The Best Ways to Invest, Ranked in 2026

I've been through pretty much every investment that I can think of from the stock market to bricks and mortar to even Lego bricks, analyzing them on loads of metrics, fees, average returns, ease of access. And today, we're going to create the ultimate tier list of investments, ranking these things definitively once and for all completely based on my opinion. I'm going to do that for each investment from the perspective of your average investor, so you and me, and then an expert in that style of investment because I do think it's important to acknowledge the differences in the opportunity between the two. We're also going to judge the investments based on their sole individual merits. What I mean by that is I'm not going to be considering the ability to, you know, avoid taxes with these specific investments. The fact that you can stick stocks and shares inside of an ICE or a pension is a massive advantage for those types of investments. But, you know, we could get really complicated and into the nuances of how to tax wrap many of these investment types. And I'm not a tax expert at the end of the day. So, we're just going to judge the investments on the investments. I've provided full access to my spreadsheet below so you can check out all of the detail and the sources if you like because I am going to be summarizing stuff here and missing things out that are on that spreadsheet because if I spent 5 minutes talking about every single investment, we would be here forever, wouldn't we? And that is ultimately a terrible investment of your time. So, let's just crack on. A global stock market fund. My absolute favorite, my muse, my flame. You buy one investment and it spreads your money across a whole load of companies across the globe. You can start with as little as a pound. You can buy and sell it ridiculously easy. They are cheap and they are very scalable. What I mean by that is it's a great place to part 10 quid or even 10 million quid. These things are honestly financial engineering miracles. The fact that you can just become the part owner of the biggest businesses on the planet whilst being sat on the toilet using your phone in a couple of clicks is madness. The world is yours, Chico, and everything in it. to quote Tony Montana. And the data suggests that just slapping your money into one of these things has produced returns of over 5% above inflation for over a hundred years. The caveat on that though is you couldn't actually buy these things for 100 years. They're fairly new inventions. And another downside is that most global index funds are market cap weighted. So you buy the biggest companies and the biggest markets in the biggest allocations. Not really a downside, more of a feature because that's really worked up to now. It's paid off to be like that. But some people are concerned that your standard global index is actually just a heavy bet on America with a bit of money everywhere else. Regardless, this is S tier for your average investor. I would honestly put this in its own category if I could above everything else. But that might uncover my deep-seated bias. For expert investors, I'm putting this in C tier. Why? Because if they were honest with themselves, they should probably just track the market, right? But if you're an expert in the global stock market, that's because you think that you know what's going to happen. So on that basis, you should beat the returns of the global stock market, shouldn't you? So if you're just buying a global tracker fund, you're leaving money on the table if you are a so-called expert. The real issue is here, these so-called experts are few and far between. Next is a developed market fund. Just like the global fund, but buys into the big well-established economies only. Think USA, Germany, and the UK. They're cheaper than a true global fund because it does not include all of the other countries with less popular stock markets that are expensive to access. But the concern about being too focused on America is even more amplified here because you don't have those other markets diluting you away. But that could be a good thing because America has done well in recent years. These funds have performed better than their global fund counterparts. S tier again for the noobs and Ctier again for the so-called experts for the same reason as we discussed above. That's a developed market fund. So it makes sense to look at next an emerging market fund. The complete opposite. All those smaller economies that have lots of future potential and promise. Think South American or Asian countries. What is emerging is up for debate. Many emerging market indexes still have China and South Korea in them. China probably feels like it's emerged by now, but there are other considerations beyond just the size of the economy that dictates why they're in these types of funds. Looking at the returns offered here, the credible data implies that an emerging market fund gets around 4% long-term adjusted for inflation, which is less than the global average or just a developed fund. That of course could change and change really is the key theme here with these types of funds. They're a bit of a basket case really. While politics, FX swings, poor governance, you are exposing yourself to all of the troubles and uncertainties of countries that are not as established as say the West. I mean, I say this as a Brit, right? And I think that we're like the gold standard at the minute for political uncertainty. But emerging markets are more expensive to access and have more uncertainty. I think they're a good addition as part of a globally diversified portfolio, but I wouldn't want them to be my main thing. B tier for the average investor for that reason. It's a side dish. It's not the whole enchilada. But I'll give it an A tier for an expert. When I say expert, I mean someone who is an expert in that particular emerging market as they could probably find opportunities in that market that others have overlooked because these markets are less researched, less looked over by the wider investing world. So you can often find genuine opportunities versus say so-called experts of the American stock market where it's a lot harder to find opportunities there because everyone is looking at that market. You can find a genuine edge in an emerging market if you know what you're doing. If you know enough about the place, right, let's look at that American market next. Before we move on to that, let me tell you about today's video sponsor, Wise. 