How Transparency Wins the Day In Finance and In Life | Tim Sykes on Impact Theory

It's this time in history that most people are wasting on the wrong stuff. They're spending it on Netflix or Fortnite or going out with their friends or drinking. And if you want to do that, that's fine, you know, enjoy your [ __ ] mediocre shitty life. But like, there's so much more that you can do with with knowledge and studying. [music] [snorts] Hey everybody, welcome to Impact Theory. Our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you actually execute on your dreams. All right, today's guest was a self-made millionaire by the age of 21 after turning $12,000 in Bar Mitzvah money into 2 million by trading penny stocks. He was named to Trader Monthly's top 30 under 30. And before he'd even graduated college, he had founded his own hedge fund, which went on to become Barclay's number one ranked short bias fund for three consecutive years. His complete and total transparency, he shows every single trade, makes it clear that his rules and strategies for investing work. His financial returns made him the number one ranked trader out of 60,000 plus on Covester five years in a row and made him one of the most sought-after pundits around. He's been featured by essentially every major business and financial media outlet, including the New York Times, Forbes, Bloomberg, and many, many more. He starred in the hit reality show Wall Street Warriors, and in an attempt to teach others what he's learned, he's written over 8,000 blog posts and posted hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of free tutorials online. He has thousands of students from roughly 80 countries, and his teachings and strategies have created many six-figure earners as well as several millionaires. He's also the creator of both profitly and investimonials.com which together have a collective ecosystem of roughly 150,000 people committed to increasing the level of transparency and accountability in the financial sector. He's also written for entrepreneur, Inc, and the Huffington Post. And additionally, he's a major philanthropist who co-founded Karma Gawa which is a non-profit that has built 51 schools and libraries as well as helping countless animals and serving hundreds of thousands of meals to those in need. So, please help me in welcoming the best-selling author of An American Hedge Fund, Timothy Sykes. [applause] [cheering] Hey welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Dude, it is very good to have you. No, it's my pleasure. I'm way into your notion of transparency and how much you're going ham to educate people to be able to do what you've done. And I want to talk about that education. Why is it so important? Why are you so hardcore about that particular aspect? Sure. You know, I'm entirely self-taught. I learned everything the hard way on the internet and I've been successful, but it took me a lot of stupid errors, a lot of mistakes, a lot longer than it needed to. And now with the internet, with all these upcoming technologies and tools, like it's easier. So, I just want to pass that down to people. I want to be the mentor to people that I never had. And then, you know, with my charity, I want to build schools because a lot of these countries, a lot of these communities never had any chance at education. So, the kids are kind of condemned to this life of poverty. You know, they're unskilled. Um so, we can change that. And for 25, sometimes 35,000, sometimes 50,000 dollars uh per community, you can build a school. It's pretty crazy in these third-world countries. Really extraordinary. What is it fundamentally that you think education gives somebody? Why is it so important? It gives them a chance, you know? I mean, success is tough. Becoming a millionaire is tough. Anything that you want to do that's worth having is tough, but if you have education, if you have guidance, if you have a mentor, you can get there quicker. Without it, you're just fumbling around, and you might still get it, but it just takes longer. So, education, I mean, unlocks everything quicker. So, walk us through your in high school, you decide you're going to tackle finance, which at least with my mind is about the most devastatingly intimidating arena I can imagine going into. How did you break it down and really begin to learn where the edges are and how to really get smart about it? Yeah, so my parents gave me control of my bar mitzvah money, roughly 12 grand. They thought it would be a good lesson to give it to me and I would lose it all. And, you know, that was the way that they kind of teach. Instead, I turned it into nearly 2 million before I graduated college trading low-priced stocks. I didn't know about low-priced stocks. I didn't say, "Hey, I want to be a penny stock trader." You know, this is like the most universally hated niche in all of finance. But, I started investing in big companies. My account wasn't going anywhere. Like, when you have a small account, you just can't make that much