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

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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

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• 0:30Graham Stephan?

  What was the most you've ever made on a single trade?

• 0:32Speaker 02

  I made a million dollars and lost a million dollars in back-to-back days. Like, that changes a man.

• 0:38Speaker 03

  GameStop is back at it again. Shares skyrocketed more than 100% on Wednesday.

• 0:43Speaker 02

  I was one of the earliest whales on GameStop. I put in $1.3 million.

• 0:47Graham Stephan?

  How much would you have made?

• 0:49Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 0:52Graham Stephan?

  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?

• 1:02Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:12Graham Stephan?

  How do you know you're not gonna lose everything?

• 1:15Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:23Graham Stephan?

  So in your opinion, what do you think is the next 10x opportunity from here?

• 1:33Graham Stephan?

  Kevin, thank you so much for coming on the Ice Coffee Hour.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:36Graham Stephan?

  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 gotta 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?

• 1:58Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:11Graham Stephan?

  How does that happen?

• 2:12Speaker 02

  It was getting kind of squeezy. This was like right after the GameStop thing in January, it's like February, March or something like that. And I think they had a high short interest ratio. Maybe they were getting squeezed, so I kind of rolled this wave ups like 70%. And the next day I kind of lost it all, like really, really quickly.

• 2:26Graham Stephan?

  What percentage of your net worth was that at the time to to gain a million dollars and lose it in two days?

• 2:31Speaker 02

  This is 100%. 100% I had no.

• 2:33Graham Stephan?

  But you didn't go down to zero.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  No, no, no. Well, I would, 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, like a good company 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 the mentality I had that like, you know, I was, 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 I 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.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  But for the most part, yeah, I just kept doing that all the way to 10 million.

• 3:24Graham Stephan?

  Why do so many people fail to do what you've done?

• 3:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:27Graham Stephan?

  Because there's just as many people I've seen on Wall Street Bets.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:30Graham Stephan?

  Who go all in on something and then they post this loss showing 95%. It's like, I gotta quit.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  100%. I mean, a lot of that is because you're chasing the really quick gains, right? There were zero DTE options. These things can literally go to you overnight. 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. 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 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.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  And the worst case scenario is it's just going to bobble to the side. And then if some callous hits or some good news happens, it'll rise up, sell for 20%, 20% profit, and just keep doing that again and again.

• 4:31Graham Stephan?

  Do you think you could recreate what you've done back then today?

• 4:35Speaker 02

  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 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, I mean, it's a swing traders 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.

• 5:12Jack Selby?

  How much do you feel is skill versus luck?

• 5:14Speaker 02

  It's both, right? Like, I was incredibly lucky to have tried this style of trading during 2020 to 21. That's just incredible luck, right? But at the same time, not everyone made 285X in 21 months. Like, that's an insane number. And so there was definitely some skill involved. 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 Wall Street Bets and other subreddits every day, reading all the comments. You know, not just like the whatever's trending and the funny pictures. Like, I was reading all the comments because it's a hive mind, right? Like, the market, like, I mean, I'm not a technical guy, I'm not a fundamentals guy. I've actually never even run like a discounted cash flow in my entire life.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  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.

• 6:10Jack Selby?

  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 Camilo a few times. And he's famously ran like 20,000 up to whatever it is now, 100 million dollars. 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?

• 6:32Speaker 02

  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, Jimmy 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 was just so many narratives, so much potential catalyst, so much potential good news that could come any day about, you know, a potential off profit deal, right? With Shaz or Nvidia investment into Shaz because data centers are just so important today.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  The AI infrastructure to build out right now. And so that's kind of what I look for. I look for, you know, it's a good company with a good long term future, but also a potential catalyst and good news that could pop up any day or in the short term.

• 7:26Jack Selby?

  If you're trying to replicate your strategy, like where are the main places you should be pulling information from?

• 7:32Speaker 02

  X wins by far now, right? It's where, 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 could 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.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  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, sell the 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 I'm like, oh, yeah, has good, a lot of people, I think, has good earnings next week.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  I might buy it today and, you know, ride that wave into the earnings.

• 9:05Jack Selby?

  What was the most you've ever made on a single trade?

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Big Five Sporting Goods, BGFF.

• 9:10Jack Selby?

  How did you find that?

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. This was on Wall Street Bets and literally someone who I decently respected, you know, 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 that was it. I was like, oh, that's a good potential play. And so I full poured it, I think.

• 9:34Jack Selby?

  Wait, that was it?

• 9:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:36Jack Selby?

  That was all of the due diligence?

• 9:37Speaker 02

  I did my own research or whatever like that, but it wasn't.

• 9:39Jack Selby?

  Okay, 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.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:48Jack Selby?

  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?

• 10:03Speaker 02

  Probably 1.7 million.

• 10:04Jack Selby?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:05Jack Selby?

  Wow.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:06Jack Selby?

  What are we doing, Jack?

• 10:07Speaker 02

  I full poured like $6 billion into this stock.

• 10:10Jack Selby?

  Six million?

• 10:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I own like 1.5% or something at that time.

• 10:13Jack Selby?

  Okay, so walk us through the amount of due diligence. How long? Just, let's just say, how many hours did you spend before you put 6 million in?

• 10:20Speaker 02

  So normally, all the diligence happens right before the trade ever happens, right? Like, I basically keep a constant background process of like all these stocks. I constantly watch again, constantly scan the news. I constantly, I'm getting familiar with them over time. And then, kind of like, I feel like, I call it like a limitless moment. Like just everything kind of clicks like all at once, right? And so for that one, it was the fact that it had a special dividend and spiked like twenty percent on the day. There were so many comments about this and also volume ticked up, right? So one thing I really, really care a lot about is increasing volume like on the candlestick charts, right?

• 10:51Jack Selby?

  What does increased volume tell you?

• 10:53Speaker 02

  More people are caring about this.

• 10:55Jack Selby?

  And and volume can be, it's like just transactions, so it's buyers and sellers at the same time.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  Correct, correct, yeah. But generally, increasing volume is, you know, is a good thing. It just means more market participants are entering this stock or caring about this stock. And there's more room for growth, usually in a positive direction.

• 11:12Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, but you bought in once it already went up twenty percent?

• 11:15Speaker 02

  Yes, I bought it when it already went up twenty percent. 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 it was a little bit risky. Sometimes, 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.

• 11:36Graham Stephan?

  So how many hours of research should the average person do before they go all in? Or even buy an individual stock?

• 11:43Speaker 02

  If I were to be honest, like I've definitely gone into stocks with just like, you know, only an hour research, especially these days with AI, right? Like you could ask your favorite agent or chat GPT, just like, give me the bull case, give me the bear case, tell me everything that's happened recently, right? And sometimes that's your perspective, that's like everything you need to know.

• 11:59Graham Stephan?

  What would Warren Buffett have to say about this?

• 12:03Speaker 02

  Well, okay, so look, I'm a swing trader, right? I'm not an investor. Like recently I made a post that I said like there's three ways to use your money to make money. 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 and never touch option, margin, leverage products, even prediction market sports betting. I've never made a sports bet in my life, right? Because I could just go to zero all of a sudden, right? And, uh, you know, maybe it's okay for the twenty dollars, 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?

• 12:48Speaker 02

  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. Because they're diversified, index funds are good for that, lowering risk. And I mean, there's, Warren Buffett actually has an article that's like, "Concentration makes wealth, diversification keeps it." So if you are in that point of, that stage in your life, where you're looking for the maximized 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 300K at Google. Like I could afford to YOLO my 401K, I couldn't touch anyways. I think it's worth, you know, spending more time and energy in trading

• 13:30Speaker 02

  and finding those single stocks that you think you have a fairly good picture of, like how it's going to perform over the next few days, weeks, months.

• 13:37Jack Selby?

  So who is this strategy for? Who would you recommend? They, they look into, you know, full porting or buying like 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.

• 13:54Speaker 05

  Oh, hi. My name's Michael. I edit the podcast and I love my work and I love my bosses.

• 13:59Jack Selby?

  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.

• 14:09Graham Stephan?

  For those unaware, Gusto is an online payroll and benefit software built for small businesses. It's all-in-one, remote-friendly, and incredibly easy to use. So you could pay, hire, onboard, and support your team from anywhere.

• 14:20Jack Selby?

  Gusto handles payroll tax filing, direct deposits, health benefits, 401K, workers' comp, literally all of it.

• 14:26Graham Stephan?

