Big Investing Mistakes, Financial Media, and More With Caleb Silver
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The gap in financial literacy is such a pain point for us as Investopedia because that's what we're here for. That's why we exist and that's really what gets me up every morning.

Welcome to the Stay Wealthy Podcast. I'm your host, Taylor Schulte, and today I've got a really special episode for you. I'm joined by Caleb Silver, the editor-in-chief of Investopedia.com, which is one of the largest financial information and educational websites on the internet. But before I get to that interview, I want to share a project with you that Caleb and a number of other people recently helped with called Learn to Money.

Learn to Money is owned, created, and hosted by my friend Tyrone Ross, who you might remember joined me on the podcast last June.

Tyrone is one of the kindest, most inspiring, giving, and motivating people I know. And a lot more people around the world are going to get to know this amazing human very, very soon. Not only because of the Learn to Money project, but also because he just delivered his very first TED Talk, which I cannot wait to watch. And he has some really big projects up his sleeve.

But in short, Learn to Money is a 10-episode foundational video curriculum that is aiming to help close the financial literacy gap and improve financial education around the world, especially in schools and especially for underprivileged youth.

The very first video was recently published. And while the audio probably doesn't do the video justice, it's just too good not to share with everybody. So turn your volume up and enjoy this gem.

Like many of you, I grew up in a home that had to operate outside of the traditional financial system. You cashed checks at a check cashing place as opposed to the bank because there's no bank account, or having to use payday loans so that you're able to eat or pay the rent. All I knew about money is that it was scarce.

It was something that was in one hand and out the other because you needed it to acquire the basic necessities of life. It's not about prosperity. It's just simply about survival. So money is something that causes tension or stress because you never know when it's coming back. And when you have it, it's already accounted for. To break that mindset, I had to build financial knowledge. So today I'm going to teach you three words you need to know. Money, debt, prosperity.

and credit. So what is money anyway? Legally, money is money because our government says it is. But what gives it value is that you and I both trust that it's worth something. Thousands of years ago, we didn't use dollars when we bought stuff. If I needed a cow, I had to give you something I had in exchange, like 10 chickens.

Together, we both had to trust and believe that 10 chickens was worth one cow. Eventually, we started using coins instead of trading our things directly, and that led to paper money. Now, when I go to the convenience store to get a drink, they don't ask me to give them chickens in exchange. I just have to give them $2. The key is that we both trust that the $2 equals a drink and that the convenience store owner can take that $2 and go buy something else with it.

It's the trust that makes it money. So as I started to get a little bit older, I realized that money equaled the things that I wanted. It was all about jewelry and sneakers and clothes and never about saving or never about putting this money into something that can grow or ownership. Which brings us to debt. Debt is just a fancy word for the money you owe someone else. Here's an example we're all familiar with.

You go to get a haircut. When you get your haircut, you just can't leave without paying. You owe the barber a debt. And when you hand over that $20 bill, you're eliminating your debt to the barber. The reason why he doesn't run after you with his scissors is because the barber trusts that he can use the same money somewhere else.

But what happens if you don't have the money to pay the barber right now? You'll have to ask her for credit. Credit is when you borrow money from someone else and agree to pay it back later. The barber isn't too happy that you don't have the $20, but after some begging, she agrees to let you pay it back in a week. The only catch is that she's going to charge you another dollar for that favor.

So now you owe $21. She's letting you use credit to pay the debt back at another time and she's charging you another dollar for that convenience. That's all credit is. But most people know the word credit from credit cards. I discovered credit cards at 19 years old. And I had no idea what an APR was or anything about the limit. I could just swipe this thing, this plastic thing, and then they give me stuff.

