Amelia wanted to host a webinar, but the tool couldn't deliver.
Zooming out, she turned to Webinar Key, an expert solution
for webinars with seamless setup and intuitive design, she
delivered the perfect webinar. Webinar Key host webinars like a
boss. Yeah, finance.
A lot of people been doing it the same way for the last 100
years, unfortunately. And it's, it's actually
surprising to me now like nobody's taking the Duolingo
approach. Like Duolingo is just, we love
that platform. They got 600 million users on
the platform teaching people how to learn a new language in these
short to the point learning modules the fastest way from A-Z
straight line. And they have mastered that.
I'm like, we need to do that. Welcome to The Kingdom's podcast
where growth mindset meets leadership and business
insights. Get insights from top
entrepreneurs, professionals and thought leaders.
Visit kingdomspodcast.com. Fuel your mind.
Your next breakthrough starts here.
Ladies and gentlemen, you'll once again welcome to The
Kingdom's podcast. And today I have with me hailing
out of Milwaukee, United States of America.
Big welcome with me, the man, the meat and the legend, Sean
Tepper. How old you, Sean?
Doing well, thanks for the invite.
Well, you hail out of Milwaukee and of course my Nigerian
brother is making waves with a box over there.
So you guys did not go that far this season of the NBA.
How do you feel about that? We'll, we'll see what happens.
I mean, over the last 10 years have really come around and I
give credit to the GM for recruiting quality talent
because going back, gosh, the 90s and even 2000's, the Bucks
were not a formidable player. So the the leadership team over
there has done a great job with recruiting talent.
Really good lesson learned on building businesses.
Recruit the right people in the business and you can go a lot
further. So yeah, we'll see what happens.
Well, and of course, you know, Speaking of our business
leadership, you are the founder and CEO or at a teacher and of
course you make it by way of the right recruitment policies.
So let's rewind to the beginning.
What was young Sean Turner like and how did that element said
evolve into the entrepreneur extraordinaire that you are
today? What age you want me to go go
back in time to? Are your Ellis memories, You
know, and let's let's do work back.
Work back all right so as a as a kid growing up I was always more
independent I kind of I didn't really try to fit in I always
kind of wanted to do things my way so I was never one of those
kids chasing popularity or today I'm sure kids are chasing you
know more likes or friends on Instagram or whatever platform
but yeah I always kind of wanted to do my.
Generation. Yeah, yeah, right.
Like I'm a millennial, older millennial.
But yeah, I always kind of did my own thing.
I always had an interest in entrepreneurship.
I never wanted to, you know, be a cog in the wheel at a
corporate machine. However, I do have over a decade
working for large corporations. But it was, it was really good
experience learning the way. But yeah, like I got into sports
at a young age. I, I doubled down on one that I
knew could get me into college, like that could get me money.
For example, I, I was a swimmer, I played baseball.
I tried some other sports. I was OK at baseball, but I was
actually pretty good at swimming.
And I'm like, let's go all in on one.
And that did allow me to through then through my high school
years is when I got faster and I did qualify or I'd get
scholarship opportunities at Division One level here in the
States did take a scholarship. The irony is also burnt out
because I was doing it as like a full time job since I was like 8
or nine years old. NC Double.
A and NCAA, yeah, I was in, I was part of D1, but I wasn't Big
10 or Big 12 or PAC10. Those are the big schools.
It was a smaller league, but still Division One.
And I quit after my first year. But I was looking at it from a
mathematics standpoint because tuition in the early 2000s,
especially at a state school in Wisconsin, was like, we're
talking like 2500 to $3000 per semester.
And I'm like, I could go make this times 234 no problem
working for somebody and still like, you know, enjoy more of
college life. But so that's the path I chose.
And, and it was really good experience.
In fact, the sports background actually it helps with ticker
today. Like I had a coach that was
really big on Team I. Was going to touch on that.
Yeah. That that team orientation, the
discipline, of course, the teamwork very, very important.
100% like I had a coach that was all about don't just think about
yourself, think about the team. And I was a little, I was pretty
not just independent but selfish growing up.
So I'd focus on what I want. Well, right, Like swimming is
more or less it is an individual sport, but it rolls out to a
team where you're scoring points.
But the same thing is with track, very individual sport,
right? You know, it's not like the team
sports we're all used to, like basketball, soccer, you know,
American football, list goes on. So yeah, we today as ticker, and
I'll go back to my back story shortly, But today, yeah, I
recruit. I prefer to only hire athletes.
And I'm serious on that because athletes have the discipline to
do the boring on repeat. There's a story I'll tell people
and there's a lot of people had to fire from Ticker because they
can't do the simple things on repeat.
And I'll bring up the point like Michael Jordan used to come into
practice 2 hours early and shoot free throws.
And there are other guys his age at the time of the that would
say the longest I could shoot free throws for is 15 minutes.
Well, there you go. That's why you'll never be the
best. So here at Ticker, it's like
when we hire people, we hire them for a specific skill set
and double down and just be. Don't be good at it to be great
at it. And people get bored after 15
minutes and they want to do this and then switch to this and
this. So I look for athletes because
they can do the boring on repeats.
