How to invest in single stocks (but why you probably shouldn’t)

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0:48Do you want to invest in individual companies? Maybe you want a piece of Tesla, NVIDIA, Amazon. For most people, it's not the right choice. Most people don't have the time to do it. Most people don't have the skills to do it. So let's say you're invested in a relatively small portfolio 10 is relatively small right that's 200 hours a quarter choosing when to buy is is half of the half of the package but a much more difficult thing i think for most investors is trying to decide when when should you sell sasha yanshin is a fellow personal finance youtuber and he invests in individual stocks as you know i invest 90 of my portfolio into global index funds it's a method that i have faith will get me where i need to go but i know you've probably thought about stock picking.

1:29And I wanted to do an episode where Sasha walks us through his process so you can see what it really takes. The most undervalued factor in all of this. If you don't do your own homework, what are you doing? Right, very excited for this conversation. Joining us today is Sasha Janshin, my YouTube friend slash nemesis. Competitor. Yeah, and therapist. You get me through the dark times, we talk a lot. But also probably one of the smartest people I've ever met. That's very kind. You know, it's okay. You need to meet more people. So we've got you on today. I suggested that you come on because you invest in individual companies.

2:07I've seen your process and I want to communicate to people what the work that they should be doing if they want to invest in companies, individual companies. Because, you know, I preach about a global index. And I think we see a lot of people just diving into individual companies without actually really understanding what they need to do. So we're going to talk about that. can we just start first of all by talking a little bit about your background yeah sure and kind of how it's how that suits your ability to buy individual companies i i studied math at university and then i kind of applied for a bunch of different jobs not knowing what i wanted to do and ended up in uh retail banking so i worked at some big american banks in various different roles and like risk management and uh building valuation models that kind of stuff then i um progressed and worked in a few different jobs that are not worth covering in any detail.

2:56And energy, a few other things. You were just on the board for phones for you. No small thing at the age of life there. It was a bit before that, but... Big of a hand. Humble brag, let's go. And after that, in 2014, is when I started my consulting business. So that was a strategy consulting firm called Strategy Desk, where I worked with the banks, we did quite well. So we began working with a lot of banks and resources companies, probably worked with the vast majority of the banks in the UK and large financial services companies, worked a lot in the US, worked in the Middle East, quite a bit in Asia.

3:35Yeah, so our work was twofold. We helped banks launch in new jurisdictions or launch new products, that kind of stuff. So that's kind of one half of the work. And the other half of the work was mergers and acquisitions, mostly in finance and bid and tech. A big bank wants to acquire a mid-sized bank or a credit card company or something they would come to us and we would value the business for them um and that's combining the valuation skills with the the sort of the the knowledge of the industry and knowledge of the inside of how these products work and how to best value what you should pay for them because i never liked consulting when covid hit um and we got hit very hard because a lot of our business development a lot of our business was face to face i kind of saw that like this is the opportunity i'm going to go and start actually doing something that i probably personally enjoy more and so that's when the youtube started in march 2020 the more i began looking into it the more i kind of realized that there is a big gap out there in people sharing um information about this from position of any any kind of experience or any kind of knowledge i think you know in 2020 2021 the world of investing just blew up globally right so we had um people sat at home with excess money so people started suddenly paying down credit for the first time ever um people started saving and investing money at a huge rate that's never happened before at the same time as all that happened all the new investing apps turned up like the robin hoods and the trading two-on-twos and the whatever like all these popular apps turned up out of nowhere and and they were free and very easy and very accessible you know you didn't need 5 ,000 quid to start investing.

5:15A lot of the finance YouTube space got very, very busy with, how shall I put it politely? People who perhaps do not quite really always know what they're saying. And I'm not saying that I necessarily know everything, but you sometimes watch some of the content and you just hold your head in your hands and just say, what is this? People really oversimplify. people oversimplifying people treating investing like it's some kind of game or like it's some kind of team sport or like some kind of team sport i like that yeah the whole social media relationship with investment is bizarre so you have people who um they you know they think that investing in a stock is like joining a fan club so you have to go and uh decide that you like a company and from that point onwards you need to buy the scarf you need to buy all the paraphernalia yet you can only ever say good things about it.

