EarningsBeats Virtual Happy Hour with Tom Bowley & John Hopkins

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:01][music] [music] [music] >> There he is. Hey partner.

[00:00:21]Hey there. How's it going?

[00:00:24]You know, they always say it's 5:00 somewhere. You know what I say?

[00:00:27]It's 4:00 here and that's good enough for me.

[00:00:30]I'm going to join you in this one.

[00:00:34]Looks like a big bottle. Got a little Got a little land shark. All right.

[00:00:38]Island beer. I'm more of a white wine guy. Although, you know, my wife and I have had a tradition for many years.

[00:00:45]Uh 5:00, so I'll We'll be out of here by then.

[00:00:48]We have uh Manhattan every Friday, no matter what.

[00:00:52]No matter what. Yeah, so But hey, great to see you.

[00:00:56]You know, >> Yeah. I'm going to put a warning out that um literally I have three large dogs sitting within 5 ft of me at my feet.

[00:01:08]We might get a little We might get a little yappy hour at some point.

[00:01:12]They're very well behaved, but they probably want to get in the action.

[00:01:17]Well, I've got uh I got a couple of cats on my end. Okay. And one of them is happily named named Star.

[00:01:25]Okay. Cuz uh every once in a while she likes to jump up on my desk when I got a video going. Absolutely. Become a star.

[00:01:33]Yeah, I mean, you know, that's um maybe it'll become a viral and we'll get, you know, a million views.

[00:01:43]Maybe I'm reading I'm sorry, I was reading comments. First Cheers, Marty.

[00:01:49]Um and then Acorn, Tom, why you always wear a hat? I thought bald is hot these days.

[00:01:57]Uh well, there you go.

[00:01:58]I can take the hat off.

[00:02:00]I'll let the hair down once in a while.

[00:02:02]Well, >> I have my earnings beats on before.

[00:02:05]What's that? I have my earnings beats on hat on before.

[00:02:09]There you go. Yeah.

[00:02:11]Yeah, you know, I've had a hat obviously when I was in public accounting and was going to clients' offices, I never wore a hat, but um I started wearing a hat regularly um back when I was probably 13 years old. Boy.

[00:02:28]>> And it started from playing golf. I just I started playing golf when I was a kid and had the hat on and it's always it's just been a part of what I do when I go outside and then I just then it just became a habit.

[00:02:40]Okay. We got a guy gentleman I'm assuming from Bonn, Germany.

[00:02:46]Welcome.

[00:02:48]What time is it there?

[00:02:50]Must be midnight.

[00:02:52]11:00 p.m. I think it's like maybe 5 6 hours different.

[00:02:58]Here's somebody with two large greyhounds. Okay.

[00:03:02]Awesome. Ontario.

[00:03:04]Nice.

[00:03:06]I'm coming to you from Charleston. Tom's from Charlotte.

[00:03:10]Ah, I'll tell you the week, Tom. It's like, you know, chat about the market a little bit later, but I had some more dental work to get done.

[00:03:17]Two more You guys are going to start calling me the crown prince. I'm going to demand it.

[00:03:23]I got more crowns in my mouth than the Saudi Arabian prince.

[00:03:27]I think you I think your dentist treats you like royalty. Every time you go in and they give you a crown. Well, I wish they'd invite me to their country home.

[00:03:36]That I paid for probably. You probably paid for their boat.

[00:03:40]You know, we have a lot of new members. This was we had a great event this past weekend.

[00:03:45]We got a lot of new folks.

[00:03:47]And we have people been with us literally 20 plus years.

[00:03:52]And since there's so many new people, I'll do this briefly, but just to give you a little background on Tom and how we met.

[00:03:59]I was in mortgage banking for many years and I moved out to Maryland in 1984.

[00:04:06]>> [sighs] >> And about 3 years in um I decided to I was working for a bank and I decided to uh sell my business.

[00:04:16]And um actually I I take that back. I left the bank. I started the business.

[00:04:22]And when I started the business, I needed an accountant.

[00:04:25]And I walked into the building I was renting an office from.

[00:04:29]I had no idea who I was talking to. I came across uh Chris and Teddis.

[00:04:34]Tom was with an accounting firm called Stoy Malone.

[00:04:38]And uh we got to know each other and actually at some point one point we shared a large office suite.

[00:04:45]So the company I had which was involved in mortgage banking and the company you had which you were a partner in in accounting, we put our resources together, had a great great suite. One of the tremendous benefits that I got out of it was accountants always work late like from January till April.

[00:05:02]And there was a couple of women in that office who cooked for the accounting team and I would horn in as often as I could.

[00:05:10]It pretty Now I'm talking serious cooking.

[00:05:15]Yeah, they're they were good cooks.

