The Doors Are Closing for Low-Agency People

For the past few years, I've watched low-agency people make more money than they should have.

Not because they were good. Because conditions were good. Easy money, easy approvals, easy wins. They mistook luck for skill.

Now the doors are closing. And they have nowhere to hide.

The Trading Boom

COVID created a generation of people who believed anyone could get rich trading stocks.

WallStreetBets. Discord groups. Screenshots of gains.

The message was clear: you don't need to build anything. Just trade. Just time the market. Just follow the right people.

I know people who lost hundreds of thousands this way. They don't talk about it. Losses aren't content.

I lost $300,000 myself.

Not from trading directly — from building a quant team.

Developers, algorithms, backtesting systems. Complex, technical, and honestly a little ego-driven.

"I'm not just trading, I'm building custom algorithms." Cool story. Expensive story.

We made trades. We ran models. At the end of it, I had less money and less time than when I started. The complexity didn't help. It just made the failure slower and more expensive.

Here's what I learned: most people who actually get rich do it by building businesses.

Not "great" businesses necessarily — just businesses that work for them. Unsexy. Consistent. Real.

Trading is a game where the house has better data, better speed, and better capital than you. You're not the player. You're the product.

The Scam Consultants

I saw another version of this in Canada's immigration boom.

Between 2021 and 2023, millions of people came to Canada. And a whole industry popped up to "help" them — immigration consultants.

In Canada, you don't need to be a lawyer to give immigration advice. You take a few courses, pass an exam, pay an annual fee, and you're regulated. More like a real estate agent than an attorney.

Some consultants were legitimate. Many were not.

I've met the low-agency ones personally. Their job was simple: sell services to vulnerable people, make promises they weren't allowed to make, fill out forms, and collect $40,000-$50,000 per client.

During the boom, it worked. Government approved almost everyone. These consultants felt like geniuses. They were flying high, charging premium fees, building "practices."

Then 2024 hit. The government tightened. Approval rates dropped. Suddenly, the people who paid $50K and got rejected started asking questions. Lawsuits. Disbarments. Practices collapsing.

The consultants didn't get worse at their jobs. The conditions got worse for people who were never good in the first place.

The Pattern

These aren't isolated stories. They're the same story.

Low-agency people find a boom. They position themselves as experts.

They extract money from people who don't know better. They mistake the tide for their own swimming ability.

Then the tide goes out.

I see this pattern everywhere now:

• Polymarket — "I made $50K predicting elections." Cool. How's your model doing when the obvious bets are gone?
• House flipping — worked when rates were low and inventory was tight. Now?
• Sports betting — the new "anyone can do it." Same story, different wrapper.
• Dropshipping, Amazon FBA, crypto arbitrage — every year there's a new version of "get rich without being good at anything."

The formula is always the same: find a temporarily broken market, extract money before it corrects, and pretend you have a skill.

Why the Doors Are Closing

Two things are happening at once.

First, conditions are tightening everywhere.

Interest rates up. Immigration caps down. Easy money gone. The macro environment that let mediocre people win is over.

Second, AI is exposing incompetence faster.

The tasks that low-agency people hid behind — filling out forms, basic research, simple arbitrage — are getting automated or commoditized.

There's nowhere to hide when AI can do your job in seconds.

The consultants who charged $50K to fill out forms? AI can fill out forms.

The traders who followed Discord signals? AI can parse signals faster.

The middlemen who existed because information was hard to find? Information isn't hard to find anymore.

Low-agency people survived by being in the right place at the right time. That's not a strategy. That's luck. And luck runs out.

What Survives

High agency.

The ability to figure things out when the playbook doesn't exist.

The ability to adapt when conditions change.

The ability to create value that isn't dependent on a temporary market inefficiency.

High-agency people don't need the boom. They build during the boom and survive the bust.

They don't need the easy money because they know how to make hard money.

This isn't a "mindset" thing. It's a capability thing.

Can you solve problems that don't have clear answers?

Can you build something when no one's handing you a template?

Can you keep going when the market stops rewarding mediocrity?

If yes, you'll be fine.

If no, the doors are closing. Fast.

The Honest Question

I ask myself this regularly: Am I actually good at this, or am I just in a good market?

It's an uncomfortable question. Most people don't ask it because the answer might be "you're not that good, you're just lucky."

But the people who ask it — and answer honestly — are the ones who prepare for when luck runs out.

I've been lucky. I've also been unlucky. I've lost $300K on a quant team that produced nothing. I've made money on businesses that worked despite my mistakes.

The difference now is I know which is which.

The low-agency people don't. They think their luck is skill. And when the luck disappears, they'll have nothing underneath.

The doors are closing. The question is whether you're inside or outside when they shut.