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Unfortunately, there's a catch. People can say things they don't believe, especially if there is a large amount of money to be made. If I'm holding a large amount of X, and can convince enough other people to buy X that the price rises (hopefully by a lot), I can sell my shares of X for a (large) profit. Pump and dump schemes have been common forever, popularized in the the 2000 movie Boiler Room as well as Wolf of Wall St.

Far stranger schemes exist, the most recently to hit popular culture is gamma squeeze. Just because a scheme is strange has little bearing on whether or not it'll end up working out with them having your money.

At the end of the day, the point is they're trying to sell their book, which is not the same as trying to sell investment X (although they may be very closely related).



> Unfortunately, there's a catch. People can say things they don't believe, especially if there is a large amount of money to be made. If I'm holding a large amount of X, and can convince enough other people to buy X that the price rises (hopefully by a lot), I can sell my shares of X for a (large) profit. Pump and dump schemes have been common forever, popularized in the the 2000 movie Boiler Room as well as Wolf of Wall St.

Or most recently Gamestop investors.

> At the end of the day, the point is they're trying to sell their book, which is not the same as trying to sell investment X (although they may be very closely related).

My point it is almost never going to be possible to distinguish between good investment advice and self-serving investment advice. Sure, there is some fungibility there for people with different investment needs, like pension funds vs young income earners. But! we should think about what we would think if the reverse was true. If investors were advocating for investments that they weren't personally invested in, then I would be far more skeptical than if they did.




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