Sean Tepper (Tykr): How to Evaluate and Screen Stocks

This transcript is auto-generated and lightly edited for readability, it may contain errors.

[0:00] Sammie Ellard-King: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Money Gains podcast. This is your host, Sammie Ellard-King, and today I’m going to be joined by Sean Tepper from the investing stock screener and educational platform Tykr. Now, this one is really for you individual stock pickers. Sean has got some incredible market beating results. And Tykr is an investment platform which helps you make better decisions and most importantly beat inflation. But for now, if you are listening on YouTube, please do hit that subscribe button. And if you’re listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, please do give us a follow and tell a friend. Um, it really does help the show. But for now, let’s get started on the Money Gains Podcast. The Money Gains Podcast.

[1:01] Sammie Ellard-King: So, Sean, welcome to the Money Gains Podcast, man. How are you doing? You well? Hey, doing well, Sammie. Thanks for the invite. Awesome, awesome. Well, um, yeah, slightly different episode today. Guest joining us from a different part of the world. Whereabouts are you in in this fine globe? In in the US, actually in Wisconsin, so that’d be the Midwest. Midwest. Wow. I’ve not been to Wisconsin. Could you give me a closer landmark? Yeah, so probably the biggest city that’s close to where I’m at is Chicago, which is like a two-hour drive south. That’s in Illinois. Two hours north of that is Milwaukee, and I just live west of Milwaukee. So I’m sure you’ve heard of Chicago. I’ve been to Chicago, Windy City, yep. I had a great time there. I’ve um I did a whole like Route One uh drive and then had to come back and did all the big cities in the north as well. Was epic. I I love the country. It’s such a such a cool place.

[1:58] Sean Tepper: I mean, it’s a large country, so you can go to the different quadrants, you could say, and it’s a completely different world. Florida’s like the tropics, and then you’ve got the Pacific Northwest, like the big pine trees. It’s it’s pretty cool how diverse it is. Yeah, absolutely. It’s wild. Like even just from state to state, like the landscape changes is insane. And indeed you can be in snow in like one point and then 30 degree heat and like 20 minutes later. It’s wild. But um, yeah, really, really um good to have you back. Um, I know we’ve had a chat on the not back, sorry. I know we’ve had a chat before. I actually came on came on Tykr podcast before. But um yeah, do you want to give us a little bit about you and your journey today? Absolutely. So um my background really started back in around 2006. Um, got out of school and then created it. I worked for an agency for one year and it kind of figured out the business model and realised that hey, agencies and the agencies at the time would produce like video, and that was like my emphasis coming out of school, actually, was I wanted to get into the movie industry as either a cinematographer or uh or and or um a screenplay writer. Um long story short, I didn’t go to New York or LA where you gotta go to get into the movie industry. And and then the the fallback is agency. So work for an agency, learn the model, started my own agency, did that from 2006 to 2010. And uh it was essentially building websites, software platforms, um, doing a lot of video for small to mid-sized businesses, and didn’t make any money because it was during the recession. So I was just clawing and scraping to get as many customers in the door, doing projects. And now we were growing, but um, I was adding more liabilities, I was adding more payroll to the company, I’m just to facilitate the need. And then went through a merger. We actually started bringing on some bigger brands in 2010, went through a merger. And at that point, I kind of hit a pause moment and said, Hey, um, I need to stop slaving away or working for a paycheck like I have been. How do we flip that equation so I get money to work for me? And what I learned is over those four years, I got to work with about 100 businesses, but I pitched about 400. So I had a closing ratio of about 25%, which is all right. But I got to learn a lot of different business models like manufacturing or restaurants or hair salons, gas stations, um, car dealerships, SaaS businesses, as well as e-commerce and everything in between. And I knew at that point, I’m like, ah, the model I really want is SaaS, but I didn’t have any good SaaS ideas because I was looking at like Salesforce and MailChimp and Constant Contact, even Netflix. Yeah, I’m like, how do I create something like that? That’s that’s what I want. But all the research I did, I’d I’d always run into a brick wall because there are too many competitors. But anyway, I decided, you know what, let’s go path of least resistance, let’s go large work for large corporates, planned on doing that two years, and that turned into 12 years, is just how life works sometimes. But I’ll eat it, man.