  And if you ever hit a tough HR situation, you get direct access to certified HR experts.

• 14:31Jack Selby?

  Switching is also super easy too. All you have to do is transfer over your existing data and you are up and running fast.

• 14:36Graham Stephan?

  You won't even pay a cent until you run your first payroll. After that, it's one flat monthly price with unlimited payroll runs.

• 14:43Jack Selby?

  So I've actually used Gusto long before I ever partnered with them. In fact, when I first set up my S corp in 2020, I had no idea where to start. My CPA actually recommended Gusto to me. I signed up and they made every Incredibly easy and I have been using them, I kid you not, for the six years since then.

• 14:58Graham Stephan?

  It's really no surprise that Gusto is ranked number one on G2's highest satisfaction products list for 2026. Over half a million small businesses, including us, use them.

• 15:08Jack Selby?

  So try Gusto today at G U S T O dot com slash Iced and get three months for free when you run your first payroll. That is three months of free payroll at G U S T O dot com slash I C E D. So who is this strategy for? Who would you recommend? They they look into, you know, full porting or buying like all of one individual company, doing the due diligence, following in your footsteps. Who is this for and who is this not for?

• 15:32Speaker 02

  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 your, have a, have a stable job. And then decide, you know, how much money you're willing to risk.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  And just, yeah, full port.

• 15:54Jack Selby?

  And by full port, you mean go all in?

• 15:56Speaker 02

  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%, you were right. That's really incredible, but you only got to gain only like from a little bit from there. Even if I had like $20 in the stock, I'm, I'm just obsessed with it.

• 16:13Jack Selby?

  But if you're wrong, I mean, then you only lose, you know.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  True, but if you're, but when you're wrong, you could, you could sell, right?

• 16:21Jack Selby?

  Here's, 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.

• 16:47Jack Selby?

  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.

• 16:58Graham Stephan?

  Oh, tell them about your recent one, Jack.

• 17:01Jack Selby?

  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 at 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.

• 17:31Graham Stephan?

  What's very funny is Jack has selectively forgotten 2020 and 2021.

• 17:36Jack Selby?

  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.

• 18:07Speaker 02

  Oh, 100%, 100%. I mean, I think you kind of hit the nail. Maybe the framing is, is, is better positioned to, uh, 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 don't know, people make fun of me online all the time that like, oh, Kevin's all in these random stocks. Uh, even though he has like a million dollars in index funds. Like, I'm very transparent about this. Like, it's in my X 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?

• 18:36Speaker 02

  Whatever, you know, people are comfortable with, just put that aside, make a whole new account for that and just go all in, all, all in there.

• 18:42Graham Stephan?

  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? Cause 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.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  To me, gambling can go to zero, right? Gambling can go to zero overnight out of your control. And again, with most stocks, right? Uh, you're not gonna go to zero overnight. And so that's, that's where I draw the line between gambling and trading.

• 19:13Graham Stephan?

  Well, couldn't you say also with a slot machine? You're not gonna go to zero. Every spin, if you do dollar spins, you're gonna lose on average, but you could also just as easily stop at eighty bucks.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  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 gonna go up in the next couple of days, couple of weeks. Like, like, 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 gonna go up five, 10% next week. Sell, buy low, sell high, and then find another stock.

• 20:01Graham Stephan?

  What are some of the red flags that stop you from investing into a company?

• 20:04Speaker 02

  Recently, uh, if the wrong type of promoters are talking about it, right? Like, uh, 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. Like, I've been, actually, I was thinking about it. I've been sharing every single trade I've made since 2020. Like, I, either on Reddit or on Afterhour 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, uh, someone else on their Discord.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  Uh, and so if, you know, I, I, I post video trade receipts. And so I, I, well, that's the biggest red flag. Like, recently, there is a stock that's come across my radar. Uh, 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.

• 21:03Graham Stephan?

  How often do you see pump and dumps?

• 21:05Speaker 02

  Back in the day, I saw it 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, I just don't care about that stuff, right? Uh, if, you know, if it's a sub-billion dollar market cap, that's automatically like a, pretty much like an orange flag for me. Uh, because that's easy to manipulate, yeah.

• 21:22Graham Stephan?

  And how do you know when to sell?

• 21:24Speaker 02

  I sell a stock or swing trade a stock, right? Either when the thesis has been validated, invalidated, or I find a sexier play.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  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 Pang. Perfect. It was earnings play, thesis validated, sell, right? Or other times, I'm just holding a stock, right? Because I'm just waiting for a catalyst to happen. Maybe it's just like bobbing 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.

• 22:07Graham Stephan?

  Tell us about that. What happened to GameStop?

• 22:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I was one of the earliest whales on GameStop. I put in $1.3 million into GameStop in October of 2020. Okay, my cost basis was around $13 a share back then. And I held until December of 2020. So I missed the squeeze by a month.

• 22:28Graham Stephan?

  How much would you have made?

• 22:30Speaker 02

  Oh my god. I believe $100 would have been, $120 would have been $10 million. So it went up to 420, so probably around 30 to 40 million, if I held to the top of the squeeze.

• 22:44Graham Stephan?

  You would have 40 x'd.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:47Graham Stephan?

  How often do you think about that?

• 22:48Speaker 02

  I don't think about that at all.

• 22:49Graham Stephan?

  Okay.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  During those days, I was ecstatic because we were right. You know, the short squeeze and all that kind of stuff. Like the thesis was right, I'll celebrate it. I was dancing alongside, you know, Roman Kitty every day.

• 22:59Graham Stephan?

  You know what's funny? I actually bought GameStop when it was $3 and something cents a share. I put $5,000 into it because I saw it on Wall Street Bets. And I just thought, this sounds funny. I'm just gonna 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 gonna kill the momentum.

• 23:26Speaker 02

  Right.

• 23:26Graham Stephan?

  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.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  Profit is profit.

• 23:51Graham Stephan?

  Profit is profit. So why do so many people miss these signals?

• 23:56Speaker 02

  I don't know. You 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? Like there are people who just, they made their money on Tesla. They made their money on Bitcoin. Now with memory stocks, right? Like Sandy's gonna M U. And they're just like obsessed with it or holding about, that's all they talk about. And I don't get it. You know, if you're 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're thinking, so like you should be okay with selling.

• 24:31Graham Stephan?

  What would you say are the shortcomings that a lot of investors fall into?

• 24:36Speaker 02

  They play with margin.

• 24:41Speaker 00

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• 25:09Speaker 02

  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, 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 the people go on full tilt, right? And trying to make that gain back as much as possible, that's when they lose it all.

• 25:35Jack Selby?

  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 and was like, if I could critique anything, I think you should have a little bit more margin.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  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 for margin? I mean, you have to be patient, right? Like, this is also like a patient man's 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.

• 26:17Jack Selby?

  I'm curious, by winning a million dollars in the stock market in one day and then losing a million dollars the following day, what does this do to your mental?

• 26:26Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 26:26Jack Selby?

  Like, how does this affect your nights when you're trying to sleep? Or just like the overall gravity of daily existence?

• 26:33Speaker 02

  To be honest, it happened so fast, it didn't quite register, you know?

• 26:37Jack Selby?

  Like, the million that you'd made had not quite settled yet?

• 26:40Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 26:40Jack Selby?

  And so it didn't feel like your net worth increased by a million?

• 26:43Speaker 02

  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 like entry price a lot. That's again, back to like my don't chase rule, right? Like, if you bought a stock and it went up 20% and then went back down 20%, that you could hold that a lot better psychologically than if you bought something at the top and just dropped the next day.

• 27:11Graham Stephan?

  Now, in terms of getting started, though, back in 2017, weren't you able to turn $8,000 into $300,000 with cryptocurrency?

• 27:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 27:20Graham Stephan?

  And then you lost it down to $35,000?

• 27:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So I call this like pain intuition. 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.

• 27:52Jack Selby?

  How much were you making at that time during 2016, 2017?

• 27:55Speaker 02

  Not even that much. Like, I did a startup between 2013 and 15. 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 are only paying me like 150K.

• 28:07Jack Selby?

  And so how did you only have eight grand, though, after like?

• 28:09Speaker 02

  I only started working there.

• 28:10Jack Selby?

  Oh, so it was just, oh, okay.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  I just started working. 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. And then this was like ICO mania. There were so many, you know, random altcoins 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 was just like, whatever the next hot one is, has a funny story. And so, you know, that 2017 run brought me all the way to 300K. And then 2018 happened and I lost it all. But unfortunately owed taxes on the realized gains from 2017.

