Hypothetical. Not a real product.
Disclaimer: This article is my personal opinion, written for educational purposes only. Nothing in it is financial advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security, or to buy or avoid any course, book, or programme. The Haaland masterclass is a made-up illustration. Jordan B. Peterson and Ray Dalio are mentioned only as public examples of well-known people who sell their knowledge; no criticism of either is intended, and nothing here implies their endorsement of anything I write. The Indonesian practitioner referred to below is deliberately unnamed; the details of their journey come from their own public interviews. Investing carries risk, including loss of capital. Please do your own research and speak with a licensed professional before making decisions.
A bit of context for readers outside Indonesia, because this post won't make sense without it.
In Indonesia, selling investment courses for a fixed fee is not a niche. It is an industry. The founders are genuine celebrities on mainstream social media, they are on every podcast, and every few months one of them launches a new programme with an annual subscription that makes people choke on their kopi. Think of the trader-influencer scene in the US or India, then add a market where most participants are first-generation investors whose parents kept everything in property and gold. Demand for "teach me how" is enormous, and the supply has grown to match it.
I should also name my conflict of interest before you find it yourself. These businesses are, in a way, Recompound's antithesis. They charge a fixed fee to teach you to do it yourself. We charge a performance fee to help you do it. So read what follows knowing that, and judge it accordingly.
Because what I want to say is not what you'd expect from the antithesis.
Erling Haaland opens an online course
Here's a thought experiment I use with new clients, and it settles the argument better than any social media thread I've seen.
Haaland launches "How to Become a World-Class Premier League Striker." US$1,500 a year, about Rp 25 million. The syllabus is genuinely daging (an Indonesian compliment: "all meat, no filler"): how to improve your shot conversion rate, how to exploit set pieces, the recovery routine of a top player, the diet, weekly tactical breakdowns. Big yellow JOIN NOW button.
Is the knowledge real? Hell yes. The man teaching it is one of the best strikers alive. The Golden Boots are real, the goals are real, the salary is real. Nothing in that syllabus is a scam.
But that was never the question. The question is:
Do you become a Premier League striker because you paid for the class?
Could you? Sure. But what are the actual chances? You'd have to quit your job, train full time for years, eat like a monk, and get injured, repeatedly, on purpose. Haaland's knowledge has never once been sold separately from Haaland's process. It can't be. The process is the product.
Legends sell their knowledge too
Haaland is hypothetical, but the pattern isn't. Look at who else sells what they know.
Jordan B. Peterson sells online courses, on writing, on psychology, on how to run your life. Millions of people have paid for them.
Ray Dalio sells books. Principles, for about the price of a lunch. And this is the one that looks properly counter-intuitive, because Dalio founded Bridgewater Associates, for years the largest hedge fund in the world. Why would the man who runs Bridgewater sell you the manual for how he does it?
Because the manual is not Bridgewater. Dalio can publish every principle he has ever written down, and you still cannot run Bridgewater. Warren Buffett has been publishing his entire philosophy in free shareholder letters since the 1960s, and there is still only one Berkshire. The knowledge can be sold cheaply, or given away, precisely because it is not the scarce part. The scarce part is the forty years, the team, the discipline under fire, and the mistakes that were already paid for.
None of these people are frauds. They are simply selling the only thing about themselves that can be packaged.
Now replace the word "striker"
Replace it with anything you admire. Trader. Investor. Founder. Surgeon. The pattern is identical every single time, and that is why I want to be very clear about what I am not arguing.
I am not arguing that the people selling investment courses did anything wrong.
Take the practitioner behind the latest expensive programme in Indonesia. I've listened to enough of their interviews to believe they made it, for real, from the market. Not from selling courses about the market. From the market itself, first, and for years before anyone knew their name. The knowledge is real. I respect people like that, whether they call themselves traders or investors. And I say that as someone whose own investing education was otodidak (self-taught), paid for with real losses, which is a tuition fee you can only pay in cash. Nobody gets a discount on that one.
So no, there is no takedown coming. Something more useful, I hope.
The price that isn't on the brochure
Here is what I would print on the enrollment page if it were mine to write. All of it is what the practitioner has said about their own journey, in their own words, across various podcasts.
