The Market Hustle
Can Collectibles be an Investment? (guest: Georgiy) Ep. 13
In this episode, we speak with Georgiy (known as @funancialism on Instagram) a Board Certified Behavior Analyst who emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States at a young age. As the first in his family to invest, he is now on a path to make work optional by 2030. He shares his unique investing philosophy and system with us all.
In this episode, we speak with Georgiy (known as @funancialism on Instagram) a Board Certified Behavior Analyst who emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States at a young age. As the first in his family to invest, he is now on a path to make work optional by 2030. He shares his unique investing philosophy and system with us all.
So I went over there and I saw some games. I saw the names of all of the collectors, the founders of the biggest companies. The S&P 500 owners were the owners of these collectibles.
Speaker 2:Yeah hey, the market hustle, helping you to succeed, teaching like nobody else Financial empowerment, giving you strategies for generational wealth so you can start helping yourself. More money for you to be getting. This is the moment for you to be winning and be living financially independent.
Speaker 3:What is up everybody? Welcome back to episode 13,. New market hustle episode. I can't believe we're already 13 episodes into this amazing podcast and I would just like to do a quick before we roll into this podcast. Thank you everybody for tuning in Again. Thank you for listening. The support we've been getting with this podcast has been absolutely incredible. A lot of people are just learning in, soaking in all the knowledge and actually taking action, Like I've talked to a couple of people who have opened up their first Roth IRA, who have even bought their first stock. It's like seeing people actually take action from the information that we are all providing is one of the most amazing things. And please, please, please, continue to message us on Instagram at the Market Hustle. Give us your feedback, Let us know how we can improve these podcasts. But, that being said, let's not waste any more time. I have both of our lovely co-hosts back on here. We have the trifecta squad here with the Market Hustle podcast. We got Pierce Pierce. How are you doing today, man?
Speaker 4:Can't complain. Man Just got off work a little bit ago, hustled down to San Diego to get to some family and I'm happy I'm doing this today.
Speaker 3:I'm glad you were able to make it. Pierce, I know you were like kind of cutting it close and you were thinking you might not be able to make it, so I'm glad you're here. Me too, man, buffy. Buffy. I know it's a little bit later for you, isn't it like 1030 right now over on the East Coast?
Speaker 5:Yes, 1030 PM, but I'm doing better than good, as usual, and it's been a wonderful week, excited to get involved with this episode, because this is a special one. It's like a blast from the past, so I'm gonna let you go ahead and handle the intro so we can get rolling.
Speaker 3:Let's do it Well. It's great to have both of you back. So, yes, today we have a special guest. I've met this guest through Instagram. I've been following his content for a few years now. He's very active in the finance niche on Instagram and his name is Georgie. So, georgie, I just wanna welcome you to the MarketHustle podcast. Thank you for taking the time out of your day to come on here to share your story and to help educate our lovely listeners.
Speaker 1:Hello, lovely listeners. I am Georgie. I run an Instagram page called Financialism, where I post mostly based on my own life story of investing, and I think what makes my page unique is my background, where I come from the Soviet Union. I was born over in Ukraine and so my family was brought up under that Stalin-like rule over there, and coming to the United States, we see so many opportunities. Each generation saw something like beyond what the other one saw. My grandparents were savers. My mom learned computer programming and I was like what's this investing thing that people get rich of? Oh my gosh, this works. Why don't everyone here do this? And so I decided to do this and teach my mom. And here we are. We already can see that a work, optional life is very possible and very early for me.
Speaker 3:That's incredible man. So your mom? I just wanna make sure I understand it. So your mom moved here from the Soviet Union, or were you actually born in the United States?
Speaker 1:So I was born over in Ukraine Since the Soviet Union had a lot of extra passports. Even though the union fell apart, my passport still says the Soviet Union. So it's a relic, it's a collectible I'm also big in collectibles and all of that but yeah. So we came here. I was nine months old and my mom knew no English and just started. She was like what makes money? Computer programming? All right, let's go with that. And so she did.
Speaker 3:Wow, that's incredible. And it's actually something I've noticed with a lot of immigrants or people who are even first or second generation, a lot of those friends that I have. They just see the opportunity that is actually available here in our country. They actually can see it because they come from the background where maybe there wasn't as many opportunities available to them. So when they come to this country they're just awestruck with like, oh my God, you can make money, you get benefits from these companies. There's a lot more. It's just opportunity, right, and I think it's incredible to see people actually take advantage of it and being willing to do what's necessary to kind of make things happen.
Speaker 3:And I'm sure like I'm excited to kind of dig deeper into your story and your background. But I think that's one of the things that I've noticed that a lot of people who have been in America for generations of generations is we can get a little like just blind, like what is actually available here, like what you can actually accomplish, and maybe that's a deeper topic of like family dynamics, where you start to have these like crazy beliefs that are kind of like projected onto you by your family and you just think it's never possible to do anything, and so you kind of get stuck into that. But I just think it's always cool to have people who maybe just didn't actually grow up in America, or maybe you grew up to it, but like it's just not your home country and you're actually coming here to like take advantage of what is available to you. So really cool to hear that. But I'm curious, like so what do you do? Work wise, like what's your career background?
Speaker 1:So I'm a behavior analyst. I work with children on the autism spectrum. Mostly that's my nine to five. I love it.
Speaker 1:That's actually the problem in my work optional life is that I feel like if I reached my one million plus dollars which I'm estimated to reach by about 2030, I think it's gonna be very hard for me to leave my job, because when I come into my clinic it's just so much fun.
Speaker 1:Every person that I met is just a blast Like. There has been maybe like two days where I was like, ah, good thing, I invest, but about a thousand plus days where I'm like, you know, I could do this even after I reach my fire number of 1.25 million or so by 2030-ish. So I love that job and I actually use a lot of those behavioral principles with the kids that I work with for my financial rules that I set for myself and for people that I mentor when it comes to finances, because finances is 90% behavior that's the quote that the OGs always say and it's 10% actually understanding money. It's more about understanding yourself, and so, through behavior analysis, I think I have a unique lens at how behavior works and operates and that gives me an advantage and this kind of emotional, non-emotional attachment to my system and just investing all the way to the moon.
Speaker 3:I love all the way to the moon. I love it For a little bit of context, george, you have a song right. I was actually listening to it earlier today. Is it called to the moon?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's called to the moon. I made it during the. I actually made it before the GameStop AMC thing, like right before it was gonna happen, and we were rushing to release that song and we were like it's not gonna make sense in a month All of these ducks are gonna die. But yeah, I love that. It's just a lot of fun. So rapping is one of those skills that I felt like I needed to learn. It's a lot like investing where I knew nothing about it and I was like let's try. Like you suck at this, but we're human, we can learn something new. So that was basically it. If I can learn how to rap on beat, coming from where I come from, then I could get to a million dollars, no problem.
Speaker 3:It's a catchy song too, so you might have to give us a preview later during the podcast. I appreciate it. Yeah, of course I'm kind of curious as well. So did you start this career path before your investment journey, or did your investment journey begin before this, before you really got settled in this career path?
Speaker 1:So my investment journey. I believe that everything like. We started this conversation talking about how each generation viewed the opportunities in America differently, and so what my grandparents did is they saved up every single dollar. They had no idea investing is a thing. They're from the Soviet Union. You can't own the means of production Like that's for the state basically to do so. Here you can actually buy the top companies and literally own them as like a Joe Schmo there's no offense to any Joe Schmo's listening but as a Joe Schmo you could create a lot of power here. So they actually paid for my university and with that I had about $10,000 that they left behind for me and with that I purchased my first stock ever, which was Weight Watchers.
