Why I Stopped Listening To Finance “Influencers” #Finance

Finance youtube. A space that’s riddled with clickbait thumbnails, predictions for the market, financial advice (that is apparently not financial advice), and of course, the

sketchiest brand deals you’ve ever seen. I don’t watch a lot of Finance YouTubers, despite being a personal

style="font-weight: bold; color: #1a73e8; text-decoration: none;">Finance Youtuber myself. And today I’m going to be explaining why that is the case, and why listening to none;">Finance YouTubers could potentially be the worst financial decision of your life, I’m not kidding. The first issue with Finance youtube that I want to

talk about is their predictions. I’m referring to how Finance YouTubers will often make their own predictions about financial-related topics, such as where they think the

economy is heading, if the Stock Market is going to go up or down, and what stocks are going to skyrocket in price this year. And some of these predictions that none;">Finance YouTubers make can be a big problem, because certain predictions such as “what stocks are going to 10x in price”, can really influence what their audience does with their money. You see, many consumers of

style="font-weight: bold; color: #1a73e8; text-decoration: none;">Finance content on youtube have little knowledge about Finance, they’re watching these

CashNews.cos to try and better themselves and make smarter financial decisions. They look to their favorite, successful, Finance influencer for advice on what to do with

their money. For example, if a person that’s new to Finance is wanting to get started investing in the Stock Market, they probably won’t know what to

invest in, so they might watch a CashNews.co like “the best stocks to invest in for 2023”, then they might actually go and buy all of the stocks mentioned in that CashNews.co. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if buying stocks that YouTubers tell you to buy, is actually a common investment

strategy for a lot of people today. But doing this can be a very bad idea, because, to be frank, most YouTubers don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re usually just good communicators that do a great job convincing their audience that they know what they’re talking about. I decided

to test out this theory of whether or not it’s a good idea to buy stocks recommended by Finance YouTubers. The idea I had was to go back and find old CashNews.cos made by

big Finance YouTubers where they make their own stock picks and predictions based on their supposed “due diligence”. Now that a couple of years have passed from the time

they made these stock picks, we can go and see how these stocks actually performed over the last couple of years for real, and see if the stocks lived up to the hype made by none;">Finance YouTubers. To start things off I found this CashNews.co called “The best stocks of 2021” from Andrei Jikh, who I would say is the second biggest none;">Finance influencer on youtube, after Graham Stephan. In this CashNews.co, Andrei is recommending you buy the stocks Chevron, Exxon, Square, PayPal, Shopify, and Coinbase. Now that 2 years have passed since Andrei made this CashNews.co, we can see how well these stocks actually

performed. I downloaded the price data for each of these stocks, did a few calculations, and worked out that since January 2021, which is when Andrei uploaded his CashNews.co, the stocks he picked returned the following: Chevron, 111%, Exxon 146%, Square -71%, Paypal -70%, Shopify -68%, and

Coinbase -85%. Overall, if you had invested in these stocks equally when Andrei recommended them, you would have made a return of -5% over the last 2 years. And if we compare the return of Andrei’s stock picks to the return of the S&P 500, AKA the broader Stock Market, you

can see that the S&P 500 outperformed Andrei by a fair amount with a return of 3%. But I get it, you might be thinking, -5%, that’s not terrible, that’s not going to destroy you financially or anything. But there are a lot more YouTubers with far worse stock picks. I decided to

repeat this same analysis with other large Finance YouTubers that made stock pick CashNews.cos 2 years ago, and the results were pretty shocking. Jeremy from “Financial

Education”, made a CashNews.co recommending you buy 5 different stocks, with predictions that some of these stocks would increase in price 10 fold. The stocks he recommended were Tattooed Chef, surprise surprise, Walgreens Boots Alliance, Microstrategy, Dropbox, and Shopify. The returns for these

stocks are as follows: Tattooed Chef -95%, Walgreens Boots Alliance -26%, Microstrategy -77%, Dropbox -1%, and Shopify -68%, with an average return of -53%. So for someone that actually sells memberships to his own private stock group, this isn’t really the best look. It turns out his group

probably isn’t “The Blueprint to Long Term Investing Success”, it’s more like “The Blueprint to losing half of your investment”. The last Youtuber stock picks I analyzed were from Stock Moe. He made a CashNews.co recommending you buy 3 different stocks, Rocket, NIO, and Tesla. Now,

