"I was doing everything right…then lost nearly £20k"

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0:34After your trial, you'll save an extra£5 a quarter on the subscription, which is exclusive to Making Money listeners. And that's moneyweek.com forward slash money. But there's a link in the description if you just want to click that. You can't prepare yourself for how you're going to feel when over time that money turns into more money and turns into more money and you're looking at a large figure and that starts to go down. Today's episode is a little bit different. We're joined by one of the Making Money audience, Amy. Many of us have had mistakes in our investing journey, but not everyone is brave enough to come and tell us about them.

1:06And I fell for it hook, line and sinker. I mean, that, yeah. Big red flag. Yeah, I know. Oh, God. I want to start at the beginning, before the story that you're about to tell us, and just ask kind of what was your relationship like when you were growing up with money? So my relationship with money when I was growing up was sort of, I mean, fairly non-existent, really. come from a working class background dad was a teacher mum was a nurse we didn't have a lot of money but we did have a lot of fun um I don't really recall having sort of an understood relationship with money other than being given 50 pence a week pocket money and putting that in my piggy bank and keeping hold of it as tightly as as possible um as I sort of grew up um my parents made some obviously made some good decisions as they got older and I remember them paying their mortgage off quite early and I remember that being like a big thing you know there was like celebration there was some sparkling wine it was like woohoo we've paid our mortgage off and I remember I didn't understand what a mortgage was but I definitely the seeds were being sowed at that stage and and that sort of made me sort of think like paying off debt early is a good thing you know so I was already starting to to get some valuable lessons from my parenting but certainly don't come from any sort of wealth.

2:27I mean, my parents today will be the type of people that would say, you kids don't know you were born 5 % mortgage rates. We paid 19 % in 1991 or whatever. And so, you know, yeah, working class family, things were tough. I got a little bit of pocket money every week. And to me, especially when I was older, investing was maybe something that like rich people did. And the stock market was something that I saw on movies. um I had a post office account and I think my nan put 10 pounds in um and that was that really how much do you think that that early experience around money fed into the situation that arose when you were older yeah so there's definitely like a scarcity mentality that was possibly sort of put into me from my how I grew up um in in a family of you know working class three kids to feed um that definitely made me and still today affects me you know I still I'm I'm quite a frugal person actually I'm I'm quite generous I'd like to think but I'm not very good at spending money on myself um I still today sort of probably try and hold on to money a bit tighter than I probably should or worry if I have to spend more than two pound 50.

3:38But you've got a good job, right? Yeah, yeah. So I do have a good job. And sort of as I grew up, I left school and didn't go to further education. I did an apprenticeship when I left school, an engineering apprenticeship. So fast forward to sort of early 20s, I'd finished my apprenticeship as a junior engineer for quite a good tech firm. All my friends were in uni laden with debt, with limited job prospects as they were leaving. And I was doing quite well for myself and had a couple of quid in the bank. Is that when you started investing? Yeah, absolutely. So I had some spare cash. I think I was probably putting a couple of quid in the bank or my post office savings account or whatever.

4:25bought some premium bonds which I still have today that are worth exactly the same as what I bought them for in I think 2002 you never won anything no not a penny not a penny people listen to that bought 100 quids worth back then which would have been a lot of money for me to fork out but I considered it as safe you know and uh and I I dug out the um the certificate the other day and had to look online with my numbers and no, not a penny, not a penny. So, so yeah, so I thought that I would put some money into a post office savings account and into the bank and can't remember what interest rates were at the time, but I definitely was mindful that I needed to start saving for my future.

5:06And my parents were giving me good lessons about, you know, you should think about maybe buying a house or, you know, you've, you're doing well for yourself, you should definitely not spend it all in the pub. So fast forward a couple more years and I went on holiday with some friends and that was before the smartphones were a thing and doom scrolling. So I was in a hotel and there was like a book amnesty and I was having a look through the books and to try and find something to read on my son lounger and I came across a book and I honestly think that it's probably the only book I could find that was in the English language.

