It’s easy to scroll through today’s feeds and feel like you drew the short straw in history: housing is ruined, the economy is broken, everything was cheaper and simpler “back then.” That story is emotionally satisfying and algorithmically supercharged… but it’s also wrong in one very important way.

Let’s get into it →

Worried about losing money when investing? You’re not alone.

In just 15 minutes, we’ll show you how to avoid common investing mistakes and build a strategy you can trust.

What you see online is not “reality,” in the same way that a movie isn’t “real life.” Most people sort of know this in theory. But the amount of distortion is still wildly underestimated.

Social media doesn’t show you posts in the order they happened. It takes everything that could be shown to you, runs it through a gigantic machine, and serves you whatever scores highest on engagement. The product is your attention; the customer is the advertiser.

And what works, reliably, on humans? Not “things are mostly fine, carry on.” What works is: “Look out!” We are wired to pay attention to anything that looks like a threat. Fear, anger, outrage, disgust: these emotions come with a built-in “open immediately” push notification.

The news business isn’t all that different. Their constraint is slightly more dignified (they still have to tell you things that actually happened), but the economic logic is the same. If there is a way to frame a story so that it sounds like a crisis, it will get tried.

Put all that together and you end up living inside a system that is structurally biased toward negativity.

Young people, especially, live inside this loop. They are seeing more “the world is on fire” headlines, more outrage, more “late-stage capitalism is collapsing” threads than any prior generation, simply because more of their lives are lived inside that engagement machine.

Some of the worries are completely fair. Housing is expensive in a way that feels almost adversarial. Being laid off by a company that just posted record profits is… not great. Watching rent, tuition, and childcare go up faster than your salary is also not great. These are real problems, not mindset issues.

But they’re not the only thing that’s true.

At the same time, there is a huge amount of quiet good news that doesn’t fit neatly into a doom-scroll. As an investor today, even if you’re starting from zero, even if you don’t own a home, you have cheaper, better, and more flexible tools for building wealth than any prior generation.

Roll the tape back 50 years. You want to build wealth. What are your options?

For boomers, housing was the big, obvious path. You could buy a home on a normal salary, with a normal mortgage, in a normal city. That’s a huge structural advantage: you get leverage on an asset that tends to go up over time, especially in places with growing populations and low crime. If you happened to be born into the right geography, you could ride a multi-decade real-estate boom almost by accident.

But that was also the problem: it was geography. Real estate is local. If you didn’t live in the “right” city, or couldn’t buy in the “right” neighbourhood, you were mostly out of luck. You couldn’t easily say “you know what, I’ll just buy a little slice of the best land in the country” from your living room. It was paperwork, friction, restrictions, and a lot of concentration risk in whatever zip code you happened to inhabit.

The other route was stocks, which was very much not easy back then. Trading was expensive: think tens or even hundreds of dollars in commissions per trade, in 1970s dollars. There were no zero-fee broker apps on your phone. Every time you wanted to buy or sell something, you paid a meaningful tax to your broker.

There were also no ETFs. If you wanted diversification you got a mutual fund, with a cheery brochure and a 2% expense ratio. So your menu was: individual stocks with high trading costs, or funds with high annual fees, or both.

And then there was the information problem. No internet, no email newsletters, no YouTube explainers, no podcasts, no reasonably-priced data tools.

There definitely wasn’t a world where you could pull up a database like RatedA, and in five minutes see what the company does and whether it’s likely to be a good business to own.

For most people, “the stock market” was a scrolling list of cryptic tickers. It felt like gambling because, for the average person, that’s about as sophisticated as the decision-making process could get.

You can now buy broad, low-cost ETFs for essentially nothing, on brokerages that also charge essentially nothing. You can dollar-cost average into a globally diversified portfolio from your phone, on your lunch break, with fewer fees than a 1970s investor paid in a single phone call to their broker.

And public equity markets are, empirically, the most effective wealth-creation machine humans have ever built. You get fractional ownership of businesses that throw off cash, grow over time, are audited, regulated, and required to tell you what they’re doing every quarter.

Meanwhile, the underlying engine of the economy is being steadily upgraded. We already had the internet boom, which is still quietly compounding in the background. Then we piled on cloud, software, AI, LLMs, and now robotics.

All of these are, in one way or another, “let’s do the same thing with fewer people, faster, at higher margins.” That flows into higher earnings, which, over time, tends to flow into higher stock prices, more dividends, more buybacks.

Layer on a policy environment that, for all its flaws, is broadly pro-business and reasonably friendly to capital: companies are allowed to reinvest, repurchase shares, and distribute cash without confiscatory friction at every step.

Put it all together and you get something that sounds almost impolite to say on the internet: if you’re a small, patient investor with a long time horizon, the toolkit available to you today is better, cheaper, safer, more scalable, than anything your grandparents had access to.

Yes, housing is rough, job security is weird, the world feels chaotic. But if you also happen to have an income, you are living in the single best moment in history to quietly siphon part of that income into the greatest wealth-creation machine humans have ever built.

It’s not rocket-science. You skim some cash off your paycheque, you put it into broad, cheap ETFs, or into a small portfolio of boring, high-quality businesses (asset-light, decent returns on capital, secular growth, not obviously run by maniacs, trading at prices that are reasonable…)

Then, you… leave it alone. You treat it the way your parents treated a rental property: something you own for 10–20 years, not 10–20 days. Over a five-year period, “double your money” is not a fantasy outcome; it’s just what compounding looks like when you give it time and don’t do anything too silly.

Whether you’re investing $1,000 or $1 million, the logic is the same. The feed will always be tilted negative; there will always be a chart, a headline, a thread explaining why now is a uniquely dangerous time to be an investor.

But don’t be fooled by it. Wealth creation is not only possible, it’s incredibly probable if you take the steps to do it.

You don’t need permission, or a perfect moment, or a secret strategy. You need a plan and a willingness to start. If you haven’t begun, this is an excellent day to do it. If you already have, this is an excellent day to keep going (and, if you can, to press the gas a little harder).

The RatedA Portfolio is beating the market. You could too.

Members receive full updates on all our buys and sells, expert insights, as well as carefully selected stock recommendations to help you invest like a pro.