Investing Through Volatility - Scott Sheridan

25:45And we did the same thing with Tasty. So I took three and a half years off when I left in 2012. three years. I took three years off. Anyway, I left in 2012. And when I left, people would ask me, when are you going back to work? Because my wife had a retirement party for me, but I was laughing. I'm like, I'm definitely doing something. I'm not stopping now. I hope to never stop. I want to keep working for the rest of my life because I enjoy it. But I took three and a half years off. I didn't know if I would like it after six months or I'd hate it after a week. I loved it. Loved it. And because I had spent, we went, my partner and I spent the first five years, we didn't have a day off.

26:23We were working 80-hour weeks, and it was craziness. My wife, I remember, asked me one day, are you sure you're good with this? And I said, no, I'm not sure, but I'll tell you when it ends. We'll look back on it. We'll see whether it was worth it. So people would ask me when I was going to go back to work. I had a simple answer. The day I don't want to have lunch with my wife is the day I'm going back to work. So my partner called me, said, you got to come back. We're going to start another brokerage firm. And I agreed to it. My wife and I were in the car going to dinner. And she said, what did you just agree to?

26:53And I started laughing. I said, I'll tell you at dinner. So I told her and she looked at me. She's like, you don't want to have lunch with me anymore. And I said, no, I do want to have lunch with you. But to do something like thinkorswim, which again, we didn't create the industry. We changed it. But to do that was life-changing and truly once in a lifetime to try to do it again. I said, I have to do, I love challenges. I have to do it just from the challenge perspective. and it's been an amazing, it's really been an amazing ride. You've talked about when you first started investing or anyone that you have to put the time in, 80 hours a week.

27:29I was like, oh, he had a late week. As entrepreneurs, we know that that's not a long week in that situation. That's just the beginning of it. Most people who have entrepreneur-like tendencies are like, hey, I don't want to have a nine to five. I'm like, well, you're going to have a five to nine. You're going to be working constantly. As people start learning these and start investing in it, there are different ways of trading and there's different ways of investing And I'm going to try and get people to understand what it's like to trade in a time of volatility. There's fundamental trading. There's traditional training.

27:54There's different indicators. There's lagging indicators. When you're looking at those type of things and there's all these different robots and all these things that come involved, how do you learn your style of trading that works with all this inundation of information? Great question. And my answer is, again, whatever works for you, keep doing that. Just keep doing it. doesn't make a difference. When people call me, I can't tell how many times I've had people tell me, you know, can I share my strategy with you? And I say, nope, don't care. I said, not being disrespectful. I've got my own. You keep yours.

28:28All I care about is that it's working for you. Now, at the network, it's really interesting because technical and fundamental would be the two most common ways for people to go about making trading decisions. our network is strictly based on math. It's just all math. It's probability based. And to me, math is math. So if somebody wants to go spend time, go watch videos, you'll start to pick up on the trading strategies that our on-air talent use. And it's a lot of large numbers, but their mantra is trade small, trade often. Trade small, trade often. So you're trying to make little pieces along the way rather than hitting that home run.

29:12Nothing better if you happen to buy a stock and it explodes. I mean, it's amazing. But those are few and far between. So to have more of a consistent approach, what do you need to do? Got to be in the game, got to constantly be trading. And all the information, again, free, available, tastylive.com. Go check out the content. So from my perspective, and let's go back to the volatility question because it's perfect for what's going on right now. You and I were talking about before we started, you know, before we started this conversation, you made a comment about, you know, well, a stock's 100 now at 60.

29:48Is this a good time to get in? Or should I, you know, should I be concerned? You know, maybe it's going to go lower. Nobody knows anything. So you don't know anything. I don't know anything. The quote unquote experts know nothing. They can't know where the market's going. So all I can tell you for sure is that if a stock was 100 and now it's 60, 60 is definitely less expensive than 100. So you know you're at least better off than you would have been had you bought the stock at 100. It still doesn't mean that it's a good buy. One of the approaches that I am taking right now, because I do want market exposure, I do want to buy some of these stocks that have been beat up, some of the big names.

30:24So for anybody that has traded options. You will understand this. If you haven't, it's going to probably be a little complicated, but volatility has exploded. Obviously, we're doing this now instead of little chops. So what happens when volatility explodes, market makers, the firms that are making the markets for all these options, they go, wait a minute, I got to get paid for the risk I'm taking because there's so much more volatility now. So the prices, the options go up because they pump volatility into the options. What does that mean? Well, in simple terms, a put gives somebody the right to sell.

