Chris Camillo
Appearances
The School of Greatness
The Investing Expert: How ANYONE Can Start Investing TODAY To Unlock Financial Freedom
we're actually seeing the world change in real time. And that change ultimately is what impacts all of the companies in the world, positively and negatively. So my entire style of investing, which I call social arbitrage, it's like information asymmetry, But what it really is is just observational investing.
The School of Greatness
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It's just literally observing the world, seeing a change, connecting the dots to the companies and sectors that are going to benefit from that change or be harmed by that change because you can invest in... you know, in, in shorting companies, if you want to go down that road, right. Uh, placing your bets and beating wall street, like that's all that it is.
The School of Greatness
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And the people that are, are positioned best to do really well with that type of investing are just normal people that are not financially minded, that are not mathematicians.
The School of Greatness
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Yeah, and it all came back pretty quickly.
The School of Greatness
The Investing Expert: How ANYONE Can Start Investing TODAY To Unlock Financial Freedom
Yeah, but that's just a mind trick, right? How do you overcome that, though? It's just not rational.
The School of Greatness
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It's a great question. And here's what I tell people. Any money that you have invested in risk assets, the stock market is a risk asset. You have to mentally, every time you check your account, reduce it by 70%. Really? Yeah, because that's your downside, realistically. Just realistically, that's your downside. So from the first dollar you put in,
The School of Greatness
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you think your account's a hundred dollar account and it's a $30 account. You have to be willing to live with that risk account being 70% less. Okay. Realistically, that's probably the lowest it's ever going to go in the worst of all worst case scenarios. Now, But if you theoretically go lower, anything is possible in this world. We can disappear tomorrow, okay? So, like, anything is possible.
The School of Greatness
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But for the most part, your absolute, like, Great Depression style, worst of all, worst case scenarios, I like to think of it as down 70%. So bucketing money is one of the most important things for an investor to do. So I always talk about the fact that investors only really have two decisions to make.
The School of Greatness
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how much of their money they want to have bucketed in risk assets and how much they want to have bucketed in safety, being treasury bills, right, or just a treasury-backed cash account that's paying you 3%, 4%, 5% a year, whatever. You make that decision, and that decision changes over the course of your life. So when you're young, you might have 5% or 10% or maybe even 0% in the safe bucket.
The School of Greatness
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Maybe you have 20%. And when you're old, you might have 80% or 90% in that bucket. Right? Right. Everyone tries to overcomplicate wealth management. Everyone thinks, oh, it's really sophisticated. You go to a wealth manager, they'll hand you an 80-page report that's your personal financial plan. You're like, dude, this is so sophisticated. It's all BS. The whole thing is BS.
The School of Greatness
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Like it's just a printed out load of crap to make it seem like it's sophisticated and you need all that assistance and help. Like for me, I have money that's safe and I have money in risk assets. That's it. And honestly, for most people, if you don't want to play the game of trying to beat the market...
The School of Greatness
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The money in risk assets could just be in an S&P 500 ETF, exchange traded fund, that is basically free to buy and cost you like one-tenth of 1% internal management fee every year. It's the world's cheapest way to invest. And you just put money in there every week or every month and you don't think about it. And then you open it up in 40 years and you're super wealthy. Right?
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Keep it simple. I always tell everyone, if you are just willing to start investing, there will be a moment in your life, more than likely, when you wake up one day and you realize that you're making more money from your investment portfolio than you are from your job. I'll never forget the day that happened to me. And I was like... What was that like? How old were you? So amazing. I was...
The School of Greatness
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It was probably 2000 and... 2008, 2009-ish, because it was right around the time I wrote my book, Laughing at Wall Street. And I had turned $20,000 into $2 million in three years in my brokerage account. And I was making a lot of money from my job at the time. I was making like over $200,000 a year, which back then was a lot of money. I was a sales guy, right? Yeah.
The School of Greatness
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Yeah, investor class. Investor class. Every human.
