When I ask new investors in Pakistan how they're learning about the stock market, the answer is usually some version of the same thing. They're in a few WhatsApp groups. They watch videos. Some have paid for an online course. They're learning by doing.
It sounds reasonable. It's how people learn most things: watch others, try it yourself, adjust as you go.
The trouble is that this only works in some settings and not others, and investing happens to be one of the others.
The Doctor Who Was Always Right
There's a story researchers use to explain this, and it's worth a minute.
A physician in the nineteenth century became known for diagnosing typhoid before the obvious symptoms appeared. He did it by feeling patients' tongues. Time after time, his early diagnosis was proved correct.
He was right because he was spreading the disease himself, with unwashed hands. Every confirmation he received made him more confident in a method that was actively causing harm.
Psychologists call this a wicked learning environment: a setting where the feedback you get is poor, delayed, or actively misleading. In a kind environment, doing the right thing tends to produce a good result quickly and visibly, so experience makes you better. In a wicked one, experience mostly makes you more certain.
Markets Are Already a Wicked Classroom
A well-reasoned decision can lose money for two years. A reckless one can pay off immediately. You find out whether you were right long after you've forgotten why you decided, and the result usually can't distinguish your judgement from the weather.
Look at the last three years on PSX, when the market rose roughly 310%. Almost everything worked. The person who read annual reports and the person who bought whatever was mentioned online both did well. The market handed out identical rewards for careful work and for guessing, which means it taught neither of them anything true.
That's the environment before anyone opens WhatsApp or YouTube. The stock market is already a tough teacher. The question is whether these places make it better or worse.
What the Groups and Videos Add
Worse, in three specific ways. They're structural.
You only see the wins. Rarely anybody in a WhatsApp group posts that they sold at a loss last month. No video revisits the confident call from March that went nowhere. The record you're learning from has the failures edited out, which means you're studying a sample chosen precisely for looking good.
You'd never accept this in any other subject. Imagine learning medicine from a textbook that only described the patients who recovered.
You learn one market's rules and mistake them for principles. Everything taught in these places is taught inside whatever conditions currently exist. In a long rally, the lessons that emerge work brilliantly: buy the dips, hold through everything, ignore the pessimists. Those aren't principles. They're descriptions of a particular stretch of time.
When conditions change, and they always do, nobody announces that the environment has shifted. The rules just stop working, and the people who learned them hardest take the longest to notice.
The group can confirm its own calls. In a smaller company, a few hundred people buying at once really does move the price. The share rises, the group treats that as proof the analysis was right, and the belief gets stronger. What actually happened is that the group bought its own idea and mistook the effect for evidence.
Filtered evidence, changing conditions, self-confirming feedback. Those are the three ways a learning environment turns wicked, and this one manages all three at once.
Why Nobody Says This About Learning Software
Here's a test worth applying for.
Could you watch a few dozen videos on software development and become a chief technology officer? You'd learn things. You might write working code. But nobody seriously believes those videos make you ready to architect a system a business depends on. That takes years across many different problems, and everybody accepts it without argument.
So why will the same person watch a few dozen videos on investing and conclude they're equipped to manage their own money properly, and often to advise others?
The answer goes back to feedback. In software, incompetence shows up fast. The code fails, the system falls over, reality corrects you within days. In investing, incompetence can be rewarded for years before anything goes wrong. Nothing forces the correction, so the illusion survives and even hardens.
That gap is also what makes so much of this content possible. A great deal of what's sold as investment education in Pakistan comes from people who started in 2022 or 2023. They aren't frauds. They're teaching the only thing they know, which is what worked during one unusually generous stretch of market history.
I'll give you my own timeline, because it seems the honest thing to do. I started in this field in 2013. I didn't begin outperforming properly until around 2017. That was four years of full-time work, not evenings, with access to people who corrected me when I was wrong, and it still took that long.
I'm not saying that to sound impressive. I'm saying it because it should tell you something about what a few videos can realistically deliver.
Experience in this field isn't measured in months or in subscribers. It's measured in downturns you've been through with your own money at stake, and there's no way to fake that or to skip it.
What Real Learning Would Require
You would write down your reasoning before you act. Not the name of the share, the argument: why this, why now, why this size, and what would prove you wrong. Then you'd revisit it later and check the reasoning against what happened, including the times you were right for the wrong reasons.
That last part is what makes it learning rather than record-keeping. You have to grade the process, not the outcome, because in a wicked environment the outcome lies to you.
Do that consistently and you will get better, slowly, over years. It's how professionals are trained, and it works.
It's also almost the exact opposite of what happens in a group chat or a comments section, where nothing is written in advance, nothing is revisited, and the only thing anyone grades is the outcome.
So What Should You Actually Do?
Here's where I'll say something that may sound odd coming from someone in this field.
Most people shouldn't be trying to acquire this skill at all.
If you have a career you're building and a family and a finite number of evenings, spending years developing an investment process is a poor use of your time. Those hours would return more invested in the work you already do well, and in the income that funds your investing. That isn't a comment on your ability. It's just where your advantage actually sits.
What you do need is much smaller. Know what you own and roughly how it earns. Know how far it can fall and decide in advance what you'll do. Know who is paid by whom. Know that a good outcome and a good decision are different things. That's a few weeks of attention rather than a few years, and it's enough to hand the analysis to someone else without handing over your judgement.
The real harm here isn't that the tips are bad. It's that beginners spend years believing they're building expertise, and end up with a collection of anecdotes from one market cycle and a confidence level nothing has tested.
By all means stay in the groups and watch the videos. Read them for what's being talked about, and enjoy them. Just don't confuse the time you spend there with progress.
Written by Fatiq Bin Khursheed
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