An Unfiltered Conversation with Chris Camillo
Chris Camillo argues that culturally connected retail traders possess a structural advantage over slow, career-conscious institutions. His new audit was not yet finished, but he expected it to show roughly 70% annualized returns over 18 years; of 70–80 publicly discussed high-conviction trades, he estimates fewer than 10 were wrong. His blunt framing: “The market is rigged for you, not against you.”
His edge is detecting changes in human attention before they become transactions, earnings surprises, or consensus narratives. Social platforms have evolved from closed social grids into open “information maps,” making conversations about products, habits, and technologies observable in real time. “Before anybody does anything, they speak about it,” and Camillo expects agentic AI to help traders connect that overwhelming conversational flow to investable companies.
Attention arbitrage is a filtering process, not a license to buy anything viral. Camillo may monitor 100 shots to find one or two where the product is genuinely consequential, adoption is escaping paid promotion, other investors have not recognized it, and no larger company-specific issue overwhelms the thesis. His live example was Sweetgreen’s new portable wrap: reviews were encouraging, but “it’s not really a trade yet.”
Camillo expresses exceptional conviction through options and concentration while insisting that no trade is certain. He commonly allocates 5–15% of his portfolio to a medium- or high-conviction idea and sometimes far more; a QSR options trade cost him one-third of his liquid net worth in an hour. The Frozen-doll thesis was operationally correct, yet the stock reversed from roughly +30% premarket to down 20–30% when a fund holding 10% of the company dumped its entire position: “There’s always something.”
His Amazon and Bloom Energy buying during geopolitical panic illustrates his probability-first approach. Camillo assigned only a 1–5% probability to the feared escalation because political incentives opposed it, versus roughly 95% odds that the scare faded and his theses resumed; he therefore added while Thread Guy and much of FinTwit were doom-posting. He cited Amazon around $197 and Bloom near $77 before Bloom later reached about $295, while stressing that outcomes—not frightening headlines—determine the trade.
The methodology can work in mega-caps because even the most-covered companies can be culturally misunderstood. Camillo’s formative examples include holding an original iPhone and recognizing its importance while Wall Street focused on the missing keyboard and weak AT&T service, and tracking the accelerating phrase “cloud computing” in technology forums before investors grasped AWS. His Novo thesis similarly began with TikTok users describing a drug capable of shedding 15–25% of body weight, not with a spreadsheet.
Choosing the right security requires separating the true beneficiary from the security investors will initially believe is the beneficiary. Camillo is not yet ready to trade peptides, but thinks the trend is a “freight train” that could unfold over months; HIMS might rise merely because investors nominate it as the obvious expression, even if another platform ultimately captures the economics. AI should test granular questions such as whether the trend can move the needle and what competing variables matter—not answer “What stock should I buy?”
The highest-leverage preparation happens before rare events and the most important restraint comes after large wins. Camillo recommends pre-mapping 20–30 low-probability scenarios so that when one occurs, the trader can act in minutes rather than hours: “You will not pull the trigger…unless you’ve been thinking about it for years.” Conversely, after a grand slam he says to trade less, because overconfidence and abundant cash have repeatedly preceded his worst decisions; he also prescribes a complete 24-hour market break every one or two months.
1. Crypto traders are entering the market Camillo once occupied alone
Thread Guy traced his route from sneaker resale to sports cards, NFTs, on-chain crypto, and finally equities after crypto liquidity and open interest collapsed in fall 2025. Reading Camillo’s chapter in Unknown Market Wizards convinced him that narrative, attention, momentum, and memetics were transferable skills rather than crypto-specific luck.
Camillo’s response was autobiographical: imagine developing that approach decades earlier, when equities were the only venue and “not one other” trader seemed to think that way. Traditional investment conferences left him feeling “like an alien”; crypto finally produced the aggressive, culturally fluent community he had wanted, albeit in a different asset class.
He initially resented watching crypto traders discover his methodology outside equities, then embraced their migration. They will erode his edge over the next five years, he thinks, but they also advance his goal of democratizing investing—and he wants two more years of strong returns to complete a 20-year record before materially slowing down.
2. Publicly calling trades became Camillo’s credibility mechanism
TickerTags began as an attempt to prove that conversational intelligence could qualify as institutional research. During that effort, a fund professional told Camillo that Wall Street would never respect an outsider’s unusual method unless he repeatedly said, before the outcome, “This is what I’m seeing. This is what I’m doing.”
Camillo consequently made his concentrated ideas public despite the risk of humiliation. He estimates that fewer than 10 of 70–80 high-conviction calls over 18 years were wrong, while acknowledging that trades can still be defeated by macro shocks, overlooked company events, or other surprises.
Recent examples were deliberately uncomfortable: Amazon around $197 while critics attacked its roughly $200 billion spending plan; Bloom Energy around $80 and then around $77 before reaching approximately $295; Palantir in the $30s; and Robinhood around $27. His recurring posture was, “The reason why it’s down makes no sense to me. Therefore, I’m doubling down.”
3. Institutional constraints preserve retail’s informational edge
Camillo distinguishes the people from the institution: hedge-fund employees may be brilliant, but regulation, documentation, hierarchy, and career risk constrain the scrappy supply-chain calls and field research common 20–25 years ago. An analyst cannot comfortably explain that a portfolio lost money because TikTok comments from 25-year-old women were misread.
His disillusioning TickerTags moment came after an unnamed fund’s data team spent six months validating the product and invited him to present. Not one investment pod attended. TickerTags was eventually sold to Jefferies, but Camillo left five years of institutional work believing the firms were “crippled,” “handcuffed,” and primarily motivated to avoid conspicuous mistakes.
Camillo acknowledged that funds such as Renaissance Capital can excel at systematic, margin-harvesting strategies, and agreed when Thread Guy mentioned Jane Street. He also noted that autonomous pods sometimes behave more entrepreneurially. What institutions generally lack is the mandate to find unconventional evidence quickly, trust judgment, and place a large leveraged trade before the observation becomes respectable.
Camillo spends six figures annually on transactional and credit-card data, mainly to see whether activity already confirms what conversational data suggested earlier. Retail traders often assume a $5–100 billion fund must know more; his message is that “most of the time” the bedroom trader is not missing a hidden fact.
4. A social-arbitrage trade must survive a demanding funnel
Camillo’s “prepared mind” begins by identifying something that could become consequential before proof arrives. Of every 100 shots, perhaps one or two reach the bottom of the funnel: genuine company-level impact, authentic consumer adoption, limited investor awareness, and no unrelated development more important than the thesis.
Sweetgreen’s wrap, launched about eight days earlier, illustrated the unfinished process. Portability could expand how and where customers consume the product, and early reviews were strong, but most content remained paid influencer promotion. Camillo needed to see whether ordinary consumers carried it beyond that first wave: “I haven’t seen enough yet.”
Camillo said he had visited one Sweetgreen location and described ordering the product, speaking casually with employees, and asking a manager whether it was moving the needle. The discipline is emotional as much as informational: wanting the trade to exist cannot become evidence that it does.
Community expands that fieldwork. During the pandemic, one member flew a small propeller plane to a Peloton warehouse, spoke with workers about inventory and deliveries, filmed the visit, and uploaded it to Discord. Camillo’s longstanding ambition is a decentralized research network “a thousand-X” larger and more intellectually diverse than any hedge fund.
5. Digital information maps expanded both the opportunity and the workload
The defining change since Camillo’s early career is that “all of the world’s communications have become digitized.” Facebook and early Instagram exposed only a user’s social grid; modern feeds operate as information maps, surfacing what strangers everywhere discuss in real time. For an attention trader, that is “sick alpha”—almost too much of it.
Direct ticker attention is useful but brutally compressed: once everyone starts discussing the same symbol, the reaction window may be minutes or hours. Product and behavioral change is more nuanced and interpretable, often providing days, weeks, or months; stopping at ticker momentum, Camillo warned, leaves “95% of the opportunity on the floor.”
He expects agentic AI to become essential because humans cannot continuously interpret the volume of discourse and map it to public companies. His own preference is lifestyle-compatible research late at night, not screen-bound day trading: roughly two meaningful hours on five or six days now, versus four hours almost every day earlier in his career.
6. The best specimens range from dresses and shoes to iPhones and cloud computing
Camillo keeps Michelle Obama’s yellow J.Crew dress in his closet as a reminder of missed alpha. Her choice placed an accessible brand before a huge audience and potentially opened a difficult demographic; magazines on his own coffee table displayed the evidence, yet the trader known for noticing such shifts failed to act.
“Damn Daniel” was not valuable merely because white Vans sold out. The viral moment put Vans into consumers’ minds, drawing mall traffic that could purchase other shoes, shirts, or accessories; a small attention spillover could materially affect the company. Camillo groups it with profitable shifts he caught in Uggs, Crocs, and other footwear brands.
Thread Guy challenged the idea that social arbitrage belongs mainly to small consumer names. Camillo called that “the biggest misconception”: at a rooftop pool party, two minutes with an original iPhone convinced him it could become his largest trade while analysts fixated on its missing keyboard, Apple’s telecom inexperience, and AT&T’s poor building penetration in Manhattan.
AWS offered the same mechanism in enterprise technology. Camillo and technology-sector contacts watched references to “cloud computing” accelerate across technical forums and inferred that major companies were evaluating migration before investors appreciated Amazon’s position. “Before anybody does anything, they speak about it.”
7. The best expression may be economic, narrative, or both
Once a trend is identified, Camillo asks whether it can move a company’s needle and whether another development could dominate the stock first. Financial modeling is secondary—“virtually none” of the initial thesis—but company size, exposure, competing variables, and the investment community’s eventual recognition still matter.
He was not yet ready to trade peptides, although he expected a “freight train” over months rather than years. HIMS could become the early expression if investors decide it is the primary beneficiary, even if Camillo concludes the economics ultimately accrue elsewhere; that reflexive trade remains valid only if exited before narrative and reality diverge.
His Novo call began with exhaustive TikTok viewing and comments from women taking Ozempic. A drug that could reduce body weight by 15–25% without equivalent effort looked like an “avalanche” because weight mattered intensely to the observed customers; he told Howard Lindzon it might be the biggest pharmaceutical drug of their lives.
Thread Guy’s “hallucination yield” question captured the danger of outsourced conviction: if everyone asks an LLM what to buy, its preferred stocks may attract flows. Camillo nearly shorted Meta after multiple people said ChatGPT expected an earnings explosion. His prescribed use is narrower—originate the thesis yourself, then make AI perform granular research that might support or break it.