I realized I needed help when the bill collector started calling every day and demanding their money and threatening me that if they didn't get it, that this was going to happen. I was in trouble and had to relearn everything I thought I knew about money. I had to learn what the richest knew about debt and credit, but also about budgeting.

saving, investing, interest, and many more ideas we'll talk about in this series. And that's why I'm so impassioned about this is because it's one thing to get you to learn about money and what money is and what you can do. But if I empower you, if I make you feel like you're as good as everyone else, your knowledge is just as good

You're just as powerful. You have all the same resources. And ultimately, you are in a position where I'm sitting now where you can give back to other people who grew up the same way that we have. The most important thing is to trust yourself with money, to trust that you'll know what to do with it when you get it, and to trust that you really can live the way that you want to. I'm Tyrone Ross, and we'll see you on the next one.

I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. I know you and me are not the target audience for the content, but it's just hard not to appreciate the amount of effort that went into producing that and recognize how much of an impact this project is going to make. If you want to learn more and follow along and maybe even help support it, head over to learntomoney.org, which I'll be sure to link to in the show notes.

As mentioned at the top of the show, I'm joined by Caleb Silver today, and we talk about three big things in this interview. Number one, how Caleb and Investopedia think about the media's role in financial content and education. Number two, the biggest investing mistakes that Investopedia readers made in the last 12 months and

And then finally, we wrap it up with a rapid fire Q&A answering what are fractional shares, limit orders, and SPACs, and what role do these things play in investing? For all the links and resources mentioned today, head over to youstaywealthy.com forward slash 105. Awesome. Let's kick it off then. You brought up doing TV this morning, so that's kind of where I want to start this conversation, which is,

You've worked in media for a long time. I even saw that you majored in journalism. So I thought I would start by asking you just about your opinion on the media's role and specifically Investopedia's role in the financial markets and day-to-day news cycle and content production and distribution.

Many financial planners like myself often suggest that people turn off the news and ignore the media and ignore these talking heads. So I'm just kind of curious to hear how you think about this and what you think about what I just said and how you approach these things as a journalist.

It's a great question. And for years, I worked at CNN and CNN Money, which is now CNN Business, and before that at Bloomberg. The news, and particularly financial news, because that's the one I know, is very much a push medium, pushing information to you. Extra, extra. Read all about it. This is the latest. We have the latest news.

This guy resigns. Here's the earnings report. It's a push at you trying to capture your attention. I came to Investopedia five and a half years ago because it was a site where I had learned a lot about business news and a lot about investing and a lot about the economy and

And it is an SEO-based site. It's a search-based site. 90% of our traffic is people coming in the side door, the back door, you know, the attic door, because they have a very specific question and they are intent-based versus a news consumer who's grazing, you might say.

So our readers, the people that come to Investopedia on the regular are coming to us via a Google or a Bing or a Yahoo or what have you because they want a very specific question answered. And when you flip it like that, we become as a publisher and as a media organization,

a pull organization. We're pulling readers in based on their intent and their intent is very specific. So we have to have the best content to match the intent. It's a different way of solving the puzzle. But I think that because people come to us because they have a need, we

We have a responsibility to educate them, obviously, to answer their question, but also to give them more education so they can take the next step, whether that's an investment decision, a family planning, a retirement decision, or a budgeting decision. That's kind of how I see us as differentiated from the places I used to work.

Now you are on Fox News and CNN and you're on TV and CNBC and doing these things. What do you suggest to listeners who maybe watch some of these programs and shows and how, you know, any advice for how they digest some of this information in the day-to-day news cycle?

Yeah, and those programs, and I like them all, and I do appear there frequently so that I can get out the message of what we see at Investopedia. We're really good at explaining what goes on in the world, and that's kind of the role I take in the media, but we also do a lot of surveys with our readers who are active investors, so we kind of have our finger on the pulse of their sentiment and their behavior, and that's kind of the part I play on TV.