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Your first international transfer is fee free, up to £1,000, and you can sign up from the link in the description or the QR code on screen. The logic here is all you need is one American fund. The S&P 500, say, the top 500 companies in America, you know, f the world. America is the world. Warren Buffett said it. And to be fair, the performance long-term backs it up. 6.6% after inflation, the highest returns that we've looked at so far. The one thing about this American only approach though that I think many investors have not considered because they've basically never experienced it is that America is prone to periods, long periods of underperformance. I wonder how that all American approach would feel if that market went through another lost decade like it did in the early 2000s. But you can access the American market for super cheap and it's the main driver of the global economy. I also don't really see that changing. By buying a global index, I'm heavily betting on the American market myself anyway. So, it's really hard to argue that this is an S tier. But the one thing that we know about returns is higher past returns often lead to lower future expected returns. So, I'm going to put this in A tier for that reason. I just have concerns around future returns of the American market considering how strong they've been in recent years. For experts on the American stock market, I'm going to say that this is S tier. But not because I think that they can beat that market. Like I said, it's too well tracked to get a genuine edge is my belief. I just think if you're a so-called expert in the American market, you can make a full-on living going on CNBC chatting nonsense every week. And that is a great gig if you can get it. >> Do we think it will prosper? >> Anybody that listened to you from 2010 has you've done a grave disservice to them. So, if you feel fine with that, that's that that's that's what you do for a living. That's fine. Someday you might be right like a broken clock. >> Many of those experts on CNBC will be in charge of our next type of fund, an actively managed fund. Basically, the expert is saying, "I know what I'm doing. Give me your money. I'll go pick winners and charge you a fee for that." Most fund managers fail to consistently beat the stock market long-term. That is a statement of fact. But even if we put that pretty big thing to one side, most average investors just chase around the best fund managers. It's a little bit like if you've ever seen young kids playing football, what happens is the strongest, fastest kid kicks the ball and then legs it after it and you just have this chain of kids following them who are never getting a touch. Peter Lynch is one of the best fund managers ever. He averaged 29% a year, but the average investor in his fund only got 7%. because the average investor just kept dipping in and out of the fund essentially not being able to stomach the ride, selling when it was going down, buying when it was going up. So even though they were with one of the best fund managers ever at the time he was kicking ass, they still underperformed the general market. That's the average investor in the fund. Obviously, not everyone did. Kathy Wood is a more recent example. Here is when she did really well one year, and here is where all of the money flowed into her fund. And fund managers also charge quite high fees for you to be in their funds for their so-called expertise. This is Ctier for the average investor. It's expensive and finding a good manager is a rarity amongst the C who have failed and then you have to be able to stick with that good manager for the long term through thick and thin. I'll give this a B tier for experts because they probably have access to the managers themselves. They know them. They know their personality. They can speak to their temperament and skills and they have an insider knowledge and look on the manager and their activities. This is access that me and you don't have. Okay, forget about a fund manager who says they can pick stocks for you. How about you picking your own individual stocks? For the average investor on the street, this is a C-tier activity because they are simply just not doing the work they need to in order to correctly value companies and ascertain if what they're buying is worth it, if it's actually a good investment. Most people, I think the average investor is just buying companies on recommendations of their friends or people at work and on well-worn narratives like EVs are the future or space is big, bro. not realizing that this sentiment is already priced into the market and that they probably shouldn't be listening to someone who works at the same place as they do about how to pick stocks and earn money from them. For a true expert in this though, this is S tier. And I honestly do think that an