6:11You can't ever entertain that anything could possibly be wrong. The CEO is a god from that point onwards. You all bow down and worship him however many times is necessary. And they don't talk about the risks. You're not allowed to assess the risks. You're not allowed to say, oh, these decisions over here, like these parts of the business are maybe bad parts of the business. Those decisions are maybe bad decisions. I think if you don't understand the major downsides or the major risks of the companies that you invest in if you don't genuinely think there are like significant risks and significant downsides you're not investing you're just in the fangler well if you've not valued the business all you've got is hope right exactly so i think that's why the belief point comes in like and it's like it's more of a religion than it is math at that point yeah could i ask you a pretty direct question then yeah so you know the stats you know how hard it is to invest why do you think that you can beat the market?

7:03Well, this is the thing. I say in many of my videos on YouTube, the vast majority of people should not be investing in stocks. It should be just, not in individual stocks, should be investing just in a broad market index. But I also know that a lot of people, even though they get told this, will not do it anyway. Me included. So my kind of objective is, well, I'm going to try to do my best to try to share some of the process, some of the analysis, some of the thinking with other people who are like-minded. For me personally, I'm just like, I'm happy with where I am. But the thing is, my situation is probably very different to most of the audience that I have.

7:51You know, I'm very aware of that where if I lost the investments that I have, I reckon I'd be all right. I have a business with multiple different sides to the business that is growing. The business is the biggest investment. And ultimately, yeah, and I say this to people, and I make occasional videos about this. They're videos that get absolutely no views because nobody cares. Nobody's interested in the simple fact that the best way to have a really large investing portfolio is to make a lot of money. If you go and invest in this broad market index at 10%, but you put in a million quid, your portfolio is going to do better than getting 25 % return but putting in 200 quid a week or a month or whatever.

8:33Okay, so you want to invest in an individual company. What do you do? Yeah, there's only two things but each of those probably takes quite a while. First, you've got to decide what price you're happy to buy in at and then compare that to what the price is today to determine what the upside is. and that's the process going to take you a long time but it's relatively simple you might really like the company you might not really like the price and vice versa sometimes you might want to invest in a company you don't particularly like but you think it's very undervalued and therefore you feel there's an upside in there and then the second thing is you've got to know when you're going to sell because that could happen in two months or in three months it could happen in 10 years you don't know um and again that's going to be driven by evaluation and the way you would value a business is if you were like a lot of people when they invest in stocks they don't treat it like they're buying a business but that is exactly what you're doing you're buying a small share of business but let's say you're buying the whole thing like you're buying a corner shop you would want to go through the books you would want to go and see exactly how those books have changed over time what are the different trends in the local area what is the demand for the types of products that the corner shop sells?

9:48Is there stuff that the corner shop does not sell, but could be selling where there's a potential upside that is not yet being materialized? Is there a general regeneration in the area? Is there actually something happening in the city where long term there's a potential less footfall that's going to be hitting? You should do all these same things with investing in a company because you're becoming a part owner of that business. So you would want to go and build a valuation model. And valuation model can come in very different guises. I tried to do a bit more work by building a bottom-up model where you would take each single part of the business, each business line, each single revenue stream the company has and try to figure out how that revenue stream is being generated.

10:30What are the drivers of that? Is it selling a particular service? What is the monthly price for the different options? What is the propensity for that price to change over time? What is the propensity for people to buy the various different products that the company sells, how's that going to change in the future? And basically, model all of those different things out and then just add them up to figure out what the overall business metric is going to be because each of those business lines will have its own cost base. The overall business will have its general costs. It will have its marketing costs.

