THIS ONE STRATEGY MADE ME 68% #investing

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]Hey folks, Alex here 95 to Freedom. In today's video, we're jam-packed with some great content.

[00:00:05]We are going to cover the number one strategy that always seemed to work for me. I'm going to share that with everybody. This is something new. I've never shared this with anyone before.

[00:00:15]So, you make sure you watch till the end. We're going to cover what's happening in the market, what's going on with my portfolio, and um let's jump right into it. My name is Alex. If you haven't watched any of my videos in the past on this channel, I document my journey investing into high-yield dividends and to real estate generating different paths or different ways of income. And uh none of this is financial advice. If you want to make sure you see future videos, make sure you hit that subscribe button. That would help this channel a lot. I don't sell courses. I don't ask for your money. All I ask for a comment below.

[00:00:48]Let me know what you guys think, your thoughts. I'm trying to get back to everyone.

[00:00:52]All right, so um for those folks who are new, um let's start with the market. As always, folks, S&P 500 going to the moon, 0.81% up. The Dow is up 0.73. Nasdaq up over 1%. Russell 1.75. Volatility index is down. Gold is hovering around $4,500. Bitcoin's up, folks. Crossed 80,000 mark, 1 and 1/2% up today at 81 and 1/2 thousand dollars.

[00:01:23]So, uh that's pretty crazy. Now, prices of gas are still going up. I don't know how it is where you live, but we are floating around like $4.70, somewhere around there right now.

[00:01:36]And um let me know what you guys are seeing around at your gas station. Uh leave a comment in below what type of gas you're seeing, or if you're driving electric car and you're just going right past that gas station. So, I want to know uh what you guys are having out there.

[00:01:55]Okay, we'll cover that. Now, we're going to touch on this real quick in case you haven't seen this. This is really my big overall big strategy that I have in investing, right? So, I I've tried different ways. I've tried living out of a brokerage account. I've used margin.

[00:02:10]I've had videos about that. I'm always experimenting. This is like a laboratory, okay? So, I'm you know, I'm making money, I'm losing money, all for your benefit. Learn off of my mistakes.

[00:02:21]Um none of this financial advice. But, as my W-2 income comes in, really what I've set up in Fidelity are three different buckets.

[00:02:30]And what I like about Fidelity, one of the reasons I left Robinhood, is the fact that I can create these buckets.

[00:02:36]They're all in the same system. I can get debit cards. I can get checkbooks.

[00:02:41]It's just it's a it's like a real bank, and I'm making 3.6% for on every dollar that's sitting in this account. So, I have a spending account. Basically covers all of my groceries, my gas, my entertainment, whatever we're spending money throughout the month. Now, that um most of those expenses really are being swiped by my Robinhood uh credit card, which gets me 3% cash back, which is pretty cool, all the purchases. And all of that gets uh covered and paid off every month by the spending account. So, basically what I did is I took my average, okay, how much do I spend per month to run our household, to feed the family, you know, to take them out to dinner, to you know, take them out to different uh events or whatever, and I set that money up aside for that. Vacation fund.

[00:03:34]Same type of idea there. Basically, every single paycheck I get, which I get paid every 2 weeks, I get uh set amount right now into my vacation fund.

[00:03:45]And as the year goes by, that accumulates, and then we can use that money to spend on our vacations.

[00:03:52]The third bucket there is essential bills, and this is basically my um electric bill, gas bill, internet bill, all the type of bills that I have. And any of them that um I could pay off a credit card, I do with the Fidelity credit card, which gets me 2% cash back. All that cash back goes into my brokerage account where I buy my dividends. Now, if you've seen my past videos, you know that my account's been floating around about a thousand bucks.

