Investment Strategies and Growth Mindset with Sean Tepper

0:00 Amelia wanted to host a webinar, but the tool couldn't deliver. Zooming out, she turned to Webinar Key, an expert solution for webinars with seamless setup and intuitive design, she delivered the perfect webinar. Webinar Key host webinars like a boss. Yeah, finance. A lot of people been doing it the same way for the last 100 years, unfortunately. And it's, it's actually surprising to me now, like nobody's taking the Duolingo approach. Like Duolingo is just, we love that platform. They got 600 million users on the platform teaching people how to learn a new language in these short, to the point learning modules, the fastest way from A-Z straight line. And they have mastered that.

0:42 I'm like, we need to do that. Welcome to the Kingdom's podcast where growth mindset meets leadership and business insights. Get insights from top entrepreneurs, professionals and thought leaders. Visit kingdomspodcast.com. Fuel your mind. Your next breakthrough starts here. Ladies and gentlemen, you'll once again welcome to The Kingdom's podcast. And today I have with me hailing out of Milwaukee, United States of America.

1:13 Big welcome with me, the man, the meat and the legend, Sean Tepper. How old you, Sean? Doing well, thanks for the invite. Well, you hail out of Milwaukee and of course my Nigerian brother is making waves with a box over there. You guys did not go that far this season of the NBA. How do you feel about that? Well, we'll see what happens.

1:38 I mean, over the last 10 years have really come around and I give credit to the GM for recruiting quality talent because going back, gosh, the 90s and even 2000's, the Bucks were not a formidable player. So the the leadership team over there has done a great job with recruiting talent. Really good lesson learned on building businesses.

2:00 Recruit the right people in the business and you can go a lot further. So yeah, we'll see what happens. Well, and of course, you know, Speaking of our business leadership, you are the founder and CEO, actor Tika, and of course, you make it tick by way of the right recruitment policies. So let's rewind to the beginning. What was young Sean Tucker like and how did that element said evolve into the entrepreneur extraordinaire that you are today?

2:32 What age you want me to go go back in time to? Alice memories, you know, and let's let's do work back. Work back All right, so as a as a kid growing up, I was always more independent. I kind of I didn't really try to fit in. I always kind of wanted to do things my way. So I was never one of those kids chasing popularity or today I'm sure kids are chasing, you know, more likes or friends on Instagram or whatever platform.

3:02 But yeah, I always kind of wanted to. Do my own generation? Yeah, yeah, right. Like I'm a millennial, older millennial. But yeah, I always kind of did my own thing. I always had an interest in entrepreneurship. I never wanted to, you know, be a cog in the wheel at a corporate machine. However, I do have over a decade working for large corporations. But it was, it was really good experience learning the way. But yeah, like I got into sports at a young age. I, I doubled down on one that I knew could get me into college, like that could get me money.

3:34 For example, I, I was a swimmer, I played baseball. I tried some other sports. I was OK at baseball, but I was actually pretty good at swimming. And I'm like, let's go all in on one. And that did allow me to through then through my high school years is when I got faster and I did qualify or I get scholarship opportunities at Division One level here in the states did take a scholarship. The irony is also burnt out because I was doing it as like a full time job since I was like 8 or nine years old. NC Double.

4:08 A and NCAA, yeah, I was in, I was part of D1, but I wasn't Big 10 or Big 12 or PAC10. Those are the big schools. It was a smaller league, but still Division One. And I quit after my first year. But I was looking at it from a mathematics standpoint because tuition in the early 2000s, especially at a state school in Wisconsin, was like, we're talking like 2500 to $3000 per semester.

4:34 And I'm like, I could go make this times 234 no problem working for somebody and still like, you know, enjoy more of college life. But so that's the path I chose. And, and it was really good experience. In fact, the sports background actually it helps with ticker today. Like I had a coach that was really big on Team I. Was going to touch on that.

4:58 Yeah. That that team orientation, the discipline air, of course the teamwork, very, very important. 100% like I had a coach that was all about don't just think about yourself, think about the team. And I was a little, I was pretty not just independent but selfish growing up. So I'd focus on what I want. Well, right, Like swimming is more or less it is an individual sport, but it rolls out to a team where you're scoring points.

5:24 But the same thing is with track, very individual sport, right? You know, it's not like the team sports we're all used to like basketball, soccer, you know, American football, the list goes on. So yeah, we today as ticker, and I'll go back to my back story shortly, But today, yeah, I recruit. I prefer to only hire athletes. And I'm serious on that because athletes have the discipline to do the boring on repeat.

5:48 There's a story I'll tell people and there's a lot of people I had to fire from Ticker because they can't do the simple things on repeat. And I'll bring up the point like Michael Jordan used to come into practise 2 hours early and shoot free throws. And there are other guys his age at the time of the that would say the longest I could shoot free throws for is 15 minutes. Well, there you go.

6:07 That's why you'll never be the best. So here at Ticker, it's like when we hire people, we hire them for a specific skill set and double down and just be. Don't be good at it to be great at it. And people get bored after 15 minutes and they want to do this and then switch to this and this. So I look for athletes because they can do the boring on repeats. And I look for team players they care about, not just themselves, but the team.

