Why I Wrote (Don’t) Invest Like a Pro

Modern investing advice is confusing. I wrote a book to help make sense of it all.

Over the past few years, I’ve noticed something strange about investing advice.

Everyone sounds confident, but almost no one agrees.

One person will tell you the only sensible approach is to buy index funds and hold them forever. Another will insist you need to actively pick stocks to keep up. Someone else will argue that the real opportunity is in crypto or options.

Each camp speaks with certainty, and each sounds reasonable in isolation. But taken together, it’s a mess.

That confusion isn’t limited to beginners. I hear it from people who’ve been investing for decades. I see it in emails, comments, and conversations all the time. People are struggling to reconcile advice that comes from fundamentally different worldviews.

That’s the backdrop for why I wrote (Don’t) Invest Like a Pro.

I’ve spent most of my career around markets. I started creating investing content more than 20 years ago, back when message boards were the main outlet. Over time, that turned into writing for financial publications, and eventually into my role covering markets professionally at ETF.com.

More recently, that’s included videos and writing aimed at a broader audience on TikTok and in this newsletter.

Across all of that, the same questions keep coming up. Not just the usual “should I buy this fund or stock,” but more foundational questions about how investing actually works, why advice conflicts, and what matters versus what doesn’t.

What has changed, though, is the environment.

Markets today look nothing like they did 20 years ago. While index investing has become a dominant force, for many investors, meme stocks, crypto, options, and a growing array of new products now sit alongside traditional stocks and bonds in the same brokerage account.

At the same time, there’s a deluge of financial advice, and it isn’t just coming from professionals anymore. It’s coming from everywhere.

Some of that advice is thoughtful and well-intentioned, but a lot of it isn’t. And even the good advice often falls short because investors don’t have the framework to make sense of it.

That’s where this book starts.

(Don’t) Invest Like a Pro is about separating the investing landscape into two distinct worlds: the passive, long-term, index-oriented world, and the active world of professionals, traders, and people trying to outperform. Most confusion comes from blending those two together and pretending they’re playing the same game.

They’re not.

Each world has its own logic and language. Advice that makes sense in one can be harmful in the other. The book walks through both sides carefully, without assuming there’s a single right answer for everyone.

It’s also not just a beginner’s guide. I wanted to avoid oversimplifying investing. I explain how stocks, bonds, and alternatives work, how funds are structured, where risk and returns come from, and how behavior and emotion shape outcomes, all in a way that’s accessible without being shallow.

A lot of investing books have one of two shortcomings. They’re either simple and reassuring but gloss over the details, or they’re detailed and technical but unreadable unless you already speak the language. I tried very hard to avoid both.

Finally, the book is intentionally modern. It doesn’t pretend meme stocks, crypto, private markets, or new fund structures are side curiosities. These are part of how people encounter investing today, and ignoring them doesn’t make them go away. The book doesn’t hype them, but it does put them in context.

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by conflicting advice, unsure which voices to trust, or uneasy about whether you’re doing the “right thing,” this book is my attempt to put everything in perspective. Not by telling you what to buy, but by giving you a framework for understanding the landscape you’re navigating.

(Don’t) Invest Like a Pro is out now on Amazon. If this sounds like something you’d find useful, you can find it here.

P.S. If you do end up picking it up and have time to share an honest Amazon review, it genuinely helps. No pressure at all.