Love is a high risk, high reward venture. You can get deeply hurt, but you can find eternal bliss. That’s why it’s the topic of many songs, though ‘Burning Love’ by Elvis doesn’t even make the Top 10 list of the Presley recordings. Because easy money to get rich is very alluring to people, many investors are also looking for ‘the next big thing’ that promises high rewards and are willing to take oversized risks (and thus possibly get hurt or financially killed) to do it. In this letter, I am going to address a ‘Top 8’ list of investments with high returns that are increasingly talked about in social media but – ‘spoiler alert’ – I wouldn’t touch any them with the infamous 10-foot pole. The appealing pitch lies in the appeal to an investor’s greed, and they proffer gain with no pain, but we know not even love can accomplish that end. If you use any of the below, you can possibly make money, but they are all bad investment risks.
Let’s do the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ first:
- The ‘old’ are ‘penny stocks’, which are small capitalization companies that have shares listed on the Over-The-Counter (OTC) exchange. Like the name suggests, most of the shares for a vast number of the companies trade for under a dollar (and formerly had their prices printed on pink paper, thus the term OTC “Pink Sheets”), with almost all companies priced under $5 per share[i]. This market is very thinly-traded and the source of the much aligned ‘pump and dump’ schemes but it offers big gains due to its volatility. Disclosures on the company’s financial health and operational performance can be extremely challenging to obtain because they are not subject to the rules as companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) or NASDAQ.
- Then, a brand-new category for investments are the vastly expanded category of what are known as ‘options’, which are agreements to buy shares, or to sell shares. An option is a contract, but an option contract does not actually have to be executed, as it gives the buyer an option to walk away. However, and I’m unfortunately not kidding, regular Americans who are plumbers or programmers by day are lighting this market up though the use of 0DTE’s, which are options that expire when the exchange markets closes that day (thus the acronym, Zero Days To Expiration). The investor pays a premium to obtain the option, generally a put or a call, and is waging the probability of the market going up or down that particular day – which no one knows. Nonetheless, half of all S&P500 index options are 0DTE and comprised a freaky 2.15 million contacts in the 3rd Quarter of 2025 alone[ii]. The appeal is you can’t lose more than your premium so it’s an easy fix for your Las Vegas gambling instincts.
Let me run through six (6) other really unwise investment bets so you have a ‘Top 8’ list of your own:
- Single stock bets of who is going to win the Artificial Intelligence (AI) race, or the biosciences market or new immunology drug. No person has unique data on any company – nor the direction the price of the stock will go – and if you did, you’d have insider knowledge and not even Martha Stewart avoided jail. Some of the biggest AI names on Wall Street took major share price dives of 10% (Nvidia) to 31% (Oracle) in just the last 60-days[iii] whereas the market is fundamentally even[iv].
- Cryptocurrencies, which you have all heard of, fundamentally represent digital currencies outside of the control of Central Banks. The biggest cryptocurrency name on the street is Bitcoin, and this currency did go up 138% in 2024[v]. However, in the last 40 days, the price of Bitcoin went from $124,752 to $91,160[vi], representing a 26.3% drop. Currencies don’t rise and fall in this fashion; speculative things that pretend to be currencies do that instead.
- Then, there is the allure of finding the right Emerging Market stock exchange to buy, and it’s easy to get sucked in, particularly by people on my side of the table who say, “It’s a great time to buy FLKR, the South Korea Stock Market ETF (Exchange Traded Fund). It’s up a whopping 75.01% Year-to-date.”[vii] That might be true, and the Morgan Stanley Capital Index (MSCI) now numbers 24 Emerging Market economies that you could tap into with your wealth. Let me simply point out that Hungary is one such market, and it was up 50.9% in 2023. Of course, they don’t tell you it was down 31.1% in 2022 or that it fell 30.9% in 2024[viii] – which means you’d still be underwater.
