We Don’t Need No Education
A few weeks back, I wrote about how finfluencers increasingly represent the first introduction to the world of investing for those who have grown up in the social media age.
The column referenced a well-known Norwegian financial influencer who agrees that many young people come across financial ‘experts’ online and that when good financial education is missing, weak advice has more room to grow.
This would seem to lead to the conclusion that financial education needs to be built into the school curriculum. A number of countries have already made financial education a formal part of the school timetable, although even advocates recognise that the extent and quality of implementation vary significantly.
Read more: The UAE Regulated Finfluencers First. Now Comes the Hard Part.
Vivi Friedgut, CEO of Blackbullion
Indeed, the CEO of Blackbullion, Vivi Friedgut, (whose mission statement is to become ‘the dominant financial wellbeing and data intelligence platform for Gen Z’) recently suggested that most teachers don’t feel confident enough to teach it and, in any case, are already stretched for time.
Her view is that adding financial education could act as a distraction from core subject teaching and that it should instead be embedded into subjects that already exist (for example, compound interest is maths, while understanding a contract would fall under the umbrella of personal, social, health and economic education). This could be supplemented by bringing in engaging experts.
However, the former president of a Council for Economic Education programme in the US reckons current research indicates that a standalone course has six times greater behavioural impact than embedding it in another course.
He suggests that educators are flocking to free, high-quality professional development to meet student demand for personal finance education, even in states that do not have a personal finance requirement.
An important caveat is that making financial education compulsory does not automatically lead to better outcomes. OECD analyses suggest the greatest gains come where financial education is introduced over several years rather than as a one-off course, linked to real-life situations (bank accounts, taxes, digital payments, borrowing), supported by well-trained teachers and reinforced by parents and community initiatives.
Hindsight Is Not Always a Wonderful Thing
Hollywood loves a time traveller, whether that’s Marty McFly trying to keep his parents from splitting up and threatening his existence or the Terminator trying to kill the woman destined to give birth to a man who will save all of humankind from extinction.
At some point, we have all wondered what we would do if we could go back in time. The most common objective would probably be to spend time with a loved one who is no longer with us – but what about the chance to use our future knowledge to make a killing on the stock market?
Well, according to a group of investment managers from Elm Wealth, we’d be wasting our time.
In late 2023, Victor Haghani, James White and Jerry Bell created the ‘Crystal Ball Challenge’, where they gave 118 finance-trained adults $50 each and handed them the front page of the Wall Street Journal one day before publication, with any mention of market moves blacked out.
These investors could go long or short on the S&P 500 and 30-year Treasury bonds, with leverage if desired. For example, after being shown Wednesday’s front page (reporting on Tuesday’s events), they placed their trades at Monday’s close and were closed out at Tuesday’s close, once the news had played out in the market. Each player got 15 trading opportunities, one front page per year from 2008 to 2022.
The result? On average, they broke even and a significant number went bust. They weren’t great at inferring market direction from the crystal ball, but they were particularly bad at position sizing.
In 1998, Warren Buffett gave a 1-hour masterclass on how to never lose money investing.
Here are the 22 most valuable lessons from his lecture:
1. You only have to get rich once. If you have $100 million and can make 10% unleveraged or 20% leveraged, the difference between $110… https://t.co/L4aQ7EwxAn pic.twitter.com/IOxZfIurU5
— Manisha Mishra (@manishamishra24) July 18, 2026
On average, the 120 participants finished with $51.62 from their $50 investment, resulting in a 3.2% return that the firm characterised as statistically similar to breaking even. Over approximately 2,000 trades, the players accurately predicted the movement of stocks and bonds only 51.5% of the time, which is only slightly better than random chance.
About 60,000 people have taken on the challenge since then, and they have fared substantially worse on average than the paid players, proving that judgement matters more than information.
Stock Around the Clock
Earlier this week, we reported that the London Stock Exchange plans to launch LSE 24, a dedicated 24/5 trading venue designed to support digital, algorithmic and agentic trading, with client testing to begin by the end of this year and the venue expected to become fully operational in the first half of 2027.
According to the exchange, the new venue will give global investors greater flexibility to respond to market events, access liquidity across time zones and manage risk. It has been suggested that it could give the exchange a shot in the arm at a time when high-profile IPOs are thin on the ground, and a sizeable number of companies have delisted.
However, the decision to offer exchange-traded products (such as funds tracking the UK and US markets) rather than individual shares initially has been criticised.
One observer described it as ‘a strange compromise approved by some clueless committee’ rather than a decision taken with investors’ interests in mind, and asked how ETP providers were supposed to hedge their risk if the underlying stocks are not trading.
His view was that this approach would result in higher bid/ask spreads during overnight hours and that the exchange would have been better off starting with stocks and exploring alternative ways to provide liquidity.
Aside from when traders will have round-the-clock access to equities, a more pressing question is what level of liquidity there will be in the market outside the regular trading hours of 8am–4.30pm, when activity is already condensed into the beginning and end of the trading day. This is a concern that has been raised by opponents of extended trading hours for US exchanges.
Limited liquidity means worse pricing for retail traders and can also leave the market vulnerable to increased volatility from a single large order placed when overall activity is relatively limited.