[00:05:17]They were good cooks. Relatives and they were good cooks and uh yeah, it was um we had some we had some really good meals. We were definitely spoiled. I mean that was the one, you know, working late is bad um you know, but when you got you know, the great meals like that, I think I probably put on 30 lb during tax Especially during the tax season. But anyways, so Tom and I got to know each other. He wasn't my personal accountant, but we got to know each other very and we all and we both like to dabble in the market.

[00:05:45]Things were hot.

[00:05:46]You know, back then there was a lot of stuff going on. Dot-com bubble, whole thing, you know, getting ready to burst, but I'll never forget when I first little bit after I first started trading, I I really got into it and I fancied myself, you know, um pretty hot trader, right?

[00:06:04]And this has got to go down as like one of the worst trades of all time.

[00:06:08]I forget which stock it was. One of your guys there who liked to dabble gave us a tip on a stock, small stock. Yeah. Okay.

[00:06:16]Yeah.

[00:06:17]You know, we looked at it, we thought about it. I said, "I'm going to take a position on that thing." And I think back then this was a large position. It was like 25 or 30,000 dollars, okay? And I said, "I'm going to take a shot at this thing."

[00:06:32]So, called the broker. By the way, back then you had brokers, you'd literally call a broker.

[00:06:37]Buy me 1,000 shares of XYZ. So, I called them up. I think it was on a Thursday. Might have been a Thursday.

[00:06:46]Or Friday.

[00:06:47]Whichever day it was, the following day the company announced it was going under.

[00:06:55]>> [laughter] >> I had not written the check yet to the broker for the >> Oh, that's painful.

[00:07:01]I called him up and I said, "You know, this company they went into bankruptcy, so I guess I don't have to send you any money."

[00:07:10]No, you do.

[00:07:12]Yeah. You're not getting any back, but you got to send it. That was so painful to write that check. I remember that. Oh my god.

[00:07:20]But anyways, we did a lot of, you know, we we dabbled a lot in the market. We went through the best times, the worst times, the dot-com bubble.

[00:07:28]I don't know how many times I got on a plane and I had options in the stock and I was just biting my nails at what it might look like when I got off. It was either going to be a really big hit or a really big big miss. Quite often a miss.

[00:07:45]And that's when stocks like regularly stocks were moving 30, 40 dollars at a time.

[00:07:53]Remember those days? Oh, yeah. I know you do.

[00:07:57]I remember definitely my worst trade of my life was on Knight Trading Group. Remember that one? Oh, god. [laughter] And I T E, Knight Trading Group. Didn't we go to a shareholder meeting?

[00:08:12]I don't know. I went to one. I I think I owned the com- I almost owned the whole company at one point from the options I had.

[00:08:20]Yeah.

[00:08:20]>> But it was one I got into the stock. I remember it was about this time of the year. It was like April or May.

[00:08:27]And got in and Knight was like trying to get order flow from all the the big firms and so forth. And they got most of their order flow from the online brokers.

[00:08:39]Um which was kind of a new whole industry back then. Remember in the late '90s, you know, E*TRADE and all these companies. I mean, it was so cool. It was like, you know, commissions were going down and people were able to trade more and eventually went to zero. I mean, still, you know, been zero for many years now, but Oh, yeah. Anyway, Knight was trading at I think at like 44 dollars a share.

[00:09:02]And I bought some of the stock and then next thing it was like 48.

[00:09:06]And so I'm like, all right, I'm I'm going to I'm going to get aggressive.

[00:09:09]I'm going all in. Yeah, I mean, if if I have one downside to me is I can get overly aggressive. Um and I really try to be very conservative for our members because I know how aggressive I can be and I know that's not good for most folks.

[00:09:26]So, um I remember getting into so many options. I think at one point I had 300 contracts or something.

[00:09:37]Um you know, going out to July or >> or whatever and I I remember one day and this was back I mean, I was I I remember a couple of days making what I what I made in a year. I hear you.

[00:09:54]Um, my annual salary. It was like the options had so many options Yeah. and night went from $44 to like 160 in 3 months.

[00:10:06]And so, I mean, I had so many of these contracts and I had the stock and I literally could have sold everything. Probably would have Well, I would have had a big tax bill cuz that's why I didn't sell, which is why if you ever hear me now say, "I don't pay attention to taxes." I mean, if it if I think it's a sell, I sell it. I'll worry about my taxes later. I'll pay my taxes because I made a mistake back then. It It'd gone up. I had all this you know, on paper profit. Yeah. Could have literally sold and paid my house off. I hear you. I had a nice home. Yeah. And I could have paid it off.

[00:10:41]And the stock started to roll over. I don't know, went from 160 down to 140 down to 120.