[00:04:20]I'm still kind of gearing up, and really my next milestone is going to be to hit $5,000. I hope to hit that within the next month or so. Now, my income that comes in from my W-2, I also set aside 401k and retirement. And then into this brokerage account, I have other ways of income that I'm getting from this YouTube channel, and uh some of the income that I'm getting from my rental properties. Now, most of my debt is right now being paid off by my rental properties, and I liquidated my brokerage account to pay off a lot of the debt. So, really I'm just trying to go really heavy on it, and I figure I don't want to overextend myself across all the different aspects. I want to kind of rein back a little bit. Maybe I went a little bit too Robert Kiyosaki, and I'm going to lean a little bit more um you know, on the safe side, Dave Ramsey, for example. Okay, so that is kind of the plan. So, let's talk about my portfolio.

[00:05:21]We'll get into this. This is my brokerage account. This is my individual brokerage account. This is where I've been buying my dividend funds. Now, CHIP I've been buying CHIP. You can see that I'm up 14% on this one. I mean, some people are being silly. Any stock that Alex buys goes down. Stop buying it, whatever. Anyways, 14% up. I'm sitting at 14 shares. I've also been buying T-SPY. This is from Top Alpha on the S&P 500. That one pays monthly dividend as well.

[00:05:51]You can see here across the board we're up about 11.8%. So, pretty good to see that. Not a big account. Now, let's cover what I really made this video about, folks, and that is what strategy really works for me as an investor. Now, for the past year or so, as I was testing all these different funds, one thing I I realized, okay, number one, um the more access I have to something, if I'm going in there every single day or every single hour or every single 5 minutes, and I'm finicking with that account, I'm either buying something or I'm selling something, I'm doing some day trading, I'm getting FOMO.

[00:06:31]Somebody's making money on this ETF, and I'm not, so I'm going to go buy that, and then buy them at the high, and then I'm starting to get hurt because I've over over-leveraged. Now I'm de-risking.

[00:06:44]Now I'm selling at a loss. And this continued throughout most of 2025. It was just like uh it it felt like chaos. Like emotionally, it just it it felt horrible. I'll tell you that. And really for the past couple of months, I had to like take a mental break from it all. I just I walked away. I don't want to feel this anymore. Like this is not me. I can't handle it. Okay, some people can handle it. Some people can be on there every single day. And we also have a Discord community, okay? And I'll be honest, just all the people who are from Discord who are watching this, um ever since I walked away, you know, after this chaos and madness, I I really just like I mellowed out. You know, I I pop in there once in a while. I read what you guys are talking about. But, like my focus has been really on my career. My focus has been on my family.

[00:07:39]And I want to approach investment like I approached my other investments.

[00:07:44]And that is you buy something that you believe in, you continue to buy that, and you let time do its thing. And I'm going to show you, folks. I'm going to um I've never shared with you guys my IRA account, okay? I don't have that much money in it, but it's a substantial amount, and I'll just show you, you know, what are my positions. Now, none of this financial advice. Don't buy what I'm holding, obviously. But, here, let me zoom in a little bit and see if we can share this.

[00:08:18]Okay, so these are all of my positions in my traditional IRA.

[00:08:23]And I purchased all of these funds back in December of 20 20 uh four, four, I believe. Yeah, it's been like over I don't know, almost 2 years at this point. And I purchased these companies, these stocks, because I believed that tech is going to explode with AI and all this stuff. So, I went out there, and I did my little research. I said, "Okay, what are the most prominent leaders in the tech industry?" And really in the matter of, I don't know, a week or so, I went out there, and I just everything was kind on the down low, so I started buying all of these different companies. You can see here, I have Intel.

[00:09:13]I have Google, AMD, Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, Walmart. And then I accidentally bought INTL instead of Intel, and I actually made out on it. So, that's pretty funny.

[00:09:26]Um I bought Meta. Uber.

[00:09:30]Bought Microsoft, Qualcomm, PayPal, and this C3.ai. Now, you can see all of my returns. Intel, I made over 256%.

[00:09:42]Wow, I did really good on that one.

[00:09:44]Google, 122%. AMD, 100 almost 20%. And you can kind of see as we go down the line. Now, which ones did I lose money on? Obviously, I lost money on this C3.ai. I lost almost 78% of its value.

