Stock Expert: Here’s My “Cheat Code” That Turned $35,000 Into $10M In 5 Years!

When others hear noise, T. Rowe Price interprets market signals to find investment opportunities. That's the power of active ETFs from T. Rowe Price. Their portfolio managers approach data from multiple perspectives, analyzing trends and conducting deep research to give you their curiosity-backed active management expertise. Learn more about their active ETFs at TROPrice.com slash explore ETFs. Exchange-traded funds ETFs are bought and sold at market prices, not NAV. Investors generally incur the cost of the spread between the prices at which shares are bought and sold. Buying and selling shares may result in brokerage commissions, which will reduce returns. TROPrice Investment Services, Inc. What was the most you've ever made on a single trade? I made a million dollars and lost a million dollars in back-to-back days. Like, that changes a bit. GameStop is back at it again. shares skyrocketed more than 100% on Wednesday. I was one of the earliest whales on GameStop. I put in $1.3 million. How much would you have made? Oh my God. So you're known for trading $35,000 into more than $10 million in two years trading stocks. How did you do this when everybody else loses money? I'm a swing trader. I'm not an investor. I have a couple of rules that are very strict that I follow. No margin. Don't chase the stock. Figure out the life you want to live and double it. How do you know you're not going to lose everything? The main things I'm looking for is a story. Go all in and figure out, do you have an edge? Concentration makes wealth. Diversification keeps it. So in your opinion, what do you think is the next 10x opportunity from here? Kevin, thank you so much for coming on the Ice Coffee Hour. Thanks for having me. So you're known on Twitter and Wall Street Bets for turning $35,000 into $10 million. You posted each trade during the meme stock era. Then once you reached your number, you diversified to lock in the profits. I got to say, that's what every single investor dreams of doing. And to be able to achieve that, if you could walk us through your biggest winners and your biggest losers. Yeah, sure. I mean, the first trade was the biggest percent win. I made like 2x in like a month off APT. The craziest trade was actually RKT, Rocket Mortgages. I made a million dollars and lost a million dollars in back-to-back days. How does that happen? It was getting kind of squeezy. This was like right after the GameStop thing in January. It was like February, March or something like that. And I think they had a high short interest ratio. Maybe they were getting a squeeze. So I kind of rolled this wave up like 70%. And the next day, I kind of lost it all really, really quickly. What percentage of your net worth was that at the time to gain a million dollars and lose it in two days? This is 100%. 100%. I had no- But you didn't go down to zero. No, no, no. Well, my style is I would go all in one single stock at a time. No margin, no options, no crypto, right? Like I don't touch anything that could, in theory, go to zero overnight, right? If you're invested in like 100% invested in a single stock, in a good stock, in a good company, this is legit, you know, the worst is like maybe a 20% drop on earnings or something like that, right? And so that was kind of a medallity I had that like, you know, I was working a very stable job at Google making like $300,000 a year. Right. And I had this 401k that I couldn't touch until I'm 65. And so why not just keep YOLOing it? And it just kept working. Right. I just kept going all in one stock at a time, one stock at a time, chasing bounces, chasing earnings reports. I mean, many, I mean, this was 2020 to 21. Right. So like everything went up. I mean, there were definitely some big losses there too. But for the most part, yeah, I just kept doing that all the way to 10 million. Why do so many people fail to do what you've done? Yeah. Because there's just as many people I've seen on Wall Street bets. Yeah. Who go all in on something and then they post this loss showing 95 it's like i gotta quit 100 i mean a lot of that is because you're chasing the really quick gains right with zero dt options these things can literally go to your overnight um i have a couple of rules that are very strict that i follow right no margin don't chase the stock like a lot of people love chasing whatever the hot stock is but you have to realize like once you hear about the stock most often it's probably already run up a lot and it kind of loses the support right like all of a sudden people could be taking profit you could be down you essentially bought the top uh if you notice in my track record like i never bought you know tesla back then right and i you know even in this current world i never bought nvidia like these are great companies like they will continue to go up but uh i just don't like i don't like chasing because in theory you could drop and then you could lose out a lot i'm what they call a swing trader right so i try to buy near support and the worst case scenario is it's just kind of bobbles to the side. And then if some callous hits or some good use happens, it'll rise up, sell for 20% profit, and just keep doing that again and again. Do you think you could recreate what you've done back then today? That's exactly what I'm trying to do right now. So I restarted my new 35k challenge account in Robinhood. And in the last few weeks, it's already up to the 52k. So I've gotten lucky on some plays, it's up 50%. And I think in this current environment, yeah, it's a swing trader's wet dream. It's so volatile. It's so narrative driven by headlines. And if you're, you know, my forte is I'm spending like all day on X these days, right? Which is kind of like the new CNBC or Wall Street is where all the talk is happening. If you kind of stay on top of where sentiment is, I think you can make a lot of money swing trading. How much do you feel a skill versus luck? it's both right like i i was incredibly lucky to have tried this style of trading during 2020 to 21 like that's just incredible luck right um but at the same time not everyone made 285x in 21 months like that's an insane number uh and so there was definitely some skill evolved i mean if i had a skill it would probably be my ability to just kind of digest like so much content like i was on WallStreetBets and other subreddits every day reading all the comments, you know, not just like the whatever's trending in a funny picture. It's like I was reading all the comments because it's a hive mind, right? Like the market, like a lot, I mean, I'm not a technicals guy. I'm not a fundamentals guy. I've actually never even run like a discounted cash flow in my entire life. Like I understand sentiment. I believe the market is based on sentiment. So I try to predict where sentiment is going, right? And what, you know, what companies are riding off of these waves. And I think that's even more so important today. So if you trade off of sentiment, that sounds kind of similar to social arbitrage, which is a trading strategy we've explored on this podcast quite heavily with Chris Camillo a few times, and he's famously ran like 20,000 up to whatever it is now, $100 million. I'm curious, in order to understand the general sentiment and the direction the sentiment is headed, what are the main things that you look for? I call myself a vibe trader now because that's essentially what I'm doing. I'm just like trying to catch the vibes. The main things I'm looking for is a story, right? a narrative, a solid thesis, both in the short term and in the long term, right? The long term provides, you know, it's a good company, right? I don't think like there's all these like mini narratives like, oh, GME is going to do something crazy tomorrow. Like, you know, I'm not sure what the long term future for GameStop is, right? But for a NeoCloud, like my current all-in, Shaz, S-H-A-Z, Sharon AI, it's a NeoCloud based in Australia, right? And there's just so many narratives, so much potential catalyst, so much potential good news that could come any day about a potential off-profit deal with Shaz or NVIDIA investment in the Shaz because data centers are just so important today that AI infrastructure build out right now. And so that's kind of what I look for. I look for a good company with a good long-term future, but also a potential catalyst and good news that could pop up any day or any short term. If you're trying to replicate your strategy, where are the main places you should be pulling information from? X wins by far now, right? Because not only does it have all the big financial accounts, posting breaking news as soon as it happens. But you have a lot of real traders doing deep dives, posting their trade receipts. And I think that matters a lot. That's what you're missing on Reddit. You don't know who people are on Reddit, right? Like I was very unique. I had a very unique posting style and username. So people gradually kind of get to know who Sir Jack was. But for the most part, these usernames are completely anonymous, right? It's hard to follow people between comments versus on Twitter. You have an actual profile. You can follow someone's winning trade and their logic and how much money they put in. And that kind of adds a lot of value to the actual content that they're saying. In terms of like how I identify real swing trades, I have a very tiny watch list I'm constantly monitoring. So I have like five stocks on my watch list right now. And every day I'm just looking at like, are they up? Are they down? Who's talking about them? What stuff is coming up with them? And basically trying to figure out, like try to tune my cause and effect in my head, right? Like if you think this news is good for data centers, why is or isn't this stock going up, right? And then once it's at a decent enough floor or some news is coming up like next week, right? Like I also subscribe to the philosophy of buy the rumor selling news. And this is basically when, you know, something potentially interesting is coming up, could be earnings report, could be an announcement or whatever. And there's usually a run up into the actual news event, right? So for earnings is a good example. There's a lot of earnings coming up. A lot of companies run up to earnings. And so if I see a stock that like, oh yeah, has good, a lot of people are, I think has good earnings next week. I might buy today and ride that wave into the earnings. What was the most you've ever made on a single trade? Big five sporting goods, BGFB. How did you find that? Oh my God. This was on Wall Street Bets and literally someone who I decently respected, I had commented back and forth with him before, literally just suggested it to me, right? Like mentioned me, it's like, hey, you should look into big five. They just did like a special dividend, right? And they had good earnings or something like that, right? And I was like, oh, that's a good, potential play and so i full poured i think wait that was it yeah yeah that was all i mean i did my own research and whatever like that but it wasn't okay but but i want the viewer to understand like when you say did my own research to them that could either mean five minutes or it could mean like five days yeah so like you heard about this information you didn't just hear from some stranger that you should full pour into big five sporting goods because if we say that publicly then people are going to try to replicate the strategy but i want them to see like transparently what it was actually like for someone that made how much money did you make on this trade? Probably 1.7 million. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. I full ported like $6 million into this stock. Six million? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think I own like one and a half percent or something at that time. Okay. So walk us through the amount of due diligence. How long, just let's just say you, how many hours did you spend before you put 6 million in? So normally all the diligence happens right before the trade ever happens, right? Like I keep, basically keep a constant background process of like all these stocks i'm constantly watching i'm constantly scanning the news i constantly i'm getting familiar with them over time uh and then kind of like i feel like i call it like a limitless moment where like just everything kind of clicks like all at once right and so for that one it was the fact that they had a special dividend and spiked like 20 on a day uh there were so many comments about this uh and also volume uh ticked up right so one thing i really really care a lot about is uh increasing volume like on the candlestick charts right looking at what does increased volume tell you uh more people are caring about this there's And volume can be, it's like just transactions. So it's buyers and sellers at the same time. Correct. Correct. Yeah. But generally, increasing volume is a good thing. It just means more market participants are entering this stock, are caring about this stock, and there's more room for growth, usually in a positive direction. Yeah. But you bought in once it already went up 20%. Yes. I bought it when it already went up 20%. I think the next catalyst was actual special dividend that was coming up, right? And so I basically rode that extra wave. So it was a little bit risky. Sometimes, you know, I like to try to catch stocks while they're kind of boring and haven't bounced yet. But sometimes I also try to catch stocks like right at that first bounce to see like how far the wave goes. So how many hours of research should the average person do before they go all in or even buy an individual stock? If I were to be honest, I've definitely gone into stocks with just only an hour of research, especially these days with AI. You could ask your favorite agent or type of DBT, just give me the bull case, give me the bear case, tell me everything that's happened recently. And sometimes that's your perspective. That's everything you need to know. What would Warren Buffett have to say about this? uh well okay so look i'm a swing trader right i'm not an investor like recently i made a post i defined as i said like there's three ways to use your