Investing
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7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Investing trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Investing has its own language, its own folklore and a cast of characters that runs from patient billionaires to spectacular swindlers. Knowing how the pieces fit together is useful whether you are opening your first brokerage account or simply trying to follow the financial news. This quiz covers the ground an investing 101 course would: how shares, funds and retirement accounts work, the strategies investors rely on, and the measures they watch. It also tells the stories behind the jargon, from manias that ruined fortunes centuries ago to the market shocks and scandals of recent decades, and it introduces the people who made and lost money along the way. It is written for beginners, personal finance students, teachers and investment club organizers alike. Every answer comes with a brief explanation, so you can test your investor knowledge on your own or print the questions for a class or a quiz night.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which scientist, then Master of the Royal Mint, lost at least £10,000 in the South Sea Bubble of 1720?
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton owned nearly £22,000 of South Sea stock as late as 1722, two years after the crash, and his total losses may have passed £20,000.
Q 02Which commodity's US futures price fell below zero in April 2020, meaning sellers paid buyers to take it?
Crude oil
Crude oil for May delivery sank to about minus $37 a barrel on 20 April 2020. Lockdowns had crushed demand and the storage tanks at Cushing, Oklahoma, were close to full.
Q 03In investing, which animal lends its name to a market that has fallen 20% or more from a recent peak?
Bear
Bear markets start at a 20% decline, while a smaller slide of 10% to 20% is only classed as a correction.
Q 04Which force did Benjamin Franklin harness by leaving Boston and Philadelphia £1,000 each for 200 years?
Compound interest
Compound interest swelled the two gifts to almost $5 million in Boston and more than $2 million in Philadelphia by 1990. Part of the Boston money founded a trade school along the way.
Q 05Which eight-block stretch of Manhattan, running from Broadway to the East River, is shorthand for American finance?
Wall Street
Wall Street follows the line of a real city wall that stood from 1653 to 1699. Dutch colonists put up the first palisade because they feared an overland attack by English troops.
Q 06Which investor, nicknamed the Oracle of Omaha, pledged 99 percent of his fortune to philanthropic causes?
Warren Buffett
Warren Buffett founded the Giving Pledge in 2010 with Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates, asking fellow billionaires to give away at least half of their fortunes.
Q 07Which flower was at the centre of a Dutch speculative bubble that collapsed suddenly in February 1637?
Tulip
Tulip bulbs at the peak sold for more than ten times the annual income of a skilled artisan. Then contract prices fell abruptly and the trade ground to a halt.
Q 08Which 1983 Eddie Murphy comedy reaches its climax on the frozen orange juice futures market?
Trading Places
Trading Places inspired a real law: a 2010 ban on using misappropriated government information to trade commodities is known as the Eddie Murphy rule.
Q 09Which cryptocurrency was invented by an unknown person writing as Satoshi Nakamoto in a 2008 white paper?
Bitcoin
Bitcoin has a built-in ceiling of 21 million coins, and the last of them is not expected to be issued until around the year 2140.
Q 10Which term for shares in large, dependable companies comes from the top-value token in a simple three-colour poker set?
Blue chip
Blue chip borrows from the basic poker set of white, red and blue counters, in which the blues are worth the most.
Q 11Which investing principle is captured by the old proverb about not putting all your eggs in one basket?
Diversification
Diversification got its modern mathematics from economist Harry Markowitz, whose 1950s work on mixing assets pioneered modern portfolio theory.
Q 12Which former stock exchange chairman was sentenced to 150 years in prison in 2009 for a $65 billion investment fraud?
Bernie Madoff
Bernie Madoff was reported to the authorities by his own sons, Mark and Andrew, straight after he confessed to them in December 2008.
Q 13Which city's stock exchange, considered the world's oldest, began in 1602 with shares in a single spice-trading company?
Amsterdam
Q 21Which famous US stock market gauge, first published in 1896, is weighted by share price instead of company size?
Dow Jones
Dow Jones launched its industrial average in May 1896 with just 12 stocks and a starting value of 40.94. A pricey share moves it more than a cheaper share in a far bigger company.
