alleging that a commercial gifting arrangement was presented to audiences as organic word of mouth. The Legalaes finding that 16.6 percent of finance creators promote their own products, rising to 32.8 percent on YouTube, describes precisely the kind of material connection those cases turn on, applied to a category, investment advice, where the downstream harm is a viewer's capital.

Platforms have been tightening the same seam. YouTube said it will label brand deals that creators fail to disclose, and Google has moved to ban undisclosed incentivised reviews under threat of manual action. A brand deal is a paid arrangement in which a creator produces promotional content for an advertiser, distinct from an affiliate arrangement, which pays a creator a commission only when a referred viewer completes a purchase. Both structures carry disclosure obligations, and both appear in the promotional behaviour the study catalogues.

The financial-advertising vertical has its own verification layer, and its recent history shows how the industry has been narrowing who is permitted to advertise regulated products. Google expanded mandatory financial advertiser verificationto 24 EU and EEA countries in June 2026, requiring banks, insurers, and investment firms to demonstrate their existing national authorisations through Google's system before running ads. That regime governs paid advertising placements. The Legalaes study describes a different surface, organic creator video, where no comparable gate on qualifications operates and where, by the firm's count, fewer than one in nine clips carries even a disclaimer.

For media buyers and brand-safety teams evaluating creator partnerships in financial services, the study quantifies a mismatch that regulatory frameworks assume away: the bulk of finance content reaching audiences on these platforms comes from creators without demonstrable credentials, and the content most likely to mislead is also the content most likely to travel. The methodology carries its own caveat, being a rule-based text classifier rather than a manual review, and the sample is limited to English-language clips collected over a 13-day window. Even with those limits, the direction of the numbers matches what enforcement actions and platform policy changes have been signalling through 2026.

Timeline

  • 1940: The SEC's Investment Advisers Act, cited by the study, establishes credential expectations for those providing investment advice
  • 2000: The FCA's Financial Services and Markets Act, cited by the study, sets its prohibition on unauthorised persons promoting financial products
  • December 2023: Google updates its UK Financial Services Verification policy, tightening email-domain matching for FCA-registered firms
  • March 2026: Australia's ACCC fines PhotobookShop 39,600 dollars for concealed paid partnerships
  • June 2026: Australia's ACCC penalises Hismile 138,600 dollars over disclosure failures
  • June 2026: Google expands financial ad verification to 24 EU and EEA countries
  • July 1 to July 13, 2026: Legalaes collects the 1,764 videos analysed in the study
  • September 3, 2026: Legalaes publishes the study
  • September 4, 2026: A class action against Sephora citing undisclosed creator pay is filed in the Northern District of California
  • September 10, 2026: The study is shared with PPC Land

Summary

Who: Legalaes, a crypto and fintech licensing advisory firm, conducted the research; the videos analysed came from creators, often described as finfluencers, on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook.

What: An analysis of 1,764 English-language finance videos found 29 percent misleading, with misleading clips averaging about 70 percent more views than accurate ones, only 2.2 percent of 1,266 creators demonstrably credentialed, and 11.7 percent of videos carrying a disclaimer.

When: The study was published on September 3, 2026, built on videos collected between July 1 and July 13, 2026, and was shared with PPC Land on September 10, 2026.

Where: The findings cover four social platforms, with YouTube posting the highest misleading share at 41.8 percent alongside the highest accuracy share at 38.3 percent, framed against SEC, FCA, and ESMA regulatory regimes.

Why: The pattern matters to marketers because disclosure liability has been shifting toward advertisers, enforcement and platform policy have tightened around creator disclosure through 2026, and the study quantifies how uncredentialed, undisclosed, and promotional the finance content reaching audiences on these platforms tends to be.