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And that for, it just wasn't enough money for the life I wanted to live with my family and the things that I wanted to achieve in my life for other people. I'm like a very, like I have a foundation, like I have like. massive dreams of doing some really big things in the philanthropic world.
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And I was like, I can't live the life I want to live in the neighborhood I want to live it in, do this for my family, and achieve that for other people on $200,000 a year, even if I grow it to $300,000. I didn't really see a way to grow it to meaningfully higher than that.
The School of Greatness
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And I think almost every ordinary person, like substitute those numbers for other numbers, but every ordinary person is likely in the same boat where they're like making this much money and they know that if they really kill it, they can probably get to here.
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but almost impossible to get above that ceiling and that's the problem the problem is what happens is they start thinking i need to start a business okay that's that's the worst thing to do right yes yes so so so you get in that zone and you think i gotta i gotta start a business i gotta start flipping houses i gotta start doing this doing that and it's like oh i've
The School of Greatness
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I hate it that that is the roadmap for almost every single person. You know what's interesting about that?
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I own businesses. I own restaurants. It is so hard. It's almost impossible.
The School of Greatness
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This is the biggest life hack. Nothing comes close. Literally nothing comes remotely close to this life hack. Forget about everything else in life and just start investing. Period. You're done. And guess what? You don't have to spend any time if you don't want to. You can go do all your hobbies, do all of your stuff.
The School of Greatness
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Just start aggressively investing and you do not have to sweat the next 30, 40 years trying to restart yourself, your career over and over and over again, doing side hustles and lots of starts and stops and a lot of depression. And then what I think I see a lot of, because my entire life is analyzing social media now for trends, right? That's what I do for my investing.
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And it's just a crap load of complaining. from this generation, which I get it. I get it. If you don't know this life hack, I totally understand the frustration. You can't make enough money to live the life you want to live and you see absolutely no light at the end of the tunnel in terms of how you can make it happen.
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That is a really depressing place to be and it's going to cause you to get out and start complaining.
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And see, that's the issue because everyone keeps talking about the income gap. Like we've heard so much about the income gap the last decade, decade and a half. How are we going to solve the income gap? you're not going to solve the income gap. It's not happening. You can make really small dents in the income gap if you want to, but it's a lost cause. So just stop. Okay. Just stop.
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Now the wealth gap, that's a solvable problem. That is 100% a solvable problem. How do we solve it? getting the entire world to invest. Every single person that you're trying to solve the income gap for, just stop and just focus on the wealth gap. Instead of trying to figure out how to make that person earn three times more than they're earning, it's not gonna happen
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Make small change, you know, try to help them still to maximize their career. That should all still happen. But teach them how to invest. It's not even teaching. Just convince them. You see, like I even hate that I just had to say the word teaching. You don't have to learn. You just have to be convinced. You just have to be convinced. And every single person has money to invest, period.
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Well, that's all noise. It's always all noise. Okay. Until it's not. And when it becomes something other than noise, we have way bigger problems. That's the way to think of it. Should you be investing now? You should be investing always. I would say especially now. So even when it's scary or uncertain or it's fluctuating so much. Yeah.
The School of Greatness
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Now, I know people are going to hear me say that and it's going to like result in a stream of angry comments because they're like, this guy is just completely out of touch. And no, I don't have money to invest. Yes, you do. You don't have money to invest because you're thinking about every dollar as a dollar. But like, this is a big...
The School of Greatness
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Part of what I wrote about in my book a long time ago, when I turned $20,000 into $2 million in three years, and I'm not saying that people can do that. That was rare. But absolutely, you could turn every dollar to $100 over a much longer period of time as an investor just with compounding. And when you realize that, once you believe that, you'll start to think of every dollar as $100, right?
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And so when you start to think of every dollar in your life as $100, it changes everything. So I don't care who you are. There is a point to which you are not making trade-offs. You're not clipping coupons. You might clip $2 coupons, but you're not going to clip a $0.10 coupon. Well, all of a sudden, when everything's 100x, you're clipping 10-cent coupons. You're clipping 50-cent coupons.