10:59How do those marketing costs relate to the number of people who will be buying the products? Is there a performance marketing budget that directly brings people in? Is there a general brand marketing budget that they're always going to be spending? How is that going to change over time as the company grows? so real simple real simple two simple steps just knock it together i think people need to rethink investing in many many many cases out of what i see because a lot of people do think it is really simple and the fact is it isn't and that's why most people should not be investing and it's very weird because i do i do yeah i do an invest yeah sorry i do i do run an investing channel or of financial management channel.

11:41And it probably very much goes against what I do. I'm making a course where I'm going to try to sell the analytics kind of like learning to people. But I'm saying that most people shouldn't be doing it. And that's because that's the case. Most people don't have the time to do it. Most people don't have the skills to do it. You know, a lot of people are not very comfortable with just making a little basic table in Excel, let alone build a whole model in it, for example. And that's probably just the most basic version that you might build, you might want to build more sophisticated things to run scenarios, etc.

12:14Yeah, most people should probably steer clear if you're not prepared to do some version of that. Because if you're just basing your investing decisions off what you've heard from somebody else, even if you trust that person, that person might have wildly different risk tolerance to you. They might have a wildly different situation. They might be happy to lose all their money because in a different scenario, they will make a huge return. Their risk-reward ratio is very different to yours. You might not be very happy at all losing all of your investments. It might be a life-changing amount of money to you.

12:50They might be earning a lot of money. You might not be earning a lot of money. So they're gonna be just fine. You're not. So it's huge. You can't just listen to what somebody else is doing and copy what they're doing because they're likely to be in a different situation to you. And if you don't do your own homework, what are you doing you're just you're just gambling you just you found a stock you found a ticker symbol you found a price it's a hundred dollars like how do you know if you should invest in it or not because some random guy on youtube said so i mean like smack yourself in the face yeah uh like it's just not the way to do it how long does it take you to build a model around yeah yeah um a long time so i think a lot of people so for me if you're investing in a company just just deciding which company let's say let's say you've decided to analyze a particular company like there's time that it will take you before you even get there just to kind of weed some out by filtering or whatever what's that process um yeah so so let's say you're going through the financials you're just quickly filtering things where you you want companies in particular times and everyone has their own approaches or their own filters but let's say you identified you want to value a business right um you will need to go and read through all of their like recent 10 qs or 10 ks you need to go and read all the different sec submissions outside there sorry i'm gonna ask what are 10 qs and what are 10 ks sorry so um 10 qs and ks are the quarterly and the annual submissions the official report yeah so every quarter they release the results and there's a short version that they publish and that everyone talks about in social media.

14:35Then there's a much longer, more in-depth version with more stuff that gets sent to the SEC that nobody reads, even though that has a lot of stuff that is not in the short version that you really should read. I mean, there can be 100 pages or whatever of stuff. A lot of it is fluff and a lot of it is just copy and pasted, the same paragraphs over and over, but you still need to read to check that nothing's changed or if there's a new line somewhere. So you filter the businesses, you then go, okay, I want to value this business. You consume all of the documentation that exists around that and you're doing that every quarter.

15:06Yeah, but even before you do that, right? So you've got to go and assess all of the past stuff from a company, go and build a model. And for me, building a proper bottom-up model as a model where you're not just taking the last, I don't know, five years worth of revenues and just saying, oh, I'll apply a 30 % growth rate or something. If you're building a real model, valuing a business from first principles like what each individual business line trying to understand like what are the drivers behind every pnl line in that could you give us a real example to tesla like what yeah so so tesla is one of the companies in my portfolio and like in my model i'd be looking at um individual factories individual potential factories what are the timelines or production lines within individual factories how many cars you think that production line will make in a given year yeah how many cars will that make what are the different optics around each different factories so for example like what what do the margins look like in china versus what do the margins look like in texas versus what would the margins look like if they started the factory in brazil or in indonesia or in india all these like potential sites that they're developing like like how does that look differently to germany what are the risks of unionization in terms of like pays and how do you get this accurate data like if you're looking at how much would it be in brazil how are you going to figure that out so this is this is a good question the idea with all of this is always try to minimize the overall error.