[5:08] Sean Tepper: Right. Um, some of the larger companies I worked with are like GE, um, Kohler. There’s a company, uh not a not a public company, but a smaller company called Direct Supply, and then Kohl’s, which is a retailer, like clothing retailer retailer. But um, at that same point in 2010-11, I got into investing. And I actually went the hard route, which was you could call it angel investing or seed round, which is me investing in individual tech businesses that are private, not public, and hoping I could um create some new idea or invest in some new idea and watch it go to a thousand percent and I’d have a nice payday at the end of that. And needless to say, that never happened either. So I did that in parallel to kind of the corporate work. And and just for context, I was uh uh a contract project manager. I got into that and it was a good experience for anybody out there. If you’re looking to take a pause moment from entrepreneurship, get a steady paycheck, and go work for corporates, project management is probably the best fit because you got on you get to run businesses and run projects kind of like an entrepreneur in some kind of essence. But so I did angel investing for five years, kind of break even, made some money, lost some money, but I’m like, I could be swinging for the fences for the next 30 years, and I’m not gonna make any money here. This is dumb. Right. So I turned my attention to Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger value investing. And I knew, yeah, so I knew these guys, even Warren Buffett has said a really famous quote like if he were just managing his own money, he could make 50% per year. And I was like, okay, um, you know he’s not a gambling man. Like him and Charlie are not gambling men. You’re not gonna see them at the casino. These are not guys who use emotions, which tells me, based on my software engineering experience, they’re using some sort of logic. And I’m like, okay, so let’s figure out what that logic is. So I literally went down the YouTube rabbit hole to the nth degree and read as many books as I could in finance as I could. And there’s a lot of noise out there, a lot of fluff. But I ran into a guy by the name of Phil Town. He wrote a few books. Uh, one is Rule One, another one is called Payback Time. And he did a third book called Invested with his daughter, Danielle. And he provided some of the calculus, some of the math that goes into investing. So I founded this in the book, put it into Excel and started kind of iterating, kind of creating my own version. But as Phil Town teaches, you should be aiming for 15% per year or more. And I was like, all right, let’s let’s kind of create this lane here between 15 and 50% and let’s go for it. So this was 2016, made 15%. 2017, it was 16%. 2018, what I did that year, I got rid of my bundled products, which were ETFs. With Tykr, what we talk about is individual stocks, is where you build your wealth. If you want to protect your wealth, you should go into like mutual funds, index funds, or ETFs. But anyway, that year I sold my funds and just focused on individual stocks and made 80%. And then my returns thereafter consistently around 50, actually 50% per year on average, now over the last uh seven or eight years. Um, but to bring us to today, I worked on this Excel sheet for four years, finally started talking to some retail investors like you and I, and just regular people, you know, that want to get into the markets, right? And start showing them this Excel sheet and the returns I’m getting. And everybody’s like, When are you gonna turn this into a software so other people can use it? And that right there, that was the light bulb moment. It’s like, yeah, the SAS idea. Only a decade, it was literally nine years later. Right. I get my SAS idea that I I’ve got a problem here. It’s not too saturated. There’s a few tools out there like simply Wall Street is good and seeking alpha is decent, you know. Yeah, um, I always give high accolades to our competitors because we’re kind of all in this together. But yeah, it it uh was 2019, took a year to build the first version, and now today we were completely built uh or highly focused on beginners, although advanced investors do use Tykr to save time, but we really simplify the language and we’re big on education and just break things down in steps. Um, but yeah, it essentially screens stocks and then teaches people to invest along the way. And as of today, we have a little over 7,000 customers in 50 countries. So we’re we’re global. That’s off. Yeah, what a journey, man.

[9:38] Sammie Ellard-King: What a journey that is. Like I love it though, because not it. I suppose one key aspect what I would take out of that as well is obviously you’ve got to this road now, and you know, incredible that you you know you’ve created this product, but you went the long route to get there because you you you you you knew you needed other skills and for that idea to come to you. And it was only throughout your life skills and you really going for it in the corporate world that this idea come to you. You knew you always had that bargain, you always knew you wanted to do it, but you didn’t like jump in to the first idea that came to your head. You waited until you built up enough skills to like then go, this is it.

[11:06] Sean Tepper: Yeah, and and expand on that. And thanks for saying that, because I knew I I wasn’t gonna lower the bar. And there are other ideas I kind of invested in another stuff along the way, but I’m like, if I’m going to go all in on something, I have to be really passionate about it. It’s got to be um something that is scalable. So a SaaS business. I always say with the Tykr community, top of the food chain business model is SaaS. You can sell a thousand or ten thousand or hundred thousand licenses on day one, you don’t have to manufacture anything that’s made of plastic or metal. It’s just like, it’s just logins. And you’ll consume, you’ll consume some server space, but it’s it’s these days, it’s cheap, it’s pennies. Um, so I’m like, it’s gotta be that. It’s gotta be highly scalable, solve a problem. I gotta be passionate about it. And if you can kind of connect the three dots, then you’ve got a winning formula, you could say. And yeah, I I had to learn along the way how do big businesses, how do big corporates really scale? And that was that kind of separated my mindset or took it to another level. Because those first four years I had that agency, it was a lot of small and mid-size businesses, which is good, but they operate much differently and they move much slower than a big business. Big businesses move so quickly via channel partners. I’ll I’ll stop there. We’ve gone won’t go into the differences, but yes, long story short, super interesting.

[12:26] Sammie Ellard-King: Like software businesses can move really, really rapid because uh you’ve you’ve created the base product, and is as you say, it’s a digital product. So it doesn’t matter if it’s one or a million people, all you’re doing is essentially harming your back end if you’ve got lots of people in there, and you just scale that as you grow very quickly, right? So it it’s it’s an insane model if you can get it right. Um, you know, often I I I speak to friends who have done businesses like this, and the stumbling block for creating a software business is often the the development of it, but with the changes in you know the internet and freelancing in across the world now, you know, you can pick up some fantastic people in different countries. So, how did you go about sort of creating that model? Was it I I could talk about the evolution of the team. So uh we’re on the third team now in their grade.