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You are, you know, I don't know. You're just doing all kinds of things differently in your life. You know, maybe you're mowing your yard now. Maybe you're making your coffee at home instead of going to Starbucks. All the things that weren't quite worth trading off are all of a sudden worth making a tradeoff for. Here's the difference.
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That money that you save by doing all of those things, right, all goes into your investment account for risk assets, right? And so believe me, when you start thinking of every dollar as $100, and it will be $100 at some point, You start finding money in your life. I don't care what it is. I don't care. There are people on YouTube. They're actually insane with how to find money, right?
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Doing all these crazy things. And you're like, that is just way too much of a hassle to make an extra $3 or $4. But for $300, I'm doing it. And it is $300.
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Once you understand that by taking that money and investing it in risk assets over the course of a long period of time, that $3 is $300, boom, you're making $300 in the morning, you're making $300 at night doing this, like you're clipping, like you're doing all this stuff.
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Listen, it's different for everyone. It's different for every period of time. I can't predict how the next 30 years is going to go. But I do believe that this is one of the most interesting times to be an investor because of the age of AI that's quickly coming for us. So...
The School of Greatness
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in one way to think about this is, is our human labor to some extent is a little wolf for some period of time might get devalued, right? If, if we're creating a new industry and that industry is the industry of intelligence, historically that's come from us, right? So now there's an industry of intelligence. And if that industry of intelligence is going to devalue human intelligence,
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then what do we do as humans? We want to invest in the industry of intelligence and we want to invest in the way that that is going to impact the world positively. So this new industry of intelligence that we call AI and automation and robotics and all the stuff that I'm really into right now, that is going to make our entire world incredibly more productive, right?
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It's going to bring us efficiencies that we just didn't think were possible in our lifetime. Meaning that enterprise industry is going to become way bigger and way more profitable than it ever has. And we can make money off that by simply owning a piece of it. You asked me earlier, you said, what does investing mean? It just means owning a piece of the world. That's all that it means.
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When it gets scary and it starts to fluctuate and you start to hear, see people Googling the great depression. This is when you make all your money, right? So this is a gift. I've been around a long time. I still feel like a kid investing, yet I can talk about the 87 crash and how I felt during the 87 crash. I was young then.
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You want to own something more than yourself? You need to invest. Okay? So once we start investing, we start owning a piece of that thing that we hate and we like to bitch about. Okay? So it's like all of a sudden, you know why guys like me don't complain that much? Because I own all that stuff. So it's benefiting me. But I actually want everybody to own it. I hate...
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That I'm making all this money off of industry. I'm making all this money off of technology advancements. And all of these other people are not just because nobody taught them or convinced them that that was something that they needed to do.
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And why did I know it? Because, again, I was privileged to grow up in a neighborhood. of really wealthy people that were investors and they were smart and like, I had access to all of this. I was really fortunate. Most people were not as fortunate as me. So now I got to spend my entire life on YouTube
The School of Greatness
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trying to spread that word to every person that's not growing up in a neighborhood with multimillion dollar houses, right? That is growing up in a neighborhood where the culture is not telling you that every single day. Like, hey, kid, you gotta invest.
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One thing you just said was wrong. You don't need to live below your means to do it. That's the thing. make... To find money in your life to start investing with, I don't care if it's $5, you can open up an account right now with like $5. A lot of these things were not living below your means. It's just kind of doing things like... Clipping coupons is not living below your means.
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It's just doing things a little bit differently to find money in your life that you didn't really care about. But now with the mindset change of accumulating these dollars that are actually going to eventually be worth, hopefully, $100 each...
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hey you fall short and they're only worth 40 or 50 does it even matter does it even matter the bottom line is these very tiny dollars are going to become very big and you don't have to do anything but literally just do it and throw it in an account yeah and just let it compound
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Yeah, I've been aggressively trying to bring women into the investment world for 20 years, and I'm almost at a point of giving up. I've tried so hard. I told them, like, when I wrote my book, I exclusively market through mommy bloggers, right? Because my entire investing methodology is observational investing, right?
