From Gerd Kommer and Markus Moser
When someone begins to deal with the topic of investing and building wealth and has no prior knowledge, he or she will be confronted with a strange phenomenon: countless financial experts in traditional and social media who claim in their publications that successful investing is “simple,” “easy as pie,” can be learned quickly and/or requires little ongoing investment of time.
This is strange because we all know that only a small minority succeed in becoming rich on their own - at least if the “wealth threshold” is not set absurdly low.
Here are a dozen examples of publications from the financial book market, from newspapers and from the Internet, in which book authors, journalists and finfluencers postulate that successful investing in capital market investments or real estate is easy, requires little work and only a small amount of time:
- “Everyone can do stocks: building wealth made easy!” (Title of a financial advice book)
- “The truth is, you can achieve better results than most fund managers in just 10 minutes a year” (LinkedIn post)
- “Investing has never been as easy as it is today: invest successfully in the stock market” (title of a financial advice book)
- "Stocks, ETFs or gold? This is how you can create the perfect portfolio in 90 minutes" (article headline in a major daily newspaper)
- “I’ll show you how you can build wealth through real estate in the best locations in Germany – without having to do anything yourself” (LinkedIn post)
- “Everything about ETFs in just 15 minutes: index, savings plan, taxes” (title of a YouTube video from a consumer protection organization)
- “Investing in Bitcoin and Ethereum is child’s play” (title of a financial advice book)
- “Anyone can easily become a millionaire” (Instagram reel from a finfluencer)
- “Index funds are considered a foolproof form of investment” (subtitle of an article on ETFs in a business newspaper)
- "You too have what it takes to be a stock market genius! Extraordinary strategies for extraordinary profits" (title of a financial advice book)
- “Rich with ETFs: How you can become rich as a stock market newcomer with little capital without any prior knowledge” (title of a financial advice book)
Let's now contrast this with the statements about the level of difficulty of successful investing from reputable professionals who have become rich themselves and/or manage large assets:
- "Investing is not supposed to be easy. Anyone who finds it easy is stupid." [1] – Charlie Munger (1924 – 2023), billionaire, board member of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (the Warren Buffett company)
- “Investing is hard.” – Ted Lamade, Executive Director at The Carnegie Institution for Science (a major nonprofit science research institution in the United States)
- “Only a tiny minority of individual investors will ever succeed in managing their money well.” [2] – William Bernstein, asset manager, financial author, financial scientist
- “It has never been harder to be a disciplined independent investor.” – [3] Jason Zweig, financial journalist at the Wall Street Journal, investment author
- “Unfortunately, investing is not a simple task.” [4] – Harold Evensky, financial scientist, asset manager and investment author in the USA
- "Being a stock investor is hard. Volatility can be high, drawdowns can be long, and nobody can definitely say when returns are going to be good or bad." [5] – Cliff Asness, founder and CEO of US asset manager AQR, billionaire
- "We are not designed to be rational investors. We need all the help we can get." – [6] Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize winner in economics
- “Making rational, disciplined investment decisions consistently over decades is really difficult.” [7] – Victor Haghani, former hedge fund manager, financial author, asset manager, entrepreneur
If successful investing were easy to learn and/or easy to practice, and if it required little effort or time investment, then clearly there should be more rich and super-rich people on the planet. Anyone who claims, without or with malicious intent, that successful investing is easy should be countered with the question: "If investing is so easy, then why aren't you a millionaire many times over? Or why aren't we all rich?"
Unfortunately, even otherwise honest, honorable, and competent financial industry players sometimes contribute to the misconception that successful investing is “easy” or “simple.” One example is the Canadian asset manager and finfluencer Ben Felix, who we highly respect. In a 2025 YouTube video he says “smart financial planning and smart investing are easy to understand” and ultimately conveys the message “everyone can invest successfully on their own” throughout the video. Unfortunately wrong.
An analogy: Would someone seriously say about the job of a car mechanic or that of a nurse “it’s easy” and “anyone can do it” – including anyone who hasn’t been trained to be a car mechanic or a nurse. Successful long-term investing is no easier than being a good car mechanic or a good nurse. Of course, in principle anyone can learn to become a successful investor, a good car mechanic or a good nurse and yet long-term, sustainable success or even the absence of significant failure in these activities is not easy and even less easy for someone without the appropriate training, commitment and perseverance.
All in all, statements like the publication titles quoted at the beginning are not only simply wrong, they are also an insult to the intellect of all people who have seriously tried to become wealthy or wealthy with their respective possibilities and have failed in this endeavor.