6:28 But yeah, my background though, yeah, through high school. And I have to admit, I was a kid that grew up. I honestly, I hated school. School was very boring. The whole concept of sitting down and staring forward and learning that doesn't make sense to me. There was one class I had in high school where the teacher would literally hand us a book. It was a CAD class, computer aid design, and he'd hand us a book in the first 3 minutes and then go look at ESPN on his laptop. The guy was great and he's like, if you have questions, you come bother me, otherwise don't bother me. And and I loved it because you can learn at your own speed by reading the book, implementing the concepts and strategies, putting into practise on the

7:09 computer. And I got straight A's in these classes and I'm like, that's the way I like learning. So yeah, school was not for me. I went to college and just kind of cruise through and, you know, passed with OK grades, but I could not wait to get into the real world. I went to school originally for architecture CAD and get this, this will, you'll laugh at this. So really good at really good at computers. I get to school and there are no computer classes on CAD. And I was going to a school that was well known for its architecture programme, UW Milwaukee. 2nd place to that would be U of M, that's Minneapolis at Gophers. And in that case, like, OK, I get to school, I'm ready for these computer aid design

7:53 classes. Let's level up my skills. No computer classes. It was all model building and drawing, which I was horrible at. And then one of the profess, yeah, one of the professors was like, just so you know, only the top 10% of students in architecture school actually going to get jobs. And I look around and I'm like, well, I'm in the bottom 10%.

8:11 I'm. That doesn't feel good. I'm not going to find a job here going against all these kids who are much more talented than me at model building and drawing. Well, I switched to Fine Arts with an emphasis on film and video production. I had aspirations of getting into the movie industry or the TV industry and I decided to stay in the Midwest. Question is, how does that type of career transfer to the real world?

8:37 Fortunately, there are ad agencies and marketing firms everywhere, so I was able to quickly get a job at a mid size agency with probably like 30 employees and I learned their business model in a year. And then I created my own agency. Fortunately, an agency, you don't need any manufacturing equipment.

8:55 All you really need is like a computer, an Internet connection, a camera, and you can start making money. Yeah, right. Like this was an easy business to start. Did that for four years. And and that's when I figure it out. The service business model is not for me. It's not scalable. In order to make more revenue, you have to hire more people, which means your profit margins never accelerate. However, at the same time, I was looking at SAS businesses like Salesforce, MailChimp, Intuit, Constant Contact at the time and I realised the whole subscription reoccurring revenue model is where I want to be in around this time, this was actually 2010, I was looking at Netflix was starting to become more subscription, getting away

9:36 from the whole mailing of the DVDs concept and I'm like, that is the model I want, how do I create that? And fortunately went through a merger with that first company in 2010, wasn't like a million dollar cheque was written to me. It was because it's a very low profit margin business. It was all debts and liabilities wiped clean.

9:55 And then I got to kind of do my own thing. So I stayed there nine months. Then I decided let's go work for big business, get big business experience. I started working for large corporations, project management type role and I did that. I plan to do it for two years. That turned into 12 years and right in that journey though, I got to manage some large projects.

10:15 I'm talking like managing projects between 2 million and $10 million and have to deploy the capital in ways where it makes a profit a profitable. It's the term or the the most important acronym and finances return on invested capital ROICROIC. Yeah, where do you right? How do you deploy the capital to generate the biggest return for the business? So anyway, at that same time, around 2011, I got into investing.

10:41 So this is where the ticker journey started. And I invested in the stock market using the basic tools that are available and in whatever platforms are out there, which most of them are confusing and hard to use. And I did that for five years, maybe matching S&P 500. And I wasn't happy with that. And I'm a big, pretty big math guy. So I knew when I kind of zoomed out, like Warren Buffett and the late Charlie Monger were able to consistently beat the market no problem.

11:09 In fact, Warren Buffett has said if you were managing 10 million or less on his own, he could make 50% per year. And I'm like, SMP maybe returns 8 to 10%. That's quite a bold statement. So I knew he is not making decisions based on feelings or emotions. He's not a gambling man, which tells me he's a math guy.

11:29 So I decided to figure out the math. I read as many books as I could, went on the YouTube rabbit hole and I created an Excel sheet and I was thinking of, hey, how do I make this easy for myself? And I was like, what's the easiest to read rating system around the world? And I thought of the traffic light.

11:46 Doesn't matter what country you're located in or what language you speak. Everybody kind of knows the whole green, yellow, red methodology. It's not hard to understand. So I'm like, I'm doing that. So I created this Excel sheet. So stocks are really on sale. Watch Overpriced. Quickly found out that only about 15% of stocks in the market make it on sale green.

12:07 It's very hard to do. And I used that sheet for the next 4-5 years making returns between 15 and 50%. So I'm like, all right, I figured out the math. I figured out what Warren Buffett's using and in 2019 was a Inflexion point where I started sharing this Excel sheet with a few guys just like us. And everybody's like, you need to turn this into software. And I was like, there we go.

12:31 Almost 10 years later, I've got my software as a service idea with some potential legs under. It took a year to build the first version, then took six months to get the first paying customer, which is how building software works. You do not make money right away. Exactly, you know, the gestation period can be quite, you know.

12:50 Yeah. And then Fast forward to today, almost five years later, we have over 12,000 customers in about 50 countries. But that was the journey all the way. You pretty much pretty much got the longer version of the back story than anybody else so far. Interesting. I appreciate that you know, you've actually won like so many hearts.