Speaker 1:Now, back then I had no system, but I knew. I knew that I had to go in. So I just copied what Oprah Winfrey was doing back then, cause I was like she's got a billion dollars, I might as well do what Oprah's doing. And then from then I started making mistakes, trading and losing money and at the same time holding and watching it go down by a third, and I was like I cannot lose grandma's money, I can't do that. And then I got into my field and I started treating every dollar like it was a multiple of a hundred. So, if I was to, I was making 16 bucks an hour as a behavior analyst and I was treating it like it was X a hundred. So I would invest my $100, $200 and just treat it like it was thousands of dollars and respect it like it's thousands of dollars. So I would study $10 decisions like they were a thousand dollar decisions and so I was investing basically every single dollar that I could, again, using all of my privileges.
Speaker 1:Soviet households we usually live with our parents for extra time and usually they end up moving in with you later on and you support them. So, having the advantage of my mom not charging me rent while I was transitioning from college into the work world, I just used every single dollar. As soon as I started making money, it was all going into the stock market because my mindset was this is either gonna go to rent to Joe Schmo, shout out to Joe Schmo again, and or I can use the privilege that my mom and my grandparents created for me and actually invest it into the strongest corporations in the whole entire world. And I chose the latter and I am very thankful that I did that. Wow.
Speaker 3:That's great, man. I mean it kind of shows just the trial and error approach that you really implemented right. Like obviously when you're just getting started, you kind of have to grasp what you have in front of you, so like, for your sake, that was Oprah, right, you saw Oprah, you're like all right, let's see she's credible, like she's a billionaire, she's a celebrity, like obviously she kind of has a higher level of the business world knowledge than maybe I do. And of course, what you quickly realize, or what I've quickly realized as an investor when I was kind of going through my journey, is that these people are at different levels, right, like they're playing a completely different ballgame. So like you kind of have to learn that lesson eventually throughout your journey. And if you're a brand new investor listening in and you haven't learned that lesson, you got to be careful listening to these celebrities or just people who are at higher levels in you, because they are playing a completely different game than what you're playing. So like just because they might like a certain stock, or maybe they even mention a certain company or stock, like a lot of times they might even that that could be like a promotion, where they're promoting a specific company or specific stock, or they're just kind of like playing with gambling money, like maybe they just have some money that you know, if they have millions, of millions of dollars, it's easy for them just to throw $10,000 at a company and call it a day and they don't really care what happens to it. But it's really cool, georgie, just to kind of hear your initial start into the investing world, because it shows that a lot of it is kind of trial and error, right.
Speaker 3:You kind of have to figure out what style works for you and you kind of have to, you know, make a few, a few errors occasionally, like you're not going to have, you're not going to like be perfect, like right, when you're getting beginning this journey, there's going to be times where, like maybe you try a certain style and you think that's the style, you're going to go for it. A lot of people end up doing the trading, starting Like that's what captures a lot of people's attention because it's super glamorous, right. Like you see, all this money, you get sold this dream where it's just super easy, like you just sit from home, you work 10 hours a week and you can make millions of dollars. Like, of course, who doesn't want that and a lot of people kind of get sucked into the investing world, like with starting in that world, and unfortunately, you know, 90% of people end up not making money trading. So I've talked to a lot of newer investors who have started their journey there and they quickly realized like hey, maybe this isn't as great or easy as people make it out to be.
Speaker 3:But I'm curious, georgie, like why don't you describe like just your general investment style now? Like how would you describe how you invest your money? Like I love the idea of thinking of every dollar as a multiple of a hundred, like that's a great perspective to have on money because it really makes you take a step back and spend money a lot more wisely, especially if you understand the compound effect, which you clearly do if you're implementing that sort of mindset. But I'm curious, if you just want to share with the listeners and our co-hosts, like how would you describe, like, your general investment strategy?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I think to address my earlier mistakes is I was basically a new, up and coming artist who was copying the strategies of people who already have millions of fans, and I can't do that. If you're an up and coming artist, don't study Kendrick Lamar's current marketing strategy. You're not going to do well, you can't do what he does. You can't do what Taylor Swift does. You have to study someone who has a thousand followers just a little bit ahead of you. So the other thing is you can backtrack their careers and go to their starting points. What moves did they make? So I actually went and skipped all the way to people who are way past the finish line. I think they lapped the world twice. So I listened to everyone who was born in 1935 or before. So that's the Jack Boggles, the Warren Buffett, the Charlie Mungers. So I just started consuming everything that they were saying and I noticed that all of the 90-year-olds are saying something very, very similar, and so that thing that they had in common, which is just buy and hold quality companies or indices that track the collection of those quality companies, and you're going to do better than you could ever dream. Jack Boggles, founder of Vanguard, passed away, I think in 2019. He said have a doctor nearby when you do your buy and hold strategy and 30 years later you open your portfolio because you might have a heart attack and it won't be worth it. So have that doctor nearby, because you'll be amazed at what you have. And so I just copied those strategies and, of course, I leave a percentage of my portfolio to explore newer things. I can't resist, but I really like the technology of crypto and what it offers to the world. I think it has some power that the stock market is again tuning into because, as we can see, a lot of companies that are tied into crypto even things like Robinhood that just trades crypto is skyrocketing. What is it on today? February 15th and February 14th, they started skyrocketing and everything that is related to is now integrating into the market.
Speaker 1:So I wanted to definitely expose like 5% of my portfolio to that. 90% is mostly sorry, not 90, but about 70% is traditional index funds that track the top companies. And then, of course, from my earlier days investing, I had a lot of individual stock picks and I ended up holding almost all of them. Just that's gonna be. I don't want to sell anything. I want to buy and hold. That's what I heard from the 90-year-old. Just buy and hold, you'll do well, and if you don't well, all of the money that you're putting in multiplied by the time will make up for all of the mistakes. So I've been doing that and I also believe in investing in what you love.
Speaker 1:So I know a lot of investors preach being an emotionless investor, but I believe emotion is key. I think people spend based on their feelings and I want to tap into that. And one of the markets I like tapping into is the collectibles market, where if someone like Jeff Bezos, for example, I went to a Star Trek convention I'm not a big Star Trek guy, but I love learning and my girlfriend the Star Trek so I went over there and I saw some names. I saw the names of all of the collectors and it was the founders of the biggest companies. The S&P 500 owners were the owners of these collectibles. And if Jeff Bezos paid like $20,000 for a Star Trek toy and I walk up to him 10 minutes later and told him I'll give you $40,000, he'll look at me and laugh and be like, no thanks, it's worth more than money to them. So about 15% of my portfolio goes into all sorts of collectibles and trading cards.
Speaker 1:Pokemon One piece is huge right now. I think it actually outperformed every single stock that I could think of over the past year, and including cryptocurrency, and I know crypto has been popping up. But that's kind of my unique approach, where it's 15% into those collectibles, 5% into crypto and the rest goes into the indices. And I have one exception. I have a lot of rules as a behavior analyst, but one exception is when the stock market crashes. That is when I look for those blue chips like Meta and Google et cetera, and I will be investing more into individual positions when there's a market crash and I will also invest a little bit more as well. So those are my secrets. They're all here now. You guys heard it, joe. You wrote that down, joe Schmo. All right, now you have it. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I got a question for you. Yeah, so you like investing in the collectibles and stuff like that as like an alternate currency, right, what's? Your view on silver like traditional, traditional currencies, like silver, gold and stuff like that. Do you have any opinion on that?
Speaker 1:So at the end of the day, like I'm kind of a what's that called, when you say one thing and believe another thing, or vice versa hypocrite. So there you go. I believe in frameworks and that contradict each other, like there's. I heard this amazing quote. I forgot by who. I think it was some amazing Indian investor and he said something like with my, with my, with strangers, on my capitalist, with my family, with my friends I'm a socialist and with my family I'm a communist.
Speaker 1:So using all of those frameworks, bars, using all of those frameworks Is is my strategy. So Warren Buffett, for example, would say silver is just a rock, right, it has very, very few things that you can really do with it. I guess gold can like conduct what. This is not a science to pot-tag electricity.
Speaker 3:I think there we go.
