S3E33 – John Duffy – Using technical analysis to earn 14% per year

Key Timecodes

• (01:03) – Show intro and background history
• (03:11) – Deeper into his business today
• (04:54) – Understanding his philosophy
• (09:20) – Understanding his investing strategies
• (11:16) – What type of indicators does he look for regarding trends
• (15:16) – What are his average returns
• (17:29) – What are the shortest term durations he used to hold stocks
• (17:54) – Is he concerned about tax events?
• (19:04) – How much time does his strategy require per week?
• (20:41) – The differences between his platform and TYKR philosophy
• (25:56) – Some examples of stocks he invests in today
• (32:03) – Deeper into his platform, how it works, and if it has a trial period
• (38:18) – What is the worst advice he ever received
• (38:52) – What is the best advice he ever receives
• (42:15) – Guest contacts

Transcription

[00:00:04.440] – Intro

Hey, this is Sean Tepper, the host of Pay Back Time, an approachable and transparent podcast on financial independence. I’d like to bring on guests to hear authentic stories while giving you actionable takeaways you can use today. Let’s go. My next guest served in the US Navy, then went on to work for IBM, and thereafter climbed the ranks in multiple large corporations until he retired as SVP at Cigna Insurance. He talks about the pain of going through the dot com bubble through 2000 and 2002, as well as the housing crash in 2008 and that he didn’t fully recover until 2014. Overall, his portfolio was down for 14 years. The question is, how does an investor protect against this? The answer is a system he put together that allows investors to protect against downside risk. In this episode, he talks about how a system and strategy work and what stocks he invests in today. Please welcome John Duffy. John, welcome to the show.

[00:01:04.600] – John

Well, thank you very much, Sean. Good to be here.

[00:01:06.980] – Sean

So why don’t you kick us off and tell us about your background?

[00:01:09.940] – John

All right. I’ll give you a little synopsis of it. Anyway, I was a Jersey guy. I currently live in Chicago, but I started my career, I guess, in New Jersey. After high school, I went to college and then graduate school. After graduate school, I did what was pretty average at that time. I joined the service. There’s lots of people joining the service in the middle of the Vietnam War. I joined the service, put in my time, fortunately spent my time in Washington, DC on active duty. When I got out of the service, I joined IBM. I joined IBM because in the service, I had been introduced to computing and the natural follow on for that was the big player at the time was IBM. So that was the place to go. And if I had it to do it over again, I might change my direction there because it was a more technical realm than I think I fit into. But anyway, that was the big change there. And then I went through a progression of jobs. I was at IBM for a while, and then I went to a company called Imperial Chemical Industries, big chemical giant like Dupont, but it was British owned.

[00:02:20.990] – John

Then that company morphed into a variety of companies. It split itself off, etc. One of the spin offs was Zeneca. That was Zeneca Pharmaceuticals. I worked for Zeneca Pharmaceuticals at the time, which is now AstroZeneca. Then the last position I had was I was a Senior Vice President at Signet Insurance, and that’s where I retired. So that’s my professional work career.

[00:02:50.080] – Sean

In a.

[00:02:50.420] – John

Nutshell.

[00:02:51.280] – Sean

Yeah, there you go. Okay. And then what year did you retire?

[00:02:54.900] – John

I actually retired in 2004.

[00:02:59.410] – Sean

Okay.

[00:03:00.350] – John

So I retired right after the market took a big crash. And then it took another big crash in 2008. And that’s what got me into the business I’m in today.

[00:03:11.300] – Sean

I was going to say, why don’t you tell us about this business you’re working on now?

[00:03:14.790] – John

What happened was, again, the market went down in 2000. It went down big in 2000, about over 50 %. And the Nasdaq, which was a hot place to invest at the time, especially if you’re a techy investor like myself, went down about 75 % or 80 %. So it really got hurt. And then the market went up slowly. By 2008, it was back to where it had been. Then it took another crash, even worse in 2000, went down about 60 %, and then slowly started climbing back up. It actually took the 2014 before I was even. That’s 14 or 15 years before you’re even again. That was a big loss. At that point in time, I had said, There’s got to be a better way. You just can’t be sitting in the market subject to big disruptions like this, especially when you’re about to retire. I was looking around for an alternative, but all the alternatives were pretty involved. They took a lot of time, a lot of work. Then lo and behold, a weird set of circumstances, a girlfriend of one of my daughters was at a meeting and she got a book and she read the book but she didn’t understand it.

