Dear Young Investor,

I remember being taught a common rule of etiquette while growing up: you never ask a woman her age or a man his salary.

Salary or money, specifically, was a private matter. Talking about how much you earned or had in the bank was just not done.

Basically, the idea was to not ask personal questions unless you earned the closeness, or the context clearly required it.

But things have changed completely. These days, it’s not unusual to find people “broadcasting” their income, net worth, or portfolio size from the “digital” rooftops. As if that one number is all it takes to measure their worth.

And they are sadly doing it under the garb of “financial education.” It is the perfect respectable mask. After all, who could argue against someone “teaching” the world about compounding?

This is the “dark side” I’m referring to. When financial education is used as a cover for social dominance or marketing, it ceases to be educational. It becomes a tool to exploit the very people it claims to help. Also, it creates a halo effect around a person’s “number” so that you stop questioning their logic and the real need for revealing such information, and start buying their authority.

And this phenomenon has permeated every aspect of our lives. We see fitness influencers showcasing elite physiques without mentioning their genetic advantages or the expensive steroids and supplements they consume, and professionals broadcasting “hyper-growth” career milestones while omitting the external support or luck involved. Across health, career, and finance, the “number” has become a tool for social dominance.

Let’s stick to money and finance here. Not a day goes by that you don’t see a post on social media—especially LinkedIn and YouTube—that contains someone revealing their stock or mutual fund portfolio size, or the size of their net worth. And the numbers have only gotten larger over the years. ₹1 crore… ₹5 crore… ₹25 crore… and now even ₹50+ crore.

The caption is almost always about the “magic of compounding,” the “power of SIPs,” and the importance of starting early. Not to forget “if I can do it, you too can!”

Now, I’ll make one thing clear here. A disciplined approach to investing, like an SIP, is one of the best financial habits anyone can build. I’ve advocated for it for years. But lately, these posts have started to bother me. And it’s not because people are succeeding, but because of the distorted reality they project.

These posts create an invisible pressure, making the average investor feel like they are falling behind, when the truth is often much more nuanced than a single number suggests.

When someone claims they built a ₹25 crore portfolio through SIPs, the viewer naturally imagines a relatable journey. The person may have started with ₹5,000 or ₹10,000 a month SIP and let time do the work.

But in reality, the story is often far simpler. The individual with the ₹25 crore portfolio had a very high income. They may have had a successful business, or significant bonuses, or ESOPs. They weren’t investing tiny savings, but massive amounts of surplus capital.

The problem is that the narrative gives all the credit to the “investment” part, while ignoring the “income” that fueled it. SIP is not magic; it is plumbing. It is an incredibly efficient way to move water from a tank into a garden, but it can only move as much water as you have in the tank. If the tank is small or nearly empty, the most sophisticated plumbing in the world won’t grow a forest.

This is where the misguidance begins. We often confuse the “power” of an SIP with the “size” of an SIP. If you invest ₹10,000 a month for 15 years at a 12% return, you’ll end up with roughly ₹50 lakh. That is an excellent achievement and life-changing for many. But it isn’t ₹3 crore or ₹5 crore, forget ₹25 crore. To reach those higher numbers in the same timeframe, you would need to invest between ₹60,000 to ₹1 lakh or ₹5 lakh every single month.

Most influencers don’t highlight that part. If they admitted, “I reached this goal because I earn ₹70 lakh a year and can afford to invest ₹2 lakh a month,” the story loses its appeal. It becomes less relatable, and the “hook” disappears. So, the income is quietly removed from the narrative, or just given a passing mention, and compounding is given all the credit.

Furthermore, even when someone is transparent about their “input,” they rarely share the life circumstances or the role of luck that helped them reach that goal. They don’t talk about the absence of family liabilities, the inheritance that provided a safety net, or the pure luck of being in a specific industry during a once-in-a-decade bull run. Luck is the silent partner in every massive portfolio, yet it is the one partner that never gets a mention in the caption.

Survivorship bias is also at play here. For every person sharing a large net worth, there are thousands who invested with the same discipline but faced different outcomes. Maybe they had to withdraw funds during a family emergency or a job loss. Maybe the first few years of their SIPs were during the period when the market was simply not in their favour. These people are invisible. We only see the achievers, which creates a really distorted picture of reality.

This is why I find these posts and videos even more dangerous. They create a false benchmark. A young professional doing everything right for their context sees these numbers and begins to question their own progress, even if they are on the right path for their specific circumstances.

This sense of falling behind leads to emotional instability. And in investing, when you feel like you need to catch up, you start taking unnecessary risks. You start chasing quick returns because the steady path feels agonisingly slow and inadequate.

Worse still, the constant comparison drains mental energy that could be spent refining your own plan. People abandon perfectly good investment strategies just because they saw someone else’s bigger number and panicked.

There is also a deeper layer here that we rarely discuss. And it’s that such posts are often less about “transparency” that the person sharing their net worth talks about, and more about marketing. In fact, it’s almost always marketing.

It brings to mind Charlie Munger’s observation:

In the digital economy, a high net worth or portfolio size acts as a shortcut to authority and credibility. If an influencer’s incentive is to build a massive following or sell a consulting service or a course, their outcome will be content that is sensationalised to build instant credibility. The net worth becomes a business asset, almost like a lead generation tool. Once you understand their incentive, you begin to see the content for what it really is: a curated advertisement for their own authority.

Now, while there is nothing wrong with building a business, it is problematic when a number is used to exploit a viewer’s insecurities. And this kind of sensationalism is pervasive. Just as miracle diets use photoshopped images to sell supplements, these portfolio numbers are the before and after photos of the financial world, and exploit the very human desire for a quick fix.

Now, let me mention what truly helpful financial content looks like. It’s not about the big number in the headline, but everything around it. A video or post that says, “I put away ₹25,000 every month for 12 years, and I stayed invested through the market crash even though it was scary, and here’s what I learned about sticking it out.” Now, that’s useful. The number is just background. The real lesson is in the behaviour, the process, and the discipline. That’s what separates real education from, well, “exploitation.”

The boring truth of wealth creation is straightforward. Compounding doesn’t create capital. It just multiplies it over time. Capital is created through surplus income, which means earning more and managing your spending. That’s the whole game.

But that story in itself doesn’t usually go viral because it doesn’t offer a quick dopamine hit, like a big net worth number. But it is the truth.

So, as a young investor, how do you focus on building your investment process when you are being bombarded with all such content?

My advice: stay alert. Recognise this content for what it is, which is “clickbait” designed to tap into your insecurities.

And the next time you see those big portfolio milestones online, just pause and ask: What was the actual input required to reach that number? When did they start? What did the market do during their journey? What hidden advantages, privileges, and safety nets did they have that aren’t mentioned? If such information isn’t shared, then the content is simply a highlight reel and not a roadmap.

But even in the rare cases where these details are shared, we must still ask: What is the true incentive behind broadcasting a number as personal and confidential as one’s net worth?

In the physical world, we don’t walk around with our bank balances pinned to our shirts. We value financial privacy for a reason. So, when someone chooses to share that number with you, a complete stranger, you have to wonder—is it really for my benefit, or is it to buy a level of authority that no amount of logic can provide?

“Transparency” is a powerful word, but in the attention economy, it is often used as a sophisticated marketing tactic to bypass our natural scepticism.

At the end of the day, the real unsung advantage in investing is the ability to keep going, steadily, in a world that’s constantly trying to convince you that you’re falling behind because someone else appears to be sprinting ahead. That mental resilience is your greatest asset.

Stay patient, stay sane, and most importantly, stay invested in your own process.

Warmly,
Vishal