How you buy an investment matters as much as what you buy. John Bogle figured this out decades ago, and created Vanguard, to give direct access to investments to retail investors like us. Sometimes there is no getting around it. Middlemen must be paid - bankers, hedge funds, VCs, private equity. But given that middlemen can end up with as much as 40% of our wealth after 5 decades of investing, we should always find the most cost-effective approach to investing - in stocks, crypto, real estate, bonds, art, collectibles or anything else.