"That sort of mentality is ill-informed of finance and the market" Uh, no it's not. "The market is not only for millionaires and billionaires. " Yes, it most

"That sort of mentality is ill-informed of finance and the market" Uh, no it's not. "The market is not only for millionaires and billionaires. " Yes, it most definitely is. And most people who 'know finance' - know this. The market is 'rigged', or rather, you are at such a disadvantage that it's effectively rigged and doing retail trading is essentially a losing game. Unless you are pursuing a broad diversification strategy (i.e. buying gold, commodities, real-estate funds etc.) in order to preserve your wealth, you really are not going to win. Retail trading entities, like ETrade are kind of a scammy thing - not directly per se - but they're selling you as fish to sharks (i.e. hedge/big funds). If you want to make money playing stocks - you have to 'know more' than the person on the other side of the trade.* Large funds and hedge funds each have massive, massive advantages including economies of scale, market-making, 'near insider trading' (i.e. they 'interview' insiders and ultimately gain info that's not public), colocating, computing power, the ability to move markets with trades, lead trades, the hire some of the smartest people in the world etc. etc. etc.. Unless you have near-inside (or inside) information on a specific stock - you're basically playing poker against Deep Blue and expecting to win. Imagine you're playing poker and they are playing 10 hands, have memorized the deck, know 'all the best moves', are using a computer, and they 'take the dealer out for free drinks every night'. You think you can beat them? On the whole, I'd argue strongly that the best someone can hope for in trading in long run to ride the alpha of the market overall - and that's it. (Or again, to pursue some very broad strategy without having to pay a private wealth manager fees) Did you read the story about how DraftKings works? Basically about 5% of the players make all the returns - they play almost professionally, or with data, or take it very seriously and buy data, know the strategies etc.. But DKings needs those Sharks to make the market. And they feed them fish (i.e. you and I), casual players. Though stocks generally grow with the economy, and underlying trades there is actually an 'investment' - you're really not investing at all. You are speculating about the future surpluses against other people doing the same. Playing the stock market is more like gambling than investing - in Poker you know you're 'playing against others'. Because on E-trade one is theoretically 'investing' one does not think one is playing against others, but that really is the case. You can try to play 'value investing' but there are just too many people with much more power playing that game as well. Finally - I would strongly recommend that readers do not take the advice on your blog and borrow on margin for 6%. If you're borrowing at 6%, then you have to get returns > 6% in order to make this profitable. In other words: in order for that to make sense, you have to beat most of the best big fund managers in the world and be a 'truly world class investor'. What are the odds of that?