“Plans are useless, but planning is everything.” President Dwight D. Eisenhower
I’ve been doing this for more than 27 years now, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the same excuse as to why the stock market is going higher: the stock market is rigged. It only goes up because the government prints money, because M2 (money supply) is higher, because of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, and so much more. Here’s the thing: I do think it’s rigged—but it’s “rigged” to go higher over time for solid economic reasons.
Gen Z Would Rather Gamble
This survey from Betterment got a lot of attention, and it hits home hard, even if it shows what we already know: Gen Z and Millennials like the bet on sports. A lot.
Source Date: August 13, 2026
More than one in four Gen Zers use sports betting as part of their long-term financial strategy, and more than half placed a sports bet over the past year. I’m not saying you shouldn’t bet on a game here or there (it is legal, after all), but to think this is a way to create wealth overnight is foolish. I’ve been to Vegas many times, and I always enjoy myself, but let’s be honest, they don’t build those huge buildings in the middle of a desert because they just like to give money away.
As someone with two teenage boys, I see this fascination with sports betting firsthand, and it is a very big worry. But if you are young and want to accumulate wealth, stay invested for decades and watch the power of compounding work to your benefit.
Time Is Your Friend
In gambling, you start with the odds stacked against you, and the longer you sit at the table, the worse it gets. Sure, you might get some free drinks, but eventually it isn’t going to go your way. Investing is quite different, as time is your friend. Or as we like to say, it isn’t about timing the market; it is about time in the market.
The longer you are invested, the greater the odds you will be up. Sure, any random day is up just slightly more than a coin flip, but go out a week, a month, a year, a couple of years, or more, and the odds of a positive return soar.
We All Had It Rough
Many young people are upset about a lot of things. The job market, AI, the state of politics, high mortgage rates, and more.
Here’s the thing. We all had it rough when we were young and just starting out. I started in this industry in 2001, right after 9/11. The tech bubble was imploding, and we were in a recession. Then things turned around for a few years, only for the entire financial industry to implode during the Great Financial Crisis. Every Friday, someone I worked with would get laid off. I remember they even started laying people off on Thursday, as everyone was scared to death to come to work on Friday. In fact, after my first 10 years of saving for retirement, the return in my 401 (k) was negative. The lost decade of the 2000s was real, and I saw it firsthand. I joined my friend Phil Rosen, the host of the Full Signal podcast, on his podcast last week, and we discussed this very concept. You can watch the whole conversation here.
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If you started in the early 1980s, you had to deal with interest rates in the double digits and a double-dip recession. The 1970s were a rough decade with low productivity and high inflation. The 1960s had social unrest and a lot of anger overall, while the 1940s had World War II. Before that, the Great Depression.
Yes, kids today don’t have it great, but this isn’t anything new.
Ignore Politics
I mentioned politics above and younger people without a doubt are more impacted by politics than when I was young. It has become a huge source of someone’s identity and I’m not sure that is a good thing, but I’ll just leave that there. When you are young, you should be enjoying yourself, not doomscrolling each night. The bottom line? When it comes to politics, just ignore who is in the White House and stick to your longer-term investment goals. This might not be easy, with political divisions deepening. But this chart says it all. Again, the market is “rigged” to go higher over time, regardless of who is the president.
Stick to Your Plan
Younger people think that all the news and bad stuff that is happening is new, but it isn’t. Every single year has bad news. As the quote from President Eisenhower says above, planning is everything. Plan for bad news and scary headlines. When things are bad and the news is terrible, your impulse will be to get out of the market and move to cash. Well, that is the worst thing you can do, as you’ll miss the pending bounce. I’ve seen this time and time again over the years, most recently last April after Liberation Day and then again in late March of this year.
What Goes Down…
Lastly, be aware that some of the best returns happen after the worst returns. Not only is the market “rigged” to go up, but the forces are even stronger when typical retail investors are out of the market. We saw this happen around Liberation Day last year and this past spring. Investors sell when they can’t take it anymore, then miss huge gains on the way back up. Even this year, on a perfectly normal 9.1% mild correction into late March, panic was in the air, and many longer-term bulls were turning cautious. Then we saw the best second-quarter return ever for a midterm year. This chart shows that after some of the worst two-month returns ever we’ve seen some of the best.
Thanks as always for reading what our team has to say. I was in New York City last week, and I had the honor of talking about this Betterment survey with Kelly Evans on CNBC’s The Exchange. You can watch the full interview from the CNBC Headquarters in New Jersey below.
For more content by Ryan Detrick, Chief Market Strategist, click here.
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