How to Spot the Next Big Trade Before Wall Street | Chris Camillo

Chris Camillo is a self-taught investor known for pioneering social arbitrage investing and the host of Dumb Money Live. This was recorded live at the Silvia Investor Summit in New York. In this conversation, we break down his $10M one-day Amazon options trade, how AI corrupted Google Trends data, and why retail investors underuse leverage and concentration. We also discuss humanoid robotics, autonomous warfare, and why the best investors today are outside Wall Street. ======================= Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates investment strategies across Stocks, Commodities, ETFs and Crypto. Whether you’re rotating into AI & Gold, allocating to the S&P 500, or accumulating Bitcoin, Arch Public executes your plan 24/7 without ever taking custody of your assets or funds. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com, and start your FREE automated trading strategy! ======================= Sleep better with Fitnexa SomniPods 3 — ultra-thin sleep earbuds built for all-night comfort. With 42dB of noise cancellation, sleep tracking, and personalized AI insights, they're designed to block out noise and help you actually rest, whether you're a side sleeper, a light sleeper, or dealing with a snoring partner. Use code POMP10 for 10% off at https://www.fitnexa.com. ======================= GalaxyOne is a financial technology platform built for people who want their cash working harder. → https://go.galaxy.app/HMiq/pomp Galaxy Premium Yield is an investment note issued by Galaxy Digital LP and guaranteed by Galaxy Digital Holdings LP. It is not a bank deposit, is unsecured, and is not FDIC or SIPC insured. U. S. accredited investors only. Cash deposits held at Cross River Bank, Member FDIC. Securities products are not FDIC insured, not bank guaranteed, and may lose value. GalaxyOne Crypto is not FDIC or SIPC insured. Terms apply. ======================= 0:00 - Intro0:34 - Social arbitrage, AI & humanoid robotics4:46 - Changing your mind & the Lululemon Google Trends trade9:40 - Using conversational data to find trades12:36 - The $10M Amazon earnings trade21:31 - Cash, leverage & concentration26:22 - Leveraged S&P ETFs & tail risk29:22 - AI risk, drones & autonomous warfare34:40 - Investing as a lifestyle & community37:30 - Finding great retail investors & why they win

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:26Speaker 01

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• 0:55Speaker 02

  I made 10 million in one day, trading Amazon options on earnings. And everyone called me a degenerate because it was a levered trade where I would have lost a few million if it didn't go my way. You know, what people don't see is the, you know, 100-plus hours of deep, deep research that went into that trade across every single data point that was available on Amazon and cloud computing and compute prices that quarter. And even like deeply assessing what the management team was likely to say on that earnings call based on what Microsoft said three days earlier, right? And so like.

• 1:31Speaker 03

  You, I think, are known for one thing, but I know you for a completely different thing. Uh, most people know you for the idea of kind of social arbitrage investing, really understanding what's happening in the world in reality, buying those stocks before kind of Wall Street figures that out. Um, but you've been spending a ton of time and pouring a lot of your own personal money into robotics, humanoids, kind of the intersection of AI and the physical world. Can you talk a little bit as to, are those two things actually the same? Like, do you see some arbitrage? And you're like, hey, this is gonna happen, but the world hasn't figured it out yet?

• 2:05Speaker 02

  I mean, I, I, I think about what I do as being completely and purely opportunistic in terms of information asymmetry. I mean, I spent the entirety of the last 20 years essentially just trying to detect any change that's happening in the world a little bit quicker than others. And, you know, I use that word change loosely because like in the past, uh, it's meant change in consumer behavior. It's meant change in culture. It could be changes in politics and, and, and weather. Uh, but recently, the last four years, it's all been about technology, right? So changes in technology.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  I always say that the larger the change, the bigger the opportunity, the faster that change is coming at us, the bigger the opportunity. And there's never been a bigger change that's hitting us as quickly as this age of AI. So, you know, what I do as an observational investor or social arb investor is I try to detect change and I try to connect dots quicker than anyone else. It's really that simple to investable opportunities. And I just try to stay hyper opportunistic about that. I don't have a framework. I wasn't a physical, um, AI investor,

• 3:31Speaker 02

  you know, embodied AI investor prior to humanoid robotics. I had zero experience in that world. But I cast a really wide net at the top of my funnel. And because I only work for myself, as you know, I'm invested in about 180 early-stage companies, uh, although I'm primarily focused on public equity markets. I can do anything I want, whenever I want. So tomorrow I can wake up and say, I'm gonna laser focus on this one thing for the next six months and not do anything else. And if I just try, decide to change my mind a month into that, oh, I think change my mind and I'll become a crypto guy. Like whatever, whatever I want to do. And I think that provides the maximum opportunity