And I look for team players they care about, not just themselves,
but the team. But yeah, my background though,
yeah, through high school. And I have to admit, I was a kid
that grew up. I honestly, I hated school.
School was very boring. The whole concept of sitting
down and staring forward and learning that doesn't make sense
to me. There was one class I had in
high school where the teacher would literally hand us a book.
It was a CAD class, computer aid design, and he'd hand us a book
in the first 3 minutes and then go look at ESPN and his laptop.
Each guy was great and he's like, if you have questions, you
come bother me, otherwise don't bother me.
And and I loved it because you can learn at your own speed by
reading the book, implementing the concepts and strategies,
putting into practice on the computer.
And I got straight A's in these classes.
And I'm like, that's the way I like learning.
So yeah, school was not for me. I went to college and just kind
of cruise through and, you know, passed with OK grades, but I
could not wait to get into the real world.
I went to school originally for architecture CAD and get this,
this will, you'll laugh at this. So really good at really good at
computers. I get to school and there are no
computer classes on CAD. And I was going to a school that
was well known for its architecture program, UW
Milwaukee. 2nd place to that would be U of M, that's
Minneapolis at Gophers. And in that case, like, OK, I
get to school, I'm ready for these computer aid design
classes. Let's level up my skills.
No computer classes. It was all model building and
drawing, which I was horrible at.
And then one of the profess, yeah, one of the professors was
like, just so you know, only the top 10% of students in
architecture school actually going to get jobs.
And I look around and I'm like, oh, I'm in the bottom 10%.
I'm. That doesn't feel good.
I'm not going to find a job here going against all these kids who
are much more talented than me at model building and drawing.
Well, I switched to Fine Arts with an emphasis on film and
video production. I had aspirations of getting
into the movie industry or the TV industry and I decided to
stay in the Midwest. Question is, how does that type
of career transfer to the real world?
Fortunately there are ad agencies and marketing firms
everywhere, so I was able to quickly get a job at a mid size
agency with probably like 30 employees and I learned their
business model in a year and then I created my own agency.
Fortunately an agency you don't need any manufacturing
equipment. All you really need is like a
computer, an Internet connection, a camera and you can
start making money. That's high revenue.
Yeah, right. Like this was an easy business
to start. Did that for four years and and
that's when I figure it out. The service business model is
not for me. It's not scalable.
In order to make more revenue, you have to hire more people,
which means your profit margins never accelerate.
However, at the same time, I was looking at SAS businesses like
Salesforce, MailChimp, Intuit, Constant Contact at the time and
I realized the whole subscription reoccurring revenue
model is where I want to be in around this time, this was
actually 2010, I was looking at Netflix was starting to become
more subscription, getting away from the whole mailing of the
DVDs concept. And I'm like, that is the model
I want, how do I create that? And fortunately went through a
merger with that first company in 2010 wasn't like $1,000,000
check was written to me. It was because it's a very low
profit margin business. It was all debts and liabilities
wiped clean. And then I got to kind of do my
own thing. So I stayed there nine months.
Then I decided let's go work for big business, get big business
experience. I started working for large
corporations, project management type role.
And I did that. I plan to do it for two years.
That turned into 12 years and right in that journey though, I
got to manage some large projects.
I'm talking like managing projects between 2 million and
$10 million and have to deploy the capital in ways where it
makes a profit a profitable. It's the term or the the most
important acronym and finances return on invested capital
ROICROIC. Yeah, where do you right?
How do you deploy the capital to generate the biggest return for
the business? So anyway, at that same time,
around 2011, I got into investing.
So this is where the ticker journey started.
And I invested in the stock market using the basic tools
that are available and, and whatever platforms are out
there, which most of them are confusing and hard to use.
And I did that for five years, maybe matching the S&P 500.
And I wasn't happy with that. And I'm a big, pretty big math
guy. So I knew when I kind of zoomed
out, like Warren Buffett and the late Charlie Munger were able to
consistently beat the market no problem.
In fact, Warren Buffett has said if he were managing 10 million
or less on his own, he could make 50% per year.
And I'm like, SMP maybe returns 8 to 10%.
That's quite a bold statement. So I knew he is not making
decisions based on feelings or emotions.
He's not a gambling man, which tells me he's a math guy.
So I decided to figure out the math.
I read as many books as I could, went on the YouTube rabbit hole
and I created an Excel sheet and I was thinking of, hey, how do I
make this easy for myself? And I was like, what's the
easiest to read rating system around the world?
And I thought of the traffic light.
Doesn't matter what country you're located in or what
language you speak. Everybody kind of knows the
whole green, yellow, red methodology.
It's not hard to understand. So I'm like, I'm doing that.
So I created this Excel sheet. So stocks are really on sale.
Watch Overpriced. Quickly found out that only
about 15% of stocks in the market make it on sale green.
It's very hard to do. And I used that sheet for the
next 4-5 years making returns between 15 and 50%.