• 28:56Speaker 02

  So the way the counter math works out, it could really, really hit you. Yeah, that was a hard lesson and also why I've never touched crypto ever since.

• 29:04Jack Selby?

  You owed how much in taxes?

• 29:06Speaker 02

  Probably around 150K.

• 29:08Jack Selby?

  How did you owe 150K when you brought it down to 30K, though?

• 29:10Speaker 02

  Oh, that happened 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.

• 29:23Jack Selby?

  You would think that you should be able to use losses of the next year to offset the prior.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  You would think, right?

• 29:28Jack Selby?

  Right?

• 29:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you're only allowed to maximize 3,000 or 3,000, obviously your income at 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.

• 29:40Jack Selby?

  So after having this crazy run up and then crash in your crypto account, 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?

• 30:07Speaker 02

  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 shut down, 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, I, my next stock was CODX, Code Diagnostics, PCR testing, the nose swabs. Remember that, right? So they were, they were building that and they were signing up all these contracts, all these states. I'm like, oh, actually they should have good earnings. And so I rode that for like a 2X. So now all of a sudden 90 turned into 180.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  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 in 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. C E C was like maybe going to lift the ban on them, whatever. And so again, that's hope, right? There's a story, there's a potential catalyst. And I got lucky and I caught the balance perfectly. And so I call 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 Chewy, I learned about Chewy, right? And like, you know, a lot of people got dogs. So like e-commerce, dogs, perfect, right?

• 31:33Speaker 02

  And that was maybe like a 25% pop. So I just, I just, I just kept doing this.

• 31:36Jack Selby?

  And so what then was your first like real loss in your 401k account?

• 31:40Graham Stephan?

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• 33:15Jack Selby?

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• 33:27Graham Stephan?

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• 33:34Jack Selby?

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• 34:14Jack Selby?

  And so what then was your first like real loss in your 401k account?

• 34:18Speaker 02

  The first loss was actually Slack before they got bought by Salesforce, right? Uh, 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, 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.

• 34:42Jack Selby?

  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?

• 34:48Speaker 02

  Probably around like 700, 800K, right?

• 34:51Jack Selby?

  So your first loss was after taking your account from 35K to 700, 800K.

• 34:56Speaker 02

  I would say so, yes. Yeah.

• 34:58Jack Selby?

  And then how much did you lose on the Slack trade?

• 35:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, probably like 200K or something like that.

• 35:02Jack Selby?

  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, does this one just like the cards didn't fall in your favor?

• 35:13Speaker 02

  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. Uh, 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 in your favor, you gotta be conservative with your next play.

• 35:50Jack Selby?

  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?

• 36:10Speaker 02

  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 to move in 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 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.

• 36:51Graham Stephan?

  Do people ever reach out to you with inside information and they say, hey, uh, here's a tip?

• 36:58Jack Selby?

  If so, Graham's looking for that exact information.

• 37:00Graham Stephan?

  I'm just curious because.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  Actually, no, actually, no. And I'm very careful to not even like accept those kind of DMs if it kind of feels like that.

• 37:08Graham Stephan?

  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.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  Everything I use is public information. Like I don't ever, I don't have any inside 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 liked 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.

• 37:38Jack Selby?

  What do you think are some of the biggest lies that are spread about investing online? Or the, the information that's being said that if the average person followed, it's just not going to help them?

• 37:48Speaker 02

  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, option trader is making a thousand dollars every day. I, 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, that, that to me is, is not how, I, 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 of 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. Turns because generally the stock market goes up, right? Like, you know, it has to be 500 goes up. Good companies should go up.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 38:44Jack Selby?

  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.

• 39:03Speaker 02

  I joke, just make more money. I mean, I mean, yeah, my situation was really, you know, unique. This was done in my 401K, so I, it was, you know, no, no taxes. I didn't pay a single ten on taxes until I withdraw.

• 39:17Speaker 02

  But even though I'm doing this in a, in a Robin Hood, you know, normal brokerage account right now. I mean, if you're trying to, 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.

• 39:35Jack Selby?

  So how much time should the average person spend a day researching and trading?

• 39:40Speaker 02

  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 mentioned. 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, you know, intake of, of, of stock use. And you could also turn the bell on for certain, for certain influencers and get their posts as soon as they make them.

• 40:09Jack Selby?

  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?

• 40:15Speaker 02

  The first one that comes to my mind is Admit Is Investing. He's the GOAT. He's got like 500,000 followers. He was early, he was early on Pound here, he was early on Robin Hood, posting all these deep dives and interviews with these, with these folks. Another, you know, he's a buddy of mine, Michael Sakand. He recently, you know, they're posting a lot. About the photonics trade and like all these kind of bottlenecks related to the AI infrastructure like picks and shuffles 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, thirty page PDFs, right? Which like really, really dry. But I think in the kind of more modern era, uh, people are reading bite sized tweets, uh, and learning a lot from that kind of drip feed of information. Uh, and then I think another one is Serenity, this anonymous, you know, white haired anime profile picture.

• 41:00Speaker 02

  Uh, she or he blew up from nothing to almost a million followers just in the last six months. And, uh, it's really, really good, like deep takes on like the AI infrastructure build out.

• 41:10Graham Stephan?

  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.

• 41:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:17Graham Stephan?

  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?

• 41:35Jack Selby?

  Is it an intelligence thing? Is it like a personality trait thing?

• 41:39Speaker 02

  I get very obsessed. Uh, and, and I think that is probably one of my strengths that like, once I'm in the stock, I'm like obsessively washing 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?

• 42:24Speaker 02

  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 back testing or reading a book, right? Because we're reading about, I have bought here, I've bought over 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 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, it's 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.

• 42:58Graham Stephan?

  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 just wasn't paying, it's gonna sell. Or if it goes up a certain amount, it's automatically gonna sell.

• 43:08Speaker 02

  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 guess automatically stopped out. When, no, you know, so I've never set a stop limit in my whole life.

• 43:28Graham Stephan?

  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?

• 43:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's my, uh, my specialty on Twitter. It's a financial rage bait.

• 43:41Graham Stephan?

  Why don't you like polygamy?

• 43:45Speaker 02

  Well, I've been very loyal.

• 43:45Graham Stephan?

  Why shouldn't men date 10 women at a time?

• 43:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. So.

• 43:49Graham Stephan?

  Like Jack.

• 43:54Speaker 02

  Props, props.

• 43:55Jack Selby?

  That's just not even true.

• 43:57Speaker 02

  Concentration creates wealth, diversification keeps it, right? That's, 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? Cause 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 be and find the best person. No, I think you should go all in. And I think that's really important. And also, uh, really quickly find out whether it's working or not.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  Either with a relationship or even with a stock. You really quickly get obsessed with it. You research everything about it and you you figure out like, oh, yeah. If you're only in like five percent or only five K, you're like, you know, eh, whatever. I don't really care about this.

• 44:51Graham Stephan?

  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.

• 44:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I would say that's my personality type.

• 45:00Graham Stephan?

  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 all in on something, they don't really think it through.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  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 uh 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 three hundred K in crypto, right? I did my startup uh back in twenty thirteen and I failed. Uh, and so I, you know, I I failed a lot, but I also kind of uh, you know, over the course of my life, taking like a very um TikTok kind of um pattern in my life, a risk on, a risk off. Right? You you do something risky, didn't work out? Okay, you know, quiet down for a couple of 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.

• 45:54Graham Stephan?

  Does it worry you right now that stock market valuations are seemingly pretty high?

• 45:58Speaker 02

  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 I think especially the modern investor may be a little bit too used to these like very quick bubbles, right? Like crypto is maybe a year or two, right? Meme stocks is maybe a year or two, but like, people don't understand like how big and 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. My view is the future of AI work is uh long running, compute intensive uh workloads. Basically, you know, most people just use, ask, you just ask a video question, right? And it's basically, you know, quick answer.

• 46:40Speaker 02

  Uh, but what what people are doing in Silicon Valley right now is they're running these like twenty four seven jobs, right? To basically uh keep churning tokens uh to do work, you know, them. The one example is like solve cancer. Right? Like you could imagine just giving an agent access to your lab and all this data 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. And that the status was like trillions of dollars in capex build out over the next five years. Right? And so we just, we just don't have enough and I think it's going to continue going into the, into the, into the future.

• 47:21Graham Stephan?

  How could you be wrong?