Speaker 1:So you don't got to be smart to be an investor. Exactly, you need an open-world conducts. So with the end, bitcoin is just well. It's just a coin, right At the end of the day. Someone made it up A whole bunch of coins. The Mona Lisa is just paint at the end of the day, right, but there's a significant significance to it. So I don't really follow the coin market, but I think my grandpa would. He would bend over for every single coin on the street Back when he he's. He actually lost his legs, but back when he could, he also passed away. So it's a lot harder now for him to collect those coins, but when he was two legs he would bend over and pick up every coin and he would sell it Every coin and he would sort them by year and try to track their value. So that taught me that there is value where people don't know there's value. Some quarters are easily worth like four dollars made of silver.
Speaker 1:When I worked at a restaurant I would check every single coin just in case with while I was there. So I'm mostly into trading cards and things that have a pop cultural appeal, but I know that certain coin yeah.
Speaker 4:It's definitely a niche thing.
Speaker 3:When did you get involved with that? Is that something you did before the whole collectible boom that we've seen in the last couple of years?
Speaker 1:I was born in 1993, but made with the universe, and in 1999, I got into Pokemon cards and by 2001, I started trading Pokemon cards.
Speaker 1:So I'm there, I'm like eight years old, seven years old, and I'm getting ripped off by 15 year olds and I know I'm getting ripped off and I'm paying for the school of life there. I still remember those deals. If anyone here follows Pokemon, I traded two shining Tyranitar's for a bunch of bulk. They're worth like $300 today each, so it was it hurt. Back then. There were a hundred each, so I remember that and if they're pristine 10, we're talking thousands of dollars.
Speaker 1:But anyways, that's a different tech talk. So since I was seven or eight, I had that mentality and I made some of my first money before the stock market and working my nine to five off of Yu-Gi-Oh cards and predicting what formats would look like. And once I realized that the stock market is the same thing but on a ground scale and with a lot less work there's no shipping costs or anything like that that's when I was like, hold on. I've been doing this since I was seven and eight. That's before Warren Buffett bought his first stock. He was 11. So I think I got an advantage going into this world and I went into this world.
Speaker 5:That's awesome. I love it, man George great collections, by the way, and it's such a pretty cool dope vibe and style that you have is impeccable, and oftentimes it's interesting because people don't tend to see some of these collections as assets, and there are many different forms of assets. It's not always just the stock market and real estate, and so this is really cool. Like personally, a few things I collect is records, because there's going to come a time where you can't actually get physical records, so I enjoy collecting these records African art, some fine spirits like your quality whiskey, bourbon, scotch and gin, and then, lastly, beach sand, which is something that I think I'm the only one that probably do that honestly.
Speaker 4:I think so, dude, I think so.
Speaker 5:Yeah, so, like whenever I travel, I collect beach like the sand from the beaches from the different places I've been in the world and I keep a nice little $2 shop bottle, that glass that I keep the sand in, and that is something that I really enjoy. But I definitely want to backtrack a little bit. First and foremost, just beautiful to see the contribution you're making in terms of your nine to five in these kids lives. That is such an incredible, powerful thing and to really have a job that you enjoy beyond retirement right Beyond 2030. That is something that I hope more people that are listening and get to experience, because it is such an incredible thing.
Speaker 5:And I like the fact that you made that interesting connection from your nine to five in terms of your behavior, analyst and experience there, and you bridge that and connected that to some of the fundamental things that you need to perform well within your financial journey as a whole.
Speaker 5:So I know you'd also mentioned that $10,000 was given to you and you didn't want to mess up grandma's money through trial and error. You settled a little bit more on a better, more efficient and productive system. And the interesting thing there is there's a 20 year study by Williams Group, and they found that 70% of wealth is lost by the second generation and 90% of the wealth is lost by the third generation, and so, of course, not everybody might be in a position where they receive inheritance, but anybody that's investing, looking to build wealth for the future generation and so forth the fact that you receive $10,000 and you've been able to do well with that what would you say is three quick, simple tips that you would give somebody who, let's say, is inheritance some assets today or some financial resources, so they don't fall into that category and statistic.
Speaker 1:So the number one thing is it's not just money that you inherit, you also inherit values.
Speaker 1:So you might not be as lucky where grandma and grandpa saved up social security checks and left $10,000 for you and enough to pay for your education, but they also showed me values that you can take. I didn't even know social security checks was considered a little bit of money. They I thought that that was a lot of money because they were able to pay for a whole university education and then some most of what they left behind went to my mom. So they were able to do all of that without fancy jobs or anything like that, just based on, hey, we need to save. They didn't even know investing was real. I did the math and they would have left behind $700 to $1.1 million. So that's 700K to $1.1 million if they knew how to invest. But they left behind low six figures and you know it is what it is. We learned off of that. That's where I come in and I'm like how do I evolve my family's trajectory now, where the next generation is gonna start off when they're 18 years old with $100,000 and no one has to die for that to happen? So that's basically the goal there.
Speaker 1:The other tip is, besides inheriting values such as their frugality and value-based spending is, inheritance does not mean that someone's dying and leaving something behind. Inheritance can be gifts that they give you throughout life. So if you got a Christmas and you got a PlayStation, you just inherited a social connection to all of your peers. That counts. Not everyone can afford a $500 gift for their kid. That is a type of inheritance. Or maybe someone bought you their first car. You don't think of it as an inheritance, you think of it as a gift. That is an inheritance just because they're alive, right? If they died, everyone would say, oh, you inherited a car, how nice, but it's a gift, but it's really. It should be considered the same thing. It's an advantage, it's a privilege.
Speaker 1:And the other thing is and this might be a little bit controversial, but I wanna say that privilege is not just what we learn in our university education. Now, for the record, my university education was at UCLA, and there is this left-leaning thing. My professors were identified as they identified themselves as communists, and I don't think there's any. I got a lot of wisdom from that. A lot of wisdom, and they're very great people, and I studied the capitalists on the internet like Warren Buffett and things like that, and at the end of the day, when you combine all of that knowledge, you end up with something just radically amazing. So those are some tips over there like that I got for you guys. Shout out to Joe Schmo again.
Speaker 4:I think that when you grown up I grew up in a kind of a similar way my grandfather immigrated from Latvia in, I think, 1952, right after the war ended, and I think those values that you talked about for Galilee and stuff like that my grandfather's biggest contribution was him having like seven different degrees, seven different masters spoke like four different languages, yada, yada, yada things that I think you could probably relate to.
Speaker 4:And I think that's one thing that most people don't understand is that being able to not only pass down money, because money is cool, but pass down this knowledge and these traits of like I think that's the reason that most wealth of loss is because they don't pass down the hey, this is how you save a dollar, this is how you even invest a dollar, and so my grandfather was in a very similar boat to where he didn't know anything about investing, but then my dad came along and changed the entire trajectory of my entire family forever, and so I think it's one of those things that people often lack, that they don't think that they're able to do that, but just one person, like you in this case, will be able to change the entire trajectory of your entire family lineage, which is really, really awesome to hear dude.
Speaker 1:I appreciate that. And one thing I wanna add is your grandfather and my grandparents. They instilled the values and the skills to it without even knowing what investing is. They have all the traits needed to be an investor, and I think a lot of people who turn away from investing they're like well, I'm already 60. And I'm like okay, so, first of all, you might make some money. Second of all, the skills that you get, that's the inheritance you're giving to your while you're alive.
Speaker 1:You're passing down a huge gift to your 20, 30 year old kids. Like, no one is too old to learn. Warren Buffett still reads every day, and he's like 94, 93. Charlie Munger read until his dying day, so you're never too old to learn.
Speaker 4:I love that man. Super awesome to hear.
Speaker 3:That's exactly right. I mean Warren Buffett. He's still an active investor and he's still investing with the mindset of holding stocks for 10 to 20 years, despite him being in his early 90s, right? So, like, this guy is in his early 90s and he has a longer term mindset than a lot of people in my age group, a lot of people in their 20s or even maybe in their 30s. So, if that doesn't tell you something, this investing game is definitely deeper than just the money part.