8. Concentration magnifies insight, error, and unknowable interference
Camillo grades ideas low, medium, high, or ultra-high conviction. A meaningful trade may receive 5–15% of the portfolio, largely through options, with a six- or seven-figure profit objective; on rare occasions, including a recent Amazon position, he again put roughly one-third of his portfolio into options.
The counterexample is QSR, owner of Burger King, Popeyes, and Tim Hortons: options went to zero, erasing one-third of his liquid net worth in an hour. It was the only loss that made him nearly physically ill, and he did not know whether he could recover—though he eventually did.
A Frozen doll produced a different failure. Camillo correctly identified what became the world’s bestselling toy and watched the stock rise roughly 30% premarket after the company’s biggest earnings report, only for a fund holding 10% of the company to liquidate its entire position into that strength; shares finished down approximately 20–30%.
“There’s never such a thing as a sure thing in investing.” His practical safeguard is a separate account containing only risk capital—not children’s or retirement money—while accepting that a leveraged idea might instantly cost 10%, 20%, or 30%. His personal rationale is an ambition to build a billion-dollar charitable foundation, not lifestyle consumption.
9. Probability and incentives matter more than geopolitical theater
Thread Guy admitted that monitoring a possible Iran escalation had made him a doomer; seeing Camillo repeatedly post “bought more Amazon” and “bought more Bloom Energy” looked reckless until both recovered. His pushback asked how conviction survived collapsing charts and a potentially catastrophic outcome.
Camillo’s answer was probabilities and payoffs. He put the feared escalation at roughly 1–5% because the political incentives made it unlikely, leaving about 95% odds that it did not materialize and markets normalized. “Forget about what people say. Look at what the incentives are.”
He views financial media as a noise machine reinforced by social proximity: similar professionals commute together, sit beside the same televisions, read the same papers, and discuss the same fears. The retail advantage begins by leaving that echo chamber and independently asking what must actually occur for the alarming scenario to become real.
Amazon remained his number-one idea because he saw further layers beyond the immediate recovery. After chips, infrastructure, and power, he expects an “AI efficiency wave” in which Amazon becomes the leading beneficiary; that could support years of reinvestment after wins, although he explicitly allowed, “I might change my mind tomorrow” if new facts appear.
10. Viral event trades have distinct waves and expiration dates
Camillo divided the “AP Swatch” setup into two waves. The easy first trade belonged to investors who anticipated the collaboration and understood that watch culture overlaps heavily with the investing demographic. By the interview, he considered that move “long gone.”
A conditional second wave remained: extraordinary Saturday lines could become a mass-market news event, reach general retail investors by Sunday or Monday, and produce another pop. The tactical plan was to enter before the weekend and exit around Monday—but only if the launch dominated a quiet news cycle. “The big trade’s over. The obvious easy trade on Swatch is over.”
Faster, larger change now supplies more setups. Where Camillo once found perhaps two major trades annually, he can sometimes find more than 10; the prior year might have become his best year ever, and the current year was developing similarly. Smaller trades still appeal for “the love of the game,” like earlier Target collaborations, movie releases, and Barbie.
11. Rare-event preparation converts latency into an edge
Camillo recommends maintaining 20–30 scenarios, each perhaps only 5% likely within a lifetime, with the exact response researched in advance. Collectively, one, two, or three are likely to occur; an earthquake, another pandemic, or a true baldness cure could therefore become a career-defining setup.
His deliberately extreme analogy was a verified asteroid certain to hit Earth in two years. Even after confirmation from multiple networks and the president, human beings would need time to believe and process it; low-probability events remain inefficient because almost nobody has already decided what to own, short, or hedge.
“The difference between moving in a matter of minutes and moving in a matter of hours might be the biggest trade of your entire life.” Preparation makes leveraged action psychologically possible: without years of rehearsal, he argues, the trader will freeze precisely when the unlikely scenario finally arrives.
Thread Guy noted the absurdity of hoping disaster strikes during market hours and asked about 24/7 perpetual markets. Camillo conceded that he “absolutely should” use them, but called himself old-school and semi-retired. He nevertheless believes crypto traders’ speed, tolerance for leverage, concentration, and large losses puts them “in the driver’s seat” against equity incumbents.
12. Longevity requires doing less after winning and preserving a life outside markets
Camillo’s most repeatable behavioral error arrives after a grand slam. Feeling brilliant and cash-rich makes his process less regimented, so his instruction is blunt: “Do less after your big wins.” Pause large trading, spend time or money with family and friends, and remember that the next position may otherwise become the worst one of your life.
He says losses are the lessons traders actually internalize. Money itself produces little consumption pleasure—“It’s the win that matters”—and excess returns largely feed his foundation. That purpose makes volatility easier to tolerate, but the QSR experience shows that even long habituation to options does not eliminate emotional damage.
His mental-health prescription is at least one complete 24-hour separation from assets and business news every one or two months. He resisted 24/7 markets partly because he remembered feeling depressed as a young trader when Friday ended; Thread Guy, who admitted watching ticks even at the gym, promised to complete the cleanse before part two.
Camillo’s long-range thesis combines Peter Lynch-style observation with Steve Cohen-like aggression. He predicts investing will become the world’s largest competitive game and that distinctive human creators who survive the AI cycle could become “the new athletes,” building $100 million-plus brands over five to 10 years. He may slow down after year 20, but expects to trade even from his deathbed: “Just give me my phone.”
Full transcript
Mr. Chris, what’s up?
Welcome to the stream, man. How are you doing?
I’m doing great, man. It’s a good day.
It’s a great day, man. I’m happy you could make it.
Look, I want to start by giving you a quick intro. Everyone’s always asking you for intros, so I want to give you a quick one. A little lore on me: I’ve always been an internet hustler kid, right? In high school, I was a sneaker reseller. Near the end of high school, I graduated in 2020 and moved on to sports cards at the beginning of COVID. Then I found NFTs, which I know you had a little NFT stint at one point.
NFTs sort of aged out, so I moved over to crypto, and then we were trading crypto on-chain. In the fall of 2025, crypto had a really rough year. 10/10 happened, and volume, liquidity, and open interest sort of fell off a cliff. I realized that, more than anything, I wanted to trade volatility.
In October of last year, I started talking about stocks, and for the first time, clips started coming out from my stream. I was saying, “I just feel like crypto traders can do well in the stock market, and that a lot of—not all of—our skills, narrative, attention, momentum, and metrics port over.”
I posted this clip, and at the time I was reading Unknown Market Wizards. I think I was on the Peter Brandt chapter, which is funny because it’s the antithesis of how you trade. You quote-tweeted me and basically said something along the lines of, “I’ve been saying this forever. It’s about time they caught on.”
I clicked on it and thought, “Who is Chris Camillo?” I clicked on your Twitter profile and saw that your banner was Unknown Market Wizards. I thought, “No way. I have the book in front of me.” I skipped ahead a couple of chapters and got to your section at the same time I was trying to convince myself I could win in stocks, like it wasn’t just luck in crypto.
I read your chapter, and it starts with the Snapple story, gets to Michelle Obama, and then ticker-tags the whole thing. I honestly could not believe what I was reading. I felt like it was meant to be at the time. It was an unbelievable chapter.
When did you record that interview?
That was years ago. I don’t know, maybe 8 or 9 months before that book came out. It was probably 2021 or something like that.
Dude, imagine this. Imagine you’re who you are, but you’re my age, and you were doing all that stuff—but crypto didn’t exist, and none of that stuff existed. The only thing that existed was the equity market. Imagine you’re the only guy in the world taking that approach, and you’re thinking, “This is insane.”
I’m not talking about not having 50 million other people like you have in crypto trading. There wasn’t one other person. That was my life decades ago, dude. I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting for other people to catch on.
Then, the moment people finally catch on to my methodology, it’s not with equities. It’s with this new thing, crypto. I’m thinking, “There’s no effing way. There’s no effing way that I’ve been waiting my whole life to have people think like me and trade like me, and they’re not doing it with stocks. They’re doing it with this new thing, crypto.”
It was insane. On one hand, it was super frustrating because it sucks to be a lone wolf forever. You want to have a community, right? You want to be able to relate.
I’ve been an investor for decades, so I go to investing events and conferences. There are technical traders and fund managers, but I’m just an alien, dude. I don’t relate to anyone. I don’t give a crap about anything anybody else is doing in the investing world. It could be as foreign to me as anything you could imagine.
I’ve had no friends in my world. I had no one to relate to. Then all of you guys stepped in and started doing this crypto stuff, and I thought, “Okay.” It sucked for me because I was thinking, “What the hell are they doing?” But on the flip side, I thought, “If all of these guys got involved with equity trading, my edge would go down meaningfully.”
These kids are young, they’re sharp, they’re using algos. Everything that I’m doing, they’re doing, but they’re relentless. They’re doing it the way I did it a long time ago, when I just didn’t sleep.
I don’t know that I need millions to tens of millions of those kids competing with me as attention-arb traders, social-arb traders, or whatever you want to call them in the equity market, because my competition in the equity market is freaking nothing. Nothing.
People ask, “How did you generate 70% returns for 18 years?” The new audit isn’t out yet. It will be soon—I’m waiting on Jack to give it to me—but I think it’s going to be roughly 70% over 18 years.
You don’t understand how weak the competition is in equity markets. You don’t understand how slow hedge funds are. You really, really don’t understand how much of a herd mentality there is in this space that I’ve been working in.
Yes, they’re technically smart. Yes, they have access to tens of billions of dollars and infinite resources, technically. But none of that matters. They don’t know what the hell they’re doing.
I started talking recently about these crypto traders coming into my space because I knew it was inevitable. I’m actually happier about it than I am mad, because truthfully, my life’s obsession is to fully democratize the investing landscape: to have every human on Earth enter the investor class, be successful, and truly understand and believe that they could be great at this.
No one believes me, dude. Every person says, “The game is rigged. It’s rigged against us.” I’m like, “Dude, it’s rigged for us. If you’re a retail trader, if you’re a normal human who doesn’t have to report to a conventional office on Wall Street every day with a bunch of suits, protect your job, and follow conventional research methodologies—if you’re just normal, connected culturally to the world, and able to do whatever the hell you want—this market is rigged for you, not against you.”
Nobody ever believes me when I say that.