• 4:16Speaker 02

  because so much of institutional Wall Street, as you know, has to work within a framework. They have to work within an area of expertise. They have, they're handcuffed, right? I have complete and utter freedom to chase the opportunity that's in front of us. And dude, I'm telling you right now, I said this, what, four years ago, three and a half years ago? The day I got on Chat GPT for the first time? Nothing comes even close to what we're seeing right now. That said, I know you mentioned robotics. We're years away, but that will be the biggest thing that humanity ever sees. Like embodied AI, robotics, humanoids, all the stuff. It's years out. Don't believe what all the hype tells you.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  Like, we're not gonna have robots doing all the stuff next year, or the year after, or the year after. Believe me, I'm probably deeper in this space than anyone in the world of finance. Uh, deployment is an exceptionally difficult thing to achieve when it comes to generalized robotics. It's never been done before. Uh, we're going to learn a lot over the next five to 10 years. But when it happens, and it will happen slowly, kind of like autonomous cars happened meaningfully more slowly than anyone would have anticipated, including Elon and all the Tesla guys. But it's starting to happen. And when it happens, it will be bigger than anything we've ever seen in our lifetime.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  You mentioned changing your mind, which I think is a very fascinating, uh, kind of exercise. It's very difficult for most people in this room to do that because it requires you to, one, go from something I believed in to maybe I don't believe in it as much. And it could happen by I'm running towards something new. So I see a bigger opportunity, a better asymmetric thing. Or it could be, I want to run away from the thing that I thought was true and is no longer true. How have you learned to change your mind and do it with such conviction that you can actually not only change your mind, but that you change your portfolio as a result?

• 6:16Speaker 02

  I would say it's one of the things I'm most proud of that has been one of the most difficult things to accomplish as an investor over the course of my multi-decade journey as an investor, especially as an investor who's very public on YouTube and X and talking about almost everything that I do. Uh, I'm always kind of questioning the counter narrative. I'm always looking for the best case against my thesis. And I'm reevaluating that on a daily basis. You know, there was a trade I made, I don't know, a year or two ago on Lululemon. And it was based on Google Trends data. I, I have been monitoring Google Trends data from the day that it first came out, I don't know, 17 years ago.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  I'm fairly well-known as probably one of the best Google Trend analysts, I think, in the world. Like, I probably spend more time on Google Trend data than anyone I know in finance. And there, I think it was like the summer of '25, we saw anomalies in the data set that we had never seen before. It was astonishing. And it was across a bunch of different brands. Lulu just happened to be one of them. Uh, if you were going on that data alone, it was an unprecedented quarter for Lululemon. We saw spikes that were just never achievable midsummer. Spikes that don't even rarely even happen during the holiday season. And we made an investment, you know, on that,

• 7:44Speaker 02

  a pretty heavy investment call on that, on Lulu. And then about, I don't know, 10 days later, realized that the entire Google Trend data set had been corrupted by AI, AI queries. I wrote articles about it. No one believed me. To this day, they still don't believe me, but it's still going on today. I essentially have more or less not used Google Trends since last summer because of this.

• 8:11Speaker 03

  Let's go a little bit deeper on this for a second, just to kind of set the scene here. So you're monitoring Google Trends in general?

• 8:17Speaker 02

  We're looking at search patterns on all the products that Lulu sells.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  Okay, you see a huge spike.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  Massive.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  Okay. And you say spike equals increased sales, which equals beat, which equals higher stock price. And so you go and you put a position on. How do you uncover that it's not an organic spike?

• 8:37Speaker 02

  Once you start building the full data matrix of all the other data points that should theoretically be aligned with what you're seeing on one data source, nothing else aligned, okay? So that was a huge red flag. Then we start to figure out why are they not aligned? What other, is this a corrupted data set? We looked at similar types of queries that had nothing to do with Lulu. And they were all started spiking around the same time, within a couple of weeks. Something had happened where they had switched. It was, I think it was Chat GPT had started gaining access to queries on Google and they started getting counted and registered. So the entire data set got corrupted. So I had to come out and basically say,

• 9:19Speaker 02

  now I'm, I'm out of that trade, right? Now, most people see you when you get in a trade. They rarely listen to you when you get out of a trade. Like, it was like, and of course, Lulu completely got destroyed on earnings that, that quarter last summer. Not this summer, but last summer. And most investors just wouldn't do that. Like, it's crazy. Like, like, I, I tell investors, like, once they get in a thesis, they can't get out of it. Like, they cannot ingest new information that hits them. It's like, you have a thesis, you test it, you continue to test it, then new information surfaces that all of a sudden makes your thesis fall apart. But because they've been vocal about it, whether to themselves, their friends, in their head, they already have this thing where they think it's gonna make a bunch of money off of it,

