There’s a line doing the rounds this week from an investment commentary piece that’s worth sitting with for a moment: “They’re not sophisticated investors. They’re policy dependents.”

It’s a clean hit. The kind of sentence that gets screenshot and shared before people have properly thought about whether they agree with it. And I’ve been turning it over for a couple of days, because my initial reaction was “yes, exactly,” which usually means I should be more careful.

There’s a story doing the rounds online that I keep thinking about. A single parent, working full time, goes to auction fifteen years ago. She’s the only person there who actually wants to live in the house. Everyone else is an investor. She wins, barely, but pays more than she should have because a cluster of people with existing wealth decided that her future home was a line item on their tax return.