Q 22Which swindler promised Boston investors a 50% profit within 45 days in 1920 using international postal reply coupons?
Charles Ponzi
Charles Ponzi said he would buy the coupons cheaply abroad and redeem them at face value in America. In reality he was paying earlier investors with the money of later ones.
Q 23Which hedge fund manager made about $1 billion on Black Wednesday in 1992 by betting against the British pound?
George Soros
Amsterdam's exchange grew up so that investors could trade shares of the Dutch East India Company, which held a charter over all Dutch trade in Asia.
Q 14Which word names the slice of profits a company hands its shareholders, most often every quarter in the United States?
Dividend
Dividend schedules vary by country: quarterly in the US, twice a year in Japan, the UK and Australia, and annually in Germany.
Q 15Dividing which number by an annual rate of return gives the rough number of years for an investment to double?
72
72 divided by an 8% return gives nine years. The shortcut is at least five centuries old: Luca Pacioli printed it in a Venetian arithmetic book in 1494.
Q 16Which low-cost investment, derided as un-American at its 1970s launch, simply tracks a benchmark such as the S&P 500?
Index fund
Index fund investing reached the public when the First Index Investment Trust was created on the last day of 1975, and rivals nicknamed it a folly.
Q 17Which three-letter abbreviation names a company's first sale of shares to the public, as Facebook held in May 2012?
IPO
IPO stands for initial public offering. Facebook's raised $16 billion and valued the company at $104 billion.
Q 18Which US workplace retirement plan was benefits consultant Ted Benna among the first to set up, at his own employer?
401(k)
The 401(k) takes its name from the section of the Internal Revenue Code that Congress enacted in November 1978.
Q 19Which nickname is given to 29 October 1929, when panicking investors traded some 16 million shares in a single day?
Black Tuesday
Black Tuesday came five days after Black Thursday, when a then-record 12.9 million shares had been traded.
Q 20Which exchange began operating in February 1971 as the world's first fully electronic stock market?
Nasdaq
Nasdaq began as an acronym for National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations, named for the trade body that founded it.
George Soros was dubbed the man who broke the Bank of England after his fund sold about $10 billion worth of pounds ahead of the currency crisis.
Q 24Which Columbia teacher, called the father of value investing, wrote the 1949 guide The Intelligent Investor?
Benjamin Graham
Benjamin Graham used that book to introduce Mr. Market, an imaginary business partner ruled by his emotions from day to day.
Q 25Which bet that a share price will fall, placed with borrowed shares, burned hedge funds during GameStop's 2021 surge?
Short selling
Short selling GameStop had cost bettors a reported $6 billion by 26 January 2021, and one fund, Melvin Capital, lost 53 percent of its investments that month.
Q 26Which company, originally a textile manufacturer, has Class A shares priced in the hundreds of thousands of dollars?
Berkshire Hathaway
Berkshire Hathaway was formed in 1955 from the merger of two textile firms, and its last mills were shut down in 1985.
Q 27Which US market regulator, created in 1934, had Joseph P. Kennedy, father of a future president, as its first chairman?
SEC
The SEC under Kennedy hired a group of young lawyers that included William O. Douglas and Abe Fortas, both later Supreme Court justices.
Q 28In the classic 60/40 portfolio, 60% goes into stocks and the other 40% into which steadier asset class?
Bonds
Bonds traditionally supplied the steadier 40% of the mix, though many investors have since explored adding alternative assets to smooth out the ride.
Q 29Which airline trades under the stock symbol LUV, a nod to its home base at Dallas Love Field?
Southwest Airlines
Southwest Airlines began flying in 1971 as a Texas-only carrier linking Dallas, Houston and San Antonio, and its headquarters sit beside the airfield.
Q 30Which corporate action did Apple take in August 2020, giving holders three extra shares for each one they owned?
Stock split
Stock split arithmetic leaves each holder's stake worth the same. Apple said the four-for-one move would make its shares accessible to a broader base of investors.