Insights from a Seasoned Stock Trader: Strategies and Lessons – Serge Berger - Episode 041

Hello and welcome to the Consistent Profits Podcast brought to you by Inside out trading and Brian McAvoy where the focus is on consistency because when you have the consistent part down, profits become easy. Hello everybody. This is Brian McAvoy with another episode of the Consistent Profits podcast. I'm excited today to be interviewing Serge Berger. He's creator of the steadytrader.com and also blue Marlin Advisor. We're going to be talking about both today. Thanks so much for being on the podcast, Serge.

It's great to be here, Brian. Thank you.

Now, for those of you not already familiar with Serge, he's been an active trader since 1998. During his career he's been a financial analyst. He's dealt in fixed income instruments at J.P. morgan and, and was a proprietary trader in equities, equity options and futures. Having had exposure to a range of different asset classes allowed him to identify which asset classes and strategies best fit his goal of achieving consistent profits. Over the years, Surge has created a trading methodology that divides markets into different timeframes and characters, allowing him to more clearly and without emotions determine the strategies to apply in different situations. Uses a repeatable, rules based approach to the markets. Now, along with being a seasoned veteran, Surge is a, an investment advisor and we're going to speak to both of those today. So again, thanks for being here and being game for the interview.

Serge, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Now, you know, as far as getting into all that you have, I mean, trading is very unusual occupation, you know, not very very, We're a small percentage of the population. So how did you actually get your start in trad?

I started trading, I was a, I was a golfer in high school and then went to university for that as well. But when I was playing in high school, I used to, of course, you know, on the weekends and in the evenings play, play at the golf course at home, you know, and then I would play with, with these gentlemen that were, you know, rather well off and you know, they were seemingly much older, much younger now that I think about it, than they seem to me at the time. So I think, and I don't think anyone were a lick over 50, but they were just playing golf all day and they had these TVs in their cart and they were on their phones, remember back in the days were like, this is the dinosaur brick phone. And I just, and they were, you know, watching these squiggly lines on TV between golf shots. It was, it was like futuristic. And anyway, I got into it then and I ended up actually Managing a little bit of money around these with, for one of the guys, a little bit together with him in high school. And then I went on to college, went on to. Went the whole investment banking thing, worked at J.P. morgan, you know, as an investment banker, and then moved on from there to, to the, the fund management side, which in, in many ways I reside to this day at Blue Marlin Advisory.

Okay. Now, but. So when did you actually start trading your own account, though?

Oh, my own account. Well, I didn't really have much money until like, college.

Okay.

And even then it wasn't much. Right. So. But yeah, no, probably, probably in college. Right. But I think, you know, one of the things about trading and investing is, is there's a steep learning curve and it's actually a quite long learning curve. And so I was fortunate not to blow up my fortune too many times and get my hopes up too much until later on. We always end up blowing up a couple accounts. I think that's par for the course, literally. But. But yeah, I think I was, I was fortunate and unfortunate, many with different ways, you know, it's. Life has ups and downs, but, but fortunate enough that I was able to learn, like, really see the inside of the market through the lens of the investment banking at JP Morgan right through the great financial crash crisis. And, and you know, that really taught me a lot of things about kind of principles we live and die by right now on the fund management side.

Oh, okay, cool. Well, so you've had an interesting career path, and so you've had some unique, you know, looks at the market, been able to learn from some different people, you know, how they perceive it and everything. I've heard you make the comment, or actually there's a couple of things I wanted to ask about. The first one would be heard you on one of your recent YouTube videos. You, you posed the question, is the golden age for stocks over? And so if I'm curious because, yeah, a lot of people are kind of asking the same question just because the run we've been on, but what we're seeing lately. So if you could expand on that, that would be excellent.

Sure. Well, as you obviously know, we've had a big run largely due to, you know, lots of essentially fiscal spending and monetary policy, ultra loose. Ultimately, interest rates went near zero in the United States. In parts of Europe, they actually had negative interest rates. And then that came to an abrupt halt about a year and a half ago. And so we're now at a point where interest rates are in absolute terms and historically speaking not all that high.

True.