[00:04:37.080] – John

So she wanted some help and my daughter said, Hey, dad, would you take a look at this book and see if you could help her out? So I took a look at the book and it was the turtles. The turtle investing. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it. Michael Covel, the turtle investors, it was about trend following.

[00:04:55.010] – Sean

I see that. I’m jumping on Amazon, I see it’s called the Complete Turtle Trader, the Legend, the Lessons and the results by, like you said, Michael Govel. Tell us about this book a little more.

[00:05:07.780] – John

Yeah, the book by Michael Govel was a book, it was a study, really, that two big investors in Chicago, both investing in commodities, they felt that they could teach investing to anybody. T o prove it, they put up $150 million. They hired about 20 people just off the street. Now, not off the street, they gave them a series of tests because they wanted a certain type of individual. But they hired about 20 of them, and these people made them a lot of money. T hey just followed these simple rules. So if you read the book and you looked at the results, you said, Hey, all these simple rules. If you read the book and you looked at the results, you said, Hey, following these simple rules over and over and over again works. I was curious and I was interested. But I could not find anything that took that philosophy and that approach and applied it to stocks. I was really either not interested or maybe looked at it as being late in life to take on commodities. I also had dealt with people who had been birthed with commodities. So all of the above, I said, I don’t really want to get into that.

[00:06:20.770] – John

But having the skills, the IT skills, I decided, I’m going to try my luck. I’ll build something that will do the background work for me, and then I’ll make the investments on the side. I put together, and I was a brick on a brick, I had to take the old books out and look things over and get used to the database again. I built a solution and I used it for myself for years. And when we moved back, we were in Florida at the time, we moved back to Chicago. I, at that point in time, was thinking about making it a business because people had asked for it. Jeez, if I could get a copy of that, if I could get… Well, it was PC based. It was not on the cloud or anything. I said, Well, I’ll look into starting a business and maybe put this thing up on a cloud. I joined an incubator here in Chicago, 1871 Chicago. It’s one of the biggest incubators in the United States today. And in joining that, it was very helpful because in corporate America, you have a staff for this and a staff for that.

[00:07:31.090] – John

And as a small business person, you don’t have a staff. And you really have to get smart about your expenses too, because you don’t have an unlimited budget. And you get into the mode of you’re a virtual company. T hat’s what we really were, a virtual company. W e contracted with people to do various things for us. I put together the company and we eventually launched. But what happened was the product that I had was very much tailored to me. I really had just took that product and made it available to general public via a website. It was popular with some people, but not enough people. Overtime, it just didn’t deliver for me. It delivered for me personally, but as a business, it wasn’t delivering enough for me. I decided, I’m going to shut it down, and I did. And then I progressed with the trend following philosophy, got better at it. And I was also in the back of my mind saying, I’d really like to relaunch with a better product, a product that suited a bigger audience, and eventually put together Trending Stocks, which is the product we offer today. And I launched Trending Stocks and we did a preliminary launch in late ’21, early ’22, and actually launched in ’22.

[00:09:06.280] – John

So we’re very new to the marketplace with the new product, but it’s much more appealing to a wider audience. So we’re yet to establish that wider audience, but that’s the goal.

[00:09:20.290] – Sean

Thank you for the context on building this business, trending stocks. And I know our investors are literally tapping on my shoulder as we speak. Sean asked this next question here, so we’re going to dive into these questions. How does this system work? Tell us about the strategy. What is it based on? I’ll stop there.

[00:09:37.780] – John

Okay. Well, the strategy is it’s based on trend following. Trend following is a strategy. It’s akin to buy and hold because you do buy for the long run. You don’t buy something you think is a flash in the pan. You buy something that looks like a good investment that’s moving, though. You buy it when it’s moving. You’re not buying at the dip. You don’t buy on a dip, you buy when it’s coming up, when it’s trending. Then the difference is you don’t want to write it down. That was the philosophy, and that’s what I learned in the book. You don’t want to write it down. There’s millions or thousands of stocks to choose from. Y ou pick a good stock, you invest in it, but immediately after you buy it, you place a stop loss behind that buy. The stop loss is set at a prudent amount of money. And we calculate a prudent stop loss for every stock that we identified as trended. But the stop loss prevents you from taking a big loss. And if you put in a stop loss that’s a trailing stop loss, as your stock price goes up, the trailing stop loss moves with it, and pretty soon you’re locking in profit.

