I spent this spring doing something I’d wanted to do for years: I sat down and honestly researched every famous way people say you can grow your money in the markets. Not just one. All of them.
Day trading. “AI trading bots.” The “funded trader” challenges all over your feed. Momentum strategies. Value investing. Low-volatility funds. Gold. Foreign markets. The $5,000 guru “academies.” Dozens of strategies, across decades of data — the academic studies, the regulator filings, the court records.
I had one question, the one nobody selling you a strategy ever answers honestly: after all the costs and all the hype, which of these actually beats just buying a boring index fund and leaving it alone?
Here’s the short version. It sorted into three tiers, and the tiers are the whole story.
Tier one: the stuff that’s sold the hardest is the stuff that hurts people the most. Day trading, the bots, the prop-firm “challenges,” the guru courses — these aren’t strategies, they’re machines for moving money from hopeful people to the sellers. The statistics behind them are brutal and consistent, and I’ll show you the actual numbers and court cases. Not opinion. Receipts.
Tier two — and this is the one that surprised me — even the legitimate clever strategies mostly disappointed. The real, academically-respected ideas — momentum, value, quality, low-volatility — they look great in a textbook. But once a regular person can only do the honest version (no shorting, no leverage), pays the costs, and waits a few years for the crowd to catch on, most of them quietly trailed a plain index fund over the last decade. The famous “value” strategy had a lost decade. The clever stuff underperformed the boring stuff.
Tier three: there was exactly one honest edge — and it’s not what you’d expect. It isn’t a way to make more money. It’s a simple, boring trend rule that makes roughly the same money as the market while dramatically cutting the gut-wrenching crashes — turning a stomach-churning 50% drop into something closer to 10 or 15%. Less return, far less pain, and — this is the part that matters — far more likely that a scared human actually sticks with it instead of panic-selling at the bottom.
That last finding is the most useful thing in the whole study, and it’s pure good news. Because the barrier to building wealth was never the math. It’s the fear. And the calm, honest answer turns out to be simpler and gentler than anything anyone’s trying to sell you.
I’m publishing all of it, chapter by chapter — every strategy, every number, every place I was wrong (including a couple of bugs I caught in my own work, which I’ll show you, because that’s the part the gurus never do). I sell nothing. There’s no course at the end. There’s just what the evidence actually says.
If you want to follow the whole thing as it rolls out — every strategy, as I publish it — subscribe here: getoutofdebt.org/subscribe
It’s free, it lands in your inbox, and by the end you’ll be able to look at any “get rich in the markets” pitch and know — calmly, with the receipts — exactly what it’s worth.
Talk soon,
Steve