Speaker 3:There are a lot of values that are important in order to master your own emotional Cause. Like, if you don't have emotional control of your like you know, of watching the money in the market go down and up, down and up, if you don't have the emotion control, you're gonna make decisions that aren't in your best interest, right, without even being aware of it. So, like that is super crucial understanding that there is more to this investing game than just the money part. And if not, that's probably the greatest gift of it all, right? Like, if you can master the traits of being a good investor, not only are you gonna make money, but you're probably also gonna live a lot happier of a life, a lot more enjoyable of a life as well.
Speaker 3:But I'm curious, georgie, so with your mother, so you said you you've started kind of investing, or helped your mother invest, was she kind of skeptical when you first started kind of explaining things to her? Like I'm curious, because you said that the, the saving parts of money was very much instilled in your life. But when you tried to bring this investing knowledge, like the next level, to your mother, like I'm curious like kind of how her reaction was or just her response when you were trying to articulate or just under or help her understand these concepts.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it came from. She watched me with a stock simulator every single day back before I got my first job. So I used a stock simulator and I was like, look, mom, if we put your money into Disney stock, then just today you made $1,000 doing nothing. And then the next day came and I was like, mom, you would have made another $1,000 today doing nothing. And that's when, like, the dots start. I didn't know like, oh, like you have to like actually lock in that profit, things like that. There's taxes involved. But the concept was starting to be formed and she saw that concept and I was doing it every single day because I didn't have a job yet, and so I used all of my time to study and, of course, I had the privilege of time. My mom said, hey, I will make food for you. You do your thing, get on your feet. So I spent that time studying and when I got my first job, I continued studying in the cars, in the commutes.
Speaker 1:Every single podcast podcasts like this. That's why I'm always like who's doing a podcast? Give me on, let me tell them my story. I knew nothing. So here we are.
Speaker 1:My mom really started to turn her gears when I explained to her that if we had just held that Disney stock instead of trading it and trying to lock in profit, we would have made more money than trying to guess things. And she was like, okay, so there's like a formula here. And then she was like well, you know what? Well, grandma and grandpa were very, very ill. So we started grandma actually passed away sorry about that for me and then 2016, grandpa was having a really, really hard time and he lost his leg. Shout out to diabetes. Why watch what you eat? Workout? I mean, he did workout. That's why he lived so long a tangent.
Speaker 1:But at that point she saw that she had her 401k her old 401k sitting and she decided to roll it over and the market happened to crash. Well, it dipped pretty hard. It was August 2015 at that time and at that point we took it, we put it into the rollover IRA and I was like now you have full control. So we started picking out different funds, different companies, and that's where, like it kind of took off. I was like this money can't sit here because we know the value of a dollar. It's going down every day. It's getting shadow, clone jutsu, like in Naruto. There's just so many of them and more, printed every single day and that logically helped her a lot.
Speaker 1:But what is still very, very difficult is the crashes, because when COVID happened, every single day, she was like let's sell, let's sell and wait, let's wait this over. Every article from every bank, from every investor is saying this is very, very dangerous. And that's where I really showed her like we're gonna stick to the course, we're gonna follow the data. So my mom challenging me every day actually pushed me to do more research, because I care about my mom more than probably every single person on earth, tied with my girlfriend. So we kept on going as hard as we could in those arguments and those debates and I just had the data on my side and that's what really like helped her to be like all right, we're gonna do this.
Speaker 1:And then she started making her own moves. She was like you know what? I wanna buy Lowe's, I wanna buy Amazon and there's one other one that I forget about, but they made huge profits in 2020. And that was just a great, great time to start as an investor and she managed to hold on and that taught her a lot, even though Donald Trump was saying the same thing every day and she was really scared. Why is Donald Trump on the news every day? This weird? And then, when the election happened and Joe Biden came in same fears but that's what really, really helped her is those debates, those discussions, and they were daily, daily informal money meetings, proving not my point but the point of the 90 year olds I was like, remember, mom, this isn't my idea. This is what the 90 year olds, this is what the data is saying, this is a hundred years of research. So here it is. You can argue with it or you can accept it. And so she was like I'm gonna accept this.
Speaker 5:Love it, love it. Shout out to your mom Because that is so cool, because it can be difficult, even for many people that are considered like part of this generation or the younger generation, to even dive into investing, to allow themselves to actually learn about it, and so the fact that she's been able to, she has been open minded and allowed you to kind of help, coach and guide her, is really cool man to see, and for the older generation it can be even more complex. So that's, it shows that the power of repetition, time, effort, teamwork right and going after noble goals is really an important key here. Like George said, he's studying and learning and going all the time. Both Josh and Pierce are constantly learning as well.
Speaker 5:I mean, we're literally all teaching each other, even through this podcast and this episode, and we learned from the audience and AKA some people that are Joe Schmoes or whatever variation of people that's around. We're all constantly learning. So I myself continue to learn, even though subject matters that we might be considered some sort of experts in. And that's really the cheat code to investing, because money's one thing, but your brain, values and decision making is a whole nother ball game. So it's definitely worth investing into that, george, real quick. What are some of the things that you did to learn that allowed you to invest for the longterm and invest responsibly?
Speaker 1:Ultimately, it was again listening to the OG's advice People like Warren Buffett, charlie Munger but also when I turn into my collectibles community and people who collected Pokemon cards, I saw that the most successful people there they actually had the same principles. And watching the crypto cycles. Like I bought Ethereum back in 2017, and I just lump sum bought in and held it and it went from $900 all the way to $83, and I just held it. Then it went to almost five grand and today it's February 15th about 2.8K. So I learned that wait a second, if I just did with Pokemon, with crypto, the classic strategies of let's buy every single X amount of time, so I buy monthly on the 24th that's my grandma's birthday, july 24th, it's none of my passwords, I promise, and so I just buying systemically that would have made me way, way, way more money if I did that same thing with crypto, same thing with collectibles. So it's never too late to be like look, I took gambles that could have paid off better. I'm still really happy with my crypto positions, my collectible positions, but if I just applied the same OG Buffet-like mentality to every single other investment vehicle, I would have been, I think, much, much closer to retiring in 2027 than 2030. And that would be nice.
Speaker 1:So always use those same principles buy and hold. Buy what you can tolerate holding for a long time. Buy also companies you believe in. Or, when it comes to collectibles, collectibles you love If it was worth zero, would you still be happy owning it? And if the answer is no, then maybe you shouldn't have it because you won't tolerate or accept the price cutting in half, which happens with even $400,000 Charizard cards, which are now $200,000. So there's crashes across everything, but it's much less likely the more niche you are, because the communities are smaller. So I would say where the overlaps are, that's where the power is. Those are general principles and I think Pierce's grandfather is evidence of that as well. He did very well in life, accomplishing so many accolades because he had those values. And if you just use that across fields like whether it's sports, fitness, diet, relationships, money you're gonna get amazing results because the principles are all the same.
Speaker 5:I love that. That's the way you just connected all of that back into life, right? Because we say it all the time on his podcast it's really about your life, not money itself, and it sounds like I've been investing in the wrong stuff. I need to go buy me some of these things that you're collecting. Man, I'm about to pull all my money out the market. I can go buy some of these. Whoa, whoa, whoa whoa. I'm just kidding.
Speaker 5:but no financial gain, I'm just kidding, but it's really cool and exciting, man. Like this is the first time I've been a big Pokemon fan, but I've never really kind of dove all the way into it in terms of like the reality of what's possible in collecting some of these things that we played with and watched and enjoyed as a kid. Right, these are real life things that are tangible, that can add more value to our lives. So it's really cool, man. I'm excited to hear all about that for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one quick point that I really wanna add real quick is that a lot of us think of value in different ways, like there's objective value, there's subjective value and when it comes to cards, like people say, well, what's the value? It's really the nostalgia, like what if you can look at a card and it takes you back to second grade of when you were bullied and some bully took that card away from you? Or these two 15 year olds got you for $200 in cards back when those were your price possessions, like to have? That is more valuable and more just emotionally triggering than anything, and that is a mental real estate. That is something that if you could pop a pill and go back to second grade or your favorite memories playing in Pokemon tournaments, like that is worth a lot of money, in my opinion, if we could turn it into money, and this is the closest way to kind of monetize nostalgia.