money. Like, 10% or 20% per year returns don't matter. So, I gravitated towards these lower price speculative stocks. The internet has changed things. You know, The Wolf of Wall Street made them very famous, but he was pre-internet. You couldn't do research on these companies. Now, you do, you know, Google Street Map views. Like, you look at these company headquarters. A lot of them are scams. You can actually make money betting against scams. You can bet on lower prices. You can bet on failure. And if 99% of penny stocks fail, and you're betting on failure, then you have a 99% chance of profiting. You just have to find shares to short, which is what's so tough. It works for small accounts, but not big accounts. So, I have made millions of dollars, but there's scalability issues. So, then I was like, "Well, I'm teaching something that's very useful. There's still a lot of people who get scammed by these penny stocks in, you know, hopes of like the big next Microsoft, which never is." So, I teach people how to spot scams, how to profit from short selling them. And then also, there's a few good companies. The cool thing about penny stocks is inefficiencies, too, where a company might announce big earnings or a big partnership, like thus validating their little technology, and it takes a few days for Wall Street to understand that, cuz no one's following these companies. So, there's an inefficiency with the scams, there's an inefficiency with the good companies, and you as an individual investor or trader can take advantage of that if you move quick enough. So, going into any new industry, and we recently launched a comic book company, what I like to do to start my education, cuz frame of reference is everything, right? Like, I really I just need to get my head around what this is, who are the players, where are the pitfalls. So, what we did was through a mutual friend and ended up getting in contact with the former head of one of the major comic book publishing houses, and I just said, "I want to take the next 2 days, and I want you to answer one question for me. Why am I going to fail?" And I found that to be really, really instructive. Not looking at, "Okay, tell me how to succeed," but tell me why I'm going to fail. Why are people going to fail in finance? So, 90% of traders lose money. The whole industry pretty much loses money. The only people that make money are brokers. So, I'm training my students for battle. I'm basically like a drill sergeant. I give them rules, I give them lessons, I teach them patterns, I teach them exactly how to spot scams. Like, you can look this stuff up on the internet. The internet changes everything. Most people aren't utilizing it. Lack of preparation is a big thing, okay? People think, "Oh, this is a good company, this is a good technology." No, that's not how you should look at companies. I had a big $500,000 loss once upon a time, before I really crystallized my rules. I didn't respect them until I had lost big. I didn't understand how valuable they were. I invested in basically this company that invented print-at-home ticketing. I was right about the technology. Everyone loves print-at-home ticketing, from airlines to movie theaters to amusement parks. And I was like, "OH MY GOD, I'M going to make millions." I was right about the technology, I was wrong about the company. The company went bankrupt, you know, bad debts, so many problems. The CEO, who looked me in my eyes, said that everything was going to be fine, actually bought the company in bankruptcy. Later, he sold the company for, you know, 40, 50 million dollars. Would have made me several million dollars. But, I was wiped out too soon because I did not know the rules of the game. People don't know the rules. They think that it's just good companies, bad companies, good picks, bad picks. It's not. There's a whole bunch of different variables, and that's what I teach. All right. So, how do if I'm a newbie in any field, how do I begin to learn the rules of the game? Like, do you have a strategy for people of like, read this book, or there's a certain set of websites and blogs they should be reading? What's that look like? So, I have a website called traderchecklist.com. Um, it's an 11-hour guide, all free. Because a lot of people say, "Oh, Tim, you're you know, you just make your money from teaching." And I'm like, "All right. Here's all this stuff for free. Take it." And it's actually my least viewed guide of all, even though it's totally free. That's interesting. Why is it the least viewed guide? Broke people are usually lazy. So, you know, I I can't make everybody happy. So, I made it free to make the broke people happy. Broke people don't watch it. This is why most people who start as my students, they start with a few thousand dollars, and they take it seriously. When they take it seriously, and they put in hours and hours of education, like learning the variables. So, trader checklist, I have seven key variables. It's not just, "Oh, is the news good? What is