• 47:23Speaker 02

  Either there's some technological innovation that increases the supply. Right? Uh, that maybe, you know, uh, China develops like a, uh, their own Nvidia style GPU, uh, really, really fast. Uh, that increases supply all of a sudden. Uh, or these workloads don't really transpire. So right now, especially Silicon Valley, like, like coding is like, is, is what most people use these L M's for. Right? Uh, cause they work. So you could build these websites and apps now. Uh, but can L M's really replace, you know, accountant, right? A lawyer, a doctor, right? Can it really build robots? Like that's another like hundred X, thousand X thematic bet that I have. I like robotics, uh, is actually the, the, the next inflection point for something called physical A I. Um, that, that requires like all the kind of same things, right?

• 48:07Speaker 02

  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 thesis falls out.

• 48:13Graham Stephan?

  What are your robot plays? Cause I tend to agree with you that it seems like the next thing would be taking chat G P T, 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?

• 48:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I think this is going to change the world just as much as like chat G P T did. Uh, there is just so much investment recently, A sixteen Z U producer board that says like, uh, venture investment in robotics at all time high. Like, you know, five X 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're, they're, they don't ask for insurance. You know, they don't ask for sick leaves, vacation leaves. They could work all day. Um, they don't even have to be perfect because humans are not perfect, right?

• 49:06Graham Stephan?

  They could show up late.

• 49:07Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 49:08Graham Stephan?

  Slip and fall.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  And so there's just, there's 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, 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, to kind of tell you how far away things are. Most recently, they invented colored LiDAR. So they're the only ones to make it. And so that replaces, that replaces two cameras. Before you used to have like a camera for color and one for LiDAR. Now you just have one, right? And so they're signing up a lot of customers.

• 49:55Speaker 02

  They're a public stock. Another one is a SPAC that's coming out pretty soon called CCXI, Agility Robotics. 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, you know, list on the, on the stock. And then actually, one that I've played a few times is called RoboStrategy. And they have, they have the best ticker, B O T, 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, he decided to turn that into a closed-end fund, basically let anybody, you know, invested in. You know, 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 and figure AI.

• 50:37Speaker 02

  Do you remember that livestream 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, that's one of the biggest holdings in, in B O T. So like, you know, you basically get access to that.

• 50:50Graham Stephan?

  So what do you think is going to happen over the next five years in terms of the economy?

• 50:54Speaker 02

  K-shaped, man. Everything is unfortunately K-shaped. And, and you know, I think there's, that's why there's this desire, this angst that I noticed in the general population, especially young people to bridge that gap, right? From, from one end of the K to the other. And a lot of H C behind it. So, but I mean, I mean, like, I don't know. My, 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 was like, you know, you got the rich people and you got the poor people. And because of the internet, 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.

• 51:38Speaker 02

  Right. People talk about the wealth, wealth income gap and et cetera. And so the most important thing is to own assets.

• 51:44Jack Selby?

  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?

• 52:00Speaker 02

  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 basis, you know, your financial base, your security base, you know, you can't be worried about when you take risks, 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. Find, you know, just make sure you're in a good place to actually go take out risk. And then you could take a risk in many ways, right? Like if you find, find, find where you're good at 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 go on and start making YouTube videos, right? Just go, just go, just go do it.

• 52:43Speaker 02

  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? Don't go in, don't go in blindly without a feedback loop. Otherwise you do end up losing money or like, you know, not growing your YouTube channel. 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? Cause I think the world is more and more rewarding people that are unique and have something different to offer in the world.

• 53:12Graham Stephan?

  So for the average person who's making $60,000 a year, a few thousand dollars invested.

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• 53:47Graham Stephan?

  What should they focus on first?

• 53:49Jack Selby?

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• 55:14Speaker 02

  I mean, just load up your Robinhood account, buy something, right? It doesn't have to be an individual stock. I think most people have never even bought a stock in their life. They have their phone, okay, automatically buy one or something. But buy spy, buy KQ, 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 gonna do it, but like, imagine I did today, right? And then, oh, it was right. And basically kind of retroactively analyze, oh, why was it right? You know, maybe I'll do the next one or something like that.

• 55:55Jack Selby?

  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.

• 56:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:15Jack Selby?

  Like, you should, as soon as I get paid, like even when I was getting paid like 4,000 bucks a month, like immediately I was shipping off 1,500 into my Robinhood account. And then the additional 2,500 was just like rent taxes. And then like I had a little bit of money for food and that was really it. Like invest first and then everything else comes later.

• 56:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's also great advice.

• 56:36Graham Stephan?

  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?

• 56:43Speaker 02

  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 like angst that I noticed. It's called financial nihilism. You know, a lot of people written about it. That just feels like your effort does not translate into results anymore.

• 57:09Speaker 02

  But there's this app on your phone now that does translate your effort into results good or bad, right? And I think that that agency, that field of control is like more and more important for people these days. I think. Generally, I think if you're just like aware of like what you're doing and also aware of like what the payback time period is, right? So like you mentioned your early example, if you're making sixty thousand dollars a year and have a thousand dollars that could 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 it, then figure out as long as you're learning something.

• 57:42Jack Selby?

  If you were to start from zero and build back to ten 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?

• 57:52Speaker 02

  My, my pick right now is Shaz, right? Sharon AI, the Neo Cloud based in Australia, uh, because I think this data center build out is only going to continue. Another one that's actually really interesting is Nokia.

• 58:05Jack Selby?

  Really?

• 58:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, because they recently got a billion dollar investment from Nvidia itself. And they also make these, um, uh, 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.

• 58:30Jack Selby?

  And for someone who does not wanna trade stocks or swing trade, but they wanna build their wealth over the next ten years, what do you recommend?

• 58:38Speaker 02

  Buy Google. I mean, if I were to distill it down to the simplest piece of advice, right? Like buy Google.

• 58:46Jack Selby?

  Why Google?

• 58:47Speaker 02

  They're at the enter center of everything, right? They're, they, they have the consumers, right? Via Google, YouTube, Google Maps, Android, everything like that. They're building the, you know, one of the best models out there. They have Google Deep Brain, all these are really, really intelligent people. They're, 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 incredible mode and it'll just keep continuing growing.

• 59:20Graham Stephan?

  What's a realistic annualized return that you think someone could expect over the next five, 10 years?

• 59:26Speaker 02

  I mean, I think the spy is going to make like 10 to 20%.

• 59:28Graham Stephan?

  You think it's going to continue at that trajectory?

• 59:31Speaker 02

  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.

• 59:44Graham Stephan?

  Didn't that somewhat end though with the 1920s Great Depression?

• 59:49Speaker 02

  There was a lot of margin. There were 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.

• 59:57Graham Stephan?

  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.

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I think, you know, 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, you know, kind of mini pop and any corrections, get a mini bounce a lot faster. And so I don't think we're going to get like some kind of crazy depression. I think we'll have a lot of volatility. But I still expect like, you know, like a good 10 plus percent per year over the next five years.

• 1:00:33Graham Stephan?

  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 two to six percent a year for a while?

• 1:00:48Speaker 02

  Right, right. Maybe like a forgotten period, right?

• 1:00:49Graham Stephan?

  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.

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  I mean, what else do you invest in, right? Like America's-

• 1:00:59Graham Stephan?

  T-bills. Graham, Graham has what 25% cash? Eh, it's 20, 25% somewhere.

• 1:01:04Speaker 02

  Cash right now, yeah.

• 1:01:05Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, I have- What's that cash? Tax-free muni bonds.

• 1:01:08Speaker 02

  Tax-free muni bonds.

• 1:01:08Graham Stephan?

  Making blended 4% tax-free.

• 1:01:11Speaker 02

  It's great, it's great.

• 1:01:11Graham Stephan?

  No state income tax.

• 1:01:12Speaker 02

  You should transfer it to X money, 6%.

• 1:01:15Graham Stephan?

  You know what's so funny? So I could take out a pledged asset line.

• 1:01:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:19Graham Stephan?

  Below that 6%. I did all the math on this and net taxes. It's not worth it for me to transfer. Like 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?

• 1:01:40Speaker 02

  Nah, simplicity's better.

• 1:01:40Graham Stephan?

  Annualized return, it's not worth it.

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:42Graham Stephan?

  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.

• 1:01:52Speaker 02

  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 SPY every year. You have Trump accounts now that are also going to be invested into the 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.

• 1:02:11Graham Stephan?

  And I feel like this is what everyone says though, right before. It's like we cut to like a month later and like something happened.

