The YouTube Investing Trap: Why You Shouldn’t Take Market Crash Advice from Influencers

YouTube and Google are full of self-proclaimed “financial experts” predicting the next market crash — but should you really listen to them?

In this episode, Tony Zabiegala and Derek Gabrielsen from Strategic Wealth Partners break down the YouTube investing trap and explain why fear, FOMO, and flashy predictions can lead investors astray.

They cover:

• Why fear-driven content gets more clicks than facts
• How COVID fueled the rise of fake online “experts”
• The red flags to look for when watching YouTube financial content
• How to separate education from entertainment
• Why “get rich slow” still beats “get rich quick” every time

From AI-generated content to vague crash predictions, Tony and Derek explain how to stay grounded, focus on your real goals, and avoid falling for bad financial advice online.

🎙️ The Capitalist Investor delivers candid conversations about money, markets, and mindset — cutting through the noise to help you think like a real investor.

Transcript

0:05

YouTube and Google are great places to capture information. However, influencers are taking over and actually predicting the next market crash. Should you actually listen to them, or are you setting yourself up for bad decisions? Heard. a couple weeks ago, Dave Abbott and myself, we talked about, like, the talking heads on TV and, you know, buy, buy, buy, sell, sell, sell the Cramer effect and all that, all this stuff. Right. Well, that's TV, and TV is, I would say, kind of mute it like, you can't get on there and just talk crazy stuff, right. You can. But then you'll never be asked back on right. But YouTube in Google that's a different creature. Because if you talk to people might listen. And the crazier you talk, the more people seem to listen. It's actually the it's actually crazy like that. Right? So that's what we're going to talk about today. We have a lot of and I'll call them influencers because as I was doing some kind of recon on this particular show, it's, hey, we got people on YouTube saying, hey, the next market crash is coming. I don't even know if they're financial experts. I don't know if they're in this field. I don't know where they're getting their information. But, you know, fear sells. At the end of the day, it really, really does. And at the end of the day, people want to hear what people have to say. Why are they going to crash? And I just said it before it, you know, it doesn't cost anything to listen in. Fear sells. So there's a lot of people out there, making these predictions. And it's been since, you know, since I even got in the industry almost five years ago. Right. You know, Peter Lynch has always been, you know, a negative Nelly. Right now, if you followed his advice, he might be even for the last 20 years. And there's there's the thing is, there's more there's people more extreme than that. You got the the rich dad, poor dad guy, the Robert Kiyosaki and how you pronounce his name. He's predicting a crash, you know, like, he got all these all these people coming in because it is very easy to say, man, a lot of things don't add up. I will say that. Right? I mean, I don't know how you rock $36 trillion in in debt and think everything's fine and keep on spending. I'm sure the rubber will hit the road at some point, but I don't know. It's, right now and the market has the world has gone through a lot of different phases in the last hundred years or 120 years, the market has existed. Right? So I'm not I'm not overly concerned that, you know, like, hey, we're we're we're about to launch off and fall off a cliff. So what's your take? The. Yeah. You know, it's, I think you hit it very well. You know, this isn't necessarily new. It's just a newer format. You know, people have been talking crazy about the market and other things for for a very long time. But now the information is so much more readily accessible, and so much more, like you said, we don't know necessarily who's talking to us, on YouTube. But you do. You can see, like the number of views, right? So you can get an artificial, sense of comfort just by the number of views and, and, and taking that for. Oh, well, this person has this amount of views. They must know what they're talking about. Well, let's even let's even take a step back, like, I still I mean, Covid was the turning point for a lot of things geopolitical, social issues like, you know, animosity across every spectrum of people. But it's it's also been a pivotal point for the market. Right. And what I really think is like like Covid for what we're talking about right now, it drove people to get their information from online. Right. Because we were stuck inside and we had nothing but a computer. Right. Yeah. Now and TVs and stuff like it forced us to start reading and listening and making all of these crazy assumptions. I mean, look at I mean, right as Covid hit, then people got bored and they started investing in NFTs. And, you know, that's when crypto took off, you know, and we're driving all of this stuff and it's human nature to listen and read about people getting rich. Like we talked about that, how the influencers are, you know, keep up with the Joneses. Hey, I'm rocking four Ferraris in this big house and I'm leveraged to the hilt out there. You don't you don't hear about that part. So. Or it's just rented Hertz. Correct? Correct. But right now you you have you hear so many things, inflation fears and stagflation starting to, you know, be, a common, you know, term thrown around, and, and, and a crash like, hey, how much is all of this really how much of this is really real? But yeah, I've been talking to, you know, our investment team and actually we actually do have, it's so the markets it's not it's not growing by multiple growth. It's actually growing because of earnings growth. Like companies are growing. They're being profitable. Like there's a lot of things going on. And you know, as much as you want to hear inflation and then you also want to hear about jobs and you know like they're they're small cracks. They're not the things not breaking in half. Right. Right. So we have all of this information. But at the end of the day the market is in line historically where it has been for since inception, almost right. So this I think this is a great question. So with all of this information out there, you know, do you think the the average investor is getting smarter or do you think they're just getting more confused. Confused confusion like because you know, like how much stuff can you actually my opinion is, how how much can you actually absorb? How much can you actually implement? You can't. It's very hard to make money with ten different strategies going on. Yeah. Now, you know, 1 to 4 strategies going on. That's that's doable. Right. But you also need to know you have to I guess basket them into risk. Right. Which ones are the ultra risky. We put a smaller percentage towards those. Yeah. Yeah. So that that's what I would say. What do you think they. Yeah. You know I think I think you hit the nail on the head there, you know, getting more confused or I think they may be kind of losing sight of the target. Right. You know what we talk about and you know, I, I understand the, irony. The, you may be listening to this on YouTube right now. But. The, Yeah. Don't listen. I we're trying to tell everyone out. They're stupid for listening to them listen to us. But what? The confusion comes in because I think you lose sight of what you're actually trying to do because we're talking about retirement planning. You know, that is a lot different than kind of, you know, I know we're talking about potential market crashes, but it is a constant flow of get rich quick ideas, right? We saw the NFTs, we saw the, the, you know, the short selling where the GameStop and the other meme stocks, you know, it is a very, it is a very confusing place because one, you're you're worried about stuff like market crashes and you're worried about, you know, real market data, but then at the same time, you have FOMO because you don't want to miss out on on the next, you know, easy thing where you could have, you know, ten next your money and, and you feel really bad about it after it happens. Yeah. Or you could have or maybe you did ten acts and let's say you did. Then you got out and you have six acts instead of ten, and you get upset and then you dump the rest in on some other idea and then you've got zero. Well, yeah. So, red flags in, in some of this YouTube stuff is the vague predictions without data or even dates, right. Like, hey, the crash is coming. As I was doing, I clicked on one guy is like, crash is coming, but I won't tell you next week, next month, next year. Like, but it's coming. I'm like, great man and all right, but I will give that one guy credit. I kind of like all right, what's his thing? He's like, well, when it does happen, this is what you want to do. And and I clicked off of it. I'm like, you know, so, so that's one thing. Just vague predictions. What are they selling? Are, you know, like, you have to understand that these influencers, YouTubers, they get paid of if they become popular, not everyone gets paid because you got clicks. You know, Derek and I don't get paid because of, the clicks we get on our YouTube channel and stuff. But, but if you get hundreds of thousands of followers and clicks and things like that, it's worth ad space. So what are they trying to do? They're creating fear. They're creating interesting topics so that they can get more clicks and followers. My biggest thing is like they're spilling over confidence, whether it's, you know, market's going to continue to melt up or market's going to crash and it's overconfidence. But at the end of the day like what are their credentials. Right. That's where I'm that's where I started having a problem. I'm like man I'd really like to dig deeper and like where did this guy come from? Or woman like whoever's spewing all of this stuff. So how do you how do you vet it? How do you that what is going on? And that's one of the things like do some research on who you're listening to, where do they come from. But, you know, maybe you can Google their name and find out, you know, their chain of what they've done, where they go to school, what kind of jobs have they had? Where did when did they start their YouTube channel? A year ago. Right. Like, I don't know. That's the what do you think they. Yeah for sure. You know the the overconfidence is is the perfect one because you know I would consider us experts but then then we have a team of, of experts behind us like picking out the stocks. And if we had to just pick out like one stock right now, that was going to be the best stock for, for the next, you know, year. I would not have great confidence in in that one because it is an extremely, extremely hard thing to do. And we have no idea what's going to happen in the next year. Yeah. And you know what's really what's actually really crazy right now is President Trump is investing America's money into these companies. Yep. And there's some of them are big. I'm you know, in talents I'm like, those are gigantic. Some of these companies are small. And you see these, it's like it's just a lottery ticket because they go from they were a 1 to 2 or $3 billion company, which is a big company. But in the grand scheme of things, they're not like 500 billion like Intel or something like that. Like they're smart. That's why you and the reason they go up 100 or 200% because no, it's all coming. It is completely under wraps. So you have to be very careful on where you're going, what you're listening. But that's like another form of get rich quick kind of steps. Right. So, we have to we have to really separate entertainment from education. You know, this is the I just remember the.com era, man. If like, new company came out, they just slapped a.com at the back of whatever they're talking about. And oh my God the things that things mooning and things up 400%. They don't even make a dollar yet. Right, right. Actually in debt like they're like that is that is close to what we're in. I've never seen it like that. That was insane that like, any guy got any kind of. Anyone got anything? You got any of those.com companies that just IPO man, I want to get in. Right. So, so what what do we do? And then also then we can also ask like, hey, how much of this is AI generated? You know, like, is this content that they're generating really good content or is it just what I spitting out? Because that seems to be a huge trend. I saw a meme the other day. They're like, hey, just think if you're about, you know, you know, 40, if you're 40, 50 or 60 years old, just know that your next doctor is passing his test