the market? What is the market cap? What is this stock's history with spiking?" I find that if a stock has spiked big in the past before, it can do it again. It's kind of like muscles have memory, stocks have memory. So, I'm looking at all of this stuff, not just about what is the news, what's happening right now. Stock market is not an exact science. So, I have to teach kind of like the art and the buy the rumor, sell the news. That's just one of the many intricacies. It's really counterintuitive. There's a lot of stuff that's super counterintuitive, and I like some of the rules that you've put in place. What are some of the big rules that you've put in place, and how do you have the discipline to stick to the rules when you see something exciting happening, and you think, "Oh, this time, this time I'm, you know I got So, rule number one is cut losses quickly. I've made millions of dollars, but like I said I had a $500,000 loss, you learn real quick to respect the rules. I didn't know the rules when I had that big loss. I I had been batting a thousand, I never had a big loss before. So, I didn't have like my risk management, I I was emotionally invested in this company. I was big time financially invested. Now, I always cut losses quickly. I only invest small amounts that I I'm willing to lose. If the stock starts to go against me for whatever reason, I don't care how good my analysis was, if it goes against me by 5%, I'm out. So, I don't let a small mistake turn into a potential big disaster. I lose roughly 30 35% of the time. So, I'm not right 100% of the time. The key is controlling my losses. And discipline is the number one problem. Like how do you stick to those rules? Take a big loss, you'll hate yourself. You'll hate that feeling, you'll never want it again. You learn from your mistakes, you learn what not to do. And now, rule number one, cut losses quickly. Rule number two, don't use leverage. Don't go all in. Any one trade can blow you up. The key to making millions is lots of small profits over and over again. My average profit is just $2,000. So, if you had to like distill why some people win at this and others don't. So, you put out all the same material, but obviously you get a slew of reactions from people that think it's all a scam to people that swear by it and it's changed their life. What's the difference in the people that end up winning with it and the people that don't? So, this was an interesting stat. All my millionaire students are from the Midwest. And I was like, what what is this what is this in the Midwest? Cuz the Midwest is [ __ ] boring. There's nothing to do. So, they spend all of their time studying cuz there's [ __ ] nothing to do. The weather is terrible outside usually. Like they're just watching like corn go by, like little haystacks. But, because there's nothing to do, they study harder. I have 5,000 plus video lessons. They need to learn every single intricacy. So, why is it important and I've heard you talk a lot about you've got people that think oh well that craze is over why would I need to go learn about it and say no no no you really do. How's that beneficial? You know, in history class you study the Roman Empire, the Egyptian Empire, the Chinese Empire and you see what they did right and what they did wrong. We don't realize like the Egyptian Empire lasted 4,000 years. I mean we haven't had anybody else since then that have really lasted that long. Like even though the Egyptians was very long time ago they used my people I'm Jewish as slaves, right? So not the best but they were still long lasting. So there are lessons from that. If I wanted to create an empire today, I would learn from those Egyptians. If you want to see what you know, the next hot sector is going to be learn from past hot sectors. I don't know what the next hot sector is. People are like okay Tim, you teach you have all these lessons just give me one tip. Like what's the stock to invest in? What do you invest in? You invest in your knowledge, your potential to be prepared for the future plays. There's always going to be another hot sector but most people are unprepared because they haven't studied the past. Now, do you think that you're unnaturally good at figuring out what to learn from the history lesson? I think that I'm very hard working. I've learned what works over now 20 years now. Um not just from trading but from teaching. I've been teaching now for 10 years. So I'm always adapting. I'm always trying new stuff. I had no idea that my millionaire students would be from the Midwest. Um I have a lot of millionaire students who are named Tim. Like these these random things keep happening. I don't plan them. It would be a lot easier like when we're in the chat room and there's five Tims trying to talk and and it's confusing. I'm like why? Why did it work out this way? Um for me all I can do is try to adapt and learn from my own experiences and then pass them down to others. I am very good at being transparent um and not caring what other