Short answer: because the Lamborghini is the product. The investment course is just how you pay for it.
If you scroll through finance content aimed at Singaporean men in their twenties, you will notice that the backdrop rarely changes. A supercar, a rooftop bar, a Marina Bay view, a watch the camera lingers on a little too long. Nobody films a dividend statement at a hawker center. There is a reason for this, and once you see it, you can't unsee it. It also explains why so many young men end up in strategies that are designed to blow up.
The real market is status, not returns
Most investment gurus are not selling returns. They are selling status, and their biggest buyers are young men.
Young men want high status, and they believe, with some justification, that status improves their prospects with women. I wrote about the research on this in 2019 in Do women prefer nice guys or rich guys? and again last year in Why guys without a passive income of $500 had better not start dating. Whatever you think of the evidence, belief drives purchases. A 24-year-old who thinks money buys him a better position in the dating market will pay for anything that promises to get him there faster.
So the guru's marketing problem is simple. How do you show a young man, in three seconds of a TikTok scroll, that you have what he wants?
You can't show him your Sharpe ratio. He doesn't know what it is, and it isn't attractive anyway. You show him the car.
Economists call this costly signaling. A Lamborghini costs well over S$1 million in Singapore once COE is included. That makes it a credible signal that someone has a lot of money. Notice that it doesn't say how the money was made, and it doesn't even say the guru owns the car. A rental for a half-day shoot will do. The signal only has to get past the viewer's gut, not his calculator.
Why the car always comes with a high-risk strategy
This is what matters for anyone thinking of buying a course.
If your marketing rests on showing spectacular wealth, you need a spectacular story to explain it. "I bought a basket of SGX REITs and banks and compounded at 7% for 20 years" does not explain a Lamborghini at age 29. Only a high-return strategy does: options, leveraged forex, crypto, small-cap momentum, margin trading.
There is also a structural reason the guru market selects for high-risk strategies, and it has nothing to do with whether the guru is honest. I ran a simple simulation to show it.
Take 10,000 young men. Give each one a strategy with the same 8% average annual return. Half of them get a steady portfolio with 12% volatility. The other half get a leveraged one with 50% volatility. Run it for five years.
| After 5 years | Steady (12% vol) | Leveraged (50% vol) |
|---|---|---|
| Median outcome per $1 invested | $1.43 | $0.85 |
| Tripled their money | 0.1% | 14.1% |
| Made 5x or more | 0.0% | 5.2% |
| Lost half or more | 0.0% | 36.6% |
| Lost 90% or more | 0.0% | 14.6% |
Monte Carlo simulation, 10,000 paths per strategy, normally distributed annual returns, losses capped at -100%. Illustrative only, not a forecast of any specific strategy.
Look at the leveraged column. The typical investor loses money. More than a third lose half. One in seven is wiped out. And yet roughly one in twenty makes five times their capital.
Now think about who makes content. The 5% who turned $50,000 into $250,000 have a story, a screenshot, and maybe a down payment on a nice car. The 15% who were wiped out stop posting. The steady investors have nothing to show except $1.43 for every dollar, a good result nobody wants to watch.
So even if every strategy has the same expected return, the people who end up on your feed come almost entirely from the high-risk tail. You are not looking at a sample of investors. You are looking at a sample of survivors.
The guru's incentives make this worse. If his strategy works, he sells courses. If it fails, he deletes his account, and another winner from the same lottery takes his place. His payoff looks like a call option, so he should prefer high volatility. Your payoff looks like the whole distribution, including the part where you are wiped out.
Why young men specifically take the bait
Two things push young men towards this trade.
The arithmetic of a small portfolio. A 25-year-old with $20,000 earning 6% makes $1,200 a year. That buys nothing he can show anyone. The only way a small portfolio can change your life in two years is to take risks that are just as likely to destroy it. High-risk strategies are not irrational for this group. They are a rational response to the wrong goal.
Risk appetite peaks in young men. This is well documented in behavioral research and needs no further explanation to anyone who has driven on the PIE on a Friday night. In the ERM readings, I describe dopamine-seeking as the first of three psychological roots of rookie portfolio design. A variable-reward strategy that pays off big once in a while feels very much like a slot machine. The Lamborghini tells you what the jackpot looks like.
Put the two together, a status-hungry buyer and a marketer who has to signal high returns, and you get a market that consistently matches the riskiest strategies with the people least able to survive their losses.
A detour through my Second Brain
Here is something I found while writing this.
Earlier this year, I moved 20 years of blog posts, research reports, and teaching notes into an Obsidian vault, and I've indexed it in a Qdrant vector database so I can search by meaning instead of keywords. Before writing this article, I asked it about "investment gurus showing off luxury cars to young men."
The top results were not about gurus. They were SGX research reports on Hong Leong Asia, which makes truck powertrains, and China Sunsine, which makes rubber chemicals for tires. The embedding model saw "cars" and went straight to engines and tires. When I searched for "high risk high return strategy," it returned the leverage section of my Olam report and position sizing tables from my REIT analysis.
That's a funny result, but it also says something. In my own notes, risk shows up as a net debt-to-equity ratio, a refinancing schedule, or a trim level. It's a spreadsheet. In guru marketing, risk shows up as an orange car. Same concept, completely different representation, and the second one sells far better.
When I adjusted the query, the vault surfaced the posts I expected, and I found I had been writing this article in pieces for almost a decade without connecting them:
- 2017, Inconspicuous consumption and the theory of platforms: how educated people signal status without luxury goods, written in the same post where I discussed the margin trading debate going around the blogs.
- 2018, The Things that you buy leave no trace: research showing an expensive car really does make its owner happier than an average one, which is exactly why the signal works.
- 2019, Do women prefer nice guys or rich guys?: the mating-market premise behind the whole guru economy.
- 2019, MBA in a Nutshell #17 – Sales: AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) versus consultative selling. The supercar is the cheapest Attention trigger there is.
- 2022, Why we pursue status: my notes on David Marx's Status and Culture and how chasing status destroys wealth.
- 2025, Why guys without a passive income of $500 had better not start dating: money and the dating market, again.
Status, mating, sales funnels and risk had sat in four separate clusters of my vault for years. The guru's Lamborghini is what links them. That is the real argument for building a second brain. You can't remember what you wrote eight years ago, but a machine can show you that you already had the pieces.
What to do instead
If you are a young man reading this, I am not going to tell you to stop wanting status. That is like telling you to stop being hungry. Here is what I would do instead.
- Ask for the drawdown, not the return. Any guru selling a strategy should be able to tell you its worst peak-to-trough loss and how long recovery took. If the answer is vague, or the track record started after 2022, walk away.
- Ask how many students blew up. A course that cannot tell you its failure rate is showing you the 5% column of my table and hiding the 15% column.
- Separate the signal from the source. Ask what share of the guru's income comes from trading and what share comes from selling courses. In most cases, students, not markets, paid for the car.
- Size your portfolio to survive. Before you can compound, you have to avoid being wiped out. A strategy that ends with a 15% chance of losing 90% is not an investment plan, whatever the upside.
- Pick a better status game. The status that actually holds up in Singapore, a paid-off flat, a dividend stream that covers your basic expenses, a career with optionality, doesn't photograph well. It also doesn't get repossessed.
The guru needs the Lamborghini because his business depends on you looking at the right tail of the distribution.
Your job is to look at the whole thing.