The problem is that we went from zero or near zero to five and a half percent over the course of 18, 19 months. And it's that shock to the system that, that resetting that I think a lot of people are not aware of what that historically at least has done and meant for future returns in the equity market. And oh by the way, the S P500 has actually gone nowhere in two years. Zero. Right. So I think a lot of people are just not quite aware of what is actually happening because there's only seven stocks that are driving, you know, things higher. Like even just the other day everyone made a big deal. CNBC had like a special session about how amazing the stock market is on a day when the Russell was down 1 1/2 percent, the S P was up by this much and the equal weight S P was that way. It was just. It's laughable. Right. Notice I'm not saying this is the end of the world and the stock market's going to crash. That can happen. That's not my base case. I just think we need to understand that in a higher interest rate environment, higher than we have for the past 10 years, things are going to reset. And oh yeah, that is what I mean by the golden nature stock. Which does not mean that stocks, some stocks can't do great, some stocks will do amazingly well, but it won't be the S&P 500, most likely.

Yeah, well, just some. I mean you mentioned a couple of things that are been really pertinent to what we've seen over the last several years, like the near zero interest rates. I know one thing a lot of corporations were doing was they were borrowing because it was almost free money to buy back their stocks which made the, you know, the, like the CEO and everybody look real good because you know, they're able to float their stock prices and so they're getting their bonuses and it's like no, they're not really adding value. But then you've also. And so the easy money has made it easy for a lot of corporations that now with things being more traditionally priced, it's gonna be a little more challenging because. Yeah, like you mentioned, I remember growing up the standard common interest rate was around like 4, between 4 and 7%. It kind of floated around in that range and then when it dropped down near zero, that was the anomaly. It just lasted for a long time until everybody got used to it. So for there to be some interest. But yeah, it's, it was the jump that really had the Big impact and how the, you know, how that affected the bond market as well. The jump in interest and, and bond yield.

It's exactly right. And you know, people's, people's memories run short. What we know is that the typical do it yourselfer or retail investor at home tends to do an asset allocation of longer term money based on what the stock market did the past three months. Right. So that tells you a little bit something about that. Most and most do yourself do a lot worse by the way, than, than the people who have at least some sort of an investment advisor. Which we can always talk about that later. But let me just say one other thing about this, if you don't mind about the, the question or you pose about the golden age of four stocks. First of all, we didn't really have much of a golden age for stocks to begin with. There's only a few stocks that actually did really well the past 10 years. That's another thing. In the United States that's true. The German DAX is unchanged for, I don't even know. It's like, it's ridiculously long because the German DAX has dividends calculated in there. If it didn't have dividends in, the DAX would be flat for like about as long as you can look back like with a reasonable time frame. And it's not that much different for the S P found. So a lot of people are just not aware that the average stock hasn't done much. The other thing that I would say about this, I just got back from a conference a few weeks ago. It was an investment advisory conference for, for, for investment advisors and money managers. And I was walking around these sort of the convention hall, you know, the booths where they offer stuff. And I was looking at all these different funds and prospects and brochures and you know, every single one of them I flipped through, went back, you know, showed us a track record, you know, you got to have a track record. And then I, I, we had lunch, had lunch with a bunch of other fund managers. And I was like, did you guys notice something in that, in that, in that convention hall over there? And they're like, no. I was like, did you realize that every single one of these brochures went back exactly 11 years? Like none of them went back more than a decade. Like did the stock market like start 11 years ago? No, but the stock market, and I'm going to use the bubble word here loosely, right, but the vertical leap started 11, 12 years ago at this point. So every damn asset, excuse my language, in the World there basically went straight up because rates went down. Right. I mean, it's laughable. The whole thing is laughable. Now it's not to mean that we can't make money from that. In fact, the easiest trade that the best trade over the past 11 years, until about two years ago, was to just buy the S P was amazing. Right. That's why everyone felt wealthy. But now we've gone sideways in two years and people are way underweight bonds and they don't want to buy bond because they think it's boring to say, hey, I can buy Nvidia. So anyway, I'm going off on a tangent. I know, sorry. But I hope that at least somewhat addresses your question you're asking before.

Oh, yeah, yeah, no, that was, that was excellent. And, and yeah, entertaining as well. Well, as far as the gold nature. Well, just in general, I mean, because one other statement that you made that I, I definitely wanted to see, you know, what you're, what you, what it is that you're, you're saying behind it. I've heard you make the comment that most people don't understand how the stock markets really work. And so. Yeah. What, what did you mean by that? Because I mean, of course most people, you know, they look at the stock market, they've, they've learned what they've learned, have been exposed to it, what they have, and so they feel like they have a decent handle on it. But as we know, that's really easy to do with a lot of things and still be missing some critical information or perspective. So. What. Yeah, if you would enlighten us a little bit on that.