[13:17] Sammie Ellard-King: So like I suppose more like from than like you’ve got the idea and you think this is because loads of people have these ideas, right? And they’re just sitting in their brains, but they don’t know how to go out and do it. Like, how how did you first like go? Oh, got it. Yeah, so yeah, it’s a lot of people kind of overcome overcomplicate this. And it’s like what you want to do is you don’t even want to build anything up front. You want to create, in my case, it was an Excel sheet, but otherwise, put together some Photoshop mock-ups, do whatever you can in PowerPoint to show your customers, not your friends or family, like identify customers because your friends are family, they’re gonna give you, they’re gonna tell you everything you want to know. You know, you want to get to people who are actually using something similar or they need what you’re you’re about to talk to them about, identify them, and then get your feet, get their feedback. And then after that, you can start to build your first version, your MVP, which set expectations up front. It’s not going to be pretty, but you just want something out there. And that that was the motive from there. And it took again, it took about a year to build that first version. Right.

[14:22] Sammie Ellard-King: That’s that’s it. Like uh a friend of mine’s building a dating app at the moment. They actually went live last week. I’ll shout them out, Matter. They’re they’re um, you know, it’s a very close friend of mine, but yeah, he’s had developers going in on this seven months, and this is their first version, and you know, they’re doing local launches now and uh and spanning out. But you know, it it is insane creating these software products, a completely different world. Um, but you’ve obviously done it to solve a problem, and that’s what we’re gonna touch on today, um a little bit more. So talk to us about you and your investments. Like you’ve obviously spoken about some of the results. Um, how do you go about it? Because you know, we’ve had people talking about solely individual stock picking or um just straight index funds. Like, what’s your style and and why why does it sort of work for you?

[15:10] Sean Tepper: Sure. Um, so what I’ll start with is and and very thankful for Phil Town for breaking this into the four M’s. You’ve got the and he does it in a different order, but you’ve got the margin of safety which encompasses all the math. Margin of safety is essentially the uh the difference between the fair value or the sticker price of a stock and the current price you see on whatever platform you’re using. There’s a difference there. And you want to go for stocks. This is Warren Buffett’s teachings as well as Phil Town as stocks that have a 50% or more margin of safety. So for example, um, let’s say you see a stock that has a share price of $100, but its fair value is $200. Hey, now we’re talking, that stock is 50% off. It’s kind of like we phrase it in a way in the onboarding with Tykr, like shopping for a gallon of milk. You see it for five bucks, but you also see another one next to it crossed off that says $2.50. It’s like, all right, I’m a bargain shopper here, I’m going for deals. So we start with the math first, margin of safety, and then and and Tykr does all that for us. There’s no, you don’t need to know any calculus, although we’re open source. You could actually read all the calculations if you wanted, but um, you’ve got the math part taken care of. Then you have the meaning, moat, and management. Now, the meaning is the business model. How does it make money? How many revenue streams does it have? Um, will the business model be around in 10 years? The moat is the competitive advantage. How does it compare to the competition? That was my issue with SaaS ideas going back over 10 years is I think of an idea, do homework, and realise, wow, there’s a hundred other people that do the same thing. And I’d be like, nope, not doing that. Um, and then the management is the last M, and that’s the CEO. What kind of track record do they have with winning? Here in the States, our country is big on American football. So if I’m looking for somebody to win a Super Bowl, am I going to the local high school? I’m going to find another NFL team that has a player that has won Super Bowls before. Obviously, I’m going with option B. I want somebody that’s done it before. So if you can find businesses that have the great math checked out the margin of safety, you’re there’s a high probability you’re going to make money, but you really remove the risk if you do a little more homework. And we have a checklist for every stock you can go through and a walk, it steps you through it. Spoiler alert, we’re going to be using ChatGPT to do that for our customers here in the very near future. So it’ll be automated. Can’t wait for that.

[17:35] Sammie Ellard-King: But yeah, then you do 10 minutes in and we just spoke about AI. Oh, now we’re getting excited here. So, yeah, in my case, to circle back to my portfolio, I invest in what I know. I I do know a lot of different business models and industries, but I’m uh I would say my expertise is tech. So my portfolio, I hold 10 stocks highly focused on all tech, and they’re they’re pretty boring businesses. If you’d like to talk about individual names, we could. I’ll I’ll pause there. Nice. Well, um what I loved, you were the first person to put me onto the 4Ms, actually. I didn’t know this existed because I was already doing a lot of what you had you you you spoke about there in the 4Ms. Like for me, moat is probably the most important of those. And and I I know margin of safety is is great, but that is with the amount of metrics available, it’s very difficult sometimes to put a quantifiable number onto that, and everybody’s margin of safety is always different. Um you know, it’s uh it’s just from personal experience, and you only have to read a few stock articles to see exactly that. Um, everybody’s analyst results for the next 12 months are always very, very different when you look at these things. But moat for me is massive because I I’m uh a guy that will look I’m not looking to dip in, dip out in six months. I want to hold that business all the way up. Um and and so for me that’s really, really important. And knowing how knowing a person and moat is, you know, one thing you said there, which I liked a lot, is that you’ve you’re hyper focused on tech because you love tech and you really got into the tech side of stuff. And that can be really different for each person, you know. I always say to people like, what is it you love? And like, what is it you buy a lot of or know a lot about? Are you in that industry? You’ve got an advantage up on the other people that are just looking at out there because you know how the industry or the business is doing before anyone and before you even look in really deep into it. So yeah, that’s what I loved about that. So, yeah, come on, talk to us about some of these individual names. I’m very interested to know, as always, you as you know.