5:43I I think every other book in the book Amnesty was German. So I went for this book and it was, it was called The Money Chef or The Wealth Chef or something. And I thought, I had to look at the back and I was like, hmm, I sort of might be quite interested in this and thought that I'd probably just read a couple of chapters and put it back in the shelf. But I took it to my sunbed and I absolutely lapped it up. I just, I still remember now that how I felt when I read that book, even two chapters into the book, maybe not two, but a few. And I remember, I remember saying to my friends that I was on holiday with, girls, we're going to be millionaires.

6:19Because, spoiler alert, the book's about compounding interest, right? And I read the book and I remember thinking, like, my brain just went into overactivity about the whole subject. And I remember thinking, like why why don't I know about this already for a start why is no one else talking about this like what am I going to do with this information how do I start and brilliant I'm going to be a millionaire and all my friends are going to be millions because I'm going to tell them all about it and I'm going to go home and tell all my family about it and it's the next best thing um so that then led me to open up um pure luck more than judgment I opened up an account with Fidelity and started paying into like an ETF.

7:07Like it was a UK. I think I only paid into one. And as I recall, initially, it was just like, I was still investing in a savings account as well, because that felt really safe. But into the fund I was putting in, like, I think initially it was like 25 quid a month. And then I upped it to 50 quid a month and then maybe up to like 100 quid a month and and I just left I did all the right things I just left it for like 15 years you know I started in in yeah 2005 and I was cycling in for all of that time um until I got to a point in early 2020 where my balance was looking pretty nice um it was almost at the sort of 50 ,000 pounds mark um I've been putting in extra over the years as well you know get a bonus in work or um pay rise or whatever I was I was putting a bit extra in here and there so yeah I got it up to nearly nearly 50 ,000 pounds and was obviously you know delighted with its progress and yeah this should be the end of a really lovely story and I should be sat here on millions of pounds today shouldn't I you did the right things but yeah but the market was on your side at the time and it's I think one of the hardest things like from reading your story is that I often say you know take the you know the thick with the thin especially the thin if it drops don't worry about it but actually when that happens it's a different experience isn't it psychologically and that's probably what happened to you right yeah a hundred percent you you can't prepare yourself for how you're going to feel when over time that money turns into more money and turns into more money and the effects of compounding start to really hit that snowball effect and the money gets more and more and more and you're looking at a large figure on a piece of paper or on a app and that starts to go down you there's no i've read so many books on the psychology of investing now as well i've really tried to re-educate myself in recent years and i'd like to think that i understand it well but i don't think it matters how had i read all of those books before i'd have still made similar mistakes I think how did how did it make you feel when the money went down though because when it's going up obviously you're like I'm on top of the world I'm so genius I'm so smart you go back to your book you're like this is the thing I did think I was a genius like I was I'd read this book I'd made all these great changes and started to invest my money I was telling everyone else about it and no one really wanted to listen if I'm totally honest they were like yeah well my money's actually in a good savings account or whatever you can't force people to do it can you and so I did sort of was there's a little bit of smugness about it I suppose I was like I'm gonna be retiring early um and so I did think that I was like the next Warren Buffett if I'm totally honest with you and and then COVID hit and so there was a big drop quick drop in COVID and you said that the the portfolio balance was just dropping on the daily was it yeah so I remember it like it was yesterday and I remember you know on your online account or on your app it's um if you're in a positive balance it's green yeah if you're negative it's red okay so it was green it was very green and I remember when Covid hit thinking oh shit I better check my Fidelity account because I had to still kept a couple of quid in a savings account as well I had some money elsewhere I thought better check that fidelity account and it'd gone down by about I don't know 10 % at that point and then I remember as the days ticked on the lockdown started to be invoked um you know Boris Johnson and his crew was standing up every day talking to the nation it was just going 6%, 5%, 3%, 10 % one day 6 % and it was ticking down and down and down and down down and I remember getting to the point where I saw that another couple of bad days and it was going to tick under zero and it that green figure was going to turn into a red figure and I just couldn't do it I couldn't do it I could not let that happen psychologically magically killed me so i sold what happened next because i know that could recovery yeah how quick it was the quick the quickest bounce back yeah yeah how did how did that make you feel awful like so it's like the seven stages of acceptance you know of any sort of major i hate to call it a trauma but no it's traumatic and i don't don't not because money money is a big part of our lives if someone robs a 10 grand out of your bank account, that's a traumatic experience.