Yeah, there's a lot of different points on that I'll try to highlight on sort of the most, the most interesting ones if I can kind of figure out the order. The first thing I think would be that I think there's a miss. A big misunderstanding about timing.

Okay.

So like for example, I was. This was about four years ago, it's just before the pandemic. I got a call from CNBC, was pretty late in the day, like a 5pm day or 4:30 call. And they wanted me to go on and be bearish on apple. That would, that would. They were telling me what my view was.

Oh really?

And then I was like, okay, well first of all, I'm not bearish apple, but let me hear you out.

Right.

And they said, oh, by the way, you're a day trader. I'm like, I'm also not a day trader, but whatever. And I was like, okay, well what's the point? They're like, well, you have to be. You have to make this bearish case on Apple against this other guy who's long term bullish, and his name is Kevin o' Leary. It's some guy in cnbc, right? And I was like, okay, well, first of all, that's dumb because that's not my view. And second of all, what's even dumber is that he's long term, I'm supposed to be short term. That's like that. You can't even have a conversation that way, right? So I would argue that most conversations on cnbc, this is not an anti CNBC con, by the way. I think there's fine content there as well. Not everything, of course, but you know, most conversations could basically stop, right? Wouldn't even happen if you could all agree on the same time frame. But most of these guys on these shows, they're just like, you know, this, that, and the other one guy's talking 10 years, the other guy's taking 10 minutes, right? You can't have a conversation that way. So I think there's a misunderstanding of what time frame is. If you ask the average investor at home, are you bullish or bearish? Apple, they will, they will actually give you an answer. The problem is you didn't, they didn't specify the time frame. Is it for the next two days, two weeks, two months, two years? They're just bullish. That means nothing. So that's one thing. Along the same lines, if we dig a little bit deeper, is understanding of where equity, equity market returns come from or your question was about the equity market. Well, first of all, the equity market has a correlation of like 0.95 to something called money supply. And there's a lot more details there sort of through, you know, a quarter over quarter at least or year over year basis. So money supply drives pretty much explains most stock market returns. Most people don't even know money flows. They don't have to know what it is, but they should at least make an effort to understand where the stock market is from. The other thing is that fundamentals don't matter much in the, in the near to an immediate term. So you can have a pristine balance sheet company, but money flows will drive the intermediate things. Like for example, as we're recording this a few days ago or the week and a half ago, we've had a really massive squeeze in the equity market. A lot of that's based, technical and really based on flows. So, you know, making that again, it's a time frame question. So when I say not understanding the market, they don't understand what drives the, the different, the different time frames in the markets. And that's, you know, and then, and then the third thing I should, if I could add on that is really not even recognizing that there are other assets in the world than stocks. Right now the stock market is important, but it's like about the fourth largest market in the world. So you have the bond market first and you have, then you have, depending on how you take swaps into that market and everything. And then you have currency markets. You know, all those markets are way larger than the equity market. The equity market's important, but it's not the only market in commodity and so on and so forth. So, you know, not what I started doing. If you number about 10, you know, about eight, nine years ago, I started like walking people through what it, what it looks like on, on a, on a, on a, at least what I do on a professional's desk, I guess, looking at the markets and you know, they couldn't believe that I was looking at the dollar index and not at all looking at the equity index when I woke up. But I was telling them if I look at, if I know what the dollar is doing, I can more or less tell you with pretty good accuracy what the bond market's doing, what the equity market's doing, and probably what some commodities are doing. But it was mind blowing to them to understand that the returns don't come from your favorite 50 day moving average on Apple. Right. And I draw a simple line and then I go crazy on stock twits and tell everyone how amazing my research is. But actually that is a pretty complex darn thing we're trying to do, you know.

Huh. Very cool. Yeah. And some interesting perspectives, especially you bringing up the money supply now. Part of it. I mean, and for anybody who goes, and Google's money supply, if you haven't heard of it before, there are different money supplies that you can reference. So generally are you looking at like the M1 or M2? The M3 is kind of a ghost out there.

Yeah.

I mean, what are you generally referencing when you, when you're saying that the money.