[19:47] Sean Tepper: Absolutely. And and so let’s dive in a little bit. So I the first stock I ever bought was actually PayPal. And the reason I bought PayPal is one is the math checks. I I bought it when I had the Excel version of Tykr, so did all the math margin of safety. And and we not only look at the margin of safety, but we’re looking at just just for your audience here so they know. So we’re looking at the revenue growth, the EPS growth, the income growth, the cash growth, the debt over the, and this is all over the last five years. It does a very thorough, highly rigorous. And this is one thing that Phil Town did that separated himself from a lot of other people out there, because there’s investors out there that look at like market cap and P to E and they make a decision. And that’s ridiculous. That’s not enough data. So we look at those that income statement, cash flow statement, and balance sheet to get a rigorous analysis to make sure this is truly a strong business from a financial standpoint. So PayPal checks that box. I did all that manually with a Succel sheet, then move down to the meaning. Now, with PayPal, the meaning of the business model is, and I say SaaS is top of the food chain, but there are two models that I consider even more scalable. One would be payment tech, where there’s transaction fees between a buyer and a seller. SaaS, a consumer is only paying once per month or once per year, whereas transaction fees, you can just let that meter run. And the transactions just go and go and go. So that would be like a PayPal or Square. I hold both stocks. Um, and then there’s advertising models. So Facebook and Google, those ad spends, again, it’s not like SaaS, you can just run the meter, let that credit card line of credit just ramp up and it’ll go. So with PayPal, they have the largest footprint out of any payment tech platform out there in 200 countries and territories, which is very rare. It’s very hard to do. So they already have the legality set up within each country where the transactions are allowed. So that check in that box is hard. And I know payment tech very well, like Square and Stripe, duplicating what PayPal has done is very hard. And then PayPal has other businesses built into it. Like today, they have Venmo, which is super, it’s integrated with Amazon and Braintree and Honey, which is that little plug-in on your Google Chrome if you want to save like the ecosystem is incredible. And I knew that at the time, like, okay, and I I got into that for that reason. The moat checks out, the the meaning checks out, and then management. Um, Dan Schulman. One cool story about him is he wasn’t able to get into college. It was it was harder for him, so he’s driving truck. He’s just a blue collar guy, but he worked his butt off and he paid his dues. He got into bigger business and he eventually worked his way up to CEO of um PayPal. Now, PayPal. Of course, as we we go back 20 years, that’s when Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, they had two different businesses, they came together and created uh PayPal essentially. So those guys are no longer with a business, as we know, but um I like stories like that underdogs that kind of come out of nowhere, they’re hard workers. Um, so all four M’s in that case checked out with PayPal. That’s why I went with that business. Still holds it today, still buy as much as I can.

[23:10] Sammie Ellard-King: Wow, that’s crazy. So you you still hold PayPal now or throughout this time. Interesting. Absolutely. Okay, so let’s take this as an example, prime example, right, of where Tykr can come into play. Because what what what would have to change for you and why for you to ever then sell PayPal? Well, first off, Warren Buffett has he has two rules. And and um you may have heard this before, but Phil Town always mentions it, also mentions it too. Rule one, don’t lose money. Rule two, don’t forget rule one. And what this essentially means is like right now, I will say with PayPal, I’m still down about 50%. The stock got hit hard. This was the end of 2021 when things really started to drop off a cliff. They haven’t recovered yet. It will, because I know this business model and I seen I’ve seen these patterns with tech businesses before. Um, but to sell it, number one, I’d have to be into the profit. So, in other words, I never sell for a loss. Never. You you always wait it out because a rising tide lifts all boats. What that means is the market will eventually lift everything up. You always sell higher than your cost basis, or other words, your your buy price. So that would be one reason I’d sell it has to rise higher. And two is if some of these competitors like Square or Stripe were to establish an equivalent footprint of 200 countries and territories at that moment and be like, oh, we got a problem here. Might want to, you know, take my gains and move on to something else.

[24:45] Sammie Ellard-King: So you would look at essentially the moat is now no longer as large as you wanted it to be, and you’re now looking at, or perhaps the CEO leave, somebody else comes in and there’s a brand new guy at the helm, and you’re not as confident as you were. So you’re assessing these four M’s as you go constantly, right? You don’t you’re looking at everything. And and how does Ticker help with this process? So Tykr takes care of that first M for you automatically. Like we’ve got over 30,000 stocks. You can log in, search for any stock, and the math part is done for you. It’s great because a lot of people out there don’t enjoy doing math nor doing calculus and all that. And frankly, I don’t have the time to. I just want to know. I just want to know. So you get in, and that’s you want to make sure that box is checked first. If so, then move on to that meaning mote and management. Place always place the highest priority in that math part because that really tells us the full story. Is the revenue growing year over year the last five years? That’s a good sign. It’s in that income. All those other met or data points I mentioned before, are they growing consistently? That’s telling us that this business is a well-led business. It’s doing the right things, it’s scaling, it’s adding more customers, it’s serving more people around the world. That’s what you want to see. And the math part usually sums it up. But again, you can remove a little bit of that uh risk if you do take a look at that meaning moat in management.