money to make money uh you could be gambling you could be trading or you could be investing right and they have different risk profiles different return profiles i don't endorse gambling at all right i never touch you know meme coins i never touch option margin leverage products even prediction market sports betting i've never minute sports bet in my life, right? Because that could just go to zero all of a sudden, right? And you know, maybe it's okay for the $20, but like when you're like with serious money, no. So investing, right? Warren Buffett is an investor, right? These are long-term holds. You believe in the company. You can go to sleep. You can go on vacation. You could be in a coma for 10 years and you're still fine holding the company, right? I think, I mean, right now I'm also an investor. My 401k is $5 million in SPY, $5 million in QQQ, and about a million DRAM, which is this ETF of membership companies um because they're you know they're diversified indexes are good for that lowering risk and i mean there's warren buff actually has another quote that's like concentration makes wealth diversification keeps it right so if you are in that point of that stage in your life where you're looking for to maximize gains you're willing to put in the energy and effort to try to find try to stay on top of sentiment and depending on your own personal finance situation right like again i was making uh 300k at google like i could afford to yolo my four okay i'm gonna touch anyways. I think it's worth spending more time and energy and trading and finding those single stocks that you think you have a fairly good picture of how it's going to perform over the next few days, weeks, months. So who is this strategy for? Who would you recommend? They look into full porting or buying all of one individual company, doing the due diligence, following in your footsteps. Who is this for and who is this not for? So we actually just hired our first ever full-time employee, Michael. Oh, my name is Michael. I edit the podcast and I love my work. I love my bosses. Thank you, Michael. And while hiring him was very exciting, all of the backend stuff, payroll, benefits, paperwork was absolutely not. But fortunately, our partner Gusto was there to handle all of it. For those unaware, Gusto is an online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses. It's all-in-one, remote-friendly, and incredibly easy to use. 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Over half a million small businesses, including us, use them. So try Gusto today at GUSTO.com slash iced and get three months for free when you run your first payroll. That is three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash iced. So who is this strategy for? Who would you recommend? They look into, you know, full porting or buying like all of one individual company, doing the due diligence, following your footsteps. Who is this for and who is this not for? I think it's for that, you know, that young, that young person who has a job. I think having a job is really important. I think, you know, if trading is your full-time activity, that's like your lifeline now and you start making very irrational decisions. So I think it's very important to have a stable job and then decide how much money you're willing to risk and just, yeah, full port. And by full port, you mean go all in? All in, yes. Because then you're like fully invested, you're fully concentrated, you're tracking every movement. For me, like, if you're right and you're only in like 5%, like you were right. That's really incredible. But you only got gain only like from a little bit. Even if I had like $20 in a stock, I'm just obsessed with it. But if you're wrong, I mean, then you only lose, you know. True. But when you're wrong, you could sell. So here's my general take on it, my unsolicited two cents, is that I think for a specific person, this strategy is probably better. But I would also hesitate at promoting something like this widespread because I know a lot of people are going to get absolutely rinsed. do I think the average person listening to this right now is going to be able to do the right amount of due diligence, have, you know, like assess their own risk profile well enough to actually capitalize on this? I don't think so. But for the specific person, I actually think that this makes a lot of sense. I know I get a lot of like flack for always buying and then the stock goes down. Oh, tell them about your recent one, Jack. Yeah. So like I bought a bunch of Bloom Energy like a week ago and then it goes down to like 230. but I also bought it 230. And so now it's like kind of like going back up a little bit. I bought some call options, you know, sold some weekly puts and stuff like that. But this all to say, every single individual stock I have ever picked has outperformed every index fund I've ever invested in. And so I'm like, if I had just gone in heavier, like I would, you know, I'd put like $2,000 into individual stock while I have like a few hundred thousand index funds. What's very funny is Jack has selectively forgotten in 2020 and 2021. Well, even if you account for that, I'm probably up still about equal with my individual and ETFs. But 2020 and 2021, I got margin called on Palantir and Robinhood and I was forced to sell at 10, but I was buying them at 15 and 20 and 30 bucks. And now they've skyrocketed. And so for me, I was like getting margin called and I was like, I have the cash in my high yield savings account, but like, this is like my fun money. I'm not even going to like feed into it. I should have. But still, the stocks that I had picked at that time were the correct stocks that were going to end up doing really well. Oh, 100%. I mean, I think you kind of hit the nail. Maybe the framing is better positioned for most people. You had a fun account, right? And you were technically all in high risk stocks or individual stocks in your fun account, right? So like, I know people make fun of me online all the time. They're like, oh, Kevin's all in these random stocks, even though he has like a little million dollars in index funds. Like I'm very transparent about this. Like it's in my ex bio, right? Like my net worth is, you know, 11.6 million and my all in challenge account is 52K right now. Like people could do the math, right? Whatever, you know, people are comfortable with, put that aside, make a whole new account for that and just go all in there. But now if you say you've somehow bought some of these stocks with like an hour of research, let's just say, where does it intersect between gambling and investing? Because it just seems like there's an element of randomness that goes into all of this where it might lean into gambling a little bit. To me, gambling can go to zero, right? Gambling can go to zero overnight out of control. And again, with most stocks, right, you're not going to go to zero overnight. And so that's where I draw the line between gambling and trading. Well, couldn't you say also with a slot machine, you're not going to go to zero. Every spin, if you do dollar spins, you're going to lose on average, but you could also just as easily stop at 80 bucks. Yes, unless you just put it all on one spin or have to really put it on one trade. I mean, I'm also just a very simple person, right? Like I can only really track like one or two stocks at a time, right? Like I think, you know, you mentioned selling call options, whatever. Like I've never sold an option. I'm a very simple person. Like I believe in a stock. I think this is a good price. I think it's going to go up in the next couple of days, couple of weeks. Like, I think that is actually rather promotable to a general audience. Like, just simplify. You don't have to get into all these kind of crazy kind of things and deal with margin and try to make more money. Just like find a good stock that you think is a good price. It's got a good story. You think it's going to go up 5-10% next week. Sell. Buy low, sell high. And then find another stock. What are some of the red flags that stop you from investing into a company? Recently, if the wrong type of promoters are talking about it, right? Like, there's a lot of, you know, shady people on X. a lot of shady things happening um people are promoting penny stocks and and and you know these people have uh it's they're anonymous and they're not transparent like i'm super transparent or like i've been actually i was thinking about it i've been sharing every single trade i've made since 2020 like either on reddit or on after hour or on x now like i'm extremely transparent about when i buy and when i sell and other people they'll talk about like when they buy but they'll never talk about when they sell or they're sharing you know obviously photoshop screenshots or screenshots they took for someone else's, someone else on their discord. And so if, you know, I post video trade receipts. And so I, well, that's the biggest red flag. Like recently there is a stock that's come across my radar. People keep DMing it to me. That's another red flag. If someone ever DMs me, like, hey, you should check this out. I'm like, automatically like, no, you know, like you probably have some ulterior motive. How often do you see pump and dumps? Back in the day, I saw quite often, I think the algorithm has done a much better job of like filtering that kind of stuff out. Or maybe I just like, I just don't care about that stuff. Right. if it's a sub-billion-dollar market cap, that's automatically pretty much like an orange flag for me because that's easy to manipulate, yeah. And how do you know when to sell? I sell a stock or swing trade a stock, right? Either when the thesis has been validated, invalidated, or I find a sexier play. And so, you know, if a stock, like, for example, I'm playing earnings, right? and earnings was good, it popped 26%, which was my recent trade on paying. Perfect. It was earnings play, these is validated, sell, right? Or it's under time. I'm just holding a stock, right? Like I'm just waiting for a catalyst to happen. Maybe it's just like bobbing, you know, sideways for a little bit and I find something else that's like more exciting, right? That has like a news coming up next week or they just launched a partnership. I'm like, okay, then maybe I'll swing to there and then swing back. That's actually, that's how I missed out on GameStop. Tell us about that. What happened to GameStop? Yeah, so I was one of the earliest whales on GameStop. I put in $1.3 million into GameStop in October of 2020. Okay. And my cost of business was around $13 a share back then. And I held until December of 2020. So I missed the squeeze by a month. How much would you have made? Oh my God. I believe $120 would have been $10 million. So it went up to 420 uh so probably around 30 to 40 million if i if i held to the top of the squeeze you would have 40x'd yeah yeah how often do you think about that i don't think about that at all okay during those days i was ecstatic because we were right you know the the the short squeeze and and all that kind of stuff like the thesis was right i was celebrating i was dancing it alongside you know roving kitty every day you know it's funny i actually bought gamestop when it was three dollars and something cents a share i put five thousand dollars into it because i saw it on Wall Street bets. And I just thought, this sounds funny. I'm just going to do it. And I bought it. I completely forgot about it. And then the whole GameStop stuff happened. And I sold, I think it was right after Robinhood disabled the trading. And I was like, oh man, this is going to kill the momentum. And immediately it started falling. And then I remember, I think I went to you and I'm like, dude, Jack, should I sell? And it had turned into over like 150 grand, I think at the time from a $5,000 investment and I sold. And I was so happy that I didn't quite get the peak, but to be able to get that price for that, I mean, that was a Hail Mary just for fun. Profit is profit. Profit is profit. So why do so many people miss these signals? I don't know. Psychologically, I've always been curious why some people get married to the stock. That's another one of my principles, like never get married to a stock, right? There are people who are just, they made their money on Tesla. They made their money on Bitcoin. Now with memory stocks, right? Like Santa is going to M.U. And they're just like obsessed with it or holding them out. That's all they talk about. And I don't get it. You know, if you're an investor, you don't care about the short-term movements at all. And you'll just kind of, you know, ride it for 10, 20, 30 years. If you're thinking about the stock, you're essentially thinking like, should I sell? Right? And so you should be okay with selling. What would you say are the shortcomings that a lot of investors fall into. They play with margin. Now, you might be hearing that AI is transforming work, but if you've actually rolled it out in your company, you know how it usually goes. You make the investment, everyone gets onboarded, and a few months later, no one's using it. Well, thankfully, today's sponsor, Superhuman Go, is actually built to stick. For those unaware, Superhuman Go is an AI chat that sits right on the side of your browser, ready to help you with any task that you're working on. It's actually from the makers of Grammarly and works inside the tools and sites your team already uses. Like whatever's on your screen, I'm talking an email, a document, a website, it already knows what you're looking at. You're not opening new tabs, pasting stuff in, or explaining yourself from scratch. All you have to do is ask and it'll summarize a long email thread, draft your reply, or prep you for a meeting using what's right in front of you. It also searches across your tools, so you're not clicking through five apps trying to remember where something is. Plus, since nobody has to learn anything new, everyone on the team ends up using it. It's the easiest way to get AI into your business. So if you're done paying for tools that nobody touches, give Superhuman Go a shot. All you got to do to find out more is go to superhuman.com. Again, that is superhuman.com or click the link down below in the description. Thanks