Day: August 27, 2014

Making students memorize the periodic table but teaching them almost nothing about basic finance is bad enough. But even at the college level, how finance and investing is taught is disconnected from how it actually works. Finance is taught overwhelmingly as a math-based field, in which students learn how to calculate beta by hand and dissect a balance sheet in their sleep. In the real world, finance is overwhelmingly a psychology-based field, where the best investors are those who control their emotions. This is rarely taught and never emphasized. And it’s why some of the world’s best investors have no formal finance training. Other fields, such as medicine and engineering, have done a much better job preparing students for the real world.-from Fool