people think. I think that that's helped. I've been on a few reality shows. I look like a [ __ ] jackass every time whether it's my own bad jokes or the editing or a of the two. But it gets people's attention and it gets people studying, which is the key to success. You know, the more hours you put in. I think too many people focus on strategies where they're never going to get rich. Like if you're an Uber driver, you're you're working hourly. Like there's only so many hours per day. Like a lot of people waste too much time on these strategies that have no exponential growth. With me, the way that I teach the same exact trade where you might buy a 100 shares in the beginning and you should start small when you're trying to trade stocks. You could do that exact same trade two, three, five years later with a thousand shares or 10,000 shares. And it's the same trade where you're trying to make 10 or 20, maybe 30% on your trade, but you can take a bigger position. In that way I'm teaching skills that have exponential income growth later on. And that's what kind of is the key to my success. Understanding that success takes time and breaking it down and, you know, chopping it up into little bite-size pieces so that people, when they are starting, they can understand it. How do you think self-awareness plays into all this? You guys talked about You were talking to one of your millionaires and I found this really interesting and he was saying that you guys actually take divergent paths. You're very comfortable shorting things. He wasn't comfortable shorting things. It just didn't fit his personality and I thought personality, what's that have to do with it? Yeah, so there's a whole bunch of patterns. If I broke everything down, there's probably 20 key patterns that between me and all my top students utilize. It's based on our personality. Some of us like to short sell. Some of us like to bet against stocks. You know, I made my second million betting against stocks. I made my first million going long. You have to adapt to the market. You have to adapt to what you're comfortable with. I have a lot of people who like to trade against me. I have a Instagram story right now where one of my students just made $6,500 and he's thanking me on Instagram. And I was like, you know what? Thank you, but thank my haters even more because without my haters, I would never work this hard. Like I had so so haters and so many doubters saying like, you can't trade penny stocks, you can't create a millionaire and I'm like [ __ ] watch me. And all of that hate, all of that doubt makes me work these 16, 18, 20 hour days pretty much every single day because I want to prove them wrong. So I'm very grateful for them. If I had no haters or doubters, you know, I was already rich before I got started teaching. I would life was boring, you know, now I have a mission. What is the mission? To teach and you know, to change people's lives um and now with charity. I mean this whole logo that I'm wearing, this is Karma Gala. This is my new charity foundation. So Karma Gala, there's no I in it because it's not about me. It's the community. And now we have, you know, over 50 schools. We support animal shelters and medical clinics and I'm actually going back down to Africa in a few weeks. We have this great charity called Vet Paw. There's a lot of stuff that I want to do educationally wise and then, you know, now charity wise giving back is frankly I have a very good life. I mean you don't need more than a few million dollars in your bank account. I gave a TEDx talk how I'll never be a billionaire. I know a few billionaires, they're [ __ ] miserable. They're unhappy. They're in prisons of their own wealth. I don't want that. So if I make a billion dollars, I'll be donating, you know, 980 million. So walk me through. How do you become a prisoner of your own wealth? And then once we're clear on that, how do you not become a prisoner of your own Sure. Um I think that a lot of billionaires um obviously they're very successful in business. They work very hard. A lot of them have earned it. Some have had inherited it. But everyone knows that they have a lot of money. And when you have that, I mean I I'm not a billionaire. I only have a few million dollars. I'm perfectly okay with admitting that. But I I have given a lot of interviews talking about my millions of dollars. Like if you look at my Instagram, it's all money, money, money, money because I find that inspires students to study harder. If I post a picture of my Lamborghini, the views go up. The length of time that people study these technical video lessons goes up when I show off my Lamborghini. I've shown up like a million dollars in cash before on Instagram. And the billionaires that I know, they might not boast about it, but everyone knows that they're wealthy. So, they need security. They can't really trust anybody that they meet. Like, you know, they have a normal conversation, but the people who are talking to them, they're not really saying