S4E8 – Max Becker-Pos – Top facepalm investments that lose money

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Key Timecodes

• (00:42) – Show intro and background history
• (03:34) – Deeper into his background history and business model
• (07:43) – Understanding his investing model and strategies
• (14:59) – A bit about his precious metals investment model
• (18:05) – Another examples of his investments
• (28:38) – How he help and educate his clients
• (25:06) – Understanding his funds investment model
• (33:43) – What is the worst advice he ever received
• (26:20) – What is the best advice he ever received
• (34:30) – Guest contacts

Transcription

[00:00:00.000] – Intro

Hey, this is Sean Tepper, the host of Payback Time, an approachable and transparent podcast in building businesses, increasing wealth, and achieving financial freedom. I’d like to bring on guests to hear authentic stories while giving you actionable takeaways you can use today. Let’s go.

[00:00:17.530] – Sean

My next guest was a cab driver, then a teacher, then eventually, financial advisor. In this episode, we talk about face-palm investments, some questionable investments that people have made through the years that, in most cases, can lose you money. We also talk about some of the stocks he holds in his own portfolio, and we use Tykr to walk through those. All right, this is a good one. Please welcome Max Becker-Pos. Max, welcome to the show.

[00:00:43.930] – Max

Thanks for having me here, Sean.

[00:00:45.120] – Sean

All right, so why don’t you kick us off and tell us about your background?

[00:00:48.500] – Max

Yeah, I guess I’m one of those guys who took a while to figure out what they want to do. Parents were trying to push me into medicine or law, which didn’t really resonate, ended up going to university, went to cab driving for a few years. That was interesting, and fell in to get an English degree, which a lot of people end up doing. And in ’97, I followed a Korean girl to Korea, and it didn’t work out because her parents were pretty conservative and couldn’t imagine her marrying a white guy. That’s the way it was. I did meet my wife there. She’s Japanese. And what a lot of people like myself end up doing if you’re from Canada or the US, you end up teaching English in Korea and Japan. So that’s what I did. And I love seeing the sparkle in kids’ eyes and helping people learn and grow. I love that part about teaching. I felt that English teaching was a bit repetitive at the end of the day because it’s very basic conversation and I wasn’t growing myself. So and the background to this story is that in ’91 in Vancouver, if you know Vancouver, we have some of the most crazy real estate in the world.

[00:01:54.280] – Max

I wanted to buy a condo downtown. And my dad said that’s crazy. Of course, if you look back 30 years, you would know it would be one of the best decisions you’ve done. Not crazy at all. So I listened to my dad. I didn’t buy that condo. And I knew that I really want to learn about investing them. My parents, they were really hard workers, good at saving, didn’t overspend. They had those good habits and the discipline, but they didn’t know how to make money work for them. And I want to learn about that. So in my 30s, I moved to back to Canada, worked at a big bank for about eight years. And that was great to learn the network and learn all about the meet all kinds of cool people, learn the financial system. At the end of the day, when you’re working for a big bank, you’re working for the man, and your job is to push product. And that didn’t really resonate with me because, yeah, nothing wrong with a product. A product is simply a way for us to fulfill our need. It’s just that the bank all they did was focus on product, they didn’t focus on people.

[00:02:53.520] – Max

And so what I did is four years ago, go into private practice, and I really focus on the relationships my clients, getting to know them, understand them, what their values are, what drives them. Because money at the end of the day, Sean is just a tool in your toolbox. And what’s more important is that Sean behind the money, we really want to know and understand that person. And that’s also the foundation of a great relationship. And then the product is what comes last. And that’s really the bridge to help you get to where you want to be. Does that make sense?

[00:03:22.320] – Sean

Does love the backstory there. Thank you. Now, just to reiterate here, you’ve been doing this or you’ve had your own practice for four years, did you say?

[00:03:32.500] – Max

It’s four or five years since 2018.

[00:03:34.670] – Sean

Got you. Okay, so it’s your own firm. And what do you help your customers with? Are you putting them into index funds, ETFs, mutual funds, or do you focus more on life insurance? What is your specialty?