11:50Yeah. Feeling that you're losing money and then doing the right thing and then realising you've done the wrong thing, there's a lot of guilt and shame in that, you know? And don't forget that the environment that I was living in at the time, it was unprecedented, wasn't it? We were all locked down. We were separate from our family and friends. I was alone. I had other sort of personal things going on. And so I had all of the feelings and all of the emotions and it consumed me. It consumed my mind for days and weeks that I thought I was brilliant. Firstly, I thought I was a brilliant investor. Secondly, I thought I was an even better investor because I protected that initial capital that I'd been feeding into the fund over however many years.

12:33And all of the relief that came with that. And then seeing it rebound and thinking, oh my God, what have I done? and having this money now sat in my bank account that's paying like 0.25 % at the time was it you wouldn't have even got that and a standard savings account um interest rates being at an all-time low and I was just helpless I didn't I didn't know what to do and I I was annoyed with myself I was embarrassed I felt stupid I didn't know what to do I yeah it was it was rough have you taken a step back and thought like even if you relied on your book um if there was no covid do you think you still would have made the same decisions because obviously in the book there was no lockdown past if no one had ever seen it it was unprecedented so yeah do you think if it wasn't for covid and you living alone you still would have made the same decision just because you didn't want to see it going down i mean it's tricky isn't it to say what you would have done in a different scenario i think that the um the way the aggressiveness of that initial crash that week in March was pretty scary.

13:42And the global lockdown felt different, right? I think people always say about crashes, everyone thinks this time is different, it never is. But every crash is kind of different, you know, in a sense of the factors. Is it nuclear missile threats or is it a global pandemic? And I think everyone thinks, oh crap, we're not coming back from this. Yeah. And also, like, is it a crash or is it just a correction? That was a crash, right? It was going down by multiples of percent every single day boom boom boom and so it's really hard to actually look back and think will i have made the same mistake same decisions but i'll be honest like i'm i'm sort of back here now in present day i'm i'm glad that i did make those decisions and everything that did happen to me happened to me because actually i've come out the other side of it a better investor i think you would have made that decision at some point and it would have been even more disastrous if you had more money right and and if the market said the problem with a good market is it flatters people and then when the crash comes they always come it happens people forget you might feel like you're the only person that did this but the markets were dropping because people were selling yeah they're a function of buyers and sellers so the market crashing at that rate is people dumping so for for every one of you that's brave enough to sit here and admit to it there's millions of other people that went did the exact same thing right yeah so i remember that time personally for me i was going to buy a buy to that property and i'd been through i'd been through the mill a few times made my own similar mistakes and i cancelled the purchase of that property and i bought in every day so the same set of scenarios of like you know not to rub salt in the wound but it just shows perspective on a situation i saw it as only a good thing and i was in this group of my mates who were like working banks and stuff and they were just like i need a loan can anyone lend me any money borrowing money off their mom and throwing it in whereas on the other side it was millions of sellers who were just like dumping because they hadn't had that kind of experience.

15:35I think you kind of have to go through it once. That's a really interesting perspective. And you saying that just gives me so much more enthusiasm that if this was to ever happen again, which it will, there'll be another crash at some point, right? I will be... Yeah. Yeah, oh yeah, you'll... The way that you... I want to talk about community and support in a second, but I'll give you my number at the end of this. And next time there's a crash comes, you message me and I'll tell you. And we'll all go, we'll all just leap in head first. And then before we know it, that time will be different. That'll be the big one.

16:02I want to talk about this because you said you were alone. It was COVID. You were like mentally in a bad place. Thank you. This tablet hates me. It just continues to shut down constantly. You're in this bad, bad place. And what that led you to do was seek out community almost, a place to go. Can you just run us through what happened after this? So obviously I was sat with this. I still, although I've sold, you know, not a loss, but not much of a gain either. It was still a fair whack of money that I had sat burning a hole in my bank account that wasn't paying me very much money. And so I now know that what I did after that was chase my losses.