[00:10:54.270] – John

So even if it comes down, you’re getting out with a profit. Now you can sleep at night. You’re not worried about waking up and finding out the market’s down 50 %. It’s not going to happen in a day. But the market is always going down. It’s a long, slow, agonizing period of time. So you’ll avoid that with trend t omming.

[00:11:16.400] – Sean

Let’s dive into the trends a little bit. What are you looking for? What indicators are you looking for regarding trends?

[00:11:22.410] – John

Well, really with the trend, I’m looking at really six different variables in there. The one is how much is it growing period?

[00:11:32.790] – Sean

Revenue growth?

[00:11:33.910] – John

How much is the stock? Is the stock price growth?

[00:11:36.710] – John

Share price growth. Share price. The share price growing over a period of time. Let’s say the period of time is 20 days or 40 days or 60 days. People will have their favorite in terms of time. So we do give them a lot of options in terms of time. But you’re looking for just that straight growth. But then within that growth, you’re really looking for a number of other things. One of the big ones in trend following is the 50 day and the 200 day, the crossover. If the 50 day moving average crosses over the 200 day moving average, it’s a very positive sign. That’s another factor that we factor into the growth. Then we look at also the growth in the last five days, because sometimes you get a stock that looks good over 60 days, but all the growth is in the last four or five days because it’s had some piece of good news. But you have to look at that and say, is that piece of good news really have longevity to it? Is it going to really bolster the market? When you combine the six variables, it smooths that curve out mentally or in mathematical, smooths that curve out and it identifies stocks that are better than the average.

[00:12:49.170] – Sean

I’m taking notes here on the six. I have share price growth as one, 50 day moving averages, 2, 200 day as 3. Sounds like I’m missing three more.

[00:12:59.440] – John

The other one is, if you look at a growth chart, everybody pictures a growth that is starting in the lower left hand corner, going to the higher right-hand corner, nice smooth chart. But they don’t always look like that. That chart can go, and one of the things we look for is, it can go along very smoothly down here flat. And then, so over 60 days, you might find that it went up by 25 %, but it went up 25 % in the last 20 days. Now, the probability of that stock continuing is a lot better than the stock that went up 19 % in the first 20 days and then gradually went up the last 5 % over the next 20 days. And that stock probably has a less chance of really being a significant growth stock. You have to look at the growth in the midpoint. How far is the stock along in the midpoint of the curve from the beginning to the midpoint and then midpoint to the end?

[00:14:02.930] – Sean

That’s a visual indicator.

[00:14:05.170] – John

It’s a visual indicator, but we mathematically look at it.

[00:14:07.910] – Sean

You do?

[00:14:08.320] – John

Okay. We mathematically calculate that and apply it. And as I said, the last one we apply is the last five days. We look at… The last five days is an anomaly. The stock went along very flat and then bang, it’s up by 25 %. But in the last five days, that’s an indicator that you really want to check out. You want to not react to that because it could be just a blip. If you want to look at it, it’s fine. Take a look at it, read about it, find out what’s behind the blip. If they just announced something very new and it’s got longevity to it, then it’ll be a good investment. But if it’s just so much market hype that pumped it up one day or a few days, then you want to lay off that stock. Sure.

[00:14:56.110] – Sean

So you’re not looking at any fundamentals? You’re not looking at any fundamentals, you’re not looking at the income statement, cash flow statement, or balance sheet?

[00:15:01.200] – John

No, we’re not looking at fundamentals at all.

[00:15:03.780] – Sean

Got it. Do you look at the business model, how many revenue streams it has? What about the comparison to the competitors? What about the CEO? Anything like that?

[00:15:12.930] – John

Not at this time. No, I haven’t been doing it and I’m doing okay.

[00:15:16.380] – Sean

Now this leads in my next question here. Can you share with us your average returns per year with this?

[00:15:22.420] – John

Well, the average returns is hard because I was using the old methodology for years. The one that I tried to sell, and that one identified stock specifically, but it would identify like a stock every week or two, not stocks every day. So it appealed to me, but it didn’t appeal to other people. So now with trending stocks, it identifies lots of stocks, and you’ve got to be more prudent about what you pick out of those stocks. Sure. In terms of return, I will say this, in the recent past, I’ve been sitting on a sideline for a while because the market was so unpredictable and up and down and it was coming down. So I really would say my latest results are pretty average, maybe 4 or 5 % because I was basically out of the market for a good portion of the time. A normal rate of return is about, I would say, about 14 % to 15 % is… Now, the thing is you buy and sell because you’re going to hit stocks. So sometimes you’ll have an active market where for a period of time you’ll be buying and selling stocks, not every day, but routinely because the market is volatile and bouncing around.