average investor can become an expert if they wanted to, if they wanted to give all of the time it requires, but it's a full-time job. If you're truly an expert who understands a sector, knows how to correctly value a business, ascertain its strengths, its opportunities, and its risks across the whole competitive landscape, do all of that analysis on their competitors as well. And then once you've bought the company, manage your own emotions and temperament, you can beat the market. But like I said, this is likely a full-time job, and I think the amount of people that can do that consistently for decades are very few. The reason I've scored this so low is I just think most people, most average investors are not doing anywhere near enough to give this a go properly. That includes myself, right? So, I did pick individual stocks and I actually did better than the stock market, but I'm going to sit here and say the truth. I am no expert. I was just lucky riding a bull market upwards. We've had a very good market basically since 2009 that I think has flattered a lot of people's egos. Right, that's the stock market. Now, let's look at property, the home you live in. I have issues really calling this an investment at all. It is more a form of force saving that basically when you finally pay it off becomes a supplement to your investments because a paid off home if you are lucky enough to get one significantly reduces the amount of investments that you need to support yourself in retirement or later life. to support rent of £1,500 a month in retirement, you would need a pot of money of around £450,000 on top of the other assets that you need to live off. So, a home that you own outright as an investment in that sense. But my house is my biggest investment is a financial trope that I think is at the center of a lot of the UK's issues. There is trillions of pounds tied up in UK houses just sat in bricks and this money is largely unproductive. It doesn't do anything but sit there. Yet, the homeowner who sits on all that wealth likes the idea of their pile of bricks going up in value, of course, even if it means that all of the other piles of bricks in their local neighborhood have probably gone up in value by a similar amount. This means that politicians are reluctant to do anything that might reduce the value of homes as they will annoy those voters. That means then you're cutting future generations out of home ownership. And then they face the challenge that we just mentioned before, right? Okay, now I need to save even more for my retirement because I can't own my home outright. So, I'm going to need to pay rent during retirement. But they can't do that because the cost of housing is so high. Housing then just sucks up more and more of the nation's disposable incomes, meaning that they can't spend that money elsewhere in the economy. You need to buy a house before anything else. Overpay your mortgage quickly so you can save on interest. And this broad idea that your house is your biggest investment, in my opinion, are some of the most damaging financial misconceptions here in the UK today. But there are significant tax benefits around capital appreciation with your own home. So I'm going to stick this in B tier. Owning a home outright, which I'll say is the expert version here, is an S tier position to be in. But if you're racing towards that at the expense of other investments, you are potentially leaving a lot of money on the table. And I'm going to add a bonus one in here and say that providing good quality affordable housing for the nation is an S tier investment for our country because that will free up productive capital for other areas of the economy and we will all benefit. Okay. What about berlet then? So owning someone else's home that they then rent off you. If you do this as an average landlord and the average landlord owns one maybe two properties, you're going to face really high deposit requirements, really high stamp duty. You're going to be taxed aggressively if you don't structure this whole thing through a limited company. And no matter what the course selling property bros tell you online, this is not passive income. You are responsible here for someone's home, it's a responsibility you have to take very seriously. You have to respond and fix things ASAP when things go wrong. And things will go wrong. And when things go wrong on a house is expensive. If the boiler breaks, you're making £300 quid a month off the property after all costs. That £3,000 new boiler wipes you out for basically a year. The capital requirements and the exposure to stress tier and all the costs that come with it as well make this a Ctier investment for the average person. Just compare the ease and simplicity of index investing to this. For experts though, the outlook is very different. Why are institutional investors buying billions of pounds worth of property in the UK? The answer is because they have scale. So if you're looking to get into buy tolet property, you really need to have the mindset of I'm not just going to buy one or two. I'm going to set up a limited company structure and I'm going to own multiple through that limited company. To get tax efficiency, basically you need to generate systems. You need people in place. You're going to need to treat this like a business. For the pros, this is a tier, I think. And the main reason for that is the access to affordable leverage. Leverage is using debt to amplify returns. If I buy a house for £100,000 and I stick £25,000 down to get into it as an example and the price goes up by 10% so £10,000 I keep all of that £10,000 and I only put in 25k. Leverage is amplifying the returns there. And with property you tend to