Teach Your Kids About Investing
(Without Telling Them).

I have a theory about hot stoves. You can tell a child ten thousand times not to touch one. You can explain heat transfer, describe burns, tell cautionary tales. None of it works as well as the moment they touch it themselves. After that, they never forget.

I have been investing since I was 16, funding my first account with savings from washing dishes and compressing cardboard at a local supermarket. Around 10,000 Danish kroner, a little over $1,400. This was 1998. Yahoo had opened a new world of financial information to teenagers like me with an IBM-PC borrowed from their parents, and I devoured it all: the speculation, the stock tips, the short-term noise. What I lacked was any framework to filter it.

Back then, investing in Denmark was largely the preserve of an informed minority. My local bank charged at least 125 kroner or 1% per trade, whichever was higher, on top of custody fees and wide bid-ask spreads. Today, some platforms charge as little as 0.05% per trade, and in some markets commissions have disappeared entirely. Trading costs have fallen by more than 90%.

I did not lose my capital. But I subjected myself to entirely unnecessary anxiety caused by wild price swings and ultimately mediocre returns at excessive cost. A simpler, steadier portfolio would have performed far better. And let me sleep.

There is an old saying:

“when a person with money meets a person with experience, the person with experience leaves with the money”.

I had that moment. My broker left with the money. I left with the experience.

I am grateful for it. Fail early and often, with sums meaningful enough to sting yet small enough not to matter in the longer run. You can study the failures of others, and I certainly have done. You can read the literature – have done plenty of that too. But nothing teaches quite like committing mistakes yourself.

So when my children reached school age, I was determined to give them a better start. Early financial education is one of the most consequential gifts a family can give its next generation. Experiential learning, not lectures, is what makes it stick.

What I had not yet figured out was how to make that happen at the dinner table.

What followed were three attempts, each more humbling than the last.

First Try: Show Them the Data

The obvious move for someone who has spent 20+ years working in the financial industry: open investment accounts in their names and show them the evidence.

I pulled up Novo Nordisk’s stock chart, deliberately stopping the timescale at July 2024. Decades of upward trajectory. Denmark’s pharmaceutical darling. The company underwriting such a large share of Danish economic growth that we started accounting for Danish GDP with and without pharmaceuticals – a difference that could translate into an economy in recession or growth.

“See this line?” I said, tracing the compound returns. “This is what patient capital looks like.”

Their eyes glazed over in under ten seconds.

Fine. Cautionary tales then. I showed them the Nordic warnings: Finland had Nokia, Sweden had H&M, Denmark now has Novo. Each the unquestioned national champion. Each apparently invincible at its peak. Each a brutal lesson in concentration risk.

Timing, I explained, savages returns. Buy Nokia in 2000? Still underwater twenty-five years later. Buy in 1995? Fortune made before the fall. The riskiest moment to own any stock is precisely when everyone believes it can do no wrong. Peak sentiment breeds peak complacency. Even expert analysts miss the inflection points: they model demand and supply brilliantly, but like so many others (myself included) easily underestimate the unknowable threats – emerging competition, regulatory shifts, technological disruption – the risks that seem obvious only in hindsight.

I tried explaining dividends as stock interest. This flopped immediately. Interest in their savings account arrives daily and predictably – an unusual but very educational feature. Dividends from abstract companies they have never seen arrive once or perhaps twice a year. Totally intangible.

I showed them how an equal-weight portfolio of Nokia, H&M, and Novo would have continued climbing despite the individual failures at different points in time. How the worst losses from the portfolio would have been far smaller than holding any single stock through its cycle.

Blank stares.

Second Try: Teach Them Through Monopoly

Monopoly seemed perfect. Property ownership. Investment decisions. Real estate appreciation. Resource management. The whole capitalist curriculum in a box.

Except Monopoly teaches exactly the wrong lessons.