16:50Right. I didn't want it. But you're on paper gains that you didn't have anymore. Because you hadn't lost any money. No, exactly. You were just, you detached yourself to the gain. Yeah. But from a psychological point of view, I'd lost the money on paper. And that was years of investing. And so I was very, very keen to invest that money somewhere else. And that was the first challenge that led me to make some of the decisions I made. So, of course, we're all at home. We can't go anywhere. We've got our smartphones in our hands. I'm interested in finance. I get on YouTube I get on Instagram I get on Facebook I get on Twitter you start to have a look at these different videos and different communities and see what these people are saying about that crash and these people are saying about the next crash and the new crash and the crash about the new crash and bull markets and all that stuff you know most of it clickbait and I came across a couple of people online that were sort of actively offering advice to people that had encountered something similar to myself you know I actually found a video specifically about it oh did you get worried in the Covid crash and sell all of your investment portfolio and you know we'll help you realign that money and make a huge amount of money in the short term to try and claw back some of those unrealized was it as direct as that do you think the messaging you felt it was you felt that it was it's almost like an offer page you know are you a single mother in this like kind of yeah I mean it feels like a promotional sales page so it was that targeted yeah I think it was really targeted and I fell for it hook line and sinker um the some of the people online had you know very polished production say the names of the people the creators so so the the main creator that i followed during this time and the one that i took the most advice from was called meet kevin um how i first came across him i don't really know the algorithm gets you i think if you millions of views if you were to google anything or search for anything on youtube i think you would somehow at some point end up with a his channel as a recommendation and also a lot of the content that he produced actually seemed like it was really well thought out and really well sort of investigated.

19:19He does a lot on like, like politics as well. It's not all just financial stuff, anything that will affect the markets really. And so I watched his channel for a while and I had a little look at some of the, he would advertise his own portfolio and the stocks that he was investing in that week and lots of screenshots Lots of like, you know, lots of gains. Tendies, as he called them at the time. Tendies, yeah. Oh, God. What's a tendie? That's what he was. I remember this period. He blew up because he covered stimulus checks daily and he got like insane. He was getting a million views a day more.

19:57I remember him bragging about the fact he was earning multiple seven figures a month. And he became almost like a meme as well. Like by the dip, he had this little song. Yeah. And then there was this tendies. It was like chicken tenders. You know, like all the gains. Get me a box. Buy this stock if you want some tendies. I don't know. It was like that's what it was about, wasn't it? That's exactly what it was, chicken tenders. I never really got it either. But yeah, he was very convincing. You know, he showed a lot of actual proof of his own gains for investing in different stocks. And why would I not believe this guy?

20:36He was making gains at that period. I think it's fair to say. He was investing in companies and he was making money. So he was able to show that to people. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And then that led you into his paid for communities. Is that correct? Yeah. So he advertised the course. So I've always been interested in psychology and his course was called Stocks and Psychology of Money. and I thought well you know the best investment is yourself I certainly realized that and I and it was like just under 500 quid I think I paid for his course and not only did he give you access to all of the content but also gave me access to his community um and there was like a little um some bait around I'll show you the trades that I don't show people yeah the VIP the VIP trades they like signals when I buy and sell oh you'll be privy to the other crap that I buy that'll go to zero.

21:30So I joined the Stocks on Psychology of Money course. And I have to say some of the content, again, is actually really well done, really well thought through. The messaging is good. It's, you know, I did learn a few things. It's like, I don't want to completely hate on this guy. I did learn a few things. I liked the way that the course was paced as well. I had plenty of time at home doing nothing because we're in the middle of a global pandemic. And I started to connect with the people in the community as well and back to your earlier earlier question I think that was a value for me really actually was connecting with the people in his community because I was alone during a global pandemic that nobody knew when it was going to end or when we were going to be allowed out of our houses and I think in everything that I've been through in the weeks leading up to that I think that you very much find safety and solace in a herd don't you And I know that's the way that a certain part of our brain works is that safety is within the herd.