what they really think. They just want to utilize the billionaires money or time or connection somehow. I think that money serves a lot of purposes, but too much of it can be detrimental. I know like The Social Network, fantastic movie, very entertaining, but they made the notion that, you know, a million dollars isn't cool. A billion dollars is cool. [ __ ] that. dollars sucks. If you have a billion dollars in your bank account, you're wasting all of that opportunity. Do you know how many people and schools and animals all over the world that could benefit from your billion dollars? And you're just a selfish prick. That's the truth, you know? I think that there's a lot that you can do with money, and a lot of rich people don't do it. I don't have a lot of rich friends. You can tell I'm I make some bad jokes. So. So, now tell me what is the the way around that to not be caught in that trap to do something? I don't want to put words in your mouth. No, I mean, I think that you have to get out there and see what you can do. I mean, I never intended on creating a whole charity company or, you know, building all of these schools. My goal is now to build a thousand schools. I never started this way. Going to third world countries opens your eyes. I mean, when I was in Laos, I had two schools open there with a great charity called Pencils of Promise. Um I've donated two million dollars to Pencils of Promise so far. Going to keep donating more cuz I love what they're doing. They built schools all over the world. But when I was in Laos at one of my school openings, this one little child came up to me and hugged me. And you know, the the children don't have much. They have like nothing. So, it was a very small child, and she hugged my like leg. And I was like, "Oh my god, this is so cute." And that was an amazing feeling. But then, I looked down on the ground. She didn't have sneakers on, and the ground, I mean, Laos, I don't know if you've seen it. It's very jagged rocks. Like, the ground is hot. It's it's rocky. And so, she was not barefoot. She had taped her her parents had taped a a water bottle to her feet that acted as shoes. And it just blew my mind thinking like, you know, we have these shoes, we have so much, and this child was so happy, so grateful for the chance at education. We go, you know, in the communities that have nothing. Um so, you need a different perspective, and charity and travel has given me that. Do you read a lot? Like outside of studying for the history lessons and finance. I never knew I was going to become a teacher, right? I always thought I was going to be on Wall Street, I was going to be a mutual fund manager, a hedge fund manager. So, I read about 2,000 books. Um for me, I've always found hot stocks, but I have problems when there's no hot stocks and I have itchy fingers like I want to trade. Like I'm I'm a degenerate addict, too. So, I've always had to find something else to do. So, I've read a lot of books. Uh IMDb on, you know, for movies has a list of the top 250 movies, I watched them all. Um I need something to fulfill my mind. Now, it's traveling and charity. Um there's so much information on the internet right now. Like, you don't need old sources anymore. Everyone's like, "Oh, what do you need to do?" Like, just pay attention to what's going on. The internet is the most amazing tool that we've had literally in centuries, probably since the printing press like 500 years ago. And there's so much opportunity, whether you're reading blogs or listening to podcasts or videos, just consume it and and kind of wander. Like, I love doing that. I love just going to like YouTube, clicking one video, and then, you know, seeing, "Oh, that this came up. Let me let me research that." So, I just want to learn everything. And it's it's amazing time to learn. It's really interesting. I want to go back to what you were saying about travel. So, Okay. um if somebody has never traveled before, they've never left the Midwest, let's bring those guys back in. Midwest. they've never left the Midwest, what would you encourage them to do, and what sort of agenda would you give them if you wanted them to have the sort of maximum transformational experience? Yeah, again, you can prepare on the internet. You can see photos and videos. Instagram is a great visual place. A lot of people message me being like, "Oh my god, Tim. Thank you for sharing this photo or this video. Now I have, you know, something on my, you know, goals and like dream boards." And you have all this stuff. Uh vision boards, right? And they put this up and they print out like my photos or videos. So, use the internet and see what stirs you up. What's something about money that you think would really surprise people? I mean, there's good and bad. Most people are like, "Oh, it's easy for you to judge. You have a lot of money." But I've been, you know, never totally poor, but I grew up middle class. So, I didn't have that much. Like we never traveled anywhere. So, for me, I always wanted