Successful investing is also a long-term process, not a one-time decision or one-time action. Just if you understand the nature of the process, the necessary long-term nature of successful investing and the discipline required for it, you would have to realize that long-term/long-term lucrative investing cannot be easy for normal people - not in the capital market, not with crypto assets and not with real estate.
The fact that chance, i.e. luck, produces rare and therefore perhaps conspicuous exceptions to this fundamental fact does not change it. With the help of chance and luck, despite a lack of competence and without hard work, one can become a salaried, highly paid managing director of a small, medium or even large company, but such "lucky" exceptions are rare and ultimately prove nothing, especially not that the strategy of "lack of competence combined with laziness" reliably produces good careers.
However, it is easy to explain the fact that so many supposed experts are spreading the nonsense in ever new formulations and publication formats that investing, building wealth and getting rich are easy and can basically be done by anyone in a reasonable amount of time. The nonsense spreaders have five motives.
Motive 1 for spreading the “investing is easy” nonsense
The first motive, the first reason is Clickbait. [8] With blatant, exaggerated statements in headlines and titles of newspaper articles, blogs, financial books, YouTube videos and Insta-Reels, circulation, clicks, views and downloads can be increased, even if the headlines and statements used are technically incorrect, exaggerated, misleading or even outright lies.
Financial clickbait is a specific variant of “investment pornography.” Investment pornography are statements in the media, on the Internet and in the marketing of financial service providers that suggest that it is possible for more or less everyone to systematically achieve high returns with little risk and/or little effort.
Financial pornography specifically appeals to some unpleasant traits in all of us: greed, FOMO (fear of missing out), envy, impatience, naivety, ignorance, overconfidence and laziness.
In summary: Motive 1 is simply conflicts of interest in the financial industry.
There are also four other perhaps not so shabby motives for him “Investing is easy” nonsense in traditional and social media.
Motive 2 for spreading the “investing is easy” nonsense
The mistake here is that a process or let's say a "game" with a simple basic structure and simple rules must therefore be easy to lead to success. A fallacy that can be illustrated by the 1,500-year-old board game chess. Chess is a banal game in terms of its rules - simpler than, for example, B. Skat, Schafkopf or Poker. A normally intelligent adult can learn all the rules of chess in 20 minutes or less and immediately implement them more or less error-free.
Does this mean that success at chess is easy? Of course not. Although chess has a simple basic structure and rules, achieving competitive success in chess is “brutally difficult” and time-consuming. This is due to the intense competition between chess players, both amateur chess players and chess professionals.
The same connection exists with countless other games, tasks or jobs. Think about cooking. Cooking seems easy and in the end it is. Anyone who wants can prepare an edible omelette, spaghetti bolognese or an edible salad. But earning “just” a normal salary as a professional chef in the long term is no longer “easy” and no longer possible for everyone. Only a tiny minority of those who try to become truly rich as a chef succeed.
In summary: Motive 2 consists in the error of confusing “simple rules of the game” with “simplicity of achieving success in this game”.
Motive 3 for spreading the “investing is easy” nonsense
The third motive for the “investing is easy” lie is an old but still effective trick that many financial journalists and finfluencers use in their publications. He goes like this: Getting rich can't be difficult simply because all you have to do is buy an old apartment building in Berlin on credit 20 years ago, Bitcoins for 10,000 euros ten years ago, or Nvidia shares for 100,000 euros five years ago. This is the so-called hindsight bias, which was identified decades ago in the discipline of behavioral finance, but in this constellation the author of the publication does not commit it out of ignorance, but quite consciously with manipulative intent. [9]
A more general manifestation of hindsight bias is our tendency to erroneously believe that a problem, once solved, or a “job” that we have mastered after a learning process, however long and involved, is then easy (or low-risk). There is a book about this phenomenon by the American physicist and communication researcher Duncan Watts called “Everything is obvious, once you know the answer” [10]. A complicated or difficult-to-master problem does not become less complicated or easier because there are people who have successfully completed the learning process necessary to master it and who then trivialize their time-consuming and strenuous learning and implementation efforts out of a strange false modesty, arrogance or ignorance. Here “easy for me” (after a typically complex learning process) is confused with “generally easy” or “easy for everyone”.
In summary: Motive 3 consists of cognitive errors Hindsight bias.
Motive 4 for spreading the “investing is easy” nonsense
Sustainably successful investing is not just a question of “what to do?”, but just as importantly a question of “what not to do, what to avoid, what to stop?” Although this statement is banal, it is rarely discussed by financial journalists and finfluencers. Reason: The “don’t do” aspect of successful investing tends to be unsexy. In addition, his discussion would show that investing sustainably and successfully in the long term is by no means easy for the majority of private investors, but often requires complex, strenuous changes in thinking and behavior. (We have written our own blog post on the aspect of “avoidance” as part of a success strategy – link here.)