[00:03:46.070] – Max

In terms of my licensing, I can do many kinds of investments and insurance. When I meet someone, really, I find out what they need and what their situation is. And it might end up be that I don’t end up recommending any product for them. Usually it would be some way to grow their wealth or protect them. So that could include investments and insurance. We offer the managed funds. So index fund, you’re looking at what? 0.3 % management fee. With a managed fund, you’re looking at about two %. I guess what I want to inject into that is it’s not apples to apples, right? If you put all your money in Vancard, yeah, you’re getting a low fee, but you’re not getting any advice there, right? So you might pay a two % fee on your investments. But what you get with me is a second set of eyes, like are you in the right mortgage or is that even a good property to buy? Or how are you following your taxes? Did you remember to get all your deductions? Those are the value ads that I can offer that say a Roboadvisor could not.

[00:04:45.990] – Sean

Right on. Thank you for that context. What I wanted to do is like a high level overview of your business model. So that’s really good to know. You’re not just putting people into investment products or insurance, but you do provide those services that second opinion on things outside of investments that, hey, maybe you can save some money here and maybe look into this or taxes. I can hand you off to the right person. I’m sure you’ve got connections there. No, that’s good. So this is a good transition point. I wanted to get right into what we would call the face-palm moments with investing, the mistakes you’ve seen. I’m sure if you’ve seen plenty when you were at the bank, but of course, I’m sure you’ve seen a few as well as running practice. So why don’t you dive in? Tell us the story here. I think there’s one in the the Cannabis space. I’d love to hear your context or backstory on this one.

[00:05:40.130] – Max

There’s so much to say on this. I guess the first thing is just the fallacy of the self, right? We get this super man or superwoman vision of ourself that we can do anything. Let’s say you were investing in crypto at the beginning when it was really hot or marijuana stocks or mushroom stocks, and all you see is it’s going up. Up. And then you just think that you’re invincible and that you can do no wrong. And everyone looks like a genius when their high risk, speculative stocks are going up. I’ve lost a ton of money in stocks, mostly just minerals and gold and mining resources, things like that. I like it just because I believed in myself too much that, hey, this company is worth a lot and it’s got great assets. But at the end of the day, it’s not what you think a company is worth, it’s what other people think it’s worth, even if you’ve done them due diligence and metrics. Tesla and Amazon, they’re sitting at their market share because the people believe that those companies are worth those valuations. There’s plenty of great companies out there that will pay you a big dividend and their stock prices will stagnate for years.

[00:06:48.160] – Max

So sentiment is huge. With marijuana, I just stood by the sidelines, Canopy Growth Corporation, so Tykr symbol weed. I think it’s in the gutter today, but it went from basically the IPO to about $60 a share, and now it’s back to about one or two dollars. And I knew a guy who timed it perfectly. He put in his money, about five dollars, and got everything out of the peak and then bought his condo. That brings me to the point that anyone can buy a stock. You just take the money from your checking account and put it in your brokerage account and buy a stock. That’s easy. The hard part is when to sell a stock, and that takes discipline, savvy, and it also takes a gut instinct to know that, hey, the market is frothy, it’s gone up, everyone has piled in. Now I’m going to sell and leave them holding the bag. Right.

[00:07:42.500] – Sean

To the audience here, I’d like to talk to the audience a little bit on this podcast. I’m looking at Tykr as we speak and I can see, Canopy Growth is actually, you know what? Because this is on video as well. Why don’t I do this? I’m going to share my screen. I’m here. All right. So looking at Tykr, I can see Canopy Growth, Tykr symbol, weed overpriced and the score is 28 out of 100. We want to see for context here, Max, so you know more about Tykr, we want to see stocks with a 50 or higher. That’s overall financial strength of a stock. The higher the score, the stronger the financials. Then the margin of safety here is zero. We want to see a margin of safety over 50 %, so pretty scary. Look at this. Here’s a chart over the last year to date. And yeah, sitting at 75 cents. And we’ve got we’ve got warnings here on anything that’s a penny stock, as we talk about and Tykr. Any stock that is five dollars or less is considered a penny stock and 99.9 % of stocks that hit that range, this is US dollars.