• 10:04Speaker 02

  especially with content creators, they refuse to like, say, hey, I now have new information and my thesis is no longer valid. It's wrong. And I'm going to exit out of the trade, even though maybe I'm down, right? That is one of the most difficult things for an investor to do. Institutional, retail, doesn't matter. It took me.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  Two decades to be able to have the strength to do that. But it's one of the most important attributes of a great investor is to let the information, follow the information as it's shifting.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  So if you're looking at Google trend data, let's just call that somewhat quantifiable data. If it doesn't line, it's kind of math, right? Then you start to ask questions. What about when you're doing more of the like reading TikTok comments or things that may be more, less quantifiable, more, you know, kind of quantitative or qualitative in the sense of, it's a little bit harder to know, is this shifting? Do you just have like a feel for like, hey, where I'm seeing less comments or what happens there?

• 11:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I basically, if y'all don't know me, I basically built my entire career on conversational data sets, which is a concept that if you're trying to detect change in the world quicker than others, where is the origin point? Where is the earliest point where you can detect that change? Most hedge funds rely on transactional data sets, credit card data, swipe data, right? What do people do before they buy something? What do people do before they take the trip? Before they change their behavior? They speak about it. They speak about it before and during. So conversational data will always be the earliest data point an investor will ever have

• 11:47Speaker 02

  access to, and it's free, right? Like, so I spend the majority of my time the last decade, decade, reading comments on videos, mostly TikTok, because that's where most of the organic, raw conversations are happening. The problem with conversational data is that it's highly interpretable and it doesn't have an historical correlated history to any, you know, revenue point at a company, right? Because it's, even the way you speak changes over time. So it's, it's very difficult. But if I find something in conversational data that leads to me to believe that people are changing their behavior or their buying patterns, or there's something happening with technology, it's not always consumer stuff.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  Sometimes it could be developers talking about going on cloud. That's how I invested in AWS, I don't know, 13 years ago, in Amazon. It could be people right now speaking about their use of AI, right? At incumbent companies, if you're trying to really detect the speed at which AI is really meaningfully being adopted across the spectrum of the, of the world economy. That's just one data point, right? That you build a thesis off that. There could be 15 other data points now that you want to build a matrix off of. It could be search data. It could be website traffic. It could be going out and interviewing store managers or actually seeing things in the real world.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  It could be transactional data, credit card swipe data. So you want to build that data matrix and you want to generally see how many aligning data points exist, right? And, and that defines the degree of conviction you have in a trade. So the trade that was the biggest trade of my life last quarter on Amazon, it was the, I've done shows about this, I made 10 million in one day, trading Amazon options on, on earnings, and everyone called me a degenerate because it was a levered trade where I would have lost a few million if it didn't go my way.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  You know, what people don't see is that, you know, 100 plus hours of deep, deep research that went into that trade across every single data point that was available on Amazon and cloud computing and compute prices that quarter. And even like deeply assessing what the management team was likely to say on that earnings call based on what Microsoft said three days earlier, right? And so like, people don't understand to have that level of conviction where you're willing to put 10% of your liquid net worth on a trade that's going to disappear in 24 hours if you're not right. Options trade, obviously, right?

• 14:32Speaker 02

  I'm willing to do that, but I'm only willing to do that when I put 100 hours into something.

• 14:37Speaker 03

  So I hope you're enjoying this conversation. But before we continue, most of you know, I live in New York City. And when I try to go to sleep, it is noisy as hell outside. There's trucks, there's sirens, there's all kinds of noise, including people just yelling and screaming for no damn reason late at night. That's why I'm so excited to tell you about the FitNexa SomniPods 3. These are earbuds that you sleep with and they're actually built for sleep, not just for music. They've got up to 42 decibels of total noise reduction. So if you've got a snoring partner, city noise, or you just can't shut off your brain at night, these are built to cancel that all out. They're ultra thin, and if you're a side sleeper, you're not fighting a bulky earbud all night. There's a private alarm built in too, so you can wake up on time without waking up whoever's next to you. And I know some of y'all, y'all got people next to you.

• 15:22Speaker 03

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• 15:45Speaker 03

  Doing something like that going into an earnings call, one of the areas that I'm very excited about is, let's say that you had a opinion on what was going to happen with AWS revenue. I'm boiling it down, let's just say that that was the, the kind of bet. And you buy the stock going into earnings because you think AWS revenue is going to beat. But when that occurs, all of a sudden, the stock goes down because the CEO says something or some other part of the business is weak, et cetera. The promise of the prediction markets, if they become liquid enough, would be, you could actually isolate the economic data point of just, is AWS revenue going to beat or not? Are you excited about being able to do that?

