The remote feels slick and useless in my hand. On the screen, a man who looks to be about 28, with hair that suggests a team of engineers was involved, is pointing at a series of violently green and red charts. His mouth is moving, and the sounds are technically English, but they aren’t landing. He says, ‘The backwardation in the crude futures market clearly indicates a supply-side squeeze, exacerbated by the Fed’s hawkish stance, which could lead to significant alpha for long-duration bond holders.’ My head nods. It’s a purely physical reflex, a social tic learned over years of pretending I’m not the dumbest person in the room. I understood exactly three of those words: the, a, and to.

My morning was already off-kilter. A ten-second gap between me and the closing bus doors had redefined my schedule, leaving that low-grade static of frustration humming just beneath my skin. And now this. This performance of intelligence, this broadcast of exclusion. It felt like the same universe: one where you’re just a few seconds too slow, a few words too ignorant, to be on the inside. We’re taught to see this kind of language as the hallmark of expertise. We assume that if we don’t understand it, the failure is ours. Our vocabulary is lacking. Our education is incomplete. Our brains are simply not wired for the high altitudes of finance, where concepts are so rarefied, they require a whole new atmosphere of language.

This is a lie.

Financial jargon isn’t a precision tool required for complex ideas. More often than not, it’s a wall. It’s a moat filled with acronyms and a gate guarded by ten-dollar words. Its primary purpose is not to clarify but to mystify. It exists to create and maintain an artificial priesthood of experts who can charge a premium for translating their own invented language back into the simple concepts it obscures. Buy low, sell high. Spend less than you earn. Diversify your risk. These are the bedrock principles. You can build a lifetime of financial security on them. But you can’t build a multi-trillion-dollar industry on them. For that, you need contango. You need quantitative easing. You need collateralized debt obligations.

Learning the Hard Way

I learned this the hard way, of course. A few years ago, I had a bit of money saved up-about $8,888-and I was determined to be a ‘serious investor.’ I walked into one of those polished advisory offices that smell faintly of leather and fear. The advisor, a man named Clark, spoke the language fluently. He talked about tactical asset allocation, alpha generation, and non-correlated asset classes. He showed me a prospectus for a ‘structured product’ that was 48 pages long. I understood maybe 18 percent of it. Because I was ashamed to admit that, I fixated on the complexity itself. My brain performed a fatal trick of logic: if it’s this complicated, it must be sophisticated. If it’s this sophisticated, it must be better than a simple index fund. I bought in. Over the next 18 months, that sophisticated product lost $878 while the simple, boring market it’s supposed to outperform chugged steadily upward. I didn’t lose because of market forces. I lost because I was sold a solution to a problem I didn’t have, wrapped in a language I couldn’t parse, and I was too intimidated to say, ‘Wait, what does that actually mean?’

It reminds me of something my friend Reese H.L. said to me once. Reese is a mindfulness instructor, an occupation about as far from Wall Street as you can get. We were talking about our respective professions, and I was half-joking about the opaque language of finance. She laughed and said, ‘Oh, we have it too. I can tell a student to “hold space for their emergent consciousness” or to “integrate their somatic experience.”‘ She saw the blank look on my face. ‘See? It sounds profound. And sometimes, for someone deep in the practice, it has a specific meaning. But most of the time, it’s just a fancy way of saying “pay attention to how your body feels.”‘ She said that every field develops a shorthand, but that shorthand can easily curdle into a barrier. It becomes a way to signal who’s in the in-group and who’s out. It’s a test of belonging, not a measure of intelligence. In her world, the consequence is that a person might feel a little lost in a yoga class. In the financial world, the consequences are measured in life savings.

Recalibrating Perspective

That conversation recalibrated my entire perspective. The problem isn’t that we can’t understand the concepts. The problem is that the industry has a vested interest in making us believe we can’t. They are speaking a language designed to be misunderstood. This is where I used to get stuck. I’d get frustrated, decide it was all rigged, and disengage completely. But disengaging is also a loss. It’s conceding that the ‘experts’ should handle it all, which is exactly the power dynamic they want. The alternative is to find a way to learn the mechanics without having to first become fluent in a dead language. It’s about finding the sandbox, the place to see cause and effect without the high stakes. I just wanted to understand the patterns, the real ones, not the linguistic fluff. It took me a while, but I realized that tools like a trading game simulator are built on this exact premise-to bypass the gatekeepers and let you interact with the machine itself.

I find it funny, this obsession with making things impenetrable. I once bought a high-end Japanese toaster. The manual was a masterpiece of terrible translation and engineering diagrams that looked like the blueprints for a satellite. There were 28 steps to make a piece of toast. I spent an hour trying to decipher it before giving up and just pressing the biggest button, which, of course, worked perfectly. The manual wasn’t there to help me make toast. It was there to justify the toaster’s price and to protect the company from any conceivable liability. It was a legal document masquerading as an instructional one. That’s a financial prospectus in a nutshell. It’s not written for you, the investor. It’s written for them, by their lawyers.

Demanding Clarity

So I’m learning to stop nodding. Now, when I hear a phrase I don’t understand, I try to see it as a red flag. Not a flag marking my own ignorance, but a flag marking a potential deception. I’ve started asking the dumb questions, both of myself and of the people offering financial advice. ‘Can you explain that to me like I’m an intelligent person who just happens not to know that specific term?’ The reaction tells you everything you need to know. A true expert, someone who genuinely wants to help, will welcome the question. They’ll find a simpler way. They’ll use an analogy. A gatekeeper, on the other hand, will react with a flicker of annoyance. They might sigh. They might define the term using three other terms you don’t know. They will reinforce the wall, reminding you of your place on the outside of it.

I’m not saying there are no complex ideas in finance. There are. But the vast majority of what affects the average person’s financial well-being over a lifetime-the things that determine whether you can retire at 68 or 78-are brutally, beautifully simple. The complexity has been added, layered on top like coats of varnish, until the original wood is completely obscured. Our job is not to learn the chemistry of the varnish. Our job is to demand to see the wood.