Speaker 4:That's good.
Speaker 3:George, I have a question just kind of regarding all that. So, like my biggest pushback to like just the crypto world and even just like the collectible world, like I completely understand like the value part, like I can see where people are willing to pay the money for that nostalgic feel, but at the same time, like I'm a big believer in, like Warren Buffett principles, charlie Munger principles as well, a lot of the older wisdom and a lot of these people would kind of push back against this world and just kind of completely write it off as a speculative bubble and maybe even a lot of listeners just would like some help and maybe understanding Because, for me, like I would say like, because these values are based on emotion and based on people wanting to, you know, like, hey, I'm going to buy because this reminds me of my second grade experience and I'm willing, like maybe I am a billionaire so I can pay whatever price. At the same time, if there's not another billionaire to kind of swoop in, to want to pay even more, then these prices are very speculative, right, which is something, you know, which is what we've seen in like the crypto world and the collectible world in general, where, like these prices can move Like although, yes, they can move like skyrocket to hundreds of thousands of dollars, like you could have the original Charizard car. Yeah, to the moon. They can literally go to the moon. And you know people see this and they're like, oh damn, like this is the place to put my money.
Speaker 3:At the same time, you know that's, this industry is very volatile, right, because everything is skyrocket. It can also plummet just on a dime, right? These asset prices, the crypto world, the collectible world, like it can have these hundred, twenty, two hundred, three hundred percent moves up, but it can also have 90, 95 percent moves down during the bear market, right? So there's a lot more volatility, because I would argue, there's a lot of speculation. And don't get me wrong, like I am a big advocate for, like what's happening with like this, like innovation, blockchain technology. I think the finance world is well overdue for some disruption, right, I think these are some dinosaur companies and I think it's more. I think right now is the perfect time to bring a new aspect, a new technology, into this world.
Speaker 3:But I'm just curious to like see, maybe your tips for somebody who's listening being like hey, yeah, I've seen these hundred percent, two hundred percent gains in the crypto world or buying collectibles. Like what would you tell them? As you know, a lot of people listening to this are brand new investors and, of course, again, I'm a big fan of, like you know, older wisdom. But I guess my pushback would be like, how do you understand the value of these? Like, how do you even value it as an investor? Is it more of like you go in with? The approach of it is kind of a little bit gambly, so you don't put in what you can't afford to lose, or is there like a way that you found is a good way to kind of value these assets?
Speaker 1:So even in the collectible space there are traditionalists, there's people who have quantitative reasoning behind the value of certain things, like, for example, if you want a perfectly graded Charizard card from the first set, there's like 129 of them in the whole entire world. You can't make it again. You can't. It's not artificial scarcity, it's actual scarcity that it took 30 years to create. There might be one or two more that pop up in the next five years. Someone maybe had it in their closet somewhere hidden, but even then the odds of it being a pristine 10, even from a pack that was in a closet for that long is very unlikely. It goes even deeper than that where people would buy plane tickets to fly to Amsterdam to get a special promo Pikachu card. So they are willing to travel thousands of miles to get a card that might be even reprinted one day, or that might just be the only opportunity to get it that day. So the traditionalists look at it like this what is the scarcity of the card? How many is in the population? So there's websites dedicated to tracking population reports. How popular is the actual Pokemon that's represented on the card? Like a Charizard? You don't even need to know Pokemon. You might know that word Pikachu is more recognizable than Mickey Mouse. And then the other thing is what is the condition of the card? So with real estate, it's location, location, location. With cards, it's condition, condition, condition. So those are how traditionalists look at cards, and I had friends that passed up on $100 cards that are now worth about $2,000 just because it didn't meet those four criteria. They would rather park money where the cards were more scarce, they were less printed. But sometimes that fourth dimension of popularity just pushes everything past this. And this is true also in the stock market world, because even though we think of communities forming behind companies and ownership in those companies is kind of strange. Berkshire Hathaway has people traveling all over the world to meet up for a community meeting right To just see these speakers talk. That's a value that Pokemon can emulate. It's beyond just the company, it's something that you can't hold in your hand of what it represents. And that also happens on smaller scales, like there are extreme fanatics of certain companies like Disney or even Alibaba. There's small YouTube channels dedicated to just tracking everything about Alibaba it's stock prices, it's culture, et cetera, et cetera. And the community behind that is the value that I seek. What communities are willing to grow and what communities can survive. Something like who gets put together through a pandemic, the Pokemon people. They all united, they, right, like what can transcend what scares humanity. A pandemic, right, who can come out on top and get even closer than that, and sure, companies can do that and they provide like valid service to humanity. But a Pokemon card is basically like a museum, right, like people go there for the social connection. I'm seeing this art piece from 10,000 years ago or whatever, something like that and that triggers something in humans that can't be touched. But you know it's real and to me that is a value to tap into, and to tap into hard At the same time.
Speaker 1:This value can disappear. Now we know things like Beanie Babies, for example. Right, there was so much hype behind that and they were selling for thousands of dollars. Where did that go? So I asked actually one of the big head haunchos of Jazzwares, who's named Jeremy Padour, a huge collectibles enthusiast. And now that company's, by the way, owned by Berkshire Hathaway and they got a special not pillow pets, squishmallows of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, by the way. I got those for me and I keep them safe. The price on them is just X6 of MSRP and especially after Charlie Munger passed right, the value that he brought to the community, all the things that he signed, probably skyrocket. I didn't price check but all of us can agree like there was probably a surge in price. You will never get another one, so I keep on going to tap into that.
Speaker 1:Warren Buffett signs a dollar. That dollar is going to sell for a grand right. People tap into that power. Same thing with trading cards. Of course it can disappear and what Jeremy told me was the elite beanie babies. Well, there's still elite beanie beanie babies. You have to convince the 12 people in the world that you're going to. They're going to take your $10,000 for that beanie baby If you want the first ever Charizard card ever printed, which came out in Japan in 1996 and it's actually missing the star in the lower right hand symbol depicting its rarity.
Speaker 1:Even like a veteran collectors don't know that this exists. Well, there's only seven in the world. You could walk up to someone say here's 400 grand and they'll say no. You have to fly around the world to the other six people and convince one of them to buy it and sometimes it's beyond money. We had some card sell just because the person liked the other person. So that's another type of value.
Speaker 1:So that's why I'm a big believer, but I also bet against my beliefs and that's why I use different frameworks. So when it comes to like the traditional Warren Buffett approach, I always set ceilings on how much I can invest into the trading card world. I will never sacrifice my allocation to index funds every single month, even if the most amazing opportunity is in front of me. I will have to work more or sell my stuff in order to take that opportunity. So I keep this rule governed behavior and I stick to it no matter what the opportunities are, because you're right, even if there are seven people in the world who knows it could go to zero. It probably won't, but it always could.
Speaker 5:Wow, that's incredible. I love what you just said towards the end there. The fact that you actually challenge your own beliefs and perspectives leaves a lot of room for growth right, and understanding different things and knowing that, yes, you don't know everything, you don't have everything figured out, and so there are opportunities. And that's something that I encourage everyone of us to actually take away from this episode is the fact that it's important that we challenge our own systems right, because there's not one size fits all for everything and some systems might work, say, this year, and then next year you might need to re-strategize a bit. So being able to challenge yourself and your own beliefs and audit your own thought processes is going to help you adopt different angles, and that's something that we all definitely need, especially in stock market investing.
