Although trustees do not need to have specialist investment knowledge themselves, charities that have invested, or want to invest, significant funds will find it helpful to have a trustee with specialist knowledge of investments on its board or committee with responsibility for investment.
Many athletes lack investment knowledge and "don't want to go to meetings with financial advisers," Mr. Lipnick said.
"It takes a lot of investment knowledge to fully understand these products," said Derek Tharp, a registered life planner at Mote Wealth Management.
While the professionals used their decades of investment knowledge and traditional stock-picking methods, the cat selected stocks by throwing his favourite toy mouse on a grid of numbers allocated to different companies.
Each lecture includes a mix of financial theory and prescriptive advice, some of which people with a reasonable base of investment knowledge may already know: actively managed mutual funds aren't worth the money, so buy index funds.
"If you're going from someone with very specific investment knowledge and they're delivering it in a precise way, that's very difficult to replicate," said Joseph Duran, chief executive and founder of United Capital, which has $8 billion in assets.
"Don't think there is some secret society out there that has the investment knowledge, and you're not in the know," said Mr. Young, chuckling as he recalled the Mexican cat farm that someone once presented to him with a straight face.
Similarly, a study by Tzu-Chin Martina Peng and her co-authors found that having taken a personal finance course in school is unrelated to investment knowledge.Second, and perhaps most important, courses in personal finance do not appear to have an impact on adult behaviour.
The findings indicate that investment-related financial education improves investment knowledge.
Otherwise, the crucial investment knowledge pertains to the fundamentals of particular stocks.