22:31We're tribal, in a sense. We're tribal, yeah, exactly. So to talk to other people, although not people that I would ever meet, like internet friends, about my experiences and, oh, shit, yeah, I lost a load of money. And those are also conversations that I didn't feel confident enough to have with my actual friends or family. Who wants to phone their mum and go, mum, I'm an idiot. I lost 40 grand yesterday. You know, it's just not really, it's certainly not me. So I found it very comforting to be a member of his community. And then as we all started to invest in the same sort of portfolio and stock picks that he was recommending, of course, it was like party time for a while because we're all like messaging each other going, wow, this is amazing.

23:14It's brilliant. Yeah. Stocks can only go up. And we celebrated together. um so so yeah i think it was actually in in the first few couple of weeks that i joined that community and started the course and started following his advice on what stocks to buy to try and claw some of my paper losses back were actually great last time we recorded to me and you were having some real dramas with your accountant so how's that been going mate they're sacked so drama sorted um they're a big corporate firm um they didn't really reply to my emails very quickly, like took a week or two at times. And they charged me way too much.

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26:05That's Vanta.com forward slash making money. There's a link in the description though, so you can just click that. one of the hardest things about reading the brief around this and listening to your story beforehand was this kind of acknowledgement that the community element is what people seek out because i i have this view of how i do my content that i've formed over a while it's like give all the information away for free let people consume it that's enough and in reality it's not because in those moments when things go wrong people don't care about me on the other side of the screen they want to talk to real people be that me or be it a community and by not having community you're driven to people who do and often that can be nefarious or it can be you know that the advice you receive in those echo chambers aren't very good so it's kind of a wake-up call to me of like i discredit that sometimes i'm like oh you don't need that you just just give everyone the information for free but then obviously people do need it if that makes sense yeah it's tricky isn't it i have to say that having and all through my journey even to the present day being part of different groups online and different like telegram channels that are about investing in other people that i've met through online communities is probably what's helped me the most through through my entire journey yeah and half of them i've never even met communities have like lots of uses because it's like you said it's like therapy almost because you're other people who are in the same position as you you can talk to them but i lost this much they're like oh i lost it too um but it also has like the benefit of when it's going well you're all you're all in the same boat so i've definitely been in a few communities myself and i think like damien said some of them are biased so um but it can be good and it can be bad so it's not always like oh it's a biased community so therefore it's it's it's detrimental or it's a scam so for example um crypto i had a lot of big investment and like you i was watching it go down it went down 80 % and I was in a little community of crypto people and they're like look this is terrible guys but just hold steady in the long run we'll be fine because of xyz and then three years later it's back up but if I didn't have that community I know for a fact I would have sold I would have been like ashamed like everyone else oh I lost all my money it was so silly but because I had the community to support me even though they were all saying this is bad but hold hold diamond hands don't sell and then three years later I'm now in profit but if I didn't have that community I would have been like i lost 50 in one day it went down 20 i need i need my money recoup so sometimes it can have benefits if they have like logic and sense behind it but it's very powerful how many that's the thing it's very powerful communities that rode into the floor exactly and game stop you know there's so many of these echo chambers where people are like diamond hands and people just sort of like hero worship some people on the internet as well like you know like roaring kitty or whatever he's called.

28:55Like so many people didn't want to, what was the stock that he was, he's all about? It is GameStop, isn't it? So, so many people who just purely because they hero worship that guy will say, don't ever sell GameStop. And if you fall into that community accidentally and all of those people, just because they love him so much, will be saying, don't sell that stock, you'd be getting really bad advice. So I think you've got to be very mindful as to the community that you choose. I think echo chambers are a real issue on the internet. And I think we all exist in them and we need to be really honest about when we get caught in them.

