Stock Market
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7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Stock Market trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The stock market turns up everywhere, from the evening news to retirement accounts, yet much of its language sounds like code. Behind the jargon lie four centuries of history, full of manias, panics, swindlers and a few very patient investors. This quiz covers the essentials: what the everyday trading terms mean, how shares are bought and sold, the indexes and exchanges that set the tone around the world, and the crashes, scandals and films that made Wall Street part of popular culture. It is written for students in a personal finance or economics class, new investors testing the basics, and anyone hosting a trivia night. Every answer comes with a clear explanation, so you can play it straight through or print it for a group.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which scientist lost a fortune in the South Sea Bubble and reportedly blamed 'the madness of people'?
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton lost at least £10,000, a fortune worth millions now, when the South Sea Company collapsed around 1720. He was Master of the Mint, in charge of Britain's coinage, at the time.
Q 02Which motorcycle maker trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol HOG?
Harley-Davidson
Harley-Davidson swapped its plain ticker HDI for HOG in 2006. The nickname goes back to a 1920s racing team of farm boys who kept a live pig as their mascot.
Q 03Which animal gives its name to a stock market that has fallen 20% or more from a recent high?
Bear
Bear is usually traced to 18th-century London's 'bear-skin jobbers', who sold shares they did not yet own, like a hunter selling the skin before catching the animal.
Q 04Which flower's bulbs sold for over ten times a skilled artisan's yearly income in a 1637 Dutch bubble?
Tulip
Tulip prices collapsed in February 1637, when traders could no longer find buyers at ever-higher prices. The mania is generally considered the first recorded speculative bubble in history.
Q 05Which fictional financier says 'greed, for lack of a better word, is good' in the 1987 film Wall Street?
Gordon Gekko
Gordon Gekko's speech was adapted from a real 1986 graduation address by financier Ivan Boesky. The role won Michael Douglas the Academy Award for Best Actor.
Q 06Which investor, nicknamed the 'Oracle of Omaha', turned textile maker Berkshire Hathaway into a vast holding company?
Warren Buffett
Warren Buffett bought his first three shares at age 11. He later called the Berkshire textile business his worst trade, even though its name ended up on his whole empire.
Q 07What has signaled the start and end of each trading day at the New York Stock Exchange since 1903?
A bell
A bell took over from a gong when the exchange moved into its Broad Street building in 1903. Pressing the button that rings it has become a ceremony for celebrities and company executives.
Q 08Which retailer's shares leapt from about $17 to nearly $500 in January 2021 as Reddit's WallStreetBets forum piled in?
GameStop
GameStop's surge handed heavy losses to hedge funds that had bet against the video game chain. Some brokers halted buying of the shares, which led to a hearing in the US Congress.
Q 09Which city's stock exchange, begun in 1602 to trade Dutch East India Company shares, is considered the world's oldest?
Amsterdam
Amsterdam's exchange began as a secondary market, a place where the company's first investors could sell their shares on to someone else instead of waiting years for a voyage to pay off.
Q 10Which poker-derived term describes shares in large, well-established companies known for reliable profits?
Blue chip
Blue chip comes from poker sets, in which the blue chips traditionally carry the highest value. The stock sense is said to have been coined in the 1920s by Oliver Gingold as he stood watching a ticker.
Q 11What name is given to the share of a company's profits paid out to its stockholders, often every three months?
Dividend
Dividend payments usually arrive quarterly in the US but only once a year in Germany. The Dutch East India Company was the first recorded public company to pay them regularly.
Q 12Which three-letter abbreviation describes a private company selling its shares to the public for the very first time?
IPO
IPO stands for initial public offering, the moment a company's shares are listed on an exchange. In the United States, the first was the sale of shares in the Bank of North America around 1783.
Q 13Which bronze animal did sculptor Arturo Di Modica leave outside the New York Stock Exchange without permission in 1989?
A bull
Q 21What name is given to a company dividing each of its shares into several cheaper ones, such as two for one?
Stock split
Stock split arithmetic leaves every holding worth exactly what it was before: twice the shares at half the price. Companies do it because a very high share price can put off small investors.
Q 22Which instruction tells a broker to buy a share only at a named price or lower, even if the trade never happens?