In summary: Motive 4 consists in the mistaken thinking of not looking at the entire “game” that determines financial success in life, but only a part of it and probably the easier part.
Motive 5 for spreading the “investing is easy” nonsense
This, like the hindsight bias, is a common cognitive error well-researched in behavioral finance science, the Dunning-Kruger effect, named after the two researchers who first named it in a paper in 1999. [11] This is about a widespread illusion of competence among people, which statistically increases the less ability or knowledge a person has in a given area. Put another way: people who are very competent in area In this context, we all know the famous quote “I know that I know nothing” from Socrates, the greatest philosopher of his time in ancient Greece. Socrates was very cleverly free from the Dunning-Kruger bias. Most of us are not.
In summary: Motive 5 consists of: Dunning-Kruger cognition error, underestimating our remaining knowledge and skill gaps once we have acquired basic knowledge and skills in a subject area.
Conclusion
Successful investing, including keeping your own irrationalities in check on a fairly consistent basis, is neither easy nor can it be done “in a short amount of time.” Journalists, book authors, finfluencers and financial services sellers who spread the “investing is easy” lie – a specific variant of financial pornography – in order to market their “learning aids” or financial products are acting dishonestly.
Presenting a process that is risky and important for people's financial circumstances - investing and building wealth - as "simple", "easy", "possible for everyone", "not time-consuming" or as "quick" is not justified by the flimsy excuse that one just wants to encourage people to finally start investing.
Likewise, the distribution of the “Investing is easy” lie legitimate in that many of its promoters probably have no unfair intentions after they have become successful investors after a long time, many painful mistakes and a lot of work. The end does not justify the means here.
Although successful investing is not easy, anyone can learn it. You don't need an above-average IQ or a degree in business administration or math, just four seemingly banal skills:
(a) An average IQ and even slightly below average should be enough.
(b) A genuine interest in the topic.
(c) A stamina budget that most can have.
(d) The solidly internalized insight that there is no such thing as investing Free Lunch exists, excluding the risk-reducing benefits of diversification.
(e) A well-functioning bullshit filter against investment pornography that is spread by the media and the financial industry on a daily basis (preferably in conjunction with a sensitive radar for conflicts of interest among banks, asset managers, finfluencers and financial journalists).
“Genuine interest in the topic” does not mean that you check your portfolio three times every week (once a quarter or six months is enough), that you habitually read the business section of a newspaper (that is unnecessary and perhaps even harmful) or that you spend five hours a week surfing around on financial portals on the Internet in order to consume mostly investment pornography. (Here Let's explain what kind of economic knowledge is actually useful when investing.) Genuine's interest simply means that you are fundamentally interested in the topic of wealth creation and wealth protection, that you also read an advice book and that you regularly think about this issue in thought and in other ways.
What is encouraging is that today – unlike 20 or 40 years ago – there are an enormous number of really helpful advice books, blogs, YouTube videos, podcasts and coaching seminars available, often for little money or even free of charge. [12]
What is even more pleasing is that ETFs have been an ingenious financial product that has existed for a good three decades, with which normal private investors can invest widely in the two central asset classes of stocks and bonds at unrivaled low costs, in an also unrivaled, robust legal structure and with small amounts, without having to analyze and continually monitor individual stocks or bonds.
The fundamental prerequisites for successful asset accumulation or asset protection through capital market investments in broad sections of the population are better today than ever before. The dangerous lie that successful investing is easy and not time-consuming is no longer necessary.
Endnotes
[1] "No one should expect investing to be easy. Anyone who expects it is stupid."
[2] “Only a tiny minority of private investors will ever be able to successfully manage their money”
[3] “It has never been harder to be a disciplined independent investor.”
[4] “Unfortunately, investing is not an easy task.”
[5] "It's not easy being a stock investor. Volatility can be high, declines can be protracted, and no one can say with certainty when the returns will be good or bad."
[6] "We weren't designed [by evolution] to be rational investors. We need all the help we can get [in investing]."
[7] “Making rational investment decisions consistently and in a disciplined manner over decades is difficult.”
[8] “To bait” = to lure, to lure.
[9] See article “Hindsight error” in the German Wikipedia.
[10] “Everything is obvious once you know the answer.”
[11] See article “Dunning-Kruger effect” in the German Wikipedia.
[12] Although here too it is difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff - again one of the many hurdles to a successful investment.