to be rich, but now that I've gotten there, there's some strings. Like no one really teaches you how to like be rich. Like, uh you know, I've lived in mansions, I lived in penthouses, I've have all the expensive cars. Like the cars like I always wanted a Lamborghini, right? I got a Lamborghini. Now I have two Lamborghinis. Like the high disappears. You need more meaning in your life. And I think that a lot of rich people are actually depressed, which people don't realize. They're like, "Oh, look at this rich guy. He has all this money and he's depressed. What's wrong with him? I would give anything to be like that." But they put their the wrong emphasis on the wrong syllabo, right? Like they they didn't understand there's more to life than money or toys or all this stuff. Like you have to find meaning. And for me and a lot of people, like, you know, you're on this journey. Like I want to be successful. I want to be rich. That's what I want. But what about when you get there? You don't have a plan for that. So, now I'm trying to teach, you know, all about charity and giving back and the lessons that I've learned now from being rich for several years. And it's not what you might think. There's a lot of stuff that comes with being rich and you don't realize it. And, you know, that's life. Like the cool thing about traveling to these third world countries is that these people have nothing and yet they're still happy. They're grateful to be alive. They're just grateful for every single day that they have, even though they have absolutely nothing. Think about the people in our country. A lot of people who have a lot of something, right? They they might not be millionaires, but they have a lot in life and they're still not grateful. So, I think we can change perspectives and we can change people's mindsets just by sharing stuff like this. Do you have an active gratitude practice? No. For me, I just live a life of gratitude. Like I'm so grateful. I jump out of bed every single day. I'm grateful for every day. I'm grateful for this opportunity. I'm grateful for this opportunity to share my crazy story with you and your your viewers and your audience. I'm grateful for all of my students who are willing to learn from me. Um I just recognize this as the most unique time in history. It's this time in history that most people are wasting on the wrong stuff. They're spending it on Netflix or Fortnite or going out with their friends or drinking and if you want to do that, that's fine, you know, enjoy your [ __ ] mediocre shitty life. But like there's so much more that you can do with with knowledge and studying. If you asked me this 10 years ago, I would have been like, go [ __ ] yourself. Like there's no way, right? Like I'm a trader. I want to be a hedge fund. I love my Lamborghini. Like I I had a very different mindset, but I was open-minded enough to try it. I was a philosophy major, right? I wasn't even a finance major. I was a finance minor. I was already studying on my own. I didn't feel the need to like major in that. So, philosophy helped me understand that, you know, the smartest man is the man who knows that he knows nothing, right? So, I'm okay with being open. I'm like, oh, let me try that. try that. If you ever go out to eat with me, I order the whole [ __ ] menu, right? This is probably why I've gotten fat before. But I want to try everything. I don't want to, you know, miss out on what might be the perfect dish. So, be open-minded and try everything and see what, you know, feels good. You've talked about not living in the BS. You've talked about how sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. Yeah. What do you mean by not living in the BS and how does that like ultra direct aggressive speech serve people? Yeah. Um I mean, as a teacher, I need to snap people out of a lot of their bad habits. Um I teach stock trading. I teach degenerate [ __ ] addicts how not to be addicts anymore. Like I'm going Addicts like cuz they're gambling something. Correct. Correct. It's like me going to the [ __ ] casino and being like, "Stop playing blackjack. Stop [ __ ] you know, pushing the little machine for the slot machine." I see a lot of people with bad habits. I see a lot of, um, people who they're not bad people, but they fall in prey to their greed, um, and to to just, you know, bad stuff and I need to change that. So, let's go back to failure. So, how is failure a powerful thing and how did you deal with it when you said you lost your credibility, you were you were down 30 35%? Um, how did you deal with that? How It sounded like you went through a pretty dark period. Yeah, I drank a lot, um, a lot. So, for me, the losses were bad, um, the drinking was bad. It was a dark hit your ego? Is that what Um, no, it Yeah, yeah, it hurt it it hurt my ego, but it hurt my business. It hurt, um, how people treated me. I mean, I was on this reality TV show. Of course, we were filming a TV show as this was happening. So, I was just drunk in every episode. Um, seriously, you