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And the ironic thing is that women are better positioned, way better positioned than men to excel at this strategy. are so, women are way deeper into these sectors, fashion, makeup, like, okay, like I was just telling you, the world has become digital and social, right? The best investments come from change. The bigger the change, the bigger the opportunity, right?
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How do you detect that change in the world? You detect that change through reading conversations. What are people thinking? What are they doing? What do they want? What are they buying? Where are they going? Where are they shopping? Where are they eating? Who talks about this stuff more than anyone else? Who expresses themselves?
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But I remember it vividly in our, I'll never forget how quickly we came back from it. And, you know, same thing with, I was like deep, deep in the dot-com bubble crash. Like that was when I was coming out of college in the workforce, investing for myself aggressively and, And it was like my entire world. And that really was scary. That was like super scary.
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Who expresses their feelings about their interest and what they want to own and what they want to do? Women. Way more than men. Who's listening? Women. Way more than men. Women actually have all of the insight. Women have all of the alpha. They have it. They are just not convinced that they can monetize it. Right?
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I've literally... Like, almost... Like, most of my biggest trades over the past 20 years have come from female and youth trends. Really? Right? Yeah. Why? Because those are the trades where there is the maximum amount of information asymmetry. Where...
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The mostly older, whiter, wealthier men who control most of capital markets on Wall Street, they are slow to pick up on that change that's happening. Like I always tell the story about Jeffree Star when he did a YouTube video of the elf primer putty makeup. This was like, I don't know, 10 years ago.
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elf was a drugstore brand it was the cheapest junkiest brand of makeup and he's like this is just as good as the 60 version and i went to walgreens and i just stood there all day and watched moms and kids coming in and they emptied the shelf of elf cosmetics because of this one product And that video got like 11 million views on YouTube.
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And I called the Wall Street analyst who covered cosmetics for one of the big three sell-side banks. And I asked the person if they had seen the video. I was like, do you see the Jeffree Star video? And they were like, who's Jeffree Star? They don't even watch YouTube. They don't even know who these people are. They are so out of touch.
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um and that ended up being a monster this is when elf was at seven bucks a share right it went up to like 160 eventually and now it's back down to like 50 60 70 whatever um most of my biggest trades i think probably females knew about that information long before any men generally knew about it
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I think just the field of finance, which is associated with the field of investing, historically, there is a misconception that that you need to be a finance head or a math head to do this stuff. Historically, the men in society have always been over that. So it's just a massive misconception.
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And it's just, I thought we would have come out of it 20 years ago when I first started talking about this, but like, It takes a long time for people to break out of it. Like look at what's happened in the workforce with women, right? Like that happened. Like we have now like massively changed like who is in these jobs. Like that's happened, but it hasn't happened yet. in the investor class.
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The investor class is still, at least the active investor class, people that are thinking and aggressively pursuing investment accounts, is still majority of men, right, that are talking about this, thinking about it, connecting dots. And it's crazy to me, man. It's just, it's absolutely crazy to me because when I, like most of my insights come from TikTok comments.
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So for, I don't know, eight years, I've been spending three to four hours a night ingesting TikTok comments. That is most where I get most of my information from. Before TikTok, it was Twitter and Instagram and Facebook, right? Facebook going back to the late 2000s.
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I mean, almost all of my trades these days, I mean, honestly, like most of them come off of TikTok. Like one of them was like the big Crocs trade when Crocs started coming back in a really big way. Massive. That was mostly based on TikTok comments. Wall Street just thought that Crocs was a fad that would come and quickly go away. They've always thought that about Crocs.
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And during the pandemic, especially, during the pandemic, there was a huge trend for Crocs. And it was because of two things. One, they killed it with the nursing community and the healthcare community. But then also they were doing all these big celebrity collaborations, right? Yeah. So they did these celebrity collaborations and all of a sudden it kind of like made Crocs cool.
