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The Iced Coffee Hour
Stock Expert: Here’s My “Cheat Code” That Turned $35,000 Into $10M In 5 Years!
01:47:48
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- [00:01]
Narrator/Advertiser
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- [00:53]
Jack
what was the most you've ever made on a single trade?
- [00:55]
Kevin Xu
I made a million dollars and lost a million dollars in back to back days. That changes.
- [01:01]
Jack
GameStop is back at it again. Shares skyrocketed more than 100% on Wednesday.
- [01:06]
Kevin Xu
I was one of the earliest whales on GameStop. I put in $1.3 million.
- [01:10]
Graham
How much would you have made?
- [01:12]
Kevin Xu
Oh my God.
- [01:15]
Graham
So you're known for trading $35,000 into more than $10 million in two years. Trading stocks. How did you do this when everybody else loses money?
- [01:24]
Kevin Xu
I'm a swing trader. I'm not an investor. I have a couple of rules that are very strict that I follow. No margin. Don't chase the stock. Figure out the life you want to live and double it.
- [01:35]
Graham
How do you know you're not going to lose everything?
- [01:38]
Kevin Xu
The main things I'm looking for is a story. Go all in and figure out do you have an edge? Concentration makes wealth diversification keeps it.
- [01:46]
Graham
So in your opinion, what do you think is the next 10x opportunity from here? Kevin, thank you so much for coming on the Ice Coffee Hour.
- [01:58]
Kevin Xu
Thanks for having me.
- [01:59]
Graham
So you're known on Twitter and WallStreetBets for turning $35,000 into $10 million. You posted each trade during the Meme Stock era. Then once you reached your number, you diversified to lock in the profits. I gotta say, that's what every single investor dreams of doing and to be able to achieve that. If you could walk us through your biggest winners and your biggest losers.
- [02:20]
Kevin Xu
Yeah, sure. I mean the first trade was the biggest percent win. I made like 2x in like a month off apt the craziest trade was actually rkt rocket mortgages. I made a million dollars and lost a million dollars in back to back days. Like, like that's.
- [02:34]
Graham
How does that happen?
- [02:35]
Kevin Xu
It was getting kind of squeezy. This was like right after the GameStop thing in January. It was like February or March or something like that. And I think they had a high short interest ratio. Maybe they were getting a squeeze. So I kind of rode this wave up like 70% and the next day kind of lost it all like really, really quickly.
- [02:49]
Jack
What percentage of your net worth was that at the time to. To gain a million dollars and lose it in two days?
- [02:54]
Kevin Xu
This is 100%. I had no idea.
- [02:56]
Jack
But you didn't go down to zero?
- [02:58]
Kevin Xu
No, no, no. Well, I would. My style is I would go all in, one single stock at a time. No margin, no options, no crypto, right? Like I don't touch anything that could in theory go to zero overnight. Right? If you're invested in like 100% invested in a single stock, in a good stock, like a good company is a legit. You know, the worst is like maybe a 20% drop on earnings or something like that, right? And so that was kind of mentality. I had that like, you know, I was. I was working a very stable job at Google making like $300,000 a year, right? And I had this 401k that I couldn't touch until I'm 65. And so why not just keep YOLOing it? And it just kept working, right? I just kept going all in, one stock at a time, one stock at a time. Chasing bounces, chasing earnings reports. I mean, many. I mean this was 2020-21, right? So like everything went up. I mean there were definitely some big losses there too, but. But for the most part, yeah, I just kept doing that all the way to 10 million.
- [03:47]
Graham
Why do so many people fail to do what you've done? Because there's just as many people I've seen on Wall street bets who go all in on something and then they post this loss showing 95%. It's like, I gotta quit a hundred percent.
- [03:59]
Kevin Xu
I mean, a lot of that is because you're chasing the really quick gains, right? Zero DTE options, these things can literally go overnight. I have a couple of rules that I'm very strict that I follow, right? No margin, don't chase the stock. Like a lot of people love chasing whatever the hot stock is. But you have to realize like once you hear about the stock, most often it's probably already run Up a lot and it kind of loses the support, right? Like all of a sudden people could be taking profit, you could be down, you could. You essentially bought the top. If you notice, in my track record, like, I never bought, you know, Tesla back then, right. And I, you know, even in this current. I never bought Nvidia. Like, these are great companies, they will continue to go up, but I just don't like, I don't like chasing. Cause in theory you could drop and then you could lose out a lot. I'm what they call a swing trader, right? So I try to buy near support and the worst case scenario is it just kind of bobbles to the side and then if some callous hits or some good use happens, it'll rise up, sell for 20% profit, and just keep doing that again and again.
- [04:54]
Graham
Do you think you could recreate what you've done back then today?
- [04:58]
Kevin Xu
That's exactly what I'm trying to do right now. So I restarted my. A new 35k challenge account in Robinhood and in the last few weeks it's already up to the 52k. So I've gotten like lucky on some, some plays. It's up 50%. And I think in this current environment, yeah, it's a sweet. I mean, it's a swing trader's wet dream. It's so volatile. It's so narrative, driven by headlines. And if you're, you know, my forte is I'm spending like all day on X these days, right? Which is kind of like the new CNBC or Wall street is where all the talk is happening. If you can kind of stay on top of where sentiment is, I think you can make a lot of money. Swing trading.
- [05:35]
Graham
How much do you feel is skill versus luck?
- [05:37]
Kevin Xu
It's both, right? Like, I was incredibly lucky to have tried this style of trading during 2020-21. Like, that's just incredible luck, right? But at the same time, not everyone made 285x in 21 months. Like, that's an insane number. And so there was definitely some skill involved. I mean, if I had a skill, it would probably be my ability to just kind of digest like so much content. Like I was on Wall street bets and other subreddits every day reading all the comments, you know, not just like the, the. The whatever's trending. And in a funny picture, like I was reading all the comments because it's a hive mind, right? Like the market, like a lot. I mean, I'm not a technicals guy, I'm not a fundamentals guy. I've actually never even run like a discounted cash flow in my entire life. Like, I understand sentiment, I believe the market is based on sentiment. So I try to predict where sentiment is going, right, and what, you know, what companies are riding off of these waves. And I think that's even more so important today.
- [06:33]
Jack
So if you trade off of sentiment, that sounds kind of similar to social arbitrage, which is a trading strategy we've explored on this podcast quite heavily with Chris Camillo a few times and he's famously ran like 20,000 up to whatever it is now, $100 million. I'm curious, in order to understand the general sentiment and the direction the sentiment is headed, what are the main things that you look for?
- [06:55]
Kevin Xu
I call myself a vibe trader now because that's essentially what I'm doing. I'm just like trying to catch the vibes. The main things I'm looking for is a story, right? A narrative, a solid thesis, both in the short term and in the long term. Right? The long term provides. It's a good company. I don't think there's all these mini narratives like, oh, GME is going to do something crazy tomorrow. I'm not sure what the long term future for GameStop is, but for a Neo cloud like my current all in Shaz, Shaz Sharon AI, it's a Neo cloud based in Australia, right. And, and there was just so many narratives, so much potential catalyst, so much potential good news that could come any day about, you know, a potential arthropic deal, right, with Shaz or Nvidia investment into Shaz because data centers are just so important today. The AI infrastructure build out right now. And so that's kind of what I look for. I look for, you know, it's a good company with a good long term future, but also a potential catalyst and good news that could pop up any day.
- [07:48]
Jack
In the short term, if you're trying to replicate your strategy, like where are the main places you should be pulling information from?
- [07:55]
Kevin Xu
X wins by far now, right? It's where. Because not only does it have all the big financial accounts posting breaking news as soon as it happens, but you have a lot of real traders doing deep dives, posting their trade receipts. And I think that matters a lot. That's what you're missing on Reddit. You don't know who people are on Reddit, right? Like, I was very unique. I had a very unique posting style and username. So people gradually kind of get to know who Sir Jack was. But for the most part, these usernames are completely anonymous, right. It's hard to follow people between comments versus on Twitter you have an actual profile. You can follow someone's winning trade and their logic and how much money they put in. And that kind of adds a lot of value to the actual content that they're saying. In terms of how I identify real swing trades, I have a very tiny watch list I'm constantly monitoring. So I have like five stocks on my watch list right now. And every day I'm just looking at like, are they up, are they down? Who's talking about them? What stuff is coming up with them? And basically trying to figure out, like, try to tune my cause and effect in my head, right? Like, if you think this news is good for data centers, why is or isn't this stock going up? Right. And then once it's at a decent enough floor or something, use is coming up like next week, right. Like I also subscribe to the philosophy of buy the rumor selling use. And this is basically when you know something potentially interesting is coming up. Could be an earnings report, could be an announcement or whatever. And there's usually a run up into the, into the actual news event. Right? So for earnings is a good example. There's a lot of earnings coming up. A lot of companies run up to earnings. And so if I see a stock that I like, oh yeah, has good, A lot of people I think has good earnings next week, I might buy today and, and you know, ride that wave into the earnings.
- [09:28]
Jack
What was the most you've ever made on a single trade?
- [09:30]
Kevin Xu
Big five Sporting Goods bgfv.
- [09:33]
Graham
How did you find that?
- [09:35]
Kevin Xu
Oh my God, this was on Wall street bets. And literally someone who, who I decently respected, you know, I had a commented back and forth with him before, literally just suggested it to me, right? Like mentioned me, it's like, hey, you should look into big five. They just did like a special dividend, right. And they had good earnings or something like that.
- [09:53]
Narrator/Advertiser
Right.
- [09:53]
Kevin Xu
And that was it. I was like, oh, that's a good potential play. And so I full ported, I think.
- [09:57]
Jack
Wait, that was it? Yeah, yeah, that was all of the people.
- [10:00]
Kevin Xu
I, I did my own research and whatever like that, but it wasn't. What?
- [10:03]
Jack
Okay, but, but I want the viewer to understand, like when you say did my own research to them, that could either mean five minutes or it could mean like five days.
- [10:10]
Kevin Xu
Yeah.
- [10:11]
Jack
So like you heard about this information, you didn't just hear from some stranger that you should full port into big five sporting goods. Because if we say that publicly, then People are going to try to replicate the strategy, but I want them to see, like, transparently what it was actually like for someone that made. How much money did you make on this?
- [10:26]
Kevin Xu
Probably 1.7 million. Oh, my gosh. Wow. Yeah, that's. I full ported like $6 billion into the stock.
- [10:33]
Jack
Six million?
- [10:34]
Kevin Xu
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I own like one and a half percent or something at that time.
- [10:36]
Jack
Okay, so walk us through the amount of due diligence. How long just, let's just say you. How many hours did you spend before you put 6 million?
- [10:43]
Kevin Xu
So normally all due just happens right before the trade ever happens. Right. Like, I keep, basically keep a constant background process of like all these stocks. I constantly watch again, constantly scanning the news. I constantly. I'm getting familiar with them over time and then kind of like, I feel like I call it like a limitless moment where like, just everything kind of clicks like all at once. Right. And so for that one, it was the fact that they had a special dividend and spiked like 20% on a day. There were so many comments about this. And also volume ticked up. Right. So what's one thing I really, really care a lot about is increasing volume. Like the, on the, on the candlestick charts. Right.
- [11:13]
Jack
Looking at what does increased volume tell
- [11:15]
Kevin Xu
you, more people are caring about this. There's.
- [11:18]
Jack
And volume can be. It's like just transactions. So it's by buyers and sellers at the same time.
- [11:23]
Kevin Xu
Correct, Correct. Yeah. But generally increasing volume is, you know, is a good thing. It just means more market participants are entering this stock, are caring about this stock, and there's more room for growth, usually in a positive direction.
- [11:35]
Graham
Yeah, but you bought in once. It already went up 20%.
- [11:38]
Kevin Xu
Yes, I bought it when it already went up 20%. I think the next catalyst was actual special dividend that was coming up. Right. And so I basically rolled that extra wave. So it was a little bit risky sometimes. Sometimes, you know, I like to try to catch stocks while they're kind of boring and haven't bounced yet. But sometimes I also try to catch stock like right at that first bounce to see, like, how far the wave goes.
- [11:59]
Graham
So how many hours of research should the average person do before they go all in or even buy an individual stock?
- [12:06]
Kevin Xu
If I were to be honest, like, I've definitely gone into stocks with just like, you know, only an hour research, especially these days with AI. Right. Like you could ask your favorite agent or ChatGPT just like, give me the bull case, give me the bear case. Tell me everything that's happened recently. Right. And sometimes that's your perspectives. That's like everything you need to know.
- [12:22]
Graham
What would Warren Buffett have to say about this?