get access to easier, more affordable leverage than you would say with the stock market. There is always risk with leverage though. Stock market property amplifying returns always comes with amplified downside as well. Another bonus. If you're the Duke of Westminster sitting on half of central London because your great great great great granddad passed it to you. I think this is S tier. Okay, house flipping next. Very expensive to get into. You're going to need all of the money that you would for a normal berlet and then all of the cost to renovate. It takes ages. It's illquid and your money is very tied up. So if something goes wrong, which it tends to with building or if the market downturns, you're stuck. Most of the shows that convince people they could quit their job and just buy a crap hole anywhere, paint it, and make 100k did so during a huge runup in house prices. Every time I watch Homes Under the Hammer, I question how the hell are these people renovating these houses so cheaply. I'm giving this C tier. I'm probably going to start annoying some people with some of these, aren't I? But I will say that buying your own home, doing that up as you live in it is potentially Btier because you get a lot of generous tax relief around capital gains with your own home. It's potentially a good way to increase your wealth, buying a doer uper, if you will. But then you got to live on a building site. I would much rather watch other people go through that living hell than do it myself. For experts, I will say that this is a tier, though. And when I say an expert, I mean a builder or people who can essentially do a work for the fraction of the cost. They don't have to pay someone else to do the work. The return they're getting is essentially the saving on labor that they're putting in themselves. What about REITs then? Real estate, investment trusts. You buy a fund that owns a load of property. You get property exposure with a stock market-l like feel for returns. They also have to pay out loads of their income or profits to the shareholders. So the income on these things can be great and they're fairly tax efficient as well. So you can place them inside of an ISA. As well as that, REITs are largely exempt from standard corporation tax or income tax as long as they're a qualifying rate. So as long as they're paying out 90% of their profits to their shareholders. The returns on average above the rate of inflation for these vary from three to six% long-term. The reason I haven't nailed down that figure more specifically is because it depends on the type of REIT that you buy. So you could buy office blocks, out of town retail, warehouses. There are loads of different types of REITs. These are a good way to get property exposure if you don't want to buy literal houses. It also gives normal people, the average investor like you and me, access to things like commercial property. But which fund you pick is the big decision here. It feels to me very much like stock picking in that sense. REITs also have unique issues. For example, if there's a property crash, they can lock you in because property is by its very nature not liquid. If everyone's trying to pull their money out at the same time because they're panicking, the fund can go, "We don't have enough money on hand, so we're shutting the doors and then you're stuck in it." Basically, when you buy a global index fund, you have exposure to some of the biggest REITs in the world anyway. So buying individual ones for me at my age feels like a a bit B tier. I might be being a bit harsh there. You might say it's A tier for some of the reasons that I discussed. I will concede that potentially in retirement because the income profile of many REITs, then it is an A tier. For experts, I'm sticking them in E tier because I just judge anyone who has committed their life to becoming an expert on REITs. Right, we're going to do some fun ones now. may have had a haircut midway through filming this because it's a long video. But anyway, true story. The first ever pack of Pokémon cards that I opened contained a Charizard. It was about 1999, year 2000. I was in year six and the very next day it got robbed off me by a kid at school and his older brothers were affiliated with an inner city Birmingham gang called the Burger Bar Boys. Stupid name for a gang, I know, but even at that young age, I knew that you didn't really mess with these guys. I'm over it now. I cried about it for a full day at the time. But yeah, I promise I'm over it. Promise. Even though that card would likely be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds today if it was in mint condition, I was never going to keep it in mint condition, was I? These cards are so valuable because ultimately all of the kids that pulled them out got their grubby little fingers on them and ruined them. At a similar time, I also remember being into pugs, tazzes, yo-yos, weird little baby aliens, and goop that the rumor has it if you bathe them at midnight under the light of a full moon, they will reproduce in your sink. So, we can all sit here today and say it was obvious that Pokémon would become the collectible powerhouse that it is. But was it obvious? And for every Pokémon, there is a Beanie Baby and a Tamagotchi or a Furby. As a standalone investment, Pokémon cards are hype driven by their very nature. They're fairly illquid and the whole market is controlled by the producer. What I mean by that is they limit the supply to create scarcity. There is also this kind of built-in element of gambling with Pokémon, right? You don't know what you'll get out of a pack, which is fun, but from an investment perspective, it's a little bit wild. They're also highly perishable. If