Level 4: The Con-Artist
This level hosts players that are literally lost souls. The players here started out with big dreams, and got sucked into shady schemes, or figured out that a straight path simply takes too long, and decided to actively pursue the art of deception (self-deception, mostly). This is the world of the multi-level marketing schemes (MLMs), the pyramid schemes, the Ponzi schemes, and the get-rich-quick schemes. There is no shortage of creativity for the front-end packaging at this level, but the core content is a rinse-and-repeat pony show. Off late, we have a whole host of self-help and self-development types who try to make it big by teaching others how to get rich – they become self appointed ‘coaches’ and ‘gurus’ of ‘life’, ‘money’, ‘health’, ‘relationships’, and ‘what-not?’. They deceive their victims by selling them ‘education’. The formula is simple, really. First, you figure out your target audience, write a convincing narative of yourself as to why you are coming from a position of authority, write-up a sales plan, and sell grass to cattle until the cattle is satiated, and dead. More often than not, if these players or the people interacting with them just pause, and think to do the (relatively simple) mathematics, it would save a world of hurt and embarassment in all directions. But as long as human emotions such as greed and lust exist, so will this level of players.
Level 5: The Clever Investor
This is a very interesting level, where one can find the fairly successful investors, along with the dead ones. There is no pun intended here, nor is it any coincidence. The commonality between the fairly successful investors, and the dead ones is that they both have a tonne of patience (the latter is dead, so there is no deliberate choice there), and do not actively try to beat anybody or the said ‘market’. This is the world of passive investing; the world of buy-and-hold; the world of diversification; the world of index funds and ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds). I’m not going to go into technical detail about why this method works well in this article (perhaps in a future article), but in short, it is because of the positive drift in the economic growth of the whole world as a financial system. But if it is as easy as NOT doing anything, everybody should be rich, right? Well, there are a bunch of reasons that make this level difficult to sustain, some of them being the downsides of staying in this level. Let’s look at the upside first. Players at this level enjoy growth in their financial value over a prolonged duration of time without actively doing anything to achieve it. As they are not actively involved in beating anybody, they have more time, and are free to use this time to do whatever else they want to. The downside is that this needs needs an almost inhuman level of patience (a random, dead, rich dude winks at you from his coffin), and an appreciable growth in value takes a prolonged duration of time. We are talking 20 years and above, here. What this means is that most of the players in this level, are playing in Level 1 (the average wage-earner) and Level 2 in parallel . This is because, for the concept of buy-and-hold to work, the player needs to be in a position to buy something, first. The typical clever Level 1 player saves a bit of his or her income, and starts buying-and-holding at regular intervals, thus gaining a level 5 entry. This promises a better future for the player, but does not improve his or her present lifestyle by much. The other downside is the systemic risk involved. If most of the players in the game of money chose to play in this level, this level would start to lose its value, as the majority of players would be buying without evaluating what a fair price is, and what is not (put in extremely simple terms). In other words, it would cause a bubble to rise, and pop (remember 2008?). Now, the chances of this happening are very unlikely, but not impossible. Any player at this level should at the very least, be aware of this systemic risk.
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