How to Spot the Next Big Trade Before Wall Street

I made 10 million in one day trading Amazon options on the on earnings and everyone called me a degenerate because it was a lever 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 3 days earlier, right? And so like >> 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 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 going to happen, but the world hasn't figured it out yet." >> 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 cuz like in the past, uh, it's meant change in consumer behavior. It's meant change in culture. It could be changes in politics, in in in weather. Uh, but recently, the last four years, it's all been about technology, right? So, changes in technology. I always say that the larger the change, the bigger the opportunity, the faster that change is coming at us. the bigger 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 herb 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, 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 going to laser focus on this one thing for the next 6 months and not do anything else. And if I just try decide to change my mind a month into that, I'll effing 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 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. like we're not going to 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 5 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. >> 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? I 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-deade 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 counternarrative. I'm always looking for the best case against my thesis and I'm re-evaluating 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. I'm fairly well known as probably one of the best Google trend an analyst I think in the world. Like I probably spent 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, 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. >> 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. >> We're looking at search patterns on all the products that Lulu sells. >> Okay. You see a huge spike, >> massive. >> Okay. And you say spike equals increased sales, which equals beat, which equals higher stock price. M >> and so you go and you put a position on. >> How do you uncover that it's not an organic spike >> 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 started 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 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 entire data set got corrupted. So I had to come out and basically say 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 they're going to make a bunch of money off of it, 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. I it took me two decades to be able to have the strength to do that. Um, but it's one of the most important attributes of a great investor is to let the information follow the information as it as it's shifting. >> 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 Tik Tok comments or things that are maybe more uh less quantifiable, more, you know, kind of quantit or um um 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, I'm seeing less comments or or what happens there? I yeah I basically is if you yall don't know me I basically built my entire career on uh 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 uh what do people do before they buy something? What do people do before they take the trip? Uh 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 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 Tik Tok 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 it it 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. 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 uh meaningfully being adopted across the spectrum of of the of the world economy. That's just one data point, right? That 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 uh or actually seeing things in the real world. uh 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' I've done shows about this. I made 10 million in one day trading Amazon options on the on earnings and everyone called me a degenerate because it was a lever trade where I would have lost a few million if it didn't go my way. Um, 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 3 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. An options trade, obviously, right? Uh, I'm willing to do that, but I'm only willing to do that when I put a 100 hours into something. So, I hope you're enjoying this conversation. 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Are you excited about being able to do that or do you think actually there's more opportunity by having the complexity of the stock price is 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. >> I I think it's first of all I think it's awesome. I think it's super interesting. I love it. Uh, 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 AD WFS 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 that Amazon management was going to uh address the capex issue headon 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. Jasse, 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 OI goes out of business or something like that, right? Like the majority of that commitment [clears throat] we hold very close to the vest right before the revenue hits. meaning like taking those final equipment deliveries. So he goes, we have a tre 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? 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 cuz I've been thinking about it every second of every day for 3 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 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. >> 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? >> Well, everything's a trade-off. And I did buy options that expired the week before. Took a 100% loss. I was fairly confident uh that with Microsoft earnings, which killed that the Wednesday expiration was going to be the move. And I went all in on the Wednesday expiration. Wild that it did not work out. Uh took a 100% 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 decide 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? Um >> you were going to make it back in one last trade. >> But again, this is this is 6 to 8 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 8 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 done because there are very few times when you have that type of conviction in a in a company 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. You're the perfect person to ask about cash >> because uh 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? Yeah, I I think I think one of the biggest mistakes investors make is not properly bucketing their money uh 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 um 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 investor how what the objective of other investors you know I'm trying to generate 50 to 80% annualized returns which I have done now 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%. Uh 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 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. Um, 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 [clears throat] 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. 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 kids'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 our head by Wall Street for 50 years, which is you must have uncorrelated returns. You shouldn't. You should avoid draw downs. What's wrong with a 70% draw down on an account that's designed to generate wealth over 30 years? I'm happy to take a 70% draw down every once in a while. I took one this summer. Okay? There's nothing wrong with a 70% draw down if over time you're going to generate two to 3x market returns. Again, 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 a 70% draw down? 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 buildout of I mean I just think it's a really messed up thing and and I'm I'm trying to drill this through retail investor's head. You're so goddamn afraid of leverage. Well, maybe you should be afraid of leverage 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. Are you willing for that account to go to zero? >> 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 it's a life-changing thing. The difference between nine and 18, whatever it is, right? So if you look at the triple lever S&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&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 draw downs? What are the what are the returns? Basically, the returns are 1.8x the market, okay? With some massive draw downs in between. But again, if you're investing over decades, why the hell do you care? Even if it's a 90% draw down, why do you care? Um, 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 onetenth of 1% which is probably what it is, okay? It's like onetenth or two ten of 1% that we will hit something that we've never seen in our history and instead of a 70 80 90% draw down 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 nonsensible. 