The Fake Rich: Why Money Content Only Shows You the Wins

You open the app for one minute and the feed has already made its case. Up 10 times in a year. I quit my job at 24. This one trade changed my life.

After a while you start doing the maths. If they can, why can’t I?

I believed those screenshots. Not all of them, but enough of them that for a long time I thought I was the only one losing. Then I started asking a different question. Not “how did they win?” but “how many people tried the same thing, and where are they now?”

It turns out those people aren’t hidden. They’re in a war record from 1943, in a study from Brazil, and in a law the EU passed in 2018.

A thousand coins

Start with a game. A thousand people stand in a stadium and each one flips a coin. Tails, you’re out.

After one flip, about 500 are left. After two, 250. After five, about 30. After 10 flips, one person is still standing: 10 heads in a row.

Now give that one person a camera.

They have a perfect record. They aren’t lying, because every flip really happened. They might even believe they have a method. To anyone watching, they look like a genius.

The other 999 don’t post a video called “I flipped a coin and lost”. They just go home.

That’s the feed. Not a sample of what happens to people, but a filter. Wins travel, because they’re fun to post and fun to watch. Losses stay at home.

The planes that came back

The strange part is that this mistake is much older than the internet.

During the Second World War, the US military had a group of mathematicians working on very practical problems. One of them was a statistician called Abraham Wald. Bombers were coming back covered in bullet holes, and armour is heavy: you can’t cover the whole plane. So where do you put it?

The obvious answer was to armour the places with the most holes. Wald’s insight went the other way. The planes being studied were the ones that came back. A plane could take holes in those places and still fly home. The planes hit somewhere else never returned, so they were never in the data.

The most important information wasn’t on the planes in front of them. It was on the planes that were missing.

Every screenshot is a plane that came back.

The trades that blew up, the accounts that went to zero, the people who quietly stopped posting: those are the missing planes. Usually you can’t see them. In one corner of the market, though, the EU makes companies count them.

The number the EU makes them print

A CFD lets you bet on a price going up or down, with borrowed money multiplying the bet.

In 2018 the EU’s markets regulator, ESMA, looked at how ordinary clients did with them. The answer was bad enough to change the rules: between 74 and 89 out of every 100 retail accounts lost money. Since then, every company selling CFDs to the public has to show a warning with one number in it, the share of its own clients who lose money.

Think about what that means. Somewhere, right now, someone is posting a real video of a real win with exactly this product. And the company that made the trade possible has to tell you, by law, that most of its clients are the missing planes.

The screenshot is on the front page of the feed. The receipt is in the small print, on the same website, sometimes on the same page.

The people who didn’t quit

You might say: fine, beginners lose. The people who stick with it and treat it like a job, they learn.

Researchers in Brazil tested exactly that. They looked at everyone who started day trading a popular futures market there between 2013 and 2015 and kept going for at least 300 days. Not tourists. People who stayed.

Of those people, 97 out of 100 lost money.

Of the few who made money, almost none earned more than the country’s minimum wage. The researchers’ conclusion was blunt: for an individual, making a living from day trading was virtually impossible. They also found no sign that people got better with practice.

Even the professionals’ scoreboard

So what about professionals? Investment funds publish their track records, and a ranking of the best funds over 10 years looks impressive. But a ranking only includes the funds that still exist.

In Europe, S&P’s research found that over 10 years about half of actively managed equity funds were closed or merged into other funds. Gone, and a fund that’s gone doesn’t appear in the 10-year ranking.

Missing planes again. Even the professionals’ scoreboard has the losers taken out.

Why the feed looks like this

None of this is secret. It’s in EU warnings, academic papers and industry reports. So if the numbers are this clear, why does the feed look so different?

Because a winning screenshot isn’t only a memory. It’s an advert.

For a lot of money content, the real income isn’t the trading. It’s what comes after the screenshot: a course, a paid group, a link to a platform that pays per sign-up, a sponsorship, or just attention, which can be sold later. None of that is illegal, and some of it is useful. But look at the incentive. A win brings followers, and followers bring sales. A loss brings nothing, or worse, it brings comments.

Nobody has to lie for the feed to lie.

Every post can be true and the picture can still be false. You only have to choose which true things to show.

Out of how many?

At this point it’s tempting to throw all of it away: every screenshot, every success story, all fake. That’s not quite right either.

Most of those wins are real. The coin flipper really flipped 10 heads. The trader in the screenshot really made that trade. The problem was never the number on the screen. It’s the number missing under it.

One winner. Out of how many?

In school, the number on top of a fraction is the numerator and the one underneath is the denominator. Almost every money story on the internet shows you the top of the fraction and hides the bottom.

So this is the one rule I took away. When someone shows me a win, I don’t ask how. I ask: out of how many, and where are the others?

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That’s also why, in my own experiment, every trade goes in the journal. The good ones, the bad ones, the days I feel stupid. Not because my wins will be bigger, but because then at least one money story on the internet comes with its denominator.

What’s a screenshot that fooled you?