[26:11] Sammie Ellard-King: And then the visual part of Tykr is pretty cool because you can log in and see these things, and it’s basically almost greens and reds. So it was before. What’s is it still the same now? It is, yeah. We I would say, and I’m I’m biased here, but we’re the easiest to use for beginners because it’s a very simple decision system. There’s a lot of screeners out there that they have too many bells and whistles, numbers and colors, and you can’t make a confident decision. Whereas Tykr, as you were just saying, on sale is green. You have watch, which is gray, which is like neutral, and then you have overpriced, which is red. So it’s kind of like a red light, green light situation. Um, there’s a score that rolls up into that as well as the margin of safety. The score is just so you know, it’s a zero to a hundred. Higher the score, the safer the investment.

[26:59] Sammie Ellard-King: And that’s so amazing for someone that is actually really interested. Because for people like myself, you know, there’s a lot of uh financial influencers out there, they bang the index funds only drum, and rightly so, like, fair enough. But also, you know, people that are interested in business and actually want to try and up those potential returns, which is one of the bigger factors, right? If you if you pick individual stocks, you’ve got the chance to do a lot better than the standard index, you know, 9.7% that you’ll get with the with the Vanguard All Cap. But like that’s um, and that’s why like a lot of us we would look at this and we wouldn’t know where to start. But with Tykr, you get this really cool little dashboard where you can put these companies in, see all this information, and at the end of it get a really confident score. Um well, as confident as you can get. Obviously, we we nobody can predict tomorrow, but it’s as best you’re gonna get. Yeah, I suppose.

[29:02] Sean Tepper: Yeah, and with so many retail investors joining the market, it’s pretty cool to see how many people around the globe. And since we we do serve customers around the globe, it’s fun to see that, like in your neck of the woods in the UK, it’s growing extremely fast. In most countries around the EU. Um, another part of the world that’s growing really fast is that South Asia. So India, Singapore, Indonesia, it’s growing extremely fast. They’re entering the market, they want their money to work for them. It’s yes, it’s important to work for money, but they know that earlier they can get into the market, make these businesses work for us. That’s that’s the best decision you can make financially. So, what do you think is so you mentioned the 4Ms. Is there anything else that people can look out for? You know, your returns here are insane. They’re market beating returns, they’re beating some of the best, best in the industry right now. What are other things that people should should really kind of look out for if they’re just about to get started with individual stocks?

[30:06] Sean Tepper: With uh, and I’ll take a step back on this. We we just launched Tykr Edu. We have Tykr, just t y kr.com, but there’s Tykr Edu, which is just edu.tykr.com. And that’s all courses in a mastermind. And with that, you know, the first course is titled Um Stock Investing for Beginners, but there’s one module in there, and I’ll talk about it right now, which is there’s people out there that they’re going for index funds. We just added ETFs to ticker, or we are in the next week. By the time this plays, it’ll probably be in the platform. But there’s a lot of people looking for ETFs, index funds, and mutual funds to build their wealth, and that’s the wrong strategy. Um, that strategy is great for protecting your wealth. If you already have a huge chunk of change, you’ve been working 30 years, you want to protect your wealth, or you sold a business, or let’s say you sold some real estate, or inherited some cash from a loved one that passed away, what do you do with that cash? You need to protect it, and that’s why you go into these index funds, ETF’s mutual funds. I actually recommend ETFs index index funds over mutual funds because mutual funds, you get the same returns, but you have a really high cost basis or um expense ratio, I should say. If you’re somebody though, and this is the majority of the people that we talk to, and the majority of the people we are learning around the world is psychologically, psychologically, they feel like they are behind. Where they’re at with their age, they feel like they should have more in their savings and more in their investments. So if you anybody out there feels that way, you are not alone. So, how do you how do you take advantage of this situation and get after it? And the solution is not these funds, it’s individual stocks. That’s where the game changes and evens the playing field so we can beat the market, we can beat hedge funds, we can beat financial advisors because we are managing our own money by going in individual businesses. It’s incredible. Once you once you know what to look for, you know, again, Tykr does the math part for you. You seriously, it’s not hard making 50%. And I could I could give you a little more context on stockpiling here if you want to go there. Yeah, I was just saying I love to know. So yeah, yeah, continue from there and I’ll cut it in. So with our onboarding at Tykr, there’s there’s a sequence of emails over like 20 some days. You get a new email, they talk about like how much should you start with? And we always tell people it’s not about making money in the beginning, it’s just about building confidence and then how to invest your first thousand dollars. And then after you’re confident, you can dial it up from there. But there’s other emails like no one to buy, no one to sell, uh, how to weighted allocation, and it really breaks it down in simple terms. But everything leads up to the most important strategy in stock investing. And I’ve got a few fun case studies for you, which is stockpiling. Stockpiling is the premise of buying. This is how I make bigger returns is to buy when the market drops. You want to buy more of your stocks that you already own when the market drops. So, for example, in February and March of 2020 is when COVID hit and the market just tanked. It went down 30%. So, guess what I did? Thanks to Phil Town. He taught us I bought as much as I could. Now, that year, get this. My returns by summer were around 60 to 80 percent. By the time the year finished, it was 120. That was my best year. Now you’re you’re not going, I will say this, um, you’re not going to get those type of returns every year unless you have some kind of major negative event, perceived negative event, because right now we just we’re coming out of this recession/slash bear market the last 15, 16 months. My returns right now, I’m up about 100%. Um, so it’s like, okay, so for the year, that’s pretty good. We’re not even halfway through the year. Could I go 200%? Most most likely. The reason is though, I’ve been buying like crazy when the market’s down. Now, a lot of people still sit on the sidelines and they wait and they wait and they wait. But I’ve I’ve got a story, I’ll give you uh a fun case study of a customer that was telling me about the 2008 recession. In the US, there were there’s the three big auto uh automotive manufacturers. You’ve got Ford, GM, and Chrysler. And GM and Chrysler took the bailout, but one company did not, and that was Ford. And this guy, he’s like, he had enough intuition. Okay, so Warren Buffett teaches us that, you know, if a business doesn’t need a bailout, that means they have a strong balance sheet. So this guy took 100 grand. He’s a plumber, he’s a blue-collar worker, he’s a plumber, he’s in an early 30s, put 100 grand into Ford, and within I think about a year or two, it turned into 2.5 million. Guy was dope. Wow. Yeah, he was wow. And that’s stockpiling one-on-one. Everybody’s running for the hills, and he’s like, this is a strong business, fundamentally, based on the financials. Went all in. Now we did say, like going 100 grand into one stock when that’s all you have in savings is probably not the best strategy.