• 1:02:18Speaker 02

  Even the 2022 blip is a blip now, right? I mean, yes, like, I mean, this is, you know, we're too young to remember, like, what was 2001, 2008 like? Right? Because that in theory was kind of like a flat line for the US stock market. Albeit, that's from that's from top to top, 2001, 2008, right? Like, maybe people have talked about how euphoric and senseless the dot com bubble actually was with, you know, 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 like this forum of people arguing every single bear case that exists out there. All the ideas kind of get out. All like people talk about like, you know, the circular financial engineering, whatever, like companies.

• 1:02:58Speaker 02

  People are talking about it openly, right? Like, you know, no one's finding anything. It's not scaring billions of dollars to keep getting pushed in. So I think, yeah.

• 1:03:06Graham Stephan?

  What about any black swan event?

• 1:03:10Speaker 02

  So like a like a COVID 25 or something.

• 1:03:12Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, I tend to think it's something nuclear. I tend to think all it takes is, why are you laughing, Jack?

• 1:03:18Jack Selby?

  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 not going to care that like, you know, I really shouldn't have taken on an additional $100,000 of margin to buy like Google stock.

• 1:03:34Graham Stephan?

  That's why you should be buying. That's why Jack doesn't buy the bottoms. He only buys the tops.

• 1:03:39Jack Selby?

  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, you know, some country, I'm not gonna say which one, drops 10 nukes on America.

• 1:03:55Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:03:55Graham Stephan?

  On America, but there would be some fear.

• 1:03:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:03:58Graham Stephan?

  Or there would be something on the other side.

• 1:04:01Speaker 02

  I mean, it's impossible to predict. So it's like, it's hard to like live or kind of invest like that. Right. Uh, and I don't know if you're gonna get the push application early enough to sell before it happens.

• 1:04:10Jack Selby?

  Get the amber alert.

• 1:04:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:11Jack Selby?

  Immediately sell everything.

• 1:04:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I mean, in that sense, like, uh, you know, build up as much money as you can and then, and then switch to gold.

• 1:04:20Jack Selby?

  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?

• 1:04:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I don't touch options. I don't, I don't touch options at all. It's just, it's too enticing.

• 1:04:34Graham Stephan?

  What do you think about Jack's option strategy?

• 1:04:36Speaker 02

  Wait, do you buy or sell?

• 1:04:38Jack Selby?

  Uh, I sell options.

• 1:04:39Speaker 02

  You sell options?

• 1:04:39Jack Selby?

  So I, I sell puts to enter positions.

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:42Jack Selby?

  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.

• 1:05:03Speaker 02

  Does it, does it increase your stress at all? Like, are you watching it close to the strike?

• 1:05:07Jack Selby?

  No, if anything, it decreases my stress because it's a hedge against the position. So like my stress, my stress would be amplified if I was just owning the stock outright. Cause that's technically a more aggressive strategy than hedging against it, which would be like a covered call.

• 1:05:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:05:21Jack Selby?

  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, 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.

• 1:06:00Speaker 02

  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 if you care what the right options to sell are. I think, you know, I think it is good. I mean, many people have recommended to me. I just like to try to keep things simple.

• 1:06:22Jack Selby?

  Let's compare Robin Hood accounts. We're all going to compare Robin Hood accounts at the end of this podcast, guys. I have to ask you, why were you banned from Wall Street Bets?

• 1:06:29Speaker 02

  Oh, I don't, 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.

• 1:06:35Jack Selby?

  Cause you were kind of famous on Wall Street Bets.

• 1:06:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Like I didn't do anything wrong. Um, I was posting, you know, just screenshots of my trades, right? And like they got tons of upvotes. Um, I mean, I had someone DM me, uh, who's apparently a part of the ma team, right? And she said, like, there's just one random person who like hates you and just like.

• 1:06:57Jack Selby?

  A moderator that hates you?

• 1:06:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:59Jack Selby?

  When did you get banned?

• 1:07:00Speaker 02

  I don't know. This is probably like, um, mid 2021 or something.

• 1:07:04Jack Selby?

  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.

• 1:07:17Speaker 02

  It's Reddit culture, right? It was Wall Street Bets culture. So I was obviously just kind of playing into it. No, I, I think probably they just saw me getting too big and just, just wanted to cut it out.

• 1:07:27Graham Stephan?

  You think it would help their forum though, to have you on there and bring in more views, more engagement?

• 1:07:32Speaker 02

  These moderators on Reddit are weird.

• 1:07:34Jack Selby?

  You're, you're, it seems like they like, like, like lost porn more than they enjoy the games.

• 1:07:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:41Jack Selby?

  Like you're one of the few people on Wall Street Bets that turned, you know, 30, you, you made effectively 10 million dollars from nothing. And they banned you.

• 1:07:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:50Jack Selby?

  But then all of a sudden you post yourself losing 99% of your portfolio.

• 1:07:54Speaker 02

  What I've learned online is that everything, all hate is just jealousy, you know? And so probably, uh, they're, they hate 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 trip.

• 1:08:11Jack Selby?

  And what's more toxic, X or Reddit?

• 1:08:13Speaker 02

  A hundred percent Reddit. A hundred percent Reddit. Yeah. People say like X is bad. I'm like, this is nothing compared to what I used to deal with.

• 1:08:18Jack Selby?

  What makes Reddit so toxic? Do you think that the stereotype of like the neck beard, you know, sitting at like the, 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, is that accurate, you think, of Reddit users?

• 1:08:33Speaker 02

  They call it like the, the high internet high mind theory, right? When you take like a bunch of people and you anonymize them and put them in a group, uh, it just descends into like the, the, the, the scum of the earth.

• 1:08:44Jack Selby?

  It's the anonymity, you think?

• 1:08:46Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. Like, I've, I've connected with several people, uh, on Reddit. And, uh, but the problem is I had to use like my own thinking skills and reading skills to articulate, okay, this guy actually sounds like a well-educated adult versus like some 10-year-old kid, right? Uh, and I would actually connect with them and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And I trusted their word more. But generally, the way the algorithm works and the uploads work is just, you know, very much based on dunking and, and extreme content. Uh, and, yeah, you just don't know who these people are.

• 1:09:12Jack Selby?

  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?

• 1:09:25Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:09:36Speaker 02

  And, uh, 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, what was at? And it actually kind of died down for a little bit, uh, 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, on the screenshots. And so people just started posting their crazy games on, on the race to 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 just started turning into like a Instagram meme page, right?

• 1:10:19Jack Selby?

  It turned a bit into a cesspool.

• 1:10:20Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. No one was actually sharing any real DD people. You couldn't follow like people's stories. Uh, and so I think the race to 10 million kind of filled that gap.

• 1:10:28Graham Stephan?

  What gets unlocked at a $10 million net worth? Why is that number so important?

• 1:10:32Speaker 02

  I mean, first and foremost, I live in California. It's a very, very expensive state.

• 1:10:38Speaker 02

  And I think, you know, if you want the modern life that social media 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 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, what people want in a house, right? Compared to like 30 years ago, people can't stand single pane windows, right? They want central air, like that the, that's the quality of life that we want has dramatically increased. And you could blame social media for that, you could blame a lot of things for that, but we're also just still humans, right?

• 1:11:21Speaker 02

  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, uh, be able to, uh, send your kids to, uh, 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 in the future, right? Because again, like, if you retire, you're not, probably not going to be able to get a job if you're out of workforce for 10 years, right?

• 1:12:01Graham Stephan?

  So are people misguided then? And they have their sights set on $10 million when in actuality it should be more?

• 1:12:07Speaker 02

  I think so, actually.

• 1:12:08Graham Stephan?

  How much higher?

• 1:12:09Speaker 02

  Uh, there's this really good report from the Hampton Club. And they had this PDF where they kind of did a survey and then got all these like numbers and results and feelings around them, right? And I, I, I think it quoted $50 million as the number where you just stop worrying, right? You just stop worrying. You know, no matter what happens, you could tank it, you know, the market could go down.

• 1:12:32Graham Stephan?

  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.

• 1:12:41Speaker 02

  That's fair.

• 1:12:42Graham Stephan?

  And a lot of that net worth could be tied up in their company or private equity. Who knows? So.

• 1:12:48Speaker 02

  So the liquid amount is lower.

• 1:12:50Graham Stephan?

  I would argue that the liquid amount is lower, but according to that, it was a 50 million net worth. That was the point.

• 1:12:58Speaker 02

  Psychologically.