• 16:28Speaker 03

  Or do you think actually there's more opportunity by having the complexity of the stock prices, not just AWS revenue? It is made up of what they say on the earnings call, the other business lines, AWS, kind of everything together?

• 16:39Speaker 02

  I, I think it's, first of all, I think it's awesome. I think it's super interesting. I love it. But for me, if you're willing to like do the real work, it's, it's the nuances and the complexity and the vagueness of what you think the marginal driver of action is going to be that day. That, listen, I knew AWS was going to, was going to beat, based on my analysis, most of the street did as well. I actually was a little more bullish than the rest of the street, but that was not the marginal driver of my conviction that day. The marginal driver of my conviction that day that made me place that trade was my confidence

• 17:19Speaker 02

  that Amazon management was going to address the capex issue head on, on the earnings call. And that based on what Microsoft had done two or three days earlier on their earnings call, which went exceptionally well, they did the same thing. Microsoft addressed it and Microsoft got rewarded for it.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  Jassy, I knew, listened to that call. He saw what they did. He's smart. I knew he would do the same thing in his own way, and that's exactly what happened. Amazon came out and said, listen, we're going to increase capex again from 200 to 220 billion. But don't be concerned. Number one, 100% of that is accounted for in terms of we have demand for every penny of that capex. And even in the event that something, some anomaly happens to where, you know, he was essentially referring to maybe someone like Anthropic or AI goes out of business or something like that, right? Like, the majority of that commitment, we hold very close to the vest right before

• 18:26Speaker 02

  the revenue hits, meaning like taking those final equipment deliveries. So he goes, we have a tremendous, we have flexibility, right? And so, again, I knew he would address it because it was the exact thing that destroyed Amazon the previous quarter and for the previous four months, right? So it was the number one issue the company was having with investors. He knew exactly how to address the issue. Microsoft had just done it. I thought it would be wild if he wasn't able to pull that off. He's not the type of CEO that's not measured. So again, while the rest, while the very few investors are thinking like I think, right?

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Like, how many investors were thinking so laser focused on that? Almost none, I can guarantee you, right? They're looking at numbers, they're looking at what's the number going to be? Are they going to beat? No, I know what's, I know what's going to move that stock because I've been thinking about it every second of every day for three months. And, and that was my move, okay? Even then, I knew that I didn't know what I didn't know. There were other factors that can come into play. I had to hold those options overnight. I didn't know what Trump was going to say about Iran that night. Who knows? The whole market could have fallen apart, you know, to the degree that earnings wouldn't have even mattered that much. So I told everyone, like, listen, post-trade, there was still a 20% chance that trade was

• 19:52Speaker 02

  going to go down the wrong way, even though I felt I had covered my basis and I had never had higher conviction in an earnings trade. But there was still like an, only an 80% shot of that trade working.

• 20:03Speaker 03

  Let's talk about actually like executing the trade. You could have bought that a week before the earnings, you could have bought it the night before, you could have bought it the morning of, you could have bought it, you know, 20 minutes before the market close. How long do you wait to make sure you have all the information necessary to do it? And I say that as like, if you bought the options in the morning, something happens at noon, you may change your mind, but you also don't want to like 359 it, you know, and like hope, hope you sneak in. So how do you think about the actual day of executing a trade like that?

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Well, everything's a trade off. And I did buy options that expired the week before, took 100% loss. I was fairly confident that with Microsoft earnings, which killed.

• 20:53Speaker 02

  That the Wednesday expiration was going to be the move and I went all in on the Wednesday expiration while it did not work out. Took a hundred percent loss, a seven-figure loss that day. And I talked about this, my account was, had been destroyed at that point because I had been getting crushed on Amazon for weeks. And so even with my account crushed, I decided to take, I don't know, it was like another 10 or 15% of my liquid net worth and put it into that last trade going into earning. And that's why everyone called me a degenerate, right?

• 21:23Speaker 03

  You're gonna make it back in one last trade?

• 21:26Speaker 02

  But again, this is, this is six to eight months of work going into this trade. And I understood why it didn't work the week before and why it didn't work on that Wednesday. And so I decided to say, you know what, I'm going for it. I put it all in on Friday. And of course, the stock had been dropping, so the options were cheaper. So I was able, I think I was down eight million and I made 11 million. So, you know, I, I, I made my money back that I had lost in the weeks and weeks and weeks prior, including that Wednesday, plus some. And I thought it would be irresponsible for me not to make that trade, as crazy as that sounds with the work that I'd done. Because there are very few times when you

• 22:09Speaker 02

  have that type of conviction in a, in a company, in, in, in a specific trade. It, it, it happens one to five times a year, right? It could be zero that whole year. So I didn't know when the next one was going to come around. It could be a month or a year.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  You're the perfect person to ask about cash. Because I think most people, when they know your story, they see how you invest, they're like, he must be 100% invested at all times. How do you think about using cash to wait for another idea, another trade, do research, risk manage? Like, do you hold cash in your portfolio? And how do you think about it?

