I studied Economics for a time (like, at university) but didn’t graduate. In Economics, we study history, sociology, math, and a lot of stuff in between. I’m saying this because although I was good at math (at the time) and attended a few lectures about the stock market, my interests were elsewhere (and also, the stock market is a rich people’s game in my country, and my family was always working class).

But I do know a bit about how it works. Not the complex stuff like shorting and day-trade, but the easier stuff, like buying shares and watching graphs move over long periods of time.

During the pandemic, I decided to invest 200 euros (the maximum amount I would not miss if I lost everything) (never invest all the money you have, especially if you don’t know how stuff works) in ETFs and see how things go.

I ended the month with 220 euros. A 10% profit for doing nothing. It was probably dumb luck, or maybe I do know how to make good choices for long-term investment but never had the money to explore this skill.

Anyway, here’s the kicker: if I had 200,000 euros and did the same, that would’ve been a 20,000-euro profit. That’s the average Portuguese annual salary before taxes. If I had 200,000 euros and made that in one month, I wouldn’t have to work the rest of the year, I could just take the 20,000 out, pay the taxes, and leave the rest there to make more money.

If I had more money and diversified the investments, I would never ever “run out of money”, because something was always going to be profitable. As long I was in for the long run and didn’t need to take the money out during a loss, it would be gold. It would be better than investing in a real business, which is crazy.

And that’s how rich people stay rich and why they lose their shit over stock evaluation. And that’s also probably why people try to make the stock market as inaccessible as possible with weird and completely unnecessary terminology. And of course, I’ll never have 200,000 euros lying around to invest because staying alive is expensive and saving money is hard, but I digress.

In the end, I pulled the 220 euros back because we had a minor financial emergency and that would help, lol.

Now, onto something related, I had the idea of investing the 200 euros after reading this: Cows that ‘picked’ stocks by defecating on a grid of 25 different company names matched the performance of expert stock analysts in Norwegian experiment.