- [12:26]
Kevin Xu
Well, okay, so look, I'm a swing trader, right? I'm not an investor. Like the reason I made a post, I defined as I said, like there's three ways to use your money to make money. You could be gambling, you could be trading or you could be investing. Right? And they have different risk profiles, different return profiles. I don't endorse gambling at all. Right. I never touch, you know, meme coins, I never touch option margin, leverage products, even prediction market sports betting. I've never made a sports bet in my life. Right. Because that could just go to zero all of a sudden, right? And you know, maybe it's okay for the $20, but like when you're playing with serious money, no. So investing, right? Warren Buffett is an investor, right? These are long term holds. You believe in the company. You can go to sleep, you can go on vacation, you could be in a coma for 10 years and you're still fine holding the company.
- [13:10]
Graham
Right.
- [13:11]
Kevin Xu
I think, I mean right now I'm also an investor. My 401k is $5 million in spy, $5 million in QQQ and about a million in DRAM, which is this ETF of memory chip companies because they're, you know, they're diversified indexes are good for that, lowering risk. And I mean there's Warren Buffett actually has another quote that's like concentration makes wealth, diversification keeps it. Right. So if you are in that point of that stage in your life where you're looking for, to maximize gains, you're willing to put in the energy and effort to try to find, try to stay on top of sentiment and depending on your own personal finance situation. Right. Like again, I was making 300k at Google, like I could afford to YOLO my 400k that could touch. Anyways, I think it's worth, you know, spending more time and energy and trading and finding those single stocks that you think you have a fairly good picture of, like how it's going to perform over the next few days, weeks, months.
- [14:00]
Jack
So who is this strategy for? Who would you recommend they look into, you know, full porting or buying like all of one individual company doing the due diligence, following in your footsteps. Who is this for and who is this not for? So we actually just hired our first ever full time employee, Michael.
- [14:17]
Kevin Xu
Oh, my name is Michael.
- [14:18]
Jack
I edit the podcast and I love my work and I love my bosses. Thank You, Michael. And while hiring him was very exciting, all of the backend stuff, payroll, benefits, paperwork was absolutely not. But fortunately, our partner Gusto was there to handle all of it.
- [14:32]
Graham
For those unaware, Gusto is an online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses. It's all in one remote, friendly and incredibly easy to use, so you could pay higher onboard and support your team from anywhere.
- [14:43]
Jack
Gusto handles payroll tax filing, direct deposits, health benefits, 401k, workers comp, literally all of it.
- [14:49]
Graham
And if you ever hit a tough HR situation, you get direct access to certified HR experts.
- [14:54]
Jack
Switching is also super easy too. All you have to do is transfer over your existing data and you are up and running fast.
- [14:59]
Graham
You won't even pay a cent until you run your first payroll. After that, it's one flat monthly price with unlimited payroll runs.
- [15:06]
Jack
So I've actually used Gusto long before I ever partnered with them. In fact, when I first set up my s Corp in 2020, I had no idea where to start. My CPA actually recommended Gu Gusto to me. I signed up and they made everything incredibly easy. And I have been using them, I kid you not, for the six years since then.
- [15:21]
Graham
It's really no surprise that Gusto is ranked number one on G2's highest satisfaction products list for 2026. Over half a million small businesses, including us, use them.
- [15:31]
Jack
So try gusto today@gusto.com ICED and get three months for free when you run your first payroll. That is three months of free payroll@gusto.com ICed so who is this strategy for? Who would you recommend they, they look into, you know, full porting or buying, like all of one individual company doing the due diligence, following in your footsteps. Who is this for? And who is this not for?
- [15:55]
Kevin Xu
I think it's for that, you know, that young, that young person who has a job. I think having a job is really important. I think, you know, if trading is your full time activity, that's like your lifeline now and you start making very irrational decisions. So I think it's very important to have your have a stable job and then decide how much money you're willing to risk and just. Yeah, full port.
- [16:17]
Graham
And by full port you mean go all in?
- [16:19]
Kevin Xu
All in, yes, because then you're like fully invested, you're fully concentrated, you're tracking every movement. For me, like if you're right and you're only in like 5%, you were right, that's really incredible. But you only got gain only like from a little bit from there. Even if I had like $20 in a stock. I'm just obsessed with it. Right.
- [16:36]
Graham
But if you're wrong, I mean, then you only lose, you know.
- [16:40]
Kevin Xu
True. Let's say you're. When you're raw, you could, you could sell.
- [16:44]
Jack
So here's, here's my general take on it. My unsolicited two cents is that I think for a specific person, this strategy is probably better. But I would also hesitate at promoting something like this widespread because I know a lot of people are going to get absolutely rinsed. Do I think the average person listening to this right now is going to be able to do the right amount of due diligence? Have, you know, like, assess their own risk profile well enough to actually capitalize on this? I don't think so. But for the specific person, I actually think that this makes a lot of sense. I know I get a lot of, like, flack for always buying and then the stock goes down.
- [17:21]
Graham
Oh, tell them about your recent one, Jack.
- [17:24]
Jack
Yeah, so like, I bought a bunch of Bloom Energy like a week ago, and then it goes down to like 230, but I also bought at 2:30. And so now it's like kind of like going back up a little bit. I bought some call options, you know, sold some weekly puts and stuff like that. But this all to say, every single individual stock I have ever picked has outperformed every index fund I've ever invested in. And so I'm like, if I had just gone in heavier, like, I would, you know, I put like $2,000 into individual stock while I have like a few hundred thousand index funds.
- [17:54]
Graham
What's very funny is Jack has selectively forgotten 2020 and 2021.
- [17:59]
Jack
Well, even if you account for that, I'm probably up still about equal with my individual and ETFs. But 2020 and 2021, I got margin called on Palantir and Robinhood, and I was forced to sell at 10. But I was buying them at 15 and 20 and 30 bucks, and now they've skyrocketed. And so for me, I was like getting margin called and I was like, I have the cash in my high yield savings account, but, like, this is like my fun money. I'm not even gonna like, feed into it. I should have, but still, the stocks that I had picked at that time were the correct stocks that we're going to end up doing really well.
- [18:30]
Kevin Xu
Oh, a hundred percent. I mean, I think you kind of hit the nail. Maybe the framing is, is, is better positioned to. For most people. You had a fund account, right? And you were technically all in high risk stocks or individual stocks in your fund account. Right? So like, I know people make fun of me online all the time. They're like, oh, Kevin's all into these random stocks even though he has like $11 million in index funds. Like, I'm very transparent about this. Like it's in my X bio, right. Like my net worth is, you know, 11.6 million and my all in challenge account is at 52k right now. Like, people could do the math, right? I think whatever, you know, people are comfortable with, put that aside, make a whole new account for that and just go all in, all in there.
- [19:05]
Graham
But now if you say you've somehow bought some of these stocks with like an hour of research, let's just say where does it intersect between gambling and investing? Because it just seems like there's an element of randomness that goes into all of this where it might lean into gambling a little bit.
- [19:22]
Kevin Xu
To me, gambling can go to zero, right? Gambling can go to zero overnight, out of your control. And again, with most stocks, right, you're not going to go to zero overnight. And so that's, that's where I draw the line between gambling and trading.
- [19:36]
Graham
Well, couldn't you say also with a slot machine, you're not going to go to zero every spin. If you do spins, you're going to lose on average. But you could also just as easily stop at 80 bucks.
- [19:46]
Kevin Xu
Yes. Unless you just put it all on one spin or at the real table, put on one trade. I mean, I'm also just a very simple person, Right. Like I can only really track like one or two stocks at a time. Right. Like, I think, you know, you mentioned selling call options, whatever. Like, I've never sold an option. I'm a very simple person. Like, I believe in a stock. I think this is a good price. I think it's going to go up in the next couple of days, couple of weeks. Like, I think that is actually rather promotable to a general audience. Like, just simplify. You don't have to get into all these kind of crazy kind of things and deal with margin and try to make more money. Just like find a good stock that you think is a good price. It's got a good story. You think it's going to go up 5, 10% next week. Sell, buy low, sell high and then find another stock.
- [20:24]
Graham
What are some of the red flags that stop you from investing into a
- [20:27]
Kevin Xu
company recently if the wrong type of promoters are talking about it? Right. Like there's a lot of you know, shady people on X, a lot of shady things happening. People are promoting penny stocks and you know, these people have, they're anonymous and they're not transparent. Like, I'm super transparent. Like, I've been actually, I was thinking about it, I've been sharing every single trade I've made since 2020, like either on Reddit or on After Hour or on X now. Like, I'm extremely transparent about when I buy and when I sell. Other people, they'll talk about like when they buy, but they'll never talk about when they sell or they're sharing, you know, obviously Photoshop screenshots or screenshots they took for someone else's someone else on their discord. And so if, you know, I post video trade receipts. And so I, I, I, well that's the biggest red flag, like recently there is a stock that's come across my radar. People keep DMing it to me. That's another red flag. If someone ever DMs me, like, hey, you should check the stock out. I'm like, automatically like, no. You know, like, you probably have some ulterior motive.
- [21:26]
Graham
How often do you see Pump and Dumps?
- [21:28]
Kevin Xu
Back in the day, I saw quite often. I think the algorithm has done a much better job of like filtering that kind of stuff out. Or maybe I just like, I just don't care about that stuff. Right. If, you know, if it's a sub billion dollar market cap, that's automatically like a, pretty much like an orange flag for me because that's easy to manipulate. Yeah.
- [21:45]
Graham
And how do you know when to sell?
- [21:47]
Kevin Xu
I sell a stock or swing trade a stock, right. Either when the thesis has been validated, invalidated, or I find a sexier play. And so, you know, if a stock like for example, I'm playing earnings, right? Earnings was good. It popped 26%, which was my recent trade on Pang. Perfect. It was earnings play, decent, validated sell, right. Or other times I'm just holding a stock, right? Kind of like I said, I'm just waiting for a catalyst to happen. Maybe it's just like bobbling sideways for a little bit and I find something else that's more exciting, right? That has a news coming up next week or they just launched partnership. I'm like, okay, then maybe I'll swing to there and then swing back. That's how I missed out on GameStop.
- [22:30]
Graham
Tell us about that. What happened to GameStop?
- [22:32]
Kevin Xu
Yeah, so I was one of the earliest whales on GameStop. I put in $1.3 million into GameStop in October of 2020. Okay. My cost base was around $13 a share back then and I held until December of 2020. So I missed the squeeze by a month.
- [22:51]
Graham
How much would you have made?
- [22:53]
Kevin Xu
Oh my God, I, I believe $100 would have been $120 would have been 10 million. So it went up to 420, so probably around 30 to 40 million. If I held to the top of the squeeze.
- [23:07]
Graham
You would have 40 x'd.
- [23:08]
Kevin Xu
Yeah, yeah.
- [23:10]
Graham
How often do you think about that?
- [23:11]
Kevin Xu
I don't think about that at all.
- [23:12]
Jack
Okay.
- [23:13]
Kevin Xu
During those days I was ecstatic because we were right, you know, the short squeeze and all that kind of stuff. Like the thesis was right. I was celebrating. I was dancing alongside, you know, Roaring Kitty every day.
- [23:22]
Graham
You know what's funny? I actually bought GameStop when it was $3 and something cents a share. I put $5,000 into it because I saw it on WallStreetBets and I just thought, this sounds funny. I'm just gonna do it. And I bought it. I completely forgot about it. And then the whole GameStop stuff happened and I sold. I think it was right after Robinhood disabled the trading. And I was like, oh man, this is gonna kill the momentum. And immediately it started falling. And then I remember, I think I went to you and I'm like, dude, Jack, should I sell? And it had turned into over like 150 grand, I think at the time from a $5,000 investment. And I sold and I was so happy that I didn't quite get the peak. But to be able to get that price for that, I mean, that was a Hail Mary just for fun.
- [24:13]
Kevin Xu
Profit is profit.
- [24:14]
Graham
Profit is profit. So why do so many people miss these signals?
- [24:19]
Kevin Xu
I don't know. You know, psychologically, I've always been curious why some people get married to the stock. That's another one of my principles, like never get married to a stock, right? Like there are people who are just. They made their money on Tesla, they made their money on Bitcoin. Now with memory stocks, right? Like SanDisk and MU, and they're just like obsessed with it. They're holding about, oh, that's all they talk about. And I don't get it. You know, if you're an investor, you don't care about the short term movements at all and you'll just kind of, you know, ride it for 10, 20, 30 years. If you're thinking about the stock, you're essentially thinking like, should I sell? Right? And so if you're so like, you should be okay, with selling, what would
- [24:55]
Graham
you say are the shortcomings that a lot of investors fall into?
- [24:59]
Kevin Xu
They play with margin. Like, you could play this game for a very long time, as long as you're responsible and take, you know, take profit and minimize your losses, right? Like, if you're up 20, you're up 20%, maybe take some more risk. If you're down 20%, maybe play a little more conservatively or, you know, add money back. Back to it. I think when people go on margin, when people go on full tilt, right. And trying to make that gain back as as much as possible, that's when they lose it all.