But for folks who have it on or think they need to watch it to make investing decisions or to make retirement planning decisions, it is a lot of noise. And the point of it is to capture your attention. And the way that a lot of them treat retirement

especially the trading day in the stock market, is like a sport. Why do they do that, Taylor? Because it's great programming. So if you think about it, there's the pregame, the pre-market, there's the kickoff, the opening bell, there's the halftime report or the power lunch or whatever you want to call it. There's the final hour of trading, very dramatic. And then there's the close and then the recap. That is sports programming 101 and

They invented that at ABC and the Y World of Sports years ago. That's a way a lot of financial media approaches it because it's kind of heart stopping and you can't take your eyes off it and they're flashing breaking news. As an investor, as an everyday investor, retail investor, somebody who's just trying to do their own planning or work with an advisor,

You could ignore most of that. Watch it to learn, to educate yourselves, to make your own decision, but don't make the decisions that a lot of the guests they bring on make because, as you know, they talk their book and they have an agenda. You've got to do your own plan. But I think they can get very valuable education out of almost all of those platforms because at the end of the day, they are journalists.

So talk to us a little bit about Investopedia. Who is Investopedia? If somebody doesn't know who you guys are, what do you do? And how do you help investors and savvy retirement savers like the Stay Wealthy audience?

So we are a finance and investing educational website. And Taylor, we are going to be 23 years old this August. And in internet years, that's 230. So we've been around from internet 1.0, started by four guys up in Edmonton in Canada who had an idea to put

a dictionary of financial terms and glossaries on the web because it was 1999, the internet bubble was popping, and financial media was really having its moment and really its beginning. If you look at CNBC and Bloomberg TV where I used to work or CNN-FN, it was just beginning and it was this moment

Everybody's interested in the stock market. Retail trading is available to everybody. So they wanted to put a glossary of terms up there to help people figure out what was going on. And they realized that there was a small company down in Mountain View, California called Google, a couple of guys working out of their garage going to Stanford that were trying to index the internet.

So if they put those financial glossaries and terms up on the internet, Google might point to them if people were asking Google about them. So it was a really simple idea, but a very good one. And it's had some staying power. They also decided they would put up test prep for folks trying to get a test for the Series 63 or trying to become a CMT. So there was a lot of test prep content on there as well. Well, all of that was super valuable and they were the first to do it with a great brand name. Investopedia is what it says it is, right? There's no

There's no murkiness about what we do, what we are. Well, it's passed through several hands since they created the site. And IAC, Interactive Corp, which is a big holding company formed by Barry Diller, owns Vimeo. It owns Angie's List. It owned Match.com for a period of time. It acquired Investopedia and it brought it into its other publishing group, which is called DotDash. You know it as About.com.

Internet 1.0, we're now a part of the .dash network. All of the sites in .dash are intent-based sites. So there is our health site, VeryWell. There's Investopedia. There's The Balance, which is our personal finance site. There's LifeWire, which is our technology site. But all of them

are here to answer people's questions about whatever vertical that we're dealing in. And so Investopedia has done that and we've grown over those last seven, eight years since we've been acquired by IAC to add news, to add retirement, to add family planning, to add economics content. So we've broadened our approach and we've also added a whole new category and vertical for financial advisors and we award our financial advisors as the most

influential every year. You're an honorary member of the Investopedia 100 in that you are someone in the financial advisory community that uses your platform to educate your clients, to educate your fellow advisors, and to promote the industry. So we're all about having the answers to people's questions, but also these new categories for advisors like you, but also for investors like me and your listeners.

If we take away the advisor segment for a moment, if we're just looking at Investopedia, do you guys have a target reader? Is there an ideal demographic that you're trying to create content for?

We don't. And what's odd is you'd think that it's mostly young people prepping for an econ one-on-one test or somebody prepping for their series seven test. But the reality is it's mostly folks, Gen X, maybe a little bit younger, a little bit more male than female, but these are individual or what we call retail investors. And a lot of them are DIY investors who want to learn how to invest themselves so that they can take matters into their own hands or

But there's also a lot of people who are looking for advice on how to find a financial advisor, how to work with a financial advisor, how to work with a planner. But more and more, you know, a lot of folks are trying to teach themselves. And 2020 was a huge year for new investors to join the stock market as market participants. We have a lot of those folks and they are 18 to 80.