again to Superhuman for sponsoring this episode. Like you could play this game for a very long time, as long as you're responsible and take, you know, take profit and minimize your losses, right? Like if you're up 20%, maybe take some more risk. If you're down 20%, maybe play a little more conservatively or, you know, add money back to it. I think when people go on margin, when people go on full tilt, right? And trying to make that gain back as much as possible, that's when they lose it all. And so what do you think about Chris Camilla? I'm sure you're very familiar with who he is. He fully endorses margin. And if anything, he looked at my portfolio, he's like, if I could critique anything, I think you should have a little bit more margin. I mean, that's extreme conviction. I wonder if he has always had that view, especially when he was just starting out or that's now when he has more of a cushion, right? To maybe take a blow from margin. I mean, you have to be patient, right? Like this is also like a patient man game in order to be happy with you know 20 swings 20 swings versus like oh it could have been 40 or something like that I mean I think the math is like you only need like four 20 swings for a double right And I think that's very possible if you find a good stocks. I'm curious, by winning a million dollars in a stock market in one day and then losing a million dollars the following day, what does this do to your mental? Oh my God. How does this affect your nights when you're trying to sleep or just like the overall gravity of daily existence? To be honest, it happened so fast. It didn't quite register, you know? And the million that you'd made had not quite settled yet. Exactly. And so it didn't feel like your net worth increased by a million. I think also psychologically, it's very different than losing a million, right? First or from your cost basis, right? Like I gained a million and then it disappeared, right? So I think that's why I also prioritize entry price a lot. That's, again, back to my don't chase rule, right? Like if you bought a stock and it went up 20% and then went back down 20%, you could hold that a lot better psychologically than if you bought something at the top and just dropped the next day. Now, in terms of getting started, though, back in 2017, weren't you able to turn $8,000 into $300,000 with cryptocurrency? Yes. And then you lost it down to $35,000. Yeah, yeah. So I call this like paying tuition. This was all in crypto, right? And this is, I mean, this is kind of where I learned everything, I guess. I mean, I've been aware of Bitcoin for a long time. I learned about it in college. I had some friends that were doing mining and stuff like that. So I kind of missed that kind of 2012 or 2013 bubble for Bitcoin. But when I learned about Ethereum in 2016, I went all in with everything I had at the time, which was only $8,000 from like working. How much were you making at that time during 2016, 2017? Not even that much. Like, you know, I did a startup between 2013 and 2015. I didn't go anywhere. Then I started my first, you know, big boy job at Stripe. I was a software engineer over there. And there were, I mean, there still are private startups that were only paying me like $150K. And so how did you only have $8,000 though after like... I only started working there. Oh, so it was just... I just started working. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I had only $8K. And then Ethereum was, I think, maybe $16 or something like that. And so I just decided to go all in that. and then ethereum went up to 100 pretty quickly and so now i'm sitting at like you know 30 or 50k uh and then this was like ico mania there were so many you know random alt coins uh taking off and so i was actually doing the exact same style i was going all in one random coin at a time back then there was a lot more sentiment based because you know these coins really don't have any fundamental value so it's just like whatever the next hot one is as a funny story uh and so you know that 2017 run brought me all the way to 300k uh and then 2018 happened uh and i lost it all but unfortunately owed taxes on the realized gains from 2017 uh so the way the counter math works out it could really really uh hit you uh yeah that was a hard lesson that also why i've never touched crypto ever since you owed how much in taxes uh probably around 150k how did you owe 150k when you brought it down to 30k though oh that capped in 2018 right so the big the top was december of 2017 and so i was you know trading all the time right so all the all the capital gains got realized in 2017 you would think that you should be able to use losses of the next year to offset the prior you would think right right yeah but you're only allowed to maximize 3 000 or 3 000 you can offset your income by 3 000 for that right i mean this was also the early days of crypto and taxes and i just wanted to do everything by the books. So after having this crazy run up and then crash in your crypto account, a few years later, you finally decide that you want to start investing in equities and stocks in your 401k. You started with $35,000. Let's talk about a few of the specific trades that you did to take your account up to like 8 million now at 10, 11 million dollars. And what did you learn from these trades? The first trade that you made was what company? It was called Alpha Pro Tech APT. They made face masks and they were based out of Salt Lake City, Utah. And again, this was like back in the early COVID days, right? Where people were just like learning about it. The pandemic, the shutdown, the lockdown didn't quite happen yet. And so the thesis was really simple. Like American made face masks. That should be a big thing, right? And so that brought me from 35K to 90K. And I was like, oh, wow, that happened fast. And then in a similar vein, my next stock was CODX, co-diagnostics, PCR testing. They got the nose swabs. Remember that? Right? So they were building that and they were signing up all these contracts in all these states. I'm like, oh, they should have good earnings. And so I rode that for like a 2X. So now all of a sudden 90 turned into 180. And then we were approaching the summertime now and Norwegian cruise lines had like absolutely got tanked. It was down like 80%, basically priced for bankruptcy. Right? And there was like a rumor. I was like getting all these like Facebook groups for like cruise moms and stuff. They were like buying like all these like on sale items that, you know, cruise lines are not going to go under. uh cec was like maybe gonna lift the ban on them whatever and so again that's hope right there's a story there's a potential catalyst uh and i got lucky and i caught the bounce perfectly and so uh i caught like a 60 bounce and now all of a sudden like 180 turned into like you know 250 300 and i just kept doing that you know i got i got a i got a dog and uh uh chewy i learned about chewy right and like a lot of people got dogs uh so like e-commerce dogs perfect right and that was maybe be like a 25% pop. So I just kept doing this. And so what then was your first real loss in your 401k account? And really quick, I just want to say that when your business is growing, you need more hands on deck. But training someone new takes time you don't have. That's why smart businesses are using our sponsor, Upwork. 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The first loss was actually Slack before they got bought by Salesforce, right? I mean, it just made sense, right? Zoom was like taking off, right? Peloton was taking off. And I was like, Slack has not really moved yet, right? And that was it. That was the thesis. And then they had earnings and it was horrible, like down like 25%. And I think I kind of misunderstood the dynamics between Microsoft Teams and Slack, which was kind of a miscalculation. And so that was my first big loss. So your first investment that you kind of lost money on was Slack. How much money was your account at that time and how much did you lose? probably around like 700, 800K, right? So your first loss was after taking your account from 35K to 700, 800K. I would say so, yes. And then how much did you lose on the Slack trade? Yeah, probably like 200K or something like that. And what did you learn from that loss? Like, was this an important lesson or was this just like, you were taking the same kind of like outsized bet over and over again, you kept winning. And then, hey, this one just like, the cards didn't fall in your favor. I have this lesson still to this day, like earnings are a coin flip, you know? Like no matter how much you think you know about a company's revenue numbers or the climate or whatever, earnings are a coin flip, right? And so, and it could be pretty, pretty expensive at that time too. And so I think what I learned is you, if you, if you have enough of a buffer of safety, right? Maybe you're up a lot recently, right? Like you could afford to take that coin flip just like I think, you know, anyone at a casino, they're kind of hot streak, right? Maybe you could, you could take that extra, extra bet. but um yeah if it goes if it doesn't go your favor you gotta be conservative with your next play do you think that the volatility or the the percentage price change is greater if earnings are good or if they're bad like does a stock respond more aggressively positively or negatively if earnings are positive or negative or is it just like is it still just like a coin flip so it's like 50 50 every time it's really 50 50 there's these there's like a lot of complicated math using options for like implied volatility and trying to figure out like what do they expect and move in the upside or downside right and so this all this is kind of published out there but essentially you never know if it's actually already priced in or not right so like a lot of people you know even some of the biggest companies right now like nvidia like you just there's so much data about them you would think it's priced in because they're up so much right and then yet still they surprise to the upside and then it also depends on like how much of that surprise is so there's a lot of variables that go into it and like i mean you could obsess over trying to figure it out but it's just it's a coin flip at the end of the day i think it's actually more intellectually honest to treat it as so you know that like i'm putting this on a coin flip do people ever reach out to you with inside information and they say hey uh here's a tip if so gramps looking for that exact information i'm just curious because actually no actually no and i'm very careful to not even like accept those kind of dms uh if it kind of feels like that I'm surprised because I thought for sure that people would say like if you've helped them make money that they might try to say like, hey, here's some info. Thank me later. Everything I use is public information. I don't ever I don't have any insider information. Right. Like I just connect the dots. Like a lot of that is like, you know, hope or copium or insane kind of theories about like, you know, this guy like this post on LinkedIn and like, oh, yeah, they're in Miami together or whatever. But again, that's yeah, that's public information. Right. And it's just it's kind of more of a fun, fun side story than the actual play. What do you think are some of the biggest lies that are spread about investing online or the information that's being said that if the average person followed, it's just not going to help them? I don't know why some people get obsessed with trying to make a trade every day. You know, some people think being a trader or day trader, options trader is making a thousand dollars every day. I think it's because it's like it feels like work. You know, it feels like activity. that's i don't think that to me is is not how i don't endorse that i think that's a lot of energy that's wasted because yes you can make a thousand dollars for a couple days and you lose five thousand dollars one day you kind of break even right i think swing trading to me is kind of the best roi on like your energy on your time on your sanity on your returns because generally the stock market goes up right like you know it has to be 500 goes up good companies should go up what I'm trying to do as a swing trader is to maximize the gains in a shorter timeframe, right? Because the market goes up and it also goes down. And if you can try to catch things on bottom and sell them on the top, you are basically compounding your gains every single time. And that's how I was able to do 285X in 21 months. But that's also a very tax inefficient strategy. I know a lot of people probably like, oh, Jack's talking about taxes. Like, you know, this doesn't really apply to me. But in actuality, taxes can cut into your gains substantially. And then that compounded year over year, you have just a smaller amount post-tax that you're able to build, let's say 30%, 40% year over year returns on. I joke, just make more money. I mean, yeah, my situation was really unique. This was done in my 401k. So it was no taxes. I didn't pay a single cent on taxes until I withdraw. But even though I'm doing this in a Robinhood, normal brokerage account right now, So, I mean, if you're trying to maximize for long-term gains, but the stock goes down, you kind of wipe out those potential gains anyways, right? So, I don't know. I think short-term gains are fine. So, how much time should the average person spend a day researching and trading? I mean, I don't think it takes more than like an hour in the beginning of the day and maybe like, you know, at the end of the day, right? Just like reviewing like what's trending, going on CNBC, see what people are talking about, follow a couple of people on X and see what stocks they mention. And the algorithm, to be honest, is really good now. You know, like a lot of people have lamented how the X algorithm has changed over the last few years. But I think it's really, really good now. So if you follow the right people, you'll be getting your intake of stock use. And you can also turn the bell on for certain influencers and get their posts as soon as they make them. To get more specific, who are those people that you should be