[00:10:47]And so, I'd had so much of the stock and I'd bought so many calls. I was starting to get margin and it was on margin. So, I was doing options on margin. I mean, it It was so stupid.

[00:10:57]I can't even tell you how dumb it was when I look back. I mean, I can laugh now.

[00:11:01]But back then it was not funny.

[00:11:03]Um, but I remember seeing it go down and I had this brilliant idea that I'll go ahead and sell the stock. You know, I'll hold the options. Yeah. And I'll sell the stock, which actually has value over time and I'm, you know, options are just time. Yeah, yeah. And the stock kept going up. It went all did a complete reversal, went all the way back down to 40. And all those options I had Gone.

[00:11:26]essentially became worthless.

[00:11:28]Yeah, that was what it was happening back in the day. I think my biggest position by far you might remember AOL was a company. I remember. Remember AOL? They got bought by Time Warner. I think it's just What was the CEO's name? I think I might have had 1,900 contracts on it like at one point.

[00:11:46]Like some some outrageous you know you know number.

[00:11:51]And and I remember they made the announcement that Time Warner was taking over.

[00:11:55]And I remember going in and seeing Diane and saying, "Well, this is it. We're going to retire."

[00:12:00]You know, because you figured a stock just keep splitting going up and up.

[00:12:04]That was the end of it. Pretty much.

[00:12:06]That was the end of AOL.

[00:12:07]That marked the top of the bubble. By the way, you know, you hear this talk about Look at maybe, you know, some things are aggressive now, but you got to understand. I mean, when people talk about bubbles, there there just is no comparison to back then. Here's an example Tom and I both know about.

[00:12:32]Do you remember PSINet? Yeah. Naming rights. Baltimore Stadium. PSINet, I don't think they had any revenue.

[00:12:40]Right?

[00:12:42]It It was a point where if a stock reported earnings, the more money they lost, the higher the price would stock price would go.

[00:12:50]Do you remember that? Oh, yeah.

[00:12:52]And PSINet >> that's what a bubble looks like. Yeah.

[00:12:55]That's what a bubble Companies that were going under had virtually no revenue or very little revenue, certainly no profits at all.

[00:13:04]And PSINet took [clears throat] out I don't know a 10-year naming right to Baltimore Ravens Stadium.

[00:13:10]And I think a year later they were out.

[00:13:12]You know, they That's what a real I mean, again, maybe things are aggressive, but when you look at, you know, Nvidia just reported Look at the revenue they had. I don't know. It was, you know, 100 billion.

[00:13:24]Whatever. It was crazy.

[00:13:26]Okay? But back then a lot of companies literally had no revenue. I remember one very vividly, this is a good one, MicroStrategy.

[00:13:35]Oh, yeah. MicroStrategy back then was just doing software or whatever they do, right? And the stock got to 330 and I shorted it, okay?

[00:13:46]And I hit it right at the right time.

[00:13:48]And I got out of it and the stock went from 330 in about 4 days [snorts] to 6.

[00:13:58]>> [laughter] >> You go back, you look at a long-term you look at a chart of MicroStrategy, you'll see what happened, okay? So, you know, now today now it's a different business, but anytime I see that stock got wrecked over the you know, it's come back a little bit, but it got it was like 4 or 500, it got back under 100. I started talking about those old days, you know. Yeah, I remember I mean it wasn't I mean the dot-com stocks obviously got clobbered back then, but I remember even some of the really good names, I mean Cisco was like 70 some dollars, you know, at the top and then uh by the end in 2002 2003 when the bottom hit, I think Cisco was back down to like 12 dollars or something from 70. So, I mean it was just everything got repriced. And of course, you know, when you're in a bubble everything's getting priced into the stratosphere because everybody's euphoric. Yeah.

[00:14:50]>> And at the bottom, everybody is, you know, panicked um so depressed and so you get these depressed valuations.

[00:14:58]Yeah.

[00:14:58]>> You know, when you get to a uh secular bear market bottom. And so that period was I mean literally within two two and a half years you went from this absolutely euphoric state where PSINet would report a loss, say they're going to pay 200 million dollars for naming rights, split their stock three for one and the uh the stock would be another double.

[00:15:22]Oh, yes. Yeah.

[00:15:24]That's splitting.

[00:15:26]That's what did it.

[00:15:27]You would lit- everybody would literally wait for the conference call and hear split.

[00:15:34]They're split even though it has zero to do with the value, you know, they just you're getting more shares, but it's just split and that was the magic word. Anyway, so Tom and I, we went through the whole dot com bubble together.

[00:15:46]I sold my little business.

[00:15:49]Tom left the accounting firm and we kept in touch.

[00:15:53]And then in 2004, we started what was originally called Invested Central.

[00:16:00]Right? Yep. And and we had a one-page newsletter.

[00:16:05]It was a one-page newsletter.