16:26So trying to figure out like, I'm never trying to like get it perfect, but I think I'm trying to get orders of magnitude and trying to say, okay, well, if I do a top down, and a top down model is one where you just take the overall numbers and just extrapolate and try to figure it out. And the problem with that is, let's say you assign like a 30 % growth rate for five years. If you just change that to a 35 % growth rate, and you don't really know which one's right, the difference in 10 years time is going to be significant like a really like the device is going to be huge whereas if you if you do bottom up you can often reduce some of that error by kind of saying okay well you know like this production line it might produce 10 more cars or 20 more cars or whatever at max capacity it's probably unlikely to produce 10 times as many cars as whatever you're trying to model and often like sometimes there is a risk of being on the wrong side um with all of your forecasts but if you're trying to do best reasonable estimate as a baseline before you do variations before you do probabilities on top of that you you are probably going to benefit from some of the errors cancelling each other out as well um because if you apply a top down and you you are you're out that multiplier applies to everything within the whole lot whereas what you're saying is there's a margin of error that you can get and a couple of errors in a top down model because so let's say your costs are too low and your like revenue growth is too high the multiplication of those two together can be like orders of magnitude like it can be two or three x difference to your target price whereas in in the scenario we're trying to work out like what what would the average cost be okay maybe you're going to be a bit out on wages here or a bit out on something else over there but ultimately at the end of the day um you're you still like this is the thing like you can be the most accurate forecaster in the world, but you don't know what's going to happen in the future.

18:15So a lot of your guesstimates are going to be wildly wrong because things happen. Companies don't do what you think they're going to do. Companies screw up or companies outperform significantly what you think they're going to do out of nowhere. So you can never know for sure. You're just trying to, at any one point, just try to say, if you were buying the business, how much would you pay? And I think a lot of people don't necessarily do this exercise because there are businesses that that i love but i would not pay the current share price for that business because i think it's like way too expensive um it's like if you know you go to a shop there might be a brand of whatever it is that you like beer or whatever that you really like but it's it's double the price of everything else so you're not going to buy it and the same here like um people say oh you don't believe in the company i'm like i believe in lots of companies but not that price say like i held amd stock for a long time and i sold it this is the only position i sold this year um and i love the company i i use their products i buy their ridiculously priced processes because they give me the performance i need in my work and stuff like that like i'm a big fan of what lisa sue is doing over there i sold the stock because i felt that it reached my target price and i didn't have any more upside left and like that that's the only and i think that's probably an even bigger thing and the choosing when to buy is is half of the half of the package but a much more difficult thing i think for most investors is trying to decide when when should you sell because a lot of people just think just are in this fan club mentality i will never sell this stock because yeah diamond hands you know got to hold all the way to the top and then you sit there and then the stock at some point collapses back down or something happens or the thesis changes could you give the example of lucid motors because i know this is a good example that kind of can you run through that yeah so i held a very small position lucid because early on when it's a very difficult company to value and i had a small position because very it's a very it was a very high risks uh risk stock because um a new company uh they went public via a spack that never produced a car they make evs a lot of risks a lot of uh potential problems however the company um had a lot of things going for them which others in this space did not they had virtually unlimited funding because they were backed by Saudi Arabia.

20:33They still are. They're a majority shareholder. So, you know, in terms of startups, the most common reason people go under is they run out of funding and they can't get the funding rounds done and stuff like that. They poached a guy from Tesla. Yeah, so they poached a guy who was in the early design team or apparently heading up that team, question marks as to exactly what the exact definition or who exactly was heading up. But anyway, when the first Model S was designed. But so they post a bunch of other people as well. So like they seem to get the right people in place. They seem to have that they got a good space in Arizona.