- [25:28]
Jack
And so what do you think about Chris Camillo? I'm sure you're very familiar with who he is. He fully endorses margin, and if anything, he looked at my portfolio. He's like, if I could critique anything, I think you should have a little bit more margin.
- [25:40]
Kevin Xu
I mean, that's extreme conviction. I wonder if he has always had that view, especially when he was just starting out, or that's now when he has more of a cushion, right. To maybe take a blow from margin. I mean, you have to be patient, right? Like, this is also like a patient man's game in order to be happy with 20% swings. 20% swings versus like, oh, it could have been 40% or something like that. I mean, I think the math is, like, you only need like four 20% swings for a double, right? And I think that's very possible if you find a good stocks.
- [26:10]
Jack
I'm curious, by winning a million dollars in the stock market in one day and then losing a million dollars the following day, what does this do to your mental, oh, my God. How does this affect your. Your nights when you're trying to sleep or just like, the overall gravity of daily existence?
- [26:26]
Kevin Xu
To be honest, it happened so fast, it didn't quite register, you know, but
- [26:30]
Jack
the million that you had made had not quite settled yet.
- [26:33]
Kevin Xu
Exactly.
- [26:33]
Jack
And so it didn't feel like you're net worth increased by a million.
- [26:36]
Kevin Xu
I think also psychologically, it's very different than losing a million. Right. First or from your cost basis, right. Like, I gained a million and then it disappeared. Right. So I think that's why I also prioritize, like, entry price a lot. That's again, back to like, my don't chase rule, right? Like, if you bought a stock and it went up 20% and then went back down 20%, you could hold that a lot better psychologically than if you bought something at the top and just dropped the Next day.
- [27:03]
Graham
Now, in terms of getting started though, back in 2017, weren't you able to turn $8,000 into $300,000 with cryptocurrency?
- [27:12]
Kevin Xu
Yes.
- [27:13]
Graham
And then you lost it down to $35,000.
- [27:16]
Kevin Xu
Yeah, yeah. So this, I call this like paying tuition. This was all in crypto, right? And this is, I mean, this is kind of where I learned everything, I guess. I mean, I've been aware of bitcoin for a long time. I learned about it in college. I had some friends that were doing mining and stuff like that, so I kind of missed that kind of 2012 or 2013 bubble for Bitcoin. But when I learned About Ethereum in 2016, I went all in with everything I had at the time, which was only $8,000 from like working.
- [27:45]
Jack
How much were you making at that time? During 2016, 2017?
- [27:48]
Kevin Xu
Not even that much. Like, you know, I did a startup between 2013-15. I didn't go anywhere. Then I started my first, you know, big boy job at Stripe. I was a software engineer over there. And there were, I mean, there still are private startups that were only paying me like 150k.
- [28:00]
Jack
And so how did you only have 8 grand though?
- [28:01]
Kevin Xu
After, like, I only started working there, like.
- [28:03]
Jack
Oh. So it was.
- [28:04]
Kevin Xu
I just started working. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I had only eight. And then Ethereum was I think maybe $16 or something like that. And so I just decided to go all in that. And then Ethereum went up to 100 pretty quickly and so now I'm sitting at like, you know, 30 or 50K. And then this was like ICO mania. There were so many, you know, random altcoins taking off and so I was actually doing the exact same style. I was going all in, one random coin at a time back then. That was a lot more sentiment based because, you know, these coins really don't have any fundamental value. So it's just like whatever the next hot one is. As a funny story. And so that 2017 run brought me all the way to 300k. And then 2018 happened and I lost it all. But unfortunately owed taxes on the realized gains from 2017. So the way the counter math works out, it could really, really hit you. And yeah, that was a hard lesson. Also why I've never touched crypto ever
- [28:56]
Jack
since you owed how much in taxes?
- [28:59]
Kevin Xu
Probably around 150k.
- [29:01]
Jack
How did you owe 150k when you brought it down to 30k though?
- [29:03]
Kevin Xu
Oh, that happened in 2018. Right. So the big, the top was December of 2017. And so I was, you know, trading all the time. Right? So all the, all the capital gains got realized in 2017.
- [29:16]
Graham
You would think that you should be able to use losses of the next year to offset the prior.
- [29:20]
Kevin Xu
You would think, right, right, yeah. But you're only allowed to maximize 3,000 or 3,000. You can offset your income by 3,000 for that, right. I mean, this was also the early days of crypto and taxes and I just wanted to do everything by the books. So.
- [29:33]
Jack
So after having this crazy run up and then crash in your crypto account few years later, you finally decide that you want to start investing in equities and stocks in your 401k. You started with $35,000. Let's talk about a few of the specific trades that you did to take your account up to like 8 million now at 10, $11 million. And what did you learn from these trades? The first trade that you made was what company?
- [30:00]
Kevin Xu
It was called Alpha Protect Apt. They made face masks and they were based out of Salt Lake City, Utah. And again, this was like back in the early Covid days, right, where people were just like learning about it. The pandemic, the shutdown, the lockdown didn't quite happen yet. And so the thesis was really simple, like American made face masks. That should be a big thing, right? And so that brought me from 35k to 90k and I was like, oh, wow, that happened fast. And then in a similar vein, my next stock was codx. Codiagnostics, PCR testing. Because the no swabs. Remember that, right? So they were building that and they were signing up all these contracts, all these states. I'm like, oh, actually they should have good earnings. And so I rode that for a 2x. So now all of a sudden 90 turned into 180. And then we were approaching the summertime now and Norwegian Cruise Lines had absolutely got tanked. It was down like 80% basically. Price for bankruptcy, right? And there was like a rumor, I was like in all these like Facebook groups for like cruise moms and stuff. They were like buying like all these like on sale items that, you know, cruise lines are not going to go under. CEC was like maybe going to lift the ban on them, whatever. And so again, that's hope, right? There's a story, there's a potential catalyst. And I got lucky and I caught the bounce perfectly. And so I caught like a 60% bounce. And now all of a sudden like 180 turned into like, you know, 250, 300. And I just Kept doing that. You know, I got, I got a, I got a dog and chewy, I learned about chewy, right? And like, you know, a lot of people got dogs. So like e commerce dogs. Perfect, right? And that was maybe like a 25% pop. So I just, I just, I just
- [31:28]
Jack
kept doing this and so what then was your first like real loss in your 401k account?
- [31:33]
Graham
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Graham
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Jack
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- [34:09]
Jack
first, like real loss in your 401k account?
- [34:11]
Kevin Xu
The first loss was actually Slack before they got bought by a Salesforce. Right. I mean, it just made sense, right? Zoom was like taking off, right. Peloton was taking off. And I was like, Slack has not really moved yet. Right. And that was. That was it. That was a thesis. And then they had earnings and it was horrible, like down like 25%. And I think I kind of misunderstood the dynamics between Microsoft Teams and Slack, which was kind of a miscalculation. And so that was like my first big loss.
- [34:35]
Jack
So your first investment that you kind of lost money on was Slack. How much money was your account at at that time? And how much did you lose?
- [34:41]
Kevin Xu
Probably around like 700, 800k, right?
- [34:44]
Jack
So your first loss was after taking Your account from 35k to 700, 800k?
- [34:49]
Kevin Xu
I would say so, yes. Yeah.
- [34:51]
Jack
And then how much did you lose on the Slack trade?
- [34:53]
Kevin Xu
Probably like 200k or something like that.
- [34:55]
Jack
And what did you learn from that loss? Like, was this an important lesson or was this just like you were taking the same kind of like outsized bet
- [35:02]
Graham
over and over again?
- [35:02]
Jack
You kept winning and hey, does this one just like the cards didn't fall in your favor?
- [35:06]
Kevin Xu
I have this lesson still to this day, like, earnings are a coin flip. You know, like no matter how much you think you know about a company's revenue numbers or the climate or whatever, earnings are a coin flip, right? And so. And it could be pretty, pretty expensive at that time too. And so I think what I learned is you, if you, if you have enough of a buffer of safety, right, Maybe you're up a lot recently, right? Like you could afford to take that coin flip. Just like I think, you know, anyone at a casino, they're kind of hot streak, right? Maybe you could take that extra, extra bet. But yeah, if it goes, if it doesn't go your favor, you got to be conservative with your next play.
- [35:43]
Jack
Do you think that the volatility or the, the percentage price change is greater if earnings are good or if they're bad? Like does a stock respond more aggressively, positively or negatively if earnings are positive or negative? Or is it just like, is it still just like a coin flip? So it's like 50, 50 every time.
- [36:03]
Kevin Xu
It's really 50, 50. There's these, there's like a lot of complicated math using options for like implied volatility and trying to figure out like what are the expected move in the upside or downside, right? And so all this is kind of published out there, but essentially you never know if it's actually already priced in or not, right? So like a lot of people, you know, even some of the biggest companies right now, like Nvidia, like you, there's just so much data about them, you would think it's priced in because they're up so much, right? And then yet still they surprise to the upside. And then it also depends on like how much of that surprise is. So there's a lot of variables that go into it. And like, I mean you could obsess over trying to figure it out, but it's just, it's a coin flip. At the end of the day, I think it's actually more intellectually honest to treat it as. So you know that like I'm putting this on a coin flip.
- [36:44]
Graham
Do people ever reach out to you with inside information and they say, hey, here's a tip.
- [36:50]
Jack
If you get it from me looking for that exact information.
- [36:53]
Kevin Xu
I'm just, I'm curious because actually no, actually no. And I'm very careful to not even like accept those kind of dms. If it kind of feels like that.
- [37:01]
Graham
I'm surprised because I thought for sure that people would say like, if you've help them make money, that they might try to say like, hey, here's some info. Thank me later.
- [37:10]
Kevin Xu
Everything I use is public information. Like I've, I don't ever, I don't have any insider information, right? Like I just connect the dots. Like a lot of that is like, you know, hope or copium or insane kind of theories about like, you know, this guy liked this post on LinkedIn and like, oh yeah, they're in Miami together or whatever. But Again, that's, yeah, that's public information. Right. And it's just, it's kind of more of a fun, fun side story than the actual play.
- [37:31]
Jack
What do you think are some of the biggest lies that are spread about investing online or the information that's being said that if the average person followed it's just not going to help them.
- [37:41]
Kevin Xu
I don't know why some people get obsessed with trying to make a trade every day. You know, some people think being a trader or day trader, options trader is making $1,000 every day. I think it's because it's like, it feels like work, you know, it feels like activity that's. I don't think that to me is not how I don't endorse that. I think that's a lot of energy that's wasted. Because yes, you can make $1,000 for a couple of days and you lose $5,000 one day, you kind of break even.
- [38:08]
Narrator/Advertiser
Right.
- [38:08]
Kevin Xu
I think swing trading to me is kind of the best ROI on like your energy, on your time, on your sanity, on your returns. Because generally the stock market goes up, right? Like, you know, the s and P500 goes up. Good companies should go up. What I'm trying to do as a swing trader is to maximize the gains in a shorter time frame, right. Because the market goes up and it also goes down. If you try to catch things on bottom and sell them on the top, you are basically compounding your gains every single. And that's how I was able to do 285x in 21 months.
- [38:37]
Jack
But that's also a very tax inefficient strategy. And a lot of people probably like, oh, Jack's talking about taxes. Like, you know, this doesn't really apply to me. But in actuality taxes can cut into your gains substantially and then that compounded year over year you have just a smaller amount post tax that you're able to build, let's say 30%, 40% year over year returns on, I joke, just make more money.
- [38:58]
Kevin Xu
I mean, I mean again, yeah, my situation was really, you know, unique. This was done in my 401k. So I, it was, you know, no, no taxes. I didn't pay a single cent on taxes until I withdraw. But even though I'm doing this in a, in a Robinhood, you know, normal brokerage account right now, I mean if you're trying to max, if you're trying to maximize for long term gains but the stock goes down, you kind of wipe out those potential gains anyways. Right? So I don't know. I think short term gains are fine.
- [39:28]
Graham
So how much time should the average person spend a day researching and trading?
- [39:32]
Kevin Xu
I mean, I don't think it takes more than like an hour in the beginning of the day and maybe like you know, at the end of the day. Right, just like reviewing like what's trending going on cnbc. See what people are talking about. Follow a couple of people on X and see what stocks they mentioned. The algorithm, to be honest, is really good now. You know, like a lot of people have lamented how the X algorithm has changed over the last few years, but I think it's really, really good now. So if you follow the right people, you'll be getting your intake of stock use. And you can also turn the bell on for certain influencers and get their post as soon as they make them.
- [40:02]
Jack
To get more specific, who are those people that you should be following on X, not including yourself, like who do you look for for information?
