Investing isn’t real.
**Chapter 1: Once Upon a Time in Wall Street—A Fairy Tale**
A long time ago, in a land filled with unpaid interns and $12 coffees, a group of men in suits decided that money should *breed.* Up until then, money was just this thing you exchanged for bread, or for convincing people to dig ditches for you. But one day, some guy named Charles Dow said, “What if we make money that *makes* money?” And everyone around him said, “Brilliant. And we’ll call it *investing.*And thus, the financial markets were born — a magical place where your “net worth” could grow while you were asleep, or shrink while you were also asleep.
It’s all completely made up, by the way. Every bit of it.
The “market” isn’t a place. It’s a collection of numbers on screens, watched by people who think watching numbers change constitutes a personality. Even **John Kenneth Galbraith**, a real economist and not a TikToker, once wrote: “The function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.” Which is funny until you realize that investing is astrology — but for people who get angry when you say that.
**Chapter 2: The Gospel According to the Dow**
Let’s break down how investing *works* (allegedly). You take your money, give it to a stranger in a Patagonia vest, and they promise to “diversify your portfolio.” This means they’ll buy tiny slivers of companies you’ve never heard of — things like *GartCo Micro Plastics Holdings* or *Thermal Dynamic Cheese Futures, LLC*. Then, every day, a bunch of adults stare at lines on a graph, trying to guess which way the imaginary number will move next. Sometimes it goes up — this is called a *bull market*. Sometimes it goes down — this is called *you should have diversified more.* When it goes *way* down, everyone gets together and calls it a *“correction,”* which sounds reassuring, like they fixed a typo. As **Nassim Taleb** (author of *The Black Swan*) pointed out: “We have a tendency to mistake the map for the territory, the model for reality.”
That’s investing in a nutshell. We invented maps, forgot the land was real, and now trade the maps for profit.
Chapter 3: Stocks — or How to Gamble Without the Cool Lights**
Stocks are what happens when gambling gets a PR firm. They’re pieces of paper that say, “You own part of this company.” But you don’t actually *own* anything tangible. You can’t show up at Apple HQ and demand your 0.000003% of an iPhone. The only real thing you own is *hope.* And hope is a terrible business model. Still, people act like buying stocks is noble. They wear suits, use words like “alpha” and “beta,” and pretend they’re not just flipping imaginary tokens on the internet. As **Michael Lewis**, author of *The Big Short*, put it: “The stock market is filled with people who know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.” Translation: everyone’s LARPing as a capitalist wizard, waving around numbers like spells and praying for their brokerage app to load.
**Chapter 4: The Cult of Diversification**
Financial advisors love to say, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” Cute. Except they never mention that *all the baskets are also on fire.*Diversification is supposed to protect you, but in reality, it’s like owning a bunch of different flavors of disappointment. Tech stocks tank? Don’t worry, your real estate fund will also tank — but *slower*. Bonds crash? Good thing your crypto hedge is down *even more*. Gold? Still shiny, still useless. During the 2008 financial crisis, everything fell together — like synchronized diving, but with your retirement. As Nobel laureate **Paul Samuelson** once said: “Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.” But investors didn’t listen. They decided to watch grass grow *on leverage.*
**Chapter 5: The Great Passive Investing Lie**
Index funds are the adult version of “just trust me.” You don’t pick stocks. You buy *all of them.* It’s like saying, “I don’t know which horse will win, so I’ll just buy the whole racetrack.” And it works — until everyone does it. Because when everyone invests “passively,” who’s left to make the active decisions that keep the system from eating its own tail? Even **Michael Burry** (the *Big Short* guy) warned that passive investing has turned the market into “a bubble of faith.” But faith is what investing runs on. Faith that those lines will go up. Faith that companies won’t collapse. Faith that money itself means anything. The economy is just a religion with graphs.
**Chapter 6: The Oracle of Omaha and the Cult of Personality**
Warren Buffett once said, “Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.” Which sounds profound — until you realize it’s basically fortune cookie logic for billionaires. Buffett, bless him, is a myth himself. The man is worth over $100 billion for *not selling things.* He’s the patron saint of hoarding. He’s famous for “value investing,” which is the act of buying things that are “undervalued” — a concept entirely subjective and mostly invented by people who write finance newsletters. As economist **Robert Shiller** wrote in *Irrational Exuberance*: “Market valuations are driven by stories, not spreadsheets.” And no story sells better than “the wise old man who reads 500 pages a day and gets richer while drinking Cherry Coke.” Buffett isn’t an investor. He’s a bedtime story for capitalism.