can watch Wall Street Warrior season, what was I, season one? Um, I I was drunk. I What what can I say? But, I think that when you go through those dark periods and when you have those losses, as I tell my students who have big losses, a lot of students have big losses before they find me or they even have them when they break my rule number one. They say, "Ah, screw Sykes. I'm not going to follow rule number one. I know better." And they have a big loss. You learn what not to do. You learn how bad it feels and you don't know that bad feeling until you have it. So, I can tell you all about the bad feeling, but you have to experience it and then, how do you overcome it? You can take it two ways, right? You could just let it destroy you and say, "Oh, life is terrible. I quit. I give up." or you use it to make you better. I'll tell you, no millionaire trader, no top student of mine has ever not had a big loss. Every single top trader that I know has had at least one, sometimes several, and they've used it to mold them and get better. And that's what I think you have to do. When you make a mistake, it's a part of life. It's part of the journey. I gave a speech at Harvard and I said, you know, you have to appreciate the lows. You have to respect the lows. Celebrate the highs, but respect the lows. Don't block them out. Don't ignore them. And so for me, sharing everything transparently online is not just a good business practice, it's actually really good for me as a trader. I haven't had many big losses lately because I have to share everything with all my students. I don't want to look like a jackass. So I practice good habits unwittingly because I'm fully transparent. That's why I think it's very good to share all your stuff online, especially in the stock market. So as you're going through that hard time, were you using self-talk or anything? Like how did you get to the point now where you're looking at the losses as a teaching mechanism? Yeah. So I mean, for me it was it was better to have success and the big loss. So a lot of people don't have success and they just have big losses and then they don't know how to get back up because they they were never up. For me, I had a successful strategy. I just had not honed in on the rules. When I lost 500,000, it wasn't because I was, you know, such a bad person. It's because I didn't respect the rules. Rule number one was cut losses quickly. How did I develop rule number one? Because of the big loss. So you have to learn what not to do, but you also have to always be looking for success. And sometimes it takes a year, two years, five years. Like my top student has made 7 million. He made nothing his first nine months. Think about that. Can you partake, seriously, be obsessed with a subject that makes you money and make no money for nine months? Most people would give up. Right? And that's this is my best student. So if my best student takes nine months, most people are going to take 12, 16, maybe 24, maybe 36 months before they understand it. My newest six-figure student, Michael Hudson, just graduated college. He made nothing his first two and a half years. Now in year three, something has clicked and now he's making $5,000 a day. I'm I'm like, "How do we get this sooner? How do we get this sooner?" And he didn't know. Like he took all these meticulous notes. I think you just need to realize that life, you know, works in mysterious ways, but it's also like a roller coaster and you have to try to use the lows when you're, you know, in them and you remember that. Like don't don't forget about it. All right, before I ask my last question, tell these guys where they can find you online. timothysykes.com. Just Google Timothy Sykes. Um on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube. I'm all over the place. Like I'm not in this for more students. Like people are like, "If you were just nicer and less weird, like you would have more students." And I'm like, "But I I like saying these jokes. Like I I like, you know, having fun with this and I'm not in this for more students like everyone else. They're like, "Oh, like you need to promote this. You need to promote that." Like I find that when I just do original work, when I just am myself, people gravitate towards me. And if someone really is going to be a good student, like they're going to need to be so dedicated. Like if someone is like, "Oh, he swears or he has a grammar problem." Or I mean, there's a million criticisms that I've seen. And I'm just like, "These are such meaningless criticisms." Like in order to be successful, I think this is the biggest thing. You have to be so dedicated to your craft and so passionate about it and so single-minded focused on that, you know, task. And most people just don't take it that seriously. They're like, "Yeah, I want to be a millionaire. Yeah, like I meet people and they're like, "Oh, you're that millionaire." And like a smile comes on their face. Like, "Oh, how do I become a millionaire?" But they don't really