Young people are often looking to experts and executives for financial advice. But sometimes those same executives are looking back at them.
Adena Friedman, chair and CEO of NASDAQ, says that she recently watched her son, who is in his 20s, learning how to invest small amounts of money into an event marketplace website. He took different sides of trades that went something along the lines of: What will the temperature be in New York overnight?
“What was so cool about it was that he was learning market structure—he didn’t even realize he was learning it,” Friedman said at the Fortune Global Forum conference on Tuesday in New York City.
She advises her sons and other younger people looking to invest to get educated before jumping in head first, with either small amounts of money or on platforms where you don’t have to spend any real money at all. “As you get more engaged and more educated, then you can start to take more risk. If you feel like you understand the risk reward that you are entering into, then you get more confidence,” Friedman said.
She warns that those looking to invest should be ready for any outcome, whether it be good or bad. And she urged young people to think about investing in their future from an early age, in a thoughtful, long-term way. “That’s what’s going to make it so that you can afford your schools or your children’s schools, afford a home and afford to travel the world. Those are the more serious things that you want to make sure that you’re having a long term orientation around while you take a little bit of extra cash and apply it in the short term,” she says.
C.S. Venkatakrishnan, group chief executive of Barclays, who was also present in the conversation, and echoed the the same thoughts about investing early on.
“I think the most important thing for young people to understand that investing in their future is really one of the biggest decisions they can make, they should start young from that first paycheck, have a really long term view, and the equity markets are a really important part of that,” he said.