I want to ask you, how do you think a mortgage lending stock that was recommended at a time of record low mortgage rates, and two overly hyped pandemic EV stocks, actually performed over the last 2 years? The answer is shockingly bad, Rocket returned -67%, Nio -83%, and Tesla -53%, averaging a

return of -68%. When you compare these returns to the return of the S&P 500 which was 3%, it isn’t looking too great for these guys. And I don’t know about you guys but I would expect youtube channels that are literally called “Financial Education” and “Stock Moe” to not recommend

stocks to their audience that have more than halved in value in just 2 years, despite the broader Stock Market return being positive over this same period. There are likely thousands of people that followed these YouTuber’s advice and would have paid the price for doing so. So I

guess my recommendation for you is to at least do your own research before listening to a YouTuber, because as that scene in the Wolf of wall street goes “no one knows if a stock is going up or whatever…”. The only thing I’d change about that scene is Matthew McConaughey saying “no one

knows what a stock is going to do, least of all stock Brokers”, when he should have said “least of all Finance YouTubers” And to clarify, I don’t

think that all predictions or recommendations about stocks or the market are bad. You can give your take on the economy, just make sure that it’s clear that it’s solely your opinion, and not coming from a place of authority. I even think it’s okay to give recommendations on what to invest

in, but you have to be careful here. For example, I make CashNews.cos recommending specific index funds, but these are diversified Investments that have been proven to create wealth for millions of people over a long period of time, as opposed to trendy pandemic stocks, which are

apparently proven to destroy your wealth in a short period of time. Really you can dumb it down to: offer good advice, not bad advice. Another big problem with Finance

youtube is that creators are rewarded for playing into the whole youtube game. This means creating CashNews.cos with crazy clickbait titles and thumbnails, and talking about whatever is trendy at the time because it results in the most amount of clicks and attention. And to be honest with you guys,

I’ve played into this a little as well, and I want to share the results because it is very interesting. I made a CashNews.co a little while ago about what lessons we investors can take away from the FTX disaster. I was going to title the CashNews.co something along the lines of “What Investors

can learn from the FTX disaster”, that’s a title that best describes the content I covered in my CashNews.co. But right before uploading the CashNews.co, I saw some other none;">Finance YouTubers upload CashNews.cos with the most absurd amount of clickbait in their titles and thumbnails, and I kind of thought, you know what, why don’t I instead change the title to “Just lost everything in FTX, what investors can learn”. It’s kind of clickbaity,

right? Because it might make you think that I lost all of my money in FTX, but then allows me kind of defend the clickbait by saying “oh no I didn’t lose MY MONEY in FTX, I was referring to all of the people that lost THEIR MONEY in FTX”. So anyways I went with the more clickbait approach.

And for the CashNews.co thumbnail, I used a picture of Sam Bankman Fried with laser eyes, surrounded by lots of flames, and a fake tweet where he says “funds are frozen”, similar to what a lot of the other text-decoration: none;">Finance YouTubers do. And here’s the crazy thing, I was actually somewhat nervous about uploading the CashNews.co because I figured I would get some backlash in the comments calling me out for click-baiting and stuff. But to my surprise, no one said anything.

And it made me think, I bet the reason no one called me out for click-baiting, is because people on youtube are already so accustomed to seeing clickbait in every CashNews.co already, that this was nothing new to them. And what shocked me even more about the CashNews.co, is that when I checked my

youtube analytics, I saw that the CashNews.co had a click-through rate of around 12%, which means that for every 100 people who saw my CashNews.co thumbnail, about 12 decided to click on the CashNews.co and view it. And this is actually the highest click-through rate I have ever received on one of

my CashNews.cos. So that proves that my clickbait was in fact successful at getting people to click. So this got me curious about which of my other thumbnails also had a high click-through rate. So I went through all of my CashNews.cos and screenshotted the ones with higher click-through rates. And

here they are…do you see a correlation between them…they all have flames. I guess it turns out that every time I put flames in my thumbnail, the CashNews.co performs well. I like to think that the clickbait I use is tasteful still, but I do think that other

href="https://cashnews.co/finance" style="font-weight: bold; color: #1a73e8; text-decoration: none;">Finance creators that are playing the youtube game are maybe taking it a bit too far to the point that it can negatively affect the viewer. Take for example Graham Stephan, who mostly

makes CashNews.cos about financial news. Scrolling through his CashNews.cos made in the last few months we see the titles, “it started: the worst housing crash in 40 years”, “The housing market is going insane”, “the Fed just crashed the market”, “congress wants to ban investing”,