29:26One that we released an episode recently where we gave a platform to an individual who believed that people should be picking stocks, individual stocks. I, in the main, disagree with this, but I think it's important to air that opinion so that I can at least... Otherwise, I just sit here and say everyone should buy a global index. And it sounds convincing, but maybe it's not. And I think with the crypto stuff, you've got a good example there. I've got the opposite as well, though. There's so many. Terra Luna. and you almost get shamed if you if you just if you it's kind of like um you know ponzi schemes like cash effects where you've got to keep bringing people in and then people go otherwise you're excluded from the scam and it's like delete them get out you're like you're ostracized from the tribe yeah like yeah so you found comfort in this group and you got in there and you said the quality of the information was good and you were making money um by buying individual companies is that right yeah what what happened so they were going up most of them i think there were a lot um so as time goes by although it's quite a short amount of time of course you get a bit of confidence don't you because this guy is saying buy these stocks these stocks are going up we're all celebrating i'm part way back to making back some of my unrealized losses and everyone's happy but then as time went on some of them started to go down and then some of them stayed up and some of them went down and then it was sort of all over the place really if I'm honest and by that point when I was a couple of months in I had a lot I had like over 30 different um stocks that I purchased as part of his advice through the the course and some of his other sort of like public videos as well.

31:14And I didn't really know what to do other than to not panic like I had last time. Ironically, I should have panicked this time. And just sit on them really and sort of wait and see what happened. And the good thing to come out of it is that that was the point in my investing journey where I started to learn a bit more about how to read an earnings report and assign my own valuation to a stock and make my own decision as to whether I think it's a company that I want to own a part of or not. But, you know, the fruits of that labour only really came to fruition much later down the line. But at that time, I just remember looking at some of them.

31:58And of course, I was on my, I had a Trading 212 app on my phone. I was literally on it every five minutes, like refresh, refresh, refresh, refresh, refresh. And some of them were going up, some of them were going down but generally the trajectory was ultimately always going to go in one direction like i don't i can't think of any of the stock picks that he recommended that ever long medium to long term did well and was it him making the recommendations i mean i want to be careful because i know it's always bad stoppers like this is not advice was it him talking about the individual companies or was it people within the community it was him talking about the individual companies yeah he very often did like sponsored videos on these companies so the companies were sponsoring him to talk about the businesses yeah i mean that yeah big red flag yeah i know oh god no it happens a lot don't feel bad it happens all the time like a lot of people do it and sometimes they're not as direct that they're being sponsored but i mean yeah it happens a lot i heard i heard scott galloway is it scott galloway the guy he's very convinced when he talks he was talking about reddit the other day and being like this is a social media company that's worth 60 billion and all the others are worth a trillion and why wouldn't you buy that and I was just like why wouldn't I buy that like and I'm I'm like you know the guy who and I get suckered in so and when you're in the communities as well and this guy is making money for you and has got all the receipts it's don't feel like an idiot yeah it's it's hard um but and it wasn't as if he seemed like he was just coming up with you know idiots.com buy some of that it they were companies that i'd heard of they were i thought his like his thesis was well thought out in in terms of some of the the content that he was making about these companies and i could see why you would want of course i didn't really know how to value a company back then but i could see why you would invest in in those companies um but yeah it didn't work out too great for me if i feel like if you're incentivized you can spin a story to make anything kind of look attractive not anything but a lot of things you can make look attractive with like selective data or conviction selected data really yeah really convicting and convincing people to like this is the reason why you should buy this and say oh that makes sense but then you don't have someone on the other side say okay these are the reasons why that could not be true so yeah it's kind of hard to always know when they make a compelling argument you tend to as humans if someone makes a compelling argument you tend to listen to them oh that makes sense i don't see any flaws with that and then you're every good investor will say these are the risks in the investment so if they're not doing proper analysis if they don't go these are the reasons i like it but these are the threats and how credible are those threats and i think a lot of stock pickers online only talk about the positives and you can you can polish any turd in that way you acknowledge that you even when you saw negatives you wouldn't take them on you you were kind of like screening out yeah yeah so yeah i was terrible for it and it's something that i'm really aware of today and i and i um and i'm mindful of that in in any arena in life so if he would say invest in demo.com i would i would first of all go and do a little bit of what i would call my own due diligence which would generally involve me putting the name of the company into twitter it's real yeah see what people say yeah okay yeah and so or the ticker symbol you know so i could get a more sort of like the investment sort of point of view and i would scroll through i don't know how many tweets that said this is a shit stock don't buy this bag of shit crap stock don't do it to find the one that would say oh yeah this is amazing you're a millionaire and that's the one that i would believe because in my mind all of these other people that were saying that it was terrible didn't know what they were talking about i get that the other way around but with youtube comments so there'll be like a thousand comments being like you're amazing you changed my life there'll be one guy they'll be like shut up you melt and i'll be like i have a melt i have a melt he's right that's me as well because look what he said about me and they was like look there's like 100 good comments i'm like but this person said this yeah yeah so yeah it's um i think it's really good to be mindful of that because in life now if there's something even if there's like an opinion that i hold i will actively seek out an opposing opinion by some loser on the internet just to try and balance up my own you know is okay i might not think that his opinion is right but it just i don't know it humbles you a little bit more in your own opinion.