Speaker 5:Like Josh mentioned, things are changing. There's a lot of technological advances Crypto is here to stay for sure. We're getting rid of all the dinosaurs and we're moving into a new era, right, so that's a huge transition phase, and it's hard for people to adapt to some of these changes that's happening, right, because they happen so fast and, before you know it, you check social media and everything is out to the moon and now you feel like you're left behind and you dropped the bag. You didn't get in the game early enough, so a lot of people might be feeling that way about the stock market, about some of these collectible items that you just highlighted, and even in the crypto space. So what are a few words you can give someone to kind of encourage and let them know? Like hey, look, we're not at the end of the game, you know what I mean? Like we're all still early. What are some of the things you can highlight to help them gain a little bit more insight?
Speaker 1:on that Right. Well, the stock market became what it is today. I feel like we are living through a financial revolution, and it was in 2019 where the modern stock market came to fruition. That is when Robinhood forced Charles Schwab to get rid of their fees. If you're in the United States and it's a matter of time until that's implemented around the world that made it accessible to so many people, because if you were trying to buy something at Charles Schwab just in 2018, you might be spending $100, but five of it's going to go to commissions and that's 5% of your investment power, which is considered almost a hate crime amongst financial enthusiasts, like front-load fees from mutual funds that charge 5%. That's stealing. But what about a person who wants to invest their first $100 and they're being charged $5 to $8 to do that? Well, no more, especially in the United States, and I feel like a lot of investors secretly do appreciate that, because they don't think twice about investing a dollar or two if that's all that they can. And I actually made thousands of dollars off of $2 bets on random crypto coins and that is not financial advice but I do have a $2 fund to throw into like I just consider it my soda of the day and instead of actually buying the soda, I invested into not financial advice the avalanche token, which went from like $5 to, I think right now at $40. So that turned into a few thousand dollars just right there.
Speaker 1:So don't be afraid to go against the traditional wisdoms. Have buckets for your philosophies and always bet against yourself. Because I sold my Tesla stocks all of them After they dropped 50%. I rode up back to having 80% gains and I was like this is too good to be true. Sell everything. And it kept on going 10x after that. So I learned my lessons and now that money's in VGT and Microsoft and one other company. But if I had just bet 10% against myself, just sell 90%, keep 10%. Always bet against yourself because, at the end of the day, no human can be 100% correct. So you want to hedge against your own imagination, and that means people like Warren Buffet right? I'm sure there's people on his team who are crypto experts. He has to hedge against himself. The future of Berkshire Hathaway will probably be inclusive of crypto in some shape or form, regardless of personal beliefs of management there. So that's my tips for the universe of investors.
Speaker 3:That's an incredible perspective. And, ultimately, I do want to point out for the listeners, keep in mind that Georgie has a system in place. He's not investing 89% of his income into speculative assets. This is a very small portion of his portfolio, so you've got to be careful with how you maneuver. I'm a big fan of having a smaller portion of your portfolio to kind of take some bolder bets or more bolder investments based on and here's the key part based on things that you are deeply aware of, deeply understand, right? More so than probably the average person out there.
Speaker 3:Because it's very clear listening to this podcast, I'm sure that Georgie deeply understands this game. He's spent a lot of time he started in the 90s, the late 90s, in the collectible world. Maybe he never knew that he would kind of end up to where he's at now, but he has a deep understanding of how this collectible game kind of works. So it's not like he just heard about collectibles a couple of months ago and he just started buying them and just seeing what happens, right? No, he's done his homework, he's put in the hours to learn this stuff, and I think that's definitely important to note out because, on one end, yes, you can kind of have these investments that potentially bring these magnificent gains. But on the other end, when you make these bets, when you make these investments, especially when they're in areas that just aren't traditional, there's just a lot more gray area and that is where the more potential upside is. But it's also where there's a lot of downside if you're not careful and if you don't understand what you're doing. And I think just to circle back to what you said earlier, georgie, about embodying the virtues or the values of older wisdom such as Warren Buffett, and one of the biggest wisdoms that Warren Buffett constantly puts out there is don't invest in what you don't understand. And it's very clear, georgie, that you understand, or you're also constantly trying to seek to understand even better this world and kind of how it's operating and how it works.
Speaker 3:But I am a little bit curious.
Speaker 3:So let's say there's Joe Smollett listening right now and he's 32 years old, right, and maybe he feels a little bit late to the investing world and he just feels like he needs to kind of catch up and he sees these gains of like 200, 300, 400% in the collectible world and that's of course, going to peak his interest the most because he has that urge of like hey, I'm behind in the investing game, so what do I do?
Speaker 3:That's the thing where, for me personally just kind of give a side note I do feel like people like they see this glamorous world, like, whether it's trading, whether it's collectibles, nfts, whether it's crypto, like although that I fundamentally believe the blockchain technology behind crypto like it's already changing the world like these big tech companies Amazon, google, meta like they're all implementing this technology into their businesses. So like, if you're investing in index funds, you do have kind of an away exposure to this technology because these businesses are implementing it. But I'm just curious like what would you tell them if they feel behind on their retirement goals and they're thinking to themselves like, hey, should I just try to like only focus on the speculative world and try to like catch up here? What would you say?
Speaker 1:So that's a big question and I have an answer that I don't know if people are going to like to hear this, but I think that your mindset has to be different depending where you're at. So if you are 32 years old, for example, you don't have $10,000 to your name. I do think personally you will get there sooner by being active I'm not saying be day trading, because you're fighting institutions doing that, but flipping things from garage sales, going to local car shops and making deals. You will get to $10,000 faster on your feet than you would by going into the stock market. In my opinion and I have a lot of examples from my own friends who have done this and they got to their first $10,000 that way but that is labor. The stock market is not about labor. It's about companies already doing the labor. You're just clicking buttons on a keyboard. There's only so much that you can get from clicking buttons on a keyboard, but actually moving your feet, doing research, buying out boxes of cards, I think you are more likely to see the first $10,000 that way.
Speaker 1:And again, the collectible world, even though it moves fast, a lot of it moves in person, so you do have more time to sell and recoup your losses, if any. There's no one day crashes in the collectible world, unless it's through auction houses. But if you're in auction houses you have way more than $10,000 and that's a different game. So if you're trying to turn $100 to $200, yeah, you could buy an index fund and in seven years it's going to double, or on average. Or you can buy $100 worth of cards, sell them on eBay and now it's $120, and then rinse and repeat. By the end of the year that'll be $200. So that requires a lot more work. So you have to subtract. How much time am I putting into this? If I put in an hour and I get paid $30 an hour, well, I technically lost $30 going to the post office, waiting in line and all of that. So those are all variables to consider.
Speaker 1:But you will, in my opinion, get the $10,000 faster by moving your feet. If you don't have feet, you could roll like my grandpa did or hop around like he did. You're going to get to that 10K a lot faster. Then, when you do have 10K, I think you're in a great spot to start putting money into passive investment vehicles, and I think it's never too early. Like you don't have to invest that whole $200 or $100 in the trading cards. You could put $195 and build those habits, those behavioral patterns of putting $5 towards an index fund. So one day when that $5 is $5,000, well, you're not going to move 5K of collectibles that easily because remember you're walking with your feet.
Speaker 1:I have friends who do and they're doing very well, but I do believe they're exceptions. No one becomes an expert. Only a few percent of people actually do extremely, extremely well across anything that comes from sports. You could sing. You could be the second best singer in the world after Beyonce. No one cares, you're not Beyonce, you have to be number one. So same thing for a lot of these collectibles. Like, if you miss, you miss hard, but there's ways to hedge and it's a whole entire world.
Speaker 1:And the last thing I want to say on this is this isn't new. Baseball cards have existed for a century. They have beaten inflation for a century, so there is a lot more history to this than meets the eye. Yes, the predictions were created overnight, right, but the culture behind Pokemon was not. That's 30 years. One piece is 25 years. That's why I wear the straw hat. If you follow me on Instagram for straw hat Luffy, he uh that that is one of the biggest enemies of all time right now.