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I think, I think one of the biggest mistakes investors make is not properly bucketing their money for the objective of that particular account and the degree of risk that you're willing to take to achieve the reward that, that is aligned with that account type. So for this particular account, which is my primary account, which is the vast majority of how I invest in public equity markets, I have a very specific objective, which is very different from what other investors, how, what the objective of other investors. You know, I'm trying to generate 50 to 80% annualized returns, which I have done now

• 23:31Speaker 02

  for 18 years in that account, every year, year in and year out. And the only way that I can achieve that is by taking concentrated levered bets when I have a high degree of conviction. So my account is generally levered 30 to 70%. There are times when I'm 100% levered. And then there are times when I'm 100% levered and things don't go well. And I'm getting margin called on the daily and I still have exceptionally high conviction. And I have to take money out and start buying options, right? So it's like I'm 100% levered. So the only way I can go in deeper is by taking equity and trans, you know, transferring

• 24:15Speaker 02

  equity to derivatives, to options. And that's where I'm like crazy levered. That's exactly where I was when I made that Amazon trade. There are other times when the market is volatile and I don't have a lot of conviction. I'm 30% levered. But for me, being 30% levered and not holding any options is like the equivalent of holding cash, right? Because if I'm only 30% levered, I don't have options, I have a lot of opportunity to dip into my account to lever up, lever up, lever up. Even if I'm wrong two or three times in a row, I can still dig in deeper. So everyone, it's diff, the answer is different for everyone.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  But I will say this, I think retail investors really underappreciate the power of concentration and leverage. And I'm not saying that you should be doing this in your retirement account or your kid's college education account, but everyone should have an account where they are willing to take responsible amounts of leverage and concentration to generate outside returns, if that's an objective for you. But I would imagine most of us would like to have an account where we can get rich quick rather than get rich slow, right? Over 50 years. And I just don't understand this stuff that's been kind of pushed into

• 25:37Speaker 02

  our head by Wall Street for 50 years, which is you must have uncorrelated returns. You shouldn't, you should avoid drawdowns. What's wrong with a 70% drawdown on an account that's designed to generate wealth over 30 years? I'm happy to take a 70% drawdown every once in a while. I took one this summer, okay? There's nothing wrong with a 70% drawdown if over time, you're going to generate two to three X market returns. Again, if, if, most of us are investing over 20 to 40 years, correct? Most of us. I mean, I'm not young. I'm still investing for 20 to 30 years at my age right now. So why do I care about

• 26:19Speaker 02

  a 70% drawdown? Why would I not want to have an account that's correlated, concentrated, levered, and generates 30, 50, 60% annually because it's concentrated and levered and correlated to what the world cares about, which right now is technology and the industry of intelligence. And if you push forward a few decades, it's all that matters, quite honestly. Intelligence and technology and global build out of, I mean, I just think it's a really messed up thing. And, and I'm trying to drill this through retail investors' head. You're so goddamn afraid of leverage. Well, maybe you should be afraid of leverage

• 27:03Speaker 02

  if it's in your kid's college education account. But why don't you start a new account with 20 bucks in it, or whatever you want, right? And, and start learning how to invest with leverage and concentration. Because anybody can do what I do, we're just afraid to do it.

• 27:16Speaker 03

  Are you willing for that account to go to zero?

• 27:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. So that's a great question. When you're in, like, what I'm going to bring up here is if, if you, if you have someone who's not a stock picker, okay, who's like, Chris, I don't want to do the crap you do. But I want to, I want to get gains that are bigger than 9% and 10% a year. I want 18%, you know, that'd be insane. That's a life-changing thing, the difference between nine and 18, whatever it is, right? So if you look at the triple leverage S and P ETF, I'm not talking about triple leverage ETFs on a sector or on a single stock. I'm talking about across the entire S and P or the NASDAQ. There have been studies done, there are white papers written on this where they've gone and backdated if you would have done that over the last 80 years, right? What are the drawdowns? What

• 28:01Speaker 02

  are the, what are the returns? Basically, the returns are 1.8X the market, okay? With some massive drawdowns in between. But again, if you're investing over decades, why the hell do you care? Even if it's a 90% drawdown, why do you care? And of course, when you're investing over time, it compounds even bigger than that, right? So my question to you is, there is a theoretical risk of a, in an anomaly situation that we've never seen, we haven't seen in 80 years. We've never seen it ever. There is an anomaly situation where you lose it all. But if I told you that that anomaly was like 1/10 of 1%, which is probably what