Yeah, I, I typically, I typically will look at, we'll look at M2 and then I am, I'm just to be clear, I'm not a doctorate here on this kind of stuff. I just see the correlations. I've always followed them as a, you know, I cut my teeth on the fixed income market. That's where I started as a bond. Bond guy. And so you, you tend to look more at that, those kind of things. But yeah, it's general, just M2 and then there's, and then there's also the velocity of money, you know, is another thing you can look at that tends to be a bit more accurate. And again, I don't try to be a doctor on this. I'm not, you know, this. I just think a general idea of it is, is good enough. If you pull, if you go to the St. Louis Fed website, if anyone cares to do that, have a look at that and type in M2 money supply and, and then add a chart of the S P500 or do it on your favorite charting platform, if you have a decent charting platform like a Bloomberg or some of the other tools out there. And you'll see it's just the same chart. And by the way, we've now had a lowering in M2 money supply. Like actually it coming down like not stagnating for the first time ever. Like ever, ever. We've literally never had that before. And so it'll be interesting to see what happens to the stock market. I don't have an answer.

Well, okay, on that note, because I noticed when I, when I first learned about money supply years ago, I found it interesting. Just like with inflation, you know, CPI and all that kind of stuff, a lot of it all depends on what they're including in, in calculating the number because they change the definitions from time to time.

Yes. Yeah, just like the CPI basket, which is basically irrelevant in many ways, but, you know.

Yeah, well. But no, well, I mean, as far as bringing up money supply and money velocity, that's, that's a topic in and of itself that actually is very cool. If you're interested or for anybody listening, we're not going to get into it here, but just look up, you know, the velocity of money or money velocity. It's actually a really cool topic and the whole, the whole field is very interesting and does have some impact on some things that you wouldn't, you wouldn't think about or, you know, you weren't aware of. So you might want to look that up. But anyway, no, with the, with the money supply, I find that really interesting, but it makes absolute sense because like when, you know, the pandemic hit a couple of years ago and they're, you know, they're printing money and dumping it into the system and all that kind of stuff, I was, some people were coming to me and they're, they're like worried, you know, it's like, Brian, I got my money invested over here. You know, I'm kind of nervous if we had hyperinflation or whatever because they were seeing the parallels between. Yeah. You know, the, the massive money printing and, and the blowing up of the money supply with other currencies, you know, historically that have failed because it definitely, you know, or directly due to that. And so to see it actually shrinking now, to me that's. That almost like is a reflection back to back in 1929 when J.P. morgan kind of engineered the Great Depression and the main trigger on that was collapsing the money supply that killed all the smaller banks. He had enough in reserves between it with his bigger banks that he'd go around buy all the small ones up. But the thing was killing the businesses in the economy was the money supply dried up. And so, yeah, you're bringing up the money supply as, as a driving factor. That's. Yeah, that's excellent. Very cool that you pay attention to that.

When I, if you ever want to read a good book and anyone. It's a, it's, it's actually more of a, it's more of an encyclopedia in terms of its size. When I first started working at JPMorgan, I was a young buck. Couldn't, you know, green behind the ears. It was ridiculous. And this big. I'll never forget. I think only saw him twice thereafter. Big managing director with like, you know, big tie and like, it was, it was just, it was very intimidating. And he just pounded this massive book on my desk and I had literally more or less just sat down and over the course of the next three years, took me a long time to read it because it's, it's a big one. I read it. It's called the House of Morgan. I think it's what it's called, or the House that Morgan Built or the House of Morgan, one of those two. And it's basically the J.P. morgan story and involves the whole thing, you know, and basically how he, you know, some people will say that he kind of ended World War II and, and this is not my words. Right. I, I wasn't alive back then anyway. Just really interesting how a banker at that point in time, you know, way, way, way back from now, with communication being basically, you know, nowhere near is today, was able to have such a global influence. Really. Just fantastic.

Oh, yeah, yeah, indeed. Yeah, I, I can imagine that the book on Morgan's an interesting read because yeah, he, he made some big things happen that, that affect that actually still Affect all of us today. Wasn't he also involved in the creation of the Federal Reserve act that.

I don't know.

I'm thinking that he was.

I wouldn't be surprised. I mean, this guy was everywhere. It's, it's just a fantastic story and I'm planning on reading it again. Again. It's just, it's a big one. Was fantastic, huh?

Okay. Yeah, I'm sorry, I didn't, I don't mean to take, take it, take us down a rabbit hole here.

No, no.