Speaker 1:And so, yeah, I didn't think the cards would go. I bought a case for $1,000 just to play and enjoy. My cards went up to five grand. I didn't expect that and if I kept that case sealed, that's $12,000 today. So you never know when, uh, you'll get one of those lucky hits. But don't spend your last $1,000 on one piece cards hoping that they're going to X12 within a year. They might. It might X24, but definitely be conservative. Don't spend your last hundred dollars investing. But if you want to turn a hundred to 200, you're going to do it quicker in person than via the stock market, in my opinion.
Speaker 3:That's a great perspective and for one that's one of the whole core pieces of the Mark Hustle podcast is we want to have people come on here and share different investing perspectives and different investing philosophies. So, of course, the most important parts even if you decide to go more towards the collectible world and try to try to invest is to make sure you understand what you're doing, cause like again kind of what George highlighted he's not saying go out there and just start buying random boxes of cards and hoping they go up. Right, the whole point. If you're using hope as your investment strategy, you're going to fall on your face and lose a lot of money. Right, you got to use strategy and homework. Right, you got to do your homework and understand what you're doing. Right.
Speaker 3:And of course, even in the collectibles world there's still going to be a touch of speculation, like you do have. It's hard to predict what the culture of society is going to kind of gravitate to. Like you can, I'm sure there's signs and for one, georgie, like you have a background in behavioral, like the behavioral studies, like I'm sure you understand a lot more about the human psyche and kind of how people gravitate towards things than maybe just the average person and maybe that's one of your unique skills that has helped you do well and navigate that world. But I do just want to highlight you do have to be careful, like you don't want to, just if you're desperate for money. One of the quickest ways to lose it all is to just go in and buy something and hope it's going to go up. And that does not only apply to collectibles, it also applies to the stock market, right, cause we see a lot of that where people jump into the stock market. You know they want to make a quick thousand dollars and then maybe they have their rent money. They're like, okay, I'm going to try to see what I could do with this, try to quickly turn it into, you know, double or triple, and that's when you get into dangerous territory. But if you hop into the other world like there's so many different avenues that you can move when it comes to investing, like of course the stock market is one of the biggest wealth creators in the world, but of course you have real estate, and then even like subdivisions you have, like you can go deeper right. Like we're starting to see crypto as an option, and then there's even non, there's more non-traditional investment opportunities when it comes to new collectibles, right, and you could even argue that it goes even deeper than that. Like whether it's, you know, celebrity sweaters or celebrity toothbrushes or whatever it is.
Speaker 3:Like you see this stuff selling on eBay, right, like eBay is a whole marketplace in and of itself. That is by. That is stuff that's like kind of being resold by people that have these random objects that people want, and that's mostly just, I would argue, kind of summarizing it all up, like it's just. It's just a big game of supply and demand. Like if a bunch of people want a certain product that is super limited and it's intention, like it's actually scarce, it's not just manipulated in a way to make it scarce, and then somebody's trying to pull a bunch of money, because that happens a lot in the crypto world too. They get to be careful of. But if it's something that people really want, then of course the value is going to go up, right. That's just the basic concept of supply and demand, and I think that's an important concept to understand if you're going to navigate that world and, georgie, I'm sure you could probably attest to that to one degree or another as well.
Speaker 1:Definitely. I think you definitely don't want to be gambling Like this. This is much different than gambling, especially when you're investing in the whole entire total stock market. You're betting on the house and the house does win. That's why it's the house, it's a. Everything goes through the house. Same thing with cards. Like I asked other people what's the index fund equivalent of a trading card, and they would say, instead of boxes, it would be random collections and collections that were established across time. So the main takeaway I have for everyone is use that conventional wisdom because it made people billionaire. So if you get 1% of the way there, well you did great.
Speaker 3:Fair enough, fair enough. Well, we are approaching that hour mark. This time just flies by when we have amazing guests such as yourself, georgie. I do have one last question, and then we'll also leave some time for Pierce and Boffi to ask a quick question or just add some notes, and I guess the one thing I want to ask is we've had the last couple of days have been some red days, and a lot of newer investors that have maybe started their journey, like maybe a year ago, or even just listening to this podcast.
Speaker 3:I've had people reach out saying hey, josh, I just started investing thanks to your podcast. So, like, they've naturally kind of sent me messages like hey, things are kind of red, what should I do? What would you give as advice to somebody who is kind of struggling during those crash periods, those red days, whether it's in the stock market or whether it's in the collectibles world? What do you normally tell people Like I know you mentioned with your mother, with your mother, you kind of go back to the basics, the fundamentals of you know hey, look, this is the wisdom from these 90-year-olds that have that are billionaires, that have very successful track records, and this is what they say to do? Is that normally like your go-to advice, or is there other things that you kind of help people to ease their emotional tensions during these turbulent times of red days in the market?
Speaker 1:So I like to test out different strategies. Sometimes I go the data route, and the data route like it does well on, you know, soviet mindsets. But over here with America, like logic and reason isn't always the answer. You have to tap into that emotion thing which we're all learning about from the Soviet Union. People don't smile there like when they walk down the street, but they will feed you and clothe you if you have an emergency at 3 am and let you into their house. So it's a different type of love and the way the affection is shown there.
Speaker 1:I think, at the end of the day, to cope with these red days, I like to do the gym metaphor, where you only get gains if you go when you don't want to. If everyone went only when they wanted to the gym, they would go maybe once or twice a week and some people a little bit less than that. But it's really those other three days of the week where you don't want to go. That's where the gains are made. Oh, I'm feeling a little bit sick. You have an excuse to not go in. Oh, you know what? This month was really, really hard. You have an excuse to invest a little bit less.
Speaker 1:It does not work that way. Wealth is not built by picking and choosing when it's an optimal time, because, one, we're not psychic. And two, 10 years from now. Today is the most optimal time. 20 years from now, it would be a miracle to get today's prices. 30 years from now, people will be like, wow, everyone who was investing 30 years ago is super, super rich, which is the same way we talk about people who started investing 30 years ago.
Speaker 1:There are two exceptions in US history to that, but usually those exceptions are swallowed up real quickly by all of the well, the norm, which is most of the time the market goes up. Most of the time you will make money if you buy and hold quality. Same goes for fitness. If you have quality workouts, well, do them over time and you're gonna be healthier. The value of your money goes up because you could do more with a healthy body, right? So if you guys aren't working out at the gym, if you want to make some quick gains financially, go to the gym Now.
Speaker 1:Your money's worth more because you could do more. You could climb mountains at 60 instead of well, who wants a million at 60? That's one of my big pet peeves. So it's never too late to start, and there's people who start working out at age 55 and they're stronger than I am, so it's never too late. Across everything and I think that's another big theme that's naturally popping up in this discussion is this is not just about money. All of these principles should be used across your life, and there's so many different ways to invest. Don't be pressured. Oh, I won't have 100 grand by 50, or even by 60, or a million by 70, or whatever your goal is. That's okay, because even if you miss oh my gosh, you walk away with so much more like spiritually speaking, than you would have by not embarking on this journey. So even if you lose, you win.
Speaker 5:Sweet, brilliant. So my last question I have and I think this is probably not just for Georgie, I think maybe all of us can chime in a bit, because the first stock I ever bought was Bank of America and I didn't even know a damn thing about it. I didn't even know what I was doing. Similar to the Georgie start, and I bought Bank of America primarily because I use Bank of America. So first time I bought the stock it was like $14 a share way back when I first started investing. And, georgie, you mentioned early on during this episode that you bought Weight Watchers. Yeah, why Weight Watchers specifically?
Speaker 1:I'm curious now, so I remember Weight Watchers was about trading at around $5 when Oprah Winfrey purchased it and then I saw it climb up to like $16 and I was like, whoa, that's way better than the 1% that Disney went up and I was like this just happened a week ago. It's still early. So I went in, I started buying Weight Watchers and I was down hard. It went down to $9. So I was down about 50% right there, close to 50%, and I just held it and I learned my first lesson about holding because it eventually broke even and as soon as it broke even I was like, oh, I could do that index fund thing.
