Charlie Munger: Teaching young people to actively trade stocks is like starting them on heroin

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Key points

Warren Buffett’s longtime business partner Charlie Munger equated trying to teach inexperienced investors how to actively pick stocks to trying to get them to use heroin.

Munger lauded large index funds for the everyday investor looking for exposure to the stock markets and said that many active stock pickers are in denial.

The market for index funds has reached $6 trillion, while the market for ETFs has ballooned to $5 trillion since the SPDR S&P 500′s inception.

“If you take the modern world where people are trying to teach you to come in and trade actively in stocks, well I regard that as roughly equivalent to trying to induce a bunch of young people to start off on heroin,” Munger said from the annual Daily Journal shareholder meeting on Thursday.


Money has flooded into index funds and exchange-traded funds during this long-running bull market, while fee-based active strategies have suffered. The market for index funds has reached $6 trillion, while the market for exchange traded funds, which track indexes, has ballooned to $5 trillion since the SPDR S&P 500′s inception in 1993.