believe it. They're not asking seriously. They don't They're not willing to put in the thousands of hours required. And again, like with my teachings, I think I can speed up the journey, but it's still going to be thousands of hours. Like there's no magic formula. This isn't like get rich quick. And those people who do get rich, like the lotto winners, like they're [ __ ] up cuz they didn't earn it. They don't They don't appreciate it. They don't understand it. I think that going through the ups and the downs is what makes you appreciate everything more. So, I wouldn't change anything. Like people ask me like, "Oh, would you get rid of like your losses?" I'd be like, "No, like I would be an incomplete trader. I'd be an incomplete teacher. I'd be an incomplete human if I didn't have my losses and screw-ups. They've helped mold me for better or worse." It's interesting. I was with you, um but give me clarity on why you'd be a less complete human if you didn't have your losses. Because again, I would not have the proper mindset or perspective of what is reality. I've already lived a very good life. If I died tomorrow, I'd be very happy still with what I did with my time. Um but I want to experience everything. And I'm grateful now for my losses. I'm grateful for my mistakes. And I'm proudest not of my own personal achievements, but what my achievements and what my lessons can do to influence others. So, I'm happy. That's amazing, man. All right, my last question. Yeah. What is the impact that you want to have on the world? I think that you know, I've had so much experience in the stock market, and I hope that I can share lessons from it. Um but I hope that I can also just transfer all of everything that I've learned in all these experiences into my students and into, you know, other charities and help other charities grow. I really think the world can change with education. Um so, I want to build as many schools as possible, and I want to help as many students as possible in any way that I can. Not just in terms of money, but in terms of just sharing experiences. And if my top students, you know, upcoming students and the the children of my students can then become transparent and share their own experiences on social media and with others. Like it creates this whole trend. Um it's pretty amazing to think about the influence that one person, anybody watching this, can have just with social media. That This wasn't available. But now we have so many little mini pieces of content, and any one of them can touch any one person. Or any one of them can touch 100 people or 1,000 people and make them think a little differently, maybe act a little differently and, you know, give more. I think that the charity world needs so much more discussion and so much more exposure. I think talking about money and becoming a millionaire and what it's like to be a millionaire needs so much more discussion. And there's no one right way to be a millionaire. But once you start talking about it online and then other people react and it creates this whole conversation and that's how things get changed, you know, from different people's perspectives. I love that, man. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. That was incredible. Cool. All right, guys, when you dive into his world, one thing you're going to see above all else is a level of transparency and accountability and I really love that. It's somebody not afraid to call people out in the industry if he thinks that they're not doing the right things, if he thinks that they're doing something that is scammy, he's going to call it out. And in that particular industry, it's really pretty incredible to put everything out there. It is so hard to be right consistently over time, to show his losses, to talk through his losses, to to literally show every single trade he makes, when he wins, when he loses. And it's really pretty extraordinary. And it's also somebody who has realized that money can't buy happiness. I know that's something I've talked a lot about. And to see him find himself in philanthropy and doing that and really giving and creating the charity, it's really been pretty extraordinary to watch his journey. He's been living out loud for a long time, so you can go back and really sort of see the evolution. Uh it's pretty extraordinary and I think that you guys will get a lot out of it. So, I highly encourage you to dive in and check it out. And then he's also got just a metric ton of highly actionable advice. So, if you are interested in learning about trading, he's got just a massive amount of content around that. So, check that out. All right, guys, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Yeah. Awesome, man. Thank [applause and cheering] you so much. Everybody, thank you so much for watching and being a part of this community. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. You're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset, cultivating grit, and unlocking your full [music] potential.