[00:08:44.890] – Sean

Of course, there are other stocks with similar share prices you could look at, like I’ll call that, for example, Singapore or Indonesia. It’s a little different. But anyway, if you get too low of a price, institutions lose interest, as you probably know, when they go looking for better stocks with higher share prices, stronger market cap, and that stock will be stuck in that purgatory, you can say, of penny stock territory. So yeah, this stock probably not going to break out.

[00:09:14.260] – Max

No, there is a dead cat bounce on the chart back there. But you made a good point because when they do enter that purgatory, it might come back or you might be able to trade it a bit. But what is the opportunity cost of being in that stock when you could find the next one that would go up a lot. And because of all the heuristic biases that we have, and that’s all part of behavioral psychology and finance to use a lot of jargon, but we get wedded to our losses because we can’t cut the cord on them and admit that we were wrong and move on. And that is another compounding the mistake that we’ve made by investing in those bad companies in the first place.

[00:09:57.420] – Sean

Selling seems to be a hot topic in our community. People get afraid, for example, they will buy their first stock and their immediate next question is, okay, when do I sell? And we try to teach people that it’s not in the buying or the selling, it’s in the waiting. That’s a quote I have to give credit to Charlie Munger on that. But people who buy and then buy more, that’s where they really build their wealth. I’ve seen people that they immediately enter and then they want to exit and they think that this entry exit is how they build wealth. And again, that’s not how you do it. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.

[00:10:33.720] – Max

Yeah, I would just go back to that. I think if you have that kill or instinct, there is definitely a cohort of the population that can do that, like my friend who bought that condo based on the weed stock because they have that gut instinct as to when to get in to get out, and then they will beat the average person that would fall mongers advice. I guess we just harken back to the fact that investing is a marathon, not a sprint. And it’s not sexy or exciting, but that’s really how you build wealth. And you go into TikTok and we’re all looking for those shortcuts, like how do I get rich overnight? And I just started to say that it comes back to laying within your means, keeping debt down, sound financial habits, the discipline of rents and repeating, of putting away a few hundred a month and doing that over years and decades. And that’s how you build wealth. There is really no shortcut. And then you go online, you see wealthy people and you think, oh, they’re so lucky, how did they do it? But you don’t see all the back story and work behind the curtain that they did to get to that.

[00:11:34.670] – Max

You just see, oh, they’re rich now. And the people that got rich by betting it all on one horse, they’re in the rarity.

[00:11:42.090] – Sean

Very, very much so. In our community, in fact, very few that have reached out that I’ve had conversations have had those moments. It’s extremely rare. Here’s the one for you. So my tax guy, he won’t give any personal names away, but he’s telling me about a customer of his, inherited a lot of money. We’re talking multi-millions and decided to get into day trading. This guy went nine years making a loss nine years in a row. Then his 10th year, he made a profit of I think it was like $20,000. And he was super excited about that. My task guy was like, You just spent 10 years. The majority of it is gone. Every year is like this addiction that was really unfortunate. But of course, he couldn’t control what his customer was doing is pretty much handling his taxes, but pretty much gambled his inheritance away, playing with day trading and then got excited over 20. We’re talking millions of dollars being traded and made a profit of $20,000 in a year. It’s like, come on, you can go work at some restaurant down the street, man, more than that.

[00:12:56.190] – Max

It’s pretty sad. Yeah, like one of the key principles of investing is preserving your capital, right? Not losing money. So when that… Yeah, investing is not supposed to be exciting. It’s not supposed to be sexy. It’s not supposed to drive our emotions like that. It’s just supposed to be the, like I said, daily rinsing and repeating. But of course, I’ve got clients who do want to do their own trading. So what I say is just work with me for a few years, build your base, have your emergency fund paid on your debt, and start building your diversified fund, whether it’s index fund or global fund, whatever. And then once, hey, you’ve got 10, 20, 30,000 in your regular funds, then sure, take a couple of thousand and have some fun with play money. But understand that it’s play money, and then you’re just gambling with that and you shouldn’t expect to make money. Or I can even introduce them to like stockbrokers who specialize in that, then those brokers can choose the risky stocks for you and they probably have a better pulse on the market as well.