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And it really made Crocs cool with like the middle school crowd. And so I was like reading these comments and I was like, dude, like this is crazy. Like Crocs are on fire. How much was it that the stock at that point?
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I don't even, I don't remember exact numbers, but there were so many things that happened during the pandemic, honestly, because the pandemic was one of the biggest changes that we've ever experienced in like consumer behavior of our lifetime. Like all of a sudden the entire world just spent a year in their house.
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So like think about all the change that happened when we all just went home for a year. We started, we cared a lot more about cameras on our computers, Logitech, right? That makes all the cameras. Guess what we bought a lot more of? Printers. Interesting. Weird, right? Because all of a sudden we're doing our schoolwork at home now. We're having to print out something, all kinds of stuff.
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Most of us that were young and investing during that time, we lost like 70% of our portfolio. OK, like 70, 80 percent. Some of us, a lot of the companies we were invested in just went to zero. OK, so that was unbelievably scary. Yet those of us that stuck around and kept doing it. I mean, it didn't take long for the market to come whipping back, right?
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There were so many things. We started buying camping equipment. One of my biggest trades was Schwinn Bicycle, which was part of a small Canadian publicly traded company. There were lines around every bicycle shop. Remember that? Interesting.
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remember that the line outside yeah we bought more bicycles during that six month period than like ever uh we bought more campers camper vans people were going camping remember uh more atvs more boats uh i was just basically all i was doing was i was on just reading comments on the internet just seeing what people were buying what they were talking about right
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There was more change than what we've ever experienced in our lifetime. And, like, people were obviously buying Pelotons, right? Shopping at home. Amazon killed it. Shopify killed it. I mean, looking back, it's all obvious stuff. But in the moment, Wall Street was really slow. Like, really slow to pick up on that stuff.
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I can't even tell you how many phone calls I did with, like, literally, like, people that sold ATVs or, like, jet skis. And they were like... never experienced anything like this. And I'm like, why is Sea-Doo not going up? Like the company, it's like Sea-Doo, right? Like that was one of my big trades. Really? Just see, like there were a hundred of them.
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So during the year of the pandemic, I don't know, maybe your audience doesn't know this, but during the year of the pandemic, I turned a four and a half million dollar brokerage account into 35 million. Holy. Yeah. So yeah, just doing that, just literally doing that, not doing anything sophisticated, just like, oh my gosh, people are all buying bicycles.
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That company 7X, it went up 7X from where it was, 7 or 8X. So this is not like trading derivatives or options. Like the actual company itself went up 700% in a very short period of time, as did Peloton, as did so many of these companies that had never experienced that type of growth.
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So I'll summarize for you what I do, but if you want to go in really deep, my book is very personal. It's very old. It's like 15 years old now. Jack Schwager wrote a book called Unknown Market Wizards where he spent, I think, a decade researching the top markets retail traders in the world.
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And I was really fortunate to be one of the five equity traders that trade stocks to be included in the book. He wrote a 35 page chapter on my methodology and he really goes in deep to my process. Okay. but at a very high list, but it's called Unknown Market Wizards. And I don't make any money when he sells books, but he spent two days interviewing me. It was nuts.
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And he has interviewed every hedge fund manager in the world pretty much for the last 40 years. And he's seen it all. But basically what I do is I surface some big change that's happening in the world. It could be a change to consumer behavior, to culture, to technology. politics, it could be a change in the weather.
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Like one of my big trades back in the day was a company called Beacon Roofing because I would monitor every spring the number of people that were searching the word roof repair on Google. And I literally would go, I'd had 10 years of history and every year it would spike roof repair, right?
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And one year, the hail storms hit populated areas at such a high degree that the word roof repair was triple anything I'd ever seen before. Well, it takes the insurance industry, I think, like a full month to print the report of insurance claims that Wall Street uses to trade companies like Beacon Roofing. They're like the largest roofing supply company in the country.
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But I had access to that information within 24, 48 hours of the big hail storms. Interesting. And the reason why it's hard to assess hail damage is because you could have really big hail storms, but if they don't hit highly populated areas, they don't matter. If they hit a highly populated area and destroy a bunch of roofs, that does a bunch of roof damage.