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. 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 5 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 it. 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 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 something that's never happened in human history might happen and you might get wiped out. >> 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. Um I have yet to understand how a software AI will kill us, but um no one's really kind of laid that out. They 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 kind 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? >> I I worry about all I don't want to say I 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 embodied AI. I am exceptionally concerned about that. But I'm not so concerned about the ro the big robots, right? Yeah. I'm concerned about drones, right? I'm concerned about fleets of millions of 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 as a good as a somewhat of a good player, right? basically no longer having uh 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, where we couldn't gain control over the straight because of a 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? It's going to be crazy. >> 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, better actors because the one thing that I know exists are bad actors. Today's episode is brought to you by Galaxy 1. A lot of people got their money working for them, but the question now, how hard is it working? Well, the folks over at Galaxy 1, they're taking a very different approach. Everyone earns 3.5% APY using Galaxy 1 Cash. And if you make over $200,000 a year, that means you're probably an accredited investor. And then you can earn up to 8% on your cash guaranteed by Galaxy Digital. The best part though is that you can actually set it so that your yield immediately is reinvested into your favorite stocks, crypto, or ETFs. You don't got to think about it every single month. It just automatically does it for you. That's why I love Galaxy 1. So, if your cash isn't working as hard as you are, then it's time to make a move. Check out the link in the description and start earning today. I don't know if it's true, but there was uh a report that Iran was using Claude to upload war plans and like details about the Ayatollah's uh funeral. And Anthropic turned it over to the government 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? >> Yeah. I I don't have an answer. Uh I'll just leave it at this. It is super concerning to me. I try not to think about it too much because it it actually is really concerning to me. Uh I'm just going to try and enjoy the days that we have left before it gets really crazy. Uh and I do think it's we're going to hit a more I I hate I I'm just being honest with you. >> I know. I'm just laughing. The days you want to enjoy are you like triple levered up on your stock account? >> No, I [laughter] mean like I listen I'm spending you know it's funny. I I spoke at another conference this morning and 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 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, uh, is that this is no longer a profession. This is a lifestyle. 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 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? And it's like I want to see what my people are talking about today, you know, and like I even put out a tweet. I want 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 Linden joke when you had to go on a Yahoo message board in 1998 and you put a post and wait 2 days for someone to respond to you. 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 cuz 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 mark. I'm like dude live life right? Like there is more to this than our little investing chaotic investing world. It's why I use Sylvia Misfits and the Misfit uh name. It started with because I don't know if you guys know this, but we have uh the engineering team is a very uh unique group of people who you normally wouldn't think would come together. And I 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 verse 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 uh a show, Dumb Money, >> right? Like that it's almost like you own the thing that they try to use as the the thing to, you know, uh put you down or or whatever. And I think that that is part of the culture is this idea of like, yeah, yeah, you're right. Dumb money, 50 plus% returns annualized. What are your returns? >> Right? And so it's I think this element of uh 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 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. Be watching the podcast. all this stuff five, six years ago that was impossible to see. >> Yeah. I 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 it because of them because they're crazy and they did they did work that no one does on Wall Street. 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 hyperfocused. 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 of one of them calls me or DMs me, they're like, "Dude, I got a big trade I've been working on for 4 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 PE. 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. 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 people like well what in I'm like no you don't understand like I will buy every piece of data I can buy. I will buy Neielson 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 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 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 cuz it's all options, right? Um, 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 and like do your own work and then maybe you'll become one of them or not, but like start with one of them. >> You you want to know uh 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. >> Yeah. >> It it's not an LP's money. And there's a uh there's a gentleman who I don't think he's here, but um I uh I talked to him, he uses Sylvia, and he told me that he came from a um uh 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 uh in like a buyout type situation." And this is maybe I don't know six years ago, 5 years ago. And he basically started to allocate to all the names that in hindsight were really smart. You he bought Carvana really low. He sold it. He rotated into Bitcoin in the last bare market. He had Robin Hood stock early. Like he just went through a series of things that he had done this. And he said, "Look, I I made all this money." He goes, "But I'm basically deathly afraid of losing it." >> And it goes back to like, "What does every CEO ever get told? Only the paranoid survive." >> Yeah. >> 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, "Nah, you know, the LP is still going to be fine." It's a very different relationship with the portfolio. >> It is. And I'll say, not that the money isn't important. For some, that's definitely the driving factor. For some others, including myself, it again, I 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 is 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 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 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 cuz I've met them now over 20 years. They feel the same way. They just god they love just nailing that tra like Bloom Energy. Like no one believed in us when we were in bloom the last 2 years. Nobody believed short sellers, short reports, everyone like ah that 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. >> What is uh the best way for people to keep learning from you? Is it the YouTube? Is it >> for me? I live on X and YouTube, but I also have like, you know, this year I realize that not everybody wants to watch an hour and a half YouTube show, Dumb Money Live, uh, and they don't want to follow me on X, cuz they just don't like. So, like I do have these like clip accounts. So, daily Chris Camilillo on Instagram, daily Chris Camilo on TikTok, whatever your favorite place is, Facebook, like there's a daily Chris Camilo and it's just like two clips a day. Very digestible because I speak forever. And so there's an editor that figures out a way to get all my BS and down to two tiny little 30-se secondond clips. Uh but yeah, you can watch Dumb 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. >> He really is a degenerate. They [clears throat] were right. >> Yeah. [laughter] >> All right, Chris. Thank you so much for doing this. >> Thank you. It's been fun. makes heavy on.