36:43It's hard to do that in an algorithm driven world that serves you information that suits your narratives because you, you know, you start as like moderately left, moderately right. And within a month, your extreme ends looking at like the hard ends of each political spectrum because the algorithm just drives you to the clicks, doesn't it? And I think it's the same. It's not easy to seek out opinions that differed to your own. You know, I might have a view of the world and I go, how do I even find the alternative view because I'm locked into my echo chambers. Yeah. There was a number of companies.

37:14I remember at the time because I remember, for example, Financial Education, who's Jeremy, what's his face? He's another one. Yeah, I don't know if you know who he is. Jeremy Lefeu or something. He's one of Kevin's friends and he had this, he was pumping a lot of stocks at the time. And the secret with these people is they make much more money out of selling the spades than they do for mining the gold, right? The pickaxes. one of the big stocks was Tattooed Chef, I remember. Was that one of the companies? Yeah. I think the thing is with that, though, compelling narrative of, like, at the time, veganism was rising quite aggressively.

37:52EV stocks are comparable. It seemed there was a palpable shift in the way people were approaching these topics. And then these companies seemed well-positioned to take hold of the revolution, right? Absolutely. That's what I mean. There was a lot of sense that they spoke in the stock picks that they recommended. And that's a really good example. Like another one was like an EV charging company. Like, you know, EV companies selling more electric vehicles than ever before. Of course it makes sense to invest in the charging infrastructure. And this guy is telling me what company to do it in. It was a no-brainer.

38:27Yeah. They went bust. We saw some of the returns that you sent over. and I think out of the eight businesses, four have bust and the others are down about 80%, 90%. Yeah. Are there any that made money over the time period that you can recall? I think there's one that's doing okay now, but I sold out when I finally decided that I'd been an idiot and that I should probably do something about it. There's one called Affirm. They're like a buy now, pay later. Yeah, yeah, I remember that. But, I mean, I remember buying them at like 100 bucks and I think they went down to 20. Yeah, they took a massive dip initially and then recovered.

39:04But again, it's that point of, if you don't know why you're buying a business and you're just buying it because someone else says so, you don't know when to sell. You don't know what's going on. And that was the problem. Like a lot of his recommendations did well in the short term. The issue with his model is, is that he never told anybody when he sold. And that's what I have an issue with. And that's what the community and the friends that I made in the community had an issue with. Is that you might find out just by something that he says in a video six months later that he sold a stock. And we're all left holding the baby and we're down 90%, you know.

39:38I highly suspect that he sold it as soon as he told everyone to buy it. Yeah. if he was getting sponsored a lot of it feels very yeah there's a lot of conflict of interest there if you're telling people to buy a stock and they're sponsoring you and he produces so much content as well it's so diluted videos a day yeah that and some of them are like three hours long so and he might mention in one video on a random tuesday at two yeah i sold that and then you can draw back to that and go i did tell everyone and say well unless you're watching meet Kevin 24-7 you wouldn't know how did the community feel like you're still in the community right I am actually yeah how do they feel I met some really great people and I think that that was one of the turning points in my mind was some of the things that happened in the community everyone was a bit pissed off because everybody had been buying all these stocks that have all of a sudden down like 70 80 90 percent and talking to different people about their different experiences and the different backgrounds that they come from and the money that they invested and where they got that money from was actually really alarming to me because I consider myself incredibly lucky to have a well-paid job where I've got some spare cash that I can put into some stocks that might go to zero.