13:13 You know you've been AVP at a creative agency, also project manager GE and of course you know now a SAS founder. Each role must have shaped your approach to risk management and invest in. And of course, like as a person, what would you say your best appetite is? It's high, but I remind myself that if I'm going to live, I want to, I want to live big. Like I, I created a business, of course, one to solve a problem in the market, which is investing is still pretty complicated for most.

13:47 And like, how do we make it easy? So we're doing that. But 2 is I need a business that creates freedom. I never want to go back to a service business. I want a business that can make money in my sleep because now being married, my wife and I really enjoy travelling and I've got a lot of hobbies including golf. Not going pro anytime soon, but I love the game. I'm a big outdoorsman, so a mountain biking, kayaking, like I want those things.

14:08 So that's what drives me. So I'm willing to take on more risk because I want more reward. A lot of people won't do that, but like if I'm going to live this life, I'm going to live it. Seriously, live it. I'm not selling myself short. I don't want to hit 70 years old and be like, I wish I would have done this. You know, the number one most used word on people's deathbeds, the number one most used word is regret. I do not want to bring that word anywhere in my life. I want no regrets.

14:39 I would be shocked, you know, to, to have regrets, you know, and of course, somebody once told me that until you stop making money while you're sleeping, you have not started making money. And that really, really, you know, touched me and refined and received approach to the concept of money making Abacus. It's very important that we are able to make passive income and the only reasonable way to to get that done is by way of investment.

15:08 And we also need to ensure that we optimise the capital that we invest in and that is directly linked to how much risk we are able to accommodate. You know, we have the risk adverse individuals, we have the risk neutrals, we have the risk lovers that are like yourself, you know, it's pretty much a continuum, but no risk, no reward, right?

15:36 That's like the stuff you, you've always talked about making investment fun, friendly and, you know, fearless. So you say that investing or could sometimes be termed as overly complicated, but why do you think so many financial platforms still confuse people rather than educate people when it comes to investing? Because yeah, finance, a lot of people been doing it the same way for the last 100 years, unfortunately. And it's, it's actually surprising to me now like nobody's taking the Duolingo approach. Like Duolingo is just, we love that platform. They got 600 million users on the platform teaching people how to learn a new language in these short to the point learning modules, the fastest way from

16:23 A-Z straight line. And they have mastered that. I'm like, we need to do that, but in finance and very few businesses are starting to take this on. There is one in your neck of the woods called Go Henry. Go, Henry. Go Henry. It's more focused, yeah. It's more focused on kids though, like helping kids get access to credit card, teaching kids how does money work, how does like the basics of how barter, A barter system turned into currency exchanging and and really empowers kids to do well. I'm like, that's not half bad learning modules like Duolingo, but we're really about the stock market. So it's actually surprising that nobody else is doing it. And and this is this is a quote from Warren Buffett. There is an innate human

17:08 characteristic that likes to make easy things complicated and it's true for everything it is. So I've had to fire people because they constantly make things overcomplicated. It, it is seriously, people will try to make things easy and they revert back to complicated. And it's, it really comes down to a, a self-discipline thing of continuously making it easy to use, which we really hammer on. That's we all we'll come up with. So, you know, our design process will come up with a concept. We'll kind of put it on paper what kind of take it to Excel, figure out the calculations on it, and then go through multiple iterations of, OK, it's easy.

17:49 How do we make it easier? How can the UIUX be even easier? Like really dissecting things and then we'll ship it to engineering. It's not easy to do it. It may, it may look like you look at it like a ticker is pretty easy to use. It's a neat looking platform. Not my user friend. Yeah, user friendly and my customers are saying a lot of this, but it takes a lot of work to get there. Yeah, it it, you know, it does take a lot of work. But The funny thing is I think it has to do with a lot of human psychology.

18:22 You know, myself, I've been professional services in the past. I did work with two of the global big for accounting fans, PWCKPMT. You know, I've seen, you know, in my day, some clients you you provide them with a solution in the most, you know, simplicities of forms and they look at that solution, they probably don't believe in it, but when you give them something that looks complicated, they probably have more confidence in it.

18:56 And then you ask yourself, like, what exactly is it that you know, certain people want, right. So I guess it's a matter of human psychology. So people think that the more complicated would I say solutions sometimes are actually more valuable, but it just depends on the psychology of the individual.

19:18 As for myself, I, I love things and very simple. I, I loved the path of, you know, the easiest resistance in terms of creating solutions to problems, because life is actually meant to be easier by the day. And of course, that's why I very much appreciate AIAI has come to make life easier and of course, make decision making accelerated and help us with efficiency. Efficiency is very, very important, especially in a scaling of the businesses and of course, achieve business goals in, you know, record time when it comes to ticker, right? Like how do you guys simplify the investor's journey, especially for someone who has never bought a single, you know, stock or any form of investment before? So kind of talk through the

20:09 journey, our model is a 14 day free trial, no credit card. We want to lower that barrier to entry as low as possible to get people to start using the tool. And within minutes you can find you can get up to speed and be pretty dangerous with the market in a good way. You can go from beginner to confident Minutes is what we tell people.

