Last week I told you how investment clubs started. Regular people in Detroit, 1940, pooling small amounts of money to learn together.
They would sit around a table and research together. Debate together. Invest together.
Here’s what actually changed.
The old investment club pooled capital. Everyone put money in, studied stocks together, voted on what to buy, and shared the results. There was a treasurer. There were meeting minutes. There was accountability built into the structure.
Think about what replaced the living-room meeting. YouTube channels with market commentary. Discord servers with “alerts” channels. Substack newsletters with model portfolios. TikTok creators explaining options strategies in 60 seconds. Reddit threads where strangers coordinate around a single stock.
The shape changed, but the human needs didn’t.
People still want to understand money, feel less alone making decisions, know what to pay attention to, and feel like they belong in the investor class.
The old club charged dues. The new club charges subscriptions.
In a traditional investment club, members paid in and shared the upside. The incentives were aligned. If the club made smart decisions, everyone benefited.
In the new model, the creator gets paid whether you make money or not. The revenue comes from subscriptions, sponsorships, affiliate deals, courses, coaching, premium access tiers, and advertising. The business model isn’t investing. It’s media.
That’s not automatically bad. Some of these creators are truly excellent educators. But you need to understand the incentive shift, because it changes everything about what you’re being sold.
Here’s the simplest way I can put it:
Old investing asked: “Do you have enough money and knowledge to start?”
Internet-era investing asked: “Do you want to join the conversation?”
That second question opened the door for millions of people who never saw themselves as “typical investors.” They came in through YouTube, Reddit, TikTok, Discord, and newsletters instead of through a broker or advisor. And that’s genuinely good. More people learning about money is a net positive.
But something else shifted along with the audience.
At the table, members learned by participating. They studied companies, presented research, debated, voted, and shared the consequences of their decisions. The learning was in the doing.
At the microphone, audiences learn by following. One person talks. Everyone else watches, likes, subscribes, and acts on what they heard.
The best modern communities try to bring the table back. They use the creator to attract attention, but then build systems that empower the members - research assignments, frameworks, discussion norms, portfolio review discipline, risk education, and peer accountability. (all of this is good!)
The worst ones never bring the table back. They keep everyone facing the stage. And that is when I get these K-1s that don’t make any sense. Or worse, I’ve seen people lose significant percentages of their wealth.
A teacher gets paid to make you smarter. A media business gets paid to keep you watching.
The leaders often don’t know as much as they think they do.
FINRA’s 2026 research found that 60% of investors aged 18–34 use social media for investing information, and 61% of them have made an investment decision based on a social media personality’s recommendation.
Here’s the (very) uncomfortable part: those same social-media-informed investors averaged 42% correct on an objective investing knowledge quiz — while 63% rated their own knowledge as “high.”
That gap between confidence and competence is where people lose money. And it’s the exact gap that a savvy media funnel exploits.
Free content gets your attention. A newsletter or Discord invite captures your email. Consistency builds trust. Then comes the paid tier which includes the “premium” alerts, the private community, the course, the mastermind, the VIP room.
Each step feels like you’re getting closer to the inside. But what you’re actually moving through is a sales funnel designed to increase your spending, not necessarily your investing skill.
You remember January 2021. A Reddit community - r/wallstreetbets - coordinated a short squeeze on GameStop that made international headlines. It proved that online investment communities weren’t just educational or social. They could become coordinated attention networks with real market impact.
That was the final mutation. The investment “club” could now educate, entertain, coordinate, pressure institutions, and create tribal identity, all at once. And the SEC noticed. They’ve warned that digital engagement practices can nudge investors toward more frequent or higher-risk trading than they’d otherwise choose.
If you’re in a paid investment community, a Discord, a newsletter with stock picks, or any group that looks like a modern investment club…you’re not in a club. You’re in someone’s media business.
That doesn’t mean it’s worthless. But it means the questions you should be asking are different:
Remember the original formula: education + access + small dollar participation + community + social proof.
The good versions of modern investment media still honor that formula. The dangerous ones just borrow its language.
But the real story isn’t about newsletters and Discord servers. It’s about what happens when the media model goes one step further and starts raising actual capital.
Next week, Part 3. That’s when it gets personal.