Limit order
Limit order users control the price they pay but risk never being filled. A market order is the reverse: it executes immediately at whatever the going price happens to be.
Q 23What is the gap between a share's highest bid and lowest asking price, a hidden cost of every trade, called?
The spread
A bull weighing 7,100 pounds, the statue was hauled away by police within a day. The city then gave it a temporary spot on Broadway nearby, where it became a tourist landmark.
Q 14Which word for an investor's full set of holdings comes from the Italian for a case for carrying loose papers?
Portfolio
Portfolio comes from portafoglio, which joins the Italian words for 'carry' and 'sheet'. Spreading one across many different kinds of asset is a standard way to reduce risk.
Q 15Which measure, share price multiplied by shares outstanding, sorts companies into small, mid and large?
Market cap
Market cap is an abbreviation of market capitalization. It counts only what the shares are worth, so analysts who also want to weigh a company's debts turn to enterprise value.
Q 16Which crime, dealing in shares on confidential company information, was central to the 1980s Ivan Boesky scandal?
Insider trading
Insider trading ended Boesky's career in 1986. He paid a record $100 million penalty and went to prison after informing on other financiers.
Q 17Which US agency, created in 1934 in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash, regulates the stock market?
The SEC
The SEC had Joseph P. Kennedy, father of President John F. Kennedy, as its first chairman. Franklin D. Roosevelt chose him partly for his own experience on Wall Street.
Q 18Which stock index is named after a journalist and a statistician who founded a financial news company in 1882?
The Dow Jones
The Dow Jones honours Charles Dow and Edward Jones. Their index debuted in 1896 with just 12 industrial stocks and went on to track 30 large American companies.
Q 19Which American stock exchange opened for business in 1971 as the world's first fully electronic market?
Nasdaq
Nasdaq began as a screen-based quotation system, with the trades themselves agreed by telephone until 1984. Its name was an acronym for National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations.
Q 20Which country's leading stock index, the Nikkei 225, took 34 years to regain the peak it hit in 1989?
Japan
Japan's best-known index is named after the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, the newspaper that took it over in 1970. Its 1989 bubble-era record was finally beaten in February 2024.
The spread is one measure of a market's liquidity, or how easily shares change hands. Along with brokerage fees, it makes up almost all of the cost of trading on an exchange.
Q 24What phrase describes purchasing shares with money borrowed from a broker, a habit that deepened the 1929 crash?
Buying on margin
Buying on margin was loosely regulated in the 1920s, when loans covering up to 90 percent of a purchase were not uncommon. As prices fell, forced sales to repay those loans pushed them lower.
Q 25Which type of investment fund, launched in the US in 1993 as 'Spiders', trades on an exchange like a single share?
An ETF
An ETF, or exchange-traded fund, holds a whole basket of investments. The 1993 original, Standard & Poor's Depositary Receipts, became the largest fund of its kind in the world.
Q 26Which ratio, usually shortened to two initials, divides the cost of one share by a company's profit per share?
Price-to-earnings
Price-to-earnings ratios of around 10 to 20 are widely treated as fairly priced, though the range shifts from one industry to another. The ratio is usually written P/E.
Q 27What term describes the profit from selling a share for more than it cost, taxed less in the US after a year?
Capital gain
Capital gain rules in the US reward patience: assets held for more than one year are taxed at a lower rate. The term covers any asset sold above its purchase price, not only shares.
Q 28Which grim phrase, first reported in 1985, describes a brief recovery in a falling share price before it drops again?
Dead cat bounce
Dead cat bounce comes from the idea that even a dead cat will bounce if it falls from a great height. Its earliest press citation described the Singaporean and Malaysian markets in December 1985.
Q 29Which month completes the old investing adage 'Sell in ___ and go away', a warning about weak summer returns?
May
May opens the six months that the adage says to sit out. The idea is also called the Halloween indicator, because the stronger half of the year for shares is said to run from November to April.
Q 30What electrical term names the rule that halts all US share trading for 15 minutes after a 7% market drop?
Circuit breaker
Circuit breaker rules were brought in after the 1987 crash to give panicking traders time to think. A 20% fall halts trading for the rest of the day.