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That increases sales for the company that makes most of the roofing materials in the United States, Beacon Roofing. And so that's just one random example of a trade.
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And you look back and you go, gosh, I wish I would have went even heavier at the time. Same thing in 2008. That was scary. Remember? Well, you remember that. Came back quicker than anyone would have imagined. Nothing phases me anymore. People, you think about the stock market. Well, what is the stock market? The stock market is nothing more than a reflection of all of our work globally. That's it.
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And there's never been an easier time to do it because now I could just do it from my iPhone on my recliner at 11 p.m. at night, searching comments on TikTok or, you know, that's how I get my alpha now.
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Back in the day, I used to do what Peter Lynch used to do in the 80s, which is like literally stroll the mall and look for what stores people were shopping at and talk to people and talk to people that worked at stores and try to assess what was hot, what was not. Like that was very time consuming. And I still do that a little bit.
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But so first you have to surface the change in the world that's happening. And there's change happening every single day. This next year, there are going to be companies that will skyrocket based on their sales going up because of some change that happened. So you have to find the change before the guys on Wall Street do. Ladies on Wall Street, right?
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Once you find the change, you have to determine if that change is going to meaningfully impact or what companies that change will meaningfully impact. So this is actually where AI comes in pretty cool, right? You could also ask chat GPs. So as I was saying, you can find some change that's happening in the world and you could go and chat GPT and say, hey... This is happening.
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What publicly traded companies are likely to benefit from this? And it will actually tell you. I used to spend like four days figuring that information out myself. Now you can just ask ChatGPT. Have you done this yet? I'm doing it now. Yeah, I'm doing it now. And it helps. It's like a tool.
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Our human, our human endeavors. It's the product of our human work. So As long as humanity continues to get smarter and more productive and more efficient, whether it's us or the robots or artificial intelligence that we're creating, doesn't matter how we do it. As long as we continue to create more and create better, the product of that will become more valuable.
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And our way to participate in that is called the stock market. Like it's not... This crazy complex thing, everyone overthinks it. Wall Street has spent, you know, 70, 80 years trying to convince us that it's this big mysterious thing that only they can understand. That we have to go through them. That we need to be talking to them through these periods, right? It's all complete BS.
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I don't think there's anything more important in life other than maybe taking care of your family. uh, than learning how to invest. Like it's actually so insane to me. I think it's the most important thing we should be starting with from kindergarten, uh, every year for your entire life.
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A good chunk of it should be focused on reminding you and teaching you how important it is for you to be part of this investor class. And it's just disgusting that it's not.
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Well, so I think a better way to think about it is that something that we all can relate to is the idea of starting a company, right? We all want to be entrepreneurs. Most of us, in the back of our head, it would be cool to own your own company. Whatever that company is, right? It never used to be like that. But over the last 20 years, now we all kind of think like that.
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I don't care if you're a celebrity, if you're a homemaker, there's a company out there that you would like to start and own or the idea of being an entrepreneur. Well, that's half of my life, right? I'm an entrepreneur. I've been in startups my entire career. I've started a multitude of companies, have sold them.
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I've had a few big successes in that world, and I've had an insane number of failures in that world, both as an operator and as an investor in private companies. That is exceptionally hard. That is exceptionally risky. You could try to do that and chances are you will go your entire life and do nothing but fail, okay? How many companies have you invested in? I'm invested in about 150.
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Private companies, not- Private companies.
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Private, yes. Meaning each of those companies, I probably have met the founder have done a massive amount of due diligence on the space and the sector. It's been a huge part of my life, quite honestly.
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Almost all of them. That's crazy, isn't it?
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Yeah, because you're investing in an early stage company that has a tremendous amount of... You're investing in an idea and the person.
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Yeah. So that's where it gets risky. That's where you could make a case that maybe you should do that. And maybe you should just never do that. Right. I would say for most people, it's insane to go out and start your own company ever. And I've done it. I've done it multiple times. Why is it insane to start your own company? Because you're almost definitely going to fail.