20:31 We can't guarantee it, but when you join, you kind of create a watch list, you add stocks to it to kind of shows you how the platform works with the whole on sale watch overpriced methodology. That's what you're looking for green and it's green, grey, red is the colour coordination. And then you land on the checklist and you don't have to complete it then. But the checklist states that 90% of customers that complete the checklist are able to confidently buy and sell stocks. And it kind of walks you through, for example, if you that the cheques on the checklist already done, for example, join the platform.

21:03 All right, that's done. Create your first check your first watch list that is done. Next step is complete the learning modules which are inspired by Duolingo. So that's going to have a little circle like how much of it is completed. Next up, connect your broker. We're adding broker connections as we speak.

21:18 Prior to that it used to say sign up for a broker. Now you can connect your broker. In my case that you Schwab automatically connected in the London. The big players are Dejiro, AJ Bell, E Toro is big in Europe, same thing with Weeble. So we're connected, Yeah, yeah, etoro, yeah, there's a lot of broker connections are, are making it easier for people to connect to ticker.

21:39 They can see their portfolio and ticker automatically update everyday. So people love that. And then it'll move on to like creating a watch list, then set alerts and you're done. It's really easy. But it's like after, after you complete those steps, you're off and running and you can we tell people you can go from beginner to confident investor in typically 14 days in that trial period, you should know what you're doing in the market, no problem. When to buy, when to sell, how to reduce risk, how many stocks should you hold?

22:10 And we can talk about all this if you want to get into it. Other one is like the difference between wealth building mode and wealth protection mode tickers wealth building, but also wealth protection depending on what your strategy is, what your age is. But it walks you through all that in simple term, you know. The confidence booster feature, it's actually powered by Open AI.

22:33 So how, how does it work? And like what kind of feedback have you gotten from your users? Yeah. So we're proud of this feature. So thankfully there's a guy out there by the name of Phil Town. He's based at the Atlanta, GA area and he's been in the hedge fund industry for years. And he came up with a methodology that's really inspired off Warren Buffett. It's called the four Ms. You've got the the mass part or what what he calls the margin of safety. We call it the same thing that encompasses everything math related when picking stocks.

23:06 The second M is the meaning. That's the business model. How many revenue streams does a business have and how scalable are those revenue streams? The third M is the most, how does the business compared to the competition. The last M, that 4th M is the management. That's the track record of the CEO.

23:22 Doing homework on all four could take you hours, if not days of research. Like if you're an analyst on Wall Street, that's going to take you a long time. We reduce it down to seconds. Thanks. With the help with Open AI. In fact, you can log in, look at any stock, and in most cases you'll see the four M score if it's been produced by users because that score is a Crowdsource feature. For example, if you complete it, I'm going to see the score you got and if I complete it, I'm going to see a similar score and that'll show the average between us. The reason is in that Moat section, it picks a few other businesses to compare against the compares against 4. So it kind of rank orders and

23:59 you know it's gamified like Duolingo. It's it's a fun experience, but it can take you about a minute to get through the form experience per stock. But again, you don't have to do it if you see the score there already. So, yeah, it's it's powerful. In fact, we tell people when to buy is when you find an on sale stock, it's green and that four M scores 80 or higher, getting to 80 or higher out of 100 scale is really hard to do, really hard to do. In that case you don't.

24:26 Financial advice here, but that would be considered a buying opportunity. You know, a lot of people are very sceptical, especially about the stock markets, you know, because there's been a history of people losing scandalously, you know, their market. So why is just the case, You know, that phobia, right, for the stock market?

24:56 And what's the biggest myth that needs to be busted into these worlds? There's a lot of to unpack there. We'll get into it. So the scepticism totally get it. Yeah, that is an issue. So you know, we teach people the difference between investing in trading and get this, I'm going to ask you a question here in a second. 99% of traders lose money in the market. We are focused on investing and it's specifically called the style investing, called value investing. That's Warren Buffett style, which is essentially understanding the financials, the fundamentals of the business, and making sure it's valued significantly higher than the share price.

25:34 For example, if you find a share price at $100 and a fair value is what we one of the many things we calculate. Let's say the fair value is at 200. That's a 50% discount. It's like going to the grocery store and buying a gallon of milk. It's listed at 5 bucks, but that 5 is crossed off and it's listed for now $2.50 or in your case $2.00 and 50 lbs A.

25:58 Pound. Pounds, yes, so we. OK. I was just going to chip this in. You know, a lot of people weren't going into investing do not like take into cognizance like the necessary investment ratios. So let's take for example, the price of earnings of the entity that you're investing in. Like these are very important, you know, metrics to analyse in order to make a well informed decision. So I'd like for you to incorporate that in your your what I say response and analysis about the situation. So we actually teach people and these are actual cited facts off of Investopedia.

26:40 Great resource. The P to E ratio and the P to B ratio, that's price to earnings ratio and then price to book ratio are both misleading and I'll get into that. So whether APDE ratio is high or low can be good or bad. So how do you make a decision? Well, you can't make a decision. And unfortunately that ratio and the P2B have been used for close to 100 years. I say close to, not quite and these days that's not how you value businesses.

27:08 Thankfully, Phil Towne and some of his books provided the correct math, which is to look at the EPS is the number one most important line on the financial statements. That's earnings per share, essentially profits of the company. You want to make sure the profits of the company are not flat and not going down.

27:26 They're increasing quarter over quarter. We do that not just EPS, which is the number one metric. We also look at revenue, net income, free cash flow, assets, equity. Then there's a few lines you want to see decreasing, which include liabilities, which is biggest liability is payroll and you have debts.