[00:13:59.900] – Sean

I haven’t heard the phrase, stockbroker in years. I think back to the 80s, Michael Douglas Wall Street, not really a phrase I hear too often. I would look at that more as you go to a hedge fund, if you want to get a little more risky, get into not only stocks but maybe some alternative investments, which would be including some private businesses that aren’t even public and try options like that, anything like that. I’m like, I don’t know. I don’t know about that. That’s a little risky.

[00:14:32.460] – Max

Yeah. And you need to have a higher net worth for that hedge fund. The gentleman I’m thinking of, he basically his company will take companies public. So you’re getting in before the IPO. And then usually once the IPO, if it goes up, we just flip it. So it’s just really a lot of companies are in a really high risk. But I put in a few thousand and it became about 10,000. So some you’re going to lose on some you’re going to win.

[00:14:58.700] – Sean

Sure. Yeah, absolutely. I want to revert back to we touched on one Facebook scenario, which was marijuana. I agree with that. That was a craze. Let’s touch to another one. I don’t know if this would be included. Did you say you made money or lost money with precious metals, minerals?

[00:15:18.500] – Max

I did pretty well for a few years. Okay. And then I got overconfident, had too much in gold.

[00:15:24.730] – Sean

Okay.

[00:15:25.500] – Max

And then had some margin calls and couldn’t cover them. So basically, that’s one way I lost money. And then another way is too many of the penny stocks. And going back to that story you were saying about buying and selling, buying and selling, I would put money into one penny stock and actually make money and then say, oh, I have to find something else to invest in, find another penny stock and then actually lose money on that one.

[00:15:49.490] – Sean

So just to be clear, you invested in penny stocks. Is this before you got into finance or a while?

[00:15:56.200] – Max

I think a while. Yeah. It’s not what I would recommend from my clients, but what I was doing on my own.

[00:16:01.660] – Sean

A financial advisor getting into penny stocks. I don’t know how ironic that is, but okay, penny stocks. Can you give us a Tykr symbol or company name?

[00:16:14.220] – Max

I think a lot of them are defunct by now, but they would be mostly on the Canadian Exchange.

[00:16:21.460] – Sean

Okay.

[00:16:21.890] – Max

All right. If you’re just looking at young gold companies, young oil companies.

[00:16:26.880] – Sean

Yeah. This is another good pause point for the audience here. So there are companies out there or sometimes individuals, not just companies, they’ll just have their own LLC that will take companies public and they’ll get sometimes a commission or you’ll get that IPO, the breakout price in that day. And then you pretty much run for the hills. And I remember running into a guy who that’s what his job was. And he was actually interested in turning Tykr into a penny stock. Hey, we could take this company public, pink sheet. It’ll be a penny stock. You’ll make a bunch of money. I really am strongly against penny stock. I think it’s the responsibility of the CEO, the leadership of the company to wait. And then you keep waiting and you keep waiting. You want to build up a really strong balance sheet with year over year, strong financials moving in the right direction, and then consider going public. A good example of that is a company I invested in earlier on, which is Palantir. Palantir went public in 2000, and I think it was 20, but they started in 2003. They want 17 years of runway before going public.

[00:17:39.370] – Sean

I love stories like that. As opposed to what this guy was talking about, he’s like, Yeah, I’d like to take a company public year two after it’s founded, make a bunch of money, move on to the next rinse and repeat. I’m like, feels like a scam, dude.

[00:17:51.660] – Max

Well, a lot of those mining companies, they’re just holes in the ground and they might have decent assets, but they probably will. I think most mines that are explored will just remain a hole in the ground and never get developed.