31:02One put gives somebody the right to sell 100 shares of stock at a particular price at a particular point in time. If you sell that put rather than buying it, If you sell the put, you now have the obligation to buy 100 shares of stock at that price within the next whatever your period of time is, 45 days, 37 days, whatever it is. So because volatility has gotten pumped up so much, I have not gone out and bought the stocks because in my mind, I'm like, I don't know if they're going higher, they're going lower. I don't need to own the stocks right now, but I'm okay owning the stocks right now. So I'm selling puts below the market and getting paid.

31:44I am selling somebody else insurance. That's the way I explain it. I'm the insurance company. And what I think I'm doing right now is I am selling flood insurance after the flood. That's the easiest way to do it. If somebody's ever tried to buy flood insurance, if you live in a zone that just got flooded, you're going, you either can't get it or it's prohibitively expensive and you're not going to pay whatever they're asking for it. Right. When option volatility gets into, historically, we're in the upper teens. But for years, we were in the low teens. We have just gone through a period where we were basically locked in the 25 to 30 range for a while.

32:25Now we're back in the 20 range. But imagine what that does to the premium. So now, again, I'm selling flood insurance to somebody who just had a flood. I'll take my chances. And I'm going to say, you know what? I'm comfortable buying Apple at whatever price or Google at whatever price. So I'm not doing right at the money. I'm going out of the money. So I'm giving myself a little bit of room. And for me, these are stocks that I'm comfortable owning and I'd love to own down at those prices. So, you know, a lot of people with options don't understand that you put down call up. So you can sell them at different prices in different ways and get in and out of different taxes.

33:04There's a lot of different ways. And with the volatility that we're going to see for at least the next two or three years, at least, is options is something that you double down in and that's something you feel real comfortable with versus, again, the cryptos and the other things? Or where are you putting your assets and your availability? For me, yes, options. Again, primarily on equities that I am looking to own for a longer period of time. but plenty of really good trading opportunities. Just if somebody is just interested in trying to make some, you know, some passive income, when I say passive, it's active, but I'm not saying you're, I'm not saying you're trading every day.

33:43You put a trade on and you let it sit for hopefully, you know, a few weeks and you let the premium come out and then you get out of it and move on to the next trade. So from my perspective and in fairness, if Ethereum got back down when I traded the one time I traded, I bought it a thousand and I sold it on the way up. It got to 4 ,000. And the way coming down, I'm looking, I said, you know what? If it gets down to$1 ,000 range again, I'll buy some. Okay. So I'm not opposed to trading those products. They're just not my go-tos. Right. And I think it also goes back to what you said, you know, being willing to invest only what you're willing to lose and you're going to be a comfortable.

34:17We talk about all the time, if I ask you to sing happy birthday, you could sing it. If I put a live hand grenade in your hands and say sing happy birthday, you're probably not going to do it as well. If you're at the point where you're freaking out on that level, don't do it. And that goes, again, back to my comment of everybody has to figure out what their level is, what their tolerance is for risk. And you will know. If you say, how will I ever know? You will know. And one of my favorite lines is when somebody said, I have no idea how to evaluate risk or reward, so I don't even know what you're talking about.

34:45And I'll say, okay, let me ask you a question. When you cross the street, do you look both ways? And they look at me like, of course I look both ways. I said, okay, then you know how to evaluate risk or reward. 100%. Right. And people don't understand that, you know, they live in their demo trades, which is great. And it's fun to play there and you can do it. The minute you get out of your demo, I remember I did this with Forex. I was like, oh, I'm going to learn Forex. I'm going to trade Forex and be great. And I made fortunes in Forex in a demo account. And then I went live. I was like, oh, OK, this is a different ballgame.

35:12Because same thing, same charts, same environment. But since it was real and I had to pin out of the grenade, I couldn't function anymore. And there's just, it just, it is what it is. You're not alone. And that's why the mantra of the network just rings so true to me. Trade small, trade often. But small is the key. And I learned that my risk came on, to your point of looking back and forth, if I could understand how a road works of what car was going to hit me or not going to hit me, I can invest in it. So I only invest in things that I understand. And regrettably, when I look at stocks or options or puts or calls or Forex or any of that, I don't fully understand how much of it is self-fulfilled prophecy, which like people like, oh, it's Fibonacci.