• 28:45Speaker 02

  it is, okay? It's like 1/10 or 2/10 of 1%, that we will hit something that we've never seen in our history, and instead of a 70, 80, 90% drawdown, it's like 100% basically? Would you not take that bet, knowing that you basically have close 99.9% chance you're going to basically double your returns over 30 years? Okay. So instead of retiring with 3 million, you're getting six? So it's just nonsensical. It doesn't make any sense at all, right? That, that, that you're not willing to take in a, in an account that's designed for that, right? There is a tail risk. We have to acknowledge that there is a tail risk.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  But guys, there's also a tail risk that someone's going to put a nuke off, we're all going to be dead in five years, right? There's a tail risk that, yeah, the AI is going to kill us, or a bad actor is going to get hold of a virus with AI and kill us. So there's tail risk everywhere in life. There's tail risk going out in the street, you're going to hit by a bus. You know, the, the, the, the girl that was homecoming queen of my grade in high school literally got hit by a bus in Manhattan, I don't know, 10 years out and is no longer with us, right? That's act, that's real. That's like my homecoming queen of my high school class. This is not some one in 10 billion tail risk. So what the hell are you so afraid of? A ridiculously small tail risk? That's something that's

• 30:14Speaker 02

  never happened in human history might happen and you might get wiped out.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  When you think about some of these tail risks, one that has become talked about more, but I don't think it's very big is like AI is going to kill us. I have yet to understand how a software AI will kill us, but no one's really kind of laid that out that just like to say it. But I do think that there's a lot of people who are worried about the physical embodiment of AI. You know, obviously if the AI had a weapon or the AI could, you know, humanoid beat us up or go through all these kinds of scenarios. You are probably one of the closest investors in the world to the development of robotics. Do you worry about any of that stuff?

• 30:53Speaker 02

  I worry about all, I don't want to say I worry, I think about all of it. And I do think there actually is meaningful risk even without the embodied AI. There, listen, there's viruses that can be schemed up. There's electrical grid that can throw society into complete and utter chaos. I mean, there's, there's, listen, you mess with the banking system, you mess with the infrastructure of society and that in many ways could be more dangerous than the physical because people will implode on themselves. Okay. You mess with the food chain, like there's a lot of stuff. In terms of embodied AI, I'm exceptionally concerned about that, but I'm not so concerned

• 31:37Speaker 02

  about the big robots, right? Yeah, I'm concerned about drones, right? I'm concerned about fleets of millions, I'm concerned about, you know, countries like America that historically have been able to leverage our resources to kind of provide defense safety to the world as a good, as a somewhat of a good player, right? Basically no longer having that strength in a world where anyone can access millions and millions and millions of drones, right? That are autonomous, that you saw a little bit of, and this happened this last year, right?

• 32:22Speaker 02

  Where we couldn't gain control over the strait because of, we're in like, not even in the first inning of autonomous warfare. What do you think that's going to be like in 10 years?

• 32:33Speaker 03

  It's going to be crazy.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  It's going to be crazy, right? So like, to say that that's not a realistic concern is wild. It's very real. There are so many concerns when you have a fragile society where technology is moving quicker than we're capable of dealing with, right? And it's, everything is becoming more democratized. You know, we love it that intelligence is becoming democratized, but there's a negative side to that. Bad actors. So I'm not as concerned with the AI turning against us, mostly because I don't think any of us can really fully assess the degree to which that's realistic yet, yet. I'm exceptionally concerned about bad actors leveraging infinite intelligence to be bigger,

• 33:19Speaker 02

  better, bad actors, because the one thing that I know exists are bad actors.

• 33:25Speaker 03

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• 34:10Speaker 03

  I don't know if it's true, but there was a report that Iran was using Claude to upload war plans and like details about the Ayatollah's funeral. And Anthropic turned it over to the government and was like, hey, you probably want to know about this. But I think to your point, it's superhuman intelligence, like the bad guys want to use it too, right?

• 34:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't have an answer. I'll just leave it at this. It is super concerning to me. I try not to think about it too much because it actually is really concerning to me. I'm just going to try and enjoy the days that we have left before it gets really crazy. And I do think it's, we're going to hit a more, I hate, I'm just being honest with you.

• 34:57Speaker 03

  I know, I'm just laughing that the days you want to enjoy are you like triple levered up on your stock account?

