Why I Stopped Investing

I don't invest money in the stock market anymore. I'm fairly sure typing that message triggered some kind of alert at Ankur Warikoo or Sharan Hegde's office and they're going to hunt me down. Jokes aside, I don't understand how have the finfluencers have normalized investing so much that not doing it feels like a crime. At face-value their advice is reasonable, but reality is so much different from that.

If you're anything like me, you cannot become a passive investor, once your money is in, there's great addiction in checking how much up you are everyday. I don't mind losing Rs 500/- in real life but if my portfolio is red by even Rs 1/- it boils my blood like anything. Even though I made good returns, I realized that I make more money in real life and amount of involvement / effect this has on my emotions and judgement is not worth it.

There's also a good number of my friends who're trying to create wealth by just trading their way out. I find it this amusing because the world's largest hedge funds, investment corporations where buildings full of people with limitless capital, bets on both sides & they can't still beat the S&P500 or NIFTY indexes but somehow my friend's believe with their pocket change they're going to beat them.

I don't have anything against investing. But I hate that so many young people are wasting time 'preserving wealth' that they haven't even created in the first place. If you're 20 something, don't create and preserve wealth at the same time. If you have to just put money into Index Funds and forget it. Try to just beat inflation that's it.

Beyond that your entire focus should be on creating enormous wealth, maximizing your skills to be 1% of 1% in your field, improving judgement to experiment with your career path, get that dream job or start that risky business. Do anything except exhausting your energy trying to find lucky trade.