35:55So it's going to go here. And therefore it's going to do this. And they do that versus how much is actually happening versus what happens when a certain politician says something and then things change radically as well. So for me not having that, I only invest in things that I understand. One of the things I understand not nearly as well as you do is growing companies. And you've done it on a really impressive level and you've walked through and you've done things that are, it's, it's, it's a bit like Gibson hitting the grand slam or hitting the home run. It just, it's wild what you've done. It's really, really impressive.

36:25What are some of the things that you've done and you talked about it and I love that you brought this up and as hard as I pushed you on the opposite way, you immediately went back to the truth, which is it's not just me. You have to hire a team. You have to be surrounded by people that you, you know, you like working with, that you're connected with, or you're doing something fun where you treat them like family. But there's a lot of people who immediately want to go into systematizing and not understanding that you have to build culture and you have to build all those other things along the way.

36:50And they just like, well, we've got AI. I'm just going to systematize it. I'm going to robotic out and shoot it. When you're building a company and you're going to that environment, what are the things that, you know, you sold Thinkorswim and then you get invited back into Tasty. What are the first things you do when you go into this? Okay, I'm going to do this. I'm going to start missing some lunches with the missus. What are some of the first things you do? we need a lot more time to really dive into this one but you know at a at a top line level if you're not truly passionate about the project it's not going to work that's for starters so you have to truly believe in what you are doing you have to really enjoy the people you are working with because there can be some really stressful times along the way and we've had plenty i mean we were close to going out of business early on a couple of times.

37:41And that's really, really alarming when you watch all the work that you've done and you're like, oh my God, it was out of our control and something happened and you're almost out of business. So one of the things that my partner, that Tom and I are really, really good at is pivoting. So I think where most people get into trouble is they get fixated on a concept and they say, here's my concept. It's a widget, It's a gadget, whatever it is. I have a new idea for a widget. Here's my widget. And they keep running into issues, but they don't modify it. And at the end, it doesn't work. And they say, well, you know, the market just was against me.

38:20You know, something just didn't happen. Versus if they had a widget and the market said, you know what? If you make gadgets, we'd be interested in gadgets. We're not interested in widgets right now. You go, great. You know what? I was going to make gadgets and now I'm making gadgets. listen now i want to i'm going to contradict myself so i'm going to say listen to the marketplace because if you don't have something in the marketplace is going to adapt you're not going to go anywhere i don't care how much you believe or how passionate you are about the project having said that as you are building it you need to make sure you are maintaining your vision on what you think this is going to be because if you allow too many forces to come at you you're going to dilute the product and it's not going to be, my guess is it's not going to be what you were hoping it was going to be.

39:07And it's a bit like standing outside the ocean, telling the waves when they're supposed to come in or out. You don't tell the market what to do. So when we launched, when we launched Thinkorswim, it was right after the dot-com bubble. And I remember how many people said to us, oh my God, we feel so badly for you. Couldn't be a worse time to launch a brokerage firm. And my partner and I just looked at each are like, what are you going to do? This is the cards we got dealt. These are our cards. You got to play them. Turned out to be an amazing time because what we quickly realized was people that had accounts at other firms were looking for alternatives because they had issues with their existing firm.

39:43When the market's going straight up and everybody's making money, why are you ever going to change? You're like, I love where I'm trading. I'm making money. What do I need to go look at something new for? So sometimes you turn lemons into lemonade because you look at it and you say, oh my God, what am I going to do? It's a disaster. Sometimes you take a disaster and you turn it around, you turn it in your favor. You go, that was the greatest tailwind I've ever had, as opposed to most people would look at it as a headwind. Right. But you have to pivot your sail. And I think as you're talking before, you've got to be able to move it.

40:11You have to be liquid in that environment. So one of the things that we're good at is we say, look, that MVP, minimum viable product, get it out. Right. Okay. There is no such thing as perfection. So get it out, make sure it's workable, whatever it is, get it out there and you modify as need be. But with the understanding that there is a version one, there's a version two, and there's probably going to be a version 10, 15, 20. One of the things I'm sorry that I didn't. So Woody was our CTO in our first hire and he had the original build for Thinkorswim. And I would love to see what that looks like just because.

40:46Just for fun. Just for fun, because it was probably like this. And then, you know, eventually we built it up to this. So just crazy to be able to see something like that. But we just, you know, you need to be able to evolve. You need to be able to adapt. And I think what most people make the mistake, the first problem for most people is they don't know how to put one foot in front of the other and say, okay, where do I go? So how do I actually get this going? Once you get this going, for most people, the blocker is money. Totally get it. So what you need to do, right? You got to be really careful with whatever money you raise.