27:45 Biggest debt is typically bank loans. You want to see those going down, but everything else you want to see going up quarter over quarter, those are the metrics to look at. So in our site, our blog, we have open source calculations so people can use, they can go create their own version of ticker for personal use.

28:00 In fact, we encourage it because we we are the only platform on the market that's transparent. We do have a patent on these algorithms and these processes. But again, personal use all day, do your thing. But people appreciate that because they'll read and it's an eye opening experience when they see, oh wow, the PDE ratio is actually misleading.

28:18 It is. And thankfully Investopedia is the source. They did their homework and then and then we did our fact checking on that. It makes total sense. P to B is, there's a few more numbers in the equation, but it's the same thing, good or higher. Low P to B can be good or bad. Higher low PDE can be good or bad.

28:35 You can't make a decision. And of course, you know that aside from just the financial basis for making these decisions, it's very, very important to have your own or would I say independent health check when it comes to these companies. And there's something I to say, revenue is vanity, profit is sanity and Cautious Inc.

29:03 And of course, if you wish cautious reality, it's actually very important for companies to have a consistent and sustained continued positive whereas net positive or cash flows, right. And that actually shows the ability to meet with, when I say obligations, both in the short term and of course, the long term. You should be investing in companies that have a proven track record over time to demonstrate liquidity and solvency.

29:37 So I'd like for you to touch on that. Yeah. Well, that's kind of what I just touched on. And those are some of the lines we look at. For example, I'll get into the numbers here if anybody's really a math nerd like me. So you have the three statements, you've got the income statements, then the cash flow statement and then the balance sheet. On the income statement.

29:54 We look at 3 lines, revenues, net income and EPS. Net income and EPS are very similar. If you ever look at those in a chart, the numbers like we should in bar chart format, they're going to be very similar because EPS is just net income divided by outstanding shares. That's the the difference. So that's sheet one.

30:14 Sheet 2 is the cash flow statement. We look at one line, which is free cash flow. And like you said, you want to have a lot of cash available because you can buy other businesses. Oh. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You can buy other businesses. You can invest more in marketing and sales. You can hire more people a lot faster.

30:30 It's a great place to be. Then on the last sheet, we look at 4 lines. Look at the assets. Yeah, it'd be assets, equity, liabilities and debts. And you want to see the assets and equity increasing liabilities and debts flat or decreasing. Ideally, you want to pay off those bank loans. And in some cases, you want, you don't want to fire people, but if they can remain flat, like for example, if you see your liabilities flat, like you have 100 people in the business, but your revenues and your profits are skyrocketing, that's the type of business you want. But if you got a business that you're increasing the revenue and the liabilities increase at the same rate, that's like my first business, that agency,

31:12 it's not a scalable business. So those are the, it's 8 lines on the financial statements. And we look at the growth quarter over quarter, over 16 quarters maximum, two quarters minimum. And the two, I say, because there are IPO stocks that recently go public, they don't always give us the history of their financials when they were private. They don't have to by law.

31:36 It has to be when they go public from that day forward. But it's kind of nice when a business goes public and gives us a few quarters of financial statements because then we can use those to calculate the scores in ticker. But that's, that's really the just of it. That's the math at a high level. And it's a lot of calculus that puts everything together. But those are the things we look at. Stop talking in one second.

31:58 We do have another tab called ratios. It's kind of a nice to have, not need to have, but there people can look at like the return on assets, return on equity, return on invested capital, the net profit margin, the P to B and the P to E are on there. But we do give the little flags to let people know like hey high or low, it can be good or bad.

32:18 But here you go if you want the numbers. You know, we've actually focused a lot, a lot on the quantitative analysis. Is there any form of qualitative analysis you know as well that goes into this decision making model? Yeah. So that's what that 4M tool, everything in Ticker is quantitative because fortunately publicly traded companies, as you know, all their data is public and we source it from two data providers. They just give us raw data sets.

32:49 We process like a million data points a day. Actually, it's a few million data, data points per day pulling from these two providers. And then we run all the calculations on whatever stock you like, whether it's Apple, Tesla, Palantir, the list goes on. Now with the qualitative, that's the non math as we know. That's where that M confidence booster comes into play. That's it looks at not just a few ratios like return on invested capital, return on equity, return on assets, but it actually gives us its own rating and as a very rigorous prompting we had to engineer took about six months of trial and error and it kind of rolls everything up to provide a score that's that zero to 100 want to be over

33:31 80. It looks at the qualitative factors. For example, we ask it and one of the questions is, hey, how would you rate the scalability of XYZ business? And it's looking at the number of revenue streams in the business and how scalable those revenue streams are. For example, do the revenues and profits increase faster than the liabilities?

33:51 So in like that's really hard to do manually. Like if I would ask you, hey, XYZ stock, how many revenue streams does it have and how scalable are they? Well, guess what, you got to go to Google, you got to go to this platform that you got to put it all together and and fortunately Ticker does it in seconds and gives you a score on that specific metric. Well, nothing short of fantastic, you know that is this would I say debate, ongoing debate in the market space, you know, when comparing different investment vehicles or so to speak.

