Everything that could be written about investing in stocks and markets has already been written yet I continue to write about investing. It really is insane, but I do this for me, not you.

This short post from Michael Batnick is one of my favorite ‘investing is hard’ posts in recent memory which got me thinking about how I would try and talk a kid into or out of a life of investing in as few words as possible.

One of the many seductions of dabbling in the stock market is the potential for lottery winners. Look at the returns these stocks have generated since going public:

Starbucks: ~18,000%
Amazon: ~21,000%
Apple: ~28,000%
Microsoft: ~72,000%
Disney: 128,000%

What many investors don’t know or don’t seem to care about is that for every Apple, there are several thousand companies that have come and gone (to zero). Let’s not even talk about the near impossibility of actually staying on the horse for a multi-thousand percent return.

The allure, thrill, difficulty, disappointment, frustration and pain of investing… without one chart!

I can’t understand why everyone is not passionate about investing.