• 1:12:59Graham Stephan?

  Where people cared more about legacy and doing something with purpose than they did about making more money. But under $50 million, they cared more about making more money in terms of importance of, you know, there's that and also family and everything else. But that was still on the radar.

• 1:13:15Speaker 02

  There was still worries, still stress, like, oh, the market had a bad year, crap, now I need to like grind again.

• 1:13:20Jack Selby?

  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 raced to 10 million, but then, once you hit it, you did exactly what it, what one would do to kind of slow down and preserve their capital instead of like race to a higher net worth.

• 1:13:57Speaker 02

  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, 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 withdraw from it to top off or maybe I want to buy something nice. And I have withdrawn like a few million from it, right? For like 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 to then like make something impactful for people, a real business.

• 1:14:42Speaker 02

  And this is, 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, that's parked in index funds, it's going to double in 10 years, that's 20, right? It's going to double again in 10 years. Like, why not just wait and use my time in something else?

• 1:14:58Graham Stephan?

  And so then how is your current net worth divided up? How much money is in your 401k?

• 1:15:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have currently, I think, eleven point five million dollars in the 401k. That's divided up in fifty five million in a SPY, five point five million is QQQ. And I think like, you know, close to millions in DRAM, you know, memory chips. And, and, and then I have the Robinhood all in account. That's currently at fifty two K that, you know, I trade with and look at every day. And then the rest is just, yeah, just like savings and the house.

• 1:15:28Graham Stephan?

  See, I never liked the 401k.

• 1:15:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:31Graham Stephan?

  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.

• 1:15:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:15:41Graham Stephan?

  Especially, I think, in California where you are.

• 1:15:44Speaker 02

  Right. Well, this gives me options. I don't have to be in California when I withdraw.

• 1:15:48Graham Stephan?

  But you're still gonna have to pay federal income taxes.

• 1:15:50Speaker 02

  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, I like, you know, well, now I'm, you know, kind of like a, um, you know, trying to justify it and how it works and all that stuff and strategize around it. But this was all a happy accident.

• 1:16:06Graham Stephan?

  But if you could have done it differently.

• 1:16:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:08Graham Stephan?

  Would you prefer to have done it in a Roth or in a taxable account? Anything other than a 401k?

• 1:16:15Speaker 02

  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 it in a Roth, right? Like I said, like I started January twenty twenty with thirty five K in the 401k. I had the option to transfer to Roth to do a rollover. But then that means I would have had to use my own cash to pay the tax for the rollover, which was around twelve K.

• 1:16:38Speaker 02

  I was like, I don't want to pay twelve K out of pocket for this rollover.

• 1:16:41Graham Stephan?

  So it was a few million dollar mistake.

• 1:16:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, in hindsight, right? But you could never, you never know. No one expects a 401k to turn into ten million, right?

• 1:16:49Graham Stephan?

  Well, you did. You certainly did, and you still didn't pay it.

• 1:16:52Speaker 02

  I still would suggest doing it in a 401k Roth because, again, psychologically.

• 1:16:59Speaker 02

  You can't touch it. And I think that that saves you a lot of stress and pressure from like your down days or whatever. And also, um, uh, it just feels compartmentalized, right? Whereas like in your taxable brokerage account, I gotta worry about all these things and taxes and you could withdraw from it anytime you want.

• 1:17:15Graham Stephan?

  So how much should the average person aim to save?

• 1:17:18Speaker 02

  I mean, you just gotta figure out the life you want to live, right? Um, and double it. I mean, uh, there's a fire map, right? For four percent of your net worth, right? As your kind of average yearly spend, right? And so, uh, 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. Um, and, and, and, and tell stories about like, I mean, I, I, 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 swan or something like that, a market tanks, or you made a mistake or accident, who knows, whatever, right? Something miscalculated. Now you're 10 years out of a job. How do you, how do you bounce back?

• 1:18:01Graham Stephan?

  So for you, doesn't that mean 20 million? So now it's a race to 20 million.

• 1:18:05Speaker 02

  Yes, I think 20 million is kind of my next target and I will feel a lot, a lot safer with 20 million.

• 1:18:10Graham Stephan?

  And now you say double it. What if someone has 20 million? Is it 40?

• 1:18:15Speaker 02

  I mean, at $20 million, what is 4% a year?

• 1:18:20Graham Stephan?

  Eight hundred thousand.

• 1:18:21Speaker 02

  Eight hundred thousand dollars a year. So yeah, I mean, I think that's a pretty good life.

• 1:18:25Graham Stephan?

  20, you don't have to double.

• 1:18:26Speaker 02

  No, no, I mean, eight hundred thousand, I mean, a million dollar salary a year, right? You think about what kind of life you could 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?

• 1:18:41Graham Stephan?

  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 worth it?

• 1:19:13Speaker 02

  I would say it's at 10 million, you know? There's something nice about that number. I think, 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. Uh, and I think it's also important to kind of stay hungry through that, uh, through that journey. Right? Either the grind, whether you're, you know, doing YouTube or investing or trading or whatever it is, uh, to stay hungry until you hit like 10 million. I think 10 million is pretty important.

• 1:19:35Graham Stephan?

  And so have you fully retired from your job?

• 1:19:38Speaker 02

  Uh, no, I'm as busy as ever.

• 1:19:39Graham Stephan?

  So you're still working your career?

• 1:19:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I'm the founder and CEO of this company called Alpha AI. Uh, we built a proactive, uh, agentic trading companion. So it's like a mobile app that you could talk to and it'll trade for you. Uh, and I guess you could call me an ex influencer now. You know, my X journey is kind of crazy. Like I, I started posting just to kind of market the startup. Right? And I grew from like a couple thousand followers to over 160,000 followers now.

• 1:20:02Graham Stephan?

  How much do you make on X?

• 1:20:04Speaker 02

  Uh, it's kind of funny. So on rev share, I make like a thousand dollars a week, I think is the kind of average rate. Um, but, uh, I've kind of blown up my X subscriptions, uh, 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 set at the highest price because I didn't want anyone to actually buy.

• 1:20:30Graham Stephan?

  How much is the price?

• 1:20:31Speaker 02

  Uh, I said at $200.

• 1:20:34Graham Stephan?

  A month?

• 1:20:34Speaker 02

  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 them like, what do you want? They're like, oh, I'm just happy to support. I'm like, okay, cool. Thanks. Um, and then 20 people subscribed and then a hundred people subscribed and a couple hundred people subscribed.

• 1:20:56Graham Stephan?

  How many people do you now have subscribed to you?

• 1:21:00Speaker 02

  I think people are gonna go crazy about it.

• 1:21:01Graham Stephan?

  And this is the most transparent financial influencer on X, right?

• 1:21:04Speaker 02

  Oh, thank you, thank you. Yeah, yeah. I repeat that. Okay. I'm the most transparent financial influencer. So I need to, I need to show you this now. Okay.

• 1:21:09Graham Stephan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:10Speaker 02

  Okay. I can show you my, uh, Creator Studio subscriptions panel.

• 1:21:16Graham Stephan?

  Oh, wow. Wow.

• 1:21:19Graham Stephan?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:21:22Speaker 02

  Okay, so you have about 600 active subscribers paying you $200 a month.

• 1:21:28Graham Stephan?

  Wow.

• 1:21:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:29Graham Stephan?

  I feel like we we gotta be a.

• 1:21:32Speaker 02

  And this is.

• 1:21:32Graham Stephan?

  Michael, take note of that.

• 1:21:33Speaker 02

  This has only started in the last two months.

• 1:21:36Graham Stephan?

  Wait a second. I can't do math.

• 1:21:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:40Graham Stephan?

  120 grand a month.

• 1:21:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's gross revenue. You gotta take out the Apple fees and Stripe fees and all that kind of stuff, right?

• 1:21:46Graham Stephan?

  So that. Now the fees, Jack.

• 1:21:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, 25% off and then.

• 1:21:48Graham Stephan?

  And taxes.

• 1:21:49Speaker 02

  1099, all that kind of stuff.

• 1:21:50Graham Stephan?

  Right, yeah, yeah. So so you're making, I don't know, like 80 grand a month, post all of T fees, everything on on Twitter?

• 1:21:56Speaker 02

  It's kind of crazy. I think there's a strong desire for, you know, transparent and authentic financial media. Like, I mean, I love to love to flip the interview back to you a little bit and just think your thoughts on like where you think the future of like financial influencers is gonna go. Like, no one's watching CNBC anymore.