So you mentioned test prep a couple of times. You mentioned some resources to find a financial advisor. I mean, there is a ton of content on investopedia.com. And I was just curious, kind of selfishly wanted to know, are there tools and resources on that website that you guys make available that maybe even some of your most avid readers don't know about because maybe they're buried behind the scenes or buried in a menu somewhere? Are there any other tools and resources that some people might not know about?

Sure. The most popular page on our site is our Investopedia Stock Simulator. And that allows people to really learn how to paper trade on their own and teaches them how to buy options, teaches them how to trade, stop, limit orders, the basics of trading and investing your own portfolio. And people spend a ton of time on that, as you can imagine, but that's how they really learn how to do it. And then they graduate off to a platform. So that's super popular. And I'm

Tens of thousands of people come through there and start a new game. We call them games, a simulated game for investing every month. They go from that into our site to actually learn what a stop order is, what a limit order is, what a spread is. And so it's a great place for people to practice that, just the trading aspect of it.

That's there. We also developed a bunch of great calculators for mortgages, for calculating your net worth, for planning for retirement. So very simple calculators where we know you're coming into that page because you've Googled, how much do I need to retire by the age of 65? Well, that depends who you are, where you are, where you live, and everything else. But you come to that page. There's a great calculator there. There's a great article for people in various life stages. So behind a lot of the highly trafficked articles are tools that also allow folks to do their own simulations. And we think that's a great way to learn.

I'll be sure to link to all of that in the show notes. I'd love to pivot here and change gears a little bit. I'd love to talk about financial literacy and specifically, I'd love for you to share some of your comments on the financial literacy gap here in the United States and maybe even around the world. And if accessibility is improving, how it's improving,

And what role you guys at Investopedia play in helping to solve this problem? And maybe also use this as an opportunity to talk about the Learn to Money Project with Tyrone Ross, which I know you're a part of. At the top of the show, I played the opening video that he and you guys all produced. So listeners are now familiar with it. But I'd love to just start the conversation here and talk more about this financial literacy gap.

Yeah. First of all, Tyrone Ross is a gem and a friend, and that Learn to Money project is one of the things I'm most proud of in my career, and I've had a 25-year career, so that should tell you something. We'll get to that in a second, but the financial literacy, the gap in financial literacy is such a pain point for us as Investopedia because that's what we're here for. That's why we exist and

And that's really what gets me up every morning because there just isn't enough financial literacy. It's not taught to you in school, even though you graduate college. Really, the day you walk into college, you're going to walk right past the credit card table there where they want to offer you a Frisbee and a free t-shirt to sign up for a new credit card. You walk out of school, most folks, with about $30,000 in debt, whether that's student debt or credit card debt, and you haven't learned anything about how to manage your money

how to invest, how to save for the future, compound interest, the basics tailored. It drives us nuts. We think it needs to be taught very young, as early as elementary school, but please, high school at the very least and make it mandatory. Only about 27 states in the country make it mandatory and it's only one class in their high school curriculum. We think it's as important or more important than any of the major subjects because this is something you're going to live with the rest of your life. Your money and your health, the two most important things

that you have going on for yourself are just not really taught that well in high school, in our schools, and they need to be, and particularly the money aspect of it because everyone's going to face those challenges and we're not giving people the best opportunities to step with their right foot forward when they're ready to become professionals, when they get their first job,

when they get out of college. So we just beat the drum on that like crazy and do webinars on it, do very basic things. I started a TikTok channel for us because I know so many folks are starting to trade for the first time without any idea of what they're doing. We want to just slow it down and help people learn the basics so that investing and planning and budgeting and all these things that are really central to your life become part of the lifelong journey. And they're not in other things people don't want to talk about, as you well know, and it's just the wrong way to approach it.