21:08They built what by all accounts is a pretty decent factory over there. They had a lot of things going for them, things which most of the other startups in the space did not have. i felt it was quite decent it was a very speculative bet um in the sense that i knew that my valuation was likely to be highly like out uh depending on what happens but i had a valuation and um the stock for some reason i think i think just uh evs became really popular just ran up every car company yeah and i want to like all of that was so i was buying it i can't remember what it was like 10 15 bucks well the spot price is 10 yeah so i think it was about 11 12 at the time yeah so i was buying a lot um early on and and and then and then they ran up and i sold at 40 and i got i got the usual fanboy hey like you don't believe in the company um that's exactly what they sound like what's what's the stock now like four yeah four dollars now and you know like i should have lost money on that one i should i should have absolutely lost 100 % of my position on that one or whatever I would have lost if I was selling now maybe 70 % because it's like all the despite all the good things the company is just significantly underperforming and there's a lot there's a lot more warning flags and red flags now that are more visible than they were back then so I should have lost money on that one but because I guess of this approach where I will always sell at the target price I still managed to collect an upside and trip on my money for no reason like just just luck i think there's something counterintuitive or some people think it's they don't quite wrap their head around when you invest what you're saying is the valuation is the point that i might sell up yeah a lot of people talk about target price and i think this is one where i use the same term because it's a term that people kind of understand but i probably mean something slightly different because for a lot of people their target price is what they think a stock is going to be at a particular point in time and there's two big problems with that one you don't know what the stock price is going to be ever and two you certainly don't know exactly when that's going to happen so when people say my target price is 500 in 2025 i always just look at it go like means nothing what does that even mean so for me it's very simple it's probably far simpler than what all of this stuff is which is i think i value a company and i it's always present value and i think like if i was buying that company today based on my best estimate for me um what would be a fair price at which i'll buy it um and if the current share price is significantly lower then i feel that i'm buying a company at a discount and if the bigger the discount the better as far as i'm concerned will it ever sell at full price maybe sometimes it does and when it does when it reaches what i think is a fair value i'll sell it doesn't necessarily mean that i have to wait 10 years and then sell the valuation it was when I first bought because the valuation will change over time.

24:04So I might be buying a stock today. And this has happened with some companies in a big way. When I was buying AMD a long time ago, I certainly did not have a valuation of which I sold today. And the same is likely to happen in the future. Like it could go up, it could go down. There are companies where I had a much higher initial valuation, but things happened. The future projections are much lower today, but the price is also much lower today. And I may have been buying very close or at the current target some time ago. But if I'm continuing to buy today and I still think that there is a significant upside, people often think, oh, the stuff you did in the past matters.

24:43But it really doesn't. You just got to execute. It's like when you play particular games, there's a strategy. You just execute the same thing over and over. And it's so boring. But that's what gets the returns. it doesn't matter that you bought that stock at four times the price like two years ago if you think still today that it is actually good like you know based on numbers not based on sentiment or because you believe in the company or whatever um then you should continue doing it um and sometimes you get rewarded very heavily for it and sometimes you will not um the average is is what is what is what you're playing at um and and trying to understand like The valuation will shift over time, but your valuation – and there's always a bit of art to it because if a stock runs up and it is 5 % off your target price, should you sell or should you not sell?

25:32Well, I mean, it depends. It's a complicated question. What other upsides are you seeing in other stocks? How many of the stocks in your portfolio? Is there a better opportunity? Should you put your money to work elsewhere? Are there bigger risks elsewhere? So it's not necessarily – you don't have to wait exactly to the penny for the target price. but you have to you know if one of them has run up and everything else has a huge upside well yeah i mean i'll take i'll shave a little bit off i'm happy to take a bit low a bit less and redistribute and so kind of it does vary how time consuming is your process i mean if you invest in the index fund you just leave your money there and you just put it in every month exactly yeah how many like stocks do you have and then yeah how many hours do you have on each stock like if you have like 10 for example in your portfolio how on a day-to-day how does that look for you yeah so so my portfolio is usually quite tight so i probably only ever have after about um up to 10 positions um major positions i think at the moment it's seven um and then some smaller ones um but with each stock i would say every quarter if you invest in the company every quarter you have to at least read all the like the powerpoint presentations the releases that they do the the 10q forms with the sec you have to read everything else that they publish as well all the news all the like appointments etc you have to read stuff about the industry you have to read stuff about what the competitors are doing because they're going to directly impact the performance of the company as well and preferably you want to read the main competitors official financial filings too so that you understand exactly what's happening i'd say to properly read all of that stuff every quarter um you know just to read the forms by the company probably talking two three four hours a quarter then to read all the other stuff from everyone else it's another two three minimum i also want to caveat this by saying that like you did this for a job and you graduated from oxford with a maths degree it comes a little bit quicker to you to most people deciphering these documents takes a little while i read one of these documents it probably take me like six hours to i mean just to like absorb it um because you know that's not not my skill set i I can tell a dick joke on a finance video pretty well, but that's my skill set.