Speaker 1:So I sold it bought index funds and then Weight Watchers went to $104 per share. Oh wow, I just held it. Oh my gosh, the money I put in. But then it dropped all the way down to what it is today, which is about $4, which is what Oprah Winfrey bought it for. So full circle.
Speaker 5:I feel up to juice. That's how the stock market and some of these assets in general are right. There's some volatility, and sometimes they're doing great for a bit and then they can just fall over a cliff, or they can stay at the bottom of the cliff and then just jump right to the top of the cliff. So it was very difficult to speculate and predict what's going to happen in the future. So that's why that's something we don't really recommend for people to try and just predict the future and assume, because these companies don't even know if they're going to be around 15, 20 years from now either. They're doing everything now to make sure they have a good chance of being around, but nobody knows for certain. And so, pearson, josh, I wonder what were the first stocks you guys bought?
Speaker 4:I've never bought. I've never even to tell this day, I've never bought an individual stock like Facebook or Microsoft or anything like that. The plan and everything that I have planned out is ETFs and mutual fund and it's very traditional, following from what my dad does, and it's like the system, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, and so I try to follow that pretty hard. But if there was individual stocks, like I actually am planning to find individual stock coming up because one of my personal friends their family company is IPOing, so it's actually going to be listed on the NASDAQ, but I think that is going to be my first personal stock that I actually pick.
Speaker 4:So it's not that I haven't had things go down. Oh, trust me, I've had tons of things go down. I invest in this one Vanguard fund called Kweb, and today Kweb's down about 3%, and so it depends on all how much money you have in there. But 3% could mean like 30 bucks or it could mean like 30 grand, and so there's days that you do see down. But I think it's like we always talk about it's over time buy and hold. 20 years from now, what's Kweb going to?
Speaker 3:be Right they don't want to learn it.
Speaker 3:Man oh man, when I first got started I had no clue what I was doing. So I was one of those investors where I was just trying to figure out. It took me a while just to figure out how to buy a stock, let alone try to figure out which one to buy. So a little over 10 years ago was when I first started my journey, and so here's my thought process. I was in there. I was like I was starting to see weed become more ingrained in society. I was starting to become less stigmatized, and so my thought process was like okay, this means that probably the businesses are going to benefit over the next 10 to 20 years, right. So that was kind of my thought process, and it's a solid thought process. Like, looking back, that was still. That was a good thought process.
Speaker 3:But what happened was I just went to Google. I'm like, all right, let's find the cheapest weed stock. That was my thing. I wanted to find a cheap weed stock, which to me at that time cheap meant low price penny stock, right. So I was like I got to find the cheapest one because I know it's going to go up. I didn't realize what market value was at that time. You know, I was just super clueless. So I went in there and I found some article and they were talking about how it was just like this one hemp company where it wasn't like a directly tied to the marijuana industry, but they were basically saying that because marijuana is becoming more ingrained in society, like hemp, which was just it's a type of paper, I guess, from what I understood, and they were saying that it was banned because of the stigma of marijuana back in the days, and because it's starting to become less stigmatized, hemp will probably become like the new way to make paper. And I was like, okay, that sounds kind of logical or whatever. Like this is probably going to happen.
Speaker 3:So I went and bought that stock, not doing much research other than reading that article which, looking back, it seemed like it was probably a pump and dump type of article. That was like a very popular back 10 years ago and, yeah, it was terrible decision. It was like a penny. I think it was like 20 cents. It did go up to like 40 cents. I kind of like got up 50 or you know, I did okay for like a couple days and then it just plummeted right and it went to like it dropped like 97% and I was like all right, this was not a good strategy, like we.
Speaker 3:You know, the one thing is like, although it was like a terrible way to kind of jump into the stock market, I learned so much from that experience, right, like I'm a big person of learning from my mistakes.
Speaker 3:I'm a very much, very much a hands on learner, so like I'm not afraid to kind of like jump into things, but I'm also very introspective and I'm going to take a step back and understand where I went wrong and where the decision making was wrong in order to correct that in the future. And that's exactly what I did. But that was the first stock that I bought, you know, and I think the core lesson is like, although you might kind of have the macro, you know you might be right on the macro logic, there's still a lot more that you have to understand on the micro when it comes to buying these companies, because buying individual companies by itself it's very, very risky and although they might have like that potential tailwind to kind of boost them up if they don't execute correctly or if they're overvalued or so many other variables, that doesn't mean they're going to go up and benefit from that industry tailwind.
Speaker 5:Well, very well said dude. Now I know what everybody bought.
Speaker 3:first Great question though. Great question, georgie. I know you know we're a little bit over the time. I just want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for coming on this podcast, being willing to, you know, be open and share your story with the market hustle community. You know, I'm sure there's a couple of people here who are going to take what you said to start. Maybe they have had that hunch to kind of look into the collectible world more. Maybe they're very familiar with Pokemon and maybe even done some trading in the past and hopefully they kind of explore that a little bit more and actually embody everything that you said with the values, the wisdom of people who are at these much further along levels.
Speaker 3:I think it's easy to kind of get intimidated where you know you hear like Warren Buffett speak and he's like you got to do it this way X, y and Z. It's really hard to give how-to advice in a general way, right, it's hard to give how-to advice generalized. So there's so many nuances in the investing world and I hope that's what this podcast helps highlight is that there are nuances and just because there's a decent route or like a lot of people are going one way, doesn't mean that you necessarily have to Like. Of course, you want to have a strong foundation in place. You don't want to just go put 100% of your retirement on something that's super, super risky, that may or may not pan out, because it's this is a game of risk management at the end of the day. But it's also good to kind of understand that there are so many different options when it comes to the investing world, and it may take time to find what really works for yourself. So, georgie, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate you for doing so.
Speaker 1:I appreciate you guys. I hope everyone listening takes some form of action you already are by listening. This is actually the method of how I learned the most about the stock market wasn't reading or anything like that. It was listening to people who are just a little bit further than I am on the journey, or way further than I am on the journey, and learning about all of these new terms and perspectives. Like you'll remember this, as whoa, he talked a lot about collectible. That's interesting. Remember that's 15% of my portfolio, right?
Speaker 1:So this is building your investing imagination and if you're listening to this right now, patch yourselves on the back unless you're driving, unless you've got that free hand. I don't know, maybe you don't even have hands, maybe you're in that new Tesla, but shout out to you because you are definitely on the right path. You are doing the right thing with your time. Most people that will be listening to some song right now. There's nothing wrong with listening to songs, but you know you are definitely using your privilege and tuning in to this podcast, so congratulations. You should be proud of yourself if you're not Good job.
Speaker 3:Georgie, and then where's a good place for people to follow you at?
Speaker 1:Well, they could definitely follow me on that Instagram slash financialism, that's FUN, fun, that's fun. And then you'll find me once you type in FUN and then A, and then you'll be like oh, there he is with the straw hat, just like he said. And if you're in there, it is it popped up. We have a Pierce who just looked me up real quick, let's follow.
Speaker 3:We'll put it in the bio of the podcast as well, to make it easy on everybody. So make sure market hosel community Do me a favor, give him a follow. Give Georgie a follow, especially if you want to learn more about the just non-traditional ways of investing, because I know he talks a lot about it on his Instagram. Give him a follow. It's been a great podcast. Thank you so much again for coming on and Buffy Pierce, as always, thank you so much for coming on to co-host. I can't wait. We'll be back next week with another special guest. These podcasts with our guests are always super fun and, as always, we're always open to feedback. If you have any suggestions on how we can make these podcasts better, send me a message at the market hustle and I'm all ears. That being said, this concludes episode 13 of the market hustle podcast. I hope everybody has a wonderful rest of their week. Goodbye. Bye y'all With that market hustle go.