So talk to us about how this Learn to Money project came about, your role in it, the goals, what Tyrone is doing. Would love to just kind of hear your thoughts there.

So Learn to Money is really Tyrone Ross Jr.'s dream of making sure that financial literacy is available to every child in America, but particularly those in the inner cities and places where he grew up, where it's just not even talked about. They don't talk about money. They don't talk about investing. They don't talk about how money is made or how to save it or what to do with it. So Tyrone is very passionate about financial literacy. And I met him attending several of these industry conferences that we all go to where everybody is talking about the latest ETF or the latest

technology that can help you screen for the most popular dividend stocks or whatever. Tyrone's up there telling financial advisors and planners and investors, five minutes from where we're sitting in, pick your city, Boca Raton or Orlando, Florida. Schools can't put food on the table for their kids.

He was there raising money and raising awareness about what was happening all around us while we're sitting there eating shrimp cocktail and talking about ETFs. So I immediately gravitated to him because we're birds of a feather there. I really believe in this. Tyrone is out there actually doing something about it. So he created this concept to do a video series called Learn to Money that teaches folks how

like he was when he was 15, 16, 17 years old, about money so they don't walk into the next phase of their life completely unaware and start a life of debt that they can't get out of. He created this idea for a video series, hooked up with a couple of terrific producers that we're working with. And as soon as I saw that he was doing it, he put out a tweet. I called him immediately and I'd known him because we were already working on some stuff. And I said, whatever you need me to do,

Caleb Silver, the business journalist who's been in this game a long time. I'm in whatever you need Investopedia to do as a platform for amplifying Learn to Money, the video series, and now a high school curriculum that teachers can teach to their students. We're here to help promote and help you produce. So I've put our shoulders into it to help get that off the ground. And ultimately, it will be a multi-part video series that

It takes on topics like debt, like spending, like investing, like compound interest in a very approachable way in a beautiful animated series. And Tyrone is terrific on camera. That goes with an educational curriculum so that if you're a high school teacher, you can say, I'm going to do financial literacy this semester. I have the learn to money video series and the worksheets and the online work that I can give to my students and we can make that a project. So there's no more excuses.

We're putting it out there and we know that people need it and they're going to use it. And I'm really delighted and honored to be a part of the project.

Well, you guys all did an incredible job, especially Tyrone. I don't think the audio does it any justice. So I'll tell everybody one more time, go to the website, which I'll link to in the show notes and watch this video. It is just absolutely incredible. And while it was made for a younger demographic, people in middle or high school, I think a lot of people can learn from it. When I was approaching the professional world, I was interviewing for a couple of firms. And the first question one of my mentors asked me was, why?

what's the difference between a stock and a bond? And I just like, I was stumped, you know, and here I am searching for a job in finance and I couldn't accurately tell him the difference between a stock and a bond. So I think a lot of people can learn from this video and, you know, you guys and Tyrone, especially just have an incredible way of telling stories and educating people. So it gave me the chills watching that video for the first time. So well done.

It gave me the chills watching us produce it and just seeing the passion that Tyrone brings to it. And the animation that you mentioned is special, learntomoney.org. And I know you'll link to it, but it is something I'm really honored to be a part of. Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks for sharing all that. Let's switch gears and talk about the recent Investopedia survey that you did titled Middle-Aged, Risky, and Going at It Alone. I've got a few questions here, but I'd love for you to just kick it off and share some of the highlights from the survey, some of the big takeaways.

It was going to be my new album cover, but I'm not going at it alone because I'm happily married. But this was a survey. We've been surveying our readers since the pandemic, before the pandemic began for their sentiment. We have about 1.5 million daily newsletter readers across our five or six newsletters. So they're all levels. They're white belts and they're green belts and they're black belts in investing and in trading. So they come to us from all sorts of walks of life.