following on X, not including yourself? Like, who do you look for for information? The first one that comes to my mind is Amit is investing. He's the GOAT. He's got like 500 followers. he was early on pound here he was early on robin hood uh posting all these deep dives um and interviews with these with these folks um another you know he's a buddy of mine but michael second he recently you know posting a lot about the photonics trade and like all these kind of bottlenecks related to the ai infrastructure like picks and shovels kind of play again like these amazing deep dives because like you know it used to be that you could only get these deep dives from like these morgan stanley you know 30 page pdfs right which are like really really dry but i think in a kind of more modern era, people are reading bite-sized tweets and learning a lot from that kind of drip feed of information. And then I think another one is Serenity, this anonymous, you know, white-haired anime profile picture. She or he blew up from nothing to almost a million followers just in the last six months. And it's really, really good, like deep takes on like the AI infrastructure build out. I really want to get down to what separates you though from all the people who want to try this or have tried it and fail. Yeah. Because I am worried that people go and they see your story going all in and they say, oh, I'm going to go all into and they just lose a ton of money. What separates you? Like at the end of the day, have you just gotten lucky? Is there a skill? Is there something you look for specifically? Are you able to avoid red flags? Is it an intelligence thing? Is it like a personality trait thing? I get very obsessed. And and I think that is probably one of my strengths that like once I'm in the stock, I'm like obsessively watching it like all day, like back in, you know, the pandemic era, like I would even be like, you know, on a, on a, on a zoom call. Right. And I have like my chart open over here. If you, I mean, if you, if you were following me, I think the most important thing to learn really, I mean, is, is learn how I do things. Right. I, I, I endorse independent thinking. Like I'm here trying to share my, my, my research, my train of thoughts, like why I'm thinking this, right. what i noticed uh how i'm connecting the dots and obviously my my trades themselves uh and i'm really hoping that people kind of pick up that like if you you know have figured out okay i'm willing to all in this much amount of my money right only to one stock follow it okay and and now you're basically watching it play out in real time i think that's much more better than kind of a simulation or kind of backtesting or reading a book right because when you're reading about i bought here i bought sold here but when you're actually watching it play out in real time you'll kind of feel it that like oh yeah he sold this because you know everyone on twitter is is scared of this news or the fed chairperson did these things and like kevin kind of connected all these dots and decided this was the top is time to sell and i think that's much more gonna you're gonna get that much more ingrained in you by kind of following me and watching how i trade in real time do you ever set limits where it's like hey if it automatically if it's down 20 even if i'm sleeping or i'm just wasn't paying it it's gonna sell or if it goes up a certain amount it's automatically going to sell. I've also never set a stop limit. I'm very weird. I'm very afraid of actually, you know, your situation, right? Where it's like randomly down 20% one day for reasons that I disagree with, right? Just some random macro or some fear headline. And then I get automatically stopped out when no, you know, so I've never set a stop limit my whole life. Now, you've previously said that every man should trade stocks like they date women only one at a time. Why don't you like diversification. Yeah, that's my specialty on Twitter. It's financial rage bait. Why don't you like polygamy? Why shouldn't men date 10 women at a time? Yeah. Like Jack. Props, props. That's just not even true. Concentration creates wealth, diversification keeps it, right? That's just true. And I think, you know we go all in on things all the time in our lives right when you're a job that's an all in on your time right a woman that's an all in right i'm saying like and it's true like you know when i met my wife it was like only like six weeks in we decided to move in together right because i was like this is it like i i think i love her and i want to move in i want to get to know her right i'm just i just went all in and i think i don't know a lot of people try to hedge right and and like you know try to especially in the dating world like oh yeah let me try to beat to find the best person? No, I think you should go all in. And I think that's really important. And you also really quickly find out whether it's working or not, either with a relationship or even with a stock. You really quickly get obsessed with it. You research everything about it and you figure out like, oh yeah, if you're only in like 5% or only 5k, you're like, you know, whatever. I don't really care about this. But this seems like this is your personality type, is you're an all in type of person. You're either a hundred percent in or you're out. Yeah. Yeah. I will say that's my personality type. Do you think most people should follow that personality type or do you think some people would be better off not doing that? Or maybe they're a bit indecisive and when they go on something, they don't really think it through. I think it depends on your goals, right? And your timeframe. I mean, just to use your view on life. I have always been a very impatient person, right? I've always wanted gain success, whatever, as big and as fast as possible. And obviously, I've been willing to risk it. And I've made many losses, right? I lost 300k in crypto, right? I did my startup back in 2013, and I failed. And so I, you know, I failed a lot. But I also kind of, you know, over the course of my life, taking like a very TikTok kind of pattern in my life of risk on risk off right you do something risky didn't work out okay you know quiet down for a couple years and once you kind of regain that financial buffer that mental sanity maybe try on some risk again right so i think there's like phases in your life too where it's appropriate to kind of take on risk does it worry you right now that stock market valuations are seemingly pretty high not really because of how insane this ai build-out is going to be like this is essentially our version of the industrial revolution you know and i think especially the a modern investor may be a little bit too used to these and like very quick bubbles right like crypto is maybe a year or two right meme stocks maybe a year or two but like people don't understand like how big and and still there's so much more to come uh with building out these ai identity data centers you have to just like try building an app with codex once and you'll realize it uh my view is the future of ai work is uh long-running compute intensive uh workloads uh basically you know most people just use ask you just ask how to do a question right and it's you know quick answer uh but what what people are doing in silicon valley right now is they're running these like 24 7 jobs right to basically uh keep churning tokens uh to do work you know the one example is like solve cancer right like you can imagine just giving uh an agent access to your lab and and all this data uh and other agents that it could spawn or whatever and just keeps running in a loop, right, trying to figure out how to solve cancer. And so that is very compute intensive. And we don't have enough GPUs or CPUs or memory or anything. The stat is what, like trillions of dollars in CapEx build out over the next five years, right? And so we just don't have enough. And I think it's going to continue going into the future. How could you be wrong? Either there is some technological innovation that increases the supply, right? That maybe, you know, China develops like their own NVIDIA style GPU really, really fast. That increases supply all of a sudden. Or these workloads don't really transpire. So right now, especially Silicon Valley, like coding is what most people use these LMs for, right? Because they work. So you can build these websites and apps now. But can LMs really replace, you know, accountant, right? A lawyer a doctor right can it really build robots like that's another like 100x thousand x thematic bet that i have like robotics uh is actually the the next inflection point for something called physical ai um that requires like all the kind of same things right like if that stuff doesn't transpire there's no need for it it just kind of stays in coding then a lot of this kind of both pieces falls out what are your robot plays because i tend to agree with you that it seems like the next thing would be taking chat gpt but making it physical yeah turning it into a person or a robot that could do something so how do you see that playing out and where are you investing in that yeah i mean i think this is going to change the world just as much as like chat gpt did uh there is just so much investment recently a16z produced a report that says like uh venture investment in robotics at all-time high like you know 5x in the last quarter i think you know humanoid robotics specifically is really, really interesting because a lot of the world is already designed for humans, right? Like how you open a door, how you put in a screw, et cetera, et cetera. And so if you have a robotic, just, I mean, they don't ask for insurance. They don't ask for sick leaves, vacation leaves. They could work all day. They don't even have to be perfect because humans are not perfect, right? They could show up late. Exactly. Slip and fall. And so there's just, so much investment in robotics right now. And actually, what's really frustrating is that there's no way as a retail investor to really play this. That's been really frustrating. And just like every other kind of way before, right? It's always been happening in the private sector, right? Like, you know, it's from startups to AI stocks right now. There are two or three stocks that are interesting in the robotics world, if you're interested in playing it. One is called OUST, O-U-S-T. They make LiDAR tech, right? So like the lasers, you know, they kind of tell you how far away things are uh most recently they invented colored lidar uh so they're the only ones to make it and so that replaced there replaces two cameras before you used to have like a camera for color and one for uh lidar and now you just have one right and so they're signing up a lot of customers they're public stock um another one is a SPAC that's coming out pretty soon called ccxi agility robotics uh and it's gotten a lot of hype recently because of some twitter influencers talking about it but it is one of the only pure robotics companies to actually list on the stock. And then actually one that I've played a few times is called RoboStrategy. And they have the best ticker, BOT, bot. And the quick story behind that is this guy, Andrew Kang, he basically was an early investor in all these robotics names through his family office and decided to turn that into a closed-end fund to basically let anybody invest it in. There's a lot of mechanics behind it, very similar to MicroStrategy for Bitcoin and like a creative dilution. But basically, yeah, it holds like equity stakes in figure AI. Do you remember that live stream? Yeah, with the robot, you know, for nine days straight, right? Like sorting packages, right? That was like a media moment, right? And so like that's one of the biggest holdings in BLT. So like, you know, you basically get access to that. So what do you think is going to happen over the next five years in terms of the economy? K-shaped, man. Everything is unfortunately K-shaped. And, you know, I think that's why there's this desire, this angst that I notice in the general population, especially young people, to bridge that gap, right? from one end of the cage to the other. And a lot of age to see behind this. But I mean, like, I don't know. My fringe theory is that like this last like 50 or 80 years of the middle class was the exception to the norm, like across like general history, right? Most of history, it was like, you know, you got the rich people and you got the poor people. And because of the internet and globalization, whatever, and America was able to kind of create this middle class. But it does seem like it's kind of going back in the other direction, right? Like people talk about the wealth income gap and et cetera. And so the most important thing is to own assets. So how can someone increase their chances maximally that are on the lower part of the K-shaped recovery to then go to the higher part? Is it focusing just broad strokes here on income or on investment and buying the right assets? The most important thing is you first have to build your base, right? You have to take care of your debts and you have to build your base. And what I mean by base is, you know your financial base your security base you know you can't be worried about when you take risk you can't be worried about your livelihood right and so what that means is you know get a good job right like like like make sure it's like safe and secure um find you know just make sure you're in a good place to actually go take out risk and then you can take a risk in many ways right like if you find find find where you're good at uh and just go do it i think a lot of people just get caught up like trying to think too much and trying to take like baby steps when i say go all in you know it means many things it could just be going and start making youtube videos right just go just go just go do it uh if you you know want to trade stocks or even do sports betting right like go all in and try and figure out do you have an edge uh i mean don't go on don't go in blindly without feedback loop otherwise you do end up losing money or like you know not growing your youtube channel uh set a timeline and i you know set a timeline like by one year i hope to achieve these things and really have a close feedback loop of like am i developing an edge here Because I think the world is more and more rewarding people that are unique and have something different to offer in the world So for the average person who making a year a few thousand dollars invested When others hear noise T Rowe Price interprets market signals to find investment opportunities. 