[35:09] Sean Tepper: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But but it makes sense going to strong businesses. I had another customer that’s he uh he went all in on traveler’s insurance for a decade. That was the only stock he bought. But he’s like, okay, so Warren Buffett owns Geico here in the states. And in the states, uh homeowners insurance is mandatory by law in, I think about 48 or 49 states. And auto insurance is mandated in about 47, 48 states, something like that. I’m not 100% accurate there. But knowing that it’s a mandatory product and it’s a reoccurring revenue model, insurance you have to pay every month or every six months or every year. This guy went all in and he he turned that stock into well over a million. So 10 years and he retired in that case. Um, but these are guys that it’s just simple buy individual stocks, strong businesses with good financials, and you you really can’t lose in most cases.

[36:06] Sammie Ellard-King: No, you can’t. And it is it is such a oh, I I also love it as well. I think you get like quite invested in the journey of these businesses. Um but yeah, you it’s just the fundamentals. You you’re just picking great businesses. It’s it shouldn’t be as hard as everybody thinks it has to be. And that that I think that that’s the real the real stumbling block for most people. It’s like, where do you even start? So with that in mind, so you know, you mentioned 30,000 stocks at the moment. Do you have how how do you navigate through that if you go on to Tykr? How’s that sort of process work? There’s an onboarding when you join, in in you get to pick what kind of industries you’re interested in. And then what ticker does is it gets you started on your journey. Like, for example, if you pick auto and maybe tech and maybe food are your interests, it’s gonna kind of spit back a bunch of stocks right there on the next screen with their logos and most of the logos we designed it so they’re recognisable. So if you like food, it might be like, I don’t know, McDonald’s or Subway or I’m sorry. McDonald’s or something. Right, exactly. Um, and if it’s cars, uh Tesla is gonna be shown there, and you can kind of add those to your watch list and kind of start your journey from there. And then that’s when the emails kick on as well, teaching you how to invest. So you got some familiar stocks in your watch list, and the platform kind of guides you along the way with adding more stocks to it. And when you do that, what’s cool is Tykr monitors those stocks. So when something changes, let’s say you’ve got an on-sale stock and the next day flips to overprice. Guess what? Because it’s on your watch list, you get a notification email saying, Hey, Sammie, heads up, something’s going south here in the business. Maybe it’s time to sell. So it it will guide you. I I like to call it the set it and forget it features. So you can put it on your watch, it kind of monitors things for you.

[38:03] Sammie Ellard-King: I love that, man. And these results that you’re getting are insane. Like, um, you know, I’m and I think anyone who’s got that slight bit of interest, you know, I always say to people, it you know, get invested initially, and if that means a fund, great, do a fund. But you know, if you are interested in doing this, there are there’s some big money to be made. Um and with tools like yours, so talk to us about the pricing model. So if someone’s interested in doing this, what how much does it cost me if I’m signing up today? It’s 14-day free trial. We don’t even ask you for a credit card, just get in, use the tool. And if you like it, after 14 days, we do ask for a credit card, and it’s 99 a year or 29 a month. And because of that juxtapositioning there, you’ve got 29 a month versus 99 a year. Guess what? Everybody goes for the 99 a year.

