Investing Will be the Most Popular Language

I wanted to finally get some thoughts out from my two days at The Money Conference in Dublin.

It was fun to be on stage with my friend Yoni Assia, the founder of Etoro (I am an investor) talking about trading and investing. Etoro is a social brokerage that has over 10 million accounts in 140 countries.

The social team from the Money Conference shared this tweet about my riffs which is a good start:

Have a look at this chart about languages:

I would never have guessed that Portuguese is the 7th most spoken language, but that is not the point of this post.

There is one language across all these languages that is universal and that is the language of investing/trading.

I talk about this trend often but it is till so early.

Over just the last four years global markets have grown, market data is abundant and most of what you need to start investing is free. In addition, social networks have proliferated and crypto (at least Bitcoin) is in every corner of the world. Bitcoin might already have more brand recognition than Nike or Coke.

We are all holding a smartphone easily connected to markets and our small or large groups on our favorite networks and we can dial in with ‘experts’ and mentors 24/7/365.

I have linked to Morgan’s piece titled ‘The Psychology of Money‘ before, but I keep coming back to this part of it:

In what other field does someone with no education, no relevant experience, no resources, and no connections vastly outperform someone with the best education, the most relevant experiences, the best resources and the best connections? There will never be a story of a Grace Groner performing heart surgery better than a Harvard-trained cardiologist. Or building a faster chip than Apple’s engineers. Unthinkable.

But these stories happen in investing.

That’s because investing is not the study of finance. It’s the study of how people behave with money. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people. You can’t sum up behavior with formulas to memorize or spreadsheet models to follow. Behavior is inborn, varies by person, is hard to measure, changes over time, and people are prone to deny its existence, especially when describing themselves.

Grace and Richard show that managing money isn’t necessarily about what you know; it’s how you behave. But that’s not how finance is typically taught or discussed. The finance industry talks too much about what to do, and not enough about what happens in your head when you try to do it.

Do your kids a favor and start them on the path to learning the language of investing.