We've been surveying them to get a sense of their bullishness or bearishness, what they were worried about, where they were putting their money, their favorite stocks or securities, were they concerned about the political landscape, were they concerned about COVID and the pandemic and the resurgence of that. All along, every six weeks, we do a new survey and we come out with data that shows us putting our finger on the pulse of the investor and we're able to

Express that by me going on television and talking about it and going on podcasts and going on the radio and my own podcast because knowing how people feel and how they're allocating their money is fascinating for financial planners but also for regular investors. Do you want to know? Are you feeling some of the same sentiments that other investors are? Where do you stand in your own personal investing situation?

universe. So we've been doing that. And then because so many new investors and traders began investing and participating in the market for the first time over the past 12 months, for whatever reason, they were home, they had stimulus money, they were out of work, they were

working from home, pick your reasons. There was no sports to bet on. 10 million people at least started investing for the first time last year. And a lot of them did it kind of when that meme stock game stop mania was happening, jumping in and buying really hot and shorted stocks. And people were getting burned. So we wanted to find out, are these people who the media, the financial media portrays them to be, right? Is this your nephew, home from college, sitting in the den, playing video games and trading stocks and

yelling for his lunch to be brought in? Or are these folks a different age group with a completely different mentality? As it turns out, according to our readers, and I think our readers are a good representation of individual investors, a lot of these folks are middle-aged. They're in their 40s. Their Gen X are a little bit older. They're putting real money to risk here. Some putting as much as $500,000 at risk. And a lot of them, 78% say they're teaching themselves how to do it.

Other folks are learning from websites like Investopedia and other good websites out there, and only about 22% are using financial advisors for that information. So that's a huge wake-up call to the fact that there are so many new participants investing for themselves, teaching themselves how to do it, taking risks by over-concentrating in their portfolios or trading on margin in some cases or

or only having a couple of two or three stocks are doing a lot of turnover in their portfolio versus adding to positions for the long term. We were surprised at who they were, how old they were, how well off they were, and the kind of behavior they were exhibiting. Was there anything that surprised you in this recent survey?

the age surprised us most. We know there's a lot of investors that are Gen X. I'm one of them. But we also thought that there were many more folks in the sort of 18 to 28 category that were part of the retail trading wave that we've seen over the last six months. And while it's true that there are a lot of young folks who do that, a lot of these folks are, like I said, middle-aged, mid-career, and they're trying to invest for the first time. That surprised me. Also, a lot of the mistakes they admitted to making and

And God bless our readers. They're so honest with us. It's a gift to be able to do these surveys with them and have them tell us how they really feel. They admitted to a lot of mistakes, Taylor, and they're interesting ones to learn from.

Yeah. One of the things that jumped out to me was that 53% of the respondents, these new investors admitted to suffering losses with their investments in the last 12 months. And as we all know, the last 12 months has been pretty easy to earn a positive rate of return on your money. You could kind of throw a dart and make money. So it was interesting to me to see that over half of them admitted to suffering losses. And it sounds like

It was mostly due from some of these common mistakes. And maybe this is a good opportunity for you to run through some of those common mistakes and share it with our listeners. You hit the exact nail on the head there. They admitted to making mistakes. 86% said they made some gains. And like you said, it was hard to not make money. But if you were trading frequently, it's a good way to lose money, especially if you don't know what you're doing. So here's some of the common ones that we saw. We asked them straight up. We gave them a list of about a dozen. And here are the ones that came up the most often.

Timing the market. Two-thirds say they try to time the market at least sometimes. We always say, and you probably say this too, it's time in the market, not timing the market that works because who can time the market? You may get lucky once or twice, but a lot of folks tried to do that buying at the low, selling at the high. It's really hard to do that and

Two-thirds of our respondents admitted to doing that. 56% over-weighted their portfolio in just one stock or one asset class. So if they really believed in e-commerce, they were loading up on just e-commerce stocks. If they really believed in Amazon or Tesla or GameStop, they were just loading up on that stock but not really adding to the position

and building a long-term position by dollar cost averaging their way in, just buying it and trading it and hoping to flip it at a higher price, waiting for waves in the trade to be able to come in and out and make some money. A lot of folks, 40% admitted to being too reactive. They made trades on gut feelings alone. Who hasn't done that?