41:18Typically it comes from friends and family or your own and you say, all right, I have X number of dollars, whatever you think you're going to need, you're going to need more. Whatever you think, the amount of time you think it's going to build to take to build it, it's going to be longer. So when somebody says I have X number of dollars and it's going to take me a year to do it, I say, you better make sure that that amount of money will get you at least one and a half X, if not two X in time, because you do the worst thing in the world is to have to go out and raise money when you're desperate for money.

41:48So that's the next lesson is if you're fortunate enough to build a business and there are suitors, people want to come out and invest in you, take the money when you don't need it. You get your best valuation from the investor when you don't need it. When you need it, you go, basically, I'll give you whatever I have to give you because otherwise I'm out of business versus if they come to you and you're fortunate enough to have cash flow and say, you know what? I don't really need your money, but I'll take it because it's always good to have some extra money in the bank and you hope you never need it.

42:20That was our first round of funding. We took the funding, didn't need it, but they were really pushing us. And at the time it was the largest investment into a private company in Illinois. We took the money. We never touched it, never needed it, but you know what? Awesome to have. No regrets for having a little bit of dilution because it gave us the peace of mind that said, look, if we do have a hiccup, we're going to be more than fine. So when you're going through that and you say, okay, I've got the money and I want to hire my first Woody, right? You want to hire that first environment of hiring the employees that become family.

42:52It's really a challenge for a lot of people. How do you weed out the people? Is there a process when you're trying to build these type of things and build the team that's going to be with you and be in the foxholes with you to survive the hits? Because they're going to come. How do you find those individuals? Is there a process that you perfected? so I definitely take a less traditional approach with my hiring and I've hired hundreds if not a couple thousand I've heard a lot of people and as I said I don't it's like in my wheelhouse is not to self-promote I don't miss on hires by bringing in people I might miss on not hiring somebody but that I will never know for me and you made a comment earlier in the conversation about culture.

43:37And I think for most people, culture is a buzzword. They say, oh, we have to have a really good culture. I actually do create great cultures within the businesses and people have asked me, how do you do it? And my answer is I just lead by doing what I do. I'm just myself. You can't teach culture. You can hopefully get people to adopt the culture. But the culture that we have, that we had at Thickerson, that we have at Tasty, is you try to hire really good people and you really challenge them. Now, when I say challenge them, my partner, the way I describe my partner is he lives to work and I work to live.

44:16So to me, I want to go out and enjoy a lot of other things in life. So I try to be as effective as I can be in the hours that I'm working. But then when I'm not working, then I go on and do the other things that I want to do. So what we do is we challenge people, we push people, but what we also do is we give people enough rope that they can go out and say, I get to go do this. And I challenge people and I get people to do things that I'll say, I want you to go do this. I'll say, I can't. And I'll say, why can't you? And they say, because I've never done it. And I say, okay, well, I'm not going to ask you to do something that I can't fix with time and money.

44:51And when I tell somebody that, and I say, I trust you, I believe in you to go do this. All of a sudden they go like this, their head explodes. They become a better employee. They become, you know, just a better, better, better, better. And it's a win, win, win. Whereas most managers, I think what most managers try to do is keep everybody in a box because they say, I don't want you showing me up at some point in time. So you just stay over here and work in your little world. We're the exact opposite of that. Somebody has an argument or it can make a compelling argument for a project that they want to go work on.

45:22We'll say, go ahead, go take a shot. Let's see what you can do. When you run into the idea of risk, I get it on the financial side. I get it when you're investing, how do you handle the risks in business environments when you've got to take those leaps of faiths? How do you find that balance? Because when I'm risking my money, that's pretty easy. If I start urinating on myself during a trade, I probably have invested too much money into this one. How do you do it in a business environment? How do you manage those risks? Because sometimes, as you said, you've been a business owner before, people don't get that we're the last people that get paid.

45:53We're the last on the line. We're the last people at the buffet. How do you manage those? My mom, she used to say about me that I could win an Academy Award because you can't tell anything about whether, you know, how my day has been. I have a massive risk tolerance. I don't know if it's good or bad, but it's what it is. And it's, I am who I am. So I can take crazy amounts of risk that to me are calculated. So I'm not like, I'm not a big casino player or sports better. I mean, for fun, you just dabble a little bit here and there, but I'll basically bet everything I have on myself. So when we see something, my partner and I have had plenty.

