Each week the NZ Herald's Cooking the Books podcast tackles a different money problem. Today, it's the astonishing rise of DIY investing since lockdown. Hosted by Frances Cook.

This year has seen a spike in new investors. Since the first Covid-19 lockdown back in March, the Financial Markets Authority estimates 120,000 New Zealand investors have joined local online investing platforms.

That's a seriously big jump for a small country like ours. For perspective, the big platforms Sharesies, InvestNow, and Hatch, now have about 250,000 clients between them.

My first reaction to this news is absolute happiness.

More Kiwis taking control of their money, and investing for their future, is awesome.

I hope that even more people join the investing journey in the future.

But with so many new investors coming in at the same time, there is the potential for things to go wrong.

No worries though – let's talk about that, and make sure that Cooking the Books listeners are the ones ahead of the curve.

For the latest podcast I talked to FMA CEO Rob Everett.

We discussed why he thinks there's been such a spike in investors, the reason for caution, and best practice for new investors.

• If you have a question about this podcast, or question you'd like answered in the next one, come and talk to me about it. I'm on Facebook here https://www.facebook.com/FrancesCookJournalist/ Instagram here https://www.instagram.com/francescooknz/ and Twitter here https://twitter.com/FrancesCook