“the worst economic collapse is coming”, “congress wants to reset investing”, “the fed just broke the market”, “it started, the worst market collapse in 50 years”, “the next great reset”, “the fed just reset the housing market”, “the fed just crashed the housing market”,

“the fed just flipped the market”, “its over, the housing market just collapsed”, “the fed just reset the market, recession canceled”, “congress just reset the housing market”, “the fed just crushed the market” and it goes on and on. And all of these CashNews.cos about how the

Fed just apparently crashed the market, oh wait never mind the recession is now canceled, wait a second now the fed just reset the housing market this time, all of these titles just paint a really inaccurate picture of how the economy really is. In reality, whether it’s the economy, the

Stock Market, or the Real Estate market, they’re not even close to how hectic and flip-floppy Graham and other YouTubers make it seem, even during the more extreme financial climate today. All these CashNews.cos do is cause a lot of fear for his audience, and

make them feel the need to watch his CashNews.cos because they don’t want to miss out on potentially crucial new market news, when in reality the news usually isn’t crucial whatsoever. And I’ve noticed that his fans are just exhausted with this type of clickbait now. Also saying things like

the Fed just reset or flipped the market isn’t even terminology people use in economics or Finance. #1a73e8; text-decoration: none;">Finance professionals don’t say to each other “hey Brad did you see that the fed just reset the market.” Instead, they say “did you see that the fed raised Interest Rates by 50 basis points instead of our 75 basis point prediction, so we

can expect the Stock Market to increase by maybe 2% today.” Once again, if the only place you learn about Finance is from YouTubers like Graham Stephan, I

think you will likely have a very unrealistic, overly dramatized, outlook on how the economy is functioning. It clearly pays them more to make scary, fear-mongering type CashNews.cos than it does to make CashNews.cos with useful advice. I miss the days when Youtubers like Graham Stephan made

personal Finances CashNews.cos that actually helped people, now it seems like they make nothing but fear-mongering CashNews.cos that don’t contain as much useful

information that you can apply to your own Finances. You don’t exactly gain a lot by watching Graham read off random news headlines that are, for the most part, just

clickbait themselves. At the end of the day, it all comes down to views, subscribers, and ultimately, money, which brings me to my last concern for Finance youtube, which is

“Greed”. Recently we saw most of the big Finance YouTubers get called out for promoting fraudulent companies like FTX, Blockfi, and Established Titles. And I think

there’s no other way to put it, other than they completely sold out at the detriment of their own fans. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with trying to maximize the amount of money you make as a YouTuber. Do as many brand deals as you want, sell courses, as long as these products

provide value to your fans in exchange. But when YouTubers promoted the Crypto exchange FTX and Blockfi, they went against their own advice. Some YouTubers went from calling

href="https://cashnews.co/crypto" style="font-weight: bold; color: #1a73e8; text-decoration: none;">Crypto a “speculative investment”, to then doing FTX brand deals where they would literally promote buying NFTs to their fans. When promoting these companies to their fans, they knew the

risks involved, they knew that their fan’s money was not FDIC insured, they ignored the warning signals, such as all of the other Crypto exchanges that went bankrupt causing users to lose

money, and frankly, they ignored these warning signs, and were okay with their fans taking the risks. And as a result, consumers of Finance content on youtube likely lost

many millions of dollars of their own money. So to sum things up, I think it’s a shame to see many of the Finance YouTubers that I used to watch start to make less

valuable content overall, and really sell out at the expense of their viewers. That’s not to say that they don’t offer good advice sometimes. I still do think that most none;">Finance YouTubers offer pretty good advice overall, but I wanted to make this CashNews.co to give my thoughts on how that is becoming less common now. I want the none;">Finance content niche on youtube to keep growing because it can provide so much value to the people that never were able to receive a personal Finance

education in school or from their parents, but I’m worried about the way things are currently headed. And I’m curious to know what your thoughts are on the state of none;">Finance content here on youtube, so please do let me know in the comments below, I really would love to hear all of your takes. But that’s it for the CashNews.co, and I’ll see you in the next one.