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They have their phone, okay, automatically buy one or something. But buy Spy, buy QQQ, maybe buy $1 of Google, right? Once you have money invested in something, you just care so much more about it and start tracking it, right? Start seeing what people are thinking about it. Start watching YouTube videos about it. Start educating yourself about what it means to be either an investor or trader. And then gradually, basically, you know, kind of do paper trades in your head, right? Like, oh yeah, that guy was talking about, you know, NVIDIA might have good earnings. I'm not going to do it, but like imagine I did today, right? And then, oh, it was right. And it basically kind of retroactively analyzed, oh, why was it right? You know, maybe I'll do the next one or something like that. I agree for a lot of my friends that do have a little bit of margin in their life, meaning like money between what they earn and what they need to spend on their necessity expenses. So like this kind of like entertainment budget, whatever the budget is that they can, the discretionary spending. I always say of that money, invest first, spend later. As soon as I get paid, even when I was getting paid like 4,000 bucks a month, immediately I was shipping off 1,500 into my Robinhood account. And then the additional 2,500 was just like rent taxes. And then I had a little bit of money for food. And that was really it. Invest first and then everything else comes later. Yeah, that's also great advice. Do you think people spend too much time, though, trying to find the next 10x stock and not enough time just trying to increase their income? It really depends on your growth potential at your job, right? Like a lot of people, I mean, you could work really, really hard and get a 3% increase that year, and maybe that time was better spent elsewhere. I mean, that's kind of where I bring it back to this weird angst that I noticed. It's called financial nihilism. You know, a lot of people have written about it. that just feels like your effort does not translate into results anymore. But there's this app on your phone now that does translate your effort into results, good or bad. And I think that agency, that field of control is more and more important for people these days. Generally, I think if you're just aware of what you're doing and also aware of what the payback time period is. So like you mentioned, for example, if you're making $60,000 a year and you have $1,000 that discuss your income, you know you make that back in like a week right and so like if you you know did something and it costs you a week of time then don't do anything for a week you know recuperate then figure out as long as you're learning something if you were to start from zero and build back to 10 million ideally what stocks would you explore and how exactly would you do it like what are like maybe three main picks you'd look into my pick right now is shaz right sharing ai to neocloud based in australia because i think this data center build out is only going to continue um another one that's actually really interesting is nokia really yeah yeah because they recently got a billion dollar investment from nvidia itself and they also make these um local edge node chips so basically um as compute increases the they get slower too right and so you want them to go really really fast and so instead of like everything like happening in the cloud and coming back it could happen at your local like telco like a tower or something like that and so that's kind of another really interesting one and for someone who does not want to trade stocks or swing trade but they want to build their wealth over the next 10 years what do you recommend buy google i mean if i were to distill it down to the simplest piece of advice right like buy google why google they're at the center of everything right they're they they have the consumers right via Google, YouTube, Google Maps, Android, everything like that. They're building, you know, one of the best models out there. They have Google Deep Brain and all these really, really intelligent people. They're the only one at that intersection, actually, if you think about it. Like, there are a bunch of, you know, AI infrastructure-specific only plays, and there are a bunch of companies that have, you know, a lot of consumers, but there's no other company in the world that has both. And I think that's just, it's an incredible moment. It'll just continue growing. What's a realistic annualized return that you think someone could expect over the next five, 10 years? I mean, I think the SPY is going to make like 10 to 20%. You think it's going to continue at that trajectory? Yeah. Like I think the profits, the revenue numbers are all there. The big companies are going to continue getting bigger. Like I said, this is our version of the industrial revolution. And so I think if you're trying to trade, you're actually trying to beat that. Didn't that somewhat end though with the 1920s Great Depression? There was a lot of margin or a lot of other factors like the dust bowl and stuff like that, right? We're seeing a mini version of that right now in Korea. I don't know. I'm watching. I get the Twitter notification where it's like your stock market circuit breaker just, you know, down 10%. But then I'm looking at the US markets and we're up. Yeah, yeah. I think we have developed a lot of rules and regulations and guardrails since the 1920s, right? I think the market also moves a lot faster and any bubbles can have a mini pop and any corrections get a mini bounce a lot faster. And so I don't think we're going to get some kind of crazy depression. I think we'll have a lot of volatility, but I still expect a good 10 plus percent per year over the next five years. I am always worried that we've gone up so much over these last 15, 16 years since 2010. I'm like, how much longer can this continue before we start averaging like 2% to 6% a year for a while? Maybe like a forgotten period, right? Right. And then people kind of grow bored of it. And then they reallocate their assets somewhere else because the stock market's not doing anything. I mean, what else do you invest in, right? T-bills. Graham has, what, 25% cash? It's 20, 25% somewhere. Cash right now. Yeah, I have more. What's not cash? It's tax-free muni bonds. Tax-free muni bonds. Make a blended 4% tax-free. It's great. It's great. No state income tax. You should transfer it to X money. 6%. You know what's so funny? So I could take out a pledged asset line below that 6%. I did all the math on this. Yeah. And net taxes, it's not worth it for me to transfer. I see. It's such a small increase that I would be able to get, and I would have to take millions of dollars to even make it worthwhile. And I'm like, am I really going to risk millions of dollars for like a point something percent? No, simplicity is better. Annualized return, it's not worth it. But I thought of it. And I worked every which way if I could take margin and I could take a pledged asset line and move it over here. Wasn't worth it. But it is very appealing. The line only goes up, right? Like America is still the number one country. The US dollar is still the most important currency. You have 401ks still reinvesting into Spire every year. You have Trump accounts now. They're also going to be invested into the markets, right? The best companies are in America. And like I said, they're only going to keep growing. I don't see a bear case. Man, I feel like that's what everyone says, though, right before. It's like we cut to like a month later and something happened. Even the 2022 blip is a blip now, right? I mean, yes. I mean, this is, you know, we're young to remember, like, what was 2001-2008 like? Right? Because that, in theory, was kind of like a flat line for the U.S. stock market. albeit that's from top to top. True. On the 108, right? Maybe people have talked about how euphoric and senseless the dot-com bubble actually was with really fake revenue and stuff like that. We're not seeing that now. And again, I think everything just gets corrected now because you have social media, because you have this forum of people arguing every single bear case that exists out there. All the ideas kind of get out. People talk about the circular financial engineering, whatever, like companies. People are talking about it openly, right? No one's finding anything. is now scaring billions of dollars to keep getting pushed in so i think yeah what about any black swan event so like a like a covid 25 or something yeah i tend to think it's something nuclear i tend to think all it takes is why are you laughing i'm just saying because like dude if if like if we have you know nuclear fallout i am not caring about my schwab account it's like i'm I'm not going to care that I really shouldn't have taken on an additional $100,000 of margin to buy Google stock. That's why you should be buying. That's why Jack doesn't buy the bottoms. He only buys the tops. Excuse me. I invested in Bloom. It plummeted. And then I also bought the bottom. So I do sometimes buy the bottom after I've already lost a lot. Let's just say all of a sudden some country, I'm not going to say which one, drops 10 nukes on America. Right. On America. But there would be some fear or there would be something on the other side. I mean, it's impossible to predict. So it's hard to live or invest like that, right? And I don't know if you're going to get the push notification early enough to sell before it happens. Get the Amber Alert. Yeah. Immediately sell everything. Yeah, yeah. I mean, in that sense, build up as much money as you can and then switch to gold. Is there a specific type or style of investing that you have officially banned yourself from ever doing again? And you would recommend people ban themselves from doing that same thing. Yeah. I mean, I don't touch options. I don't touch options at all. It's just, it's too enticing. What do you think about Jack's option strategy? Wait, do you buy or sell? I sell options. You sell options. So I sell puts to enter positions and I'll find something with a high implied volatility on a blue chip company that I really like, such as Robinhood, such as, you know, I have a little bit of Elf, I have a little bit of Bloom and I sell puts to enter the positions and then I sell calls to, you know, ideally make some weekly premium. And if I'm buying options, I buy them over leaps where it's essentially just leveraged money. Does it increase your stress at all? Like, are you watching it close to destroying? No, if anything, it decreases my stress because it's a hedge against the position. So like my stress would be amplified if I was just owning the stock outright because that's technically a more aggressive strategy than hedging against it, which would be like a covered call. Yeah, yeah. So like the way I see it is if I can make two, if I have to collect 2% premium per week on a company, 3% premium per week on a company selling covered calls, then I know if the company goes down 3%, I'm exactly where I was. If it goes up, however much it is, I collect 3%. If it stays the same, I collect 3%. If it goes down 10%, the IV spikes. And if the IV spikes, so do premiums. And then I'll just sell another covered call to continually decrease my tax basis. And the same logic that you said, how the only thing you really consider is the average cost or like your enterprise. That's essentially what I'm doing too, by selling calls to decrease, you know, it's one way of looking at it, my average cost. Yeah. I don't know. I'm a very simple person, right? And that's just, that's a lot of math. And to me, the, if you're willing to, if it makes sense to you, right. And like the math is easy and it doesn't add stress or take too much time to kind of analyze and figure out what the right options to sell are. I think, you know, I think it is good. I mean, many people have recommended it to me. I just like to try to keep things simple. Let's compare Robinhood accounts. We're all going to compare Robinhood accounts at the end of this podcast, guys. I have to ask you, why were you banned from Wall Street bets? Oh, I don't know. I think someone just got really jealous and kind of like rage banned me and deleted a bunch of my posts. Because you were kind of famous on Wall Street bets. Yeah. Yeah. Like I didn't do anything wrong. I was posting, you know, just screenshots of my trades. Right. And like they got tons of upvotes. um i mean i i had someone uh dm me uh who's apparently part of the mod team right and she said like there's just one random person who like hates you and just like a moderator that hates you yeah when did you get banned i don't know this is probably like um mid 2021 or something um do you have any idea why i mean i i've perused your reddit account you do say some things that are you know, maybe a little bit abrasive to some with, you know, moms or mother-in-laws. It's Reddit culture, right? It was Wall Street culture. I was obviously just kind of playing into it. No, I think probably they just saw me getting too big and just wanted to cut it out. You think it would help their forum, though, to have you on there and bring in more views, more engaging? I mean, yeah. These moderators on Reddit are weird. you're you're it seems like they like like like lost porn more than they enjoy the games yeah like you're one of the few people on wall street bets that turned you know 30 you made effectively 10 million dollars from nothing and they banned you yeah but then all of a sudden you post yourself losing 99 of your portfolio what i've learned a lot is that everything all hate is just jealousy you know and so probably uh they're they get to see a winner right uh and yeah the moderators on reddit are just extremely power hungry they just love banning people for any reason it's basically like a power uh trip