[00:09:58]Uh PayPal has been getting crushed almost 50%. Qualcomm, I'm down 7%.

[00:10:06]And Microsoft, down 0.61%.

[00:10:10]Overall, I'm up 63% on this portfolio. Now, I'm not here to brag to you that I, you know, picked the right stocks or any of that stuff. Um if I would have bought the S&P 500, I probably would have done just as well.

[00:10:26]Um so, it this is not really for me to, you know, to brag to you that I'm I'm good at picking stocks. The whole point of me showing this to you guys is the fact that I bought something that I believed in and I walked away. I didn't, you know, deal any I didn't continue to trade them. I didn't I wasn't attached emotionally. I wasn't looking at them every day, "Oh, you know, how's my Intel stock doing? Oh, it's down 5%. Should I sell it?" And then I would sell it. And then 3 days goes by and then it's up 15%. Like I said, I believe overall, we're going to see uh a tech growth. And that was my gamble, basically. Um that was the risk that I was willing to take. I made the risk on that, you know, I made the decision to put my chips on really the the chip companies, right?

[00:11:20]So, so that that's one thing that I did right. Um I did my analysis. I made my purchases and I walked away. And really, I didn't get into my IRA, you know, on a daily basis. I got into it maybe on a quarterly basis. Every few months I go in there like, "Oh, how's this stuff doing?" "Oh, this stuff's down or this stuff's up." I don't care.

[00:11:44]It was very similar to uh the approach I had in my 401k, you know, I just continue to put money in there. Some years it's down, some years it's up, but it's growing. And if I go back 10 years, I can see the growth that happened in there.

[00:11:57]And why am I saying all this? Well, I'm telling you this because I think probably you watching right now, you are probably watching other content creators out there who always out there to get, you know, quick wins. And I was one of those people as well. Like I'm, you know, I tried day trading. I I've made some money, I lost some money, then I lost a lot of money.

[00:12:22]And you know, I I realized like, "Hey, let's look at statistically, okay? 97% of people lose money day trading." Um so, if even if I make $5,000, it's not guaranteed that let's say I make five grand in a day, it's not guaranteed that I I'm going to lose um that I'm not going to lose that $5,000 the next day.

[00:12:44]And if I do, then well, I just spent 2 days basically in this total stressful period. Or even if I make, let's say, $50,000 in 2026, well, in day trading, I could surely lose $50,000 in 2027. So, you can pretty much like erase a whole year's worth of wins, basically, at that point. So, I knew personally that um no, this is not something that's going to work for me. I know there's people that it works for and I applaud and I cheer them. I hope that they can be profitable for the rest of their careers. But, for me, I I looked back, I sat back in the last couple months and I said, "What what's really worked for me?" And investing long-term, dollar cost averaging, investing in my real estate has worked out really well for me, too. You know, real estate, I don't go in there every day and I'm seeing the value of my houses. If if the value of my house drops 10%, I don't list it on the market to try to liquidate it the next day. Uh just not how it goes. There's fluctuation, but I believe in the market that I'm buying in, that I'm holding in, and I just continue to to go along with it. So, really, that that's kind of the, you know, the strategy that I think I really want to apply with this dividend account as well. I want to buy stuff that I know uh and I believe in, and I've tested things. So, I am being a little bit, you know, obviously experimental with CHIPPY, and you know, I've said that up front. Like, I'm not a big fan of YieldMax and CHIPPY's like the only fund that they like didn't mess up, honestly.

[00:14:22]And the fact that it's still going up is is pretty crazy. So, um I don't have a lot of money into it, so I figured I'll, you know, test the waters a little bit with that. But, I really want to build out positions that I think make sense long-term for me. So, I hope you guys liked this video. Let me know what strategies you guys um found to be successful. And um you know, what helps you to stay the course. So, leave those comments below. Thanks for watching. Give me a thumbs up. Subscribe if you haven't yet. We'll see you in the next video, folks. Take care.