- [40:08]
Kevin Xu
The first one that comes to my mind is Amit is investing. He's the goat. He's got like 500,000 followers. He was early on here, he was early on Robinhood posting all these deep dives and interviews with these folks. Another, he's a buddy of mine, but Michael Sakand, he, you know, posting a lot about the photonics trade and like all these kind of bottlenecks related to the AI infrastructure, like picks and shovels kind of play and again like these amazing deep dives because you know, it used to be that you could only get these deep dives from like these Morgan Stanley, you know, 30 page PDFs right? Which are like really, really dry. But I think in a kind of more modern era people are reading bite sized tweets and learning a lot from that kind of drip feed of information. And then I think another one is Serenity. This anonymous, you know, white haired anime profile picture. She or he blew up from nothing to almost a million followers just in the last six months. And it's really, really good. Like deep takes on like the AI infrastructure build out.
- [41:03]
Graham
I really want to get down to what separates you though from all the people who want to try this or have tried it and fail. Because I am worried that people go and they see your story going all in and they say, oh, I'm going to go all into and they just lose a ton of money. What separates you like at the end of the day? Have you just gotten lucky? Is there a skill? Is there something you look for specifically? Are you able to avoid red flags?
- [41:28]
Jack
Is it an intelligence thing? Is it like a personality trait thing?
- [41:32]
Kevin Xu
I get very obsessed and I think that is probably one of my strengths, that once I'm in the stock, I'm obsessively watching it all day. Back in the pandemic era, I would even be on a zoom call and I have my chart open over here. If you were following me. I think the most important thing to really is learn how I do things, right? I endorse independent thinking. Like I'm here trying to share my research, my train of thoughts, like why I'm thinking this, right? What I noticed, how I'm connecting the dots and obviously my trades themselves. And I'm really hoping that people kind of pick up that if you have figured out, okay, I'm willing to all in this much amount of my money, right? All into one stock, follow it, okay? And now you're basically watching it play out in real time. I think that's much more better than kind of a simulation or kind of back testing or reading a book, right? Because we're reading a book I bought here, boss, sold here. But when you're actually watching it play out in real time, you'll kind of feel it that like, oh, yeah, he sold this because, you know, everyone on Twitter is scared of this news or the Fed chairperson did these things and like Kevin kind of connected all these dots and decided this was the top. It's time to sell. And I think that's much more. You're going to get that much more ingrained in you by kind of following me and watching how I trade in real time.
- [42:50]
Graham
Do you ever set limits where it's like, hey, if it automatically, if it's down 20%, even if I'm sleeping or I just wasn't paying it, it's going to sell, or if it goes up a certain amount, it's automatically going to sell.
- [43:01]
Kevin Xu
I've also never set a stop limit. I'm very weird. I'm very afraid of actually, you know, your situation, right, where it's like randomly down 20% one day for reasons that I disagree with, right? Just some random macro or some fear headline and then I guess automatically stopped out when no, you know, so I've never said I stop living my whole life.
- [43:21]
Graham
Now, you've previously said that every man should trade stocks like they date women only one at a time. Why don't you like diversification?
- [43:30]
Kevin Xu
Yeah, that's my, my specialty on Twitter is financial rage bait.
- [43:34]
Graham
Why don't you like polygamy?
- [43:37]
Kevin Xu
Well, I've been very.
- [43:38]
Graham
Why shouldn't men date 10 women at a time?
- [43:41]
Kevin Xu
Yeah. So like Jack, props, Props.
- [43:48]
Jack
That's just not even true.
- [43:50]
Kevin Xu
Concentration creates wealth, Diversification keeps it, right? That's just true. And I think we go all in on things all the time in our lives, right? When you're a job, that's an all in on your time, right? A woman, that's an all in, right? I think like, and it's true, like, you know, when I met my white wife, it was like only like six weeks in. We decided to move in together, right? Because I was like, this is it. Like I think I love her and I want to move in, I want to get to know her, right? I'm just, I just went all in. And I think, I don't know, a lot of people try to hedge, right? And you know, try to, especially in the dating world, like, oh yeah, let me try to be and find the best person. No, I think you should go all in and I think that's really important. You also really quickly find out whether it's working or not, either with a relationship or even with a stock. You really quickly get obsessed with it. You research everything about it and you figure out like, oh yeah, if you're only in like 5% or only 5K, you're like, you know, whatever. I don't really care about.
- [44:44]
Graham
But this seems like this is your personality type, is you're an all in type of person. You're either 100% in or you're out.
- [44:50]
Kevin Xu
Yeah, yeah, I will say that's my personality type.
- [44:52]
Graham
Do you think most people should follow that personality type? Or do you think some people would be better off not doing that? Or maybe they're a bit indecisive and when they go all in on something, they don't really think it through.
- [45:03]
Kevin Xu
I think it depends on your goals, right. And your timeframe. I mean, just your view on life. I have always been a very impatient person, right. I've always wanted gain success, whatever, as big and as fast as possible. And obviously I've been willing to risk it and I've made many losses, right. I lost 300k in crypto, right. I did my startup back in 2013 and I failed. And so I, you know, I failed a lot, but I also kind of, you know, over course my life taking like a very TikTok kind of pattern in my life of risk on, risk off, right? You do something risky, didn't work out, okay, quiet down for a couple years and once you kind of regain that financial buffer, that mental sanity, maybe try on some risk again, right? So I think there's like phases in your life too where it's appropriate to kind of take on risk.
- [45:47]
Graham
Does it worry you right now that stock market valuations are seemingly pretty high?
- [45:51]
Kevin Xu
Not really. Because of how insane this AI buildout is going to be. Like this is essentially our version of the industrial revolution. And I think especially the modern investors are maybe a little bit too used to these on very quick bubbles, right? Like crypto is maybe a year or two, right? Meme stocks maybe a year or two. But like people don't understand like how big. And still there's so much more to come with building out these AI dentist data centers. You have to just like try building an app with Codex once and you'll realize it. My view is the future of AI work is long running, compute intensive workloads. Basically, you know, most people just use. You just ask a question, right? And it's basically, you know, quick answer about what, what people are doing in Silicon Valley right now is they're running these like 247 jobs, right? To basically keep churning tokens to do work. One example is like solve cancer. You can imagine just giving an agent access to your blab and all this data and other agents that it could spawn and whatever and it just keeps running in a loop, right? Trying to figure out how to solve cancer. And so that is very compute intensive and we don't have enough GPUs or CPUs or memory. The status, what like trillions of dollars in capex build out over the next five years, right? And so we just don't have enough. And I think it's going to continue going into the future.
- [47:14]
Graham
How could you be wrong?
- [47:16]
Kevin Xu
Either there is some technological innovation that increases the supply, right? That maybe China develops their own Nvidia style GPU really really fast, that increases supply often, or these workloads don't really transpire. So right now, especially in Silicon Valley, like coding is what most people use these LLMs for, right? Because it works. They could build these websites and apps now, but can LLMs really replace accountant, a lawyer, a doctor, can it really build robots? That's another 100x1000x thematic bet that I have. Robotics is actually the next inflection point for something called physical AI that requires all the kind of same things, right? If that stuff doesn't transpire, there's no need for it, it just kind of stays encoding, then a lot of this kind of bulgesis falls out.
- [48:06]
Graham
What are your robot plays? Because I tend to agree with you that it seems like the next thing would be taking ChatGPT, but making it physical, turning it into a person or a robot that could do something. So how do you see that playing out and where are you investing in that?
- [48:22]
Kevin Xu
Yeah, I mean, I think this is going to change the world just as much as like ChatGPT did. There is just so much investment. Recently async Zu produced a report that says like venture investment in robotics is at all time high, like 5x in the last quarter. I think humanoid robotics specifically is really, really interesting because a lot of the world is already designed for humans, right? Like how you open a door, how you put in a screw, et cetera, et cetera. And so if you can have a robotic just. I mean they don't ask for insurance, you know, they don't ask for sick leaves, vacation leaves. They can work all day. They don't even have to be perfect because humans are not perfect. Right.
- [48:58]
Graham
They could show up late.
- [49:00]
Kevin Xu
Exactly.
- [49:01]
Graham
Slip and fall.
- [49:04]
Kevin Xu
And so there's just, there's so much investment in robotics right now. And actually what's really frustrating is that there's no way as a retail investor to really play this. That's been really frustrating. Just like every other kind of way before, right? It's always been happening in the private sector, right? Like from startups to AI stocks. Right now there are two or three stocks that are interesting in the robotics world if you're interested in playing it. One is called Oust o u s t. They make lidar tech, right? So like the lasers, you know, to kind of tell you how far away things are. Most recently they invented colored lidar. So they're the only ones to make it. And so that replaces two cameras. Before you used to have like a camera for color and one for lidar and now you just have one, right? And so they're signing up a lot of customers. They're a public stock. Another one is a SPAC that's coming out pretty soon called CCXI Agility Robotics. And it's gotten a lot of hype recently because of some Twitter influencers talking about it. But it is one of the only pure robotics companies to actually list on the stock. And then actually one that I've played a few times is called Robo Strategy and they have the best ticker b o t bot. And the quick story behind that is this guy, Andrew Kang, he basically was an early investor in all these robotics names through his family office and decided to turn that into a closed end fund to basically let anybody invested in. There's A lot of mechanics behind it, very similar to MicroStrategy for Bitcoin and a creative dilution, but basically it holds equity stakes and figure AI. Do you remember that live stream with the robot for nine days straight sorting packages? That was like a media moment, right? And so like that's, that's one of the biggest holdings in blt. So like, you know, you basically get access to that.
- [50:43]
Graham
So what do you think is going to happen over the next five years in terms of the economy?
- [50:47]
Kevin Xu
K shaped, man. Everything is unfortunately K shaped. And you know, I think there's, that's why there's this desire, this angst that I notice in the general population, especially young people, to bridge that gap right, from, from one end of the K to the other and a lot of agency behind it. But I mean, I mean, like, I don't know, my fringe theory is that like this last like 50 or 80 years of the middle class was the exception to the norm. Like across like general history, right? Most of history it was like, you know, you got rich people and you got the poor people and because of the Internet, the Internet and globalization, whatever, and America was able to kind of create this middle class. But it does seem like it's kind of going back in the other direction, right? People talk about the wealth, income gap and et cetera. And so the most important thing is to own assets.
- [51:37]
Jack
So how can someone increase their chances maximally that are on the lower part of the K shaped recovery to then go to the higher part? Is it focusing just broad strokes here on income or on investment and buying the right assets?
- [51:53]
Kevin Xu
The most important thing is you first have to build your base, right? You have to take care of your debts and you have to build your base. And what I mean by base is, you know, your financial base, your security base. You know, you can't be worried about when you take risk. You can't be worried about your livelihood, right? And so what that means is, you know, get a good job, right? Like, like, like make sure it's like safe and secure. Find, you know, just make sure you're in a good place to actually go take on risk. And then you can take on risk in many ways, right? Like if you find where you're good at and just go do it. I think a lot of people just get caught up like trying to think too much and trying to take like baby steps. When I say go all in, you know, it means many things. It could just be go on and start making YouTube videos, right? Just call, just go, just go do it if you, you know, want to trade stocks or even do sports betting, right? Like, go all in and try and figure out do you have an edge? Don't go in, don't go in blindly without a feedback loop. Otherwise you do end up losing money or like, you know, not growing your YouTube channel. Set a timeline and I, you know, set a timeline, like by one year, I hope to achieve these things and really have a close feedback loop of like, am I developing an edge here? Because I think the world is more and more rewarding. People that are unique and have something different to offer in the world.
- [53:05]
Graham
So for the average person who's making $60,000 a year, a few thousand dollars invested, what should they focus on?
- [53:11]
Jack
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Graham
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Jack
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Graham
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Jack
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Graham
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- [54:37]
Kevin Xu
I mean, just load up your Robinhood account. Buy something, right? It doesn't have to be an individual Stock. I think most people have never even bought a stock in their life. They have their 401k automatically buy one or something. But buy spy, buy QQQ, maybe buy $1 of Google, right? Once you have money invested in something, you just care so much more about it and start tracking it, right? Start seeing what people are thinking about it, start watching YouTube videos about it, start educating yourself about what it means an investor or trader. And then gradually basically, you know, kind of do, kind of do paper trades in your head, right? Like oh yeah, that guy was talking about, you know, Nvidia might have good earnings. I'm not going to do it, but like imagine I did today, right? And then, oh, it was right. And it basically kind of retroactively analyzed. Oh, why was it right? You know, maybe I'll do the next one or something like that.
- [55:18]
Jack
I agree for a lot of my friends that do have a little bit of margin in their life, meaning like money between what they earn and what they need to spend on their necessity expenses. So like this kind of like entertainment budget, whatever the budget is that they can. The discretionary spending. I always say of that money, invest first, spend later. Yeah, like you should. As soon as I get paid, like even when I was getting paid like 4000 bucks a month, like immediately I was shipping off 1500 into my Robin Hood account and then the additional 2500 was just like rent taxes and then like I had a, a little bit of money for food and that was really it. Like invest first and then everything else comes later.
- [55:57]
Kevin Xu
Later. Yeah, that's also great advice.
