AI Will Not Help You Get Rich Quick

I almost gave an AI $50,000 to trade with.

There’s a video making the rounds where a guy claims he let Claude manage his portfolio for a month and made $102,000. I watched it, and instead of dismissing it, I did what I always do: I sat down with Claude and designed the whole thing. Autonomous trading agent, brokerage API, scheduled sessions, risk limits. It would’ve worked… in the sense that it would’ve happily placed trades all by itself while I ran my company.

Then statistics talked me out of it. (Thanks, Dr. Jargowsky!)

The Math That Killed It

Forget 100% in a month. Imagine we could make just 5 to 10% per month! Wouldn’t that be awesome!?!

• 5% per month is 79.6% per year! $50,000 becomes $17.4 million in ten years.
• 10% per month turns $50,000 into $4.6 BILLION in ten years.

Holy shit! I’ll be the next Warren Buffet!!! No, even bigger than Buffet! His entire lifetime record is roughly 20% a year, and it made him one of the richest humans alive.

AND ALL BECAUSE OF MY $20 PER MONTH CLAUDE ACCOUNT!!! What idiot wouldn’t do it???

But wait. If 5% a month were achievable by anyone, whoever did it would be the richest person on Earth inside 15 years. But nobody has EVER done it.

Great months will happen. The same strategy that mints a +150% month also prints the -40% ones, and the sequence nets out to ordinary or worse. Every winning month on YouTube is one lucky draw from a wide distribution, posted by a guy selling a $100/month trading community. The people who drew the other card don’t make videos.

Oh, shit! Wait. What? The guy claiming to make $100k per month off AI trading is peddling a $100/month trading community? But why? I mean if I could make $100k per month on AI Trading not only would I ONLY do that, but I’d take all of my profits every month and roll it forward! I’d be richer than Buffet in no time!

It’s all bullshit.

Even the win loses. Say I somehow got 50% in a year: $25,000! Short-term gains are taxed as ordinary income, so call it $15,700 after the IRS, $13,000 after data feeds, all earned while risking a 50% drawdown. My boring diversified account would’ve gotten most of the way there while I slept.

The Reason Your Trades Are Free Is Because You Are the Product

Most people think tapping buy on their phone is the same thing the big guys on Wall Street are doing. It’s not even the same sport. Firms pay exchanges to put their servers in the same building as the matching engine and respond in microseconds; anything you can see on a chart was harvested before the chart rendered. Institutions buy credit card data and satellite photos; your news headline was priced in before a human eyeball reached it.

And why is your trade commission-free? Same reason bars have ladies’ night. The women get in free because their presence is what the paying customers came for. Market makers pay your broker for the right to trade against your orders, precisely because retail flow is uninformed and safe to bet against. You’re not the customer at this bar. You’re the draw.

An AI chatbot fixes none of this. It reads the same public news everyone else reads, later than the machines that already traded on it.

Korea, This Month

Want to see how this ends at scale? Young South Koreans, priced out of housing, piled roughly 3x to 5x leverage into AI stocks, in what Reuters called a market warped into “a wild casino.” In July it broke: 1.2 million accounts hit margin calls and roughly 360,000 were forcibly liquidated, 62% of them people in their 20s and 30s. Wedding funds, gone. Life savings, gone.

The Boring Play

Earn money at the thing you’re actually good at, where you have a real edge: your career, your business. Put the savings somewhere diversified and leave it alone. At a 20-year horizon the speed war is irrelevant, the tax code finally favors you, and at two trades a year, you’re no longer anybody’s ladies’ night.

And next time someone shows you a video where an AI made them $102K in a month, ask one question: if it’s a rate and not a lucky draw, why are they selling you a course instead of compounding their way to a trillion dollars?

You just saved fifty grand.