• 1:22:10Graham Stephan?

  It's true. I think I think there's such a fine line because I noticed with any sort of stock trading person.

• 1:22:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:17Graham Stephan?

  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. Yeah, 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.

• 1:22:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:48Graham Stephan?

  The the gray area becomes what's the success rate of the stocks?

• 1:22:53Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:22:54Graham Stephan?

  And do you have an influence on the price going up?

• 1:22:58Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:22:59Graham Stephan?

  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?

• 1:23:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you know, I think this matter very seriously, right? Like, it affects like the stocks I pick and like when I post about it. I mean, I think the number one thing is I'm I'm very transparent, right? I post my buys and my sells, like people know exactly what I'm talking. I don't have any other accounts. I only have those two accounts, the 401k and my Robinhood account, right? I post my exact thoughts. Um, I, you know, even recently, I only post my trades after market closed now.

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• 1:24:34Speaker 02

  To me, this is no different than someone going on TV and saying like, I own this stock, right?

• 1:24:39Graham Stephan?

  Like Jim Cramer.

• 1:24:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or like Michael Berry, right? Like he has a sub stack. He's making, you know, multi-million. Yeah, yeah. And like he, you know, he's definitely aware if he goes 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, you just, it's just blatant lying.

• 1:25:12Graham Stephan?

  So what should they do to prevent that from happening? Or what disclosures do you think should be required to crack down on that?

• 1:25:20Speaker 02

  The SEC can only go after the big people, right? Like the reason why they 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. Here's my price target. And then 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 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 deceitful people. Like, that's really how you protect the masses. Because no matter what, the SEC can't go after everyone.

• 1:26:06Jack Selby?

  So how much money are you making on X?

• 1:26:09Speaker 02

  I mean, currently, I guess you could say I'm making a million dollars a year.

• 1:26:11Jack Selby?

  That is absurd. A million dollars a year, and that's from $200 a month subscription fee that people pay into your membership.

• 1:26:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's from the X subscription I started only about two months ago.

• 1:26:22Graham Stephan?

  It's only gonna go up, man, especially with the amount of retweeting.

• 1:26:26Speaker 02

  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, um, there's a latent opportunity, right? And a small window to become, I think, you know, I think X is gonna be the most important platform

• 1:26:45Speaker 02

  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 of Mars, right? The social platform, the chat platform, the money platform, et cetera. 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, Alexander Wang at Meta, posts like 400 times on X and like a few times on Threads, your 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.

• 1:27:21Jack Selby?

  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.

• 1:28:03Jack Selby?

  Million dollars, eleven million dollars ish, twelve million dollars close to now.

• 1:28:07Speaker 02

  It's in my bio.

• 1:28:07Jack Selby?

  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 eleven million dollars into some company when in actuality, it was, you know, less than point whatever, zero three percent of your net worth. Was this, was this true? Or was this?

• 1:28:32Speaker 02

  I assume that people were following me aware of the entire story. Right? Like people have seen me post about my, my journey. People have seen me post about my 401k, eleven million dollar screenshots, and they'll see that this is a Robo screenshot is completely different, right? And this is an all in challenge account, which I also do mention in various kind of replies into comments, right? Yes, not everyone follows every single tweet. Sometimes they just see one tweet and that's your, there's your first time exposure for you. So I do, you know, make sure I add asterisk, I make sure.

• 1:28:57Jack Selby?

  I saw that you started doing that recently.

• 1:28:58Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 1:28:59Jack Selby?

  Which, which I appreciated because you said, I'm going all in, added an asterisk.

• 1:29:03Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 1:29:03Jack Selby?

  And then you said, down in the bottom of the, of the tweet, you clarified, this is all in on a challenge account. So it's not actually like my public eleven million dollar net worth. It's just like the thirty five or so thousand. But then another thing that I saw that you do, that I was like a little eh about was you started the new challenge account with thirty five thousand dollars. You ran it up to what was the peak?

• 1:29:21Speaker 02

  Oh, yes. I did run it up to about a hundred K.

• 1:29:24Jack Selby?

  So you ran it up to a hundred K, how quickly?

• 1:29:26Speaker 02

  Um, I mean, like a month or two, yeah.

• 1:29:28Jack Selby?

  A month or two, but then you ran it back down.

• 1:29:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:31Jack Selby?

  To like thirty five K.

• 1:29:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:32Jack Selby?

  Basically exactly what you were in the beginning. And then you recently tweeted, I turned thirty five K into fifty K in a matter of like a couple of months. Yes, you did do that because now you're at fifty K. And so you did that, but it was from the second time of being at thirty five K.

• 1:29:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:48Jack Selby?

  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,

• 1:29:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:55Jack Selby?

  fifty K from your all time high. Granted, the returns are still solid.

• 1:30:00Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, yes. It's, it's, 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 go 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, like dude, like, I don't try to hide that, right? Like, other people, you know, expose that, and 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, 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?

• 1:30:41Speaker 02

  Like, when the common person hears that, they're like, oh my god, this is the best phone ever made, right? But only kind of people, 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 the 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.

• 1:31:15Jack Selby?

  So when's the last time you were wrong?

• 1:31:18Speaker 02

  The worst trade I made in this, uh, this new account is, uh, has been, uh, RCAT, uh, Red Cat Drones. Because I thought that, you know, the Pentagon, they approved like a billion dollar spending and the whole, you know, Ukraine war kind of changed how the war, uh, story works. And there's gonna be a lot of investment in drones, like, that is actually true. That did not reflect in the stock price at all, you know? And so I kind of held this, uh, down and, uh, all the way, that's, that's what kind of helped, uh, made me round-trip all the way down back to 35K.

• 1:31:46Jack Selby?

  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 RCATs, 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, the base share of RCAT to the 2X leverage?

• 1:32:06Speaker 02

  I had never done any leveraged ETM ever before, right? I try 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 gotta experiment with yourself too. And so I did get successful with Palu, which was a 2X version of Palo to Networks, right? And that went well because of earnings and whatever like that. So I was like, oh, you know, maybe 2X leveraged things aren't worth playing with, right? You have extremely high conviction. And with the Red Cat play, you know, I thought like I could catch the bounce. And with a 2X levered play, you only have to bounce halfway there in order to make it all the way back. But again, the bounce never came and I think my main takeaway there is, yeah, you don't. That was almost essentially going off full tilt.

• 1:32:51Jack Selby?

  And so the mental kind of stop loss was 35K because you didn't want to go probably beneath the original.

• 1:32:56Speaker 02

  That is fair. 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%, 30% and the chart just looks absolutely ugly, you know, then yeah, there's that.

• 1:33:08Jack Selby?

  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 Arcat and Arcax thesis?

• 1:33:23Speaker 02

  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?

• 1:33:30Jack Selby?

  But the gross number.

• 1:33:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've seen it dip down. I mean, it's, I mean, like, like, you know,

• 1:33:38Speaker 02

  I'm not sure if it's related to the Arcat 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.

• 1:33:55Jack Selby?

  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, like the gross amount of subscribers that you had went down, right? After

• 1:34:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:14Jack Selby?

  Arcat and Arcax, like, once you were incorrect about that thesis, then people unsubscribed and, and stopped paying you. But then probably as you're going back up again. People are like resubscribing it's 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.

• 1:34:37Graham Stephan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:38Jack Selby?

  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, in a small window of time.

• 1:34:44Graham Stephan?

  Well, that's investors across.

• 1:34:46Jack Selby?

  Yeah, exactly. It's just, it's just funny. Yeah.

• 1:34:48Graham Stephan?

  And I share my.

• 1:34:48Graham Stephan?

  Buying into hype and selling the fear always.

• 1:34:51Speaker 02

  I shared this message with every subscriber. I highly endorse independent thinking, right? And I share my thesis. Um, it's up to you to decide whether you like it or not, right? And for the, the Arcat one, a lot of people disagree with me, you know? And I noticed that a lot of people did not enter to play with me because it was a fairly weak thesis, like looking back on it, right? Uh, and so I'm, I'm happy that, you know, a lot of people skipped out that one.

• 1:35:14Graham Stephan?

  Do you think that you felt pressured to go big to like prove yourself again in that trade?

• 1:35:19Speaker 02

  Yes, there was another lesson I posted about recently, which was, uh, don't force a trade. 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.

• 1:35:47Jack Selby?

  Who do you think is the best investor alive right now?