**Chapter 7: Crypto — When Investing Met Fan Fiction**
If you thought stocks were imaginary, welcome to crypto — the sequel nobody asked for. Crypto is what happens when people realize even *money* is made up and decide to start making up their *own.* Bitcoin was invented by a mysterious figure named Satoshi Nakamoto, who disappeared after proving that you could, in fact, make an economy out of vibes. Every crypto enthusiast swears it’s the future. Meanwhile, most can’t explain what it does. **Nouriel Roubini**, NYU economist and perpetual buzzkill, called crypto “the mother of all scams.” He’s wrong only in that scams usually end. Crypto is like if Monopoly money got a tech startup. It’s the stock market without pants.
**Chapter 8: The Rituals of the Cult**
The rituals of investing are endless:
**The Earnings Call** — a quarterly séance where executives summon confidence from spreadsheets.
**The Annual Report** — an 80-page PDF of nouns like “synergy” and “pipeline.”
**The CNBC Interview** — an ancient performance art where analysts pretend to know why things happened *after* they already did.
Then there are *chartists* — people who look at lines and shapes on graphs (head and shoulders, triangles, “cup and handle”) and treat them like tea leaves. It’s financial astrology. If you ask a trader why they bought a stock, they’ll say something like, “It bounced off resistance on the 200-day moving average.” That’s just astrology for people who own khakis.
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**Chapter 9: The Myth of “Smart Money”**
Every time the market moves, pundits say, “The smart money is doing X.” Who *is* this “smart money”? No one knows. But we keep invoking it, like Zeus. In reality, “smart money” is just “money that hasn’t lost *yet.*” And “dumb money”? That’s yours. It’s always yours. Because retail investors are the main characters in this comedy — armed with Robinhood apps, Reddit threads, and pure delusion. Remember GameStop? A whole group of people on Reddit decided, “Let’s break the market!” And somehow, they did. That’s the punchline: Wall Street is as real as a magic trick. It works only as long as we all agree not to look too closely at the hands.
**Chapter 10: The Financial Media Industrial Complex**
Finance journalism is theater. Every day: “Markets rallied today as investors reacted positively to… something.” They don’t know. No one knows. But they have airtime to fill. Half the time, they say “investors are optimistic.” The other half, “investors are cautious.” And sometimes both — because quantum uncertainty applies to vibes. The truth is, most “analysis” is a narrative written *after* the fact to explain what was random. It’s like listening to a weather report that blames the wind on “investor sentiment.”
**Chapter 11: Experts Agree: Nobody Knows Anything**
Every decade, the financial industry relearns this fact: **nobody knows what’s going on.** The 2008 crash? Missed by 99% of experts. The dot-com bubble? They called it “a new era.” COVID? “Temporary volatility.” Inflation? “Transitory.” As **Richard Thaler**, Nobel laureate in behavioral economics, noted: “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” In other words, you can be right about the nonsense, and still lose everything. So maybe it’s not “investing” — maybe it’s *performance art.*
**Epilogue: A Confession**
The stock market isn’t real. Money isn’t real. Value isn’t real. But the anxiety? That’s *very* real. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe the true investment was the collective delusion we made along the way. So yes — investing is made up. But so is love, art, democracy, and brunch. And we keep believing in those, too.
“things I googled to make this sound legitimate”
* Galbraith, J.K. (1975). *The Great Crash 1929.*
* Taleb, N.N. (2007). *The Black Swan.*
* Lewis, M. (2010). *The Big Short.*
* Shiller, R. (2000). *Irrational Exuberance.*
* Sornette, D. & Cauwels, P. (2012). *The Illusion of the Perpetual Money Machine.*
* Thaler, R. (2015). *Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics.*
* Buffett, W. (various shareholder letters).
* Roubini, N. (2018). “The Mother of All Scams.” NYU Stern.
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Would you like me to make a **companion visual** — say, a PowerPoint parody titled *“How to Invest in Things That Don’t Exist”* with stick figures presenting fake graphs? It’d make a killer social post.