46:34We've been together. It's a long time. This is our, I think our 36th year together, which is crazy. And we've had some of these, some of these, and obviously some huge successes. But from my perspective, you have to have the stomach. You have to have the internal fortitude to say, I can tolerate not getting paid. I can tolerate this, this, this for some period of time. Obviously, you can't go into perpetuity without getting paid. But when we started Thinkerswim, we took basically a bare minimum salary and we just bet on the upside. So we had stock in the company. We said, you know, if this works, the salary is going to be irrelevant.

47:13it. So I can't tell you what problems somebody's going to run into, but most problems are solvable. And what I say to my team, I say, don't worry about making a mistake because typically if people start panicking about they're going to make a mistake, they make bad decisions because I don't want to do this because even though it might be better in the long run, if it doesn't go well, it's going to look badly on me. That's a bad, for me, that's a bad mindset. So my feeling is take a lot of risks, but like in baseball, so long as you only have two strikes, you're still in the batter's box. It's when you get your third strike that you're going back to the bench.

47:50So you need to be careful. And again, calculated risks. So there are things in one of the comments I've said to my kids since they were little, control the things that you can control because you're going to have to deal with things out of your control that are going to take a lot of your bandwidth. The ones that are going to trip you up are the ones that are out of your control. so you've got to make sure that you've got some you know some juice left in the tank that you say okay i can go navigate that problem now my partner and i it's also really really important if you do have a partner pick somebody that has a different skill set you don't need somebody that you don't need somebody that does it's the same as you because you can do what you can do so my partner's skill set is very different than my skill set but we have mad respect for each other to the point where we don't even need to talk you just go do you i'll go do me when we need to talk we'll come back together, we'll figure it out.

48:41And that's why it's worked for as long as it has worked. So when looking for, first of all, you said when hiring people. So hiring people, I will finish with this. Hiring the wrong person is worse than not hiring somebody. So if you are not sure, don't do it. Because when I say it's worse, what happens is it takes a while to figure out that you have the wrong person. Once you have the wrong person, now you got to put time and effort in to figure out how you're going to get rid of the person. Then once you do that, then you got to start the process over to backfill that role. So again, hiring the wrong person worse than not hiring somebody.

49:17Now, going back to my partner, I can't stress enough about how critical it is that if you do have partners, pick partners that you literally would hand your checkbook or your credit card to and say, I have total confidence with what you're going to do with this. I think the best advice I've heard about partners is hire the person that if you fell into a coma for three years can make sure that your kids eat. And if that's not your person, you walk away from it. Really, really simple. I totally agree with that. As people are walking into this, if there was one piece of advice when they stop by, and obviously I'm going to ask on how they can get ahold of you.

49:50If they're looking at in their personal lives to how they move forward, and then how to deal with the times right now, which I will be as politically correct as I can are unprecedented is the nicest way I can say what's going on right now. What is the piece of advice that you would walk in and say, Hey, this is what's going on. This is what you should do next. As far as investing goes, we're seeing investing and also personal life. Cause there's a lot of people right now who haven't seen, you know, you've seen it from 87 all the way up to now, right? We're walking into this and we're like, we get it's impressive.

50:22Where's the world going? What are we doing? As far as investing goes against somebody who has some disposable income, obviously if you need your money to live, then you don't have disposable income, But hopefully if you've been working for a few years and you've been able to put a little money away, I can't tell you how important it is to just put money away on a regular basis, whether it's every couple of weeks, whether it's every month. And it could be$50. It could be$100. It could be$500. Whatever. Just start getting money to work in the stock market. You know, we talked about earlier talking about the S &Ps.

50:54So you own an S &P 500 or the QQQs. That's the NASDAQ. Those are really simple. You can buy fractionals. You can go out and buy$25 worth. So it's critical that people are engaged. If you have a portfolio, if you have more money right now to do something, take a look at what I was just talking about earlier. Might not be the right strategy for you, but for me, selling puts in stocks that have elevated volatility, selling puts that are out of the money. I'm typically looking around at 25 delta. So I've got some cushion in case I'm wrong. But again, do it only if you want to buy the shares. So don't go do it because, oh, well, the market was down.

51:35Now it's up again. And it's just going to keep going higher. Nobody knows where the market's going. And you've made the comment that we're in for many years of volatility. And I agree with you. Are we going to be higher than this in the next year or two? Maybe. Are we going to be lower in the next year or two at some point in time? Probably. So don't pick one spot and say, I'm just going all in today. because I think today's the day, but also try not to panic. You know, so the S &Ps went from 60, almost 6 ,200 down to 4 ,800. You know, I'm sure there were people that are like, I just want out.

