Financial markets remain one of the most powerful mechanisms for building long-term wealth. They are extraordinary for the ability to aggregate information, price risk and enable businesses to allocate capital to enable growth and innovation.
But something has changed and, increasingly, parts of the system appear designed less to improve investor outcomes than to increase activity. At times, they feel less like a place for disciplined investment and more like one specifically engineered to keep participants playing a game.
Markets are not casinos, they allow real businesses to raise real capital to do real things, but around that core function layers of activity have developed that look and feel much more like a casino than a stock exchange.
For advisers, the challenge is clear: how do you help clients build long-term wealth in a system that often nudges them to do the opposite?
Whose clock are we on?
Construction of the Sagrada Família cathedral began in 1882 and is finally being completed this year. This may seem like an unusual tangent, but when asked why it was taking so long, Antoni Gaudí is said to have replied: ‘My client is not in a hurry’.
This is a useful framing for investing, because this is not just about returns, it is about time and more specifically, whose clock we are following. Gaudí was clear in that response that he was not working to the city’s clock, the media’s clock, or anyone else’s. He was working to his client’s, in this case God’s, clock.
Most investors today are pulled between several clocks at once: markets, media, peers and their own anxieties. This means that elements of a long-term approach – quiet, patient and compounding – often struggle to compete.
From democratisation to gamification
However, that tension that investors feel is not accidental, it is increasingly structural. A decade ago, much of the industry set out to ‘democratise’ investing, with commission-free trading opening up markets to more people.
That sounded like progress, and in many ways it was, but what happens if you’re not paying for the product? As former Google engineer Andrew Lewis first quipped: ‘If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product’.
When trading is ‘free’, the business model does not vanish, it simply moves. In this case, instead of charging commission brokers sell the order flow to high-frequency traders.
That means platforms increasingly earn more when clients trade more. The result is a subtle but important change: the system increasingly rewards activity rather than outcomes.
What began as democratisation has, in parts, become gamification in the form of zero-commission trading, same-day options and bets measured in minutes rather than months.
These developments all share a common feature: they compress time horizons and encourage engagement. In 1960, the average holding period for a US stock was measured in years, by 2024 it had fallen to just months; that is a complete change in investor behaviour.
Designed for your instincts
This shift matters because these elements of gamification that are edging ever closer to mainstream financial markets interact with something deeply ingrained in all of us: basic human wiring.
The impulses that tend to undermine investment outcomes (fear, greed, recency bias and the desire to belong) are not character flaws, they’re adaptations that helped our ancestors to survive. In markets, however, they can be deeply unhelpful.
Other industries have long understood how to harness these instincts, with casinos as the obvious example: casinos are not designed despite human psychology, they are built to exploit it by using intermittent rewards and constant stimuli to keep participants engaged and active.
It’s difficult to ignore the parallels emerging in parts of today’s financial system, which increasingly rewards activity, because activity is visible, measurable and so often feels productive.
In investing, however, activity is rarely the driver of long-term outcomes that are instead built, more often than not, through patience, discipline and the ability to hold a course when the world feels unsettled.
Or, if we return to Gaudí, it depends on building cathedrals rather than playing in casinos.
Activity versus outcomes
This is where advisers are indispensable to their clients. Not as forecasters, because markets have a habit of humbling even the most confident predictions, but as stewards and behavioural buffers.
Advisers are the people who can help clients identify which clock matters and then remain aligned to it, which in practice can often mean doing less, not more.
It means helping clients recognise when decisions are being driven by emotion rather than evidence and questioning whether the incentives embedded in a product or platform are aligned with the client’s objectives.
It also means creating enough distance between the investor and the moment to allow better judgement to prevail. In a system that encourages engagement, good advice often involves restraint. While that may not sound dramatic, it does, however, have the advantage of being useful.
Dan Brocklebank is head of Orbis Investments UK. The views expressed above should not be taken as investment advice.