James Carthew: The ‘get rich quick’ zeitgeist is hurting investors in the long run
Investment trusts are being brushed aside as investors pursue flashier products such as ETFs, but it may be costing them more than they think.
Three articles got me wondering about how to tackle investor education last week. First there was a piece by Hargreaves Lansdown CEO Matt Benchener in the FT lamenting the £600bn of UK investors’ savings that is stuck in cash ISAs. He pointed out that UK consumers overestimate probability of losing money from investing over a 10-year period by as much as seven times.
On the same day, Tom Aylott published an article spotlighting that investment trust ownership was declining (as were open-ended funds) as investors switch to exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
Lastly that same day, US platform Betterment published its 2026 Retail Investor Survey, flagging a trend of using social media for accessing financial news, a small but growing use of AI to advise on investment decisions, a tendency to conflate investing and gambling, and a growing sense that people will not have enough to retire on.
My first thought was to wonder if the first three are linked to the last one.
The ‘get rich quick’ mentality that blurs the lines between gambling and investment may be a reflection of this fear that saving for retirement is unrealistic – especially if a high proportion of your income is being diverted towards paying off student debt.
There is also the FOMO effect – as social media influencers share their good news stories about their cryptocurrency and meme stock investments, and boast about how much they made stagging the SpaceX IPO, while the bad news stories are not shared or do not get the same traction.
As many of these investors will end up getting their fingers burned, it is reasonable that next time around they will look for investments at the opposite end of the risk scale by piling into cash.
Sadly, that can be just as damaging to long-term wealth creation.
To illustrate that, let’s look at 10-year returns…. read more here