you just ruffle the corner slightly of one of these things, you half the value, which is a bit grim. I also don't love in the modern day how what was a joyous childhood pastime for me for about 24 hours before it came one of the most traumatic events of my life has today been taken over by speculators and monetized to a level where the whole hobby just feels like it's about how much things are worth. I do still love the intergenerational element here though. I love that parents who loved it in the past can now enjoy it with their kids. I mean that is nice. If you have certain cards, of course they're worth a lot. Same for baseball cards and other such collectibles. But this really is a game of expertise. I don't think an average person can just look at Pokémon and go, "Oh, I'll get into this so I can make a bit of money." I think you need to live and breathe the hobby, really enjoy it. And I think that's a characteristic across most collectibles. Classic cars, Pokémon, Lego, watches, fine wine, fine art, trainer reselling. I think this is all Dtier really for the average person who's just looking at it as a way to make money. This is a tier though for a true expert, someone who lives and breathes the thing. they get to sell it to other experts or convince average investors that these things are a great investment, so they should buy them for lots of money. But it does become a bit of a second job. Really, I think a lot of these collectibles are more like side hustles than they are investments if you want to make money out of them. My personal view on this is, and feel free to disagree, I think you should buy these items because you love them and you should enjoy them. Play Pokémon with the kids, drive the car, wear the watches, and drink the goddamn wine because one day you'll be dead and none of it will matter. Next up are cashlike instruments and investments. Starting with a bog standard savings account. These are easy access, really simple to use, highly liquid, and scalable. But over the long term, savings accounts like this have only just about kept up with inflation. And that's factoring in periods of very high interest rates in the past. My financial markets risk management lecture at uni used to say that investment is the sacrifice of consumption today in the hope of greater consumption tomorrow. We give up the ability to buy stuff today hoping that we can have more ability to buy stuff tomorrow. On that basis, under that definition, savings accounts are a terrible investment because we know that they tend to not outrun inflation. If anything, they go backwards. So, you're decreasing consumption over time. But these things are really useful in certain cases. Short-term liquidity, emergency funds, and to protect your investments, to stop you from selling your investments when times get bad. They are an investment in your investments in that sense. And at certain points in your life, large cash balance, large cash balances, sorry, I'm going to say that again, are useful if you want to derisk from your investments. Using a high interest savings account like this to build up an emergency fund is a tier basic personal finance. Whacking all of your money though in one of these because you think cash is king is Dtier. An expert in savings accounts is the kind of person who spends all their time chasing around the best bank account rates, switching bank accounts to get an extra 0.1% on their savings. I don't think this is a great way to spend your time. E tier. Put that effort and time into other types of assets that will produce you a better return. Okay. What about money market funds and short-term bond ETFs? This is any product, fund, ETF that has that characteristic almost like a savings account, but typically provides a better rate. Many savings accounts providers are just sticking your money into one of these funds or ETFs or whatever vehicle they use and just paying the difference between what they get and what they've offered you. I don't see these as investments. I use them heavily myself. I see them as a way to provide liquidity within my business. I'm going to say they're a tier for that purpose for providing short-term liquidity and putting your money in a place that's probably slightly better than a savings account. The expert viewer this in my opinion is Ramen Nikiser at Pensioncraft. He has great content on money market funds. If you're looking to learn about them, go check his videos out. He goes straight into S tier because he is that guy. How about bonds themselves then or other forms of fixed income? The returns here longterm appear to be around 1.34% above the rate of inflation. So these are not making the average investor rich, are they? But they're not really designed for that, are they? I think the most common use case here that will apply to most people watching this at some point in their life is to have an allocation of bonds in your portfolio to reduce the impact of a stock market crash to dial down the volatility of your portfolio potentially. A tier for their feature as a riskmanagement tool within a portfolio. S tier for the experts because the people who really understand the bond markets, traders and such, these guys can make billions. Okay, let's annoy a load of people now, shall we? With gold. has had a great time recently and during that runup I made a video where I was critical of the view that gold is, you know, the world's best investment. I think there's a lot of recency bias tied up into that sentiment. It's done well recently, so people really like it. But gold tends to have long periods of underperformance, literal decades of underperformance. Not to mention, it produces no yield. It doesn't do anything. It's