Throughout my time studying financial markets, one thing that’s always bothered me was the intrinsic pretentiousness of so-called “financial professionals”. Let’s be clear; nobody knows what’s really going on with the markets. A monkey throwing darts at random tickers has equal weighting on its investment decisions relative to a band of Adderall / caffeine-induced hedge funders being paid millions to manage someone else’s money because buying an index fund is not exciting enough when you’ve got billions to blow.
People are being gaslit by Wallstreet every day. We see it in the mass media when CNBC assumes retail investors are children who can’t keep track of their own expenses much less manage their own money. We see it in the very institutions that control the ability for us to choose when and where we spend money. Having my employer match my RRSP is great but god forbid I take their hard-earned contributions and decide what to invest in for myself, no please be rational and buy one of Blackrocks's ETFs to let them decide what’s best for me. No thanks.
The truth is when you dig into the highs and lows of financial markets, you see the irrationality that drives not merely the lower echelons of society but the so-called top as well. With extra sprinkles of fervent irresponsible greed that’s caused most of the previous financial meltdowns and will do so again. They get the play the game this way because they know there are no consequences, after all, it’s not their money and hey who else is gonna manage your money for you? Hand over your savings and get back to working that 9-5 you child.
I love apps like Robinhood. Actually, let me set myself straight, I hate how Robinhood operates but love the idea of Robinhood. Decentralizing the market for its participants and allowing normal people at the individual level to participate in wealth-growing is fantastic and only serves to provide organic liquidity + increase the velocity of money within an ecosystem. The very foundation of capitalism is that people can vote with their dollars and the very best ideas win since they serve the greatest pool of people. We can’t have that when monolithic behemoths control how capital moves at every step nor can we expect true innovation to occur in such a situation. Yet this is the financial world now.
I’ll continue to ramble in the future about the financial world and great projects being built to truly democratize it. I originally wanted to write this post to share some short and funny anecdotes to demystify the financial industry so here they are: