The Returns You
Never Keep.
Why investors earn less than their investments — and what actually closes the gap.
Co-founder
Co-founder · Licensed Investment Advisor
Our returns are… meh.
Budi Ryan — licensed investment advisor. Real portfolio, audited by our own clients every day. And yes — in 2025 we made 17.5% and the index still beat us.
Multibagger calls, "saham naik 100%", signal groups, crypto moonshots — loudest at the top of every bull market.
Next to that, our best year ever looks like a rounding error.
So why would we fly here to open with numbers that lose to every Instagram screenshot you've seen?
Our returns aren't that important to you.
(They are to us.)
What's important to you is your returns —
and for anyone you follow, that means one number:
what do the followers actually earn?
Not the guru. Not the fund. Not the account posting the screenshots.
The people who followed.
Same fund, two very different returns famous story — verify sourcing
Our customers' returns — not ours published snapshot · 7 Aug 2026
Every client, worst to best published percentiles · 7 Aug 2026
Money arrives at the top, leaves at the bottom
As entrepreneurs, you'd never run a business this way — buy inventory at peak COGS, liquidate at clearance prices. Nobody in this room needs "buy low, sell high" explained. So the real question of tonight: why does it keep happening — to smart people?
Which portfolio — the one you remember,
or the one you have?
Since this year, analysis is free.
Behavior is still expensive.
To prove it, we'll do something unusual: we're giving you a prompt pack. Five prompts — understand a business, read its statements like a skeptic, estimate intrinsic value, design your own Investing 101 curriculum for your background, and write a thesis before you buy. Point Claude at IDX filings tonight. Free.
And we're still confident it won't fix your returns. There will always be a newer, smarter model promising a better framework — and the urge to switch to it is itself one of the forces we're about to name.
The Unteachable Lessons
A whole category of lessons that can't really be transferred by talking — they only fully land through experience. We're going to share them anyway, because what a talk can give is the vocabulary: so when one of these moments arrives, you recognize it faster. It happened to us too — that's how we know the cycle:
We've paid this tuition ourselves, more than once. The way out is a choice each of us gets to make: learn it once — or pay again.
In the moment it feels like… / hindsight calls it…
Possibility sells. Probability confuses.
Two offers. Notice where your own eyes go on each — the cards are drawn the way your brain renders them. Hover both.
Same brain, opposite blind spots: tiny odds → we see only the prize; real odds → we see only the (unimpressive) expected value. Psychologists call the first half the possibility effect. The pitch is engineered for it — and it wins both ways. Only you need to be sober.
Tonight, everyone believes this chart.
On Tuesday, everyone restarts it.
Right now you're thinking: "I'll let the power of compounding work for me." Then Tuesday, an investment wizard posts a new method on Instagram. We switch. The clock restarts. It happened to us too — more than once.
Wagenaar & Sagaria (1975): people underestimate exponential growth even immediately after being taught it. Each switch assumes a modest ~15% cost (exit timing, fees, the new method's tuition) — change the assumption, the shape barely changes.
"I'll build a bigger base first" — the trade-off nobody prices
Survival isn't the conservative option — it's the aggressive option, because staying in the game is the only place the exponent gets to run. This is the lesson that answers the 100× promises we opened with.
Notice what we didn't teach:
how to read a balance sheet.
If you want investing 101 — ask Claude to design you a curriculum for your literacy level, tonight, free. That part of investing has been commoditized.
What hasn't been commoditized — what may never be — is behaving well while holding money. That's what this series is about.
"After describing these same forces, Howard Marks lists the handful of things that give an investor a fighting chance against them. Note the phrase. Not victory — a fighting chance."
THE MOST IMPORTANT THING — ch. "Combating Negative Influences" · verify exact quote against the book
Part 2: what a fighting chance actually looks like in practice — the systems, not the willpower. You already run your companies this way. Nobody applies it to their own portfolio.
Homework (private — you won't have to show anyone)
List every position you're "waiting for breakeven" on.
Just the list. Bring it. That list is Part 2's opening scene.
Compute your true all-in, money-weighted return.
Every account, every position, including the ones that "don't count." We'll share a simple template.
One number doesn't lie. Everything else on your brokerage app is a mood.
The one honest number.
The six forces, named.
And proof the gap can be closed.
Part 2: engineering the fighting chance. Part 3: come see the kitchen.