[00:16:07]I don't know if it came out daily or week- whatever it was, but you know, what it wasn't made of much, okay? And I'll never forget, you know, we were feeling pretty cocky like get a few members, you know, I'll never forget our very like our first big event.

[00:16:23]You know, we had an event in Bethesda, Maryland where I lived, like a Hilton or Hyatt.

[00:16:29]And [snorts] I don't know, I set up 50 chairs, you know, we had a buffet breakfast that was to die for.

[00:16:35]And you know, 9:00 comes around. I'm waiting for people to you know, come marching in.

[00:16:41]I think we ended up with three and I was one of them.

[00:16:45]I had a lot of croissant, I will tell you. I had a lot of pastry, okay? To eat? Yeah. I But but but we learned from that and we started fine-tuning and um Tom and I actually ended up going on the radio uh to talk about our service, talk about the market and we kept sort of growing that radio network.

[00:17:07]And at one point, we were in over 20 markets, you know, throughout the United States, people start to get to know who you were.

[00:17:14]Now, you also then had, you know, the financial crisis come along.

[00:17:19]So, just when we got out of the dot-com bubble, we were kind of sailing along, then the great recession hits.

[00:17:26]Right? That's another whammy.

[00:17:29]And we took it on the chin like big time. We were I'm telling you, we were just like getting by.

[00:17:34]Right? Yeah.

[00:17:35]Yeah, we had a number of different iterations of our business over the years and yeah, that was a pretty pretty rough patch through like 2009 2010. Yeah.

[00:17:46]>> Um because, you know, everybody was beaten up so badly by the market.

[00:17:51]Uh you know, the last thing you wanted to do is to listen to somebody talk about stocks or you know, putting away money for your retirement or whatever. Most people were just trying to scrape by and, you know, keep their job or get a job. Yeah. Um it was so it was really a brutal time, but uh yeah, that was that was a really rough stretch and you know, for us in the business and then uh things started to pick up a little bit over the next few years and then I think it was 2015 when uh Chip Anderson, president of StockCharts, uh talked to me about coming on board there as a senior technical analyst.

[00:18:27]And uh some of you, I mean, I think that's where a lot of folks, um you know, got to know me pretty well because I was doing a blog at um StockCharts. I was writing a blog every single day that the market was open.

[00:18:42]Yep.

[00:18:42]>> And I would publish that article at about 9:00 Eastern. I mean, for me it was like a goal to publish it exactly at 9:00 a.m.

[00:18:50]every morning, 30 minutes before the market would open.

[00:18:54]Um and I remember, John, you were probably like this, too. Nobody, if you're not like our age, you don't know anything about this, but newspaper delivery, you remember?

[00:19:03]For you know, 6:00 in the morning, my dad used to be upset if 6:15 the paper wasn't in the driveway. You you something got a boy coming by and throwing the paper cuz he used to like to sit down, read the sports, you know, read his the business and everything else.

[00:19:19]Um and I just I always remembered him being in that routine. Like he wanted to have his paper at a certain time.

[00:19:26]Um you know, drink his coffee or whatever and and uh you know, catch up on things.

[00:19:31]And so I tried to when I was at StockCharts for those four years, I tried to make sure I published my article every single morning at 9:00 a.m. Yeah. And uh had a huge uh following there.

[00:19:43]And um it really helped, you know, lift our business. Um probably as much as anything. Absolutely.

[00:19:49]>> Um you know, just building that readership and viewership over those four years.

[00:19:54]And then uh um we all kind of went our own way. It was, you know, several of us over at StockCharts. Me and uh that point it was Greg Schnell and Arthur Hill and um Aaron Swenlin.

[00:20:10]And we all kind of went our own way and you know, fortunately for you and me, John, we already had the business set up. We already had EarningsBeats set up ready to go.

[00:20:19]And so and we kept it going the whole time I was at StockCharts, but it was just it wasn't anything like it is right now.

[00:20:27]Yeah. Um when when I I ended up coming back in 2019, but I remember it was 2018 when we started the model portfolio. Yeah. Um and that's really when things started to build start to build up at EarningsBeats. And then when I left StockCharts in August of 2019, we had already established credibility through these portfolios and so forth.

[00:20:53]And so when we reached out to everyone at StockCharts, we got a uh really big response. Yeah. Um to kind of kick off what I would say was really the you know, the successful part of our business venture.

[00:21:05]>> Yeah.

[00:21:05]We were successful the first 15 years, but it was up and down. Yeah. But I think, you know, starting the portfolios was a big big uh change in our business, a positive. And then coming back from StockCharts after having built up a lot of followers, um really was a big big uh piece of our business over the years. Absolutely. You know, I'm I'm going I'm going to looking at the chat here because uh we got a little happy hour here.