[38:57] Sammie Ellard-King: So yeah, yeah, love that. Okay, so $99 as well. So for people in the UK listening to this, that’s even less, or is it still 99 in the UK? Good question. So we this is for the entrepreneurs out there, especially building a SaaS platform. We use Paddle at Tykr, and Paddle does the currency conversion, and we also use what’s called a Netflix index. So, for example, if you were to buy Netflix in the States, it’s like 10 to 12 bucks per month, whereas in India it can be like two or three. So we did that adjustment with Paddle, depending on what country you’re in, you will see most likely a lower price. Um, so I there’s a few countries in Europe that they have differences like that, but otherwise I’d say it’s a close to a one-to-one ratio. Like you’re in London, is that correct?

[39:47] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah, just outside. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you might you might see based on that currency conversion, probably a little less. It could be 90 some euros, probably not even 99. So, like if for the sake of the percentages that you’re going to potentially increase your yearly returns, it’s basically paying for itself, essentially, if you’re investing more than a few hundred pounds a year, basically. Yeah, our you’ll see people, our Trustpilot score is fortunately a very it’s a 4.9 out of five. And there’s people that say that, yeah, it’s it’s a it’s paid for itself. Um, that’s a common phrase you’ll see, which is, and that’s what we want. We want low risk to get in, low barrier to entry, get in, use the tool, tell tell your friends about it. Yeah, for sure.

[40:38] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. God, it’d be one of those things. It’s like, wow, I’ve just like gone from taking over at 8%, 9% to now hitting 15, 16, 17, 20 this year. How on earth am I doing this? And uh, you know, it’s so talk to us a little bit about the AI integration because that’s a big step. Um, yeah, what what’s the what’s the plan with that? Yeah, so with with uh the I gotta give credit to my team. They’ve been really driving this, especially the software engineers. I’m I’m I’m learning as fast as I can, but they’re ahead of me. So we try to think about okay, what can AI do? What can ChatGPT do? But at the same time, think about what are our customers’ biggest pain points? And one right now, as I mentioned, that 4M checklist, you kind of you have to go through on your own, which takes like, I don’t know, maybe three, four minutes. But it’d be nice if it could do it for you and I. So it gets the math part done, but then that meaning mode and management, it kind of you have to check boxes and use some sliders. And we try to gamify it a little bit, but it’s like we’re talking to customers and they’re like, what if you could just have this done for us? And for like a year now, we’re like, oh, that’s hard to do. And then we see what ChatGPT can do. It can look at the business model, it can tell us how many revenue streams a business has, how scalable those streams are, then it can move on to the man the moat and give us true competitors. That’s really hard to do automatically. And we we’ve been doing tests on this, and then of course the CEO, that’s that’s a little easier to find out their background and kind of track what they have. Maybe if there’s a glass door rating, you can leverage that. But um, yeah, so that’s one way we’re calling it an investment assistant. So if you start adding stocks to your watch list, it will help uh kind of raise a little flag and be like, hey, maybe you want to look at this stock too, which is a higher score, you know, kind of guide you towards some stronger businesses, and then answer questions along the way. So that investments assistant we’re we’re working on as we speak. You’ve got my mind going there.

[42:42] Sammie Ellard-King: Now the the when you said that it will find true competitors, it’s just the power of it and the speed of it will be just absolutely out of this world, and suddenly you’ll be finding opportunities where you would have never seen them in a human eye, would have taken them weeks to find, perhaps. Yes, weeks, if not years. And that’s one thing, too, is a lot of the popular stocks we all know by the time they’re super popular, uh like on the news and whatnot, in some cases they’re still good buy, but other cases it’s not. But you still see these analysts with large companies still pumping them, you know, and you’ll see that on Reddit and Twitter, like, keep buying this stock, keep buying that. It’s like, what if you could get ahead of that? And that’s that’s what we’re doing is like letting people know this is a stock that just went from overpriced to on sale. Financials are moving the right direction, but with ChatGPT to really break out the forms for you. Oh my gosh, that that’s gonna be a game changer.

[43:44] Sammie Ellard-King: Sean, you’ve got me going now, like thinking about the ways that I can utilize that. Like it’s just like insane, isn’t it? Like and and having that that level of because uh, you know, a lot of investment companies are integrating AI into what they do, and rightly so, because you know they want to see their returns increase too. But and if it’s gonna help the little guy, which is what Tykr does, um happy days, right? So obviously, you I think people might get confused with this slightly. So you don’t invest directly through Ticker, do you? Correct, yeah. So you have brokers out there, just kind of give a quick um uh definition here, the two different platforms you want to be using. So a broker, like I I use TD Ameritrade here in the States, the big players are like TD Ameritrade, eTrade, Robinhood. Um, there’s like Schwab and Fidelity and whatnot are fine too. But I know around the world there’s interactive brokers is global. There’s eToro, which is hot in the U. Um, you guys get a bunch, like DEGIRO is really big where you’re at.