just a yellow rock. Yes, it has industrial uses. as there are a few but most of the gold in the world is still used today in jewelry in Indian saris and just stored as bricks underground because it doesn't perish and it has a limited supply. So it's a good way of countries storing wealth out of swapping each other's currencies in a way that's universally recognized across those countries. People will disagree but as an investment I'm putting this in B tier for the average investor. The long-term returns are around 4 to 7% above the rate of inflation, which is solid, but you'd have had to have held this for a very long time to get that. And the whole it's done better than the S&P 500 since the year 2000 is based on this mental rise in performance just here. Because of its very up and down performance in recent decades, I personally wouldn't base my retirement goals on gold, but I can see how, you know, a small allocation within a portfolio as a diversifier is attractive for some people. experts in gold. Let's put them at A tier because I think a good gold trader can probably do quite well for themselves. What about other commodities? Trading them or just tracking a fund that buys them. I will admit that I don't know much about commodities. I of course have exposure to commodities within my portfolio. The businesses that I buy in my global index buy and sell commodities to make their goods and services. As well as that, I have commodity businesses inside of the the global index itself. The research that I've done suggests a lot of variety here. anywhere from minus3% to plus 2.5% adjusted for inflation. I think with commodities, they're just so impacted by world events, shortages, global uncertainty, things that are very hard to predict that really, if you're getting involved here, you're trading in a sense. You're betting on what the future version of the world will look like. I don't think that that's a good thing for the average investor to be doing. Dtier. How about experts then? So for a short while I used to sell offplan property investments in Manchester and we had many investors all over the world. It bought in a really quite eclectic bunch of people. One group of investors within the business that were buying a lot of property were a set of um oil traders from in the south of England. They would buy property all the time. There's a big group of them and then one day they all just disappeared. Didn't pick up the phone, you know, just vanished off the face of the earth seemingly. Turns out they've made 700 million quid in a day and were accused of manipulating the oil market, so they went to ground. Looks like the FCA has settled with them for just 1 million quid, though. Yeah. So, if you know what you're doing, commodity trading clearly looks like a great gig. Hard to argue that 700 million quid in a day isn't S tier. But I'm ranking these guys Etier because they weren't my clients. They were my mate Barnes clients, and I was jealous of the fact that he had such a good client base. My best client was assassinated in Turkey by someone on a motorbike using an Uzi rumored to be acting for the Iranian government. Like I said, quite an eclectic bunch. Let's stick with trading, shall we? With day trading, FX trading, any action around an investment that involves you taking short positions where you enter in and out of the market quickly. I often wonder why the first thing that people often ask me about when it comes to investing, the first thing they discover isn't index funds or ISAs, but it's day trading. Maybe it's the fact that people like Greg Seker have completed trading so much that they have decided to leave billions on the table that they could make from doing it well to run spammy ads selling courses instead. The data is there. Most people who do this lose money. For the average investor, it's essentially gambling. F tier. For a true expert, though, if you're willing to treat this like a literal full-time job, find a market where you can get an edge, manage your risk correctly with positioning and keeping your cool around losing money, I think you can make a lot of money from doing this. I know people who make a lot of money from doing this and the sky is the limit. The best traders in the world make billions. A tier for those individuals, but they are the elite athletes of this game. It requires this mix of talents and skills and personality traits that I think are quite unique. Not to mention the fact that they just love doing it, right? If you love studying companies and charts and you can do it well, this is a great gig potentially. But if that doesn't really excite you, you shouldn't go anywhere near it. Somewhere you can win is with starting a business. As far as investments that you could potentially make, I think this is right up there. The upside for earnings is almost unlimited. And as someone who made that shift from a normal job in a 9 to5, but I always had this desire to start something of my own. So if you're that kind of person and you're sat there thinking, I don't know what to do, but I want to give something a go. Don't reinvent the wheel. Just look around you at what others are doing and go, how can I improve on that a little bit? There are countless people who are amazing at business who have written down everything they know in books. You can learn from them before you ever get started. And I do think with your own business, the biggest barrier for most people is just getting started. And regardless of if it works or not, you will learn stuff along the way. In a previous life before YouTube, I had a little eBay side hustle and that taught me all about search engine optimization because on eBay you have to try and appear