[00:16:44.050] – John

And then you’ll get times when you’re a buy and hold investor, your stocks, you sit on them and they gradually go up. And it takes a little getting used to because when it’s volatile, it can get you a little nervous about the process. But if you hang with it, as the turtle investors showed, it works out in the long run. The turtle investors really weren’t looking at any significant detail in terms of fundamentals.

[00:17:14.610] – Sean

Yeah. We’ll talk about Tykr is a lot different.

[00:17:20.220] – John

Yeah, Tykr is a lot of detail. I was going to say somehow or other, if it was a marriage between Tykr and trending stocks, it could probably be very helpful.

[00:17:29.300] – Sean

What are the shortest term durations your platform has you holding? We’re talking days, weeks?

[00:17:36.390] – John

Well, we hope when you buy, you’re going to be in it for months. But it’s been as short as a couple of weeks. When a stock all of a sudden will hit some blip and take a dip, you can be out pretty fast.

[00:17:54.790] – Sean

Aren’t you concerned about tax events?

[00:17:57.450] – John

Well, that’s the whole thing. You have to get used to the tax event. At the end of the day, I think it averages out that you have a tax event, but at the end of the day, you’re going to have a tax event eventually on the stock. You don’t want to lose money waiting for your tax event. You don’t want to say, Well, I want to hold for a year, and therefore, you lose money in the last couple of months. I think if you look at my results, you look at it and say, Hey, I pay my taxes, but I take losses too in there. The selling of the stock doesn’t guarantee you won’t have a loss. When the stock turns down on you early, you’re going to take a loss. So you balance out the losses. But taxes are a consideration and a lot of people have a problem with it. If you’re investing in a mutual fund, if you are not a mutual fund, an IRA or Roth or an IRA, you’re fine. I happen to be one of those guys that has an IRA, but I also have money outside the IRA.

[00:19:02.010] – John

So mine is a balanced load.

[00:19:04.610] – Sean

How much time does this strategy require per week, would you say?

[00:19:09.810] – John

Actually, when it’s going good, very little, very little, because you hardly look at it. Because if the stocks are doing good and you’re invested, you’re buying a hold invested and you’re happy to be buying a buy a hold investor because your stock losses your safety and it’s moving up with you as the stock goes up. So you can go for periods of time where really you almost lose touch with the market. And that’s one of the concerns we have with our clients is that if they buy in a good period of time, they invest and they sit back and say, I really don’t use the system every day or every week even. So they can tire of it. And that’s a concern we have. But it can get when it’s more volatile, you’re going to be You’re going to be making more trades and looking at more stocks.

[00:20:03.190] – Sean

Got you. Let’s take a quick commercial break. Hey, this is a quick heads up that we have a second podcast titled Top Stock. With Top Stocks podcast, I talk about investing, business, and finance. The audio content is published on your favorite podcast platforms such as Apple, Spotify, Google, or Amazon. And the video content is published on the Tykr YouTube channel, so you can either watch or listen to each episode. These episodes are just me, so no interviews. And the overall goal is to help you become a better investor. Go ahead and look up Top Stock’s podcast or check out the Tykr YouTube channel. All right, back to the show. Now, investor, especially listeners out there, are going to want to know, hey, what are the differences between your platform and Tykr?

[00:20:48.310] – John

A lot.

[00:20:48.780] – Sean

Of differences. Yeah, a lot of different. Our strategy and results are significantly different. So for context, we’re very much about buying when stocks are going down. I have to give Phil town credits on that, as well as warm buffett, is you want to be buying great businesses when it looks like a sinking ship, but your fundamentals are still rock solid. Like our system, if you’ve been in it, stocks are either on sale, watch or overpriced. So we buy significant… You want to be buying all the time, but then you really buy more. For example, I tried to… Every penny I could find off the road, I would put it into the market in 2021 and two. And now, give you the context of our strategy, I’ve been using the tool for about eight or nine years. My average returns per year, about 50 %, five zero.

[00:21:38.060] – John

We’re early on in ours, but…

[00:21:40.590] – John

Sure. This year not been a good year.

[00:21:44.160] – Sean

Well, this year you should be crushing it. For example, because I.