27:39But, you know, I think it comes quickly to you, you know. Maybe, and I guess like we all need to take advantages of the unfair advantages that we have. But I'll say, yeah, so you're probably doing at least, I would say seven to 10 hours of reading, minimum per company. Then the model, like the first time you build is going to be a long amount of time. Then you maybe are just doing adjustments or improvements or fixing a few things or whatever it is. And when you're doing that, maybe it's only two to three hours a quarter to go and adjust your model. Let's say you only do one major update to your model every quarter.

28:17But then you need to listen to the earnings call because stuff gets said on the earnings call that is neither in the 10Q or any presentation or anything. And they answer live questions from analysts where they might give away something that isn't printed anywhere else. So you need to listen to that. That's an hour and a half to two hours on top of that. Is there an in-call between? The only score is when the company does a live call after they've published the results, where they go through the results and then they answer some questions that people have submitted. And then typically the format is then they answer some live questions from some select analysts that they like.

28:49So yeah, so that's another, let's say two hours to do that of time. So when you add that up, you know - It's a full-time job. You've got a YouTube channel, so like you don't work nine to five. So for the average person working nine to five, is this, is this realistic? It works five to nine. Five a.m. to nine a.m., basically. Well, that's probably five, that's probably 20 hours a company a quarter, right? So let's say you invested in a relatively small portfolio. 10 is relatively small, right? You know, that's 200 hours a quarter. For you. Well, for you, not for the average, average like Britain.

29:25So it might be a bit more for the average person. Not for Rain Man over here. Yeah, exactly. but you know like and that's before accounting for anything else you're going to be doing in terms of actually earning money and i don't think most people have 200 hours every three months that they can possibly and i'm saying that's the bare minimum because if you're if you're going a bit further if you're actually going to be diving more what about the process of trying to discover new companies not the ones that you're already invested in the screening process or managing your portfolio trying to decide like you know is there a macro reason why you should be redistributing or moving money around or anything else like that.

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32:27That's Vanta.com forward slash making money. There's a link in the description though, so you can just click that. I probably spend far more time analyzing companies that I do not invest in. Just because like there are too many things I don't like, or I think the valuation is too rich. or there are companies that I used to be invested in that I held a position in NVIDIA for a long time. I think actually very early on in my channel, like one of the very early investing videos I did was I sold my position in NVIDIA. So by that point, I already held it for a long time, ran up. And yeah, it's run up even more because we've had the AI bubble since then.

33:04And obviously, you're never gonna be able to always time the peak or whatever. But there are companies where they're doing well now and I used to own them. I don't know them now. I think this mentality that the stock market is about playing games or trying to win or something. It's a method for getting a return on my money. I'm putting my money to work in these companies. And, you know, like some years you have a bad year. Like I had a pretty bad year last year. I think most people had a pretty bad year last year. Generally, because of my investment in visual stocks, when the stock market does badly, I do significantly worse.

33:44When the stock market does good, I tend to do a bit better on average. So, you know, just in last year, I think the stock market went down a bit, but I went down, what was it, 35, 40 % something? You know, Tesla collapsed by a factor of four, so it could be all worse. But in other years, like this year, I think so far the same portfolio is outperforming the market by three or four times. It swings around about, and I'm not here for a quick 100%. I'm not interested in... Do you enjoy the process? I enjoy the process. You enjoy it all. You have to. Because I've seen your portfolio makes me want to go gray and lose my head.