by jamming questions in the chat, GPT that's scary, right? But, ChatGPT might be telling people what's wrong and where to go and how to how to cut x, Y, and z inside my body and kill me. Who knows. So. But what do you think? Yeah. You know, I think that was the one I had circled to separating entertainment from education and, sales from education as well. You know, it's, countless times I've, I've talked with people, whether they were clients or, you know, I was just talking to them. Where they kind of present something as, like, this is, you know, I read this article on the internet, and, you know, it's kind of facts when in reality is really just an advertisement for someone who is like against annuities or for annuities. Right. You have to, you know, when you're when you're putting your stuff out there on the internet, you have to take a position. Right? And so either, you know, I just picked annuities out of the sky. Either annuities are the greatest thing ever or annuities are, you know, the root of all evil, you know, do you have to pick a side? And just because you read it on the internet or you watch a YouTube video on it doesn't necessarily mean that that is how it applies to your situation. Yeah, I put an annuity into somebody's plan and it made it worse. Guess what I'm not recommending? I put it in there and it made it better. Guess what I'm going to recommend. Do you have to do it now. But it's it's my job to explain the information. Right. And and you know what? At the end of the day, you know, market crashes, things like that, people might get wrapped up into this. And here's the, here's the actual other side of the equation. The other side of the mountain is that they hear that things are going to crash. Tony, can you put me into cash? And I'm like, man, I really don't want to do that. Right? Right. I mean, we can talk about putting a portion into cash, but I'm not here to tell you what to do. I'm here to help you navigate through it. Right. And the people, the, you know, the people that have missed opportunities, they're the most dangerous to themselves. I had somebody tell me the other day they're like hey Tony, I know we been sitting in cash, you know, for a couple months, which wasn't a good idea, wasn't my recommendation. But they were. Are they are. And that's okay, because we didn't know what was going to happen with the tariff board and all that fun stuff. But now that the market just continues to melt into all new, all time highs, I the email said something along the lines of like, hey Tony, I think like, I want to get back involved. What do you think of XRP? So XRP is like the third generation of crypto. You got you got Bitcoin that everyone knows that most people know about Ethereum. XRP is like it's I'll just call it new. And when I say new it's like maybe this year kind of just, you know, people have probably known about it. They were buying it for $0.20 and it's $3. So yeah, it's up a Kajillion percent, but it came out of nowhere. Yeah. And and then, but then she followed it up with a, a sentence that said, but I'm still scared of the market. And I'm like, you want to get into like the most aggressive crypto. And but you're still scared of the stock market right. I'm like yeah. It's just like the conflicting data. And where did you get that. Like 000 you know the, the profile that I know of this person I'm like where did you even learn in here of XRP like that. That is that there is so many. It was four sentences and I had I had about 20 questions since that went along with these more before we start implementing anything. Right. Yeah. So the person that has a missed opportunity, you know, they always say when the, when the conservative people want to start being aggressive, that's when. Yeah, that's when you need to. That's when you need to be worried. So. All right, take us home, man. It's so help us. Let's wrap this up. Like, how would you sum all this up? Yeah. You know, it's, I think YouTube advice is the same as just advice that you have gotten throughout the years. You just need to be careful, where it's coming from, and you need to put it in the proper place in your brain, you know, don't don't mix up getting rich quick with your overall retirement plan. And just because they're on the internet doesn't mean that's necessarily true, ourselves included. But you can you can check us out and we can we can talk to you about specific things. But, you know, not everything that you're watching on YouTube is necessarily sound financial advice. So make sure you're doing additional research and talking with professionals to make sure you're getting that good advice. Right? I remember, you know, a radio show and this is maybe when I was naive the early years of my career. Right. And and the the name of the show was get Rich slow. Not get rich fast. Right. Let's get rich slow. And that makes a lot of sense now because to get rich fast you can go broke fast. Yeah. So you know implementing multiple strategies not ten maybe you know one, 234 different things to help diversify. Volatility is always a good idea. But as YouTube they're probably talking about one thing to push all your chips in on one idea or one strategy. That's where it's like, okay, let's bet that one strategy and how risky does it sound? That's how I would say, you know, how YouTube content is made right now. Let's talk about one thing and like, blow it up, like in a good way or bad way. So we again, that's as as Derek said, you know, what's entertainment, what's really education and how does it fit into what you're comfortable with. Yeah. And when you're talking about FOMO, you know, people are only talking about their wins, right? Someone paid $4.2 million for a jpeg of our of, of a rock. So, let's keep that in mind when you're, when you're, you're upset about missing out on a random crypto, the currency that no one has ever heard of or. And with that, I think that's a good, good place to wrap it up. If you guys have any questions, show ideas. Hit us up at info@connect.com and we'll talk to you next week. The opinions expressed in the podcast. Are for general informational purposes only, and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any investment, legal, financial or tax strategy. It is only intended to provide education about the financial industry. Please consult a qualified professional about your individual needs.