Professor Braden Lindstrom gave $82,000 to someone he met via WhatsApp.
It wasn’t one of those romance schemes plaguing gullible & lonely middle-aged people either. This was all about profit. Lots of it, and quick.
$82,000 seems like a lot of money, in this case. Depending on the college, it could be a full year of after-tax earnings. The professor badly wanted to multiply it.
Here’s the stock he bought, according to The Wall Street Journal. The red arrow roughly marks his entry point.
That chart is a beauty.
The professor told the WSJ reporter he bought shares in “late March.” We’ll assume he paid~$6/sh, maybe more. Based on the facts, as reported, it’s a safe bet he had no methodology in building the position.
This is most people. In the world’s largest capital market, at least.
Practically everyone in America has brokerage access now. From Robinhood Markets (HOOD) to WEBULL Corp (BULL), investing today has the aesthetic appeal of casino slots.
Click, refresh, boom…buying stock is painless. We’re a long way from the days of phoning a broker, placing an order, and paying a 2% commission. The professor likely keeps transaction costs low by absolutely never paying for advice or pro-level trade execution.
Also, most American investors don’t have time to learn anything about where invested money goes, how it’s used, or how it’s treated. Ask them why and they’ll explain they don’t have the skill, or interest.
Rudimentary multiplication, flash-card math, drives their every decision. They’ve read stories about bountiful riches in markets, and they need that right away.
Hope & Blame
Get something straight about people. If they make a good decision, it’s their idea. If they lose, someone else did it to them.
It’s how most people think. It’s also why they habitually lose. If you want to change your odds, consider taking responsibility for every decision you make, regardless of circumstances.
Take the professor. He thinks $1.76-trillion-dollar Meta Platforms Inc (META), the parent company of WhatsApp, should protect him from these situations.
Not his financial acumen, not his common sense, not his reckless tendency to gamble an entire year’s salary on a Chinese company nobody’s ever heard of. No, no, not any of those. It’s the messaging app’s fault.
Play this line of thinking out further. Should META monitor his chats, put them into AI, do some back-of-the-envelope stock research, and give him a snapshot of the upside potential? Sure buddy…
And if so, would he give META a slice of his profit? Doubt it. That’s all his.
What the professor doesn’t know, because he’s not very smart, is the creator of the message he answered already understood his flawed thinking.
Savvy people realize hope & blame the professor. There’s more. He likely feels resentment at what he assumes is bountiful success experienced by others. Then there’s the envy component… it’s unfair.
You see, most people have about three emotions driving everything they do. They have no time or capacity for self-examination. That means they’re about as predictable as Pavlovian dogs.
“Huge upside potential” and “imminent catalysts” were enough to get the wheels turning in this guy’s head. Simple math, multiplying the $82k, thinking about what he’d do with the winnings. That’s what took over.
The best marketing encourages you to think about what you’d do with all that extra cash. That sets the hook. An effective ad goes into repetitive detail about how today’s corporate blue chips were once unknown… and you could be as victorious as the renegade investors of yesteryear. Imagine the possibilities!
But that’s not how successful people think. It takes time and effort to earn money. It takes respect and attention to keep it.
Life in Memerica
If you don’t take care of your cash, someone else will.
And while it is technically possible to go 100:1 on an investment, it’s less likely you’ll know in advance.
I’ve had more than one investment go 100:1. In each case, I felt like the idea was crazy, and made a small, token investment. I’m sure it’ll happen again, assuming I live long enough. And I’m also sure I’ll once again be appropriately small in the trade.
Professor Lindstrom might not have a next time. From the way the article reads, he’ll spend years finger pointing and hoping some State Attorney recovers his losses.
Meanwhile, the genius on the other end of the WhatsApp chat encouraged him to try just one more investment with huge potential…
Notice the timing… Just about two weeks after the first chance to multiply profits… This time it was a Chinese education company… also with huge upside potential.
He says he passed on this one… but surely some people went for it.
This stuff works, especially on Americans. Who have more money than sense.
Guided by greed, envy, and the tantalizing idea of life as they’ve seen it on Instagram, they find a way to get what they deserve.
As a society, we’ve never had it this good. But as a group of people, we’ve never been more vapid, dull, and asleep.
Just imagine spending countless hours working away on lesson plans, lecturing, researching, and the near-decade of school it took to get there.