I want to ask you about this because you are so adamant, outspoken, and open about wanting everybody to participate in these markets. Historically, I’ve gone through life—not lying to people, but avoiding the discussion of what I buy and what I trade.
There was a time when I wasn’t doing that. I would say, “You should buy this. You should trade this.” I convinced my dad to buy NBA Top Shot and my friend to buy Solana, and every time it ends in one of two ways: either it ends in a disaster where they lose money, or they make money and think it’s because they’re a genius.
I’ve found that the easier path of least resistance is just not to talk about it. You are as far on the other end of the spectrum as possible when it comes to trying to get people to trade. Why is that?
When I first created my company, TickerTags, the first social data intelligence company for hedge funds and banks, I wanted to prove that my methodology could be institutional. That was my high ground.
I was always an outsider. I was always on the outside of Wall Street, and I always wondered what it would be like to get deep inside Wall Street. I did. I got as deep as one could go. I worked with the biggest funds in the world, at the top levels of those funds, educating them on conversational datasets—how to look at them and how to interpret them.
Ultimately, they’re so lazy and intimidated by it that most of them, to this day, still don’t know what the hell they’re doing in this space. When I was making the rounds with these funds, which was a pretty cool experience for me at the time—this was in the mid-2010s—one guy sat me down and said, “Listen, what you’re doing is incredible. Your track record, your approach, your methodology.”
He said, “But no one in this industry is going to respect it. What you need to do, as hard and intimidating as it seems, is be outspoken about what you believe and what you’re seeing in the market. You never want to be called out for being wrong, but you just have to call your shots out loud.”
“Every time you take a meeting, say, ‘This is what I’m seeing. This is what I’m doing.’ People are going to see it work more than they’re going to see it not work. Over time, you’re going to earn the respect of other investors in institutional Wall Street.”
Since that day, I’ve been very outspoken—not in terms of saying, “You need to invest in this,” but saying, “This is what I’m seeing. This is what I’m doing,” knowing that I could just fall flat on my face because that trade might not work. It doesn’t always work. It never always works.
Truthfully, over 18 years, I’ve made 70 to 80 high-conviction trades, and I think fewer than 10 of them have been wrong. That seems insane. I know it seems insane, but I’ve been very outspoken with all of those 70 to 80 trades.
If someone went back through all of Twitter, YouTube, and everything I’ve ever done, they would find those 70 to 80 trades. A person could document all of them—the book and everything I’ve talked about before the trades happened.
And it’s kind of nuts, man. The guy was right. Eventually, if you’re willing to be open and say, “This is what I’m doing. This is why I’m doing it,” there’s always going to be something weird that might creep up that you missed. The trade didn’t work, or the macro environment crashed right in front of you, so the trade didn’t even matter. There are a lot of ways for a trade to go bad, but damn, so many of them have gone so well.
Even the most recent one—Amazon at $197, when every single person was shitting on Amazon. Every big institutional investor, every retail investor, all of X was like, “Dude, this $200 billion that they’re spending is insane.”
I was like, “You know what?” I came out and said, “Dude, Amazon was hurting. I am doubling, tripling, quintupling down.” I did the same thing with Bloom Energy.
Bloom Energy, ticker BE, was down to $80. Bloom Energy came down to the 70s—I think it came down to $77. I’m doubling down. I don’t care. The reason why it’s down makes no sense to me. Therefore, I’m doubling down. Now it’s at $295 a few months later, right?
So it’s so hard. People don’t understand how fucking hard it is when nobody believes, and it seems like the dumbest move in the world to say, “I so believe in this, I’m tripling down.” Palantir in the 30s—there were guys coming out saying, “Dude, you’re getting into Palantir now? Are you kidding me? This move is so over.” Robinhood at $27—it’s just like, here we are again. Robinhood’s down to the 70s again. I’m doubling down on Robinhood. I’m still doubling down on Amazon.
By the way, it’s hard for me in equities. It’s not hard for you guys in crypto, because you guys are used to having the world against you. You’re used to having outlandish opinions that are uncorrelated and that no one believes in. You guys are fucking nuts just like me. The thought of you guys coming into my world is both invigorating and exciting.
Meanwhile, I know what’s going to happen. The edge is going to slowly come down with what I do if you guys really do this, which I know you will. I know you will. You’re already starting. Over the next 5 years, the edge is going to come down. But I’m at the tail end of my career, man. I want 2 more years of big returns. I want to hit the 20-year return mark.
Okay. I’m getting involved in it, dude. I’ve been grinding since I was 12 years old, okay? I’m not young. I’ve made all the money I’ve wanted to make times 10. There’s nothing I want to buy. I just want to help people.
I just want people to get in the market, learn how to invest for themselves, and not be afraid of or intimidated by Wall Street. The timing could not be better. I’m so pumped to have more of you guys getting into equities.
Okay, let me ask you about a specific trade, and then we’ll come to an old trade that you wrote about and talked about in the Market Wizards interview, but I haven’t seen you talk about in a bunch of YouTube videos.
The connection is the Sydney Sweeney–American Eagle moment that happened in 2025, where she did all the ads for American Eagle and it ripped 75–100%. I didn’t trade it, but that was the moment where I realized, “Okay, I think I could do this well.” You wrote about this Michelle Obama dress on Jay Leno in 2010 or something like that. I looked it up—we showed it on the stream, the yellow dress. You were watching it; you weren’t paying attention. It was J.Crew. J.Crew went on this crazy run, and you’re telling Jack, “I bought the fucking dress. It’s in my closet.” Do you actually have the dress?
I got it, man. I’ve got it in my closet right now. It’s in my closet right now. I bought it on eBay forever ago to remind me that there’s always a social-arb trade that you’re missing out on in the world.
Dude, I think it was People, Us Weekly, or one of those magazines on my coffee table. She was in that dress on everything, and it was right in front of my face. How often does the first lady wear something from J.Crew, right? Everything just made sense, because at the time it was so hard for a company like J.Crew to break into a brand-new demographic of Black Americans. That’s a really hard nut to crack.
Michelle Obama at the time was as big as it gets. Instead of going out and wearing some $10,000 dress, she’s wearing this thing from J.Crew. It was just a moment for the company. The fact that I missed that—being a guy whose pride was catching on to those things—shows you how many opportunities there are.
By the way, there have never been more social opportunities than right now. I’ve never seen anything like this in my career. I can’t keep up with them. I’m missing them left and right. I missed a monster one on coconut water a few weeks ago.
That was a good one.
Dude, for me to miss that—my forte is that I never miss a shoe trade. I can’t even tell you how many shoe trades I’ve made over the past 15 years. Every single time the shoe market shifts, I’ve nailed a trade almost every time, from Uggs to Crocs. Just all of them. Vans back in the day, with the white Vans that sold out and went viral.
Damn Daniel.
Damn Daniel. That’s right.
Oh, that was a trade.
Oh, hell yeah. Trade. Damn Daniel, dude. Vans on fire. On fire.
By the way, people don’t really understand how this works. It’s not that they can only sell so many pairs of white Vans. The bottom line was that the Damn Daniel viral TikTok ultimately brought more eyeballs to Vans and got people thinking about Vans. Maybe they’re in the mall, Vans is now on their mind, they stop in, check out the white Vans, maybe they get something else, maybe they get a T-shirt, whatever. It doesn’t take much to move the needle of a company like that.
How big of a trade was that for you? Do you see this and it just goes off? Do the spidey senses start tinkling?
Yeah. The way that I measure my trades is by conviction level. Low, medium, high conviction. If a trade is high conviction or ultra-high conviction and nobody believes it, then that’s significant.
I had a video clip come out recently that everyone was ripping on because I talked about this QSR trade with Burger King, Popeyes, and Tim Hortons.
So good.
And how I lost one-third of my liquid net worth in an hour. People were like, “Dude, as if the guy put a third of his liquid net worth in stock options that went to zero.” Yeah, I did, dude. I did. I lost that third. By the way, a crypto trader wouldn’t even blink at that.
Leverage to the tits right now. Yeah, yeah.
Right. You know it. Nobody does that in equities, but I’ve been doing that forever. High-conviction trade.
Listen, I’m a family guy today. I really try to be more prudent in what I do, so I generally don’t put a third of my whole portfolio in options. Although, it did happen again recently, and it worked in my favor with Amazon. So it does still happen.
I might put 5–15% of my portfolio in a trade like that. Usually, I try to make 6–7 figures on a trade if it hits, if it’s medium to high conviction. It’s mostly options.
Speaking of Amazon, this is such a sidebar, but you did an interview—I think it was a Graham Stephan interview—and you were telling this story. I played it on stream, and the stream was dying. You’re the most requested guest ever.
After this clip, you’re talking about how you were at a horse race or a flag football game or something with your friend’s daughter. She’s like 10, and she says, “Chris, I have $500. I saved up. What should I buy?” You’re like, “Okay, take this $500, get 2× margin, borrow against it, get $1,000, and put all of it into Amazon.” Did she do it?
That’s right. It was at a tennis tournament here in Dallas. I had just met this guy and his daughter. She was 11. He said, “She’s got $500. She’s thinking about opening a brokerage account and investing $50 of it prudently. Can you help her out?”
I looked her in the face and said, “Forget about that plan. You take that $500 and tell your dad to borrow another $500 on margin, okay? You take the $1,000 and put all of it in Amazon. All of it. There’s at least a 50% shot you’re going to 4× that money, because Amazon’s probably going to 2× over the next few years. You’re going to 4× your money. There’s a 50/50 shot that happens. There’s maybe a 1–2% chance that, if this goes really bad, you lose it all. But you’re 11 years old. Why do you care? It’s $500. Do you want to make $2,000?”
She thought I was insane. I think her dad thought I was insane. I actually don’t know if they did it or not. I’m going to find out. But the trade would be looking good so far. She’d already be up. Amazon’s up 50%, so she’d already have almost doubled her money, and that was a couple of months ago.
When they left, I said, “Listen, if the trade goes totally bad, I’ll pay you $500. I’ll give it back to you.” I was starting to feel like I shouldn’t be saying this stuff to an 11-year-old.
Eleven, right? Yeah.
Yeah. So I told her, “I’ll give you the $500 as long as I’m not broke.” Honestly, if you lose all $500, I might be so broke that I might not be able to give it to you. I do love that story. It was true.