- [55:59]
Graham
Do you think people spend too much time though trying to find the next 10x stock and not enough time just trying to increase their income.
- [56:06]
Kevin Xu
It really depends on your, your, your growth potential at your job. Right. Like a lot of people, I mean you could work really, really hard and get a 3% increase that year and maybe that time was better spent elsewhere. I mean that's kind of where I, I bring it back to this weird like angst that I noticed. It's called financial nihilism. You know, a lot of people written about it that just feels like you're, your effort does not translate into results anymore. But there's this app on your phone now that does translate your effort into results, good or bad. And I think that agency, that feel of control is more and more important for people these days. I think generally, I think if you're just aware of what you're doing and also aware of what the payback time period is. So early example, if you're making $60,000 a year and you have $1,000 discretionary income. You know, you make that back in like a week, right? And so like if you, you know, did something and it costs you a week of time, then don't do anything for a week, you know, recuperate, then figure out as long as you're learning
- [57:04]
Jack
something, if you were to start from zero and build back to 10 million, ideally, what stocks would you explore and how exactly would you do it? Like what are like maybe three main picks you'd look into?
- [57:15]
Kevin Xu
My, my pick right now is Shaz. Right, Sharon. AI to Neo Cloud based in Australia. Because I think this data center build out is only going to continue. Another one that's actually really interesting is Nokia. Really? Yeah, because they recently got a billion dollar investment from Nvidia itself. And they also make these local edge node chips. So basically as compute increases they get slower too, right? And so you want them to go really, really fast. And so instead of everything happening in the cloud and coming back, it could happen at your local telco tower or something like that. And so that's kind of another really interesting one.
- [57:53]
Graham
And for someone who does not want to trade stocks or swing trade, but they want to build their wealth over the next 10 years, what do you recommend?
- [58:01]
Kevin Xu
Buy Google. I mean if I were to distill it down to the simplest piece of advice, right, like buy Google. Why Google? They're at the center of everything, right? They have the consumers via Google, YouTube, Google Maps, Android, everything like that. They're building one of the best models out there. They have Google, deep brain and all these really, really intelligent people. They're the only one at that intersection. Actually if you think about it, there are a bunch of AI infrastructure specific only plays and there are a bunch of companies that have a lot of consumers, but there's no other company in the world that has both. And I think that's just an incredible moment. It'll just continue growing.
- [58:42]
Graham
What's a realistic annualized return that you think someone could expect over the next five, ten years?
- [58:48]
Kevin Xu
I mean I think the spy is going to make like 10 to 20%.
- [58:51]
Graham
You think it's going to continue at that trajectory?
- [58:54]
Kevin Xu
Yeah, like I think the profits, the revenue numbers are all there. The big companies are going to continue getting bigger. Like I said, this is our version of the industrial revolution. And so I think if you're trying to trade, you're actually trying to beat that.
- [59:07]
Graham
Didn't that somewhat end though with the 1920s Great Depression?
- [59:11]
Kevin Xu
There was a lot of margin. There were a lot of other factors like the dust bowl and stuff like that.
- [59:15]
Narrator/Advertiser
Right.
- [59:16]
Kevin Xu
We're seeing a mini version of that right now in Korea. I don't know if you know, I'm
- [59:20]
Graham
watching, I get the Twitter notification where it's like there's stock market circuit breaker just, you know, down 10%. But then I'm looking at the US markets and we're up.
- [59:30]
Kevin Xu
Yeah, yeah. I think, you know, we have developed a lot of rules and regulations and guardrails since the 1920s. Right. I think the market also moves a lot faster and any bubbles have a mini pop and any corrections get a mini bounce a lot faster. And so I don't think we're going to get some kind of crazy depression. I think we'll have a lot of volatility. But I still expect good 10 percent per year over the next five years.
- [59:56]
Graham
I am always worried that we've gone up so much over these last 15, 16 years since 2010. I'm like, how much longer can this continue before we start averaging like 2 to 6% a year for a while?
- [60:11]
Kevin Xu
Maybe like a forgotten period.
- [60:12]
Graham
Right, right. And then people kind of grow bored of it and then they reallocate their assets somewhere else because the stock market's not doing anything.
- [60:19]
Kevin Xu
I mean, what else do you invest in?
- [60:21]
Jack
Right.
- [60:21]
Kevin Xu
Like America Bills.
- [60:23]
Jack
Graham. Graham has what, 25 cash.
- [60:25]
Graham
Yeah, it's 20, 25% somewhere cash right now.
- [60:28]
Narrator/Advertiser
Yeah.
- [60:28]
Graham
That's not cash. It's tax free. Muni bond tax free. Medium bonds, making blended 4% tax free.
- [60:34]
Kevin Xu
It's great. It's great.
- [60:34]
Graham
No state income tax.
- [60:35]
Kevin Xu
You should transfer it to X money. 6%.
- [60:38]
Graham
You know what's so funny? So I could take out a pledged asset line.
- [60:42]
Kevin Xu
Yeah.
- [60:42]
Graham
Below that 6%. I did all the math on this and net taxes. It's not worth it for me to transfer. Like it's such a small increase that I would be able to get and I would have to take millions of dollars to even make it worthwhile. And I'm like, am I really going to risk millions of dollars for like a percent simplicity annualized return? It's not worth it. But I thought of it and I worked every which way. If I could take margin and I could take a pledged asset line and move it over here. Wasn't worth it. But it is very appealing.
- [61:15]
Kevin Xu
The line only goes up. Right. Like America's still the number one country. The US dollar is still the most important currency. You have 401ks still reinvesting into spy every year. You have Trump accounts now that are also going to be invested into the markets. Right. The best companies are in America and like I said, they're going to only going to keep growing. I don't see a bear case, man.
- [61:34]
Graham
I feel like that's what everyone says though, right before it's like we cut to like a month later and like
- [61:40]
Kevin Xu
something happened even in 2022. Blip is, is a blip now, right? I mean, yes, like, I mean, this is, you know, we're, we're to remember like what was 2001, 2008, like. Right. Because that in theory was kind of like a flat line for the US Stock market, albeit that's from, that's from top to top channel 1008. Right. Like many people have talked about how euphoric and senseless the dot com bubble actually was with, you know, really fake revenue and stuff like that. We're not seeing that now and again. I think everything just gets corrected now because you have social media, because you have like this forum of people arguing every single bear case that exists out there, all the ideas kind of get out. Like, people talk about like, you know, the circular financial engineering, whatever. Like companies people are talking about openly. Right. Like, you know, no one's finding anything is now scaring billions of dollars to keep getting pushed in.
- [62:28]
Graham
So I think, yeah, what about any Black Swan event?
- [62:32]
Kevin Xu
So like, like a Covid 25 or something?
- [62:35]
Graham
Yeah, I tend to think it's something nuclear. I tend to think all it takes is. Why are you laughing?
- [62:41]
Jack
I'm just saying because like, dude, if, if, like, if we have, you know, nuclear fallout, I am not caring about my Schwab account. It's like, I, I'm not going to
- [62:51]
Kevin Xu
care that like, you know, I really
- [62:52]
Jack
shouldn't have taken on an additional $100,000 of margin Google stock.
- [62:57]
Graham
That's why you should be buying. That's why Jack doesn't buy the bottoms. He only buys the tops.
- [63:02]
Jack
Excuse me. I invested in Bloom. It plummeted. And then I also bought the bottom. So I do sometimes buy the bottom after I've already lost a lot. Let's just say all of a sudden, you know, some country, I'm not gonna say which one drops 10 nukes on
- [63:17]
Graham
America, but there would be some fear or there would be something on the other side.
- [63:24]
Kevin Xu
I mean, it's impossible to predict. So it's like, it's hard to like live or kind of invest like that. Right. And I don't know if you're gonna get that push notification early enough to sell before it happens.
- [63:33]
Jack
Get the AMBER Alert.
- [63:34]
Kevin Xu
Yeah.
- [63:34]
Jack
Immediately sell everything.
- [63:36]
Kevin Xu
Yeah, yeah. I mean. I mean, in that sense, like, you know, build up as much money as you can and then switch to gold.
- [63:42]
Jack
Is there a specific type or style of investing that you have officially banned yourself from ever doing again, and you would recommend people ban themselves from doing that same thing?
- [63:51]
Kevin Xu
Yeah, I mean, I don't touch options.
- [63:54]
Graham
I don't.
- [63:54]
Kevin Xu
I don't touch options at all. It's just. It's too enticing.
- [63:57]
Graham
What do you think about Jack's options strategy?
- [63:59]
Kevin Xu
Wait, so you buy or sell?
- [64:01]
Jack
I sell options.
- [64:01]
Kevin Xu
You sell options.
- [64:02]
Jack
So I. I sell puts to enter positions, and I'll find something with a high implied volatility on a blue chip company that I really like, such as Robinhood. Such as, you know, I have a little bit of elf, I have a little bit of bloom, and I sell puts to enter the positions, and then I sell calls to, you know, ideally make some weekly premium. And if I'm buying options, I buy them over leaps where it's essentially just leveraged money.
- [64:26]
Kevin Xu
Does it. Does it increase your stress at all? Like, are you watching it close to the strike?
- [64:30]
Jack
No. If anything, it decreases my stress because it's a hedge against the position. So, like, my stress. My stress would be amplified if I was just owning the stock outright, because that's technically a more aggressive strategy than hedging against it, which would be like a covered call.
- [64:43]
Narrator/Advertiser
Call.
- [64:44]
Kevin Xu
Yeah. Yeah.
- [64:44]
Jack
So, like, the way I see it is if I can make two. If I have two, collect 2% premium per week on a company, 3% premium per week on a company selling covered calls, then I know if the company goes down 3%, I'm exactly where I was. If it goes up however much it is, I collect 3%. If it stays the same, I collect 3%. If it goes down 10%, the IV spikes. And if the IV spikes, so do premiums. And then I'll just sell another. Another call. Covered call to continually decrease my tax bases. In the same logic that you said how the only thing you really consider is the average cost or, like, your enterprise. That's essentially what I'm doing, too, by selling calls to decrease. You know, it's one way of looking at it. My average cost.
- [65:23]
Kevin Xu
Yeah. I don't know. I. I'm a very simple person. Right. And that's just. That's a lot of math. And to me, the. If you're willing to. If it makes sense to you. Right. And, like, the math is easy, and it doesn't add stress or Take too much time to kind of analyze and figure out what the right options to sell are. I think, you know, I think it is good. I mean, many people have recommended to me. I, I just like to try to keep things simple.
- [65:45]
Jack
Let's compare Robinhood accounts. We're all going to compare Robinhood accounts at the end of this podcast. Guys, I have to ask you, why were you banned from Wall street bets?
- [65:52]
Kevin Xu
Oh, I don't, I don't know. I think someone just got really jealous and kind of like, rage banned me and deleted a bunch of my posts.
- [65:58]
Jack
Because you were kind of famous on Wall street bets?
- [66:00]
Kevin Xu
Yeah, yeah, Like, I didn't do anything wrong. I was posting, you know, just screenshots of my trades, right? And like, they got tons of upvotes. I mean, I, I had someone DM me who was apparently part of the mod team, right? And she said, like, there's just one random person who, like, hates you and
- [66:20]
Jack
just like a moderator that hates you.
- [66:21]
Kevin Xu
Yeah.
- [66:22]
Jack
When did you get banned?
- [66:23]
Kevin Xu
I don't know. This is probably like mid 2021 or something.
- [66:27]
Jack
Do you have any idea why? I mean, I, I've perused your Reddit account. You do say some things that are, you know, maybe a little bit abrasive to some with, with, you know, moms or mother in laws.
- [66:39]
Kevin Xu
It's Reddit culture, right? It was Wall street cultures. I was obviously just kind of playing into it. No, I, I think probably they just saw me getting too big and just, just wanted to cut it out.
- [66:50]
Graham
You think it would help their forum, though, to have you on there and bring in more views, more?
- [66:55]
Kevin Xu
These moderators on Reddit are weird.
- [66:57]
Graham
You're, you're weird.
- [66:58]
Jack
It seems like they like, like, like lost porn more than they enjoy the gains. Yeah, like, you're one of the few people on Wall street bets that turned, you know, 30. You made effectively $10 million from nothing and they banned you. But then all of a sudden, you post yourself losing 99 of your portfolio.
- [67:16]
Kevin Xu
What I've learned online is that everything, all hate is just jealousy, you know, and so probably they hate to see a winner. Right? And yeah, the moderators on Reddit are just extremely power hungry. They just love banning people for any reason. It's basically like a power trip.
- [67:34]
Jack
What's more toxic, X or Reddit 100?
- [67:36]
Kevin Xu
Reddit. Yeah. People say, like, X is bad. I'm like, this is nothing compared to what I used to deal with.
