Stop Touching It

My son keeps asking me about day trading.

Not in a formal, “Father, please explain the mechanics of leveraged speculation” kind of way. More in the way teenagers ask about something they’ve already half-decided is interesting because the internet has made it look exciting.

He’ll mention some guy he’s seen on social media. Usually young. Usually confident. Usually standing in front of a car that isn't his. The message is always the same: the world is full of idiots working normal jobs, while the smart people are making money before breakfast by reading charts on a laptop.

And I can see why it hooks him.

Of course I can.

If you’re young, and everything feels expensive, and every adult seems slightly stressed, and the old promises don’t look quite as solid as they used to, then day trading must look seductive.

Why wait decades to build wealth when someone online says you can learn a strategy and get there now? Why accept slow, boring progress when your feed is full of people claiming they’ve hacked the system?

The strange thing is, I’ve met quite a few people over the years who’ve done day trading. They all have brilliant stories. They’ll tell you about the stock that went up 300% in a week. They’ll remember the exact moment they bought. They’ll describe the feeling of watching the number climb, the adrenaline, the certainty, the rush of being right.

They remember the wins in cinematic detail.

Funny thing though.

None of them are rich.

The Stories We Like to Tell

Day trading is perfect for storytelling because it gives you everything a good story needs: risk, tension, danger, victory, humiliation, redemption.

It turns money into theatre. Every morning becomes a new episode. Every chart becomes a battlefield. Every decision feels meaningful because there’s a number on the screen moving up or down in real time.

That’s a powerful drug.

And I don’t say that to be dismissive. I understand the attraction. There’s something deeply human about wanting to act, especially when the world feels uncertain. Doing something makes us feel involved. It gives us the illusion that we have a grip on things. If I’m checking the market, I must be engaged. If I’m moving money around, I must be smart. If I’m making decisions, surely I’m improving my chances.

The trouble is that action and progress are not the same thing. Sometimes action is just anxiety. Sometimes all our clever little interventions are just ways of avoiding the discomfort of waiting.

I’ve done this in other parts of my life. I’ve refreshed inboxes when I should have been writing. I’ve fiddled with plans when I should have trusted the original idea. I’ve asked for more opinions when, deep down, I already knew what I thought.

There is a particular kind of modern madness that tells us every problem can be solved by more input, more data, more tweaking, more movement.

Investing just exposes it more clearly because the scoreboard is visible.

And when the scoreboard is visible, we become idiots.

My Deeply Boring Investment Strategy

Here is my entire investment strategy:

I put my savings in one place, with one fund manager, and I leave it alone.

That’s it. That’s the grand secret. No complex spreadsheet. No late-night trading. No alerts. No clever rotation into the next hot sector. No pretending I understand semiconductor supply chains because I watched two YouTube videos and read a thread by someone with a wolf emoji in their username.

For over 20 years, I’ve invested with the same fund manager. His basic approach is to buy good companies and hold them for a very long time. The fund hardly ever changes. He is not trying to capture every trend or win every quarter. He is not trying to look busy.

He is trying to own quality and let time do its work.

I check my portfolio about twice a year. Sometimes less. My stress about the stock market is close to zero, which is a wonderful thing because the stock market is very good at manufacturing reasons to be stressed. There is always a crisis, a boom, a crash, a warning, a bubble, a genius, a fraud, a new paradigm, a once-in-a-generation opportunity, or a once-in-a-generation disaster.

I mostly ignore all of it.

Over those 20 years, I’ve made returns of more than 500%, or around 13% annualised. Maybe that doesn’t sound spectacular in the age of crypto screenshots and AI stock hysteria, but £100,000 invested 20 years ago would is now worth about £1,150,000.

That is a pretty healthy return.

And the weirdest part is that I got there by doing almost nothing.

The Hardest Thing Is Leaving It Alone

Doing nothing sounds easy until you actually have to do it.

It sounds passive. Lazy, even.

People imagine patience as this soft, gentle quality, like sitting in a garden with a cup of tea while life unfolds around you. But real patience is much harder than that. Real patience is sitting through uncertainty without scratching the itch. It's watching other people make money faster than you and not abandoning your plan. It is listening to confident strangers explain why everything has changed and still deciding not to touch the thing that's working.

That takes a kind of strength we don’t talk about enough.

The problem is that doing nothing gives you very little emotional reward in the short term. Nobody congratulates you for not selling. Nobody claps because you didn’t panic. Nobody sends you a trophy for resisting the urge to buy whatever everyone was excited about last week.

Activity, on the other hand, feels brilliant. It gives you a little hit. You did research. You made a decision. You took control. Even if the decision turns out to be terrible, it felt productive at the time.

This is why most people find long-term investing so difficult. Not because they lack intelligence, but because they have feelings. They get scared when markets fall and greedy when markets rise. They hear about someone else making money somewhere else and suddenly their perfectly sensible plan starts to look dull.

And dull is dangerous.

Dull makes you vulnerable to stories.

A friend mentions a stock at dinner. A podcast guest talks confidently about the next big thing. A teenager on TikTok explains that the entire financial system is about to collapse unless you buy whatever he bought yesterday. Slowly, the boring thing you chose starts to feel like a mistake, even though nothing has actually changed.

So you interfere.

You sell something. You buy something. You rebalance something. You call it strategy, but often it’s just discomfort looking for an outlet.

The Theatre of Being Busy

Professional fund managers struggle with this too. In some ways, they have it worse because they’re paid to look like they’re doing something.

Imagine telling a room full of clients: “We reviewed everything carefully and decided to leave it exactly as it is.”

That might be the right answer. It might even be the best answer. But it doesn’t feel like an answer worth paying for. Clients want activity. Committees want updates. Reports need charts. Presentations need movement. The whole industry is built around the appearance of intelligent intervention.