Yeah, that was a good one. I’m reading this book right now. You mentioned hedge funds a little while back, and I’m kind of obsessed with hedge funds right now. It’s called More Money Than God, and it’s like the fund of the decade every 10 years. It has Soros, Druckenmiller, Tiger, and Paul Tudor Jones, and it goes through all of them.
I think you’ve talked publicly a couple of times about how you ran money for a week and were like, “Fuck this shit,” and returned it. Secondly, you’re so vocal right now about how dumb you think these funds are, specifically in this market, and how much edge there is. Where does that edge lie? What are they good at, what are they not good at, and what is your general feeling about that scene?
Yeah, I’m more comfortable talking the truth about hedge funds because most of my buddies in the space have since left the space, so I don’t feel as bad. By the way, I actually love guys who work at hedge funds. A lot of them are still my close friends. It’s their career; it’s their job, man. It’s not the people, it’s the institution. It handcuffs you.
It’s wild to me. There’s no way it used to be like this, because when I talk to people and find out how the best funds were actually operating 20 or 25 years ago, dude, they were so scrappy. They were calling supply chains, traveling Asia, and getting the scoop. Back then, insider trading was basically legal, so they were all doing it in the scrappiest ways ever. That was when you wanted to be in that business, when it was like, “Where can you find the alpha?” You just went for it. When you watch the show Billions, it used to be more like that.
But you know what happened 10 years ago? The SEC came down hard. Now they’re really strict about what information is public, what’s private, what you can trade, and what you can’t trade. You’ve got to document everything at a hedge fund, okay? You can’t do anything shady and get away with it these days.
People who work there, it’s just a job, man. They don’t really care. You know how you make money? You make money by not doing anything dumb. That’s the number-one takeaway from Wall Street. You have a career and make money by looking really smart and trustworthy, helping the fund raise a lot of capital, and not doing anything stupid, right?
You don’t take at-bats for home runs in that industry. You just don’t do it. If the primary source of alpha, which I know it is, is trying to make sense of what people are saying in comments on TikTok videos, you can’t put that in your notes, man. You can’t say that you lost this portfolio because you misinterpreted what a bunch of 25-year-old women were saying in comment data on TikTok. That’s not cool. That’s not going to go over well with your 55-year-old Boomer boss, right?
They’re crippled because they can’t adapt to the new way of trading. It just seems insane to the Boomer bosses who are still in control of a lot of these funds. There’s nothing behind the curtain, I promise you. They’re really good. There are a lot of funds that are actually really good at algorithmic stuff, making pennies on everything. They do that incessantly, and that’s just something foreign to me. I have no interest in it.
Renaissance Capital—there are still funds that are killer when it comes to figuring out how to institutionally make money no matter what, getting between the margins.
The Jane Street stuff.
Yeah. But in terms of finding real alpha, being really scrappy, knowing where to look, and just using your gut to put on big leveraged trades on the information you find quickly, dude, they’re not good at doing that.
There are fast-trading shops on Wall Street where you have pods, which are small teams with full autonomy to do whatever the hell they want with the money they manage. Some of those teams, because I’ve been working with some of those teams—I did that at TickerTags—are savvy enough that they’re willing to do that, and they’re kind of getting into this style of trading. But more often than not, no.
In fact, I won’t name the fund because I have so much respect for the guy who runs it. He’s one of my idols, and I actually got to meet him recently and talk shop with him, which is the coolest thing in the world. When I was running TickerTags, I got invited to go up to his fund and present to everyone after working with his data group for 6 months and having them vet my data for 6 months.
I showed up and sat in the coolest conference room in the coolest office I’ve ever been to in that industry. Not one pod showed up. Not one. The data guys were just in the room going, “Dude, we’re so sorry. We’ve been telling everyone how well your data is working, and that they need to learn this stuff.”
At that moment, I was like, “Fuck you. Fuck you.” I was so out of trying to teach these guys that this is the way to think and this is the way to trade. TickerTags was hell for me. I kept it for years, and I sold it to Jefferies. Jefferies institutionalized it and used a lot of pieces of it. They poured money into it.
Ultimately, I walked away from that experience—5 years of working with the biggest guys on Wall Street—going, “Dude, they have nothing on us. They have nothing on us.” They’re so crippled, so handcuffed, so lazy, and so focused on protecting their jobs and not willing to put themselves out there.
If every retail trader really saw what I got to see up close, they would have so much more confidence in themselves. One of the things we’re worst at is that when we see everything clearly, we doubt ourselves because we think, “There’s no way that I’m seeing this as just some person in my bedroom, right? And XYZ fund, managing $5 billion to $50 billion or $100 billion, doesn’t see this. I must be missing something. I must be missing something.”
But you’re not. Most of the time, you’re not. You see the moves on earnings; you see the moves. They’re not seeing this stuff. The only thing they can see is transactional credit card data. That’s it. That is their primary data source, and it has been for 10 years.
By the way, that data source is not that great. It’s good. It’s good. It’s not nearly as good as what I do. I buy that data. I spend 6 figures a year buying that data just for myself, so I can see if the things I’m seeing in conversational data sets are reflected in the data hedge funds are paying for.
That seems insane, right? I just want to know if the thing I’m seeing in a TikTok comment stream is showing up yet. I’ll give you the perfect example right now. I want to talk about this on my show, actually, but let’s just talk about it.
Right now, I’m looking at the Sweetgreen wrap. It’s not really a trade yet. Sweetgreen came out with the wrap 8 days ago, and it has the potential to make their product portable for the first time, right? You could hold it in your hand and take it with you, as opposed to a salad. Salads are portable, but not as portable as a wrap.
What that means is there’s potential for a mega social trade. You have to have a prepared mind as a social trader. You have to know when something’s about to happen that could be explosive, and you have to watch it every day and know what you’re looking for.
The first wave of conversational data is paid influencers. Almost everyone who has been talking about this has been a paid influencer. That’s cool. Sometimes you can have a viral moment just from paid influencers if they do a good enough job of convincing the world to go buy this stuff, right?
What you’re really looking for is authenticity in what they’re saying and whether it starts to translate outside of paid influencers to actual consumers who take it viral. It might take me a few weeks to figure this out, and I’m on the ledge right now. The reviews have been good—really good. It has the potential to be a real game-changer for Sweetgreen, but I haven’t seen enough yet to make that determination.
Now that you know, you’ve got to be on it, right? I’m reading every review on TikTok every day of Sweetgreen wraps. I’m reading every comment. I’m speaking to clerks, going into Sweetgreen, having conversations, and talking to customers. I’m doing this for a lot of different things. Sweetgreen is just one of them.
You have to understand that, as a social trader, you can’t become biased. You might want that trade to work, but you can’t convince yourself that it’s a game-changer, because that’s when you get into trouble. For every 100 shots, you might get lucky and get 1 or 2 that follow the bottom of the funnel where everything is aligned, right? Dude, game-changer moment for the company.
Other traders don’t believe it or haven’t seen it yet. Nothing else is happening with this company that’s more meaningful than this one thing that I’m trading. In this case, it would be the wrap, right? So, there’s a lot that has to happen for you to get to the bottom of the funnel and actually trade in a big way.
How many physical locations have you been to so far to talk about it?
I’ve only been to one so far.
And what do you do when you get in there? What do you do when you walk in?
Very casual. Just keep in mind, if you act like you’re important, no one’s going to talk to you.
Yeah, for sure.
You have to be as casual as you possibly can. Go in there, order it, talk to the people on the line, ask for the manager, and say, “Hey, dude. Is this thing moving the needle for you? What’s going on here?” Go in there dressed like an idiot. Don’t go in there in a suit or anything like that. They don’t want to give any information away. Just have fun with it.
I started sharing this with a few people in my community, so we’re all kind of doing it now. What I love about being an attention-arb trader is that it’s a community, and I never had a community before. I’ve been a lone wolf for decades. No one cared. People thought I was insane with the stuff that I do. I always had to do this stuff alone.
Back in the day, I used to put a comment on a Yahoo message board and wait 10 hours for one other comment to pop up. I joked to Howard Lindzon about this, the guy who started StockTwits. He was the same way. We both lived through that world.
I love that as social traders, we can work together. I’m like, “Hey, I have an idea. I have a thesis. Here’s what it is.” Then everyone does their own homework. Everyone’s looking at different data sets. Everyone’s going around interviewing clerks.
We did this during the pandemic. I had a guy in my community get in his little propeller plane and fly to a Peloton warehouse, walk up the ramp to where they were packaging the Pelotons for the trucks, hang out, and start talking to the guys about deliveries and whether they had enough inventory. Then he took video of it and uploaded it to the Discord.
You’re a maniac, dude, but that’s what it’s about.
This is what hedge funds do.
I joked in my book, Laughing at Wall Street, which is 16 years old now, that my dream was to create a community that would be infinitely larger than any hedge fund. Whatever a hedge fund thinks it has in terms of resources, people power, diversity of opinion, and research, we would be 1,000 times bigger.
How cool would it be to have a community that’s that much more intellectually diverse, working that much harder, and doing any research we need to do instantaneously? We’d have more people on the street. That’s what’s started to happen with the Dumb Money community that we’ve been messing around with for the last 8 years.
Now you crypto guys are coming in, so it could potentially get a lot bigger.
I was cracking up about how you wrote the book at around a $2 million P&L. I was like, “I should write a [expletive] book.” I was watching some of your old interviews from 16 years ago. It’s classic.
Wait, hold on. You have to understand. You crypto guys just don’t get it. To do that from 2007 to 2010, nobody invested with concentration. Nobody invested with leverage. Crypto wasn’t a thing. It was [expletive] nuts.
To 100x your money in 3 years was psychotic behavior back in 2007 to 2010. The market moved so slowly. Investors were like turtles back then.
You guys didn’t enter this space until much later. Now you guys have the whole concept of YOLO and all this [expletive] psychotic behavior. I was the only psychopath back in the mid-2000s to late 2000s. I was the only one.
Now there’s a million. There are 50 million of you guys. You know what’s so crazy? Even today, I think you can check this.
I think there’s something like 30 to 50 million active crypto traders. I don’t know if that’s remotely right.
I don’t know about active right now. At one point, definitely.
I think it’s a lot smaller at the moment, but I think at one point, yes.
There are barely that many active equity traders. So, yeah, there are very active traders, absolutely, but barely that many. I know that for a fact.
The majority of equity traders are still fundamental or technical. Even among the technical crowd, there aren’t tens of millions of technical traders who are doing that stuff all day long. Most of the active traders are those technical guys.
