Thinking about a round of gambling in the futures market?

Everybody thinks about it. Everybody dreams of a lazy, quick way to make a big pile of money.

Every American can be a millionaire, but it requires diligence and discipline and decades of making the right decisions about spending, debt, and saving, and most Americans just don't have it in them to consistently do so. They buy houses with mortgages that are too large, they buy vehicles on credit, they take out student loans, they use credit cards. They do not save a set percentage of their income.

Sitting back and dreaming of a few well times strokes of the keyboard generating massive piles of cash with little to no effort, no discipline, and most of all no wait for decades is much more appealing than the guaranteed way to be rich, which is slowly.

I have to fight the urge to move into riskier, concentrated investments several times a year. And, Oh! If I had just done this the last three years, like I wanted to, my returns would have been double, triple (whatever) quintuple what they really were in my boring investments.

But they also might have been down by 50% or more. I don't have a crystal ball. And the fact that looking backwards it would have worked does not really mean anything moving forward.

And my boring way will get me where I need to be if I just stay on track. I do not need to take those kind of risks, even though they are tempting at times.