Discover how brokerages profit from your long-term investing—and how you can flip the script with event-driven investing.
AI Investing
You’ve heard it a million times: Invest for the long term. Time in the market beats timing the market. But what if this age-old advice isn’t just about your financial health—but also about lining the pockets of brokerage firms?
This blog might change the way you think about your favorite brokerage platform…forever.
Brokerages love long-term investors. Why? Because your loyalty and passive behavior are cash cows for them. They don’t need you to trade every day to profit off your money. Instead, they’ve built an intricate system that quietly bleeds you while you sit back thinking you’re doing the smart thing.
Here’s how it works—and why brokerages benefit far more than you do.
Brokerages make money by selling you products like ETFs, mutual funds, and even CDs. The fees are best when you stay in the market long-term, even if it’s not in your best interest (pun intended).
Here’s an example of the fees paid on a typical fund or ETF over a twenty year period for clients starting with just 10,000 in their account. Given these parameters the custodian - the broker - takes $13,000 in fees from you. The catch: you have to keep your money tied up in their products as a buy and hold investor or they make much less. In other words, while your goal is maximum returns, the broker’s goal is maximizing fee income by keeping your money invested.
Did you know brokerages can lend the stocks you own to short-sellers without your explicit permission? It’s called securities lending, and they collect hefty fees from borrowers while you get… nothing.
Even if your stocks are just sitting there, your brokerage is hustling behind the scenes to turn them into cold, hard cash—for themselves.
They can rent out your stocks at interest rates that average 8 percent but get as high as 30% without paying you anything. The catch - again - is that they can only do this if you don’t ever sell the stocks!
Long-term investors rarely check or adjust their portfolios, and brokerages love that. It means fewer customer service inquiries, less demand on their systems, and more predictability for their business model. Meanwhile, they quietly collect fees on managed funds, robo-advisors, or other “set-it-and-forget-it” products you’re likely using.
All the while, the only person who isn’t hustling is you.
Even when you “do” trade, brokerages don’t just execute your order for free. They often sell your trades to market makers through a shady practice called “payment for order flow (PFOF)”.
These market makers profit by shaving tiny fractions of a penny off your trade price—and the brokerage gets a cut of that action. The kicker? You’re usually getting a worse deal than you think.
These days, payments for order flows are very low for stocks. It’s far more lucrative to loan out your stocks to hedge funds or collect fees on ETFs and mutual funds.
If you’ve ever borrowed money to invest more using margin, your brokerage charges you interest—sometimes at rates north of 10 percent. They make this look like a convenience, but in reality, it’s a trap that ensures their profits grow, whether your investments do or not.
If long-term investing sounds like a trap designed to enrich brokerages, it’s because it is. But here’s the good news: You don’t have to play their game anymore.
By focusing on event-driven investing, you can identify key moments in the market—like earnings surprises, regulatory decisions, or industry shifts—that have the potential to generate higher returns in days and with reduced exposure to market mayhem.
Event-driven investing is not a new concept. Hedge funds have been doing it forever and making billions from it. The idea is quite simple: events cause price fluctuations in stock prices. If you know the direction of the fluctuation, you can buy the stock or option and then sell once the event news is fully baked into the share price.
You don’t need to be a market genius to do this. It’s just trading on the news. Here’s a real example:
Syra Health - a small public company - was chosen as a subcontractor for a $75 billion contract awarded to Caduceus Healthcare by the U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services on Feb. 8th 2024. The partnership aims to provide comprehensive care and services, marking Syra's entry into federal contracts and expanding its healthcare solutions from local and state to federal levels, highlighting its commitment to enhancing healthcare delivery and management.
Following a LevelFields AI alert in the Billion Dollar Contract scenario, SYRA closed up +229% for the week.
The best player in the field of event-driven investing is LevelFields AI. The company utilizes cutting edge AI technology to speed read millions of company announcements and flag the events proven to move share prices. Users are alerted to these events and shown how they typically affect share prices, much in the way a weather forecast predicts rainfall.
Faster Gains: Unlike the slow grind of long-term investing, LevelFields pinpoints events that move stocks significantly over days or weeks, not decades. Why put all your money at risk of market pullbacks over a year for 7% gains when you can make that in a single day or couple days using LevelFields and put your money back into safe, interest bearing money market accounts?
Lower Risk: By focusing on data-driven strategies around specific events, you avoid the market-wide volatility that can erode long-term returns. Every day you stay in the market is a day you risk being exposed to market panic from wars, pandemics, policy shifts, terrorism, extreme weather, or other black swan events like the mortgage-backed securities debacle that caused the global financial crisis.
Empowering Tools: LevelFields gives you cutting-edge AI to analyze trends and spot opportunities faster than the competition—meaning you’re always ahead of other investors in spotting trade ideas.
You Profit, Not the Platform: With LevelFields, there are no hidden fees, securities lending schemes, or cash sweep tricks. It’s a tool designed to serve *"you," not itself.
The long-term investing mantra has been sold as the golden rule of personal finance, but now you know the truth: It’s a system rigged in favor of the middlemen.
Event-driven investing with LevelFields flips the script, giving you the tools to outsmart the market and beat the brokers at their own game.
Want higher gains in less time—with less risk? It’s time to embrace a smarter way to invest.
Break free from the brokerage trap and discover how LevelFields can help you take control of your financial destiny today.
With LevelFields, you gain access to cutting-edge analytics that empower you to find better investments 1,800 times faster.
The platform analyzes over 1.8 million market events each month, ensuring you act on facts, not opinions. Don’t leave your trading decisions to chance—equip yourself with the tools to make informed, data-driven investments.
Join LevelFields now to be the first to know about events that affect stock prices and uncover unique investment opportunities. Choose from events, view price reactions, and set event alerts with our AI-powered platform. Don't miss out on daily opportunities from 6,300 companies monitored 24/7. Act on facts, not opinions, and let LevelFields help you become a better trader.