The number of people who chase narrative is still that big. We haven’t had our moment yet. It’s still in front of us, and I think it’s probably going to take you guys jumping ship and coming over.
Give me your take on this. The first time I ever traded a stock option was maybe 2019, and I basically wiped out a couple of accounts. Then I got started with NFTs and crypto. This style of trading is pretty much all I know, and as a post-COVID phenomenon, it’s really all that I know.
How much has evolved from pre-COVID to post-COVID in the way you look at markets, think about markets, and observe activity in markets?
The key thing that has changed is that all of the world’s communications have become digitized. That one thing is all that matters, because if you’re trading attention, you have to be able to surface shifts in attention.
Think about what I used to do back in the day. I would have to actually go talk to people, go to the mall, and have real conversations. Even on Facebook, as crazy as that sounds, Facebook was a social grid. You didn’t have access to things that existed outside of your own social grid. Instagram was a social grid.
Now it’s an information map. Social channels have become information maps. They’re open. They’re not contained to the people that you know and follow. You can actually see, in real time, everything that everyone in the world is speaking about as they’re speaking about it.
That is sick alpha. It’s almost too much alpha. It’s really just a matter of where you start and how you go about doing this to make the most of your time.
Over the next few years, I know what’s going to happen. AI is going to take over this space because there’s just too much information flying too quickly. You need the assistance of agentic AI to help you assess what the world is talking about and how that’s connected to investable opportunities in the market.
Something you talk about a lot is turning conversational data about people talking about products into trades. Something that crypto is familiar with, and that’s happening a lot in the stock market right now, is conversational data from people talking about tickers—mimetic momentum. There’s this Serenity account going crazy right now, and there are Citrini picks. There are a lot of people talking about stock names or coins and bringing momentum behind them.
How do you think about that? Is there value in it?
There’s definitely value in that, but the reaction time is so compressed with those moves that you can make an absolute killing if you’re quick. I understand how crypto traders would naturally be oriented toward alpha that is concrete, dependable, and correlated—alpha that’s likely to actually work.
The type of attention that I’m trying to read has more nuance to it.
Got it. Meaning that there’s a larger window of reaction time and a bigger opportunity to find that information and make a trade because it’s interpretable and happens over time. With ticker data, if everyone’s talking about a ticker, you might have minutes to maybe hours if you’re on it. The type of attention that you trade is usually days to weeks and sometimes months.
I prefer it because I’m not a guy who likes to be tuned in all the time. I like having a life. I don’t want to trade all day. I’m not a day trader. I’m not glued to a screen.
Twenty years ago, maybe I might have loved it. Not anymore, man. I love life. I hang out with people all day long. I like to do my work late at night, when I’m alone and have chill time to do my research.
It doesn’t fit with my lifestyle, but I get how it would fit with a crypto trader’s lifestyle. Don’t stop there, is what I’m saying. That’s a viable way to trade, but you shouldn’t stop at a ticker, because you’re leaving 95% of the opportunity on the floor.
Speaking of this longer-horizon thinking, we were trading oil on the stream because we wanted some volatility. For the first time in my life, I’m monitoring geopolitics, which I realized is a lot harder than I imagined. I’m not sure what I imagined, but it was difficult to do.
I got pretty one-shot black-pilled—doomer-pilled—from this whole situation, along with most of FinTwit.
And I'm watching as Trump is threatening to drop a nuke on Car Island in Iran, and I'm doom-posting. You're on Twitter, and you're basically like, “What? There's a war? Bought more Amazon. What? There's a war? Bought more Bloom Energy.” You go on Graham Stephan: “What? Bought more Bloom Energy. Bought more Amazon.” You just keep buying.
I'm like, man, I thought Chris Camillo was smart. What the fuck is this? This is supposed to be my guy. What is this? And then, boom, it rips back. You know, buy the FUD, buy the fear, whatever. All-time highs on both.
So, from this framework that you trade off of, as well as you can articulate it, how are you able to develop such deep conviction in Amazon where you're not just watching the chart, you're not watching it lose structure, and you're not buying into a potential World War II-type outcome?
Well, probabilities and outcomes, that's all that matters, right? So, was there a probability that we could have gone down that path of World War II and bombing Iran? Yeah. I was aware of it. I assessed the probability of it. Then I looked at the probability of that not happening and what would happen, and I looked at the outcome of both. I thought the trade was much better on the side that it wouldn't happen.
Right. So, okay, could it have happened?
Yeah. Let's call it 5%. Realistically, it was somewhere between 1% and 5% maximum. So, I'm looking at a 95% probability of it not happening for very obvious reasons. I mean, come on. Look at the incentives. I kept telling people over and over again: look at the incentives. You always follow the incentives. Forget about what people say. Look at what the incentives are.
The incentives are that he can't have it. He just can't have it. Is there some possibility that Trump would lose his mind and get so emotional that he literally doesn't care about politics anymore and just says, “Do it”? Yeah, that could have happened. One to 5%. I think that's a reasonable probability.
Okay, now I'm looking at the flip side. There's a 95% probability it doesn't materialize, we're going to see the market normalize, and then my trades are going to hit. It was a very obvious trade to me.
I think one of the biggest traps for investors is noise. All of institutional Wall Street gets trapped by noise. Why? Because they have to take the Long Island Rail Road into the city every day with other suits, then go to the office, where they're with the same rich dudes watching the same CNBC. They all get caught up in this whirlwind.
I've seen it, man. I spent years deep in the trenches with these guys, hanging out with them, going for drinks at night, going to dinners, and all this stuff. They all think the same because they all hang out with each other all the time. They read the same paper, the same news, and watch CNBC in their offices.
I mean, if you wonder who the 80,000 people who watch CNBC are, 50,000 of those 80,000 are TVs in finance offices. That's what it is. I think it's something like 80,000 people watch CNBC. Eighty thousand. It's embarrassing, right?
That's insane.
I don't know the exact number, but it's embarrassingly low. I'll just tell you that. Roughly half of the people watching broadcast financial news are working at a finance company, right? They're part of that echo chamber.
Yes, dude.
As a retail trader, you've got to get the hell out of it. It's insane for you to be a retail trader following mainstream news. Why would you do that to yourself?
I think the biggest alpha, the biggest magic you can have, is figuring out how to break out of the matrix and think independently for yourself. There's not a lot of that happening, even with retail traders. I think that's the biggest opportunity for anyone trying to win at this game: believe in yourself and get the hell out of that echo chamber.
Beautiful take. Something unique about your Amazon and Bloom trade, at least from my eyes, is that it's a little bit different from your typical J.Crew, Sweetgreen, or Vans social arbitrage, at least as I've imagined a lot of your trades.
With those, it's like these smaller companies where a specific product goes viral on TikTok, Instagram, or Twitter, and you find an edge, capture that spread, and make a lot of money. Amazon isn't one specific product that's gone super viral. Bloom Energy isn't either. These are much bigger trades on a longer time horizon, part of a much bigger megatrend.
So how do you apply your strategy to these bigger megatrend-type major-cap trades?
The biggest misconception in social trading is that it only works with small companies. Most of my trades have been big companies—most of them since day one.
I wrote an entire chapter in my book about the original iPhone and how Apple was one of the biggest trades of my career. There was no stock more covered in the world than Apple, and yet there was no stock that Wall Street got more wrong than Apple.
Every analyst, every tech reporter, and every big multibillion-dollar hedge fund guy thought they knew what was going to happen and that the iPhone was going to fail. It didn't have a keyboard. They didn't have access to a good network. Apple knew nothing about telecommunications. “We've seen this story before.” Blah, blah, blah. Everybody jumped on that bandwagon.
I held it in my hand, man. I held that original iPhone in my hand at my pool party on the top of my condo, and I will never forget that moment. We passed that phone around, and people were like, “Dude, this is insane. This is actually insane.”
I looked at that screen and played around with it for about 2 minutes. I was like, “This is going to be the biggest trade of my life.”
What made it even better was that the data network they were on, AT&T in Manhattan, didn't work through buildings at the time. So even if you wanted to get an iPhone, you really couldn't if you lived or worked in Manhattan.
Most of the people who worked on Wall Street had very limited insight into friends, family, and co-workers who had an iPhone and used an iPhone. They were oblivious to the magic that was happening. It was this perfect storm of bias and skewed information.
But that was the biggest company ever, man. I traded Amazon before, at the birth of AWS, when I was deep into the software sector. I was a sales guy. My friends were working at technology companies, and we were essentially studying Reddit forums with technologists and monitoring the daily increase in communication around the term “cloud computing.”
Literally, we were just measuring how many times the words “cloud computing” were popping up in technology Reddit forums. Every day, it was accelerating. I was like, “Dude, what is happening?”
It was very clear to us that essentially every major company in the world was assessing a move to cloud computing and that Amazon was going to be the primary beneficiary of it. Before investors picked up on it, we knew because we were looking at what people were speaking about.
Before anybody does anything, they speak about it. They talk about it with their colleagues and friends, and they get their opinions about it. There is no better source of alpha anywhere in the world unless you can get inside the minds of humans—which maybe we will eventually—than reading what people say.
People will talk about what movie they're going to see, what they're going to eat for dinner, what peptide they want to get on, and the new product they want to buy. They'll talk about everything in their lives. You just have to know where to look.
But listen, being an attention-arbitrage trader, you have to get to the absolute earliest detection point. You want to be first every single time. You want to be first. This is ground zero of where the change we're looking for starts. It starts in people's heads, and then they talk about it. They speak it, right?
The peptide example brings me to an interesting question: how do you think about the best expression of an idea?
Oftentimes, in the iPhone example, it's obvious—you buy Apple. In the AWS example, you buy Amazon. Peptides are an interesting one because everyone has been talking about this forever, and that's one where it's a little bit more unclear. Is it Hims? Is it Eli Lilly? How do you identify the best expression of your idea and then figure out whether or not it's tradable?
Okay, great question. First of all, on peptides, I'm not there yet. We're planning a big peptide episode where we're going to dissect all the theoretical peptide trades on Dumb Money Live.
We need that.
There's a lot of research that goes into an episode like that.
Yeah.
There are 2 ways to look at it. One is: who will be the real beneficiary of this? Where will this be a needle-mover? Is this a needle-mover for Hims, or is it a needle-mover for some other platform?
