Even after being exposed to some financial education in schools, more young investors are putting speculative bets ahead of building long-term wealth.
My financial education didn’t have the most auspicious start. I suppose I was lucky that in high school I had a class on basic investing and finance. But I cringe when I remember that we read One Up on Wall Street, which encouraged us to go to a local mall, look for stores that had a lot of customers, and consider buying their stock. Since then, financial education has become more common — but evidently not much better.
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Access to financial education has never been greater, according to the CFA Institute, which polled Gen Z on their investing habits. The Gen Z cohort — those born between 1997 and 2012 — was almost 60% more likely to have some financial instruction in school compared with millennials, and 150% more likely than Gen Xers.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Bloomberg Opinion (paywall)
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Allison Schrager is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.
Photo by Andrew Brookes/Getty Images
