Social Media and Investing - Not a great idea

Content creators do not share incentives with their audience (mostly)

The age of social media has had a big impact on investors.

When I started creating content a couple of years ago, I did not fully understand to what extent how different the incentives for content creators are compared to their investor audience.

What gets views and likes?

The incentive of investing content creators is, not to get great returns in the market, but to get more views, more likes and sell products to their audience. The incentive of the content creators is to grow their subscriber base and offer paid products and promotions.

This is a reality that is not questionable. Paid products and promotions offer a high return without risk. For successful content creators that make a lot of money from paid products, their portfolio and returns might be important, but will always be secondary to their source of income.

What gets the most views and likes?

• Content on popular stocks

• Content on recent investing news headlines

• Macroeconomic and short-term predictions (including ultra-bearish content)

• Talking about famous investors

I might be missing some in my list, but you get what I mean. That type of content is not the best for investors, but it is what people watch on YouTube. If people watch that kind of content, content creators will end up making it.

Content creators spend many hours every week thinking, planning, recording and editing a video that could get many likes and views, and they will not spend all that time on creating content that won’t be watched. It does not make sense for them.

So, what will I do from now on?

From now on, you will be seeing me much less on YouTube, and I will be spending those 3-5 hours I spent every week creating videos on analyzing companies and trying to improve my returns. I have less and less free time as I age, and YouTube was a huge time consuming hobby that was starting to become a pain in the ass. I might make an occasional video on some interesting opportunity, but I am not at all interested in creating the kind of superficial content that is required to get tons of views and subscribers there.

I will keep sharing my ideas and research in this blog and in Twitter, which is much less time consuming than YouTube and it actually helps me structure my thoughts and connect with other great investors. In the future, I will decide if I add a paid tier to this substack or completely stop sharing content. What I will not do is spend time thinking about what will people read, or watch and create content around that. I will focus on the most interesting investment opportunities that I can find, even if they have no interest in the investing community. My goal is to improve my returns not to get views, likes and subscribers.

I think my audience here is aligned with my goals, you also seek to improve your returns, so I hope that you find the content in this blog interesting. I think I will be able to find a way to align my incentives with yours. There are surely other writers who have been able to do it, so it is not impossible at all.

Hope you found my thoughts useful,

Oscar.