40:55I can afford to lose it. It's fine. But I met some people, particularly another couple of females, because I think the whole industry is probably sort of overweighted men to women by probably like 10 to one. A couple of women who like, I met a woman who skipped her rent one month so that she could put the money into his, some of his stocks and buy his course. And she had two young children. She worked in hospitality in the US. So she lost her job through COVID. And it was like, you're literally talking about people's life savings, but whether that's a hundred thousand pounds or a hundred pounds it's all relative isn't it and so I was coming across these people that were I never told them how much money I invested because I just felt awful because they were investing like a hundred bucks and on their backsides because they'd lost most of it and so it was it was that that sort of made me and a couple of other sort of videos that he made that annoyed me a little bit but it was that that really made me think i can't do this anymore i've got somehow i've got to get out of all this and and figure it out myself and get some proper advice and and and try and make good was it hard to make that admission to yourself so hard it feels real then right yeah and also like you want to be right um again reading about the psychology is associated with um investing and trading as well um it's our ego that doesn't want to sell a stock because selling the stock at a loss is an admission that you were wrong to buy it in the first place and you have to get your ego to a to a place where you can deal with that and that you can put your hand up and and admit to your it's so much harder to admit to myself that I've been an idiot, then actually I find it to admit to other people, if I'm totally honest.

42:59But naturally, I'm quite a perfectionist. And I think because of what we went through in COVID and the time that we were living through, I wanted to provide for myself. You know, I lived alone. I'd gone through a divorce a couple of years beforehand. And I wanted to be the best person for me and provide for myself and invest in the right stocks and look towards retiring early and all the way back to the beach when I was 23 reading that book thinking like yeah I'm gonna be a millionaire woo to you know that present day and and thinking Amy you've you couldn't have made a bigger cock up of this like what are you gonna do when I was in my early 20s I was in a relationship and the individual that I was in a relationship with told me that that she was going to inherit millions of pounds and she said I'm going to be a multi-millionaire and I need someone to help me manage it so do you want to do that with me and I was like fucking this is sick you know early 20s met this person she's gonna be rich I can quit my job so I quit my job there was no money it was just a lie and I sat on my ass for a year not admitting to myself that it was a lie yeah even though I knew it was waiting for this money and in that time I built up all this debt I didn't pay anything and and I remember the day that I spoke to my uncle actually and he was like there is no money like you need to get out of this situation and that was like the hardest day because as long as the lie is keeps going you don't have to admit to yourself that you've been an idiot and you would rather just keep the lie going than go it's almost like you've been born afterwards or like the air was like cleared out the room and it's like oh now I'm in the cold dark world on my own so you know I wrote through something similar in that sense lucky now yeah that's it it led me here it led me here so honestly everything that i am right now is because of that that moment and this is why when i said to you before it's the making of you you're kind of forged in that fire and i think everyone has to go through it and i know it's an awful traumatic experience to lose money not once but twice you know you feel like a fool every way around right yeah you'll find that like the wisdom that you gain from it in years to come will will make you infinitely more money and i think to make those mistakes in in earlier life rather than at 60 you see people that make that mistake as they're about to retire they transfer their retirement to a scammer on a phone because they've never they've never been unlucky enough but fortunate enough to take the knock in their early portion of their life do you know what i mean so i think you'll see it as a blessing long term i do now overall i'm i'm really grateful for the experience that i went through because of all the reasons that you just highlighted it has made me a better investor um and it's made other areas of my life improve because of the lessons that I've learned around who I am and how I behave and why I behave that way um to be mindful of that is is I think really puts you in a position of strength who this is a hard question but who do you blame do you blame Kevin do you blame yourself No, I blame myself.

46:01Don't get me wrong. Like, some of the ways in which he conducts himself is not great. I'm not advocating what he does or the message that he delivers, although I notice he has diversified slightly recently. He's a bit of a chameleon, isn't he? He sheds his skin. He was a property guy and then he was a stock guy. And now he's into options. Yeah, and now he's a property guy again and a bit like a politician. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But one of the, I'm a great lover of like a saying. And one of the sayings I read in one of the books that I read is that holding resentment is like drinking poison and expecting your enemy to die.