Investor Lab. Where money learns to multiply.
Twelve short lessons that turn your kid from someone who saves a dollar into someone who owns a piece of a real company. Stocks, dividends, compound interest, risk — explained kid-first by Ivy, the investing mentor most adults wish they'd had.
From "what is a stock?" to a real custodial account.
The Investor Lab series builds in two arcs: five cinematic deep-dive episodes that teach the core ideas, then seven action episodes that turn the ideas into habits your kid can actually use.
Why owning beats consuming. Sets the mindset Wall Street took 20 years to learn.
What stock ownership actually means. Slices of a real pizza company — kid-first.
Step-by-step custodial brokerage walkthrough. The lesson Ivy wishes she'd had at 12.
Prices move. So what? The Ivy Rule for handling ups and downs without panic.
Don't put all your eggs in one basket. The slice-the-pie rule.
Build the habit of checking your portfolio — without obsessing. Weekly, not hourly.
When to take the gain. The grown-up rule grown-ups still struggle with.
The magic Einstein called "the 8th wonder." Reinvest the dividends. Watch what happens.
Long-term beats short-term, every time. The diamond-hands principle from the data.
Bonds explained as letting the company borrow from you. The other half of investing.
Beating inflation — why "saving" alone loses you money over time.
The 12-rule toolkit. Your kid graduates an investor — not a hopeful saver.
Open Episode 01 — student, parent, and teacher.
Every Investor Lab episode ships with the same three companion PDFs. EP 01 (Welcome to the Investor Lab) is yours to download free, right now.
Three companion PDFs — free preview
Click any to download the real, full-quality sample. The same three-tier set lands with all 12 episodes.
Four learning channels. One investing brain.
Investing concepts can feel abstract — so Investor Lab delivers each idea through four channels at once. Numbers AND pictures. Stories AND simulations. The lesson lands.
Visual
Animated chart growth. Pie slices that resize as a portfolio diversifies. The "Hourglass" effect of compound growth shown frame-by-frame.
Auditory
Ivy's kid-pitched voice walks through the math out loud. Repeatable rules ("Time in the market beats timing the market") stick like song hooks.
Kinesthetic
The Pizza Stock cut-up. Coin-stacking the compound interest table. Drawing your first ticker symbol. Portfolio cards moved across a table.
Reading + Writing
The portfolio journal. The investment-thesis sentence stems ("I'm investing in X because…"). The 5E plan for educators with vocabulary scaffold.
Same 12 ideas. Four levels of depth.
A first-grader colors a pie chart. A senior opens a real custodial Roth IRA. Investor Lab scales up four times so the same kid keeps coming back deeper.
Coloring book of stocks-as-pizza-slices. Story about Ivy buying her first share. Worksheet: circle who owns the toy company. The vocabulary lock-in.
Pick 3 imaginary stocks. Track them on a paper portfolio for a month. Talk about why prices moved. The first real investing reflexes form here.
Parent opens a real custodial brokerage account. Kid picks the first $50 investment. Tracks dividend reinvestment. Real ownership of a real company.
Open a custodial Roth IRA from teen earned income. Set a real asset allocation. Build a 5-position portfolio with a written thesis. Investor for life.
The cost of starting late is the cost of not knowing.
These aren't opinions — they're from the SEC, the Federal Reserve, J.P. Morgan, FINRA, and DALBAR. Investor Lab is built around what they actually found.
$100/month from age 10 becomes $1.1M by 65.
At the long-run S&P 500 average return of ~10% (~7% real), a 10-year-old investing $100/month would have roughly $1.1M by age 65. Starting at 25 yields about $290K. Time is the asset compound interest needs most.
Source: U.S. SEC Investor.gov compound interest calculator; NYU Stern (Damodaran) S&P 500 historical returns data set.
Miss the 10 best market days and your returns get cut in half.
An investor who stayed in the S&P 500 from 2003-2022 made ~9.8% annualized. An investor who missed just the 10 best days (often the days right after big drops) made ~5.6%. Time in the market beats timing the market.
Source: J.P. Morgan Asset Management, Guide to Retirement 2023; corroborated by Putnam Investments studies.
The average investor underperforms the market by ~3% a year.
Not because they pick wrong stocks — because they buy high, sell low, and panic in between. DALBAR's 30-year study consistently shows a 2-3% annual gap between fund returns and the average investor's real returns. Investor Lab teaches the behavioral discipline first.
Source: DALBAR, Quantitative Analysis of Investor Behavior (multi-year study).
41% of Gen Z investors started before age 21.
Gen Z is the first generation to start investing en masse before college. If your kid waits until 25, they're behind their peers and the math. Investor Lab gives your kid the head start their friends are already building.
Source: Charles Schwab Gen Z & Millennial Investing survey (2023); aligned with Robinhood and Fidelity Youth Investor Reports.
Only 16% of US adults can answer 4 of 5 basic investing questions.
Most American adults — including the ones managing 401(k)s — cannot pass a basic 5-question investing-literacy quiz. This is the floor we're raising your kid above. Investor Lab teaches what your kid's manager probably doesn't know.
Source: FINRA Investor Education Foundation, National Financial Capability Study (2021).
Start at 8 vs. start at 28: ~8× more by 65.
A kid who invests $50/month from age 8 ends with ~8× the wealth of someone who starts the same $50/month at age 28 — despite contributing only 67% more total dollars. The math doesn't care about your job. It cares about the start date.
Source: Computed from S&P 500 long-run real return (NYU Stern / Damodaran); independently verifiable on SEC Investor.gov compound calculator.
Investor Lab isn't an app. It's an investor education.
The other "kids investing" tools focus on the trading app. Investor Lab focuses on the brain behind it — so your kid invests like an adult before they're one.
Round-up app with kid-side
- Auto-investing of spare change
- No curriculum, no mentor lessons
- $5+/mo per family
- No printables or homeschool fit
- No K–12 progression
Custodial brokerage with thin ed
- Lets kids buy stocks with parent approval
- Educational content is light blog posts
- No structured lesson plans
- No mentor character storytelling
- Banking-app first, education second
Investing inside a banking app
- Tier add-on to Greenlight subscription
- Light gamified education
- No K–12 curriculum scaffold
- No teacher resources
- Locked to Greenlight banking platform
A real investor curriculum
- 12 cinematic mentor-led video lessons
- 3 PDFs per episode (Student / Parent / Teacher)
- K–2 / 3–5 / 6–8 / 9–12 scaffolded
- Custodial-account walkthrough included
- 5E lesson plans & rubrics for educators
- Behavioral & compound-math literacy first
Start them at 10. Watch the math do the rest.
12 episodes. 72 worksheets. One custodial account walkthrough. One $9.99/mo family membership covers every kid in your house.
Lock in All-Access · $9.99/mo or $49.99/yr →7-day money-back guarantee · cancel anytime · one membership covers your whole family