34:26 So we have cost talks, we've got ETFs and even a crypto. So for persons that are just starting out like what's the advice? Yeah, yeah. Again, no financial advice here, but I'll break everything in a category. So when you join Ticker, one of the first educational articles, and this is one thing I didn't mention, is when you join every day over like 30 days, you get a new investing tip. Now if you'd like, you can skip each of the emails, you can just read them all in one go on our site because they're all listed there.

34:58 Tip 1234 in a list and for example, the first one is investing for trading. The second one I believe is wealth building mode verse wealth protection. Now a lot of people get confused about the difference between stocks, ETFs, index funds, and mutual funds. Stocks are for wealth building mode. Now, what we mean by that is if you have a timeline to retire that's five years out or more, you should be an individual stocks, 10 to 15 stocks. For example, Warren Buffett, how did he make his first million? He had a private investment company that was investing in about 10 stocks.

35:35 So that's why we tell people about 10 to 15 stocks. That's where you want to be. That's a sweet spot. Now, when you start nearing financial independence or retirement, then you want to consider moving to an ETF, index fund, or mutual fund. Essentially, it's the same product. It's just a group of stocks, sometimes bonds and stocks, but the best returns you're going to get are about 8 to 10% per year. Typically ticker while building mode. We tell people we can't guarantee it, but we tell people you should be arriving between 15 and 50% per year. For example, my returns averaged over the last 10 years plus around 3035% somewhere in there.

36:16 So, and it's not, it's not hard to do you know, definitely outpacing the market without a lot of effort. Now getting into index funds, ETFs and mutual funds will give you the differences between these. So people know and then we'll jump over to crypto. So index funds and ETFs have an expense ratio of about one point, I should say .1%. So what does that mean?

36:37 Just for holding it? You are charged a certain dollar amount, in this case point 1% for just holding the product. With stocks, you don't have an expense ratio, so they're roughly the same price just to hold it in your portfolio. Mutual funds on the other hand, same product, but the expense ratio is not .1%. It can be as high as .5 to 2.5.

37:01 It's very expensive. What you're paying for is more people managing the mutual fund if you want that, and you have more Peace of Mind because there's more people touching it and you can get on the phone with them and be like, hey, what stocks are in this mutual fund? If you don't feel like looking it up online, fine, teach their own.

37:18 But like I tell people usually go with ETFs or index funds because you're going to get the same returns. Now, the difference between index funds and ETFs, there's one big major difference. It's called intraday pricing. So when you buy an ETF, let's say at 1:00, 1:00 PM on a Tuesday, you're going to get the price at 1:00 PM on that Tuesday. Now, with an index fund, you don't get it at 1:00 PM. You have to wait for it to get to the end of the day, and then you get the end of the day price. Even if you bought it at 1:00 PM, does it really matter? No, because you're getting the same returns over time. So those are the differences between stocks, ETF's, index funds and mutual funds.

38:00 Crypto, we have crypto and ticker, but you cannot calculate where crypto is going because there is no income statement, cash flow statement and balance sheet. However, we do have it in the tool because we do have tracking mechanisms. So you can keep track of it. You can also set alerts on it. It's all in one clean location and we tell people with crypto and their other financial institutions that say the same thing is try to go 5% or less of your net worth in crypto. It is highly speculative, of course. That's how.

38:31 Yeah, yeah, you can't calculate it, but if you want a small percentage, go 5% or less. I've heard of too many people though, they'll take a second mortgage out on their home and go all in on some small crypto coin. It's like it's just a losing situation. Very, very stupid. A very, very risky gamble, but I think one reason why I like the ETF's is the diversification of the portfolio. It's kind of makes it safer pretty much or or would I say relatively safer.

39:05 Is there a minimum amount that you know the average person needs to begin investing you know with meaningfully or is that a myth? So we tell people, we use analogy. It's like jumping into the deep end of a swimming pool, like your first time when you're a little kid. It's really scary. After you do it the first time, you realise this is not so bad.

39:28 So we tell people start with like between 100 and $1000 and just buy a few stocks. The only objective at that point is to just become educated using Ticker and then get some confidence by buying your first, second or third stock. After that first step in that first month, the next step is try to invest between 15 and 30% of your income.

39:52 Now if you can't get there, that's fine. Start small and work your way up. But if you can arrive at that range, 15 to 30%, you go out five years with compound interest, you go out 10 years. And this is on individual stocks. Like for example, and I have the numbers like we can do an Excel sheet side by side, but you will make twice the amount of money going to individual stocks over 10 years compared to an index fund, ETF or mutual fund. The fact that I know 20 year olds, 30 year olds and 40 year olds that are piling into index funds, ETF and mutual funds. You get the wrong tool for the job. I mean, that's fine.

40:25 Like you were stating that it protects your wealth. Keep it there. Maybe go 20% into a bundled product. But I would like if you feel like you're behind and most people do feel like they're behind, you want to accelerate that process. Warren Buffett style investing, 10 to 15 stocks. It's still diversified enough, but still at the same time focused enough so you can get those bigger returns and put yourself in a much better position.

40:51 For example, I got a friend of mine here. I'll I'll stop talking here. He has made about an average salary in the she's about 55 average salary making about 50 thousand $60,000 a year. Just an assistant at a business and her dad taught her to invest in a focused portfolio of stocks and find stocks with a strong balance sheet.

