October 2026
About a third of U.S. households invest outside of workplace retirement plans, a process which increasingly involves navigating an expansive menu of products, information sources, and trading platforms while often seeking little to no involvement from financial professionals. To better understand and support these investors, we use the FINRA Investor Education Foundation’s 2024 National Financial Capability Study (NFCS) to build a new measure of investment literacy for this population. We find that riskrelated knowledge is a defining feature of advanced investment literacy, the segment that distinguishes the most sophisticated investors.