- [67:41]
Jack
What makes Reddit so toxic? Do you think that the stereotype of, like, the neck beard, you know, sitting at like the, you got like some sauce from the night before dribbling down your chin or whatever. You know, like your belly's hanging over your desk.
- [67:53]
Kevin Xu
Yeah.
- [67:53]
Jack
Like, is that, is that accurate? You think of Reddit users, they call
- [67:57]
Kevin Xu
it like the Internet hive mind theory. Right? When you take like a bunch of people and you anonymize them and put them in a group, it just descends into like the scum of the earth.
- [68:07]
Jack
It's the anonymity.
- [68:09]
Kevin Xu
Exactly, exactly. Like, I've connected with several people on Reddit, but the problem is I had to use like my own thinking skills and reading skills to articulate, okay, this guy actually sounds like a well educated adult versus like some 10 year old kid. Right. And I would actually connect with them and you know, et cetera, et cetera, and I trust their word more. But generally the way the algorithm works and the upvotes work is just, you know, very much based on dunking and extreme content and. Yeah, you just don't know who these people are.
- [68:35]
Jack
On the topic of Reddit, you created r the race to 10 million. I'm curious, why did this resonate with so many people? Because it has like 500,000 members. And what is so important about getting a $10 million network?
- [68:48]
Kevin Xu
It all started as a kind of inside joke with me and a couple other Redditors that we were all kind of racing our own ways to 10 million and see who gets there first. I mean, obviously it's just like a nice big number. And we created a subreddit. We're basically posting updates and screenshots. And I made it first and there was a spreadsheet of where everyone was at, and it actually kind of died down for a little bit between 2020 and 2023. But somewhere in the middle, I think it crossed like a magical number just like on its own, like around like 25,000 members. And I think that's when it started getting trending. Front page. Right. And I mean, that was my favorite part of Wall street bets. It was the, the, the game porn and lost porn.
- [69:26]
Jack
Right.
- [69:26]
Kevin Xu
Like the big kind of numbers on, on the screenshots. And so people just started posting their crazy gains on, on the raise of 10 million. It was like the perfect forum for it. And so I kind of cleaned it up a little bit. I started promoting it and Wall street vets at that time, I mean, it's just started turning into like a Instagram meme page. Right.
- [69:42]
Jack
It turned a bit into a cesspool.
- [69:43]
Kevin Xu
Exactly, exactly. No one was actually sharing any real dd. People you couldn't follow like people's stories. And so I think the race specifically kind of filled that gap.
- [69:51]
Jack
What gets unlocked at a $10 million net worth? Why is that number so important?
- [69:55]
Kevin Xu
I mean, first and foremost, I live in California. It's a very, very expensive state. And I think, you know, if you want the modern life that social media, it sells to you these days, right? It is very expensive. Like whenever I post something like that, people are like, oh, you can move to Southeast Asia. You could just like, you know, buy this kind of house in Tennessee or something like that, right? But yes, you can live. And I can retire for 50, 60 years, probably in Thailand, right? But do I want to? I think you've talked about this on your videos often, right? Like what people want in a house compared to like 30 years ago. People can't stand single pane windows, right? They want central air. Like the quality of life that we want has dramatically increased. And you could blame social media for that, you could blame a lot of things for that. But we're also just still human, right? Like we get fed this information unwillingly and that kind of raises our own bar for what we expect. And happiness is basically expectation minus reality, right? And so if your expectation because of just various social media and life tells you that you need to be able to send your kids to this kind of daycare or go on vacation twice a year or something like that, that's kind of like unfortunately what you expect from life now. And so even at $10 million, that's not going to survive me for 60 plus years. Like I've done, I've done the math. Like it's very expensive to live and you're not even taking into account inflation and like, who knows what happens in the future, right? Because again, like if you retire, you're not probably not going to be able to get a job after you're out of the workforce for 10 years, right?
- [71:24]
Jack
So are people misguided then and they have their sights set on $10 million when in actuality it should be more?
- [71:30]
Kevin Xu
I think so, actually. How much higher? There's this really good report from the Hampton Club and they had this PDF where they kind of did a survey and got all these like numbers and results and feelings around them, right? And I, I think it quoted $50 million as the number where you just stop worrying, right? You just stop worrying. No matter what happens. You could tank it, you know, the market could.
- [71:54]
Graham
But I will say, because I saw that survey and I did a whole video on that survey because I Found it very interesting. A lot of those people don't have 50 million liquid. It's 50 million net worth.
- [72:04]
Kevin Xu
That's fair.
- [72:04]
Graham
And a lot of that net worth could be tied up in their company or private equity, who knows?
- [72:11]
Jack
So, so the liquid amount is lower.
- [72:13]
Graham
I would argue that the liquid amount is lower, but according to that it was a 50 million net worth. That was the point psychologically where people cared more about legacy and doing something with purpose than they did about making more money. But under $50 million they cared more about making more money in terms of importance of, you know, there's, there's that and also family and everything else. But that was still on the rad worry.
- [72:39]
Kevin Xu
So stressed like, oh, the market had a bad year, crap. Now I need to like grind again.
- [72:43]
Jack
So explain then your logic in, I mean you had this race to 10 million Reddit, this was clearly your fire or your fat fire goal was 10 million financial independence, retire early. You wanted to race to 10 million dollar net worth, you did exactly that swing trading, going all in on individual stocks. But then once you hit that net worth, you threw it all into ETFs. And so explain this cognitive dissonance where you think that actual freedom is higher than 10 million. You race to 10 million, but then once you hit it, you did exactly what it, what what one would do to kind of slow down and preserve their capital instead of like race to a higher net worth.
- [73:20]
Kevin Xu
Yeah. So I mean this was my grind, right? Like I made it to $10 billion and essentially it's my nest egg now. I think it's also compounded by a fact that I can't really access asset. You know, it's in my 401k. If I withdraw from it, I get taxed, it turns into income tax and a 10% early withdrawal penalty. Right. That's really significant. Right. So essentially like I kind of think of it like a trust fund that I created that you're not supposed to touch. Like, you know, maybe I'll withdraw from it to top off or maybe not want to buy something nice. I have withdrawn like a few million from it.
- [73:49]
Narrator/Advertiser
Right.
- [73:50]
Kevin Xu
For life stuff. But you're not supposed to. And I think that keeps me hungry too. Like I want to make my legacy, I want to make my impact and success, you know, through my startup, through the old fashioned way. Right. Actually have present like make something impactful for people, a real business. And this is just, it's a, it's a safety buffer now. Right. So rather than continue to go all in on that and the stresses that come with, you know, trying to do that for $10 million that's parked in index funds. It's going to double in 10 years. That's 20. Right, it's going to double again in 10 years. Like why not just wait and use my time in something else?
- [74:21]
Jack
And so then how is your current net worth divided up? How much money is in your 401k?
- [74:25]
Kevin Xu
Yeah, I have, have currently, I think $11.5 million in the 401k that's divided up in 55 million in spy, 5.5 million is QQQ. And I think like, you know, close to a million is in dram, you know, memory chips. And then I have the Robinhood all in account that's currently at 52K that, you know, I trade with and look at every day and then the rest is just. Yeah, just like savings and the house.
- [74:51]
Graham
See, I never liked the 401k. Yeah, I hated it. I hated the idea of foregoing taxes today and paying taxes later. Because in my perspective, taxes I think are going to be higher in the future.
- [75:04]
Kevin Xu
Right.
- [75:04]
Graham
Especially I think in California where you are.
- [75:07]
Kevin Xu
Right, well, so this gives me options. I don't have to be in California when I draw.
- [75:10]
Graham
But you're still going to have to pay federal income taxes.
- [75:13]
Kevin Xu
Sure, sure, yes. And that can change in the future. Right. And so yeah, that is a small risk I'm taking. But I like to have, I like, you know, well, now I'm, you know, kind of like, you know, trying to justify it and how it works and all that stuff and strategize around it. But this was all a happy accident.
- [75:29]
Graham
But if you could have done it differently, would you prefer to have done it in a Roth or in a taxable account? Anything other than a 401k?
- [75:38]
Kevin Xu
Definitely a Roth. I get quite depressed when I run the numbers. And you know what's funny is the reason I didn't do in a Roth, right, Like I said, like I started January 2020 with 35k in the 401k. I had the option to transfer to Roth to do the rollover, but then that means I would have had to use my own cash to pay the tax for the rollover, which was around 12k. I was like, I don't want to pay 12k out of, out of pocket for this rollover.
- [76:04]
Jack
But it was a few million dollar mistake.
- [76:06]
Kevin Xu
Yeah, yeah. I mean, in hindsight, right, but you could never, you never know. No one expects a 401 to turn into 10 million.
- [76:11]
Graham
Right. Well, you did, you Certainly did. And you still didn't pay.
- [76:15]
Kevin Xu
I still would suggest doing it in a 401k Roth because again, psychologically you can't touch it. And I think that saves you a lot of stress and pressure from down days or whatever. And also it just feels compartmentalized, right, Versus in your taxable mortgage account. I got to worry about all these things and taxes and you could withdraw from anytime you want, want.
- [76:38]
Graham
So how much should the average person aim to save?
- [76:41]
Kevin Xu
I mean, you just gotta figure out the life you want to live, right? And double it. I mean there's a fire Math, right, for 4% of your net worth, right? As your kind of average yearly spend, right? And so. But I think it is important to double it. I think, I don't. You know, there's very few people who've actually retired early and tell stories about like, I mean, you always want to avoid the worst case scenario. And to me a worst case scenario is you retire early because you thought you hit a number, right? Five to ten years pass, something happens, maybe like a black swan or something like that, A market tanks or you made a mistake or accident, who knows, whatever, right? Something miscalculated. Now you're 10 years out of a job. How do you bounce back, right?
- [77:24]
Graham
So for you, doesn't that mean 20 million? So now it's a race to 20 million?
- [77:28]
Kevin Xu
Yes, I think 20 million is kind of my next target. And I will feel a lot, a lot safer with 20 million.
- [77:33]
Graham
And now, now you say double it. What if someone has 20 million? Is it 40?
- [77:38]
Kevin Xu
I mean, at $20 million, what is 4% a year? $800,000 a year. So yeah, I mean, I think that's a pretty good life.
- [77:48]
Graham
20, you don't have to double.
- [77:49]
Kevin Xu
No, no, I mean 800,000. I mean a million dollar salary a year, right? You think about what kind of life you could live with that. I think that's pretty good. I mean, other people have different ambitions. They want to travel every day, they want a private jet. I get it. Um, but for me, I'm a pretty simple guy in real life, you know,
- [78:04]
Graham
so at what point does taking on additional risk just not become worth it? Hey, by the way, really quick, if you want extra content just like this, as well as early access and a bonus post show posted every single week, feel free to join as a channel member to get immediate access to all of that as well as early access to everything else that we post along with priority responses to all of your comments. So if that sounds cool, feel free to join Would love to have you on board. Thanks so much. We'll get back to the podcast now. So at what point does taking on additional risk just not become worth it?
- [78:36]
Kevin Xu
I would say it's at 10 million. You know, there's something nice about that number. I think you're. I think, you know, the first million is nice, but it's really meaningless these days, right? And I think you need to kind of keep going. And I think it's also important to kind of stay hungry through that, through that journey, right? Either to grind, whether you're, you know, doing YouTube or investing or trading or whatever it is, to stay hungry until you hit like 10 million. I think 10 million is pretty important. Important.
- [78:58]
Jack
And so have you fully retired from your job?
- [79:01]
Kevin Xu
No, I'm as busy as ever.
- [79:02]
Jack
So you're still working your career?
- [79:04]
Kevin Xu
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I'm the founder and CEO of this company called Alpha AI. We built a proactive agentic trading companion. So it's like a mobile app that you could talk to and it'll trade for you. And I guess you could call me an ex influencer now. You know, my ex journey is kind of crazy. Like, I started posting just to kind of market the startup, right? And I grew from like a couple thousand followers to over 160,000 followers now.
- [79:25]
Graham
How much do you make on X?
- [79:27]
Kevin Xu
It's kind of funny. So on Rev Share, I make like a thousand dollars a week, I think is the kind of average rate. But I've kind of blown up my ex subscriptions quite a lot. And so the story behind it, it's another happy accident. I turned on X subscriptions because I thought it might help me with the algo, like, that's it. And I set it at the highest price because I didn't want anyone to actually buy.
- [79:53]
Graham
How much was the price?
- [79:54]
Kevin Xu
I set out $200 a month. Yeah, yeah. And I didn't have any content. I was like, I'm not. I don't want to post like subscriber only content. I don't want. I don't want this like, you know, extra, you know, thing to do, right? And then like, you know, one person subscribed, you know, two person subscribed accidentally. I asked them like, what do you want? They're like, oh, I'm just happy to support. I'm like, okay, cool, thanks. And then 20 people subscribed, and then 100 people subscribed and a couple hundred people subscribed.
- [80:19]
Graham
How many people do you now have subscribed to you?
