yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

How A Ponzi Scheme Works


less than 1m read
·Nov 8, 2024

So you may have heard about Ponzi schemes in the news. Everybody knows they're illegal, but you might not understand how they work. So Ben is here to show us.

To start off, Ben gets a few people to invest their money with him. At the end of the year, he gives those clients amazing returns that beat every other investor in the market. Needless to say, the investors are thrilled. In fact, they're so ecstatic about all the money they're making that they tell all their friends and family about it too, who tell their friends, who tell their friends.

In the stock market, most investors make money some years and lose money others. But Ben's Ponzi scheme, yeah, it never loses money. In fact, it always beats the market by a huge margin.

But the returns he pays to these people aren't from actual profits. He just takes the money these new guys invest and gives it to these guys. But as soon as you can't get enough new money from this group to pay these people, then the whole pyramid starts to crumble because they're not getting paid anymore.

Ben, and these guys who invested first, made a killing, but these folks lost all their money. So the next time a guy like Ben tries to get you to invest in something that sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Just ask Ben. Wahoo!

More Articles

View All
Alfred Lin with Justin Kan
Next up, I’m pleased to introduce Alfred Lynn, who’s a partner at Sequoia Capital, one of the top investors in Silicon Valley and the world. He serves as a director on a bunch of awesome Silicon Valley companies like Airbnb and Houzz. Before that, he was …
Introducing Khanmigo for teachers
This is Conmigo, an AI-powered guide designed to help all students learn when subjects are giving them trouble. Conmigo can help. Kamika was fun and can transform learning into an adventure. Kanmigo is not just for students; teachers can use it too by tog…
Interesting example of Aliasing
Okay, I stuck a moment without the kids to do this for you. I’m going to show you a principle called aliasing. Aliasing is when your sample rate of your measuring device is not fast enough to actually catch the true frequency of what’s happening, so you c…
Parametric curve arc length | Applications of definite integrals | AP Calculus BC | Khan Academy
Let’s say we’re going to trace out a curve where our x-coordinate and our y-coordinate that they’re each defined by, or they’re functions of a third parameter T. So we could say that X is a function of T and we could also say that Y is a function of T. If…
The next best thing to owning an airplane
If you fly under 150 hours a year, it just doesn’t make sense, not financially. You know, go get a fractional; that’s the next best thing to owning an airplane. Do you want to explain that a little bit? So, there are different ways to get an airplane. Yo…
Zero-order reactions | Kinetics | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy
Let’s say we have a hypothetical reaction where reactant A turns into products. Let’s say the reaction is zero order with respect to A. If it’s zero order with respect to A, we can write that the rate of the reaction is equal to the rate constant k times …