- Lest we leave the party too early before the drinking really gets going, let’s not forget about leveraged ETFs or their cousins, Exchange Traded Notes (ETN’s). An ETF is generally a basket of stocks, and that means it started out as a passive investment (which is good). This particular category of product recently grew to $13.1 Trillion[ix] so it is sizeable. The product feature (actually bad news) is that you can trade an ETF intra-day on the markets, and like a needle in the hands of a heroin addict, that otherwise attractive feature allows a good instrument to be used poorly. If you can fathom it, in September 2025 alone, there were 81.8 BILLION trades of U.S. equity ETFs[x]. Fueling that growth are ETFs that pile on 200% – 300% of debt, the financial impact of which is a 1% rise in that ETF would result in a 2%-3% move for the investor, or conversely a loss of 2% -3% for an ‘inverse leveraged ETF’. There’s a new category of leveraged ETFs coming out that will now leverage up to 5x![xi] The ugly history of leveraged ETFs is that 55% of leveraged ETFs have closed already[xii] and yet these new 5 x leveraged ETFs will apply mainly to cryptocurrencies, so now we have bad idea #4 co-joined at the hip with bad investment idea #6. I mean, geez, what could possibly go wrong?
- High Yield Bonds. It should never be forgotten that these vehicles are called ‘junk bonds’ on the financial services ‘sellers’ side of the table. Investments should not be junk.
- Futures Contracts (a real contract to deliver, as opposed to options above which can expire without exercise, a certain commodity or financial instrument at a set time and at a set price). This category includes timber, wheat, corn, copper, cow bellies and cryptocurrencies. Now we’re swimming with sharks.
Robinhood is a company that offers a new variety trading platform, popular with the unexperienced populace, that rose in fame when it was the public face of meme stocks (think GameStop), but it now extensively dotes on active day traders. Regarding it, let me simply provide the below quote from an advocacy group for the protection of individual investors[xiii];
“It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that a casino (Ceasars Entertainment) came out of the S&P 500 *(index) and Robinhood went in.”
On this Thanksgiving weekend, I highly urge you to succeed with investments that truly are investments, those with high probabilities of success. Good investments are not gambling, but instead are financial instruments for the creation of family wealth and security. You can get a hunk of junk, or you can do it the right way and sleep at night. Sound investments and sound sleep go together. I can gladly report that you have none of the above eight bad investment risks in your portfolio.
It remains my deep and distinct honor to serve you.
Pat Zumbusch
Founder and CEO
[i] “Pink Sheets; The OTC Market” (Kelly Bailey, Corporate Finance Institute, November 28, 2025)
[ii] “The State of the Options Industry: Quarter Three 2025” (Chicago Board Of Exchange, CBOE Global Markets, October 29th, 2025).
[iii] “Oracle Was An AI Darling On Wall Street. Then Reality Set In” (Peter Rudegeair, Nate Rattner, Sabastian Herrera, Wall Street Journal, November 19th, 2025)
[iv] SPY Performance Chart (Yahoo.Finance. Com)
[v] LSEG Data Stream (Pasit Kongkunakornkul, Reuters, December 19, 2024)
[vi] Bitcoin Daily Trade History (Yahoo.Finance.com)
[vii] YahooFinance.com (November 27, 2025)
[viii] “Equity Returns Of Emerging Markets” (MSCI)
[ix] “U.S. ETF Assets Reach Record $13.1 Trillion” (Markets Media Group, November 17, 2025)
[x] “Tradeweb Exchange-Traded Funds Update – September 2025” (October 10, 2025, Tradeweb)
[xi] “The First 5x Leveraged Funds Could Open Up A New Era Of High Risk ETF’s” (William Edwards, Business Insider, October 20, 2025)
[xii] -ditto-
[xiii] “As Small Investors Crave Risk, Robinhood Cranks Up Offerings” (Hannah Erin Lang, Wall Street Journal, November 26, 2025).