[00:21:48.750] – John

Was buying… This year is better. Yeah, this year is better. Last year was bad.

[00:21:53.770] – Sean

Right. Well, last year was… That’s one of those gifts. You need to be… And I remember talking to, I’m going to give a shout out to Ryan Sterling. He’s an advisor out of New York. He’s like, When the market crashes, that’s a gift to investors. And now because of the strategy, again, I can’t take credit for this. It goes to fill town and warrant. But I’m going to be I think I’m at about 120 %, 130 % for the year so far, only because I bought in when the market was down. If I waited on the sideline, which we have a lot of investors that did, you’re going to be up… What is the market up now?

[00:22:34.450] – John

Maybe 10.

[00:22:36.070] – Sean

Percent for the year? I’m actually going there now. For the year, I don’t know. Yeah, I’m going to macro trends. So for the year, the market is up 11 %. Yeah. So people would be so 11 % versus 120. It’s a significant difference there, but it’s all the discipline of the fundamentals in buying those good businesses when they’re down. Now, I will say I tried the moving averages because one of Phil’s books, he talks about using the stochastic, the MACD and the moving averages. And I find I was selling out of good businesses at the wrong time. And one was Lulul lemon and another one was Facebook Meta. And the MA’s were saying, Oh, get out. The ship is sinking and you’re going to lose all your money. And I followed the TA and technical indicators. And I was like, What am I doing here? Because the stocks went down just a touch and then took off like a rocket thereafter. And guess what? The moving averages were saying, Well, it’s going to fall again and just stay in the sidelines. It’s going to fall. Well, guess what? They never fell again. They just went I eventually got back into voodoo, but I never got back into Facebook.

[00:23:49.420] – Sean

And I can tell you what, the returns I’ve missed in the last six, seven years, it worked, hundreds of percentile points. Just massive missed opportunity.

[00:24:00.350] – John

When the market goes down, it is a good buying opportunity. But we, using the trend p oint, I would not buy on the dip. It would have to go down and then start back up. In other words, it would have to be generating a trend, a positive trend. It wouldn’t be necessarily you buy at the bottom, but you wouldn’t buy at the top either. In other words, you would start and you could find it. But there’s cases where stocks go down and they don’t recover. The GMs in the world, the Ford motor companies, the Cisco system, they just flattened out.

[00:24:41.460] – Sean

That’s where you want to look at those, unfortunately, here does it for you. But those financial statements to see is that it can be this conglomerate of a business, but the revenue can go flat, which means the points will decrease in our system. And then the EPS can go flat. And then that income, that means our margin of safety will decline. And that’s that indicator like, yeah, we’ve plateaued. You probably want to take your profits and get out of there.

[00:25:07.280] – John

Yeah. Well, it happens. But I’m saying we would not get out at the top either. We would get out when the markets are coming down and you get out, or the market or the stock starts coming down, you get out at that time. In the trend following business, we put information out on all different stocks, not just the S&P 500. There’s a lot of Russell 2000 stocks in there, and they’re more volatile than.

[00:25:35.940] – Sean

Yeah, you probably got Penny stocks, lower cap.

[00:25:40.910] – John

For sure. Now, I personally am not invested in those. When I’m talking about my results, I’m talking about the bigger brand names. I’ll be in some new stocks. I’m in AI today.

[00:25:56.200] – Sean

Well, let’s talk about that. And there’s a disclaimer at the end of the episode that says, Hey, whatever we mention is not financial advice, but our audience would love to hear what stocks are you invested in today.

[00:26:06.660] – John

Well, the AI stock is at C 3 AI.

[00:26:10.480] – Sean

Okay, I’m heading to Tykr as we speak. I just want to see how it’s rated.

[00:26:14.880] – John

It bounces around quite a bit, though.

[00:26:17.500] – Sean

Yeah, I see three. Ai, Inc. Yeah. Okay. I have to say it’s a 33 out of 100 in Tykr and a zero margin of safety. And then I see the share price is 38. I’m jumping. We’ve got this part called analyst ratings to see what other people out there are saying about the stock. It’s 50-50 .

[00:26:37.980] – John

I bought it in at about 23, I think.

[00:26:41.400] – Sean

Okay. All right. Interesting. What else you got in your portfolio?

[00:26:46.080] – John

Jeez, I’m trying to think right now. I have to take a look. Well, I’ve got some bigger ones. I’ve got like Costco.