• 35:02Speaker 02

  I mean, like, I, listen, I'm spending, you know, it's funny, I spoke at another conference this morning and there's all these events happening, your events tonight, all this stuff. And I'm like, people are like, why are you not, I'm in New York for under 24 hours, like why are you going home? I'm like, my son plays JV football, he's got three games left. I don't know how many days he'll see the field, like I'm getting my butt home to see my son play football. Like that is what I care about, right? Like so, and I say that to you guys because as investors, we get so caught up in all this stuff. We all do, we love it. Let's, you know, the thing I love about investing in 2026, partially because of guys like you, is that this is no longer a profession. This is a lifestyle.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  This is, I don't, I don't want to call it a hobby. This is our life. We're a community now. Like, I thought about this the other day and I had a little anxiety and stuff, there was some stuff going on in my life and I got on X because it was like, those are my people. You know what I'm saying? It's like, I want to see what my people are talking about today, you know? I'm like, I even put out a tweet, I wanted to talk to them, but like, this is a culture now. It's a culture of being in the investor class and we're all in it together and it's really special. But I've been doing this before there was a retail investor class when, you know, me and Howard Linsen joke, when you had to go on a Yahoo message board in 1998 and you put a post and wait two days for someone to respond to you.

• 36:32Speaker 02

  Like, there was no such thing as a retail investor really, right? But like, we get so caught up in it that so many of us, like I used to get depressed on a Friday when the market would close. I know you don't care if you're a crypto guy, it's always open. But like, like, but like I see a lot of young guys now, they're like, oh, they get depressed when the market's not open or whatever. They're like, they want 24 hour, I'm like, dude, live life, right? Like there is more to this than our little investing, chaotic investing world.

• 37:01Speaker 03

  It's why I use Sylvia Misfits and the Misfit name. It started with, because I don't know if you guys know this, but we have, the engineering team is a very unique group of people who you normally wouldn't think would come together. And I first started using it as like, the team was a team of misfits, it was something we were proud of, right? It was kind of like, hey, us versus the world. And then it quickly hit me that a lot of people in this room feel like misfits to the traditional financial world. And so your point about like, there's a culture, there's a community, all this stuff, you know, Chris has a show, Dumb Money, right? Like that, it's almost like you own the thing that they tried to use as the thing to, you know, put you down or whatever.

• 37:43Speaker 03

  And I think that that is part of the culture is this idea of like, yeah, you're right, dumb money, 50 plus percent returns annualized, what are your returns? Right? And so it's, I think this element of, there's an irreverence to it, but the thing that I tell, every time I talk to anyone who works at a hedge fund, big Wall Street institution, I say, you're underestimating this group of people in two ways. They are smarter than you think and they got way more money than you think. And you can see it's now starting to resonate where they're starting to say to themselves, well, if that is true, maybe I should be learning from them, maybe I should be paying attention, maybe I should be reading X, I should be reading the newsletters, I should be watching the podcasts, all this stuff. Five, six years ago, that was impossible to see.

• 38:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I think people don't fully understand, and it's a small number of retail investors, by the way, and this is what I would like, my recommendation to all of y'all would be to find these people, they're out there. Like over half of my biggest trades, the last eight or nine years were not surfaced by me. They were surfaced by people in my network who are psychotic like me in a different way, and they put their 100 hours or their 200 hours into a trade. And then like, I'm like, okay, I'm going to now put my time into that, but because of them, because they're crazy and they did, they did work that no one does on Wall Street.

• 39:05Speaker 02

  Like you would never do this type of work for a job because no one would appreciate it. You do it for the love of it because you're a little nuts, you're maybe a little autistic, you're, you're, you're, you're hyper focused, like, we're all like this. I have it in me, there's a group of investors that I've gotten to know over 25 years, they're all crazy, but when some, one of them calls me or DMs me, they're like, dude, I got a big trade I've been working on for four months. I'm like, okay, what is it? And then I'll start my process. You're not in this alone, you got to find these people. I'm one of them, okay? Like, I always tell people, steal, don't copy trade me, but steal my ideas and then do your own research, poke your holes in it, let me know if you find a hole, because like, that's, you know, I want you to play devil's advocate on my ideas.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  None of us are perfect, but there are some of the best investors in the world are retail investors that are just psychopaths, that literally they will do things, like when I, when I go deep on a trade.