[00:18:03.690] – Sean

Yes. Yes. All right. So we got marijuana, we got gold, we got penny stocks. Anything else? Any other good examples of face palm investments?

[00:18:14.370] – Max

I think just the crypto, especially you can look at the Dogecoin video on YouTube, and it’s hard to tell if it’s serious or if it’s sarcastic, but it’s look it up. It’s a Dogecoin song. I think Dogecoin is going to the moon. And Elon Musk is saying, I agree. Investing has been gamified. People like, celebrities going on Twitter and saying and buy this or Robinhood, the app, it would have fireworks when you did a trade. I would just think the whole general trend of that, the gamification. And at the end of the day, you have all these retail investors pouring in, but they’re swimming in a shark infested sea with big sharks that live and breathe that stuff. And they and they know everything. And these institutions are trading ahead of you. They’re taking your data, you’re trading data and front running it and using those as feeding that into algorithms and using that to trade against you. If that makes sense.

[00:19:13.470] – Sean

Well, I would push back. Well, I would agree with that a little bit, but I have to push back a little because as we learned is with trading, you’re 100 % right. The reason is somebody’s on the winning side, somebody’s on the losing side. But with investing, if you are looking at a strong business and another thousand people over here are looking at the same business you can all invest and that business has an EPS that’s increasing quarter over quarter, year over year, same with their revenue, same with their assets and equity, everybody can win. And that’s where you want to be. Unfortunately, and this is really what you’re saying is you’ve got that shiny object syndrome as people look over here, there’s this fancy new crypto coin or this hot new IPO stock or penny stock, and you get media behind it, you get… Celebrities have no idea what they’re talking about behind it. And then, unfortunately, that retail investor that doesn’t have a lot of experience or have the right tool, they don’t know what they’re doing. They put their money into it. Next thing you know, they lose money. So that is an issue today because you see a lot of that pumped on YouTube and TikTok and Reddit and Twitter.

[00:20:21.180] – Sean

We saw what happened with FTX is a great example.

[00:20:24.270] – Max

Totally. Yeah, I totally agree with what you’re saying. Investing is the way you describe it. It should be about putting your money into companies that have solid businesses, solid products, solid customer bases, and they manage their growth carefully.

[00:20:39.370] – Sean

Right. Now, let’s take a quick commercial break. Have you ever lost money in the stock market? Maybe you heard or saw a comment on YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, or another social platform, or maybe you just received bad advice from a friend. Yeah, I think we’ve all been there. Most people lose money in the stock market because they make decisions based on emotions. What if you could remove emotions from investing? What if you could make consistent returns in the stock market based solely on logic? What if there’s a software that could handle that logic for you? Introducing Tykr, a platform that helps you manage your investments with confidence. Get started today with a free trial. Visit Tykr. Com. That’s T-Y-K-R. Com. Again, Tykr. Com. All right, back to the show. Yeah, crypto is a good one. We did add crypto to Tikr. Our listeners will laugh at this. They probably know this by now. And big reason is to bring people into the ecosystem. It’s the marketing play. It’s like, oh, you’ve got crypto. Oh, great. And it’s like, there are no ratings on crypto. And then they’ll ask me, why isn’t there a rating on Bitcoin or Ethereum or Dogecoin?

[00:21:50.490] – Sean

It’s because a coin is not a business. A business has an income statement, cash flow statement, balance sheet, all that good stuff, whereas a coin does not. And at that moment, it’s like, oh, God, it’s okay. So a stock is a business. A crypto coin is a digital asset with no income statement, no cash flow statement, no balance sheet. But anyway, bring people in the ecosystem and try to open their eyes to, hey, value investing, Warren Buffett style, that’s the tried and true way to build wealth, not gambling with some crypto coin.

[00:22:22.240] – Max

For sure. And Buffett himself always said he only invests in things that he understands. Yes. I think that’s a good rule to stick by. If you don’t really understand the business, whether you’re investing in it or speculating in it, maybe you shouldn’t be in it.