But there's a better way to look at this in the early days. Sometimes it matters less who the beneficiary of that change will be. What really matters is what other investors will think, right or wrong, in the early days.
If you come to the determination that other investors will believe Hims will be the number-one beneficiary of the peptide explosion that I believe we're going to see over the next number of months—not years, but months—then that matters.
Then you could trade that even if you don't believe that HIMS is going to be a true beneficiary, right? You just have to exit at the right time. So it is hard work, though, because you have to really figure out: Is there a needle-mover here? And if there is a needle-mover, who is it? And are there other things happening at this company that are way, way more important than this one thing that I'm trading peptides?
You don't know. But I'll tell you this: peptides—it's a freight train. It's coming for us.
Fast. No one, no one is going to stop this freight train.
I said the same exact thing about Ozempic back in the day.
Did you trade?
When I was trading Novo. People thought I was [__]. I had lost my mind. I told people, I said, “This might be the biggest pharmaceutical drug of our entire life.”
What was your tell on that? TikTok?
So it was TikTok. Yes. I was basically watching every single TikTok video and reading every comment of every woman that was taking Ozempic at the time, and it was so clear to me that this was an avalanche.
If you listen, most of my career, a lot of my big trades have been front-running female and youth trends because those are the trends that Wall Street tends to be slower at catching on to. I understand what moves the female mind probably better than most middle-aged white guys, right?
So I realized that there is almost nothing more important to females than weight. I've always known this. It shouldn't be a big secret to anyone. And somebody creates a miracle drug—
That will shed 15% to 25% of your weight—
Without having to do anything. Are you kidding? Do I even have to explain this?
Yeah. And I get to inject it. It's like—yeah.
I sat across from my buddy Howard Lindzon at the Crescent Hotel years ago and I told him this, and he looked at me with glassy eyes. He's like, “What are you talking about, dude?” I'm like, “Drop everything and put all your money into Novo right now because I'm telling you, this thing is going to fly. It's going to fly.”
So when you do that, how much time is spent on financials and revenue and the current price and what it's trading at right now? What percent of your thesis is relying on that?
Virtually none. I just have to know: Is this a needle-mover for the company or not?
Needle mover. Got it.
And by the way, AI will tell you that in 2 seconds. You don't even have to do the work anymore. Is there anything else happening at the company right now that, if my thesis is correct and if the investment community comes to learn what I know is a fact over the next 6 months, could be more meaningful than that?
AI will do a great job helping you with that exercise. So you might not have to actually do anything anymore in terms of real fundamental work. But honestly, this is the equivalent of a hair drug for men.
I've always said that if someone creates a miracle drug for hair, I will sell every single stock in my portfolio and put it in.
I'll make $1 billion on that trade. If someone invents a cure for hair loss that reverses hair loss, I will make $1 billion on that trade. I will be the most heavily invested, most levered, psychotic trader around that drug the second that information comes out that someone has cracked the code.
You know about the finasteride-minoxidil stack? It—
No, it is not good. It's not good enough.
It's not good enough. I agree.
And it has too many side effects. So, listen, I'm not saying that it won't be successful. I'm saying it's not the magic pill that GLP-1s were for weight loss. It's not it.
Fair, fair, fair, fair. Wait, I have an AI thing. I have a question. There's a friend of mine, his name is Good Alexander on Twitter. He's a really sharp guy, and he talks about this concept of hallucination yield, which is basically, if everyone's asking LLMs what to buy and when they should buy it, hallucination yield is the delta between the price target ChatGPT gives you and what a stock is currently trading at.
In theory, if everyone is outsourcing their information to LLMs, what the LLM tells you to buy or suggests you invest in will have an increasing impact on market flows in the future. What do you think about that concept?
Yeah, that's absolutely true. And the thought that someone's asking an LLM what to buy makes me want to just shoot myself. I had a multitude of people who had texted and emailed me the week of Meta earnings, the big earnings week, saying, “Dude, ChatGPT is telling me that Meta is most likely to explode.”
Screaming to buy Meta, by the way.
Dude, I was like, I almost shorted Meta just based on that. I had no position in Meta. I didn't care about Meta. But I was like, “Dude, what the hell are all you guys doing?”
That's not how you use AI for trading. You use AI as an assistant to help you with deep research. As I just said, I come up with a thesis, then I want to ask very granular, specific questions and have the AI do the dirty-work research for me that contributes to supporting my thesis or not.
But I don't ever ask it blindly what stocks to buy. That's just not how LLMs work. If you know how they work, it will be a fool's errand to go about using them in that way.
I like that take. One potential social-arb trade that's been getting talked about a lot—I'm sure you've seen the AP Swatch. What do you think about that? Are you in the trade? Are you thinking about the trade? A lot of people in my chat are excited about it.
There are potentially 2 waves to that trade. The first wave of that trade is being a really astute social trader and getting in that trade early before anyone else.
2 weeks ago. Yeah.
Yep, that's right. You knew it was coming. You made an assessment for the reaction that it would have, especially amongst investors, because there are a lot of investors that are big watch guys.
This is part of the culture here. To be a great attention-arb trader, you have to understand culture. The demographic that this is going to hit just happens to be the demographic that invests as well. That matters. So that trade's long gone. There's a potential second wave of the trade.
The second wave of the trade potentially is that this weekend becomes more of a mass-market media event, meaning that we are going to see such outlandish lines on Saturday morning at Swatch stores.
I have a kid already in line right now, camping out 3 days ahead, because I want one for the stream. There are lines in New York, everywhere right now.
I know. Listen, man, I got a strategy.
I know. You know. My bad. My bad. Keep going.
I'm going to be there too. I get it. I love this stuff, man. I love it. I have done this so many times. I used to trade Target collabs back in the day, when it would move the needle for Target because it would bring so many people into Target.
You talked about it. What was it? Missoni. What was it?
Missoni was one. I mean, there were so many—dozens, dozens of them. I bought the Missoni bike as a souvenir and just kept it in my garage because I made so much money off those trades.
So, if it becomes a true mass-market media moment this weekend—if it becomes a massive news story on Sunday and Monday—what we might see are people outside of the watch market, more retail investors, just general retail investors, saying, “Dude, I’ve got to own Swatch. This is crazy.”
You might see a pop on Monday from the weekend madness. I would say that the time to exit that, more or less, would probably be Monday. You'd want to get in that trade now and exit Monday. But that's only if you believe that they're going to knock it out of the park this weekend and it's going to be an otherwise slow market-news kind of weekend, right, for markets, and this one's going to be in the Journal on Monday and everyone's going to be talking about it.
Yeah, it could have some juice. The big trade's over. The obvious, easy trade on Swatch is over.
Yeah, 100%. You did this interview—I don't know, you've done a lot of interviews—but I was listening to some old ones, and you mentioned you take 2 trades a year. Do you get fired up about a Swatch scalp, or are you kind of loving the game?
I do more than 2 now—a lot more than 2 now. I used to only be able to do 2. Sometimes I can get 10+ high-conviction trades in a year now. It's been happening. Last year was a monster year for me. Last year might end up being the best year I've ever had in the market. This year is turning into another one of those years. 2020 was the best year before that.
The more change, the quicker the change, and the bigger the change, the bigger the opportunity for a social-arb trader—someone that trades on change. So, yeah, the love of the game. I love it, man. It's not about the money always. Sometimes I just like these little fun ones because they're fun, and it's nostalgic for me.
I used to trade movie releases. The last big one I did was Barbie.
Oh, were you in the movie? The trading movie?
Well, you know, I did have a 2-second clip in Dumb Money, the movie that they put us in.
If you watch it, it's about an hour in, so look out for us in that movie.
I don't know, man. I don't know. What I do feel, though, is that if you fast-forward 10 years, the concept of trading and investing is going to be one of the biggest things on Earth. I think we're going to have hundreds of millions of people like us who are living and dying and eating trading and investing.
It will become a primary means for wealth building in the age of abundance, when the world is rapidly changing and it's really hard to differentiate yourself purely through your human output. It's more about capital allocation. The concept of allocating capital will be something we'll all have our eyes glued to.
By the way, I'm transitioning a bit. My passion in life is people. I really just love people, man. I love people who are doing great things. And while I'm a big believer in AI—I've been talking about AI for 3-plus years, saying it's the biggest opportunity of your life as an investor to invest in AI—I got beat up, especially in the early days. Now people are coming around on it.
I now think that there's a massive opportunity in people. What I mean by that is, if you're one of the few people who can survive this AI supercycle and develop a brand, a voice, and a following for yourself, I think if we fast-forward 5 to 10 years, podcasters—the ones who truly have a unique, strong, raw voice and are deeply connected with other humans—will be the new athletes, worth hundreds of millions of dollars each. I truly believe that. By the way, that is the way.
Beautiful take.
Yeah. And I want to help them. I find that fascinating, and I think some of the biggest future podcasters are petrified of ever putting a mic in front of them if it's not just their iPhone while doing TikToks.
My next big move is to help find the next generation of human creators and help them become 100-plus-million-dollar brands 5 to 10 years from now. I think that's the big arb trade right now.
For me, it's just fun because, like I said, I get joy out of being around really interesting, ambitious, colorful people who are balls-to-the-wall trying to do something crazy and big. They like doing things outside of conventional business, which is content creation.
I just want to hang out with other content creators and help them. That's going to be the thing that I do next, which means I know what's happening: You guys are getting in my world. You're going to make my world harder.
I'm going to start to phase out of investing 4, 5, or 6 hours a day doing social research. That'll become less.
I used to scream this take. I used to scream that crypto influencers were the new celebrities, and I would always joke that we're gladiators in the arena. We're modern-day warriors. Where does financial media go? We do this every day. You do financial media. It's honestly a relatively small group.
No, man. You know why it's small? Because it's boring.
Finance is boring, dude. And I'm going to tell you right now, other than you crazy-ass crypto guys, crypto is boring to most of us. It's boring as hell, dude. Most normal people who aren't crypto traders, technical traders, or finance heads hate finance because finance is boring.
Here's the pivotal moment for finance: when the entire world, whether it happens slowly or quickly, starts to invest like I do. Because the shit that I do is not boring.
When the world wakes up to the fact that this is where the alpha is, all of a sudden you're going to have a billion people watching finance creators and looking for alpha in their lives, looking for alpha on TikTok, looking for alpha in YouTube videos—anywhere they see the world changing and they're connecting dots.