34:26Crypto makes you a bit strong because you can see an 80 % loss and be like, well, that's that. But to have to monitor it every day, or not every day, but to have to be aware of all of your different stocks and do all this reading and all this, like you said, you lose 40%. It's stressful. for i think it would be for most people because especially um people who have not been through it before so i remember like the thing that really got me into investing it's it's an interesting anecdote um i'll tell you without naming names but i was working at i was working at a big american bank um during the financial crisis um i ended up walking out of that bank with my cardboard box with my stuff in it um so so i've been i've been on that um on that train but at one point um on the morning when Lehman collapsed, all the bank stocks were being destroyed in the stock market.

35:14And I sat relatively close to a pretty senior guy in the overall bank. And I remember seeing, because this was outside any kind of disclosure periods or anything like that, we weren't privy to any insider info or anything, but just the stock goes down from, I can't remember what it was like from 60 to three dollars or something like that um and the guy just goes and buys like a pretty reasonable six-figure amount of the stock at three dollars and i'm sitting there going i'm just observing because i'm a graduate you know on a graduate salary uh just watching this and i'm like i'm trying to understand the mentality and the mentality is very much like like everyone's panicking the stock is just collapsing for no particular reason and there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the bank there's nothing like in any of the disclosure there's nothing in the documents and nothing in the numbers but the market is panicking so you go and you go and do the opposite of what all the people running around waving their hands in the air are doing um i think the stock price is now i can't remember it's 115 something um i've never seen someone make that much money in such a short space of time um probably even since then just um live um sitting next to them and i and and that's kind of when i really began understanding the mentality properly um and i think a lot of people have not been through that necessarily especially some of the newer investors where you kind of like stuff goes down stuff goes up um long term um it sounds incredibly simple right long term the strategy is you you buy low sell but buy low sell high doing it is so hard like talking about it super easy but doing it because you know like the stock goes down and oh my god you made a mistake and then the stock sits down for a year for two years for three years sometimes you invest in the company that is a great company the company actually performs incredibly well continues performing incredibly well for years and the stock never goes up because sentiment is a thing and the market doesn't like it and the investors like that will happen sometimes a company that doesn't deserve to go up will go up that will also happen um and and kind of understanding that it's a mix of an of art and science is is really really important because a lot of people think it's purely one or the other and it's like you need to understand that there's a huge element of luck in it um but a bit like with poker you need to build the science where you play knowing that there is a luck element but knowing what you do when luck goes for you or against you um and i think if you the moment you stop um understand like stop understanding that in the true sense um you you probably you've probably lost and you shouldn't be investing in stocks the thing so to to kind of like caveat that as well you talk about the guy and the example of him buying into the bank i think a lot of retail investors really bought into the buy the dip narrative and like they they throw in they go into the fire but they they haven't got the other side of it by the dip because you know you go and look at some of the cases recently because everyone was into i didn't really ever understand this but everyone went crazy on amc and gme and i'm looking at it and i'm sitting there going i just fundamentally do not compute i'm like a company is valued on nothing to do with numbers um like you like you think you're gonna outsmart the hedge funds um because you think that you know how shorts work i think this episode is probably nowhere near long enough for us to actually go into how shorts can unwind without them having to buy back everyone's stock but anyway um so everyone everyone's sitting there kind of thinking okay well how do we um how do we play this game how do we make 1000 percent quickly and i'm sitting there like what are you guys doing and then the stock begins going down and begins going down further and it's like oh no we're gonna buy we're gonna become multi-billionaires and i'm sitting there going oh no like the company is literally printing a new share class and selling it to you because they know that you're chumps and you're going to buy it anyway and you and then you do what the fuck you're doing so like you said you spend around 200 hours a month no a quarter a quarter about 200 hours a quarter like researching your stocks and building your models how do you have time for that when you have your job i'm a kid yeah i have i have two two unfair advantages over many other people i think So one is my job is directly linked to the investing that I do.