Investing Without Friction: The ADHD Guide to Building an Investing System That Lasts

Understanding investing is one thing. Building a system that survives real life is another. For many adults with ADHD, the difficulty is not intelligence or interest. It is turning a sensible decision into a system that survives delayed rewards, research rabbit holes, competing signals, and changes in motivation. In Investing Without Friction, Marc Ellingworth turns traditional investing advice on its head. Instead of asking an ADHD brain to fit a perfectly consistent plan, he builds a system that remains useful when attention, motivation, and interest move elsewhere. Grounded in ADHD research, official data, and real market evidence, the book builds a complete investing system around those realities. An emergency reserve, broad ETF core, and retirement pillar form the foundation. Individual stocks, crypto, options, and other calculated risks are allowed. They are simply no longer asked to do the foundation’s job. A good system creates boundaries, not a cage. It keeps the essentials running with minimal maintenance while leaving deliberate room for curiosity and individual ideas. This book begins with one assumption: you are already investing—or have decided to start—and have at least a small amount available for it each month. That may be fifty dollars or five thousand. You may be opening your first brokerage account or already own ETFs, individual stocks, crypto, or options. If the money is available but the system is not, this book is for you. PART I — UNDERSTAND THE BRAIN BEHIND THE DECISIONS Explore the reward and fuel system, intensity, switching and filtering, and the scaffolding and brake system—and see how those mechanisms become recognizable investing traps. The aim is not to excuse bad decisions. It is to understand what a durable system has to account for. PART II — BUILD THE FOUNDATION Create the parts that should not depend on attention or excitement: an emergency reserve, a broad ETF core, protection from unnecessary costs and overlap, and a retirement pillar that actually gets funded. PART III — MAKE ROOM FOR MORE Go beyond the foundation into individual stocks, business quality, crypto, options, and other forms of calculated risk. Curiosity is not treated as the enemy. It is given boundaries, so additional risk sits on top of a stable system rather than replacing one. PART IV — TURN IT INTO A SYSTEM THAT LASTS Work with the numbers that are actually yours, give each part of your money a job, set up the accounts and automations, and create a review process designed to take minutes a month—not hours a week. The goal is not to make you more disciplined. The goal is to build a system that does not need discipline as its main operating principle. ABOUT MARC ELLINGWORTH Marc Ellingworth combines international executive leadership and investing experience with a long-standing research focus on ADHD, giftedness, and neurodiversity—work he has presented at conferences and university workshops. He explores how complex systems can be redesigned for minds that don’t work in straight lines and applies that approach where the gap between knowing and doing can be especially costly: investing.