[00:26:53.090] – Sean

Yeah, there you go. I could talk all day on that. That one actually a score of 83. Margin of safety is zero, but a lot of investors that like this business, and this is, of course, we teach the forums, start with the math, but the meaning of the business is special because of that membership. It retains customers, keeps them coming back, buying in bulk, and it’s a revenue stream in itself.

[00:27:17.580] – John

It’s just a billion play. But also it’s a recessionary type. In a recession, people go to Costco. So it’s usually a good hole there.

[00:27:26.880] – Sean

Defensive mechanism there. That’s a solid business. That’s a good one. What else do you got?

[00:27:32.430] – John

Another one that’s in that category is Home Depot, I believe in.

[00:27:39.020] – Sean

That’s HD, right?

[00:27:41.030] – John

Hd.

[00:27:41.240] – Sean

Yeah. Yeah, jumping there now. 61 out of 100. Margin safety is zero. But yeah, Home Depot is interesting because I’m looking at it perspective, again, from the meaning of the business is the world population is growing so fast, yet we need more homes for people to live, whether they’re condos or large complexes or individual single family. Home Depot will always be a supplier of materials for that industry.

[00:28:13.460] – John

You know what’s interesting, though? The world population is growing, but developed countries, the population is not growing. I mean, the United States is growing because the border, we have a lot of people coming across the border, and we do have a big immigration. But a lot of other countries, Western countries and developed countries, their populations are falling.

[00:28:35.920] – Sean

Can you give an example? Because I have a lot different data because we have a lot of customers from India.

[00:28:41.130] – John

South Asia. India is not… I don’t consider that a developed country. I’m looking at West Germany or Germany.

[00:28:49.250] – Sean

Okay, you’re looking at which population density is not where it’s at in some of these other countries. But yeah, there are some countries that is declining, but the world in general, we’re…

[00:29:00.120] – John

The world in general is growing. And the problem there is you’ve got to feed those people because a lot of those countries that are growing are really, you know, they’re behind the rest of the world in terms of a lot of advanced medicine, food, etc. They’re going to have a hard time. And you got to look at Argentina. Argentina. What the heck is going on down there? Inflation rate is almost 100 %.

[00:29:30.810] – John

So you got some crazy places out there.

[00:29:34.040] – Sean

Argentina, though, fortunately, they’re in a spot where they have the real estate to build, and then they have food because they’re still a powerhouse with cattle. They also have good wine if you ever venture.

[00:29:47.100] – John

They’ve weathered that storm before. They’ve been there. But I’m just saying it’s just a crazy world right now. China, their population is supposed to be falling right now. So the Chinese could fall a long way and still be a very populous country.

[00:30:06.910] – Sean

Yeah. Circling back to Home Depot, what I’m looking at is businesses that are part of the home building process, again, whether it’s single family, multifamily, or large complexes. You think about that, will this business… You ask yourself the question, will this company go out of business in the next 10 years? And that’s, in my opinion, a definitive no on Home Depot.

[00:30:27.310] – John

Yeah. And Costco is not going out of business yet.

[00:30:30.740] – Sean

Correct. Yeah, exactly. I got to ask, what is one more stock you can give us?

[00:30:35.840] – John

One more stock. Let me see. The last one was NVIDIA, but everybody owns NVIDIA.

[00:30:43.200] – Sean

I own AMD, but I do like NVIDIA as well. I’m actually jumping to NVDA. 83 out of 100. Solid score and Tykr. And I see a heck of a rally. They’re at all time highs. Really strong stock. I like semis. Again, you probably hear a thread here. Really looking at the business model. Start with the math in Tykr, but jump to the business model, that meaning. It’s in everything from automobiles to computers and refrigerators to microwave. Semis are.

[00:31:22.290] – John

In everything. Chips are great. T he businesses being on short in some cases. Everybody’s in the chip business or everybody’s concerned about the chip business. Because if you get cut off, like they’re talking about Russia having all these problems because they’re being isolated from some of their access to chips, it’s crazy. They’re talking about cars. If there’s a chip shortage, you may be riding around in a car with a little meter. It’s an analog. an analog meter instead of digital.

[00:32:03.610] – Sean

Thanks for giving us context on how your business or how your system works, how the strategy works, what type of stocks you’re investing in. Can you tell us a little bit about your business? I f people join it, is there a trial period? How much does it cost to the retail investor? Stuff like that.

