Where you're told to put money
Investing has a long-run positive expectation that fees, taxes, and behavioural error chip away at. Crypto was sold as opt-out from TradFi but rebuilt every TradFi concentration pattern plus unique scam vectors. The same dollar across the two produces very different distributions; this cluster audits each. Sources are Vanguard / Morningstar / Brookings (investing) and CoinGecko / Brown Costs of War / FTC (crypto). The gambling audit lives at its own page.
Investing
Seven calculators across the actual mechanics of building wealth at a household scale: compounding, savings rate, fee drag, returns visualisation, retirement projection, the tax-advantaged-account stack, and the contribution-cap structure. The math the industry tells you and the math the industry takes from you, side by side.
- Compound calculator: starting capital + savings rate + horizon
- Fee-drag calculator: 1% AUM fees take 28% of lifetime returns
- Tax-advantaged accounts primer + IRA / 401(k) / HSA contribution caps
- Productivity-vs-wages divergence post-1973
Crypto
Crypto was sold as opt-out from TradFi. Every TradFi concentration pattern has reappeared, plus unique scam vectors. Three interactives: the entry-date sensitivity that drives most retail losses, the institutional-collapse map by failure mode, and a memecoin Monte Carlo sim that makes the ~99%-to-zero distribution felt rather than stated.
- BTC entry-timer: pick a date, see what an investment would have done
- Collapse-bars: $60B Terra, $8B FTX, $5B Celsius, etc., color-coded by failure mode
- Memecoin survival sim: pick 10 random memecoins, watch ~99% go to zero
Why these are clustered. Both products are marketed as ways to grow money. Their distributions of outcome are not similar. Investing in a diversified index has positive long-run expectation modulated by fees, taxes, and behaviour. Crypto is negative-EV in the median case across most reasonable inputs. The cluster lets you run the same dollar through each calculator and read the difference.
Where to go from here. The wealth cluster documents what asset ownership actually looks like across the US distribution. The fed page documents how monetary policy redistributes asset prices.