Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: The Video of Dumb Investment

Financial literacy

A central problem for financial regulators is that people want to sell risky financial products to retail investors, and retail investors really want to buy them, but then later they regret it. Life would be pretty easy, for the regulators, if the retail investors all desired what was good for them, if they all wanted to prudently invest in low-cost diversified productive investments. Then the regulators could just prohibit selling spicier stuff to retail. “I’ve got an exchange-traded fund that provides three times the daily performance—,” some company would say, and the regulator would say “nope!” and move on. “I ...