top of the rankings, right? I used the lessons that I learned about ranking in search to get half a million views on my second ever video on YouTube because I optimized the title to appear top of YouTube search. I think the stat that 90% of businesses fail scares people off. But what I've seen from my limited experience dealing with people who are proper business people, not just, you know, social media influencers like me, right? Is they just have this dogged determination to fix any problem that comes in front of them. I think if you're relatively intelligent and you have that determination, you have a high chance of succeeding. And regardless of that, right, rather than saying 90% fail, think of it like this. There is a 10% chance that if I start something alongside my normal job that it might change my life. And if I fail, well, I just stay as I am right now. Given a 10% chance to completely change your life, if you want to do something like this, it's not for everyone, of course. Would you take that chance? I personally would just do it 10 times. guarantee success. This is a tier for your average investor because of the potential unlimited earning upside. Not to mention the personal development that you get from starting a business. The skills you learn and things like that are pretty much unmatched versus anything else on our list today. The thing that prevents this from being in S tier is that very real risk that it doesn't work and you've wasted time and money. This is S tier for an expert because business is a game that gets easier the more you play it. Okay, what about not starting a business but buying an existing one? There are going to be lots of baby boomers looking to exit their established companies in the coming years. Everything from massive businesses down to small operations. The good thing is, you know, they work. They are profitable businesses and all of that kind of sweat equity to get it off the ground. All of the initial risk has been done for you. So, you can skip those steps. The one thing about that though that I think is a downside is you haven't got that ground floor experience. You don't understand what it takes to make the business work, right? Because you've never worked in it. Obviously, if you understand that sector or niche inherently because you already work for a business and you want to branch out by buying your own, that's a different kettle of fish. But if you're looking to buy a business with no prior experience, I would be structuring the deal so that you say, "I'm going to shadow the owner for 12 months so I learn everything about this before I take it over." B tier for a noob with no experience. S tier for a seasoned operator that understands the specific industry that they're buying into. If you don't fancy being self-employed, well, how about then you invest in the business of you? Skill up. It doesn't matter what you do. If you add on complimentary skills to your role, you become more valuable within your sector. Learn how to use AI. Develop the ability to do public speaking. Learn how to write properly. Whatever it is, go, "What skill can I learn to amplify me within my role?" Most people just want a paycheck, right? They go to work, they leave. They don't want anything else from it. Absolutely fine. But if you want progression, then skill up. This is S tier. No matter where you are in your career, average or expert, S tier. If you don't fancy learning technical skills, just get yourself in the gym or hit the tarmac. Fitness improves your physical health and your mental well-being, which then feeds in your ability to perform in every other area of your life. And beyond that, it's a good investment because it typically extends your healthy life expectancy, which means you'll be retired longer, which means your assets can compound for longer, so you become richer. It also means benefits like the state pension which get paid out for as long as you live, you get more money out of those, improving the return on investment there from you from all the tax you paid. Average or expert S tier. Next, I'm grouping two together. So, private equity and VC investments. This idea of getting into companies early on so you can experience more of the growth. There's a real big push that I'm seeing across the investing world to get normal investors access to this type of investing. The argument is much of the gains have been seen in private equity in the VC world. Companies are coming to the market later. So normal investors are missing out on a lot of the gains. So let's get them involved in that. I'm a bit unsure because you know any good quality VC will tell you that one out of 10 of their investments makes any money. The rest go bust or or lose cash. This is highly speculative. Also, it's highly illquid. You're buying businesses that aren't listed. So you could plunk your money into a fund that buys these companies, say, and then the only option that you get money out is if one of the companies sells or it lists on the stock market. Most average investors, I think, need to get to grips with the basics of investing first before entering this kind of market. Dtier for the average investor, S tier for an expert who can actually pick winners because it's probably the best way to become a billionaire without actually building the business. Hedge funds are next, and they're similar. They're similar in the sense that they're really a game for the wealthy. Not just to mention the fact that you need loads of money to even get into one. These are E tier because for the average investor, they won't even qualify to get through the front door. For an expert, so someone who's just got enough money to be able to put money into a hedge