I've done it. But you know, when you do it, you usually end up wrong because you can't time it and your gut doesn't know what's going to happen. And it's a risky place to take some chances. 12%, Taylor said, they traded on margin in the last year. That's not a lot, but still folks trading on margin who are new to the market, new traders, new investors is a

great way to get your hands burned. 25% of those who said they traded on margin said they knew what they were doing. So 75% had no idea what they were doing in one of the most dangerous trades you can make if you don't have that skillset. Yeah. How often do you guys run these surveys? Every six weeks. This was a special one where we very explicitly said, we want to know your sentiment, but we're also asking you, our readers, are

who's new to the market in that you've just joined in the last 12 months and who's been here longer. So then we could split it out and just look at what new traders were doing versus older traders and investors and older traders and investors have the benefit of experience. Some have been with us for a long time and have been through a bunch of different market cycles. So

including the great financial crisis, including the dot-com bubble. So they've seen some cycles and we always can hear them when we get the surveys back because they're cautious, they're a little bit more careful and they've seen some of these movies before. So they're a little bit more trepidatious. The newer, bolder investors, and they're not all 23 years old, are the ones who are taking risk and learning what happens when things go wrong. Yeah, well, I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised to see that podcasts were the third most used podcast

medium or source used to get financial information during the pandemic. So I was happy to see that just below websites and news outlets. So podcasts came in number three there. Hallelujah. Well, you mentioned a few minutes ago that you have a TikTok channel. TikTok has been a lot of fun for my wife and I to kill some time, especially during the pandemic. We had a lot of fun with it.

Great.

Great question. I used to get this question all the time. Friends of mine who know where I work and they would say, hey, I want to buy Amazon or I want to buy this or that stock, but it's $2,000 a share. Or I want to buy Berkshire Hathaway, but it's $250,000 a share. Well, in the last few years, many of the big online brokers have offered what they call fractional shares. So they are what they say they are. You can buy a fractional piece, a dollar amount of a stock versus buying in one share of the stock

on its own. Because if you can't afford that one share, then it means you couldn't get exposure. Well, now Schwab, now Fidelity, even Robinhood, they all offer some form of what they call stock slices or fractional shares. So you can choose when you go to make that order, that buy order, whether it's going to be

an amount of shares, 10 shares or $10 worth. And that allows you to accumulate a position. But you know what they're also great for, Taylor, is gifts. If you wanted to give somebody a couple hundred dollars worth of amazon.com as a graduation gift or pick your stock that you want to give them, you can do it via fractional shares. It's so much easier. And it takes that, you know, the stress of I can't afford the stock, but I can put in a couple hundred bucks and get access.

What is a limit order and why would somebody use one? This is another great one. When folks go to buy their first shares of stock or they're starting to invest for the first time, maybe they have an idea of what they think a company's stock price should be, or maybe they've done the research and maybe let's just pick WD-40. It's a stock I love to talk about because it's been around forever and everybody has a cat or two in their toolbox. Stock hit an all-time high many times in 2020, incidentally. Well,

Great San Diego company. Yes, absolutely. So if you wanted to buy that stock but you don't, let's say it's trading at 80 bucks, you think 85, you want to buy it somewhere between 80 and 85 but you don't want to buy it if it goes to 100, you place an order and you place an order with a certain price ceiling on it. So if it goes above this, I'm not buying it. Or it allows you to place that order without having the risk of missing the price you want to get it at and if you miss it, if it passes through that price, you miss it but

But you set that limit order and then when it does hit that point again, then it exercises your purchase of that stock. So it's a great way to control the price you want to pay for the stocks you want to own.