[00:22:37.830] – Sean

Right. That’s probably a conversation you have with your customers quite a bit like, hey, I can help you out with some products here. But if you do go into individual stocks, probably invest in what you know, think about your hobbies, your interests, what industries you understand, who you work for sometimes. That gives you a better starting point than going on YouTube and seeing what’s hot.

[00:23:00.430] – Max

That’s a great way to start as well because there are so many thousands of investments out there. So, yeah, stick with what you know and stick with what you’re interested in.

[00:23:08.090] – Sean

Right. So I have to ask, are you investing in individual stocks today?

[00:23:13.400] – Max

Yes, I have a Troyalist Gold. I don’t know if you know them.

[00:23:17.570] – Sean

Let’s do another. We’re going to share the.

[00:23:19.670] – Max

Screen here. Sure. So T-R-O-I-L-U-S. There we go.

[00:23:24.960] – Sean

All right. T-s-x. We’ve got a penny stock here. $0.35?

[00:23:31.530] – Max

Yeah, if you want to know. But you stay away from penny stocks, right? You wanted to know what regular stocks I’m investing in? Yeah, I have a lot of funds. I’m not really in any regular stocks.

[00:23:42.130] – Sean

Okay.

[00:23:42.870] – Max

All right. Toilet Gold have really good assets, and they’ve been careful not to over dilute. I think they’re a pretty interesting company. I didn’t put that much money into them, but my friend put a boatload.

[00:23:57.900] – Sean

Okay, so the audience for those listening, and we do have this on YouTube or it’s going to YouTube, but Trialist, Gold, T-L-G, share prices at 35 cents, scores 22 out of 100 margin that safety is zero. So I would probably run for the hills on this one, but let’s take a closer look at the financials.

[00:24:19.550] – Max

All they do is drill. They’re just drilling and proving assets. Their idea is to drill, improve, improve those reserves in the ground and then get brought out by a major strategy for a junior miner.

[00:24:31.110] – Sean

Okay. I do see their assets did increase significantly in 2021, up to 66 million. They’re down to about 30 million in 2022. Equity fell off a little bit too. All right, looking at the share price returns to date to negative 30 % year to date. Let’s go five year. Five year is negative 50. Have you made a profit on this one?

[00:24:59.190] – Max

I have not. No, I just bought and hold.

[00:25:01.340] – Sean

Got you. Okay, you could be in at a while. All right, funds. Let’s check out one of your funds.

[00:25:09.870] – Max

Yeah. So I don’t know if they’re available online like that. Well, they’re mostly mutual funds or investment funds. Would they show up there?

[00:25:20.260] – Sean

Probably not. Tykr has ETFs. Mutual funds usually have to go through the mutual fund company. So yeah, why don’t you tell us one of the funds you’re invested in? And are they primarily in a certain industry or sector? Are they spread out?

[00:25:34.630] – Max

We’ll just answer your question before. If you’re looking for a regular stock that I’ve invested in, it would be like Barrett Gold or one of those gold majors, if you want to pull that up.

[00:25:44.810] – Sean

Yeah, let’s jump back in. Barrick. Yes. I bet a few customers mentioned this one to me. All right, New York Stock Exchange just G-O-L-D is a Tykr symbol. Share price is 16, score is 33 and margin of safety is zero %. Returns to date are negative seven. Five-year returns, 31 %.

[00:26:08.440] – Max

Well, the interesting thing about Barrett Gold is that Warren Buffett, who doesn’t believe in gold, and always said that he didn’t like gold as an investment, actually put a bunch of money into this company a few years ago. So you’d be investing along with Buffett. They’re one of the largest gold companies in the world, and they just have huge volume. So their leverage to the gold price. So if you believe in gold, and if we saw gold shoot up to like 3,000 an ounce versus the 2,000 ish at now, then the leverage would be huge because they mine about 500 million ounces per year.

[00:26:45.550] – Sean

So.