• 40:02Speaker 02

  People like, well, what in for I'm like, no, you understand, like, I will buy every piece of data I can buy. I will buy Nielsen data. I will I buy hedge fund data. I will read every piece of information in the world. Anyone speaking about the company as an investor, if they're a customer of the company, you know, i- i- if it if the customer of a company is an engineer, I will read every Reddit forum where engineers are talking about the thing. If it's an HVAC company, I'll read every forum where HVAC people speak to each other going back two years. I am, I will go to the ends of the world to cover every single basis. So I am not missing anything. Even then, I know there are things that I don't know that I don't know about the trade. But we just are crazy. Like, we will do

• 40:44Speaker 02

  that level of deep dive research before I put 10 or 20% of my net worth in a trade that will go away if I'm wrong, because it's all options, right? But those people are out there. Like, I have a few. They're out there to find. They're on X. You could find them, you know, those find those people, follow them, don't copy trade them, but steal the crap out of their ideas for yourself and like, do your own work. And then maybe you'll become one of them. Or not. But like, start with one of them.

• 41:16Speaker 03

  You want to know why they do that? I've come to the conclusion, on one hand, there's no constraints. So they don't have to go defend it to an investment committee, all that kind of stuff. There's no like, oh, our LPs are going to get mad if we put more than 5% of our portfolio in a trade, whatever. So you're kind of invest anywhere, do anything, take unlimited risk. But more importantly is, it's their money.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:39Speaker 03

  It it's not an LP's money. And there's a, there's a gentleman who I don't think he's here, but I talked to him, he uses Sylvia, and he told me that he came from a, a, a union family. And so he's like, I never really had money before, but through some circumstances of a company that he worked at for a long time, basically got a lump sum of money in like a buyout type situation. And this is maybe, I don't know, six years ago, five years ago. And he basically started to allocate to all the names that in hindsight were really smart. He parked Carvana really low. He sold it. He rotated into Bitcoin in the last bear market. He had Robin Hood stock early. Like, he just went through a series of things that he'd done this. And he said, Look, I made all this money. He goes, but I'm basically

• 42:23Speaker 03

  deathly afraid of losing it. And it goes back to like, what does every CEO ever get told? Only the paranoid survive.

• 42:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:31Speaker 03

  Right? And so in a weird way, like, he is better positioned, because to him, every single dollar means something versus a hedge fund manager who's like, eh, you know, the LP is still going to be fine. It's a very different relationship with the portfolio.

• 42:46Speaker 02

  It is. And I'll say, not that the money is important. For some, that's definitely the driving factor. For some others, including myself, it again, I don't want to downplay it by using the word game, but we are playing a very serious game. And it's a game that we love. And we're obsessed with it. It's like a game of chess, and we want to win. And there's nothing like the feeling of getting a pick right, especially when the rest of the world doesn't see it. And you've worked harder than anyone else. There's no, I mean, the money's great. Don't get me wrong. But like, money's not a motivating factor for me anymore. For me, it's winning. And it's not necessarily winning against others. It's like against myself. Like, to be able to nail that trade that no one else saw, because

• 43:29Speaker 02

  you worked harder than everyone else, you did more research, you kind of cut through the noise, you figured out what that marginal driver of performance, or stock price, or price, like, whatever it is, is, and like, you found the nugget, right? And you put in months of work. That is the biggest satisfaction. And you do that because you're obsessed with this game. Like, like, I just, I'm not a gamer. I don't like actually play video games. But I assume it's the same feeling that those guys get. They want to win. They want to play to win. And like, that's what I, I love it so much. And I know there's other guys just like me, because I've met them now over 20 years. They feel the same way.

• 44:11Speaker 02

  They just, God, they love just nailing that trade, like Bloom Energy, like, no one believed in us when we were in Bloom the last two years. Nobody believed. Short sellers, short reports, everyone like, ah, the company sucked for 13 years. Like, like, no one believed us. And like, we just, and then here is Bloom from 30 to 300, you know, in what, 15 months? And it's like, nothing beats that feeling.

• 44:36Speaker 03

  What is the best way for people to keep learning from you? Is it the YouTube? Is it Twitter?

• 44:42Speaker 02

  For me, I live on X and YouTube, but I also have like, you know, this year, I realized that not everybody wants to watch an hour and a half YouTube show, Done Money Live. And they don't want to follow me on X, because they just don't like, so like, I do all these other clip accounts. So Daily Chris Camillo on Instagram, Daily Chris Camillo on TikTok, whatever your favorite place is, Facebook, like, there's a Daily Chris Camillo. And it's just like, two clips a day, very digestible, because I speak forever. So there's an editor that figures out a way to get all my BS and down to two tiny little 30 second clips. But yeah, you can watch Done Money Live. We do one a week or so. And then I love X, man. I'm just like, I live on X. It's my, it's my community.

• 45:21Speaker 03

  He really is a degenerate.

• 45:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:23Speaker 03

  They were right.

• 45:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:26Speaker 03

  All right, Chris, thank you so much for doing this.

• 45:28Speaker 02

  Thank you. It's been fun. Thanks for having me on.