So people tweak. They rotate. They adjust exposure. They explain why this quarter required a subtle repositioning towards whatever phrase sounds reassuring at the time. Some of that may be useful. Plenty of it is theatre.

We see the same thing everywhere now. We reward visible effort even when invisible discipline produces better results. We like people who look busy. We trust movement. We distrust stillness. The person who keeps making changes appears engaged, while the person who sticks to the plan risks looking complacent.

That is completely backwards.

Sometimes the most intelligent thing you can do is nothing. Not because you don’t care, but because you understand that your constant involvement is the problem.

What Social Media Does to Money

This is the part that bothers me most when my son asks about day trading. It isn’t the curiosity. I like the curiosity. I want him to understand money. I want him to ask questions about how all these things fit together.

What worries me is the packaging.

Day trading on social media rarely looks like gambling. It looks like independence. It looks like rebellion. It looks like masculinity, intelligence, confidence, and escape all rolled into one.

The message is rarely just “trade stocks.” The message is: don’t be ordinary. Don’t be trapped. Don’t be like everyone else. Don’t listen to the tired adults who fail to understand the new world.

That is incredibly powerful when you’re young.

It also happens to be very convenient for the people selling courses.

The whole thing is wrapped in the language of empowerment, but so much of it is just financial adrenaline. It blurs the line between education and entertainment, between investing and gambling, between confidence and competence. A lucky trade becomes proof of genius. A screenshot becomes evidence. A rented car becomes a business model.

And because the feed never shows the full story, the losses disappear. The boring months disappear. The anxiety disappears. The people who quietly blow up their accounts disappear. What remains is the highlight reel, and the highlight reel is poison.

Adults are not immune to this either, by the way. We just like to think we are. We may not fall for the Lamborghini trader, but we fall for our own versions. The clever newsletter. The impressive podcast guest. The friend who always seems to know what’s coming next. The fund with the beautiful presentation and the very serious people using very serious words.

We all want someone to tell us that the shortcut is real.

The Boring Magic of Compounding

Compounding is one of those ideas everyone understands intellectually but almost nobody gets.

The maths is simple.

Small gains, repeated for long enough, become enormous.

The behaviour is hard. You have to leave the thing alone long enough for the curve to bend. You have to allow time to become the main character.

That is where people struggle.

Because compounding looks unimpressive for ages. It doesn’t give you much to talk about at dinner. It doesn’t make you feel clever. It doesn’t give you a dramatic story about the time you spotted something nobody else saw. It just sits there, doing its work, while you get on with your life.

That's the beauty of it.

Good investing should not dominate your emotional life. It should support your life. It should sit in the background like plumbing or electricity, quietly functioning while you spend your attention on things that deserve it.

Your family. Your health. Your work. Your friends. Your actual life.

I don’t want to spend my days worrying about whether Nvidia is overpriced or whether some inflation number came in slightly above expectations. I don’t want to be the person refreshing charts while my children are talking to me. I don’t want my mood to be determined by a red or green number on a screen.

That sounds like the opposite of freedom to me.

The Wider Lesson

Of course, this isn’t really just about investing.

It rarely is.

The more I think about it, the more I realise that the lost art of doing nothing applies almost everywhere.

In writing, the magic rarely comes from one grand burst of inspiration. It comes from returning to the page, again and again, even when the previous draft looks flat and lifeless.

In fitness, the magic is not the heroic January workout. It is the boring Tuesday session you do when nobody cares.

In relationships, it is not the grand speech. It is the quiet accumulation of small acts: listening, remembering, forgiving, showing up, making the cup of tea. Saying sorry.

The valuable stuff is usually slow.

Trust is slow. Skill is slow. Wealth is slow. Health is slow. Character is slow.

You can’t hack your way around all of it, no matter how many people promise otherwise. Some things have to be built by repetition, restraint, and time.

This is not a fashionable message. It won’t sell many online courses. Nobody wants a 12-week programme called “Choose Something Sensible and Stop Messing With It.” There’s no sexy acronym for leaving things alone, although I’m sure someone will invent one and charge £399 for the workshop.

But maybe that’s exactly why it matters.

In a culture addicted to movement, stillness becomes a discipline.

In a world that confuses noise with knowledge, patience becomes an edge.

And in a market that rewards stories, the boring person in the corner may be the one who wins.

What I Want My Son to Know

I don’t want my son to avoid risk. That would be terrible advice.

A good life requires risk. Starting something new is risky. Telling the truth is risky. Falling in love is risky. Backing yourself is risky. Leaving a comfortable path is risky. You cannot build anything meaningful by trying to eliminate uncertainty.

But I want him to understand the difference between risk and roulette.

Good risk has a purpose. Bad risk has a dopamine loop. Good risk teaches you something even when it fails. Bad risk just leaves you craving the next hit. Good risk often feels boring for long stretches. Bad risk feels exciting immediately.

That’s usually the tell.

If something promises instant emotional intensity, be careful. If it makes you feel clever before you’ve done the work, be careful. If the person selling it seems richer from selling the dream than living the dream, be very careful.

Wealth, like most worthwhile things, often feels underwhelming while you’re building it. Then one day you look up and realise the boring thing worked.

The lost art of doing nothing isn’t laziness.

It’s restraint.

It’s the ability to know when your involvement helps and when it just makes you feel useful.

And in a world screaming at us to act, it may be one of the most underrated skills we have.

Until next time,

Jon "Currently Sat on the Sofa" Kaye

Choosing to live more deliberately

P.S.

This is not financial advice. Feel free to day trade and lose all your money. But also feel free to do nothing and remain poor. Just don't blame me either way.