The Brazil Securities Commission (CVM) has published a research report, produced with the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV), examining investor decision-making in financial pyramid schemes and sports betting. The study assesses how psychological traits, cognitive biases and financial knowledge interact in these contexts, highlighting financial education as a key investor-protection factor and finding that subconscious betting-related stimuli can increase receptiveness to risk across both illicit and licit investment choices. The report indicates that basic financial knowledge reduces vulnerability to investing in pyramid schemes and helps mitigate cognitive biases linked to betting “priming”, including for more impulsive or overconfident individuals. It also finds that exposure to betting priming, such as advertisements for betting sites, is associated with a higher tendency to invest in either pyramid schemes or lawful investments, suggesting that betting cues may broaden risk-taking behaviour. Based on the Brazilian sample, participants did not differentiate their resource allocation between bets, pyramid schemes and traditional investments. The experiment drew 970 valid responses collected between 2023 and 2024 from citizens invited from CVM’s consumer service database, using random priming followed by assignment to scenarios (legitimate investment, bet or pyramid scheme) to measure propensity to invest and the proportion of own capital allocated. This is the second publication under the CVM–FGV partnership initiated in 2022; the first study on investor decision-making in irregular investments was published in January 2024.

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