The Contrarian Investor: Thinking Against the Crowd

In this C1 ESL lesson, students explore contrarian investing and the psychology of following the crowd while learning vocabulary for market behavior and practicing inversion after negative adverbials.

Warm-up:

Students answer a few questions about following the crowd. Next, they take a fun quiz to find out what kind of investor they are and discuss their results. Then, they guess which facts about markets and investing are true.

Video:

Students watch a video titled “Gary Shilling explains the only way to beat the market and win.” After watching the video, they answer questions about economic growth, market cycles, going against the consensus, and the housing bubble.

Vocabulary:

Students match market expressions such as herd mentality, capitulation, and a dead cat bounce with their meanings. They then fill in gaps with expressions like buck the trend, out of favor, and ride out, changing the form where necessary.

Grammar:

Students learn how inversion is used for emphasis. The lesson covers inversion after negative and limiting adverbials such as never, rarely, seldom, not only, no sooner, hardly, only when, only after, little, under no circumstances, and at no time.

Exercises:

The learners rewrite sentences starting with the words given. They then find and correct mistakes in sentences that use inversion.

Reading:

Learners read a text about why going against the crowd is so hard. Afterward, they answer questions about the text and find words that match a set of definitions.

Speaking:

Students decide whether a group of investors are contrarians or crowd followers and explain their choices. They then play an investor edition of “Would You Rather…?” Finally, they rank warning signs of a market bubble from most to least reliable.

Discussion:

Students debate a scenario in which they are the only member of an investment club who wants to sell. Finally, they argue the side they disagree with for two minutes.