Analysing the market morning, noon and night. For years. Not a weekend hobby: a full-time job.
Sitting through brutal drawdowns when the market wasn't cooperating, and still executing the system while their mental state was in pieces.
Going negative on margin. Starting again from zero. At one point, borrowing capital from a friend to keep going.
And after all of that, still no guarantee of immediate success. The success came. It came after the part nobody puts in the highlight reel.
So the brochure says US$1,500 a year. The real price is the years, the drawdowns, the margin call and the friend who lent them money. And notice: that price is not hidden by the seller. It is hidden by the buyer, from themselves.
"But the guy really did make it from the market!"
Yes. That is exactly my point, not a counter-argument to it.
Haaland really did score those goals. That is precisely why his goals are worth nothing to your career. Somebody else's process, fully completed, is the least transferable thing on earth. You can watch every one of his goals and it does not add a single goal to yours.
The problem was never the class. The problem is what the buyer expects to happen after paying.
Somebody pays the subscription and quietly expects that five years from now they'll be financially free, no longer working, without having paid anything like the effort the teacher paid. That is not a knowledge gap. That is an expectation gap, and in this business the gap between expectation and reality is where nearly all the suffering comes from.
Not everyone can become a trader or investor who reaches financial freedom in five years. Not everyone can become a Premier League striker, or a surgeon. And that is not a disgrace. That is the base rate.
Three questions before you pay
Before paying for any programme like this, the honest questions are not about the teacher. They are about you.
Am I willing to sacrifice the profession and expertise I've spent years building? Because this is a full-time job, and you already have one.
Am I willing to dedicate myself for years, not months, to actually put this into practice? The teacher did.
Am I willing to carry a severe drawdown with my own money and stay disciplined through it? Not in theory. With the mortgage due.
If your answer to all three is yes: go for it. I mean that, and I'd be happy to be proven right about you.
If you paused on any one of them, keep reading, because the next part is the good news.
The good news
Most people, when they're honest, pause on at least one. That's fine. Here is what they forget:
You do not have to become Haaland to be financially free.
The world is full of people who will never score in the Premier League and are perfectly wealthy. They didn't buy the striker's masterclass. They did something a lot less glamorous: stayed in their own lane, kept earning from the thing they were already good at.
Howard Marks has a memo I keep coming back to, "Fewer Losers or More Winners". His point: the investors who end up on top over a long career are rarely the ones who chased the top decile in any single year. They are the ones who were consistently above average and never blew up. Haaland is a top-decile-every-year athlete. You do not need to be. You need to not blow up.
"Isn't this just you protecting your own business?"
Fair question. I flagged the conflict at the top, so let me be equally direct about what we actually do, and you can judge for yourself.
What I sell is the boring alternative to the masterclass: you don't quit your job, you don't stare at a screen all day, you stay focused on your own expertise and on being a decent husband or wife, and a licensed investment advisor (in Indonesia the licence is called Penasihat Investasi, issued by OJK, our financial regulator) does the stock research.
Two things I would demand from anyone offering this, including us:
First, your money stays in a brokerage account in your own name. It never moves to us. We cannot run off with it, because we never touch it.
Second, you only pay when your portfolio grows. If we don't perform, we don't get paid. Our incentive and yours point the same way. This is the exact opposite of a fixed-fee course, where the seller is paid whether or not you ever make a rupiah.
And honestly, my own returns don't matter much to me. What matters is your return, and every other client's. If only we make money, what's the point? That's why we publish the returns of all our clients, calculated the way a mutual fund calculates its net asset value, updated daily, at recompound.id/performance. No sign-up needed. Past performance, as always, guarantees nothing.
What we cannot promise
I can't make you financially free in five years the way the practitioner did it for themselves. Nobody can promise you that, and if someone does, that promise is the most expensive item in the brochure. Kita bukan dewa. We are not gods.
What we offer is slower: compounding that is steady rather than spectacular, with drawdowns kept in check to the best of our ability, so the journey doesn't give you a heart attack and you can actually stay in it until the end.
If you're looking for a striker's masterclass, buy one from a striker. Just read the brochure twice, including the part that isn't printed.
See you on the next one.