[00:32:20.550] – John

Yeah. Right now, if you join, there’s a four week free trial, which we think is pretty good. We want people to join and stay, obviously. So a four week free trial. And then we give you an option of you can either pay by the year or you pay by the month. And by the month is a little more expensive. By the year, you save a couple of months. So you’ve got $30 a month or $300 a year. So you save two months if you pay by the year. Got you. Yeah, that’s great. When you’re looking at investing and you got a significant amount of money that you’re working with, $30 a month is not a lot to pay. Yeah. For the security of, one, finding good investments, and two, be able to manage your risk with those. So you sleep at night.

[00:33:09.370] – Sean

Sure. Yeah, there you go. That’s it. People want that peace of mind. Their money is safe, right?

[00:33:15.620] – John

Yeah. You want to make sure that they’re not going to wake up and be really hurt. Everybody can live through a downturn.

[00:33:25.330] – Sean

Absolutely. All right, well, let’s jump into the rapid fire round. This is the part of the episode where we get to find out who John really is. If you can try to answer each question in 15 seconds or less. You ready?

[00:33:37.140] – John

Okay.

[00:33:37.880] – Sean

All right. What is your favorite podcast that you listen to?

[00:33:41.180] – John

My favorite podcast really is The Goodfellows. I’m now your Hoover Institute.

[00:33:47.450] – Sean

I’ve never heard of it. What is it about?

[00:33:50.760] – John

Well, it’s always on current events or recent current events. It’s very good. There’s three main speakers and they usually bring in somebody each week or so. But they talk about big topics. They’ll talk about the situation in Ukraine, the situation with China, trade, the situation with Taiwan, all those types of it. More international look at the world.

[00:34:19.330] – Sean

Got you. What is the recent book you read and would recommend?

[00:34:23.380] – John

That’s a good one. Okay, this is a funny one. How about the end of the world is just the Beginning by Peter Zeehan. Have you ever heard of Peter Zeehan?

[00:34:32.840] – Sean

No, I’ve gone to detail here. Tell us about the book. Okay.

[00:34:36.450] – John

Well, Peter Zeehan is a geopolitical specialist, and he really makes his money by advising states, companies, countries, literally, on a look at the future through his eyes, through the geopolitical spectrum. He’s looking at natural resources, what you supply to the world, where you get your energy from, etc. So we can look at countries and states and companies and give them a good idea of what the future holds for them and where they’re possibly lacking. One of the big things he’s pushing is globalization. The United States actually was spawned globalization because our Navy protected the world and basically piracy and things like that went away after World War II and everybody could ship goods anywhere and the cost of getting things went down because you didn’t have to manufacture it all yourself. It would get outsourced, so much stuff. Now, the United States, the number of ships is down considerably from 600,000 to under 300, and the world is going to start to reshore some things because those supply lines are not as guaranteed as they were. That’s one of his big themes there.

[00:36:05.600] – Sean

Yeah, very interesting. I may add this to my list. I am particularly intrigued by how the world is changing so quickly now, and there’s a lot of things that have been predicted that are coming to pass. It’s really fascinating. That’s a topic for another podcast, I think.

[00:36:25.640] – John

One of the things you’ll like in this book and his other book was the accidental superpower, is really the position of the United States. The United States is very blessed, very blessed as a country. We got a river system that the beat and the band. We have about 50 % of all the navigable rivers in the world or in the United States. That’s a good point. Then fuel, we got oil, we got natural gas, we got fracking. There’s a lot of things going on. We’ve got the wheat belt in the United States. We got California for a lot of different supplies of food.

[00:37:07.700] – Sean

It’s a large geographic area. There’s a lot of natural resources. We can self sustain better than most countries around the globe.

[00:37:14.770] – John

We’re fortunate. We have friendly neighbors, North and South, and we have fish, East.

[00:37:20.330] – Sean

And West. East and West.

[00:37:22.730] – Sean

Plenty of them, too.

[00:37:26.210] – Sean

Good points here. Again, we could go for another hour on this. Let’s jump to next question. Here’s the movie question. What is your favorite movie?

[00:37:36.350] – John

Well, first of all, I’m not a big movie goer. I stopped going to movies when my kids got old enough to go on their own. But my favorite movie, thinking about it, is It’s a Wonderful Life. The reason for it is I think it points out what’s really important at the end of the day.

[00:37:53.660] – Sean

Classic Christmas movie. Since you don’t watch movies, do you get into anything, like any documentaries on Netflix or HBO, anything like that? Or do you just not watch anything?