[00:26:46.390] – Max

500 million ounces and you increase the price of gold by $1,000 an ounce, that’s huge. If you believe in gold, it’s a long term strategy.

[00:26:56.760] – Sean

Yeah. I’m a contrarian, as you can tell, in many cases. I don’t love precious metals because to me it’s not a scalable business. It comes and ebbs and flows like, hey, it’s hot one day and the next day can be not so hot. I like because I’m so into business growing businesses or working on my own. I really appreciate and like companies that have multiple streams of revenue. They’re scalable revenue streams, which means they can increase their revenues without increasing liabilities. Long story short, it’s usually software companies can do that best. Ad advertising can do that very well, as same as payment tech. So yeah, I like businesses and I steer my audience, go towards more businesses with multiple revenue streams. If you do go into precious metals, set expectations, you could be there for a while and breaking even, as we saw with Barik.

[00:27:52.260] – Max

Okay, I got one more that might be interesting for you. Okay. This is one of the growth funds that we offer. The management have invested heavily in this. So it’s called Intuitive Surgical.

[00:28:03.230] – Sean

Yeah.

[00:28:04.130] – Max

You know them?

[00:28:05.450] – Sean

I’m familiar. Yeah. There we go.

[00:28:08.530] – Max

You could probably talk more about them than I can. What they do is, well, surgery is going to be like you saw at Star Wars. So you’re going to have what they do is they create robotic arms for doctors. So you’re going to see a lot of influx of AI and tech into the medical field continuing. And that’s what they invest in. And you can probably talk more about it.

[00:28:31.150] – Sean

Sure. Yeah. So intuitive, surgical, ISRG is a Tykr symbol. So right in Tykr, this one is overpriced, scores 39 out of 100 and margin of safety is zero %. So not looking the strongest. I do like what you’re saying. And I’ve heard the guys on Motley Fool say the same thing as they… A few of them do like the stock a lot because it’s that I think they phrase it as non-invasive surgery. So you don’t have to get a human body inside doing the work. It’s those robotic arms. I think your Star Wars metaphor there is brilliant. We’ve seen this on a lot of sci-fi films. That’s the way the industry is going. Let’s take a closer look here and then we’ll jump back to the business model. The the returns to date are about 0.3%. Both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq have outpaced it. But let’s take a look at the five year, 62%. Not the biggest there as well. A lot of the stocks that have done that just this year alone. But let’s jump into the financials just to take a quick look. Revenues for those listening, I’ll speak to what we’re seeing.

[00:29:45.670] – Sean

So revenues have been increasing year over year, which is looking good. Net income and EPS have been declining. Eps we’re looking at 2019 was $11.95per share went down to three dollars, then up to four, then back down to three. So little bit of a drop off. That’s why that margin of safety is zero %. That EPS were increasing. That’s where we’d see a bigger margin of safety. So what’s probably happening here is they’re investing more in either tech or people. If your profitability is decreasing in a company, usually that tells us they’re adding more payroll and more liabilities. So maybe they’re looking at the long term play, which I would agree with you. You look at where the future is going, I see more robots in this non-invasive processes being the way to go. Sure enough, as I jump to the balance sheet, I’m looking at liabilities. Those have been increasing. So that’s most likely people, maybe equipment, maybe if they’ve got facilities where they’re engineering product, then I look at manufacturing plans. Yeah.

[00:30:58.740] – Max

Okay, pretty cool.

[00:31:00.320] – Sean

Yeah, familiar. Very familiar. That’s cool. All right. So this is funny. You’re a financial advisor. You personally, you go into some stuff that’s a little riskier, but some stuff like the funds, it sounds like you do put most of your money into more some conservative funds.

[00:31:18.490] – Max

I mean, yeah, I was into trading quite a bit, not so much anymore, really. It takes time. So I want to focus on my clients. I want to focus on helping them growing my business, being a resource for people. Probably a lot of that came from FOMO just knowing that I got a late start in finance, a late start in investing and wanting to make up for lost time. And I think you see that that’s also another theme or meme that people pile on the risk when they’re trying to catch up.

