Investing Trivia Time

Talking Real Money - Investing Talk

Don McDonald

Education, Business, Investing, How To

4.5 • 811 Ratings

🗓️ 19 August 2025

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This lively episode of Talking Real Money features trivia-packed investing fun, smart listener questions, and sharp commentary from Don and Tom. They dive into a Wall Street Journal quiz on investing genius, exploring surprising historical returns and market myths. Listener calls span a range of financial planning topics—from special needs trusts and Roth IRAs for kids to emergency fund placement and ETF selection. 0:04 Don and Tom banter about working weekends and boomers in the office 1:55 Wall Street Journal quiz: Are you a stock market genius? 3:20 Which stock created the most wealth in 100 years? (Hint: it wasn’t Apple) 4:19 Why Altria (Philip Morris) beat the rest 5:31 Berkshire Hathaway drops 99%—would Buffett still beat the market? 6:37 Show mission: make investing simple, not complex 8:28 Caller Valerie: Investing for a daughter with disabilities using Vanguard ETFs 10:24 Portfolio review and discussion of special needs trusts 11:20 Structuring brokerage accounts with trust beneficiaries 13:31 Caller Steve: Roth IRAs for sons, target date vs. all-equity funds 14:36 Tom critiques Schwab’s target date funds—Vanguard preferred 16:20 Future value of $10K over 50 years at 10%—retirement math 17:20 Caller Sam: Can he gift stock into a Roth IRA? (Spoiler: No, but workarounds exist) 18:59 Economist “Felicity Foresight” exercise—guess the ending balance after 100 years of perfect timing 20:34 The shocking power of compound returns: $10 quintillion 22:15 Geography jokes, the U.S. “Middle East,” and why cruises go to Juneau 23:39 Written Question (Bruce): Keeping emergency funds in a Schwab money market fund 25:10 Online bank trust vs. FDIC insurance—why it’s safe 27:51 Don calls Tom a “premature curmudgeon” 28:30 Caller West: Should he add SGOV to his BND bond portfolio? 29:52 BND vs SGOV explained—behavior during rate changes 30:37 Back to WSJ quiz: investing trivia and early company names 31:31 Bezos almost named Amazon “Kadabra”; Google was almost “Backrub” 33:20 What’s a googol? And why Google isn’t even the biggest number 34:48 Shoeshine story: how Joe Kennedy dodged the ‘29 crash 36:39 Caller Diana: Investing for four grandkids—gold coins vs stocks 38:41 Why diversified ETFs beat Boeing stock or gold coins Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Reality Radio for a really great future.
0:08.0	We're talking real money.
0:10.0	Wow.
0:10.8	Hi there.
0:11.9	Welcome to Talking Real Money, the show about your dough.
0:18.1	Hello.
0:20.6	I'm Don McDonald.
0:22.9	And over there at the offices of Appella hanging out in the heat because they don't
0:29.2	turn on the air conditioning on the weekends is our good friend Tom Cock.
0:34.4	I'm ready to give out their home phone numbers now.
1:13.0	Call them and tell them, give us just a little air, please. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They don't believe that you need air conditioning on the weekends. You're not supposed to be there, dude. That's it. Yeah, apparently not. So I'll pack it up and be out of here. You're supposed to be working Monday through Friday, 9 to 5 at the most. And generally speaking. Until like 11. So it's less. Yeah, I know. Oh, I see. I get it. You get it? Yeah. Does everybody show up every day, 9 to 5? No. I get it. The old baby boomers think, what, you go to the office? That's wacky and weird and out of date. Forget it. Look what COVID did to us. I mean, that's wacky and weird and out of date forget it look what covid did to us yeah i mean that's its legacy yeah right totally you don't go to work anymore it's totally
1:18.3	changed it's so weird i never went to work so you know i'm different but uh most people did
1:26.7	hi uh this is the show where we talk about your money, and we try to share information with you that's unique or valuable.
1:35.6	But the main thing we want to do is give you what you want personally.
1:40.9	That's why we take your calls and answer your questions at 855-935-935 Talk. That's 855-935-8-255. So give us a call every Saturday. And one of my, I am a sucker for quizzes. When I see a quiz, I do. I love to test myself. As a matter of fact, I do like a couple
2:04.2	of crossword puzzles every morning now. And, you know, I don't always finish them, but I like
2:11.8	to test myself. And I like the, I like quizzes that are like, you know, Ripley's believe it or not quiz, where the answer is like, oh, come on. Really? Those are trivia. This isn't knowledge. This is trivia. Well, they say the Wall Street Journal says, are you a stock market genius take our quiz. But really, I don't know. Some of these, some of them are a some of these some of them are a little weird some
2:35.3	I would say actually having read these a couple of times now yeah stock market genius is somebody like
2:41.6	you know Warren Buffett now or the academics they're the geniuses they figure out sort of patterns
2:47.6	this truly is just kind of fun stuff. It is. It's investing trivia,
2:53.5	really. So let's start with the first question. Are you ready? Are you ready? So you get a
2:59.6	thousand bucks. Yeah. In 1925, you live, you live for over 100 years.
	...

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