Building financial literacy through structured investment theory education
We've spent years studying how markets actually work, not how they're supposed to work according to textbooks. That distinction matters more than you might think.
We're researchers and educators who got tired of seeing people make the same mistakes. So we decided to do something about it.
Lead Educator
Fergal spent fifteen years working with institutional portfolios before realizing most retail investors were being taught strategies that only make sense at scale. He now focuses on what actually works for individuals managing their own capital. His approach strips away the jargon and gets to the mechanics that matter.
Research Director
After completing her doctorate in behavioral economics, Siobhan became fascinated by the gap between how we think we make financial decisions and how we actually do. She designs our curriculum around real cognitive patterns, not idealized rational actors. Her work helps students recognize their own decision-making habits.
Most investment education teaches you models. Clean, elegant models that fall apart the moment uncertainty enters the picture. We start with uncertainty instead. Markets don't behave. People do. And people are messy.
Our approach builds from actual market behavior backwards into theory. You learn why diversification works by seeing how correlations shift during stress, not by memorizing formulas. You understand risk by examining real portfolio drawdowns, not by calculating standard deviations in a vacuum.
This isn't about being contrarian for its own sake. It's about equipping you with frameworks that hold up when conditions change. Because they always do.
Three principles guide everything we build. They came from watching thousands of students struggle with conventional approaches.
You can memorize capital asset pricing models all day. But until you understand when they work and when they break down, you're just carrying around academic baggage. We teach the boundaries of every concept first, then fill in the details.
Paper trading teaches you nothing about emotional discipline because there's nothing at stake. Our simulations include realistic constraints, time pressure, and incomplete information. You learn how you actually respond when markets move against you.
Nobody knows where markets are heading next week. The successful investors we've studied don't try to predict either. They build systems that work across different scenarios. That's what we focus on teaching—robust processes, not clever forecasts.
Dontarix started in 2018 when we couldn't find investment education that matched how markets actually function. So we created it ourselves. Here's what that journey taught us.
We spent two years analyzing why retail investors consistently underperform. Not just collecting data, but interviewing people about their actual decision processes. Turned out the problem wasn't intelligence or dedication. It was frameworks built for different purposes being applied to individual portfolios.
Our first cohort in 2019 included seventeen people with different backgrounds. Some had finance degrees. Others had never read a balance sheet. The traditionalists struggled most because they kept trying to apply institutional strategies. The beginners often did better—fewer bad habits to unlearn.
Between 2020 and 2024, we worked with over three hundred students. Each cohort helped us understand what clicked and what confused. We rewrote entire modules when better research emerged. Added case studies from recent market events. Removed concepts that sounded sophisticated but provided little practical value.
Our September 2025 program incorporates everything we've learned. Smaller cohorts for better interaction. More emphasis on behavioral patterns. Updated content reflecting how markets have evolved. We're still refining it because markets keep changing and so should education about them.
Our next program starts in September 2025. Spaces are limited because we keep cohorts small for meaningful interaction.
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