They're like, “Dude, can I get rich off the fact that I just sat in this car, a Tesla, back in 2016 or 2017?” Yeah, you can, man. You can.
Wait, what's the blocker? Why hasn't a GME-type moment happened again? I guess it's a little bit different.
Nobody believes my story. People would rather believe that you can get rich off a meme stock or a crypto coin than the fact that you could actually get rich through real companies benefiting from real change happening in the world.
For some odd reason, nobody wants to believe that you can do what I've done. They either don't believe that I've done it, or they believe I'm some weird anomaly that can't be replicated. Meanwhile, I have thousands of people in my community who are just regular guys and women—more guys than women—who have regular jobs and have been doing this for 3, 5, or 7 years.
They're like, “Dude, I'm averaging 30% or 40% annualized, and all I'm doing is connecting dots from what I see in the real world to companies that are benefiting from it.” They're like, “I don't even know how to thank you.”
I'm like, “Dude, you just did, because I know what it's like to have a regular job and to be capped.” My regular job paid me a ton of money—like a quarter of a million a year—but that was not enough for me. I was still capped. I was like, “Dude, I either have to go get some other random job, and maybe it's better, maybe it's worse, but I'm not going any higher in this job.”
A lot of people are in that scenario, but they're capped at $50K, $80K, $90K, or $100K, and they will never make more money than that for the rest of their lives.
Yeah.
Ever. Other than maybe some inflationary moves, there's only one way out. If you're a regular person with a regular job, the only chance you have of building generational wealth is to come to terms with the fact that you can be a great investor.
You could just do it on the side, and you could have fun with it. You don't have to work with technicals. You don't have to be a pedigreed Wharton grad. You don't have to understand finance at all, especially in the age of AI.
All you have to do is figure out how to observe the world around you and connect the dots of change to companies that are either benefiting from or being harmed by the change you see happening around you.
Most of that observing is watching videos on TikTok and reading comments. How fun is that, dude? If that's not a fun way to make money, I don't know what is.
What's your screen time every day?
Historically, I used to spend about 4 hours a day doing this. I'm more distracted than I've ever been, and I'm more interested in diversifying how I spend whatever time I have left in the world doing things I really enjoy.
Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy this, but I've been doing it a long time. I've made way more money than I ever thought I could make from it, and now I'm starting to have more fun in my life. I'm spending more time with friends and family, hanging out, and just doing fun stuff.
I'd say 2 hours a day meaningfully now, usually at night, dissecting comments on TikTok videos—not 4. And that's usually only 5 or 6 days a week. It used to be pretty consistently 7. Even if I was going out, I'd get home at 1 in the morning and start cranking until 3 or 4.
That's a realistic target you just threw out there.
It is, dude. Anybody can do this. There are no excuses, dude. I talk about this in all my other interviews: you have to bucket your money. You need to have a designated account to be ballsy with, and don't put your kids' retirement in that account.
Start a new account. Only put money in there that you can take big risks with. Start making trade-offs in your life. Start investing in a new account with risk capital. But don't just wait—start now. Anybody can do it.
Okay. I have 2 more. I'll let you go really quick. Number 1 is reminiscent of the stock operator Jesse Livermore. He had this concept of acts of God, or something like that, when he had a generational setup—a great trade—and then some shit completely out of his control, something he could never have forecasted, happened and blew up the trade.
You have this one story about Frozen and the dolls that came out. It was a generational trade, but the company was bankrupt. They printed a bunch of stock, sold it over your head, and you lost a bunch of money on the trade. Any other fun examples of that?
There's never such a thing as a sure thing in investing. Just know that there's always something. Those are the 2 that stick in my head, quite honestly.
That damn Frozen doll. And the fact that there was a hedge fund that sold its entire position on the day of the biggest earnings report in the company's history. I nailed the trade. I nailed the fact that the Frozen doll was going to be a game changer for them. It was the number 1 bestselling toy in the world, and the stock was up 30% premarket and ended the day down 20% or 30% because a fund sold 10%.
They owned 10% of the company, and they dumped the entire position in one day. I don't even know how they pulled that off, but they did it because they sold into strength. They had been wanting to dump those shares for years, dude.
As an investor, you will never know if there's going to be a macro market movement that's going to wreck your trade. You will never know if something random pops up for that company that was just off your radar. There are so many ways for your trade to go bad. It's all about probability and outcomes, and as long as you understand that there's no such thing as a sure thing.
I'm willing sometimes to put double digits of my portfolio into a single trade, all options. I'm willing to live with the fact that I might lose 10%, 20%, even 30% of my liquid net worth if something bad happens in a second. But that's because the objective of what I'm going for is big, right? I'm trying to build a billion-dollar charitable foundation. I have to take big swings in my life if I want to get there.
And I'm in it to win it. There's something fun about having a 20-year audited track record of 70%. That's something I'm really proud of that I thought I would never be able to pull off. When I wrote Laughing at Wall Street in 2010, I was only 3 years into this journey.
How old were you?
God, that was 2010—16 years ago. I was in my mid-30s, young 30s, I guess.
Wow.
Young 30s. I thought there was a chance that it was a fluke, that I was an anomaly and could never keep that up. Maybe I could do it for 2 more years. Then I thought, “Can I push it to 10?” I asked myself, “Can I do 15?” Now I'm at 18, and all I want is 2 more years because I believe in the methodology and I want to be able to say, “Hey, this methodology has worked for 20 years.”
There's something fun—I don't know what that means. Am I the best retail trader in history? I think it's probably close to it. I know there are some other crazy traders out there who live in the shadows, who have never been publicized. They're quiet and are probably doing just as well as I'm doing somewhere in the world.
But I want to show that a normal, regular guy can pull this off without working for a hedge fund. You can do it. You can make hundreds of millions of dollars in the market starting with a $20,000 account. I want to show that that's possible.
I can't wait to see the audit. Okay, last question before I sign off. You did this interview 4 years ago, I think—4, 5, 6 years ago, maybe—and you're talking to this guy. You ask him, “Are you prepared for if the biggest earthquake in America hits California? What are you going to do with your money?” He says, “I'm prepared. I think about this all day.”
What do you do when the biggest earthquake hits America? And are you thinking about natural-disaster trades?
Yeah, of course, dude. I call this having a prepared mind. This is one of the easiest trades you will ever make.
Basically, as an investor, you should have 20 scenarios. Each of those scenarios maybe has a 5% likelihood of happening in your lifetime. You know exactly what you're going to do if and when that scenario plays out. It could be an earthquake in California. It could be a news report that someone just found the magic pill for baldness—male-pattern baldness, like I was talking about.
You should have 20 or 30 of those, right? They're all unlikely to happen at any moment in time, but collectively, it is highly likely that 1, 2, or 3 of those will happen over your lifetime. If it happens on a weekday during market hours, that's the grand slam because you will be one of the only people in the world who's been sitting there and waiting for it. Maybe you set a Google Alert for it, right? You know exactly what you're going to trade.
Now, it sounds dumb, but it actually takes humans and hedge funds a pretty long time once something happens to assess it, do research, and think, “Okay, what am I going to do about this? What's my play?” You would think that in 2026 the market is so efficient. It is so inefficient when it comes to any low-probability scenario.
I tell people as a joke, if it came out on CNN right now that we just discovered an asteroid that is 100% going to hit Earth in 2 years and we are done—we are over—and you saw 10 other mainstream news channels saying, “This is real,” and the president came on, even then your brain is not going to clock it quickly enough. You're going to need time. We need time to process.
What you want to do is—
What are you doing in that scenario?
What?
What are you doing in that scenario?
That's a longer conversation.
Okay.
But it doesn't matter. There are trades to be had. And by the way, AI will help you with these trades. The trades almost don't even matter because AI will help you with them. You just need to be mentally prepared for these low-probability scenarios, including another pandemic, by the way.
Yeah.
Because when one of them happens, you want to be able to move in real time. The difference between moving in a matter of minutes and moving in a matter of hours might be the biggest trade of your entire life.
If you could move in minutes with high conviction and leverage when one of those 20 low-probability things actually starts to materialize, you will make the biggest trade of your life. That's the only trade you ever need to make to be a top 1% or even one-tenth of 1% investor.
People do not pay enough respect to the fact that all you need to do is have a little preparation and do a little homework. I have a lot of these. I don't talk about them because I don't want the whole world to be onto all my low-probability trades, but there are a ton of them.
You just need to mentally prepare because if you don't mentally—I promise you one thing—
You will not pull the trigger on that trade unless you've been thinking about it for years.
If you've been thinking about it for years, you will pull that damn trigger so hard because you've been waiting. You have been waiting for it to happen. So the second it happens, I don't care where you are. You could be in your car—you will pull over to the side of the road and put on the trade. It will happen.
Don't tell me the plan, but which outcome are you the most prepared for?
Man, I mean, I am pretty prepared for that disaster outcome. Disaster outcomes are pretty easy trades, and you know they're coming, right? You know there's another virus coming at some point, dude. I hate saying it, but—
In the age of—by the way, also in the age of AI—
You know, as much as I like to stay optimistic about this, there are some bad-actor things that are going to happen in the next 10 or 15 years because of the democratization of intelligence.
The democratization of intelligence is going to result in some of the greatest breakthroughs in all of humanity. It is also going to result in some of the scariest stuff that we have ever seen. So you just have to be prepared for both. You have to be prepared for both. It's happening.
The cool thing about AI is that stuff is going to happen quickly. You've already seen it in the markets, right? This is why I tell crypto traders: equity traders cannot process information quickly. They just can't. They've been doing this so slowly for so many decades.
You guys as crypto traders, your brains, your neurons are firing way quicker than equity traders. Also, you guys are willing to take risk. You're accustomed to concentration. You're not afraid of leverage, and you're not afraid of losing a crap ton of money when you're wrong.
So you are in the driver's seat to own equity traders once you get comfortable with this world. I'm happy to see you, man. Welcome to it. I'm happy to see—
I love watching other guys who are even ballsier, younger, and quicker than me make it in this world of social arb and attention arb. This is what I've been waiting for. I just want to see other guys—and maybe even someday women, though I doubt it—get into the space and crush it.
They are so afraid of this world. I want to see them get into the space and crush it, because every time they do, there's an institution on Wall Street that is so pissed off by it. They're so pissed off at it. We will literally dismantle that world one trader at a time.
When you say the funniest thing about talking about a natural disaster happening is that, if it happens to be within market hours—which sounds ridiculous to me—are you on the perp wave? 24/7 markets, Hyperliquid perps? What do you think about that concept?