[00:21:30]Here's Larry saying, "It's the market humbling. I've been trading since 1977.

[00:21:35]And I now get most nervous if I have several consecutive wins because that's when I get whacked."

[00:21:42]>> [laughter] >> Well, there's some truth to that cuz Absolutely. when you're when you're winning every time, you get overconfident. And sometimes you maybe put too much into a trade um or maybe you have too many positions cuz you just think you're invincible. Oh, yeah. Um and all of a sudden the market turns on you and you don't you know, you're not really set up to manage it well. Yeah.

[00:22:04]Because you either have too big a position or maybe too many positions.

[00:22:07]Makes it really difficult. I mean, that I think everybody struggles with that.

[00:22:11]Yeah, I think, you know, I have I have sort of a rule in life that if everything is >> Oops. I lose you?

[00:22:22]Um you know, my internet's a little slow, but yeah, you're back. You're there. I'm saying I I kind of a rule that seems to apply.

[00:22:31]And that's uh if I had like a string of doesn't matter what it is in life. If things are going well, I know there's something around the corner about to bite me.

[00:22:41]And I think the same [laughter] I think it's the same thing.

[00:22:44]What Here's uh by the way, asking, "When did you start video chat room? 15 years ago, technology was not as robust as it is like Zoom and YouTube." Well, a couple things.

[00:22:55]When we got our business we finally got our business off the ground, we used to have in-person web- seminars.

[00:23:04]We'd rent a room in a hotel. The first one was a disaster, but they started to get better.

[00:23:08]We go to hotel, we get 40, 50 people.

[00:23:11]But you got to feed them, you know, you got to get the equipment set up. And honestly, there was nothing better than, you know, the internet and the chat rooms and Zoom that, you know, came through for us so we could communicate.

[00:23:26]Cuz you stop and think about so much better way to teach people about charts is when they're right at the computer. We used to have put a big screen up and we'd have to flip the slides. So anyways, we you know, we we uh did sign up for Zoom. And now we do a lot of StreamYard and that really helped change the business.

[00:23:46]Um especially like our streaming events.

[00:23:50]You know, we do a streaming event on the weekend and we get many, many hundreds of people that come in, you know, to to listen to what Tom's got to say.

[00:23:59]And um that has had a big impact, right, Tom?

[00:24:02]Yeah, no doubt. I mean, it's uh it's really cool um when you think about where we were 15, 20 years ago, like when we did the live webinars. First of all, we're only drawing from people who can travel right there. I mean, we're we're really limiting ourselves to just, you know, geographical limitation like around the Washington D.C. area when we got started. Yeah. And I I know our very first webinar that we did where you said we drew three people, you know, we first started out, I'll never forget this. This we did more fundamental analysis. I was talking about P/E ratios and sales growth and book value. I mean, that's what we were teaching. It wasn't it wasn't the MACD or the PPO or any of that.

[00:24:45]This was teaching people how to basically be an accountant, which was a horrible idea. I mean, looking back, it's like and I kind of remember we spent thousands and thousands of dollars advertising.

[00:24:58]>> Oh, yeah. And I think our I think we initially were going to charge like a thousand dollars a person to come to this thing.

[00:25:05]And it turned into you know, anybody who expressed interest, you know, can you give us a couple hundred bucks kind of a thing. I was not me running out on Wisconsin Avenue begging people to come in.

[00:25:18]Didn't you have like one of your neighbors or something that came? That was one of the three. Me and my neighbor and one other person. Did you have you told me we collected but did you have to pay that person to show up? No.

[00:25:30][laughter] I didn't.

[00:25:32]Here's somebody saying that back in the '80s and '90s the only real weekly stock show was Wall Street with Louis Rukeyser. He's right.

[00:25:39]>> that. Yeah, on Friday evenings. I used to love that show. Yeah, I did too. You know, and so yeah, thank you. He said you guys were quite inventive to get this off the ground. Well, thank you.

[00:25:49]It takes a lot of um I've been involved in a couple of businesses. You got to have to stay You got to be able to ride the ups and downs of Trust me, we had plenty.

[00:26:00]Uh let's see what else we got in here.

[00:26:03]Um Okay.

[00:26:08]Let's see here. While you're looking, John. Yeah. I remember being you know, when I first started following the stock market, this was back in I'm dating myself but back in the 1980s.

[00:26:18]I was in public accounting for roughly about 20 years but I took about a year and a half off. I left Yeah. accounting in 1986 and I went to work in an all internal audit department at a bank in Baltimore.

[00:26:33]Um and I was there for about a year and a half and then the accounting firm same accounting firm called me and they wanted me to come back and put me in a different role and anyway. But for that year and a half I remember I would go in and I I loved the market.