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Like when I said 75%, that's 75% of my portfolio that were deeply vetted and I'm pretty good at doing what I do. Almost all companies will just fail. If you go to start a company, it's almost definitely you're going to fail.
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There are a near infinite number of ways for a founder to fail. Now, put that aside. Being an investor, just generally being an investor, investing in stocks, investing in the market, this is what's so wild. you could actually go out and invest in the smartest people in the world.
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Like you could just be like, by the way, complete psychopaths, people that will be like, they don't, they're going to like, destroy their family and or not have a family they will have basically no friends they will work 80 hours a week they're a genius they're a psychopath they are going they're going to do whatever it takes they'll steamroll relationships to make their company a success
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You can invest in Steve Jobs back in the day, right? You can invest in Jeff Bezos. You can invest, you might hate Zuckerberg, but you can invest in Mark Zuckerberg if you want, right? Sam Altman, Elon Musk, right? Like whoever it is. Like, you don't have to try to be them. You could just literally just throw some money and just ride their life, right?
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Just like anything they create, any value that they create in this world, you could just get paid for all the stuff that they're doing. Like, we don't ever think like that, but you could do that. Like, we already know who these people are. And there are a lot of them out there, right? And do you think that you are that ambitious? Do you think that you're that smart?
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Are you willing to throw your whole life away just to achieve what they achieve? For almost everyone, that's probably not a smart or a healthy decision, honestly. but you don't have to. They're doing it for you.
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So like, this is like the one thing that I wish someone would have sat me aside 30 years ago and said, Chris, you're gonna spend most of your life torturing yourself as a founder, which is what happened to me, okay? Starting companies, growing companies, you're going to have success this much of the time and almost all the rest, you're going to fail.
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Because I've started so many companies, almost all of them have failed.
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I have had so many privileges and so many advantages. And it's still- So many. My parents were so amazing to have moved us into a neighborhood with the most successful people in the country. And I would start businesses in middle school and high school, car detailing, this, that, just deeply engaging with these people all the time.
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And so, yeah, I've had access to some of the smartest, most ambitious people in the world that have helped me all along the way and still it's almost impossible it's almost impossible and like now looking back I joke around that I'm like I'm like you know yes I'm invested in 150 private companies and I probably have tried to start that many over the course of my lifetime myself and
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And if I would have just not done any of that and just focused on investing in other great people, and not that there aren't great people starting companies, but it's really difficult to kind of decipher who... Who is, who is, like what their weaknesses are when they're just starting off in life.
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Meanwhile, you can just pick from the best companies in the world. And let them do the work. Let them do the work. And as soon as they do something that's sus, you can sell it and get into a different company. There's a fully liquid market. These days, stocks trade pretty much 24 hours a day. They're Robin Hood and stuff. So it's like... It is such a magical time to be an investor.
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Like this is the best time in my life to be an investor and especially, quite honestly, to be investing in public markets. Like I used to say it was really difficult to identify information asymmetry, which is like my style of investing, like to identify information that other people don't see or don't appreciate. It's never been easier as a retail investor to do that. and to beat Wall Street.
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Wall Street is weaker than they've ever been. They've had so many layoffs over the past decade. They're operating off of just a small amount of resources compared to what they used to have, right? the advantage has swung back to us retail investors. There's just never been a better time. Plus, there's just a lot more publicly traded companies now. They can't keep up with all the information flow.
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We live in a digital world. We live in a social world. What does that mean? It means that We're able to detect change. When I say we, I mean like normal people that are just surfing Instagram and TikTok all day, which is what I basically do for my investment research. We're able to see the world evolve and change in real time as it's happening.
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without all the noise of wall street um and by the way we live all around the world we like live in the real world right we don't all live in kind of the same place in the northeast where we're kind of like all working together in the same buildings around the same type of noise with the same media cnbc wall street journal like just an echo chamber of thoughts