- All right, let's go back to the bar mitzvah.
You get the cash.
- [Tim] Yeah.
- From the parents and the relatives.
- [Tim] Yeah.
- And stuff.
Why would you then go and start investing?
Because I tried that when I was a kid,
but there was like no information out there.
- No.
So the markets were,
I mean my money was just sitting
in series E E-bonds for like
six years.
Like you have your bar mitzvah when your 13.
- [Brian] Government bonds?
- Yeah, yeah, like government bonds,
doing nothing.
I was a tennis player.
I was playing tennis every single day.
- Single bonds? - Correct.
- The coupon is just-- - [Tim] Nothing.
- It's garbage.
- It's Nothing.
But that's what I put it in for six years.
I was a tennis player.
I got injured.
I had Tommy John surgery.
I don't know if you know Tommy John surgery.
So they take something out of your other arm
and they put it in this arm.
You shouldn't have gave me coffee.
I feel like I'm talking faster than normal.
- [Brian] You're doing great.
- But,
so I'm walking around school like Robocop
after my surgery.
And I can't do anything.
I'm already into college,
early admission.
And so my parents gave me control
of my bar mitzvah money.
They thought I would lose it all.
They thought that it would be a good lesson.
I give the kid the 12 grand,
he'll blow it in the stock market.
- They knew you were gonna trade?
- Well, I didn't, again,
I wasn't a trader at first.
I invested in
Viacom,
Super Cuts,
and business objects.
These were like my first three stocks.
And my account,
one month would go like 12,100,
then like 11,900.
And I was like this is so boring.
And I'm sitting there with two casts,
but I could still type.
This was 99.
The stock market's going crazy.
I gravitated towards tech stocks.
But I couldn't afford the big tech stocks at the time,
which was Netscape and Yahoo.
So I was like--
- [Brian] The prices were too high?
- Correct.
So I was like what else is there?
So there were upcoming little internet companies.
And I was like well,
if Yahoo and Netscape, I mean back then,
they weren't really anything.
They just hype like they were being used by a lot,
but they didn't have any revenue.
So I was like well, if these websites are valued highly,
what about the smaller websites
that are growing.
And so I invested in like
this company called Net Taxi,
which was like an early Facebook.
And the stock went up seven times.
Again, I sold too soon.
I took my 20-30%.
Then I had the dot com strategy.
So I gravitated towards
how can I grow my $12,000 account.
Senior year of high school,
12,000 became 100,000.
Freshman year of college,
I made nearly a million.
I just got addicted to finding
and tinkering
to see what works.
That's what people need to do.
If they know nothing
about trading or the markets,
tinker.
Test around.
Like put aside a $1,000 that you can lose,
and play with it, and test,
and see different strategies.
Try, you know,
trading art.
Trade baseball cards.
Trade stocks.
Whatever you can do.
But start to look, because every single industry
that I've found has these little inefficiencies
that most people glaze over
'cause they don't care.
Like with penny stocks,
most people don't care
because they think the money's too small.
Like oh, you made 500 in a day.
You made 2,000.
I'm like my whole career,
I've made a few million dollars.
That's nothing
in the game that you were playing.
You could make a few million dollars in one day.
- [Brian] Yeah.
- So it's just
recognising that.
The good news is,
you ever make a few million dollars,
you're set.
Like I live a pretty good life.
- Yeah, and I was trading the banks money.
So yeah, I mean,
I think our PNL that year was like $100 million.
- [Tim] Correct.
- But it was the bank's money.
- Were you trading other people's money,
or your money?
That's the thing.
- Yeah, it was a bunch of people on the desk.
You got to pay the sales force.
And by the time you get in to the meaning
at the end of the year,
you're walking away with you know,
a lot less.
- But that's good, because without them,
you wouldn't have money to trade.
And most people don't have money to trade.
They're like oh, I would like to make $2,000 in a day,
but I don't have that money.
So it's nice that I've made $2,000 today,
but how do people get started.
Like, if you have a small account,
you're not gonna make $2,000 in a day.
So I try to teach my students
how do you make $100 in a day.
And then you can size up later
once you have experience,
once you have a bigger account.
Like today, I bought
3,000 shares of this stock.
If I wanted to go bigger, I could have.
I donate all my trading profits to charity,
because I just want to show the process
these days.
But you know, you can get bigger
with a bigger account
once you have experience.
But you have to learn the process.
That's the key that I really want to
get people to understand.
- It's like a martial arts.
It's almost like a martial arts.
- Yeah.
- You have to get a black belt or a purple belt
before you can really go out there
and compete and have a chance of survival.
- And everyone is different.
And it's a moving target.
So, just to make people understand
that this isn't as easy as they think it is,
like the market is always changing.
Sometimes I have a perfect pattern,
and if the market's different,
if the market's bad,
that pattern is irrelevant.
Like Uber was a very hot company.
But for whatever reason,
the IPO market isn't good right now.
Sometimes IPO didn't do well.
So now Uber is dead in the water,
which is a shock to everybody.
It's not an exact science.
And people have problems with that.
They want it to be an exact science.
Like you learn mathematics,
like who's the best at solving this formula.
Even, you know,
martial arts,
you learn specific moves
and specific stuff.
That always works.
With the stock market,
you have to be willing to throw out your entire thesis,
which is tough.
(upbeat music)