[00:38:05.790] – John

Well, I’m saying I watch these things on YouTube, etc. Peter Zion, good fellows, and they’re pretty timely.

[00:38:17.090] – Sean

Got you. Okay. All right, moving on to a few business questions here. What is the worst advice you ever received?

[00:38:24.710] – John

Worst advice I ever received was just buy IBM stock and you’ll be fine.

[00:38:31.650] – Sean

That is pretty bad advice.

[00:38:34.060] – John

When I was told that, the stock was selling at over $300 a share.

[00:38:39.150] – Sean

Oh, boy. And today, I’m jumping to it, we’re at 132 and it’s been flat the last five plus years.

[00:38:49.620] – John

Yeah. Not a winner.

[00:38:52.120] – Sean

Not a winner. Okay, all right. Flip the equation. What is the best advice you ever received?

[00:38:57.620] – John

This is going to surprise you. The best advice is, and it is a little story behind it, but sometimes the answer is no is the answer. I was in high school and I wanted something. I was trying out for something, etc. I didn’t get it. I was sitting there talking to my dad and he said, What you’re looking down? I said, I try to get such and such and I didn’t get it. Then I mentioned it. I said, I said a lot of prayers and I guess God didn’t answer my prayers. Then my dad said, No, he answered your prayers. The answer was no. That’s it. It was like a revelation to me. I was like, No, you ask God for something, he either answers it or he just doesn’t hear your request. He doesn’t answer, no. But it’s true. It is parents. My dad pointed out that, Hey, parents who love their kids, most of the time when their kids ask for something, the answer is no, because it’s not good for them.

[00:40:02.440] – Sean

I was just going to say there’s a lot of wisdom behind that because there’s a why behind it and usually a good reason why. But I don’t know, do you know who Jockel Willink is? Jockel Willink? I think he’s not ex Navy Seal. He’ll always be one like the Marines. But he’s one of these guys on YouTube. He’s got this video where when… P retty much essentially when a door closes or no is given, that’s a good thing because you go in another direction. And you want those, if you’re going to get a no, you might as well get a no really fast.

[00:40:40.720] – John

And get a no, a clear no, not a whimsical.

[00:40:44.020] – Sean

Yeah, it’s a no. is this gray area, which you’re an SVP, you get it. When you’re at that level, you don’t want to be dealing with vendors and customers and get this in between wishy washy whimsical, maybe. It’s like, no, is it definitive yes or definitive no? So we can move forward to the next point.

[00:41:02.560] – John

Yeah. No, you put it behind you and move on.

[00:41:04.430] – Sean

That’s it. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:41:06.090] – John

So I love that.

[00:41:08.700] – Sean

All right, last question here is the time Machine question. If you could go back in time to give your younger self advice, what age would you visit and what would you say?

[00:41:16.610] – John

I would probably visit, as I said, getting out of the service, going off active duty. I really was working with IBM at the time in the service, and it was just a natural progression to move to IBM. I was offered a position, but I never went out and really looked for a job. I just took the first one because it was easy and it was just the natural flow. It was good money, it wasn’t bad, but I really never went out and looked for a job. It might have changed my career direction completely.

[00:41:52.030] – Sean

It may have, but I’m thinking here for my perspective, I’m like, Wow, you really landed at a solid company when tech was low the world of technology is really changing.

[00:42:02.000] – John

And IBM was the biggest. It was the Microsoft.

[00:42:08.320] – Sean

Exactly. Yeah. So I think you made the right choice. I would argue that you did. But anyway, where can the audience reach you?

[00:42:17.570] – John

Well, they can reach us at trendingstocks. I o. That’s the big thing, i o. So that’s the easiest way to get to us. Awesome.

[00:42:25.620] – Sean

All right, John, well, thank you so much for your time. Appreciate it.

[00:42:28.820] – John

Hey, thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it and good luck.

[00:42:32.230] – Sean

All right. Thank you. Talk to you soon. Hey, I’d like to say thank you for checking out this podcast. I know there’s a lot of other podcasts you could be listening to, so thanks for spending some time with me. Also, if you have a moment, could you please head over to Apple podcast and leave a review? The more reviews we get, the more Apple will share this podcast with the world. So thanks for doing that. And last thing, if you do hear any stocks mentioned on this podcast, please keep in mind this podcast is for entertainment purposes only. Please do not make a buy or sell decision based solely on what you hear. All right, thanks for your time. Talk to you later. See you.