fund. I don't know enough about what's appealing about these style of investments that pull so many people in. I look at it from an outsider perspective and go, they appear to underperform the market and charge really high fees to do so. But I also know that they give access to fairly advanced investment strategies, tax planning, and all sorts of other things. So, there's clearly benefits there that lure the rich in. So, let's just give it a B tier, shall we? All right. Next up, what if I told you there was an investment that if you consistently deposited £100 a month into it, that that had produced a return of 58%. That is nearly 10 times the American stock market over the same time period. Would you be interested? What if I told you as well that this investment was fairly easy to buy and sell? The fees are not that high and you can invest for a couple of quid up to a couple of billion. Would you be interested? What if I told you that investment was Bitcoin? Those are the facts around the performance. The other side of this is it remains highly volatile. The thing still sheds 50% of its value at a whim. There is also no regulatory protection here that you get with other assets in the traditional finance space. I've interviewed people on the podcast that have lost everything in a robbery and not being able to get it back. Also, it's just so highly contested and debated, isn't it? I think people will get most angry about this investment out of all of them. Funnily enough, the other one that will make them angry is gold, which has a lot of similarities or comparisons. I'm not going to get into the pros and the cons here. What I will say though is if you like Bitcoin, my personal view is that why not just have a small holding as part of your portfolio so you can still benefit from other assets like the stock market which has a longer track record and it has the ability to protect it from taxation. If Bitcoin does what you think it will, you know, you win. If it goes to zero, you don't lose everything. B tier for your average investor. I want to stick you right next to the gold guys and see you have it out amongst yourselves. And then when it comes to Bitcoin experts, I'm sticking you in E tier because I'm just so sick and tired of all the comments on all of my videos telling me that I don't understand Bitcoin and that it's all I should talk about. I could look at loads of other cryptos here. The list is endless. I'm not going to do that. But I will look at meme coins because, you know, lol. Whether it's a dog, a not so safe moon, or a rocket full of jizz, whatever your flavor is, this is F tier. It's not an investment. It's either a pump and dump or internet culture. It's just pure speculation, gambling for the average investor. Ctier for experts because if you can set one of these up, get the attention, and then run the Ponzi scheme successfully, you can make a lot of money. But being a scumbag scammer, rinsing people out of their hard earnings, and then getting a lengthy prison sentence from the US government potentially prevents this from being in S tier. NFTts. I think you know where these ones are going, right? Moving on. Gambling. Take a look for a second at a list of the highest paying taxpayers in the UK this year. Two out of the top five are betting companies. Who's really winning here? It's a rigged game. The longer you play it, the more you lose. And no matter what system you think you have, they've got millions, billions of data points on how everyone plays. So any system that you think you've developed, they've already seen it and they're working it against you. I think, you know, having a little flutter, little bit of spicing up a football game, betting with your mates, the grand national, all good fun if if it stays fun for you. But using gambling as a way of making money, seeing it as an investment, is an act of financial self harm. The only people who win longterm are the people on the other side of the bet. Why do you think they spend so much money on advertising? When was the last time you saw the S&P 500 advertising itself? And why is Poly Market, another form of gambling, being caught up in a fake betting scandal? Like I said, have a bit of fun. But if you see this as a way of genuinely making money, F tier, get it in the bin. for experts and professional gamblers who claim they know how to win the system. Maybe we can find some examples of professional gamblers who have won consistently. And I will concede things like poker involve an element of skill. So people can win that. But when you're playing against the house, any example that you show me of someone who's won consistently over decades, I'm just going to say it's proof of the lottery fallacy that if you get enough people to do something where most people lose, you will eventually get one winner that you can hold up and go, "Look, they know the secrets." I'm also putting them in F tier cuz I just don't love gambling very much. So, to conclude, when putting this together, the thing that I've observed is that the broader the investment that you make, the less expertise that you need to perform it well. Things like the global stock market and such that have that broad aspect to them are highly attractive for the average investor. But the more specific the investment that you want to make, the more expertise you need, the more in the weeds you need to be to make it work to shift the odds in your favor. I think most people who are looking at alternative investments as a way of making money often underestimate the level of expertise required to truly thrive within it. If you've made it this far, I really appreciate you. Thank you so much, you legend. And I'll see you in the next one.