52:08Just get me out. Now we're back up to, right to 5 ,800. You go, then you probably have positions that are too big if that's the approach. There's also, if we do enter another 15 plus year bull markets, there's nothing wrong with having mental or actual stops in. So if you do buy stocks and you have a great run, you could just keep raising your stops. So if you buy a stock at a hundred and you know, a handful of years, it's now 200. You can say, you know what? I'm going to let it go. But if it gets to 180, I'm out. I'm going to get out. And that's, if you put an actual stop in on the stock, your broker will take that order.

52:45And you just say, you look, set it and forget it. I Coming back to the business side, if somebody has the opportunity to go start a business and that has been a dream to do it, I can't stress enough. If you have the ability to do it, go do it. Even if it means that you have your regular job and you're doing this on nights and weekends to get going, don't have a regret in your life in 15, 20, 30 years to say, I really wish I would have done it. What's the worst thing that happens is you fail. And you go get a job. Worst thing that happens is you have to go work for someone else. Everyone ignores everything else you just said, Scott, for the last 30, 40 minutes here.

53:28Go do it. Find your own way. Just please, for the love of everything. There is nothing as scary as it can be. And it can be scary. When you only eat what you kill, that's very different than getting a paycheck and a corporate credit card. but there is nothing in the business world that is more satisfying than starting a business and watching it grow and develop and build into something and my last comment to that is if you do get to that point and you do have suitors you have people that are knocking on your door that want to invest in your company somebody told us this early on as a private equity firm with with uh when we were taking money for thinkorswim we did not go with this firm but one of the comments from the partner of private equity firm said whoever you go with Make sure you get whatever you want in writing before you sign the deal.

54:16It's really easy to fall in love with the concept of, oh my God, these people want to invest money in our business. Just remember, when they do that, you're going to lose some, if not most, of the control in your business. And that's something you need to think about because if you don't want to lose control, don't take the money. If you want to take the money, get what you can. I'm not saying they're going to give you everything, but don't say, I'll wait until I sign the deal and then go back and ask for something else. you're not getting it. With the last thing I want to ask regarding the change of control, AI is coming in and it's changing the world.

54:49And there's a lot of different people who have different opinions about it. What is your opinion about AI, especially for future business owners and investors in the future? From what little I know, amazing, awesome. And I think it really is going to change the way that many of us operate going forward. Having said that, I don't see it is going to be the technology or the technological feature that's going to put people out of business and change everybody's lives and nobody's going to have a job anymore. I don't see that happening. Will some jobs go away? Yes, but that's just, you know, that's just technology moving forward.

55:27You know, when you hear about people complaining, well, I might lose my job, you go back and look at jobs that we've lost over time due to technological advancement. So, you know, you have, name things. When the internet took off, you know, Sears Roebuck doesn't exist anymore. Kmart doesn't exist anymore. But now all these other jobs, people are making money from sitting at home on eBay. So I remember when dot coms were starting to show up on ads on billboards. It was weird to see ad email. I mean, email addresses and web addresses on billboards. So a lot of jobs were lost. A bazillion more jobs were created.

55:59It's going to happen again. That's right. So and that goes back to being flexible. So whatever your job is now, maybe part of that job or all of it, modifies, changes, goes away. It doesn't mean that there aren't going to be other opportunities. And, you know, for me, I try to learn something every day. I try to pick up some piece of information that's new information for me. And as scary as it can be, I try to recreate or reinvent myself in different ways and say, how can I go do this better or do this better? What can I do to improve? And if we have something that is available, and literally you get it on your phone right now, so you can get AI anywhere and the models are just going to become better and better and better, I would try to embrace it.

56:41I wouldn't run from it. It's not leaving, that's for sure. So if someone wanted to embrace you, if someone wanted to track you down and do all that other than going to Velvet Taco, if someone wanted to embrace you and connect you, how do people track you down? How do they connect with you? Email is the best. It's scott, S-C-O-T-T, at tastytrade.com. And if they want to learn more about Tasty Trade and all the education, you guys are doing 15 hours a day, where do they go? So tastytrade.com is the brokerage side. We do have help and learning center. But if you really want to watch the videos and check out all the on-air talent, that would be tastylive.com.

57:15T-A-S-T-Y, live, L-I-V-E, dot com. Great stuff. Scott, I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for coming on. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. That's a wrap on this episode. from surviving market crashes to building billion-dollar brokerages, Scott proved that success isn't about predicting the future. It's about learning to take risk, staying engaged, and playing the long game. Don't just watch the markets. Get in the game. Because if you're not trading on proven principles, you're just gambling with guesses.