[00:26:46]I mean, I've always had a passion for the market ever since literally since I graduated college.

[00:26:52]Um probably should have just gone into that right away, but I don't know, maybe I wouldn't have gotten the fundamental background, maybe things would have been a lot different. Anyway, um I would show up at the bank. I I remember I had to be in at 8:30.

[00:27:04]And I would usually show up at 8:00. And I had um ledger paper, you know, that accountants use. Yeah. I spread it out.

[00:27:12]And I had hand-drawn charts on all the Dow stocks. A literal spreadsheet. A literal spreadsheet. And I had like different colored pencils.

[00:27:23]And so, kind of think like what StockCharts does now with their with their, you know, colored volume and stuff like that. I mean, I used to do that by hand on each individual stock in the Dow.

[00:27:36]And I always joke with Chip, it's like, "Listen, I had this idea 15 years before you had it. I just didn't I wasn't smart enough, you know, to put it online and to do what what Chip did, but I was I was looking at this stuff using candlesticks. And actually, I think I did bar charts back then.

[00:27:54]Um but I had every Dow stock, you know, and I was I was tracking and charting back then. So, it's not shocking that I've ended up where I ended up. I mean, I like I said, I was always very passionate about it. Yeah. And mostly self-taught.

[00:28:10]Um but I always give John Murphy a lot of credit cuz I read his book and some of the stuff that I read and kind of opened my eyes and really um inspired me to do a lot of research.

[00:28:21]Yeah. And so, you know, the late great John Murphy, good friend of mine, and uh Yeah. miss him, but he did uh and many of you probably know, you probably saw him on CNBC. He was on CNBC for 7 years as like the technical analyst guy. I mean, he was he, in my opinion, is like the father of technical analysis. And um if you ever get had read his books. um, Technical Analysis of Financial Markets. A great book. It's got charts from back in the 1990s, but the the meat of the book is really still, I think, really, uh, interesting. You know, remember you speaking of fundamental analysis, I'll never forget, you know, when I was first started getting interested in stocks, thinking about whether or not I wanted to buy a stock, I would I would send in a request to the investor department of a company.

[00:29:18]So, I don't know, say it's IBM, right?

[00:29:21]Literally, this is before the internet and everything else, I send a letter, you know, to whom it may concern, investor unit, IBM.

[00:29:31]That's a week, you know, at least.

[00:29:33]Okay, for it to get there, right? Yeah.

[00:29:37]Probably get a letter back, thank you so much for your interest. We're going to get you an annual report. That's another week, okay?

[00:29:45]>> [laughter] >> And maybe two to three weeks later, you know, you get a annual report.

[00:29:55]And so, you know, that's 10 months old.

[00:29:58]So, you're sitting there saying, "Okay."

[00:30:01]Now, who knew then? I mean, it's like this is what you get, okay?

[00:30:04]Who knew you could do it by the second now, that you could trade, and, you know, like somebody said in there, yes, I do remember that you had to pay a 2% or 3% or whatever it was to the broker.

[00:30:17]Literally, call a broker up, the stock that you've picked, "I'm interested in this stock. Okay, I can do it for you. It's going to cost you 2% or 5% whatever the hell it was."

[00:30:27]Yeah. You're in the hole already.

[00:30:30]You're like >> Crazy. You're 2% to 3% 5% in the hole, hoping that the stock, you know, is going to work for you, and then it goes down 7%, and you're 10% in the hole, and you're you know.

[00:30:43]>> [laughter] >> I remember I remember when I was in public accounting I had a client who had millions of dollars in the market. I used to do his taxes.

[00:30:52]So, I would go through and I started you know, just I mean, they traded his accounts so much and the commissions were so high. Yeah.

[00:31:02]>> Um and options commissions were even higher.

[00:31:05]And I remember doing an analysis of his account one year showing him that after millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars had been traded throughout the year, he ended up making like 3%. The market that year had gone up like 20%. So, he only made 3%, but the brokers, the commissions that they earned were like unbelievable. I mean, the total commissions of I mean, cuz he was they were very active with his account. And so, they were making money, but it was all being eaten up in commissions.

[00:31:39]You know, he wasn't holding things for very long. Yeah. And I think a lot of people were like that back then when they just turned their money over to somebody and not really paying attention to what they're doing. I mean, he had no idea when I told him how much money he had paid in commissions on his portfolio and how much money he made, he immediately dropped his broker. He's like, I I can't even believe the number.

[00:32:04]I mean, it was like I want to say hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions. Unbelievable.

[00:32:11]It was horrible. Listen.

[00:32:13]>> Yeah, I mean, to look, you know, 20 years later and or 25, 30 years later and now we're sitting here with zero commissions. I mean, you know, instant execution. Yeah.

