This research employs data from Japan to study the relationship between the experience of financial education and the participation of Japanese persons on financial markets. We account for unobserved heterogeneity by employing a three-class Finite Mixture Model. The prior probability of class membership is a function of socio-demographic characteristics of the person. We examine the association between the investment experience probability conditional on class membership, and the experience of financial education at home, school and the workplace, controlling for a financial literacy score measured through Item Response Theory, and several behavioral traits. The results allow us to extract a segment of striving persons whose investment behavior differs in important ways from other groups. Education at school or work is significantly associated with higher investment probabilities across all classes of individuals. The impact of financial education at home is more heterogeneous, and may be negative for the most fragile groups. We believe that our results may offer important insights for policy-makers involved in the design of financial education programs.