Finance
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8correct to beat the crowd
209 free Finance trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
67 free finance trivia questions with answers. These finance trivia questions cover the whole world of money: the 1929 crash and Black Monday, tulip mania and the South Sea Bubble, the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England, Bitcoin, the euro, credit cards, cash machines and the swindles of Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff. There are questions on Warren Buffett and Jack Bogle, on why a salary is named after salt and a mortgage after death, and on the bull and bear that came out of a London coffee-house alley. The set is built for pub quiz hosts, finance teams, classrooms and anyone who reads the business pages. It runs from easy questions most people can get (how many companies are in the Dow?) to expert ones that only a market historian will know (when did the Bank of England print its first cheque form?). Every answer has been checked against a primary reference and each explanation adds one more fact worth remembering.
30 of 209 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which nickname is given to 29 October 1929, the busiest day of the Wall Street Crash?
Black Tuesday
Black Tuesday's record 16.4 million shares came five days after Black Thursday's 12.9 million; on the heaviest days the tickers ran hours behind because the machines could not keep up with the trading.
Q 02The Dow took 25 years to regain its 1929 peak, under which US president?
Dwight Eisenhower
Dwight Eisenhower was president when the Dow closed above its September 1929 high on 23 November 1954; the index had lost 89% of its value by mid-1932, which is why the climb back took so long.
Q 03Which flower was at the centre of what is generally called the first recorded speculative bubble?
Tulip
Tulip bulbs with flame-streaked petals fetched the highest prices in the 1630s; the streaks were later traced to a virus, so the most coveted flowers were in fact the diseased ones.
Q 04The Mississippi Company bubble burst in 1720 in which country?
France
France had let the Scottish gambler John Law run its finances and a company with a monopoly on Louisiana trade; when its shares collapsed in 1720, Law had to leave the country.
Q 05On Black Monday, 19 October 1987, the Dow Jones lost roughly what share of its value in one day?
23%
About 23%: the 508-point, 22.6% fall was the largest one-day percentage drop in the Dow's history, and exchanges responded by adding circuit breakers that halt trading when prices plunge.
Q 06Which investment bank's bankruptcy on 15 September 2008 became the defining moment of the financial crisis?
Lehman Brothers
Lehman Brothers, 158 years old, filed the largest bankruptcy in US history, with $639 billion in assets, after the government refused a bailout and weekend talks to sell the firm collapsed.
Q 07The 158-year-old firm that collapsed in September 2008 began as a store taking cotton as payment in which US state?
Alabama
Alabama: a Bavarian immigrant family ran the store in Montgomery, took raw cotton as payment for goods and grew into cotton brokers, opening a New York office in 1858.
Q 08Which US investment bank was sold to JPMorgan Chase in a Fed-backed 'fire sale' in March 2008?
Bear Stearns
Bear Stearns went to JPMorgan Chase for an initial $2 a share, raised to $10 after shareholders revolted, with the Fed financing $29 billion of its mortgage assets; a year earlier the shares had topped $170.
Q 09How large was the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) that Congress authorised in October 2008?
$700 billion
Congress authorised $700 billion for TARP in the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 3 October 2008; the Dodd-Frank Act later cut the authority to $475 billion.
Q 10Which British company's shares soared and then collapsed in the notorious 'Bubble' of 1720?
South Sea
The South Sea Company won its trade monopoly with Spanish America by agreeing to take over millions of pounds of government debt, a swap of debt for shares that fed the frenzy of 1720.
Q 11In the Weimar Republic hyperinflation of 1923, roughly how many marks did one US dollar buy by November?
4.2 trillion
4.2 trillion marks bought one dollar by late November 1923; workers were often paid twice a day and rushed to spend the money before it lost its value.
Q 12What temporary currency, backed by mortgage bonds, ended Germany's 1923 hyperinflation?
Rentenmark
The Rentenmark was backed in name by mortgages on German land and industry that could never really be cashed in, yet Germans chose to trust it and the inflation stopped.
Q 13The January 2021 GameStop short squeeze was driven mainly by which online community?
r/wallstreetbets
Q 21Michael Burry, the investor played by Christian Bale in 'The Big Short', trained professionally as what before starting his hedge fund?
A medical doctor
A medical doctor: after Vanderbilt medical school he was a neurology resident at Stanford, posting stock picks online between hospital shifts, before he quit medicine to start Scion Capital.