Plus, the thrift most people see as virtuous. Shopping around for deals, saving, saying no to indulgence, having the cheaper, tougher cut of steak because Prime filet seems wasteful… Only to give the entire pile to some stranger you meet through an inbound WhatsApp message.
It’s the More Disease. And as soon as you point it out, people scoff. They hit back with the dreaded, “Easy for you to say…” or “Some of us aren’t as lucky as you.”
These blame statements are an intellectual copout. They had the $82,000, or their personal equivalent. They could’ve spent it living, enjoying their personal choices, or even changing careers to something they liked more than teaching, using the extra cash to supplement a better life.
People won’t do it. They don’t want to learn, experience, or indulge in doing what they love.
They’ll say it’s not true… but actions matter more than slogans, narratives, and empty words.
Year of Delusion
At TTL, we discourage pejoratives. It’s a sign of intellectual laziness.
It’s why when we use the term “loser” in association with the professor, we’re merely talking about the $82,000.
Most of the cohort scoffs at our mission. We aim to consistently beat the S&P 500 Index. Year in, year out, decades on end, we want to outperform that index.
There will be bigger years, and sluggish years, but beating that index over time is a much more interesting way to multiply money than buying Chinese shell companies off a WhatsApp chat.
The biggest swath of American gamblers posing as investors disagrees. They don’t have time for that. They need outsized, life-changing, mistake-fixing gains now, today. These are Memericans. They need action fast, and someone to blame if they don’t get it.
Like yesterday, when battery-operated toy & hydration product company SRM Entertainment Inc (SRM) announced it would reverse-merge itself into a company called Tron…which aims to hoard TRX crypto tokens.
The stock went from a recent ~$0.50 to almost ~$10 on the news.
Then it fell back to $7.25 the following day. With no insight into Tron or TRX tokens generally, what lies ahead is anyone’s guess. Someone out there bought that top tick using real cash.
Meanwhile, the S&P 500 Index is up 2.4% YTD not including dividends. While 2.5% technically beats it, double-digit returns are a low bar in 2025.
Most people laugh at the idea of double-digit annual returns. What used to be idealized as successful investing now seems hokey. They can’t see, through the fog and confusion of memes, advertisements, narratives, and fractious political protests. The broad index isn’t going anywhere.
This year at least. Notice how break even is all we’ve got half way through 2025. Think about the trillions of retirement dollars treading water. The thrifty Ameriprise reps carting around branded pens and squeeze balls telling workers the stock market always goes up…
It’s a funny thing… the index. We had more than a decade of can’t-lose talk about the thing. Books about it. Indexing as moral high ground. Yet it’s dead.
The indexers average their buys, meaning every paycheck chips away at the long-term goal… of evidently a better life. Few can articulate what’s wrong with the current one…
Hold on, don’t sell, buy the dip, just don’t quit, you don’t want to miss out on more.
Americans always want more. They’ll reach, claw, scheme, even resort to tattling, all for more money they again won’t spend.
People have this weird combination of thrift, greed, and duty to causes and ideas. It’s why the most skullduggerous capitalists start foundations later in life. It’s an effort towards moral cleansing. They make these goofy attempts to do good. When nobody points out they could’ve just been a little less myopic along the way. Avoiding all the guilt-inducing behavior in the end.
Or the average person, who instead of walking subconsciously into every meme trap that flies by, could just live today, do more of what they enjoy, and less of what they don’t.
It’s this big group, the mass, that would hate the two stocks we’ll add to the Trustee Portfolio today.
To the core portfolio, a company you’ve heard of. It’s up ~40% over the last year, including a small dividend. It’s stock chart looks like a set of concrete stairs.
And to the cyclical portfolio, a smaller stock, about 1/10th the size, which looks set to cross into an uptrend just in time to benefit from the shifting geopolitical situation. That one might give us whiplash, which is what a well-timed cyclical stock can do.
But back to the first one, the boring one, up only ~40% in the last year. The professor would never buy that one off a WhatsApp chat. There’s no way. It’s way too stable, way too known. Plus, a ~40% move on $82,000 only yields $114,800… in a whole year. That’s way too slow…
The hard-working professor, envious of those who get more, live better, and seem ahead. Masquerading as a well-behaved worker, is in reality a hopeless gambler, drawn in by hope, crippled by loss, soothed by blame. He’ll never take the time to think clearly about his decisions, learn about the market. And he’ll certainly never pay for a newsletter to help him do it…
Let’s get into these two new stocks… and the other 11 sitting on index-beating gains half way through 2025.