If I were Robinhoood, I'd try to be the facebook of financial startups- give every high school student a starting portfolio of fake stocks to manage through high school so they learn how to invest and manage money, then have avenues to have different "tabs" in their portfolio for real stocks they have gifted by family, and another for real ones they buy...

They can play with purchase what ifs in the stock sandbox, and plan and grow in the real tabs... among many many other things...

I did that with google finance about a decade ago and the financial crisis wiped me out. I wasn't even good at managing fake money.

Disclosure: I have started putting away some money in a vanguard Roth IRA now. I don't think about it too much because it is the minimum vtsax would let me invest anyways.

We were doing that in a high school course. Then 9/11 happened.

I suggested Delta.

A teammate asked his dad for a stock tip and invested the rest in a company none of us had ever heard of.

Delta popped back +25% or so over the next bit (from memory).

His company made some announcement and the stock doubled in value.

... I learned a lot about how the world works from that class.

In my middle school course when we played "the stock market game", I just picked a spread of reasonable stocks at the start. Every time we could rebalance our portfolio, I just read. I didn't care about the game. Got first or second in the class, and thus free pizza, for it. Kinda continuing that with in my current investment life; invest in index funds, walk away.

But is investing in stocks something you would want high school graduates to pick up?

I always thought of stock-picking as something that the average Joe should be careful with. Trading on less information than insiders and slowly being eaten by fees and taxes. It's an under EV game.

Besides that there's the wisdom of crowds that will eventually follow the trends and invest irrationally (pump and dump). That's how bubbles are created.

When I was in highschool, I was attempting to corner the market on commodities - specifically wheat!

Every day I would log in and manage my account - I was a commodities broker and I managed to build a pretty powerful little empire with my savvy transactions.

While not as powerful when it came to ore... my wheat holdings were no laughing matter... that was until the day I smoked pot, dialed in and accidentally sold all my wheat holdings as opposed to buying up all the other supply - thus eliminating my monopoly on the galactic wheat trade...

Man, Trade Wars was a blast in the early nineties.

That's an interesting story and I'm sure you learned a lot through the experience. I'm also sure there are plenty others like you, to whom trading was educative.

But on the other hand I'm sure there are a whole lot of young people on the other side of things. Those who start learning about stock-trading and soon see it as a way to make money fast by taking huge risks. They get spammed by 500$ signup bonuses to various stock-trading platforms, they're presented with 100x leveraged trading options and such. I don't see much benefit in that.

What I think is young people should be taught how the market works with a huge grain of salt. Definitely not by letting them go wild with play-money since we all know what will follow up.

Agreed, it's a fine line between investing and gambling, and much of it has to do with the length of time involved.