Yes, but maybe not as risky as you may have been led to believe. Here’s how the S&P 500 (the 500 biggest companies in the United States) has changed in value over the last 60 years. If your investments followed the S&P 500, and, crucially, you held onto your shares through the occasional recessions, it would be historically unprecedented for you to lose your money.
That being said, everything has some level of risk, and how much you’re willing to tolerate is ultimately up to you.
Here are several things you can do to mitigate risk:
🧺 You can diversify, meaning you can spread your investments across different companies. Investing in the 500 biggest companies in the US carries a different level of risk than putting all your money into a startup nobody’s ever heard of.
🕒 You can be patient. Even professional investors, who spend all day watching the stock market with the help of very expensive software, tend to hold stocks for half a year on average. Experts caution non-professionals about the dangers of trading around short-term, day-to-day fluctuations in stock prices.
🏦 You can avoid riskier financial instruments. Cryptocurrency is unregulated and options involve making speculative bets on future prices. Investing in private companies, as opposed to public companies that are traded on the stock market, is also riskier because private companies are less regulated. All these investments can be found on Wealthsimple, but they’re not enabled by default and you have to actively enable it. Greenback Revolution only provides information on stocks, ETFs, bonds, and loans. We touch on investing in private companies, but only on platforms dedicated to impact investing and not on Wealthsimple.

It used to be that you needed thousands of dollars to buy a share of a company’s stock. Nowadays it’s much more accessible and with apps like Wealthsimple you can easily invest as little as you’d like with no commission fees.

Some financial innovations have also helped make investing more accessible. For a start, you can now buy fractions of a share instead of having to buy the whole thing. For instance, rather than buy a share of NVIDIA for $100, you could instead buy a quarter of a share for $25. Another innovation is exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which make it easier to buy a bunch of different shares at once.

Buying an exchange-traded fund (ETF) is like buying a group of shares. You buy a share of an ETF just like how you would buy a share of a company, with the ETF basically being a company that exists purely to hold shares of other companies. The value of a share of an ETF is based on the shares it owns, so by investing in an ETF you're effectively buying shares of all the companies it holds. A classic ETF is the Vanguard S&P 500 Index ETF, which owns bits of the 500 biggest companies in the United States. Thus, buying a share of this ETF is like investing in the 500 biggest companies in the United States all at once. Back in the old days, a broker would charge you a big fee for arranging an investment like that, but thanks to ETFs it's now much easier to diversify (fun fact, the world’s first ETF was launched in Canada in 1990!).

If the price goes down, you still own your share. Your share might be less valuable, but technically it’s only a loss once you actually sell that share. Some shares can have their price falling for years. That’s why it’s important to reflect on a stock’s long-term growth opportunities and your own long-term financial goals before you cut your losses and sell.

No, as long as you stick to the fundamental stuff like stocks, ETFs, bonds, and loans. In those cases, the worst that can happen is the share price goes to zero or the company goes bankrupt, and you don’t get any money back from the money you invested.
When you hear about people losing more money than they invested, it’s because they went out of their way to invest in more complicated financial instruments like options (betting on future prices) and margin trading (investing with borrowed money).

No. Greenback Revolution is here to share insights on the socio-environmental performance of stocks, as well as a small sample of publicly available historic or posted information about financial performance. Our listings of stocks are not an endorsement that they will be financially successful and past performance is not indicative of future results (as we know all too well from non-linear climate risks). Make sure you evaluate stocks yourself before deciding to invest.

Morningstar's Total Return % shows how much the stock's value has changed over time. This includes dividends and management fees, so it shows more than just how the stock's price has changed. Different financial information providers may have slightly different methodologies, which explains why the same number can look slightly different on different platforms.
When looking at returns over multiple years, Morningstar's Total Return %'s are shown as "compounded average annual returns"—so a 3-Year Total Return % of 10% doesn’t mean that it grew 10% over 3 years, but that on average it grew by 10% over each of the last 3 years. Toggling between daily, monthly, and quarterly returns changes the period of time you're looking at. So if you toggle for daily you're looking at returns as of the most recent weekday, and if you toggle for monthly you're looking at returns as of the most recent end-of-the-month day.
For more information, consult Morningstar's methodologies.

We’re so often told to keep our social insurance number to ourselves that it’s easy to forget they have an actual, practical purpose. Financial institutions are required to collect your social insurance number so that they can report your earnings to the government.

Of course, make sure you’re dealing with a reputable financial institution, as well as the authentic financial institution. Fraudsters are able to deceptively mimic contact information and website layouts. A good rule of thumb is to only share sensitive information on websites, not through messages (i.e. texts, emails), and to go to websites yourself, not through a link that’s been shared with you.

The income you make from selling shares is called “capital gains” and the income you make from dividends is called “investment income”. These are different from “employment income” and reported on a different line of your tax returns.