• 1:35:50Speaker 02

  There's a, there's a clear answer for that, actually, is Leopold and Eshinbrenner, right? The, uh, the ex OpenAI guy that started his situational awareness fund and invested all these picks and shovels, right? Like he's, I think up to like $20 billion in AUM, which is from, this is from like a two-year track record, by the way, right? This is equal to Bill Ackman's Pershing Square that he's developed over 20 years, right? And this guy, because you know, he, he wrote his, uh, uh, early thesis on the AI infrastructure build out, uh, invested in all the picks and shovels along the way. Uh, now that's why he's up to like 20 billion now.

• 1:36:19Graham Stephan?

  Doesn't that concern you though? Because Kathy Wood had a similar upswing, 2020, 2021.

• 1:36:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I think the game changes at different scales, right? Like I think, um.

• 1:36:32Speaker 02

  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 here may 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 could kind of bank the fees, right? You're not necessarily in it for the gains themselves.

• 1:36:50Jack Selby?

  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 10.

• 1:36:59Speaker 02

  That is my critique of that quote that like hedge fund managers 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 your bosses. You're playing a game of like, I better make sure I don't lose money so that, you know, my LPs don't don't don't exit, right? And they're playing a game of like, hey, we develop, you know, we double this year, give us more money, right? Versus if you're playing with your own money, you're actually really invested in concentrating these bets and thinking deeply about your own net worth and stuff.

• 1:37:31Jack Selby?

  It's easier to sell a product that guarantees, you know, positive return, even if the positive return is like 3% 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 for that.

• 1:37:45Speaker 02

  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 your life.

• 1:37:54Jack Selby?

  What are your thoughts on Chris Camilo?

• 1:37:55Speaker 02

  Love Chris. Yeah, I watched a podcast with you guys. He was on another livestream with Amit and Wolf recently. Talk about AI trading. I think he's the GOAT.

• 1:38:06Jack Selby?

  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 Xu'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.

• 1:38:49Jack Selby?

  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?

• 1:39:11Speaker 02

  Thank you. I think it's 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.

• 1:39:22Speaker 02

  And 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 gain engagement bait is because I'm, I'm, I'm trying to. I think you need to put yourself in positions of luck too. Right? I think a lot of people don't. I think a lot of people 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 in this fire like, oh, but I could be by the top or et cetera. I don't get it. I'm just like, I'm just like, you need to put yourself in, in, in positions to become lucky. Right? And, and also just like minimize, minimize your, your loss. Right? And, and that stuff.

• 1:40:05Speaker 02

  In terms of like the, you know, the course guide, it's funny, I don't have a course.

• 1:40:10Speaker 02

  I don't have a Discord. I don't have any of the, 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? Cause like on X, you have to kind of be more polished and you know, be tight and concise to go viral, et cetera. Versus my sub only pull like a couple more long forms, just like what I'm thinking about, et cetera, et cetera. And I, I take that duty 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. 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 bust hole.

• 1:40:51Speaker 02

  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 again, I want to see the thesis kind of play out. And I'm very upfront with folks that like I might trade at a whims notice. Right? Like I add that disclaimer. I even give a heads up that like, hey, look, uh, I'm looking, the market's looking weak today. I'm not liking 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.

• 1:41:18Jack Selby?

  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 are planning on spending their savings on? Or should it just, should a savings account for those types of people just be spy?

• 1:41:33Speaker 02

  I'll say yes to that, but I feel like I'm a little bit hypocrite because I do have 400K in SGOV. 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, it's not actually the emergency fund, like hands down, right? But then everything else beyond that, yeah, definitely put it in spy.

• 1:41:52Jack Selby?

  You were gonna say.

• 1:41:52Graham Stephan?

  Oh, yeah. Let's compare our Robinhood accounts.

• 1:41:54Speaker 02

  Sure, sure.

• 1:41:55Jack Selby?

  All right, Grant, pull yours out.

• 1:41:56Graham Stephan?

  Well, I don't have.

• 1:41:58Jack Selby?

  Don't you have something in there?

• 1:41:59Graham Stephan?

  I have something.

• 1:42:00Speaker 02

  Want to do like a race to a million dollars in our Robinhoods?

• 1:42:03Graham Stephan?

  I would do this for the members. Would you put 10K?

• 1:42:05Jack Selby?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:42:06Speaker 02

  If this is something. Right, like up here, right?

• 1:42:08Jack Selby?

  And then we could.

• 1:42:08Speaker 02

  And then just deposit money in there.

• 1:42:10Jack Selby?

  If this is something that you guys would be interested in, let us know. This is something that 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.

• 1:42:20Graham Stephan?

  Mine is $169,000. And it's because Bitcoin is up, uh, quite a bit today.

• 1:42:31Jack Selby?

  Okay. And then what's your, what's your like monthly and then your yearly?

• 1:42:35Graham Stephan?

  Oh, we don't want to see the yearly. That's not important. Weekly, I'm up two and a half percent. Monthly, I'm up 5.4%.

• 1:42:42Jack Selby?

  Okay. And then what's your one year?

• 1:42:43Graham Stephan?

  Uh, we don't want to see that, Jack.

• 1:42:44Jack Selby?

  Come on, this, we have to, we have to catch a flight.

• 1:42:46Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, but.

• 1:42:47Jack Selby?

  Oh!

• 1:42:48Graham Stephan?

  But that's just because crypto is down.

• 1:42:49Jack Selby?

  And then what's your all time? Uh.

• 1:42:52Graham Stephan?

  Now, I don't know, because I don't really use this account. I just moved it over for the bonus.

• 1:42:54Jack Selby?

  Dude, so how are you gonna hate on me when you've lost more than I've like this?

• 1:42:59Graham Stephan?

  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.

• 1:43:08Jack Selby?

  So that, right, so that 90,000 loss is kind of fake.

• 1:43:11Graham Stephan?

  It is fake because it doesn't know my cost basis. My cost basis of Bitcoin in this was like 28 to 32K.

• 1:43:18Jack Selby?

  Sure, but as Chris Kamal says.

• 1:43:18Graham Stephan?

  So this only tracks from when I put it in.

• 1:43:20Jack Selby?

  Whatever your portfolio is, you're choosing to buy those holdings every single day. And so like, just because you bought Robinhood a while ago, doesn't mean that you continued to hold it through the overpriced valuation.

• 1:43:31Graham Stephan?

  Tax loss harvest and offset gains.

• 1:43:33Jack Selby?

  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 gonna do is something different. And I'm only gonna 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.

• 1:44:17Jack Selby?

  And the idea was I would make enough money to purchase this watch. And so in two months, I'm up about 13.3%, 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.

• 1:44:32Speaker 02

  Pretty good.

• 1:44:33Jack Selby?

  What you got?

• 1:44:35Speaker 02

  I'm at 53K right now, up 3% today, all in, Shaz, one stock, keeping it simple. Over the last week, up 23%. And over the last month, technically down 8%, so you can see here, this is what hit that 35K.

• 1:44:50Jack Selby?

  You never went down though.

• 1:44:52Speaker 02

  I never went down. Yes, I kind of, you know, that's psychological, 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 tell, I say I locked. Then and my made my next uh my next uh trades count. And so on June 24th, yeah, I went back to 35K and you know, it's technically up.

• 1:45:08Jack Selby?

  Let me see the one year.

• 1:45:09Speaker 02

  Fifty percent since then. Um, I think one year. Yeah. So this is where you see like, uh, you know, if you look at the all time, it's like 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, cause I got in like the Reddit IPO and they forced you to create an E-Trade account and et cetera, et cetera. Then I transferred over here for a 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 to 35K challenge account up to let's say 44K, right? And then kind of paused 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.

• 1:45:51Jack Selby?

  Cool.

• 1:45:51Graham Stephan?

  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 gotta go on a flight right now.

• 1:46:00Jack Selby?

  Yep, we gotta catch a flight to Florida.

• 1:46:01Graham Stephan?

  So.

• 1:46:02Jack Selby?

  Hope you guys enjoyed.

• 1:46:03Graham Stephan?

  Thank you so much for watching.

• 1:46:04Jack Selby?

  Thank you.

• 1:46:04Graham Stephan?

  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.

• 1:46:23Jack Selby?

  Till next time.

• 1:46:38Speaker 07

  Hey, Bose here. When your next track starts, listen for the decisions that the artist makes. The vocal pushed right up front, the bass that waits half a beat, that sample from a 70s underground gem. Every choice deliberate. With Bose, you'll hear it all. Your music deserves Bose.