If you’re actually smart, there is no excuse to not be able to make money

There’s a popular narrative, which is that a high IQ is insufficient for making money, and that many smart people are either unwilling or unable to make money due to personal issues or being unfairly excluded from society. And there is some truth to this. I can relate to not wanting to work in a corporate setting. But here’s an unpopular opinion: if you’re truly smart, then you should still be able to find ways to make money. A high IQ is correlated with problem solving ability, which includes solving money problems.

A high IQ confers an advantage against competitors at finding niches–and recognizing patterns, trends and inefficiencies in markets. This can be the stock market, but also e-marketing, e-commerce, or pretty much anything in which there is competition. True, the attainment of wealth is not as g-loaded as, say, math or writing, but smarter people are still at an advantage given the adversarial nature of markets.

I did this with the BTC hedging method. I, along with @whalepanda shown below, were arguably the first to notice the trend of Bitcoin underperforming the Nasdaq for long stretches, and I developed a successful hedging method with it.

Is it a coincidence the two smartest people found the pattern that eluded everyone else? But sure, keep telling yourself that ‘IQ is just a number,’ or that being ‘too smart’ is a hindrance to success. Today, Friday the 10th, Trump threatened surprise tariffs against China, causing Bitcoin to instantly drop 3%, so the hedge was a success.

In trading, your competition are the biggest hedge funds in the world staffed by PhDs. How is it possible to be ‘too smart to succeed’ when that is what you’re up against? Likewise, for e-commerce or e-marketing, you competition are algos and another competitors. Again, how does being ‘too smart’ hurt?

As another example, I also was among the first to come up with the idea of investing in leveraged tech back in 2016-2017 when far fewer people were talking about it. True, it was not my idea, but I was among the first to run this strategy, with great success buying the dip during Covid in 2020 and again in 2025. Total returns since 2015 with the combination of leveraged tech and Bitcoin hedge has approached 20x on my account, well in excess of the overall market.

I been saying forever to replace your crypto with large-cap tech stocks and ETFs, like QQQ. There are no excuses now. You cannot just blame bad luck for your inaction when everyone had plenty of warnings and the signs were clear. More people are coming to the realization I had. Bitcoin sucks compared to tech stocks, as I have been saying on the blog for a while now:

I mentioned how I also made big money on Polymarket by correctly betting on ‘no Bitcoin reserve’. You don’t even need that high of an IQ either. You don’t need to be a political genius to know that Trump has a long history of over-promising and under-delivering. It was a no-brainer trade for the reasons given in my post. By exploiting information asymmetries or the popularity of false beliefs or narratives–in this case unsupported optimism about Trump’s ability or willingness to deliver on a bitcoin reserve–easy money was made.

As another example, in January 2020, very early during Covid, two of among the objectively smartest people in terms of IQ, @DanielleFong and Curtis Yarvin, are on record for having bet aggressively against the stock market and profiting big, as they correctly anticipated that the virulence of Covid was more serious than suggested by what they saw as the relative complacency of policy makers in the U.S. compared to China. [0]

Here is an excerpt from a transcript of a podcast appearance of Yarvin recalling his bet:

Curtis: Yeah, yeah, and that’s a fascinating story because we landed in the lockdown of shit basically. And the whole story of these events is so fascinating. And I had a really weird view on it because I was of after about, I think the middle of January, I was making financial bets on the coronavirus. And so I was basically rooting for this fucking disease which is a really unhealthy state of mind. And so basically as you no doubt know, anyone who has a financial position in anything comes to talk their book and basically believe in their story.

And on October 6th 2025 on Twitter he said he made “small ton of money off deep OTM puts” he bought in January 2020:

(I could have swore he made this put option trade and I spent a half an hour to find evidence, hence the podcast link above, but the evidence was starting me in the face on the front page of his Twitter timeline, having posted it just 4 days ago.)

How much is a ‘small ton of money’? I dunno. But it was a well-executed trade nonetheless. In response to the predictable “muh bullet plane” retort, I am talking about in the aggregate. Despite survivorship bias, smarter people, as a whole, outperform less intelligent investors. This is why the best-performing hedge funds in the world, like Jane Street, screen so heavily for IQ. These interviews are like IQ filters beyond what can be ascertained with an IQ test.

If you’re ‘legit smart’ and not a midwit who is under the illusion of being smart–plenty of those people exist unfortunately, although on the positive side, they are also your competitors–then you will keep seeing patterns, trends, and opportunities to monetize. You will be so far ahead of everyone else.

Just saying you don’t want to participate in the ‘rat race’ is no longer an excuse when there are many ways to make money self-employed or otherwise on the side. Many high-IQ wordcel-types are making decent income on Substack now. Same with Twitter’s revenue sharing program.

This isn’t to say luck doesn’t play a role, and it does, but at some point if you’re consistently unlucky, maybe it’s time for self-reflection. Perhaps you’re not as smart as you were let on. Which is fine, because almost any competent person can still make some money. Or if you’re consistently successful, and controlling for confounders like correlation, then maybe it’s skill.

[0] In hindsight, America’s Covid policy was actually a lot better than much of the rest of the world. China and other countries, which had much more strict lockdowns, fared worse and had many relapses and endless shutdowns which hurt their economies, wheres the U.S. economy and stock market recovered in a ‘v-shape’. There was no consistent relationship between more lockdowns and fewer relapses.