[44:45] Sammie Ellard-King: Um so that’s where you actually massive where we are, yeah. Right? That’s where you connect your bank account, and that’s where you place your trades. Those same platforms, though, they don’t screen. If they do, that’s not their core business model. That’s not what they’re focused on. So I use TD Ameritrade as my broker, but then you need a screener to know what to look for, what to avoid, how to invest. And that’s Tykr’s, that’s second platform. So we are classified as a screener. I love that. So you’re obviously utilizing that eToro as the platform, let’s say um eToro can be any of them. Um but then you’re so if we kind of recap on what you were saying here across this, so like you’re you’re you’re coming in, let’s say you’re investing and you put a thousand pounds in each month or a hundred pounds, whatever that might well be, that value doesn’t matter, but you’re attributing that amount to your investments each month. Um and what Sean has been saying, correct me if I’m wrong here, Sean, that if you’re if that business is massively on sale, that may be a part of your portfolio. Or your watch list, you’re then pounding money into that business because you you know that the fundamentals are great. And then what you’re doing is waiting for it to bounce back through your margin of safety in the mode that is essentially allowing that stock to grow, and that is allowing you to get these market beating returns. So you’re you’re really looking for those on sale great businesses at all times, and that and that’s and that and that and Tykr allows you to get that super quickly.

[46:17] Sean Tepper: It it exactly, yeah. You’re the new pitch man now. Cool, all right. Yeah, no, I just had to recap it because I think it, you know, people can get carried away with hearing 50%, and it’s like, well, actually, how did he go about that? And uh, you know, simplifying it is um is it is really important, I think, especially for in new people looking to individually stop pick. Um what’s the hottest stock on Tykr right now? What’s the big one? We actually, when you log in, you you can create your own dashboard, different modules, and there’s one module titled The Most Commonly Searched Stocks, and I think Tesla, Tesla and Apple are always at the top of the list of most popular stocks searched. Um I will say my favourite business model, which is reaching all-time highs right now, which is a stock I hold, which is Microsoft. Um I’ll give a quick 60-second if less um reason why. So for years I noticed that Microsoft is essentially they have so many revenue streams. You’ve got the uh Office 365, which large corporations, like for example, I work for GE, has over 100,000 employees, and you’re never going to get a call from the CTO or the CFO saying, hey, we need to cut costs, which means we’re gonna get rid of Microsoft Word and Excel. And that conversation will never happen, ever. Like these companies run on that. So um, if every large business in the world uses Microsoft 365, that’s a winning formula right there. It’s almost like the insurance play. It’s like it’s mandatory. Then you’ve got Azure for hosting, you’ve got Xbox video games, you’ve got Windows operating system. Um they just bought Activision Blizzard, video game publisher. Um they own other platforms underneath. Now they’re working on um their their own ChatGPT. Well, that’s right, Microsoft did invest. Um they bought in, yeah, with it. It’s like this is a winning business model just from a meaning. If you take that second and from a meaning standpoint, it is incredible.

[48:30] Sammie Ellard-King: And they’re integrating AI now into uh 365, and it looks wild. I saw the first iteration of it the other day, and I was like, that is gonna be an absolute game changer. It’s scary because you’re like, is it gonna is it gonna kill a lot of jobs? But um you’re also like, well, it’s gonna make a lot of jobs too. So um yeah, I the AI conversation is is is a vastly moving, a good very quickly moving vast conversation, isn’t it? But um yeah, Microsoft, I love Microsoft. I bought Microsoft uh for the first time 10 years ago, and I still hold it to this day, and I top it up regularly, and I do exactly what you do, Sean. You know, I wait for why some for some reason someone’s kicked off and it’s down six percent. Happy days for me. I’m jumping straight in there with a little bit of cash on the side because I it I think it’s one of the best businesses on the planet, and um yeah, it’s it’s it it it it it speaks for itself and its results over the last few years. So okay, so Microsoft, yeah, and then you can obviously then see once you’ve then selected your portfolio, you’ve as you mentioned, you’ve got your your dashboard, you can then monitor those each day and then drag and drop and imagine as you buy and sell.

[49:47] Sean Tepper: Exactly. We’ve got a portfolio tracker feature as well, and there’s two ways to update it. You can do it manually, individual stocks, or you can do this, it’ll be launching with ETFs in the next week or two, which is uh you can do like a CSV export from your broker and import right into Tykr. Did some testing this morning actually works like a charm. So excited for that. There you go, little cheeky plug. All right, man. Well, look, this has been a real great chat. Thank you so much for coming on. Like, uh I really do employ people to go and check it out. But yeah, if you wouldn’t mind sort of um telling people the best places to to to come uh come check out ticker. Yeah, just easiest place, tykr.com. That’s t y kr.com. Nice. And and are you still doing the podcast these days?

[50:32] Sean Tepper: Yeah, the payback time podcast, which I interview um investors and entrepreneurs. I I still run that. So that’s paybacktimepodcast.com, where you can just look for Google Payback Time Podcast and starting a second podcast here, which will just be me. 10-minute episodes coming soon. That’s what that’ll be called Top Stocks. I will be doing stock reviews and diving into individual business elements, just making it easier to understand from you know layman’s terms perspective. I love that, man. Well, listen, thank you so much for coming on. It’s been uh it’s been great having you. And uh yeah, we look forward to to getting some market-beating returns with Tykr, man. Awesome. Thanks for the invite, Sammie. Appreciate it. Cheers, Sean.