This essay first appeared in The Palm Beach Letter

In my ongoing effort to shock and awe you with contrarian (and sometimes counterintuitive) truths about building wealth, I give you this little nugget to chew on today:

You cannot become wealthy by investing.

Please don’t tell anyone I told you this. If any of my fellow investment newsletter publishers knew I was saying such things they would have me tarred and feathered.

The investment advisory business – and in that I include brokerages, private bankers, and insurance agents, as well as investment newspapers, magazines, newsletters, and Internet publications – is a huge, multibillion-dollar industry based on lots of hard work, clever thinking, sophisticated algorithms, and one teensy-weensy lie.

The lie is that you can grow wealthy through investing.