[00:31:48.820] – Sean

Amen. That seems to be a common theme. So listeners out there, if you feel that way, if you feel like you’re trying to make up for lost time, don’t lose sleep on this. It’s something that a lot of people that are in that boat. I would say probably eight or nine out of 10 people are in that same position. And the solution is keep your job. Don’t expect to leave your job the next day. You want a steady paycheck and just keep investing in the market if you can, every paycheck. Try to get some money aside, just have that discipline. I know some people will run into this issue with Tykr. Some people will invest in month one and then they wait one month, two months, three months, four months, five months, whatever, and then they invest again. And you can’t do that. You have to be disciplined. It’s like your 401(k) if you work for an employer, they’re not going to skip months. They’re going to take money out of every paycheck and put you in. So you’re probably teaching your customers the same thing. Don’t skip months, be disciplined. And that’s if you can do those two things: keep a steady paycheck, keep investing, comp on interest, it does some special things for you over time.

[00:32:55.030] – Max

Absolutely.

[00:32:56.080] – Sean

Yeah. All right. Let’s transition to the rapid-fire round. This is the part of the episode where we get to find out who Max really is. If you can try to answer each question in 15 seconds or less. You’re ready?

[00:33:08.590] – Max

For sure.

[00:33:09.530] – Sean

What is your favorite podcast?

[00:33:11.690] – Max

Yours is one of them. I don’t really watch a lot of podcasts regularly, though.

[00:33:15.400] – Sean

I made the list. Let’s jump to the book question. What is a recent book you read and would recommend?

[00:33:22.180] – Max

I like Wallace Waddell’s The Science of Getting Rich.

[00:33:25.540] – Sean

I have not heard of that. Thanks for the heads up. All right, movie question. What is your favorite movie?

[00:33:30.890] – Max

Probably a Korean movie called Peppermint Candy.

[00:33:33.920] – Sean

I have never heard of this. Is this a Canadian production?

[00:33:38.150] – Max

It’s Korean. It’s not mainstream.

[00:33:40.290] – Sean

Okay, very underground. Nice. I’d to check it out. All right, a few more questions here. What is the worst advice you ever received?

[00:33:49.070] – Max

Probably not to invest in the condo when I was 21 years old.

[00:33:54.540] – Sean

Right on. All right, flip that equation. What’s the best advice you ever received?

[00:33:58.160] – Max

Best advice has just been a stream of advice from my mental fitness coach on just how to really change my life and change the way I look at things and believe in myself.

[00:34:08.380] – Sean

All right, nice. The last question here is a 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?

[00:34:18.210] – Max

I would visit age 19 and teach my younger self everything I know now about investing and also not to lend money to people who wouldn’t pay me back.

[00:34:28.740] – Sean

Nice. Good advice. All right, Max, where can audience reach you?

[00:34:32.370] – Max

You can find me on my website, abundancewealthcommunity. Com. And whether you’re in the US, Europe or Canada, feel free to reach out to me if you want to chat. I’m also on LinkedIn, I don’t charge for my time, so I’m happy to have a chat with you, give you a second set of eyes or hear about your story. And if you are in BC or Alberta and you’d like some help with your finances, then I’m licensed in those provinces and able to serve you there.

[00:35:03.440] – Sean

Awesome. All right, Max, thank you so much for your time.

[00:35:06.000] – Max

We’ll see you. Thank you, Sean. You have a great one. Appreciate it. Hey, I’d.

[00:35:09.340] – Sean

Like to say thank you for checking out this podcast. I know there’s a lot of other podcasts out there you could be listening to, so thanks for spending some time with me. If you have a moment, please head over to Apple Podcasts and leave a five-star review. The more reviews we get, especially five-star reviews, the higher this podcast will rank in Apple. Thanks for doing that. And remember, this show is for entertainment purposes only. If you heard any stocks mentioned on this podcast, please do not buy or sell those stocks based solely on what you hear. All right, thanks for your time. We’ll see you.