Q 22Jack Bogle, who pioneered index funds for ordinary investors, founded which firm?
Vanguard
Vanguard launched its first index fund for individual investors in 1976; industry insiders ridiculed it as 'un-American' and a 'sure path to mediocrity', yet Bogle is now called the 'father of indexing'.
Q 23Isaac Newton spent the last three decades of his life running which British institution?
Retail traders on Reddit's r/wallstreetbets piled into GameStop, a stock hedge funds had bet against, and drove it up roughly twentyfold in January 2021 until brokers such as Robinhood restricted buying.
Q 14The Enron scandal dissolved which accounting firm, then among the world's five largest?
Arthur Andersen
Arthur Andersen was convicted in 2002 of obstructing justice by shredding Enron audit papers and gave up its licences; the Supreme Court threw out the conviction in 2005, too late to save the firm.
Q 15Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, the largest known in history, showed clients paper holdings of roughly how much?
$65 billion
$65 billion was the total on Madoff's fictitious client statements when his sons turned him in to the authorities in December 2008; the money investors had actually handed over and lost was nearer $18 billion.
Q 16Charles Ponzi's 1920 scheme claimed to profit from arbitrage in what?
Postal reply coupons
Ponzi promised 50% in 45 days from buying international postal reply coupons cheaply abroad and redeeming them for US stamps; he never actually traded them at scale.
Q 17What prison sentence did Bernie Madoff receive in June 2009?
150 years
150 years was the maximum possible; Judge Denny Chin said a message had to be sent that the fraud was 'extraordinarily evil' and not a bloodless crime that takes place on paper.
Q 18Warren Buffett was born and built Berkshire Hathaway in which US city?
Omaha
Omaha, Nebraska, is where Buffett was born and kept his office; for decades tens of thousands of shareholders travelled there each year to hear him answer questions for hours, a gathering nicknamed 'Woodstock for Capitalists'.
Q 19Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett's holding company, was originally a manufacturer of what?
Textiles
Textiles: Berkshire Hathaway was a declining New England mill company when Buffett began buying its shares in 1962; he shut the last mills in 1985 and has called the purchase his biggest investment mistake.
Q 20Warren Buffett founded the Giving Pledge in 2010 with which couple?
Bill and Melinda Gates
Bill and Melinda Gates joined Buffett in launching the Giving Pledge in 2010, asking the world's wealthiest people to promise the majority of their fortunes to charity in their lifetimes or wills.
The Royal Mint
The Royal Mint made Newton its Warden in 1696 and Master in 1699; the post was meant to be a sinecure, but he personally questioned suspects and brought counterfeiters to trial.
Q 24Which banker personally organised Wall Street's rescue in the Panic of 1907?
J. P. Morgan
J. P. Morgan summoned New York's leading bankers to his library and pressed them to put up money to stop the runs; the panic led Congress to set up the Federal Reserve six years later.
Q 25The Federal Reserve's westernmost district is headquartered in which city?
San Francisco
San Francisco has been the head office of the Twelfth District since 1914; Los Angeles, now a far larger city, has only a branch office, as do Portland, Salt Lake City and Seattle.
Q 26Which country's central bank, the world's oldest, created the economics prize awarded alongside the Nobel Prizes?
Sweden
Sweden's Riksbank, founded in 1668, marked its 300th anniversary by funding the economics prize in Alfred Nobel's memory; Nobel's own will had named only five fields, and economics was not one.
Q 27Which institution has been nicknamed 'The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street' since a 1797 cartoon mocked it?
The Bank of England
The Bank of England owes the name to James Gillray's 1797 cartoon, in which the prime minister, Pitt the Younger, woos an old lady while reaching for her gold, a jab at his government's constant borrowing.
Q 28The Medici Bank, a leading bank of 15th-century Europe, was based in which city?
Florence
Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici built the bank in Florence, and under his son Cosimo the Elder, from 1434, its wealth turned into unofficial control of the Florentine Republic.
Q 29Which US president signed the law creating the FDIC after thousands of bank failures?
Franklin Roosevelt
Franklin Roosevelt signed the Banking Act on 16 June 1933; deposit insurance was the amendment that won the bill the backing of its House sponsor, Henry Steagall.
Q 30The Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 made permanent which FDIC insurance limit per depositor at each bank?
$250,000
$250,000 began as a temporary limit: Congress raised it from $100,000 in October 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, and Dodd-Frank made it permanent in July 2010.