- [80:22]
Kevin Xu
I think people are Going to go crazy about it.
- [80:24]
Jack
And this is the most transparent financial
- [80:26]
Kevin Xu
influencer on X. Oh, thank you, thank you. Yeah, repeat that. Okay, I'm the most transparent. So I need to show you this now. Okay. Yeah, I can show you my creator studio subscriptions panel. Oh, wow.
- [80:42]
Graham
Oh my gosh.
- [80:45]
Jack
Okay, so you have about 600 active subscribers paying you $200 a month.
- [80:51]
Kevin Xu
Wow.
- [80:52]
Graham
Yeah, I feel like we, we gotta be. And this is Michael, take note of that.
- [80:56]
Kevin Xu
This has only started in the last two months.
- [80:59]
Jack
Wait a second, I can't do math. Yeah, 120 grand a month.
- [81:05]
Kevin Xu
Yeah, I mean that's gross revenue. You gotta take out the Apple fees and stripe fees and all that kind of stuff.
- [81:08]
Graham
Right?
- [81:08]
Kevin Xu
So that feels Jack. Yeah, yeah, 25% off and then taxes, taxes, 1099, all that kind of stuff.
- [81:14]
Jack
So. So you're making, I don't know, like 80 grand a month post all T fees, everything on, on Twitter.
- [81:19]
Kevin Xu
It's kind of crazy. I think that there's a strong desire for, you know, transparent and authentic financial media. Like, I mean, I'd love to, love to flip the interview back to you a little bit and just get your thoughts on like, where do you think the future of like financial influencers is going to go? Like, no one's watching CNBC anymore.
- [81:33]
Graham
It's true. I think, I think there's such a fine line because I noticed with any sort of stock trading person, yeah, subscriptions are like the number one way to make money. But in a way you're almost selling money because there's this idea that, oh, I'll pay $200, I get some proprietary information that'll make me more than that. And so it's a very easy push of like, hey, If I pay 200, I could see an ROI of even $100. I make a hundred dollars a month. Paying 200 is an example. It just, it sells itself in such a way. So I see a lot of success with that. The gray area becomes what's the success rate of the stocks? And do you have an influence on the price going up? If you buy something, does that cause the price to go up? And then all of a sudden now is this the self fulfilling prophecy of like I buy a stock and it goes up, up because they buy it?
- [82:33]
Kevin Xu
Yeah. And you know, I take this matter very seriously. Right? Like it affects like the stocks I pick. And like when I post about it, I mean, I think the number one thing is I'm, I'm very transparent, right. I post my buys and my sells. Like people Know exactly what kind of stock. I don't have any other accounts. I only have those two accounts, the 401k and My Robinhood account. Right. I post my exact thoughts, you know, even recently. I only post my trades after market close. Now to me, this is no different than someone going on TV and saying like, I own this stock. Right? Or even like Kramer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or like Michael Berry, right? Like he has a substack he's making, you know, multi million. Yeah, yeah. And like he, you know, he's definitely aware if he was in a movie.
- [83:12]
Graham
Right?
- [83:12]
Kevin Xu
And so like I think that's freedom of speech is very important. But I think where people get, you know, just the bad people are doing very bad things. I've been in these discords. I have read the SEC filings, the lawsuits against these people, right? Where they're just lying. You're just straight up lying. They're saying like my price target is a thousand dollars. I'm holding this forever. And they just sold. Like you just, you just, just blatant lying.
- [83:35]
Graham
So what should they do to prevent that from happening? Or what disclosures do you think should be required to crack down on that?
- [83:42]
Kevin Xu
The SEC can only go after big people, right? Like they recently went after Andrew Left, right. The citron short seller guy, because he was doing this exact same thing, right? He was telling people, I'm still holding, here's my price target it and that he would just be selling into that movement that he created. Right. I think that's just, that's, that is wrong and that is deceitful. That's what the SEC defines as manipulation and deceitful. I think transparency is really important, right? Like how much are you playing with when you buy, when you sell? That's why I post all my trade receipts. It's like a video too. Like it's like, you know, completely real. And I think directly to your question, you have to teach everyone how to do independent thinking, right? You have to teach people how to recognize these scams and these like deceitful people. Like that's really how you protect the masses. Because no matter what, the SEC can't go after everyone.
- [84:29]
Jack
So how much money are you making on X?
- [84:31]
Kevin Xu
I mean, currently, I guess you could say I'm making a million dollars a year.
- [84:34]
Jack
That is absurd. A million dollars a year? And that's from $200 a month subscription fee that people pay into your membership?
- [84:41]
Kevin Xu
Yeah, it's from the X subscription I started only about two months ago.
- [84:45]
Graham
It's only going to go up, man. Especially with the amount that you're tweeting,
- [84:48]
Kevin Xu
I mean, I'm not even doing much. I post like a few posts a day. I post my early thoughts, my watch list, my trades, right? I think there's just so much. There's a latent opportunity, right, And a small window to become. I think X is going to be the most important platform for all the tastemakers in the world. The vision for X or SpaceX AI, right, is for it to be the operating system on Mars, the social platform, the chat platform, the money platform, et cetera. But even here on Earth, I mean, Zuckerberg tweeted the latest model release on x, it got 12 million views, right? The chief AI officer, Alexander Wang, I met posts like 400 times on x and a few times on Threads, their own product. So that just shows you how important X is to kind of the general kind of talking points and population. It's all downstream from there. And so I think it's really important to be an influencer there.
- [85:44]
Jack
So I skimmed Twitter or X daily. Like, I'm constantly looking at X and you started showing up in my feed and I would see your tweets and I liked them and I would kind of like, keep tabs on you because I thought the transparency was really interesting. I'm like, okay, like, I wonder if he's making money, losing money, what is he buying, what is he selling, when is he doing all of this trading activity? And I enjoyed it. But I also found myself, like, a little annoyed by your account too. And I think obviously that's kind of like you do it on purpose. You post like rage bait. And I wanted you to correct any of my observations because I could be wrong about some of these things. But these are the main contending points that I have to the stuff that you say on Twitter. And I want to hear your opinion on this. Obviously, you publicly shared that your net worth was like $10 million, $11 million. Ish. $12 million close to.
- [86:29]
Kevin Xu
It's in my bio.
- [86:30]
Jack
It's in your bio. So you're like, you showed your net worth, but then for some time you created this challenge account. And in the challenge account you said, I'm going all in. Like, I'm full porting. But I think for a while, you didn't really stipulate that that was your challenge account. And so some could be led astray thinking you're putting $11 million into some company when in actuality it was, you know, less than zero point whatever.03% of your net worth was. This was this true or was this.
- [86:55]
Kevin Xu
I assumed that people were following me, aware of the entire story. Right. Like people have seen me post about my, my journey. People have seen me post about my 401k, $11 million screenshots and they'll see that this is a raw Mako screenshot. It's completely different. Right. And this is an online challenge account, which I also do mention in various kind of replied comments. Right? Yes. Not everyone follows every single tweet. Sometimes they just see one tweet and that's your first time exposure for you. So I do make sure I add an asterisk.
- [87:19]
Jack
I make sure I saw that you started doing that recently, which I appreciated because you said, I'm going all in, added an asterisk and then you said down in the bottom of the tweet, you clarified this is all in on a challenge account. So it's not actually like my public 11 million dollar net worth. It's just like the 35 or so thousand. But then another thing that I saw that you do that I was like a little about was you started the new challenge account with $35,000. You ran it up to what was the peak?
- [87:44]
Kevin Xu
Oh yes, I did run up to about 100k.
- [87:46]
Jack
So you ran it up to 100k. How quickly?
- [87:49]
Kevin Xu
I mean, like a month or two.
- [87:51]
Jack
Yeah, a month or two. But then you ran it back down. Yeah, to like 35k. Yeah, basically exactly what you were in the beginning. And then you recently Tweeted, I turned 35k into 50k in a matter of like a couple months. Yes, you did do that because now you're at 50k. And so you did that. But it was from the second time of being at 35k, which I also thought was like, okay, this seems like it's lacking a little bit of transparency because technically you're still down, you know, 50k from your all time high. Granted, the returns are still solid.
- [88:22]
Kevin Xu
Yes, yes, yes. It's, it's, it's very hard to, you know, explain all that nuance and disclaimers on Twitter. Right. And especially, you know, you're trying to balance, you know, engagement and going viral and content. Whatever. Like people say that in the comments. Right? And I like them and I retweet them too. Right. But like, you know, kind of tongue in cheek, right? Like, dude, like I don't try to hide that, right. Like other people, you know, expose that. I'm like, you're right, right. Like I really kind of lean into the fact that like, you know, I round tripped Already, Right, Right. To me, it's marketing Twitter similar to, I think, how Apple always says every iPhone is the best iPhone they've ever made. When the common person hears that, they're like, oh, my God, this is the best phone ever made.
- [89:08]
Narrator/Advertiser
Right?
- [89:09]
Kevin Xu
But only tech insiders like, okay, that's a very specific sentence they said. And similar to me, when I say I went from 35k to 52k in 2 weeks, that is technically accurate.
- [89:19]
Narrator/Advertiser
Right?
- [89:19]
Kevin Xu
And so in terms of disclaimers and is there other information people are not getting? This is why, again, I endorse independent thinking and doing our research. You have to kind of click in the profile and see the other tweets and kind of catch up on the story. Right? There's just so much like, I can't be explaining the whole story to you every single time, otherwise none of the posts will go viral.
- [89:38]
Jack
So when's the last time you were wrong?
- [89:41]
Kevin Xu
The worst trade I made in this new account has been RCAP Red Cat Drones. Because I thought that, you know, the Pentagon, they approved like a billion dollars in spending and the whole Ukraine war kind of changed how the war story works. And there's going to be a lot of investment in drones. Like that is actually true. That did not reflect in the stock price at all. And so I kind of held this down and all the way, that's what kind of made me round trip all the way down back to 35k.
- [90:09]
Jack
What I was curious about is I know you bought RCAT and then it went down a lot, but then you doubled down by buying Arc Hacks, which is the 2x leveraged RCAT stock. And I'm curious, did your thesis change or did your conviction level change in order for you to go from, you know, just the base share of rcat to the 2x leverage?
- [90:29]
Kevin Xu
I had never done any leverage ETM ever before. Right. I tried to stay away from those, and that was a rule I set. But, you know, rules are meant to be changed, right? Different market conditions, different styles, whatever is meant to be played with, you got to experiment with yourself too. And so I did get successful with Palu, which was a 2x version of Palo Alto Networks.
- [90:48]
Narrator/Advertiser
Right.
- [90:49]
Kevin Xu
And that went well because of earnings and whatever like that. So I was like, oh, you know, maybe 2x leverage things are worth playing with, right? If you have extremely high conviction. And with the Redcat play, you know, I thought, like, I could catch the bounce. And with a 2x levered play, you only have to bounce halfway there in order to make it all the way back back. But again, the bounce never came. And I think my main takeaway there is. Yeah, you don't. That was almost essentially going off all tilt.
- [91:13]
Jack
And so the mental kind of stop loss was 35k because you didn't want to go, probably.
- [91:18]
Kevin Xu
That is fair. That's fair. Yeah. I don't do real stop losses, like systematically. Right. But I do have mental stop losses. Right. If something's, you know, down 20, 30 and the chart just looks absolutely ugly, you know, then. Yeah, there's that.
- [91:31]
Jack
I'm curious how your membership fees changed from, you know, taking it 35k to 100k. Like, how many members did you have paying you? 200amonth? And then how did that change after you were incorrect about the RCAT and RCAX thesis?
- [91:45]
Kevin Xu
The analytics behind extra subscriptions are actually very light. There's not that much information about churn rate and who's canceled and when they cancel, whatever. Right. So.
- [91:53]
Jack
But the gross number.
- [91:54]
Kevin Xu
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've seen it dip down. I mean, it's. I mean, like, like, you know, I'm not sure if it's related to the RCAP play or just like, you know, they subscribe for one month. I want to see what was behind the. They liked it or didn't like it, and then they turned like, I think like, you know, similar to me, like a lot of times you sign up for a subscription, right. And the first thing you do is just go cancel. Right. So I'm not sure if that's not if it's related to the play itself or they just wanted to try for a month.
- [92:18]
Jack
What's funny to me is like, technically speaking, you did bring it back up to. To 50 or 55 is where you're at right now. Who's to say where you'll be in a week or two weeks or a month? Who's to say? But the funny thing is you bring it up and then everyone starts subscribing and I imagine like, like the gross amount of subscribers that you had went down right after.
- [92:36]
Kevin Xu
Yeah, yeah.
- [92:37]
Jack
Arcad and archives. Like, once you were incorrect about that thesis, then people unsubscribed and. And stop paying you. But then probably as you're going back up again, then people are like resubscribing it's. But they don't have the foresight to look over a long period of time. And this is not my endorsement into you as an investor. I'm just saying, like, technically speaking, if you do look at the data over a long period of time, you have been correct more than you've been wrong.