The dominant strategy is aggressive acquisition financed by maximum leverage. Buy every property you land on. Build houses immediately. If cash constrained, pawn your property and wait for better days. Never save. Never wait. Never analyze opportunity cost. The winner is not the prudent saver deploying capital strategically. It is whoever buys most aggressively and rolls luckiest.

My kids were learning something, just not what I intended: that leverage beats patience, aggression beats strategy, and randomness beats skill.

The cruel irony: Monopoly was invented by Elizabeth Magie in 1903 as a critique of land monopolies and rentier wealth. Parker Brothers bought it, stripped the lesson, and kept the mechanics. A game designed to condemn capitalism ended up celebrating its worst instincts.

Strike two.

Third Try: Let Them Experience It Through Splendor

One evening, we tried a new game: Splendor.

And suddenly, everything clicked.

Splendor is simple to learn. Players collect gem tokens, spend them to buy mines and trading posts, and those cards generate permanent resources that fund bigger purchases. Collect the right combination and noble patrons seek you out. First to 15 points wins. The whole game is patience, compounding, and watching what your opponents are doing.

The mechanics teach nearly every investment principle I had failed to explain with charts.

1. You must save before you can invest.

Unlike Monopoly’s buy immediately or lose the opportunity mechanic, Splendor requires you to collect resources over multiple turns before making your first move. Grabbing a few gems at a time feels slow. It is also the only path forward. Patience is not optional.

2. Reinvestment compounds your advantage.

Buy a ruby mine and you receive a free ruby every subsequent turn. That ruby funds your next purchase, which generates more resources, which enables bigger purchases. My kids watched their purchasing power accelerate:

“Dad, I can buy this one without any chips now because I have so many mine cards!”

They had discovered compound growth without me saying a word about it.

3. Specialization and diversification are both valid strategies.

Some players focus heavily on one gem type. Others spread across multiple. We have seen both win at our dinner table. One night, my daughter went all-in on rubies. My son diversified across everything. Both had viable paths to victory. The game prescribes no single correct approach, which is exactly right. Concentrated conviction and broad diversification can both work, depending on execution and circumstance.

But some diversification is non-negotiable. Total concentration leaves you exposed. My kids discovered this empirically after a few crushing defeats, which is roughly how most investors discover it, professional or otherwise.

Here the Nokia-H&M-Novo lesson finally landed. Not because I showed them charts, but because they had felt the pain of over-concentration in rubies while watching a sibling win with a balanced portfolio.

4. Strategic thinking and market dynamics matter.

The asset you are saving for might be snatched before you can buy it. My kids learned to watch what their fellow players were collecting.

“He’s been storing emeralds… he must be going for that Level 2 card. Should I take it first or let him have it?”

Suddenly they were thinking about competitive positioning, opportunity cost, and whether to block a competitor or stay focused on their own path.

5. Quick wins can be traps.

The tempting move is to buy the expensive card that advances you faster in the short term, but drains a lot of resources. Rushing for an early win often locks you into a narrow path, leaving you exposed when the board shifts. My kids learned this the hard way: a hasty grab for points early cost them the flexibility to compete later. The patient player, building quietly toward a stronger position, won.

The Nokia parallel finally made sense here, not from a chart, but from having made the mistake themselves of over-concentrating into an expensive position.

What Changed

The difference between attempts one, two, and three was not the complexity of the concepts. It was the mode of learning. Data made investing abstract and forgettable. Monopoly installed the wrong mental models entirely. Splendor made the principles obvious, intuitive, and sticky.

My kids still do not know they have been learning about portfolio construction, concentration risk, compound growth, and strategic rebalancing. They think they are collecting gems and competing for noble patrons.

Which is exactly the point.

As for Novo Nordisk: most Danes have a stake in the company’s recovery, directly or through their pension. The national champion that once seemed invincible is a reminder that no stock is exempt from the lessons above.

But hope, as my kids now know from watching a sibling snatch the emerald mine they were saving for, is not a strategy.

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This article reflects my personal views.

For more on why early financial education matters, see: Why Most Family Offices Should Fail, And How to Build the Rare Exception.