[00:32:25]>> No broker on the line.

[00:32:27]Um I mean, I I take it all for granted.

[00:32:29]I get so irritated if I try to go into Schwab or something they're and they're down.

[00:32:34]You know, and they say, "Oh, you know, sorry. We're" I'm like, "Oh, I do not want to pick up that phone and call somebody and try to get them on the line, explain what I want to do and the problems I'm having. By the time, you know, you know how fast this market runs and moves? No. So, you have time for that. Oh, just wait till they go to 24-hour trading. Ugh.

[00:32:54]Um All right, a couple more things. Well, well, you know, we're not going to be here too terribly long. Um but this is one that I know, you know, it's going to make you sad.

[00:33:05]Uh somebody's asking, um what where did Greg Schnell go?

[00:33:13]Yeah, uh we lost Greg.

[00:33:16]Um Greg was a really good friend of mine. We talked almost every day.

[00:33:21]Um I met him at StockCharts.

[00:33:24]Um he um he had brain cancer.

[00:33:29]Um and it came on pretty quick.

[00:33:33]Um I remember, you know, they were doing a lot of experimental drugs and stuff, but um unfortunately, his health deteriorated really fast.

[00:33:44]Um >> [snorts] >> and this was, I guess, when was it? Two three years ago?

[00:33:51]I think he passed on like June 6th or June 7th.

[00:33:55]And I want to say it was 2023 or 2024. I think 24.

[00:34:01]20 This is 2026. That that would only be two Maybe maybe that's right. I think so, but yeah.

[00:34:07]>> time flies, but um yeah, that's uh Greg was a really, really dear friend of mine.

[00:34:14]Um Yeah, good guy. Really good guy.

[00:34:16]>> Yeah, he's been to my house. I've been up there to, you know, Calgary. I spoke to his group.

[00:34:22]Uh of course, we met a lot at StockCharts and did you know, he and he and I and Arthur Hill and Joey are pretty all all of us pretty close.

[00:34:30]Yeah.

[00:34:31]And so, we used to, you know, do a lot of things together when we would go out to, you know, Washington, Seattle for any any of the the Chart Con events and things like that. I keep asking Jim to do one do another one because I You should. Selfishly, I just I love going out there and, you know, hanging with all of the commentators. I hope he does.

[00:34:53]Um All right, couple things.

[00:34:57]I had something in my mind and I like already lost it.

[00:35:01]We're talking about start Oh, a lot of people getting Thank you so much for the nice comments about Tom and um and Ernie's beats. Really, really appreciate it. Oh, I do want to mention something.

[00:35:12]Um not going to spend a lot of time on it, but every year we have two we have a spring and fall special.

[00:35:22]We're kicking off the spring special tomorrow, but it's on the site.

[00:35:27]So, if you want to save some money, you know, if you're a new member or if you want to add on, you'll save a couple hundred dollars.

[00:35:36]And it's a you know, it's a good deal.

[00:35:37]You'll learn more about it.

[00:35:38]But, it is on the site.

[00:35:41]If you want to check it out, you know, take advantage of it. Save a little bit of money.

[00:35:45]We really uh you really do appreciate that.

[00:35:49]Um maybe we can you know, we got to wrap this up pretty soon. Maybe just like you know, sitting here looking at the market. Very interesting sort of close today.

[00:36:01]Um I see that the S&P, you know, got within 10 points of its all-time high and then kind of retreated some.

[00:36:09]Um Nvidia, you know, I one of sort of impressive thing is Nvidia keeps getting whacked after its earnings and the market's holding.

[00:36:19]That's a positive, right?

[00:36:22]Yeah, I mean, Nvidia's been a weak semiconductor stock for almost a year now.

[00:36:27]Um I mean, when I say weak, it's not going down. It's just on a relative basis, semiconductors are just absolutely exploding.

[00:36:35]And the reason is easy to see. I mean, their earnings. If you look at the earnings growth in these companies, I mean, I did valuations when I was in public accounting, and I know a lot of people like to hide behind PE ratios and say, "Well, the market, you know, is way overvalued."

[00:36:48]And you hear it over and over and over again.

[00:36:51]It depends on market conditions. I mean, if you got a market environment where the, you know, Wall Street feels like, you know, we're going to remain in a fairly low interest rate environment, you've got earnings growing as rapidly as they are in some of these stocks, they are deserving of much, much, much higher valuations.

[00:37:09]Um because you take this rapid growth into the future, and you discount those earnings back um to today, and you know, it comes down to how much you want to pay today for all of those future earnings. And when a company is growing 30, 40, 50, 60% a year, that's not You don't They're not going to have a 10 or 12 PE or even a 15 or 20.

[00:37:33]You're going to have You've got to pay up for those. If you don't want to pay up, you just can't own them.