And we should also say that that would apply to ETFs as well, exchange traded funds. Absolutely. ETFs to trade and are priced like stocks. So you can do that with ETFs. You can do that with stocks. I'm not sure on the commodities front if you can do that, but let's stick to those two categories right now. And it's a great way to sort of limit your risk and feel better about the price you feel is right to pay for the security. All right. And then finally, what the heck is a SPAC? Oh.

Wow. SPAC is the term of the year of 2020 for Investopedia. These are special purpose acquisition companies. A lot of times people refer to them as blank check companies. These are private companies formed with the sole purpose of finding another company to target in an acquisition and take it public. And as an investor in a SPAC, you have the right to

to buy shares of the SPAC or shares of the target company once it takes it public, or you can buy what we call warrants, which is the right to buy stock at a later date. So it's a great way to access companies. And you're seeing a lot of these SPACs formed around the hot areas of the market. So electric vehicles, you see them in space travel, you see them in cannabis and in DraftKings, the online gaming site, went public via SPAC. It's a faster way for a company to get public

through this vehicle called a special purpose acquisition company or SPAC as it's known. And it gets them public a lot faster than the normal routine that companies go through in the IPO process. And for investors, it's a way to access those markets and those companies that would have taken years potentially to go public if they ever made it. That said, there's a ton of risk in SPACs because the private company that is a

acquiring the company that intends to take public has a period of time in which to do that. It's a year or two years and they have to get it public or return the money to you. Plus some of the ownership structure of these SPACs is not really that much in favor of the retail investor, but they are very volatile. They have been very hot. So it's a hot part of the market that everybody was talking about and every celebrity has one now. And we may have seen the bubble on this one.

Yeah, it is a fun topic. I'll have to dedicate a whole episode to talking about them, especially since it sounds like WeWork might be going public here through a SPAC. So that'll be interesting to watch. Yeah, absolutely. Listeners can...

Obviously here, your passion for financial education, you're extremely knowledgeable around a lot of these different topics. If people want to hear more of you and your knowledge and the things that you're doing in Investopedia, they can listen to the Investopedia Express podcast. Maybe talk to us about what that podcast is, where they can find it, some of the topics you cover and all that good stuff.

Thanks. Yeah. The Investopedia Express is a podcast I put out every Monday morning, and it's really set up as a setup for the week. So what I call it is what the educated investor needs to know to start the week. And that could be, here's what's happening in the markets. Here's what's happening in the global economy. Here's what's happening this week. I talked about the infrastructure bill that President Biden just put out there and what that might mean in terms of government spending and what sectors might benefit. So it's a setup.

And so here we are, here's what's going to be happening this week and how to think about it as an educated investor and a conversation with somebody in the industry that's touching an interesting part of it. And that could be an economist, a Nobel Prize winning economist like a Joe Stiglitz. It could be a strategist, an equity strategist at one of the big investment banks.

It could be a financial advisor or planner that speaks the language of retail investors, or it could be a rapper like Cassius Cuvait rapping about SPACs, who I had on the podcast recently. So it's a fast one. We call it the Express because it's fast, 25 minutes or less. And it's every Monday morning. And I have a lot of fun doing it, way too much fun doing it. And I would love it if folks would check it out. Give me some feedback.

Of course. Yeah. I will link to the podcast in the show notes. Everybody can find it and check it out and tune in. Caleb, I really appreciate not only everything that you do for financial education in the consumer space and the advisor space, but I appreciate you coming on this podcast today and sharing some of your knowledge and some of the history behind investopedia.com. So thank you very, very much.

Is there anything else that you'd like to share? And maybe if not, where can people find you? Yeah, I am easy to find. I am at Caleb Silver on Twitter. You can find me on LinkedIn. My name and my bio are all over the website and the podcast course. And I try to get out there a lot. And what I really love is hearing from our readers and from our followers. And we have a great dialogue going with them. So it's been a real honor to be the editor-in-chief of Investopedia. And I've really enjoyed talking to you and getting to know you, Taylor. So thanks so much for having me.

Absolutely. Thanks again, Caleb.