- [93:00]
Kevin Xu
Yes.
- [93:00]
Jack
And it's funny how it just kind of like there is a clear correlation between how you're doing and how you're not doing, like in a small window.
- [93:07]
Graham
Well, that's investors across.
- [93:09]
Jack
Yeah, exactly. It's just, it's just.
- [93:11]
Graham
And I share the hype and selling the fair always.
- [93:14]
Kevin Xu
I share this message with every new subscriber. I highly endorse independent thinking. Right. I share my thesis. It's up to you to decide whether you like it or not. Right. And for the RC1, a lot of people disagree with me, you know, and I noticed that a lot of people did not enter to play with me because it was a fairly weak thesis, like looking back on it.
- [93:34]
Narrator/Advertiser
Right.
- [93:35]
Kevin Xu
And so I'm happy that, you know, a lot of people.
- [93:37]
Graham
Do you think that you felt pressured to go big to like prove yourself again in that trade?
- [93:42]
Kevin Xu
Yes. There was another lesson I posted about recently which was don't force a trade. Right. I think because of whatever was happening at that time, right. I was like, ah, let me find another trade. And like the thesis just wasn't strong enough. And so it's actually funny because even like last week when the market was down a little bit, I'm like, oh, should I like swing again? No, no, no. Like just cool down, right? If you're like trying to force it, if your thesis is not strong enough, just like cool down. It's fine. You can even stay in cash for a little bit until you feel like you understand the market. And so a lot of lessons. Yeah.
- [94:10]
Jack
Who do you think is the best investor alive right now?
- [94:13]
Kevin Xu
There's a, there's a clear answer for that actually is Leopold Messengbrenner, right. The, the ex OpenAI guy that started his situational awareness fund and invested in all these picks and shovels, right? Like he's I think up to like $20 billion in a. Which is from, this is from like a two year track record, by the way. Way, right. This is equal to Bill Ackman's Pershing Square that He's developed over 20 years, right. And this guy, because he wrote his early thesis on the AI infrastructure build out, invested in all the picks and shovels along the way. Now that's why he's up to like 20 billion.
- [94:42]
Graham
Now doesn't that concern you though? Because Cathie Wood had a similar upswing 20, 20, 2021. Yeah.
- [94:48]
Kevin Xu
I mean, I think the game changes at different scales, right. I think he knows this industry well. There's Obviously this is the right timing for that, but who knows what wave happens in the future, right, that he or may or not benefit from. And also, you know, honestly speaking, like all these hedge fund managers, at a certain point you're like, you know, trying to increase your AOM because you could kind of bank the fees, right. You're not necessarily in it for the gains themselves.
- [95:13]
Jack
That's an interesting point. Yeah. That they're, that they're probably not so focused on taking risk that could on average yield them 40% if that means they have some years where it goes down.
- [95:21]
Kevin Xu
That is my critique of that quote that, like hedge fund managers statistically don't beat spy, because I think most managers are playing a different game, right? You're playing a game of delivering good reports to your bosses. You're playing a game of like, I better make sure I don't lose money so that, you know, my LPs don't, don't, don't exit, right? And they're playing a game of like, hey, we developed, you know, we doubled this year. Give us more money, right? Versus, if you're playing with your own money, you're actually really invested in concentrating these bets and thinking deeply about your own net worth and stuff.
- [95:54]
Jack
It's easier to sell a product that guarantees, you know, positive return, even if the positive return is like 3 to 5%, than it is to sell something that could have negative 10% one year, but up 40% and like that volatility, because people don't have the stomach.
- [96:07]
Kevin Xu
The dirty secret on Wall street is most people just want to make that one year claim to fame, right? Start their own fund and then just coast for the rest of their life.
- [96:16]
Jack
What are your thoughts on Chris Camillo?
- [96:18]
Kevin Xu
Love Chris. Yeah, I watched a podcast with you guys. He was on another live stream with Amit and Wolf recently talking about AI agentic trading. I think he's the goat.
- [96:29]
Jack
We asked him what he thought about you and he said, I actually don't know much about him and can't remember why I started following him, but there must be a reason since he is a coarse guy that likely regularly shares trade ideas with traders who will pour money into each of them. I'd ask the question about exactly what parameters he puts in place to ensure that he's not profiting off of the trading flow of his subscribers. How many days minimum does he wait before exiting a published buy trade? Does he fully disclose his exits? By Kevin Xu's own words in his article Embracing Degeneracy, he seems to be the Byproduct of right time, right place luck, fueled by a methodology that is highly concentrated, feels like he is better than an average investor who spends time researching and taking concentrated bets that have worked out. But most of this appears to have been fueled by a bull market. So not necessarily a genius investor with a meaningfully differentiated strategy as much as much as a bold investor who is benefiting from simply bringing aggressive, long and concentrated in high risk growth equities. It's a relatable story as most anyone can replicate that success to some extent. What do you say to that?
- [97:34]
Kevin Xu
Thank you. I think that's a fairly accurate critique. I am very bold because I like, I like big rewards, like small rewards don't excite me that much. Right. It's not worth the time and effort and there's definitely a huge degree of luck luck, right. Like I'm doing this in these bull markets, right. But I also, I mean the way, the reason I post on X and, and try to get engagement beta is because I'm, I'm trying to. I think you need to put yourself in positions of luck too, right? I think a lot of people don't. I think a lot of people are, are very conservative. They can't deal with any money loss at all. Like I, I know people with millions in cash and they've been in cash for the last five years, right? I'm like what are you doing? At least put in the spot. You're like oh, but I could be buying the top or et cetera. I don't get it. I'm just like, I'm just like, I think you need to put yourself in positions to become lucky, right? And also just like minimize your loss, right? And that stuff in terms of like the, you know, the course guy, it's funny, I don't have a course. I don't have a discord. I don't have any of that stuff, right. I told you the story of ex subscriptions and people and I'm very thankful and people enjoy my kind of like more longer form rambling thoughts, right? Because like on X you have to kind of be more polished and you know, maybe tight and concise to go viral, et cetera versus my sub only pull like kind of for more long forms of like what I'm thinking about, et cetera, et cetera. And I, I take that duty very importantly, right. And so I do have some guardrails I set for myself, right. I never touch a company like less than a billion dollar market cap. I never sell same day, you know I, I mean, that's generally just because I, I, I, I want to see the thesis play out out. Right. And so I don't really have like a strict time, like I must hold for this amount of time. Right. But if you actually do look at my track record, I never sold a stock, like within three days. Right. Like, I, again, like, I want to see the thesis kind of play out. And I'm very upfront with folks that like, I might trade at any, at a whims notice. Right. I, like, I added, I add that disclaimer. I even give a heads up that like, hey, like, I'm looking, the market's looking weak today. I'm not liking this. You know, I might exit in like the next few hours or something like that. Right. And so, like, I'm not, I'm not, there's, I'm not front running anybody.
- [99:40]
Jack
Here's an interesting question. Do you think people should have savings accounts if they don't have any thing in the foreseeable future that they are planning on spending their savings on? Or should it just, should a savings account for those types of people just be spy?
- [99:56]
Kevin Xu
I, I'll say yes to that. But I feel like I'm a little bit of a hypocrite because I do have 400K in Escov, you know, basically like bonds as well as the emergency fund fund. Right. But I think that's just because of my, you know, cash flow these days. I just want to make sure I have a bigger fund, I think. I mean, establish an emergency fund, like hands down. Right. But then everything else beyond that. Yeah, definitely put it into spy.
- [100:14]
Graham
You were going to.
- [100:15]
Jack
Oh, yeah. Let's compare our Robinhood account.
- [100:17]
Kevin Xu
Sure, sure.
- [100:18]
Jack
All right. Graham, pull yours out. Well, I don't have, don't you have something in there?
- [100:22]
Graham
I have something you want to do
- [100:23]
Kevin Xu
like a race to a million dollars in our Robinhoods.
- [100:25]
Graham
I would do this for the members. Would you put 10k?
- [100:27]
Jack
Yeah, for sure.
- [100:28]
Kevin Xu
I'll do something.
- [100:30]
Jack
And then we could.
- [100:31]
Kevin Xu
And I just deposit money.
- [100:32]
Jack
If this is something that you guys would be interested in, let us know. This is something that I, I would be, I would be down for. But first, let's just show off our. Show off, you know, whatever you want to call it. Technically, for me, it's not really showing
- [100:43]
Graham
off, but mine is $169,000 and it's because bitcoin is up quite a bit today.
- [100:54]
Jack
Okay. And then what's your, what's your, like monthly and then your yearly.
- [100:58]
Graham
Oh, we don't want to see the. Yearly, that's not important. Weekly I'm up by two and a half percent. Monthly I'm up 5.4%.
- [101:04]
Jack
And then what's your one year?
- [101:06]
Graham
We don't want to see that.
- [101:07]
Jack
Jack, come on. This. We. We have to. We have to catch a flight.
- [101:09]
Graham
Yeah, but. Oh, but that's just because crypto's down.
- [101:12]
Jack
And then what's your all time? It's about that.
- [101:15]
Graham
No, I don't know because I don't really use this account. I just moved it over.
- [101:17]
Jack
How are you gonna hate on me when you've lost more than I've.
- [101:21]
Graham
Like, the thing is, I only. The thing is, I only moved this in because Robinhood gave me the 3% crypto bonus. So I moved something into here.
- [101:31]
Jack
Right. So that 90,000 loss is kind of fake.
- [101:34]
Graham
It is fake because it doesn't know my cost basis. My cost basis of bitcoin in this was like 28 to 32k. Sure. But this only tracks from when I put it in.
- [101:43]
Jack
Whatever your portfolio is, you're choosing to buy those holdings every single day. And so like, just because you bought Robinhood a while ago, doesn't mean that you continued to hold it through the oversized valuation, tax loss harvest and offset gains. Here's mine. This account, as you can see in my all time graph, I ran it from like 40k to 81k. This was selling options right here and then buying options right here. And so like selling options was working out great. And then I got greedy because I'm like, I know how to do this. Started buying options also dogecoin, lost everything. And then I restart and I tried it again, lost everything. I'm like, okay, this time what I'm gonna do is something different.
- [102:20]
Kevin Xu
Different.
- [102:20]
Jack
And I'm only going to let myself sell options because every time I've sold options, it's worked out really well for me. So I started with like basically 10k. I'm up, I don't know, 11.4% in two months. Ish. And then if I go to my other account, my gamble account, this is the account that I loaded with 100k and so it's fresh. Only ever had 100 grand in it. And the idea was I would make enough money to purchase this watch. And so in, in two months, I'm up about 13.3%, which is not bad. And I'm really only selling options. This is kind of what I'm doing right now, but that's it.
- [102:55]
Kevin Xu
Pretty good.
- [102:56]
Jack
What you got?
- [102:57]
Kevin Xu
I'm at 53k right now, up 3% today. All in Shaz 1 stock. Keeping it simple. Over the last week, up 23% and over the last month, technically down 8%. So you can see here, this is what hit that 35k.
- [103:13]
Jack
It never went down.
- [103:14]
Kevin Xu
No, I never went down. Yes. I kind of, you know, that's psychological. I'm very big on psychological numbers. Right. And so I started with 35K. You kind of don't want to go below that. And then I tell, I say I logged in and made my next, my next trades count. And so on June 24, yeah, I went back to 35K and you know, it's technically up, let me see, the one year, 50% since then, I think. The one year, yeah. So this is where you see like, you know, if you look at the all time, it's like all weird. Like I've had this account since like you know, 20, me 15 or whatever. So it's like all the different deposits and withdrawals and whatever, the lines get messed up, right. And then like I started this account on E Trade because I got in like the Reddit IPO and they forced to create an E Trade account and et cetera, et cetera. Then I transferred over here for a bonus as well. So that's why all the kind of numbers look weird. But if you see here. Yeah, like I traded it, the 35k challenge account up to let's say 44k.
- [104:05]
Jack
Right.
- [104:05]
Kevin Xu
And then kind of pause it for a bit to work on my start startup. And then basically around November, December last year, I started up again and it's been up and down.
- [104:13]
Graham
Cool. Kevin, thank you so much for coming out filming with us. We'll link to all of your information down below in the description. Really appreciate it. We gotta go on a flight right now.
- [104:23]
Jack
Yep, we gotta catch a flight to Florida, so hope you guys enjoyed. Thank you so much for watching.
- [104:27]
Graham
Thank you.
- [104:27]
Jack
As always. We would not be here if not for you guys.
- [104:30]
Graham
And also if you want early access to videos just like this, as well as extra content, feel free to join the channel memberships. We're also posting extra episodes of Jack and I. We have occasional guests, we do post shows, so really hope you enjoy it. Feel free to join the membership. Thank you so much. And until next time.
- [104:46]
Jack
Until next time.