Body supply and everything. That actually is very, very, very cool. But it is worthwhile information though, and, and understandings that, you know, we don't just have the markets and they're there and they're in this isolated bubble. There are other significant factors that influence and sometimes drive the markets that, that aren't necessarily apparent to most, you know, your everyday person. And so it's good that you're bringing these things up. And right along with that, one thing that we talked briefly about is of course, you know, this, this, you know, this podcast is about trading and trading is, you know what I mean? Of course that's why everybody's here because people are traders. But the, you know, you and I were talking about the importance that, you know, for people to, you know, not have all their eggs in a trading basket. They, they, with their, with their wealth, they really need to be probably, you know, if they're going to be wise, you know, especially with the long term plan. Don't, don't be betting the farm on trading. Trading should be, you know, kind of off to the side, but you want to actually be managing the better part of your wealth and you know, hopefully with some help and it's fun because here, now we can, and I got to throw the question at this because it's been baiting me ever since we started here. If you would just share your views on the difference between financial planners and investment planners.

Yeah, well, the difference between a financial planner or a financial advisor. The. The what? The. We can play with the words here. Right. But I'll just use the words that I use, if you don't mind. So a financial advisor is typically someone who will make you a financial plan. They will asset, allocate you money according to what, you know, the. For the big firm they work for tells them to. Which means basically you have three buckets and that's it. Right? So nothing is tailored. And you know, they'll send you a statement and they'll ask you how your dog is and whatever and that's great, right? That's a financial advisor and that's, that's important. You need a financial advisor, but that's not an investment advisor. An investment advisor typically is actually only available to people who have north of $10 million. Like Goldman Sachs doesn't take people, I think, unless they have at least liquid 20 million. And so it's typically reserved for that. Like we at Blue Marlin offer that for much, much, much more normal people. But what an investment advisor does is they will actually, they're investment specialists. They're not there to. I mean, we make financial plans. We have people who do that for us. That's not me, that's not my game. But we have people who can do that. But it's investment advisors, right? So like we're there to actually, for example, assist people even if they want to trade with some of their money, right? So we'll allocate their money. We're in charge of the investments, specifically investments. But if they have a trade idea or something they want to call, they call us. If they call their financial advisor, that financial does not know anything about the markets. In fact, I'll tell you, we have a lot of subscribers at the Study Trader that are investment financial advisors because they don't get the information they need. It's 100% true. They don't get the information they need from the company, the big bank that they work for. And so they need better information to advise their clients with. You know, So I think people need to understand a little bit more what an investment advisor and how important is, particularly for the trading community, which of course you attract here, right? Like guys really consider an investment advisor. Like an investment advisor. Note the word here. It's not a financial advisor. It's someone who will call you with ideas. Someone you can call if you have questions, right? Not every five minutes, but, you know, certainly several times a month if you have to. And there's a huge difference between investment advice and a newsletter, right? So newsletters are great. That's information, that's research. You do that, I do that. That's great. The problem is we cannot give you investment advice but an investment advisor, which is why we, we create a Blue Marlin advisor for that. It's an actual registered advisor. We are ready to be able to give actual advice. Like, Joe, you have the so and so much in your portfolio. We think you should buy this and this much like an actual amount of this and this call or whatever, right? That kind of thing. We can. Very good grounding. And I Think, and I think a lot of people don't understand how the trading stuff correlates with their broader investments. And, you know, as you say, you know, most people should. No one really, as far as I'm concerned, should be trading anywhere near more than 20% of their money. Like, I talked to our hedge fund networks and everything every day. There's not a single person that's a professional investor that I've ever come across that has more than 10, maybe 20% of their assets that they trade with. Like, not even, not even close yet. The investing public is still out there trying to live off of that dream. Now, again, trading is. I do it every day, right. But I do it with smaller amounts of money. And I think people are starting to wake up to that a little bit, too. So as we speak here today, Robinhood announced their numbers. I think the stock is down about 15, because guess what? No one's trading anymore. Right. Because it's, it's, it, it's, it's hard. There's wonderful opportunities every single day.

Right.

But as long as we have to keep in mind, it's a risk management exercise, you know, and trading is great and we, again, we, we do it, we want to do it, but let's do it with a certain amount of capital. Not every penny we have.