and what's more toxic x or reddit 100% reddit 100% reddit yeah people say like x is bad i'm like this is nothing compared to what i used to deal with what makes reddit so toxic do you think that the stereotype of like the neck beard you know sitting at like the you You got like some sauce from the night before dribbling down your chin or whatever, you know, like your belly's hanging over your desk. Yeah. Like, is that accurate, you think, of Reddit users? They call it like the internet hive mind theory, right? When you take like a bunch of people and you anonymize them and put them in a group, it just descends into like the scum of the earth. It's the anonymity, you think? Exactly, exactly. Like, I've connected with several people on Reddit. but the problem is I had to use my own thinking skills and reading skills to articulate okay this guy actually sounds like a well-educated adult versus some 10 year old kid right and I would actually connect with them and you know etc etc and I trusted their word more but generally the way the algorithm works and the upvotes work is just very much based on dunking and extreme content and you just don't know who these people are On the topic of Reddit you created r slash the race to 10 million I'm curious why did this resonate with so many people because it has like 500,000 members. And what is so important about getting a $10 million net worth? It all started as a kind of inside joke with me and a couple other Redditors that like we were all kind of racing our own ways to 10 million and see who gets there first. I mean, obviously it's just like a nice big number. And we created a subreddit. We're basically posting like updates and screenshots and like, you know, I made it first and there was like a spreadsheet of like, you know, where one was at. And it actually kind of died down for a little bit between like 2020 and 2023. but somewhere in the middle i think it crossed like a magical number just like on its own like around like 25 000 members and i think that's when it started getting trending on the front page right and i mean that was my favorite part of wall street bets uh it was the the game porn and loss porn right like the big kind of numbers on the screenshots and so people just started posting their crazy gains on the race of 10 million it was like the perfect forum for it uh and so i kind of cleaned it up a little bit uh i started promoting it um and wall street bets at that time I mean, it's just started turning into like an Instagram meme page, right? It turned a bit into a cesspool. Exactly. Exactly. No one was actually sharing any real DD. People, you couldn't follow like people's stories. And so I think the race to 2 million kind of filled that gap. What gets unlocked at a $10 million net worth? Why is that number so important? I mean, first and foremost, I live in California. It's a very, very expensive state. um and i think you know if you want the modern life that social media it sells to you these days right it is very expensive like whenever i post something like that people are like oh you can move to southeast asia you could just like you know buy this kind of house in uh in tennessee or something like that right but like that's yes you can live and i can retire you know for 50 60 years probably in thailand right but do i want to right like you know and i think you've talked about this on your videos often right like the the what people want in a house yeah right compared to like 30 years ago people can't stand single pane windows right they want central air like that'd be this that's a quality of life that we want uh has dramatically increased and you could blame social media for that you can blame a lot of things for that but we're also just still humans right like we get fed you know this information unwillingly and that kind of raises our own bar for like what we expect and happiness is basically expectation meets uh minus reality right and so if your expectation because of just various social media and life tells you that you need to, you know, be able to send your kids to this kind of daycare or go on vacation twice a year or something like that, like that's kind of like, unfortunately, what you expect from life now. And so like, you know, even at $10 million, that's not going to survive me for 60 plus years. Like I've done, I've done the math. Like it's very expensive to live and you're not even taking into account inflation and like, who knows what happens to future, right? Because again, like if you retire, you're not probably not gonna be able to get a job after you're out of the workforce for 10 years. So are people misguided then and they have their sights set on $10 million when in actuality it should be more? I think so, actually. How much higher? There's this really good report from the Hampton Club. And they had this PDF where they kind of did a survey and got all these numbers and results and feelings around it. And I think it quoted $50 million as the number where you just stop worrying. You just stop worrying. No matter what happens, you could tank it. you know, the market goes down. But I will say, because I saw that survey and I did a whole video on that survey because I found it very interesting. A lot of those people don't have 50 million liquid. It's 50 million net worth. That's fair. And a lot of that net worth could be tied up in their company or private equity. Who knows? So the liquid amount is lower. I would argue that the liquid amount is lower, but according to that, it was a 50 million net worth. that was the point psychologically where people cared more about legacy and doing something with purpose than they did about making more money but under 50 million dollars they cared more about making more money in terms of importance of you know there's there's that and also family and everything else but yeah that was still on the radar still worries still stress like oh if the market had a bad year oh crap now i need to like grind again so explain then your logic in i mean you had this race to 10 million Reddit. This was clearly your fire or your fat fire goal was 10 million financial independence, retire early. You wanted to race to $10 million net worth. You did exactly that swing trading, going all in on individual stocks. But then once you hit that net worth, you threw it all into ETFs. And so explain this cognitive dissonance where you think that actual freedom is higher than 10 million. You race to 10 million, but then once you hit it, you did exactly what one would do to kind of slow down and preserve their capital instead of like race to a higher net worth. Yeah. So, I mean, this was my grind, right? Like I made it to $10 million and essentially it's my nest egg now. I think it's also compounded by the fact that I can't really access it. You know, it's in my 401k. If I withdraw from it, I get taxed. It turns into income tax and a 10% early withdrawal penalty. Right. That's really significant. Right. So essentially, like I kind of think of it like a trust fund that I created. that you're not supposed to touch. Like, you know, maybe I would draw from it to top off or, you know, I want to buy something nice. And I have withdrawn like a few million from it, right? For life stuff. But you're not supposed to. And I think that keeps me hungry too. Like I want to make my legacy, I want to make my impact and success, you know, through my startup, through the old fashioned way, right? Actually have for them, like make something impactful for people, a real business. And this is just, it's a safety buffer now, right? So rather than continue to go all in on that and the stresses that come with, you know, trying to do that for $10 million, dollars that's parked in index funds it's gonna double in 10 years that's 20 right it's gonna double again in 10 years like why not just wait and use my time uh in something else and so then how is your current net worth divided up how much money is in your 401k yeah i have currently i think 11.5 million dollars in the 401k uh that's divided up in uh 55 million in spy 5.5 million is qqq uh and i think like you know close to millions in d ram uh you know memory chips uh and and and Then I have the Robin Hood all-in account. That's currently at $52K that I trade with and look at every day. And then the rest is just savings and the house. See, I never liked the 401K. Yeah. I hated it. I hated the idea of foregoing taxes today and paying taxes later. Because in my perspective, taxes, I think, are going to be higher in the future. Right. Especially, I think, in California where you are. Right. This gives me options. I don't have to be in California when I withdraw. But you're still going to have to pay federal income taxes. Sure, sure. Yes. And that can change in the future, right? And so, yeah, that is a small risk I'm taking. But I like to have, you know, now I'm, you know, kind of like trying to justify it and how it works and all that stuff and strategize around it. But this was all a happy accident. But if you could have done it differently, would you prefer to have done it in a Roth or in a taxable account? Anything other than a 401k? Definitely a Roth. i get quite depressed when i run the numbers and you know what's funny is the reason i didn't do in a roth right like i said like i started uh january 2020 with 35k uh in the 401k i had the option to transfer to roth uh to do the rollover but then that means i would have had to use my own cash to pay the tax for the rollover which was around 12k i was like i don't want to pay 12k out of pocket for this rollover but it was a few million dollar mistake yeah yeah i mean in hindsight right but you could never you never know no one expects a 401k to turn into 10 million right well you did yeah you certainly did and you still didn't pay i still would um suggest doing it in a 401k raw because again psychologically you can't touch it and i think that that saves you a lot of stress and pressure from like you know down days or whatever and also um uh it just feels compartmentalized right versus like in your taxable mortgage account i gotta worry about all these things and taxes and you can withdraw from anytime you want. So how much should the average person aim to save? I mean, you just got to figure out the life you want to live, right? And double it. I mean, there's a fire map, right? Four percent of your net worth, right? As your kind of average yearly spend, right? And so, but I think it is important to double it. I think I don't, you know, there's very few people who've actually retired early and tell stories about like, I mean, You always want to avoid the worst case scenario. And to me, a worst case scenario is you retire early because you thought you hit a number, right? Five to 10 years pass. Something happens, maybe like a black spot or something like that, a market tank. So you made a mistake or accident, who knows, whatever, right? Something miscalculated. Now you're 10 years out of a job. How do you bounce back? So for you, doesn't that mean 20 million? So now it's a race to 20 million. Yes. I think 20 million is kind of my next target. And I will feel a lot safer with 20 million. And now you say double it. What if someone has 20 million? Is it 40? I mean, at $20 million, what is 4% a year? $800,000. $800,000 a year. So yeah, I mean, I think that's a pretty good life. 20, you don't have to double. No, no. I mean, $800,000, I mean, a million dollar salary a year, right? You think about what kind of life you can live with that. I think that's pretty good. I mean, other people have different ambitions. They want to travel every day. They want a private jet. I get it. But for me, I'm a pretty simple guy in real life. you know? So at what point does taking on additional risk just not become worth it? Hey, by the way, really quick, if you want extra content just like this, as well as early access and a bonus post show posted every single week, feel free to join as a channel member to get immediate access to all of that, as well as early access to everything else that we post, along with priority responses to all of your comments. So if that sounds cool, feel free to join. Would love to have you on board. Thanks so much. We'll get back to the podcast now. So at what point does taking on additional risk just not become more of it? I would say it's at 10 million. Yeah, there's something nice about that number. I think, you know, the first million is nice, but it's really meaningless these days. Right. And I think you need to kind of keep going. And I think it's also important to kind of stay hungry through that through that journey. Right. Either the grind, whether you're doing YouTube or investing or trading or whatever it is to stay hungry until you hit like 10 million. I think 10 million is pretty important. And so have you fully retired from your job? No, I'm as busy as ever. So you're still working your career. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I'm the founder and CEO of this company called Alpha AI. We built a proactive agentic trading companion. So it's like a mobile app that you could talk to and it'll trade for you. And I guess you could call me an ex-influencer now. You know my ex is kind of crazy Like I started posting just to kind of market the startup Right And I grew from like a couple thousand followers to over 160 followers now How much do you make on X It kind of funny So on RevShare, I make like $1,000 a week, I think is the kind of average rate. But I've kind of blown up my X subscriptions quite a lot. And so the story behind it is another happy accident. I turned on X subscriptions because I thought it might help me with the algo. like that's it um and i said at the highest price because i didn't want anyone to actually buy how much was the price i said at 200 a month yeah yeah and i didn't have any content i was like i'm not i don't want to post like subscriber only content i don't want i don't want this like you know extra you know thing to do right and then like you know one person subscribed you know two persons subscribed accidentally i asked him like what do you want you're like oh i'm just happy to support. I'm like, okay, cool, thanks. And then 20 people subscribed and then 100 people subscribed and a couple hundred people subscribed. How many people do you now have subscribed to you? I don't think people are going to go crazy about that. And this is the most transparent financial influencer on X, right? Oh, thank you, thank you. Yeah, yeah, repeat that. Okay, I'm the most transparent financial influencer. I need to show you this now. Okay, yeah. I can show you my creator studio subscriptions panel. Oh, wow. Wow. oh my gosh okay so you have about 600 active subscribers paying you $200 a month wow yeah I feel like we we gotta be uh and this is Michael take note of that this is only started in the last two months wait a second I can't do math yeah 120 grand a month yeah I mean that's gross revenue you gotta take out the Apple fees and Stripe fees and all that kind of stuff right Not a fees, Jack. Yeah, 25% off. And taxes. Taxes, 1099, all that kind of stuff. State taxes. So you're making, I don't know, like 80 grand a month, post all fees, everything on Twitter. It's kind of crazy. I think there's a strong desire for transparent and authentic financial media. I mean, I'd love to flip the interview back to you a little bit and just get your thoughts on where you think the future of financial influencers is going to go. No one's watching CNBC anymore. It's true. I think there's such a fine line because I noticed with any sort of stock trading person, subscriptions are like the number one way to make money. But in a way, you're almost selling money because there's this idea that, oh, I'll pay $200. I get some proprietary information that'll make me more than that. And so it's a very easy push of like, hey, if I pay $200, I could see an ROI of even $100. I make $100 a month paying $200 is an example. it just it sells itself in such a way so i see a lot of success with that yeah the the gray area becomes what's the success rate of the stocks and do you have an influence on the price going up if you buy something does that cause the price to go up and then all of a sudden now is this the self-fulfilling prophecy of like i buy a stock and it goes up because i buy it yeah and And I take this matter very seriously. It affects the stocks I pick and when I post about it. I mean, I think the number one thing is I'm very transparent. I post my buys and my sells. People know exactly what I'm talking about. I don't have any other accounts. I only have those two accounts, the 401k and my Robinhood account. I post my exact thoughts. Even recently, I only post my trades after market closed down. When others hear noise, T. Rowe Price interprets market signals to find investment opportunities. That's the power of active ETFs from T. Rowe Price. Their portfolio managers approach data from multiple perspectives, analyzing trends and conducting deep research to give you their curiosity-backed active management expertise. Learn more about their active ETFs at TROPrice.com slash explore ETFs. Exchange-traded funds ETFs are bought and sold at market prices, not NAV. Investors generally incur the cost of the spread between the prices at which shares are bought and sold. Buying and selling shares may result in brokerage commissions, which will reduce returns. TROPrice Investment Services, Inc. To me, this is no different than someone going on TV and saying, like, I own this stock, right? I can see him like Kramer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or like Michael Berry, right? Like he has a sub stack. He's making, you know, multi-millions. A hundred thousand. Yeah, yeah. And like he, you know, he's definitely aware if he was in a movie, right? And so like, I think that's freedom of speech is very important. But I think where people get, you know, just the bad people are doing very bad things. I've been in these discords. I have read the SEC filings, the lawsuits against these people, right? Where they're just lying. They're just straight up lying. They're saying like, my price target is $1,000. I'm holding this forever. And they just sold. Like you just, just blatant light. So what should they do to prevent that from happening? Or what disclosures do you think should be required to crack down on that? The SEC can only go after big people, right? Like the reason went after Andrew left, right? The Citron short seller guy because he was doing this exact same thing, right? He was telling people I'm still holding his my price target and that he would just be selling into that movement that he created, right? I think that's just, that is wrong and that is deceitful. That's what the SEC defines as manipulation and deceitful. I think transparency is really important, right? Like how much are you playing with, when you buy, when you sell. And that's why I post all my trade receipts. It's like a video too. Like it's like, you know, completely real. And I think directly to your question, you have to teach everyone how to do independent thinking, right? You have to teach people how to recognize these scams and these like deceitful people. Like that's really how you protect the masses because no matter what, the SEC can't go after everyone. So how much money are you making on X? I mean currently I guess you could say I'm making a million dollars a year That is absurd A million dollars a year and that's from $200 a month subscription fee that people Pay into your membership Yeah it's from the ex-subscription I started Only about two months ago It's only going to go up man especially with the amount That you're tweeting I mean I'm not even doing much I post like you know a few posts a day I post my early thoughts my watch list you know my trades Right I think there's just so much There's a there's a latent opportunity, right? And a small window to become, I think, you know, I think X is going to be the most important platform for all the tastemakers in the world. Like, I mean, the vision for X or SpaceX AI, right? Is for it to be the operating system on Mars, right? The social platform, the chat platform, the money platform, etc. But even here on Earth, I mean, Zuckerberg tweeted the latest model release on X. It got 12 million views, right? Like the chief AI officer officer, Alexander Wang, I met, posts like 400 times on X and like a few times on threads, their own product, right? So that just shows you how important X is to kind of the general kind of talking points and population. It's all downstream from there. And so I think it's really important to be an influencer there. So I skim Twitter or X daily. Like I'm constantly looking at X and you started showing up in my feed and I would see your tweets and I liked them and I would kind of like keep tabs on you because I thought the transparency was really interesting. I'm like, okay, like I wonder if he's making money, losing money. What is he buying? What is he selling? When is he doing all of this trading activity? And I enjoyed it. But I also found myself like a little annoyed by your account, too. And I think obviously that's kind of like you do it on purpose. You post like rage bait. And I wanted you to correct any of my observations because I could be wrong about some of these things. But these are the main contending points that I have to the stuff that you say on Twitter. And I want to hear your opinion on this. Obviously, you publicly shared that your net worth was like $10 million, $11 million-ish, $12 million close to now. It's in my bio. It's in your bio. So you're like, you showed your net worth, but then for some time you created this challenge account. And in the challenge account, you said, I'm going all in. Like I'm full porting. But I think for a while you didn't really stipulate that that was your challenge account. And so some could be led astray thinking you're putting $11 million into some company when in actuality it was, you know, less than point whatever, 0.3% of your net worth. Was this true or was this? I assume that people were following me and aware of the entire story, right? Like people have seen me post about my journey. People have seen me post about my 401k, $11 million screenshots. And they'll see that this is a Rob McClure screenshot is completely different, right? And this is an all-in challenge, which I also do mention in various kind of replies and comments, right? Yes, not everyone follows every single tweet. Sometimes they just see one tweet and that's your first time exposure for you. So I do, you know, make sure I add asterisk. I saw that you started doing that recently, which I appreciated because you said, I'm going all in, added an asterisk. And then you said down in the bottom of the tweet, you clarified, this is all in on a challenge account. So it's not actually like my public $11 million net worth. It's just like the 35 or so thousand. But then another thing that I saw that you do that I was like a little about was you started the new challenge account with $35,000. You ran it up to what was the peak? Oh yes. I did run up to about a hundred K. So you ran it up to a hundred K. How quickly? Um, I mean like a month or two. Yeah. A month or two, but then you ran it back down. to like 35K. Yeah. Basically exactly what you were in the beginning. And then you recently tweeted, I turned 35K into 50K in a matter of like a couple months. Yes, you did do that because now you're at 50K. And so you did that, but it was from the second time of being at 35K, which I also thought was like, okay, this seems like it's lacking a little bit of transparency because technically you're still down, you know, 50K from your all-time high. Granted, the returns are still solid. Yes, yes, yes. it's very hard to, you know, explain all that nuance and disclaimers on Twitter, right? And especially, you know, you're trying to balance, you know, engagement and going viral and content, whatever. Like people say that in the comments, right? And I like them and I retweet them too, right? But like, you know, kind of tongue in cheek, right? Like, shh, right? Like, dude, like I don't try to hide that, right? Like other people, you know, expose that. I'm like, you're right, right? Like I really kind of lean into the fact that like, you know, I round tripped already, right? to me, it's, you know, it's marketing, right? Like Twitter, I mean, it's similar to, I think, how Apple always says every iPhone is the best iPhone they've ever made, right? Like when the common person hears that, they're like, oh my God, here's the best phone ever made, right? But only kind of, you know, tech insiders, like, oh yeah, that's a very specific sentence they said. And, you know, similar to me, when I say I went from 35K to 52K in two weeks, that is technically accurate, right? And so, you know, in terms of disclaimers and is there other information, you know, people are not getting. This is why, again, I endorse, you know, independent thinking and doing our research. Like you have to kind of click in a profile, see the other tweets and kind of catch up on the story, right? Like there's just so much, like I can't be explaining the whole story to you every single time. Otherwise, none of the posts will go viral. So when's the last time you were wrong? The worst trade I made in this new account has been RCAT, Red Cat Drones, because I thought that, you know, the Pentagon, they approved like a billion dollars in spending and the whole, Ukraine war kind of changed how the war story works. And there's going to be a lot of investment in drones. That is actually true. That did not reflect in the stock price at all. And so I kind of held this down and all the way, that's what kind of made me round trip all the way down back to 35K. What I was curious about is I know you bought RCAT and then it went down a lot, but then you doubled down by buying RCACs, which is the 2X leveraged RCAT stock. And I'm curious, did your thesis change or did your conviction level change in order for you to go from, you know, just the base share of RCAT to the 2X leverage? I had never done any leverage ETM ever before, right? I tried to stay away from those. And that was a rule I set, but you know, rules are meant to be changed, right? Different market conditions, different styles, whatever is meant to be, you know, played with. You got to experiment with yourself too. And so I did get successful with palu which was a 2x version of palu to networks right uh and that went well because earnings and whatever like that uh so i was like oh you know maybe 2x leverage things are worth playing with right if you have extremely high conviction uh and with the red cat play you know i thought like i could catch the bounce uh and with a 2x levered play you only have to bounce halfway there in order to make it all the way back uh but again the bounce never came and i think my main takeaway there is yeah you don't that was almost essentially going off all tilt and so the mental kind of stop loss was 35k because you didn't want to go probably beneath the original. That is fair. Yeah. I don't do real stop losses like systematically. Right. But I do have mental stop losses. Right. If something's, you know, down 20 percent, 30 percent and the chart just looks absolutely ugly, you know, then. I'm curious how your membership fees changed from, you know, taking it 35k to 100k. Like how many members did you have paying you $200 a month? And then how did that change after you were incorrect about the RCAT and RCACs thesis? The analytics behind extra subscriptions are actually very light. There's not that much information about churn rate and who's canceled and when they cancel, whatever, right? But the gross number. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've seen it dip down. I mean, like, you know, I'm not sure if it was related to the RCAT play or just like, you know, they subscribe for one month. I want to see what was behind the content. They liked it or didn't like it. And then they churned. Like, I think like, you know, similar to me, like a lot of times you sign up for a subscription, right? And the first thing you do is just go cancel, right? So I'm not sure if that's not, if it's related to the play itself or they just wanted to try for a month. What's funny to me is like, technically speaking, you did bring it back up to 50 or 55 is where you're at right now. Who's to say you're where you'll be in a week or two weeks or a month? Who's to say? But the funny thing is you bring it up and then everyone starts subscribing. And I imagine like the gross amount of subscribers that you had went down, right? After. Yeah, yeah. RCAT and RCACs, like once you were incorrect about that thesis, then people unsubscribed and stop paying you. But then probably as you're going back up again, then people are like resubscribing. But they don't have the foresight to look over a long period of time. And this is not my endorsement into you as an investor. I'm just saying like technically speaking, if you do look at the data over a long period of time, you have been correct more than you've been wrong. And it's funny how it just kind of like there is a clear correlation between how you're doing and how you're not doing. like in a small window of time. Well, that's investors across. Yeah, exactly. It's just funny. Buying and the hype and selling the fare, always. I share this message with every new subscriber. I highly endorse independent thinking, right? I share my thesis. It's up to you to decide whether you like it or not, right? And for the R-Cat one, a lot of people disagree with me, you know, and I noticed that. A lot of people did not enter the play with me because it was a fairly weak thesis, like looking back on it, right? and so I'm happy that you know a lot of people do you think that you felt pressured to go big to like prove yourself again in that trade yes there was another lesson I posted about recently which was uh don't force a trade yeah right I think because of whatever was happening at that time right I was like ah let me find another trade and like the thesis just wasn't strong enough and so it's actually funny because even like last week uh when the market was down a little bit I'm like oh should I like swing again like no no no like just cool down right if you're like trying to force it. If your thesis is not strong enough, just like cool down. It's fine. You can even stay in cash for a little bit until you feel like you understand the market. And so a lot of lessons. Yeah. Who do you think is the best investor alive right now? There's a clear answer for that, actually, is Leopold Machenbrenner, right? The ex-OpenAI guy that started his situational awareness fund and invested in all these picks and shovels, right? I think up to like $20 billion in AUM, which is from a two-year track record, by the way, This is equal to Bill Ackman's Pershing Square that he's developed over 20 years. And this guy, because he wrote his early thesis on the AI infrastructure build-out, invested in all the picks and shovels along the way. That's why he's up to $20 billion now. Doesn't that concern you, though, because Cathie Wood had a similar upswing 2020-2021? Yeah. I mean, I think the game changes at different scales. I think he knows this industry well. there's obviously this is the right timing for that but who knows what wave happens in the future right that he or me or not benefit from and also you know honestly speaking like all these hedge fund managers at a certain point you're like you know trying to increase your aom because you can kind of bank the fees right you're not necessarily in it for the gains themselves that's an interesting point yeah that they're that they're probably not so focused on taking risk that could on average yield them 40 if that means they have some years where it goes down that is my critique of that quote that like uh hedge fund managers uh statistically don't beat spy because i think most managers are playing a different game right you're playing a game of delivering good reports to their bosses you're playing a game of like i better make sure i don't lose money so that you know my uh lps uh don't don't don't exit right and they're playing a game of like hey we developed you know we doubled this year give us more money right versus if you're playing with your own money you're actually really invested in in in concentrating these bets and thinking deeply about your own net worth and stuff. It's easier to sell a product that guarantees, you know, positive return, even if the positive return is like three to 5% than it is to sell something that could have negative 10% one year, but up 40% and like that volatility because people don't have the stomachs. The dirty secret on Wall Street is most people just want to make that one year claim to fame, right? Start their own fund and then just coast for the rest of their life. What are your thoughts on Chris Camillo? I love Chris. Yeah, I watched the podcast with you guys. He was on another live stream with Amit and Wolf recently talking about AI agentic trading. I think he's the GOAT. We asked him what he thought about you. And he said, I actually don't know much about him and can't remember why I started following him. But there must be a reason. Since he is a course guy that likely regularly shares trade ideas with traders who will pour money into each of them, I'd ask the question about exactly what parameters he puts in place to ensure that he's not profiting off of the trading flow of his subscribers. How many days minimum does he wait before exiting a published buy trade? Does he fully disclose his exits? By Kevin Hsu's own words in his article, Embracing Degeneracy, he seems to be the byproduct of right time, right place, luck fueled by a methodology that is highly concentrated. Feels like he is better than an average investor who spends time researching and taking concentrated bets that have worked out. But most of this appears to have been fueled by a bull market. So not necessarily a genius investor with a meaningfully differentiated strategy as much as a bold investor who is benefiting from simply bringing aggressive, long and concentrated in high risk growth equities. It's a relatable story, as most anyone can replicate that success to some extent. What do you say to that? Thank you. I think it's a fairly accurate critique. I am very bold because I like I like big rewards, like small rewards don't excite me that much. Right. It's not worth the time and effort. um and uh there's definitely a huge degree of luck right like i'm doing this in these bull markets right but i also i mean the way the reason i post on x and and try to get engaged in bait is because i'm trying to i think you need to put yourself in positions of luck too right i think a lot of people uh don't uh i think a lot of people are are very conservative they can't deal with any money loss at all like i i know people with millions in cash and they've been in cash for the last five years, right? I'm like, what are you doing? At least put it in a spot. You're like, oh, but I could be buying a top or et cetera. I don't get it. I'm just like, I think you need to put yourself in positions to become lucky, right? And also just like minimize your loss, right? And that stuff. In terms of like the course guy, it's funny, I don't have a course. I don't have a Discord. I don't have any of that stuff, right? I told you the story of X subscriptions and people, I am very thankful and people enjoy my kind of like more longer form rambling thoughts right because like on x you have to kind of be more polished and you know maybe tight and concise to go viral etc versus um myself only for like a kind of more long form which is like what i'm thinking about etc etc and i i take that duty uh very importantly right and so i do have some guardrails i set for myself right i never touch a company like less than a billion dollar market cap um i never sell same day you know i i i mean that's generally just because i i i want to see the thesis play out right and so i don't really have like a strict time like i must hold for this amount of time right but if you actually do look at my track record i never sold a stock like within three days right like i kind of again like i want to see the thesis kind of play out and i'm very upfront with folks that like i might trade at any of the whims notice right i like i add it i add that disclaimer uh i even give a heads up they're like hey look uh i'm looking the market's looking weak today i'm not like this you know, I might exit in like the next few hours or something like that. Right. And so like, I'm not, I'm not, there's, I'm not front running anybody. Here's an interesting question. Do you think people should have savings accounts if they don't have any thing in the foreseeable future that they're planning on spending their savings on? Or should it just, should a savings account for those types of people just be spy? I'll say yes to that, but I feel like I'm a little bit of a hypocrite because I do have 400K in S-Gov, you know, basically like bonds as well as the emergency fund, right? But I think that's just because of my, you know, cash flow these days. I just want to make sure I have a bigger fund. I think, I mean, establish an emergency fund, like hands down, right? But then everything else beyond that, yeah, definitely put it in SPY. You were going to show Robinhood account. Let's compare our Robinhood accounts. Sure, sure. All right, Graham, pull yours out. Well, I don't have. You want a rate? Don't you have something in there? I have something. Want to do like a race to a million dollars in our Robinhoods? I would do this for the members. Would you put 10K? Yeah, for sure. I'll do 10K. account right up here and then we could and i just deposit money if this is something that you guys would be interested in let us know this is something that i i would be i would be down for but first let's just show off our show off you know whatever you want to call it technically for me it's not really showing off but mine is 169 000 and it's because bitcoin is up uh quite a bit today okay and then what's your what's your like monthly and then your yearly oh we don't want to see the yearly that's not important weekly i'm up by two and a half percent monthly i'm up 5.4 percent and then what's your one year uh we don't want to see that jack come on this we have to we have to catch a flight yeah but oh but that's just because crypto is down and then what's your all time uh now i don't know because i don't really use this account i just moved it away so how are you gonna hate on me when you've lost more than i've like the thing is i only the thing is i only moved this in because Robinhood gave me the 3% crypto bonus. So I moved something into here. Right. So that 90,000 loss is kind of fake. It is fake because it doesn't know my cost basis. My cost basis of Bitcoin in this was like 28 to 32K. So this only tracks from when I put it in. Whatever your portfolio is, you're choosing to buy those holdings every single day. And so just because you bought Robinhood a while ago doesn't mean that you continued to hold it through the overpriced valuation. Tax loss, harvest and offset games. Here's mine. This account, as you can see in my all time graph, I ran it from like 40K to 81K. This was selling options right here and then buying options right here. And so like selling options was working out great. And then I got greedy because I'm like, I know how to do this. Started buying options. Also Dogecoin, lost everything. And then I restart and I tried it again, lost everything. I'm like, okay, this time what I'm going to do is something different. And I'm only going to let myself sell options because every time I've sold options, it's worked out really well for me. So I started with like basically 10K. I'm up, I don't know, 11.4% in two months ish. And then if I go to my other account, my gamble account, this is the account that I loaded with 100K. And so it's fresh, only ever had 100 grand in it. And the idea was I would make enough money to purchase this watch. and so in two months i'm up about 13.3 percent which is not bad and i'm really only selling options this is kind of what i'm doing right now but that's it pretty good what you got uh i'm at 53k right now uh up three percent today all in shaz one stock keeping it simple uh over the last week up 23 and over the last month uh technically down eight percent so you can see here this is hit that 35k round trip. You never went down, though. I never went down, yes. I'm very big on psychological numbers, right? And so I started with 35k. You kind of don't want to go below that. And then I say I locked in and made my next trades count. And so on June 24th, yeah, I went back to 35k. Let me see the one year. 50% since then. I think the one year. Yeah, so this is where you see, if you look at the all time, it's all weird. like i've had this account since like you know 2015 or whatever so it's like all the different deposits and withdrawals and whatever the lines get messed up right um uh and then like i started this account on e-trade uh because i got in like the reddit ipo and they forced you to create an e-trade account and etc etc then i transferred over here for bonus as well uh so that's why all the kind of numbers look weird but if you see here yeah like i traded it the 35k challenge account up to let's say 44k right and then kind of pause it for a bit to work on my startup uh and then uh Basically, around November, December last year, I started up again and it's been up and down. Cool. Kevin, thank you so much for coming out, filming with us. We'll link to all of your information down below in the description. Really appreciate it. We got to go on a flight right now. Yep. We got to catch a flight to Florida. So hope you guys enjoyed. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you. As always, we would not be here if not for you guys. And also, if you want early access to videos just like this, as well as extra content, feel free to join the channel memberships. We're also posting extra episodes of Jack and I. We have occasional guests. We do post shows. So really hope you enjoy it. Feel free to join the membership. Thank you so much. And until next time. That's the power of active ETFs from T. Rowe Price. Their portfolio managers approach data from multiple perspectives, analyzing trends and conducting deep research to give you their curiosity-backed active management expertise. Learn more about their active ETFs at T. RowePrice.com slash explore ETFs. Exchange-traded funds ETFs are bought and sold at market prices, not NAV. 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