I am not. This is where I'm an old-school guy, you know? I should be. Listen, you're right. I should be, and maybe I'll get on, but I'm kind of semi-retired, man. I'm just—I know it sounds crazy—I'm just not as interested as I used to be.
Fair.
Getting onto new things for me, I just don't care. But I should be on it. I absolutely should be. No doubt about it, I should. But I'm doing less these days, not more.
Fair. Chris, I have to sign off, but this was absolutely incredible. I think you're sort of the mega-boss of a lot of things that I talk about on a micro scale. It's an inspiration to watch what you do and follow your style, because I think it's very familiar and refreshing to a lot of people who come from the crypto world and from these niche markets.
You feel like you can't compete, and then you watch somebody who seems fairly achievable compete at the highest level and crush it, which is awesome. So, I really appreciate you coming on. I love that you do so much media. Shout out all your stuff. Shill all your stuff.
But the final question is: who are your personal trading GOATs, if any? Who do you think is the best? Who did you take inspiration from? If it's nobody, that's kind of cool too, but I'm just curious.
No, there have been two. One is Peter Lynch. Obviously, Peter Lynch is the GOAT of observational investing with the Magellan Fund back in the day. I read his book, One Up on Wall Street, as a kid. Listen, everything I do now is inspired by what he did. I just do it in a much purer way.
For Peter Lynch, it was part of his methodology. For me, it's 100% of my methodology. I also like Steve Cohen because of how ballsy and aggressive he has been throughout his career, just with everything that he's done. We both grew up on Long Island. We're Long Island kids.
I'm very different from him, and what we do is very different from each other, but I just like how aggressive he is. He wants to be the best, and I want to be the best at what I do. He got into some trouble along the way, but he pushed the limit of what you could do as a hedge fund when he was more active. So, those are the two guys that come to mind.
That's awesome. Have you ever thrown up because your position size was too big in a trade?
Close to it, yeah. But you have to realize something: I've been trading options since I was a young teenager. It's like anything else. You just become so used to something that you don't feel it anymore.
The only time I became almost physically sick from a loss was that QSR trade, where I did lose a third of my liquid net worth, and it was really hard. I didn't know if I was going to come back. Thank God I did. That was the one time that it really hit me hard.
But no, I just don't care. I also don't consume a lot of things. The money I have is all for a greater good. I pour most of my excess returns into my charitable foundation. I have enough to live; I don't need anything.
So, it's just a matter of whether I'm going to build the foundation quicker or slower. If I'm having a good year, it's going to build it quicker. If I'm having a bad year, I'm upset because I want to do good in the world, and the foundation is part of how I do that.
When you're not trading to pay your bills, you don't really get nervous. You just go for it.
Actual last question, then no sign-off. When you make $100,000, $1 million, and $10 million for the first time, what do you do with the money?
Nothing. Like I said, I don't. The win is what matters. I'm not trying to buy something.
What if you were to recommend to somebody else, whose trading portfolio isn't as insane, how they should protect their first $100,000, $1 million, or $10 million?
I think the biggest trap—and I fall into this many times after my biggest wins—is that I do the dumbest things, not by buying things, but through the worst trades. The absolute worst trades come after that. So, I'll tell you exactly what to do.
When you hit a grand slam and you're like, “Dude, I just knocked it out of the park. I am a genius. I know exactly what I'm doing,” don't even touch the market for a while in a big way. Just chill out. You are not as smart as you think you are. You are about to make the worst trade of your life.
If history repeats itself, almost every time I've knocked it out of the park, I have then gone on to do something so stupid because I get so overconfident. I'm so cash-flush that I'm not as regimented.
Yes. With my process.
And that is the trap.
I know I just said not to do this, but I know everyone watching is going to make the same mistake that I made. There's only one way to learn these lessons: you have to get destroyed. You have to lose money. The only way you really learn in this game is by losing money, and then you'll learn.
That's what I would say to do. Do less after your big wins. You'd be better off taking part of that money and actually doing something fun with your family and friends. You'd be better off buying something rather than just making a dumb trading move, because that's what you're likely to do.
I think most of us are not in this to buy the exotic car or the plane. Most of us are in this because we love to win. We just want to prove to ourselves that we can do it.
The big people do not respect what we do.
Hell yeah.
This is the biggest game on earth outside of soccer. Do your research. Outside of soccer, there is no more competitive sport than investing.
So, if you make it to the top rung of investing, you have outcompeted more people than in any game, sport, or competition in the world—more than chess, more than anything. The only thing that has more people playing and trying to be good at it is soccer, according to my research.
How cool is it to play a game where the stakes are that big? If you can make it into the top 1%, we're part of the biggest game on earth, and we don't get enough credit for that. If you look at the top baseball players, the top tennis players, the top football players, and the top basketball players, they have nothing on us who have gotten to the top ranks of investing, because there is
My favorite take ever. So many people love this because that's the rush. We're doing this as a sport for us, and people don't understand that we do this for sport, the same as athletes.
We love other investors. I love other great investors. I want to beat them, but I also want us all to become better over time. And, by the way, we're all making money doing it. It's so fucking fun, dude.
Do you realize how big this is? By the way, we will eclipse soccer soon. This is growing at such an exponential rate in terms of new young people getting into the game of investing. There will be no competitive sport on earth in 5 years bigger than investing.
We're part of the biggest game on earth.
Chris, I think you probably know this, but you're not quitting after 20 years.
I'm not quitting, dude, but I'm going to slow down, man. I have to—
I think you know this already, but it's not looking likely.
I'll slow down. I know.
I tell people I love this sport because I will be on my deathbed in a hospital. All I need is my phone, man. Just give me my phone. I'll still be trading.
You can still do this. People like golf because you can play golf when you're older. Dude, you could play this game when you're 80, okay? How fun is that? And you're still competing.
I welcome the competition. I welcome all the crypto kids, because I know my job is going to get harder. I'm up for it. Welcome to my world. Let's go.
Chris Camillo, absolute pleasure, man. You're the GOAT. Oh, when do you sell Amazon?
I don't think it's going to be for a while, and here's why. I think the ultimate move on Amazon hasn't happened yet, because they are the number-one beneficiary of the AI efficiency wave, which has not started yet.
If you look at the AI waves, starting with chips, then moving toward infrastructure and power, the next big wave is the AI efficiency wave. That hasn't started, and that's where Amazon is really going to shine. No one is talking about that yet.
Amazon has layers of things that are happening for the company. The thing I'm most excited about, people aren't even there yet. Their brains aren't even there yet. I think we have rounds of positive surprises for Amazon in the future.
I could see myself continuing to compound and lay back into Amazon after every big win. This could go on not just for months, but we could have years left in this Amazon trade if the world plays out the way I think it's going to.
By the way, I might change my mind tomorrow if things change. You have to be willing to look at new information day to day. But right now, it's still my number one.
When you wake up in the morning, how much time do you let pass before you check the tape?
Usually, I don't even check it in the morning. Sometimes I'll check it right when I look at it, but honestly, I like to do my stuff. I take my cold ice shower.
You're a cold kind of guy, for sure.
I chill out. I do my little meditation, try to get my head right, and stuff like that. Usually, it's about 45 minutes.
Are you a 5 a.m. wake-up kind of guy?
No way. No way. You have to remember, I'm up late. I'm up really late, man. I'm up until around 3 usually.
Really?
Yeah. That's when I do all my research. So, I go to bed, man. I'm usually not even up until after the market has opened.
You don't do market open?
8:30 my time, Central.
Oh, that's tough.
Yeah, so I'm not up, and I don't care. I tell all my friends, “Dude, you—” My friends are all texting me, “Shit’s happening.” I'm like, “Dude, I don't care. I do not care. I do not need to pay attention to the market.”
I think one of the healthiest things that an investor can do—and I challenge every investor to do this—is take a full 24 hours off from the market. I know you won't.
You are not allowed to look at stocks or business news. You don't know if the market was up that day or down. You don't know what the hell happened. You must take, at minimum, a 24-hour break once every 1 to 2 months.
If you can't do that, you have a problem, man.
Chris, I got a problem, brother.
You have to do it.
I got a problem, man.
You know, Tim Ferriss will literally go to Costa Rica, lock his phone up, learn how to salsa dance and stuff for mental health. I'm not telling you to do that for a week. I'm telling you just not to look at any financial assets or business news for 24 hours. I promise you, you will feel so great if you pull that off. You will be so proud of yourself, and you will feel like a normal fucking person, dude. Okay? I know what it's like to be the way that you guys think as younger traders.
I used to get depressed on Fridays when I was a kid because the weekend was coming and the market—there was nothing. There was no crypto. There was no after-hours. None. I literally remember being depressed because I didn't know how I was going to get through the weekend. That is not okay. It's not mentally healthy, and I know that's the way every single one of you guys are. This is why I don't want 24-hour trading. I don't want it. It's not good for you.
I'm fried. Yeah, this is actually 24 hours. I can't even—I mean, I'm watching every tick a lot. Oftentimes, I'm at the gym. My phone's out. It's—
Do it one time. Do it once. The next time I come on your show, the next time you email me to do it, I want you to tell me when you did this.
Do you have a recommendation? What should I do? Where should I—
Anything you want. But here's the deal: you cannot tell everybody. Don't talk—don't text me crap about the market. I'm taking a 24-hour cleanse. It's like a juice cleanse, man. It's for your brain and your nervous system. It's so damn good, and it's going to make you remember who the hell you are as a person outside of this crazy life of trading that we all get sucked into.
Chris, before part 2, you have my promise: 24 hours. I'll do it. I'll even do a juice cleanse at the same time. I'll buy them from Sweetgreen. I'll wear my Swatch AP, and it'll be a whole thing. Dude, you're awesome. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for staying so long after. We'll do a part 2 at some point, but you're awesome, man. See you on the Swatch line on Saturday, guys.
Cool. I got guys out in every line. Good luck. Good luck to yours. I'll tell you that.
All right. Later,
Chris, have a good one.
Bye.
Peace. Cinema, man. That guy fucking is nuts, bro. That guy's a fucking lunatic, man. That was cinema, bro. I'm not going to lie. That guy's a lunatic. If that doesn't make you feel like you can make money in the markets, I don't know what will. I genuinely don't know what will make you feel confident in yourself to make money in the markets if that doesn't fire you up.