We Don’t Need No Education
A few weeks back, I wrote about how finfluencers increasingly represent the first introduction to the world of investing for those who have grown up in the social media age.
The column referenced a well-known Norwegian financial influencer who agrees that many young people come across financial ‘experts’ online and that when good financial education is missing, weak advice has more room to grow.
This would seem to lead to the conclusion that financial education needs to be built into the school curriculum. A number of countries have already made financial education a formal part of the school timetable, although even advocates recognise that the extent and quality of implementation vary significantly.
Read more: The UAE Regulated Finfluencers First. Now Comes the Hard Part.
Vivi Friedgut, CEO of Blackbullion
Indeed, the CEO of Blackbullion, Vivi Friedgut, (whose mission statement is to become ‘the dominant financial wellbeing and data intelligence platform for Gen Z’) recently suggested that most teachers don’t feel confident enough to teach it and, in any case, are already stretched for time.
Her view is that adding financial education could act as a distraction from core subject teaching and that it should instead be embedded into subjects that already exist (for example, compound interest is maths, while understanding a contract would fall under the umbrella of personal, social, health and economic education). This could be supplemented by bringing in engaging experts.
However, the former president of a Council for Economic Education programme in the US reckons current research indicates that a standalone course has six times greater behavioural impact than embedding it in another course.
He suggests that educators are flocking to free, high-quality professional development to meet student demand for personal finance education, even in states that do not have a personal finance requirement.
An important caveat is that making financial education compulsory does not automatically lead to better outcomes. OECD analyses suggest the greatest gains come where financial education is introduced over several years rather than as a one-off course, linked to real-life situations (bank accounts, taxes, digital payments, borrowing), supported by well-trained teachers and reinforced by parents and community initiatives.
Hindsight Is Not Always a Wonderful Thing
Hollywood loves a time traveller, whether that’s Marty McFly trying to keep his parents from splitting up and threatening his existence or the Terminator trying to kill the woman destined to give birth to a man who will save all of humankind from extinction.
At some point, we have all wondered what we would do if we could go back in time. The most common objective would probably be to spend time with a loved one who is no longer with us – but what about the chance to use our future knowledge to make a killing on the stock market?
Well, according to a group of investment managers from Elm Wealth, we’d be wasting our time.
In late 2023, Victor Haghani, James White and Jerry Bell created the ‘Crystal Ball Challenge’, where they gave 118 finance-trained adults $50 each and handed them the front page of the Wall Street Journal one day before publication, with any mention of market moves blacked out.
These investors could go long or short on the S&P 500 and 30-year Treasury bonds, with leverage if desired. For example, after being shown Wednesday’s front page (reporting on Tuesday’s events), they placed their trades at Monday’s close and were closed out at Tuesday’s close, once the news had played out in the market. Each player got 15 trading opportunities, one front page per year from 2008 to 2022.
The result? On average, they broke even and a significant number went bust. They weren’t great at inferring market direction from the crystal ball, but they were particularly bad at position sizing.
In 1998, Warren Buffett gave a 1-hour masterclass on how to never lose money investing.
Here are the 22 most valuable lessons from his lecture:
1. You only have to get rich once. If you have $100 million and can make 10% unleveraged or 20% leveraged, the difference between $110… https://t.co/L4aQ7EwxAn pic.twitter.com/IOxZfIurU5
— Manisha Mishra (@manishamishra24) July 18, 2026
On average, the 120 participants finished with $51.62 from their $50 investment, resulting in a 3.2% return that the firm characterised as statistically similar to breaking even. Over approximately 2,000 trades, the players accurately predicted the movement of stocks and bonds only 51.5% of the time, which is only slightly better than random chance.
About 60,000 people have taken on the challenge since then, and they have fared substantially worse on average than the paid players, proving that judgement matters more than information.
Stock Around the Clock
Earlier this week, we reported that the London Stock Exchange plans to launch LSE 24, a dedicated 24/5 trading venue designed to support digital, algorithmic and agentic trading, with client testing to begin by the end of this year and the venue expected to become fully operational in the first half of 2027.
According to the exchange, the new venue will give global investors greater flexibility to respond to market events, access liquidity across time zones and manage risk. It has been suggested that it could give the exchange a shot in the arm at a time when high-profile IPOs are thin on the ground, and a sizeable number of companies have delisted.
However, the decision to offer exchange-traded products (such as funds tracking the UK and US markets) rather than individual shares initially has been criticised.
One observer described it as ‘a strange compromise approved by some clueless committee’ rather than a decision taken with investors’ interests in mind, and asked how ETP providers were supposed to hedge their risk if the underlying stocks are not trading.
His view was that this approach would result in higher bid/ask spreads during overnight hours and that the exchange would have been better off starting with stocks and exploring alternative ways to provide liquidity.
Aside from when traders will have round-the-clock access to equities, a more pressing question is what level of liquidity there will be in the market outside the regular trading hours of 8am–4.30pm, when activity is already condensed into the beginning and end of the trading day. This is a concern that has been raised by opponents of extended trading hours for US exchanges.
Limited liquidity means worse pricing for retail traders and can also leave the market vulnerable to increased volatility from a single large order placed when overall activity is relatively limited.