[00:37:38]They're not going to come back down unless the market starts sensing a recession.

[00:37:43]Yeah.

[00:37:43]>> And the problem with the big growth stocks, you know, you have to understand that's very aggressive money. Because at some point, if we do go through some sort of a slowdown, or any of these companies find that some of their competition is starting to take market share away, some of these companies could get hit really hard. I mean, that it is inevitable at some point. At some point, yeah. At some point, but we don't know what that point is. And you know, look at SanDisk. I've been saying SanDisk was just too high, too high, too high for the last year. And it was $400 a year ago or whatever. And now it's 1,400 or whatever. I mean, it's You know, there's a risk of being in these stocks, but there's also a risk of not being in these stocks.

[00:38:29]Because you look at the S&P 500 and there it's going up, but it's being carried by a lot of these growth names.

[00:38:38]Um I saw one comment in the chat John's Lawrence said, "50% of the time I'm 100% correct on my picks."

[00:38:45]>> [laughter] >> That's pretty good one. I love it. Yeah, sometimes I'm 40% of the time I'm 100% correct sometimes.

[00:38:54]Um yeah, I'm just trying to go through some of the comments and all. Thanks by the way for being here. I mean, you know, we're just kind of shooting the breeze and all, but we do feel like we've got a community at Orange Feeds through all of our shows and the and so forth. I feel like, you know, we've got a little bit of a relationship.

[00:39:12]And so we like to do these every once in a while. I think we we've done one or two before. I think maybe this is our third one. Is that right, John?

[00:39:19]>> Yeah, and somebody's saying you should do this weekly. I don't know if we'll do it weekly, but I think we'll do it more often. I do. I like, you know, shooting the breeze, getting to hear from people, and um again, we really appreciate everything that like you we wouldn't be in business, you know, if it wasn't for people supporting us.

[00:39:38]So, we really do appreciate it. Look, I I know I'm going to have to zip out of here.

[00:39:44]And um we'll do another one soon, right?

[00:39:47]Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I I'd like to do maybe one of these a quarter. I don't I don't I think weekly you probably get a little tired of it.

[00:39:55]>> Yeah, you would say that. Same thing. I don't know what we talk about every week.

[00:39:58]I mean, same same stories over. You guys will say he told us that last week. I I wanted to get into Detroit sports this uh Ah.

[00:40:08]I'm from Detroit, John. I'm from Detroit originally, so I got a deep connection to Detroit. Yeah.

[00:40:14]Unfortunately, the teams have not come through for me.

[00:40:18]Yeah, I'm uh I'm a Washington area sports fan. I mean, I you always see my Panther stuff cuz I live down here in North Carolina South Carolina now. I live 15 minutes south of Charlotte, so I've kind of I've adopted the Panthers. I really like the Panthers and um I don't know, just it's always good for the city and for the community for the team to well. So, I'm pulling for the for the Panthers, but you know, in my heart I'm a Washington area sports fan, so Yeah.

[00:40:45]>> I grew up you know, my my family, my dad, he had season tickets to the Redskins for 58 years. I still can't call them the Commanders. I'm sorry. I grew up I mean, I I wore that gear um you know, with pride for so many years.

[00:41:01]Um still, you know, in my heart big fan, although Dan Snyder ruined that franchise. I mean, we've had some of the worst owners um of our sports teams. You know, in Washington, I could have been a Nationals fan and a um uh Ravens fan. But instead, I was the opposite of an Orioles fan and a fan. Yeah.

[00:41:24]>> And it has been brutal being both over the last many, many years. I hear you.

[00:41:30]But uh yeah, your your Pistons I was going to give you some some grief, but >> Don't bother. I'm just wondering now with >> We're going to wrap it up, but uh we'll talk about, you know, somebody saying maybe do it monthly. Uh maybe we'll do another one in a month. That that's cool.

[00:41:44]Yeah.

[00:41:44]>> And um and people a lot of, you know, great Again, thank you so much. Spread the word about Orange Beats. We um I got I can't tell you how much again we wouldn't be anything without all without all of you uh supporting us and uh really appreciate um what you've done for us.

[00:42:03]Absolutely. All right. Absolutely.

[00:42:06]>> Going to wrap it up, Tom. I'm going to I'm getting ready. It's um 4:47. I got 13 minutes before the Manhattans come out. Uh-oh.

[00:42:15]Don't drive. I'm not talking 4:59, I'm not talking 5:01, okay? I have a clock.

[00:42:21]5:00 [snorts] I'm talking 5:00. That's the old That's the old-fashioned way.

[00:42:25]All right, everybody. Thanks for coming by. Uh, take a look at that special and uh, we'll do it all again next week.

[00:42:30]Bye-bye.

[00:42:31]See you.