41:14 He didn't have Ticker, but he is is teachings are in line with Ticker. But her Apple stock now on its own, it's over $1,000,000 and she's making an average salary because she had the discipline. She just put a little bit into Apple every paycheck and she's got a few other stocks she shared with me. But I've got dozens of stories like that. People that don't have big income and they've got a multi $1,000,000 portfolio because of the discipline of 15 to 30% into a few individual stocks.

41:43 It is seriously, if you haven't heard the phrase compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. There's how's your rationale? I I was actually. Waiting to to to mention that because that was Albert Einstein's statement. Yeah, correct. He said our compound interest is the 8th, you know, a wonder of the world. And are you able to to explain how that strategy, right, is able to help those people who feel left behind, right. And of course, what they can do to have a meaningful retirement adopting the eight one of them.

42:22 Yeah, so this this is one thing I'm really passionate about, which is helping people get back on the right track, get the amount of people losing sleep everyday and the stress around money. Get this, These are statistics from CNBC and it's pulled from a user base in the US, so doesn't have London or the UK involved. But get this, it's over 50% of people are. What is it financially stressed And 70% are not on track to retire by their targets.

42:58 Retirement age, which in most cases in the States is 6570%, are behind. Only 30% are on track. So what do you do? Well, option A, you can get a second or third job, no thanks to that, right? Or option B, why not make your money just work harder for you? Start to deploy some of that capital you have sitting in those funds. Power down in your 4O1K, keep your 4O1K moving. That's fine, especially if you got a company match. But let's start moving more capital into individual stocks. And if you want a little help, talk to a financial advisor. In fact, we're starting to see more financial advisors using Ticker coupled with their strategy. Wealth protection mode is what a financial advisor's job is. Most people don't know that

43:43 they're not going to build your wealth, they're not going to build your business and they're not going to Polish your resume. They're not going to pick individual stocks for you. That's not their business models to protect your money. So they'll, they'll go like 20%, Thirty percent, 40 percent, 50% protection mode, sometimes as high as 80.

43:58 And then let's move some of that into wealth building mode, individual stocks. And that's where again, they don't know. They're not stock picking. Their job is, I mean, all day they're talking to people, they're a fiduciary, that's their job. So then they'll use Ticker and empower their customers to just use a platform. Here you go.

44:18 Use a percentage of your income, use Ticker, deploy that capital and start accelerating. We can track it together. You know our Speaking of Tikar, you guys are now in 50 plus countries and of course with over 12,000 customers, what was the hardest part of scaling up globally? So a lot of my experience especially at big business and this is how big businesses grow so fast is through channel partners. You can do YouTube ads, Facebook ads, Google ads, you can do SEO, you can whatever marketing strategy you think is cute. Like people can do that.

44:56 And we do generate about 17% of our leads from our YouTube channel, another 17% from SEO. But that's not where it comes from. The majority come comes from other businesses, channel partners. So we partner with other fintech businesses that serve retail investors, bloggers that talk about finance or investing Youtubers, other Youtubers that talk about finance or investing, other influencers. You know, that's a great marriage and we we do a Rev share with them.

45:25 So it creates a win win. But you look at how big businesses grow so quickly. That's essentially what they're doing is they're partnering with other businesses and how do we get to 1,000,000 people in one day, 10 million people in one day. Our model is the same thing. So it took a long time because you got to get your product.

45:42 If you're building software, you have to get to your product maturity, something that you know users are happy to use their, they feel empowered, it's got a good look and feel and save some time, make some money. But then on the business side, it's got to be a positive reflection on their brand. If you come out of the gates with an ugly looking software and want to partner with XYZ business and that business has a million users, they're going to be a little apprehensive with sharing your tool. So it took, I mean, we're, we're now starting to get to some big partnership opportunities, but it's 4 1/2 years. Not too many people would continue grinding away to get big partnerships.

46:19 We're talking like exposure to millions of people we're facing here. And it, it takes a long time. It, it's a grind. It's like big grind, you know? The grind, you know, when you look at what is reaching behind me, it says it's not over when you lose, it's over when you quit. You know quitters don't mean and don't quit. That's good.

46:42 Very, very important, you know, to us founders, you know, I'm a founder myself and you know, I always keep that at the back of my mind. You know, a lot of people quit too early before their breakthrough. So you actually host your own podcast as well. Payback time. How's that helped? You know your personal brand and your professional brand.

47:06 You did some good homework on me. However, this little snippet is actually a little old. So I did decide to shut down Payback time. We found payback Time, which was a pot, I'll keep it short for your audience was really a podcast on helping people build businesses. And over 3 1/2 four years, I actually didn't generate any leads for Ticker or any partnership opportunities. And I found it was actually getting in the way of me because I'm the main sales guy reaching out to partners, right? It's one of those deals where you got to like you got to cut things out of your schedule that are getting in the way of what really matters.

47:41 And so the podcast had to go. If if anything were to happen to Ticker, for example, were to sell to a large financial institution, the immediate next step I was, I would do is probably create a venture capital firm and just help startups. I'd probably do mentoring, but I probably spin up payback time or version of it, maybe rebranded or something because I loved it. I loved it.

48:02 It's a great way to network like what you're doing. It's a beautiful business, but again, it just never translated to an ROI to Ticker, so that's why shut it down. Now. However, we do have the Ticker YouTube channel and all the content I produce for that. We actually create an audio version and launch it on Top Stocks, which is a podcast we have.

