Interesting comment ... that there were few younger people present.
It may be that younger people find the field of "finance" [however defined] to be too complicated, with too many variables, and unable to pick up ONE SINGLE thread with which to begin a quest for information.
Some of those "younger folk" think I'm an old fart (technically, I am), but when I get into one-sentence-summaries of why this company or that company is doing well or not well, they get dazzled after the first twenty or thirty examples.
None of the winning (or losing) CEO's is a household name. Utterly forgettable. But important, nonetheless.
And there are more scams [and sometimes just plain bad luck or lack of common sense] out there than you can count; and all the government regulations in the world can't prevent or fix them; in fact, the government is at the root of some of them, even if well-meaning. [If a government accounting rule is so complicated that the company officers spend more time filling out government forms than they do managing the company, then the government is not helping.] [I could tell you stories.]
So, you raise an interesting point. Apart from the "mattress fund", in which younger folk just keep their carefully hoarded and sequestered savings in a money market fund because they just don't trust anything else, it is difficult for younger people to know where to begin. To invest wisely and to avoid pitfalls.
Maybe the key word is "investing wisely" and wisdom takes years ... nay ... decades ... to acquire.
And meanwhile the younger folk are simply trying to learn their day jobs and to raise families.
In my case, totally by "accident' [actually, it was Divine Intervention ... no joke], I found out about Mr. Lichello and his AIM system.
As one book stated in the intro: "Life is difficult; but once you realize that life is difficult, then it is no longer quite so difficult."
Keep fighting the good fight of faith. [ paraphrase from St. Paul ]
Best regards,
Al
AI