Oh, yeah. Well, another, another way to look at it, because I, I preach all the time. You know, it's an old wisdom, but people put, being able to put it in a context that it's actionable. You know, you've heard the wisdom, I'm sure. You know, treat your trading as a business been around forever, but for nobody, I mean, for somebody who's never started their own business or owned or run a business, they don't really have what that. They don't have a concept of what that even actually means. And so it's like, yeah, if, if, you know, you're working a job, you know, you got your career, you've been there for 20 years, and it's like, yeah, you know, I'm kind of tired of this. I want to strike out on my own. You wouldn't take all of your money and sink it into, you know, like, if you wanted to open a surf shop or a restaurant or whatever, you wouldn't take every penny you've got and dump it into that. You would take a little bit of your wealth and get, get the business up and running and. Same thing you would want to do with trading. Yeah, like, like you were saying, you don't want to take the bulky wealth, you want to have it to be a small percentage because trading actually is a business. It's not investing, it's, it's an investment in that business. But you're trading just like if you're trading any other goods or services, it's a great, it's an ongoing regular activity where you're buying and selling for profit. It's not long term investing. And so if you, but you have to treat it like a business. And if you look at it from that perspective, it's like, yeah, if, if I'm going to take my wealth, I'm only going to take a little bit and risk it on this business. I mean, absolutely.

And as far as, you know, like you're all about little, it's in your name. Right. The consistency of, of, of trading. And so I guess question for you, if you don't mind, what do you think about, do you see people struggling with the concept of the non linearity of returns?

Oh, sure.

Meaning. Meaning people have this expectation that they're just going to make money every week, every month, every quarter and they're not aware that that does not exist. Like there's always big drawdown and big is relative. Right. But drawdowns and it doesn't matter where you are in June, it's more important where you are in December. If you go calendar, do you kind of come across that?

Oh, sure, yeah. And again, a lot of it is it all depends on how you set up your business, the strategy that you use. Because, because with any business, I mean, even if you wanted to get say real grand, let's say, you know, you don't even want to open a restaurant, you want to open a pizza place, there's still 20 different ways to run that business. Business models you could have. And so the same thing with trading and what a lot of people don't realize is, you know, they'll look at any business, you know, like they drive by or you know, retail, you know, establishments, and they're thinking that those, you know, trading is different from that because we have this huge uncertainty in the markets. But every business has potentially huge uncertainty to deal with. You got uncertainty, you know, is your staff going to show up every day? Is the government going to shut you down on Covid, one of your suppliers going to crap out? Is the city going to decide to, you know, build in front of your parking lot? You know, three months, you never know what kind of random event can have a serious impact on your business. So all businesses have, you know, a, an element of Uncertainty with traders, it's a little more of a daily basis. But there are ways to mitigate that, that uncertainty and the swings depending on how you go about your trading business. And like, for a lot of traders, one of the best ways to mitigate it really is to keep their per trade risk low. That's one of the best ways to mitigate the swings. I mean, if you're betting, you know, if you're, if you're going 5% in 5, 5% of your account on every trade, you're going to see some big account swings. But if you're, if you're only risking a half percent, you can have 10, 10 losing trades in a row and it's only knocking you down 5%. So you're not going to have as, as big a swings on a per trade basis. But a lot of it, yeah, it all depends on how you strategize your business, how you, how you're going to, you know, your goals from the, you know, for the business, how much time you're going to put into it, how well you're going to skill yourself up, the model that you're going to put in place, all that kind of stuff so that there are a lot of variables in getting it sorted out. But you know, as far as the linearity, back to your question, a lot of people, they come from a career where they've only worked for other people their entire life and so they have kind of that employee mindset. I put in my time, I get a paycheck and it's extremely linear. Okay, maybe I get overtime if I'm, you know, if they're working the extra hours, but that's about it. And with business and trading, yeah, you can see some, some exponential moves that are very non linear. So it isn't equated to effort or resources spent as far as your returns. Sure.

Yeah. Well, we come across a lot of people that, that are either still quite young in their career and they just have very little life experience. I'm talking about, you know, kids, usually boys in their 20s somewhere. So it's nearly impossible to describe that to them just because there's a lack of life experience. However, we do see even more people just because they tend to have some more wealth in sort of the 50 to 65 bracket that want to retire. As you say, they kind of had it, they want to retire early and they come in with the same expectation now they have more life experience. But I really always try very hard to, to warn them of the non linearity of returns. And as you say, a lot of ways to mitigate that. One way is to knob at the farm. Other ways is to, you know, use strategies that actually have hope. Most strategies, believe it or not, don't have hope.