48:22 So it's just the recycled YouTube content in audio format that came as requests because some people are like driving to work or doing something. They're like, Sean, I can't watch YouTube. How do I listen, right? You probably get the same thing. Right, How do I get so so I'm hybrid, you know, I'm on YouTube.

48:41 I'm also on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Podcasts, basically we're available almost everywhere. So you pick your option, pick your poison video, audio, we serve away. And of course, I think I love Spotify for the fact that they're hybrid. You can actually choose the the video or audio option.

48:59 And of course, YouTube, YouTube Music also is that option. You choose whether you want the audio or the I love hybrid models. You know, in terms of, you know, your leadership legacy, when it's all said and done, what do you want to be remembered for? Gosh, I would say really making a positive impact on people, especially financial outlook.

49:25 You know, they always, what is it health and wealth are like right up there with the the two things people are really focused on a lot and it can cause a lot of stress if you're not healthy, What do you want more than anything to be healthy? And if you don't have money, what do you want more than anything, you want money. So to ease that stress, again, I'm surprised not a lot of people are doing it like we are.

49:46 Yes, there's a lot of Youtubers and people talking about finance and giving some good advice and some not so good advice, but like we're going a step further and providing the actual tool. Like here you go low barrier to entry. I actually didn't give prices before and and this just saves people a tonne of time where prices are aligned with Netflix.

50:05 It's like starts at 15 bucks a month or 99 a year to get into the base tier and people really appreciate that our competitors around the same price. It's like you want to make this easy to use. Of course, if you're looking at this from the UK, you're going to see pounds. You have a a tool called paddle. I won't go into detail, but it converts the pricing based on where you're located.

50:26 So it makes it a global tool, not a not AUS tool. That's a lesson I learned working for GE is create global software. Don't just create AUS software. But anyway, that's that's a legacy I want to leave really made a positive impact on people specifically around the topic of finance. Oh wow, I I, I love that positive impact is statement or what I say a compound word that is very, very dear to my heart. And let's go through the quick fire round. I have a quick fire round questions for you fun and fast. Are you ready to rumble?

51:02 I'm ready to rock. Let's do it. OK. So number one was the first stock you ever bought and how did you perform? First stock I ever bought was actually PayPal and that had performed very well over the years, but that is my one dud in My Portfolio as we speak out of 10 stocks I hold. But I'm still very bullish on it because it's a payment tech platform, highly scalable business and their new CEO over the last year has been making wise choices.

51:28 So I'm I'm very bullish over the long term on PayPal. I am bullish on PayPal. It's something that is going to continue to stay relevant, you know, for the first year if you need to write out the troughs to get to the peaks, you know, number 21 book that changed your financial mindset forever. Probably going back almost 10 years, I read Good to great for the first time. I was like, that was the first really impactful book. I of course read the whole list of Hot One friends and influence people and and Richard.

52:01 Cornell. Yeah, the usual suspects, but yeah, good to great was yeah, good book I read. I've got bookshelves all over around the room you can't see. But like I'm always trying to consume some kind of marketing sales leadership. I love that grin of my mom used to say read as Anita and I agree with that.

52:25 Good advice, yeah. #3 ice cream or golf to unwind? What's your go to? Did you say ice cream? Yeah, or golf. I oh gosh, can I say both? Or leave A twist. There you go. You know what it would it would make golf much more difficult because managing melting ice cream out there on a hot, sunny day. So I'm all about experiences.

52:51 Of course I love ice cream, but I got to go with I love playing golf and I love being out there with friends. So golf is the winner. OK, there you go #4 what's one thing people assume about investing that drives you crazy? They'll say the market is rigged and, and my response to that is, no, you're not seeing what they're looking at, which is again, profits is #1 if you literally just follow profits, in most cases, you're going to make a positive return.

53:22 So many people overcomplicate it. The market's not right. We're looking at profits. And I work for big business businesses and I was in those boardrooms. Guess what they're talking about every quarter? Profits Where the profits. Profit is sanity, you know. Yeah. Are they increasing quarter over quarter?

53:37 That's it. It's not complicated. So #5 If Teeker had a theme song, what would he be and why? Oh man, I got to go to my one of my favourite songs. Thanks to my parents for getting me into 70's rock. Peter Frampton. Do you feel like I do almost a 15 minute song? If you if you know it, you know it goes out there, then know it. I, I need to find that song.

54:04 I need to find that song, you know, but we've actually come to the end of today's episode. I always say that an attitude of gratitude is good attitude and the SI unit for measuring life is time. So if somebody shares their time with you to share their life with you. So thank you today for sharing your time, your life educated and of course, inspiring us on the platform.

54:28 Love and respect to you all the way to your side of the pond for wishing you the very, very best in all of your endeavours. So do you want to leave a shout out to anybody? And of course, please advise our audience on the right thing to do in terms of disseminating the valuable information. Always leave it with two things at the end of a podcast #1 is you can. If you want to learn more about Ticker, just go to ticker.com, tykr.com and then I'm very active on LinkedIn. Sean Tepper, easy to find.

55:05 Yeah. Any questions there, reach out. OK, Thank you very much. And of course audience, you know what to do. Share, like subscribe, share with your network basically. And of course, until I see you again, stay out of trouble and be good guys.