You know, true, hilarious, but true.

Yeah, yeah, it's sadly hilarious. Right. But, but I think that's, that's one of the things where I always want to be. I'm always very careful and, and usually when I say that I would like to be the fly on the wall and see what the reactions are of these people because a lot of times they're just phone calls. But I, I think sometimes it's shock, sometimes it's just, you know, I'm not listening this guy. It's like literally just, you know, finger in my ears. So I think even there it's. Once someone has that in their mind because they watched a lot of great commercials or infomercials on trading and all the amazing probably things that are going to happen, it's nearly impossible to get it out of their head. And so typically they have to trip over. The problem is the 20 year old, 25 year old can trip a couple times, doesn't matter. You can get a job.

Right.

What we tend to see is with the 55, 60 year old and that's not old, by the way, right now that's we are expected to live much longer. It's going to be more difficult to make up those losses. And they tend to tend to make very silly mistakes, usually out of just frustration because they don't want to be in their job anymore. And I, I can fully understand that. I just wish I had more ways of walking them off the, the ledge. And it's, it's hard, you know, it really is hard.

Oh yeah, yeah. No, part, part of the reason I was, I was laughing there is, you know, as far as, yeah. Some ideas being ridiculous, but also the, you mentioned earlier, like as far as the golfing and everything and things that don't help. As far as the view that people have. Remember several years ago, I think it was E Trade where they, they had the baby.

All the old E Trade commercials, those are 90s late, maybe late 90s commercials. When they started, those were so hilarious.

But a couple of my favorites was where he's, you know, he's in the, the clubhouse of the golf.

In the clubhouse. Yeah. Not being able to paint it goes something like this is weak, man.

Calling the other guy shankopotamus and all that.

Thank you, Potomac. Exactly.

Those commercials did not help. The, the Average consumer, they helped the company a lot because they, they conveyed this message. Oh yeah, so easy a baby can do it. It's like no, dude, you're just dragging people down the wrong road.

Oh for sure. And this is, and this is in the late 90s, right into the early 2000s, those E trade babies retired. And there's actually one that came out just after, during or after the pandemic about the, the E Trade may be coming out of retirement. Have you seen that one?

No.

Now he's a lumberjack somewhere and they come in with the helicopter and they're trying to getting him. It's, it's. Anyway. And that happened right at the peak of the market again. So the E Trade baby made its appearance at the peak of the dot com bubble, more or less.

Right.

And again at the peak of the post Covid bubble. So great timing. But I would argue honestly with the advent of, of you know, the phone and everything and, and brokers and this is not an anti Robin Hood comment, just to be clear, I'm tend to be quite neutral on this. But the gamification of this and the ease of access on our phones and the confetti flying, you know, that does not help. It really doesn't. You know, back with the original E Trade babies you still had to actually be on a physical computer. You know, now you can be in between two shanks in the golf course and yet wank out a trade. Right. It's crazy, you know.

True, true. Well, okay, so back to what you do. And with the Blue Marlin Advisor you said that you are filling a gap or a gap in the market because the, the bigger banks are targeting mostly 10, 10 million liquid and over investors. You said that you can provide your services for people that aren't necessarily at that level of means. So what actually is the group that you would be able to service with your Blue Marlon Advisor?

Well, the reason we. I've always done this kind of stuff, right. I've always done investment advisory, you know, fund management, all that kind of stuff with people that are in market. So a lot of times I do this for like family offices or high net worth people. But it doesn't mean that they have to have a fortune. The reason that banks can only offer that kind of service to those people is because they have a whole department of people that cost half a million each. You know, to call you. We don't have that overhead but we could. So we can do that. So I mean we've got people, you know, starting around $250,000 where you can start doing that again it's not day trading we're not going to call them every five minutes with a day trade that's insane but for that we have chat rooms and stuff on the steady trader side. But you know what I think is important is for people to have someone to talk to you know and I know you offer great services. We have services and that's great information but it's not someone you can talk to someone who knows you specifically. So I think what people really should consider is if they're self directed investors or at least part time doing some of them with their own money they should take your research or your stuff or whatever else you want to get it from right get you getting from anywhere but then you need someone you need a partner you need to talk to someone about this and like your neighbor who looks at the stock market once a day that does not count they need to.