So I'm like, all right, I figured out the math.
I figured out what Warren Buffett's using and in 2019 was
a inflection point where I started sharing this Excel sheet
with a few guys just like us. And everybody's like, you need
to turn this into software. And I was like, there we go.
Almost 10 years later, I've got my software as a service idea
with some potential legs under. It took a year to build the
first version, then took six months to get the first paying
customer, which is how building software works.
You do not make money right away.
Exactly, you know, the gestation pure can be quite you know.
Yeah. And then Fast forward to today,
almost five years later, we have over 12,000 customers in above
50 countries. But that was the journey all the
way. You pretty much pretty much got
the longer version of the back story than anybody else so far.
Interesting I appreciate that you know, you've actually won
like so many hearts you know you've been AVP at a creative
agency, project manager, GE and of course you know now a SAS
founder. Each role must have shaped your
approach to risk management and invest in.
And of course, like as a person, what would you say your breast
appetite is? It's high, but I remind myself
that if I'm going to live, I want to, I want to live big.
Like I, I created a business, of course, one to solve a problem
in the market, which is investing is still pretty
complicated for most. And like, how do we make it
easy? So we're doing that.
But 2 is I need a business that creates freedom.
I never want to go back to a service business.
I want a business that can make money in my sleep because now
being married, my wife and I really enjoy traveling and I've
got a lot of hobbies including golf.
Not going pro anytime soon, but I love the game.
I'm a big outdoorsman, so a mountain biking, kayaking, like
I want those things. So that's what drives me.
So I'm willing to take on more risk because I want more reward.
A lot of people won't do that, but like if I'm going to live
this life, I'm going to live it. Seriously live it.
I'm not selling myself short. I don't want to hit 70 years old
and be like, I wish I would have done this.
You know, the number one most used word on people's deathbeds,
the number one most used word is regret.
I do not want to bring that word anywhere in my life.
I want no regrets. I would be shot, you know, to,
to have regrets, you know, and of course, somebody once told me
that until you stop making money while you're sleeping, you have
not started making money. And that really, really you know
touched me and refined and received approach to the concept
of money making Abacast it's very important that we are able
to make passive income and the only reasonable way to to get
that done is by way of investment.
And we also need to ensure that we optimize the capital that we
invest in and that is directly linked to how much risk we are
able to accommodate. You know, we have the risk
averse individuals, we have the risk neutrals, we have the risk
lovers that are like yourself. You know, it's pretty much a
continuum, but no risk, no reward, right?
That's like the stuff you've always talked about, making
investment fun, friendly, and, you know, fearless.
So you say that investing or could sometimes be termed as
overly complicated, but why do you think so many financial
platforms still confuse people rather than educate people when
it comes to investing? Because yeah, finance, a lot of
people been doing it the same way for the last 100 years,
unfortunately. And it's, it's actually
surprising to me now like nobody's taking the Duolingo
approach. Like Duolingo is just, we love
that platform. They got 600 million users on
the platform teaching people how to learn a new language in these
short to the point learning modules, the fastest way from
A-Z straight line. And they have mastered that.
I'm like, we need to do that, but in finance and very few
businesses are starting to take this on.
There is one in your neck of the woods called Go Henry.
Go, Henry. Go Henry.
It's more focused, yeah. It's more focused on kids
though, like helping kids get access to credit card, teaching
kids how does money work, How does a bar like the basics of
how barter, A barter system turned into currency exchanging
and and really empowers kids to do well.
I'm like, that's not half bad learning modules like Duolingo,
but we're really about the stock market.
So it's actually surprising that nobody else is doing it.
And and this is this is a quote from Warren Buffett.
There is an innate human characteristic that likes to
make easy things complicated and it's true for everything it is.
So I've had to fire people because they constantly make
things overcomplicated. It, it is seriously, people will
try to make things easy and they revert back to complicated.
And it's, it really comes down to a, a self-discipline thing of
continuously making it easy to use, which we really hammer on.
That's we all we'll come up with.
So, you know, our design process will come up with a concept.
We'll kind of put it on paper what kind of take it to Excel,
figure out the calculations on it, and then go through multiple
iterations of, OK, it's easy. How do we make it easier?
How can the UIUX be even easier? Like really dissecting things
and then we'll ship it to engineering.
It's not easy to do it. It may, it may look like you
look at it like a ticker is pretty easy to use.
It's a neat looking platform. Not my user friend.
Yeah, user friendly and my customers are saying a lot of
this, but it takes a lot of work to get there.
Yeah, it it, you know, it does take a lot of work.
But The funny thing is I think it has to do with a lot of human
psychology. You know, myself, I've been
professional services in the past.
I did work with two of the global big for accounting fans,
PWCKPMT. You know, I've seen, you know,
in my day, some clients you you you provide them with a solution
in the most, you know, simplicities of forms and they
look at that solution. They probably don't believe in
it, but when you give them something that looks
complicated, they probably have more confidence in it.
And then you ask yourself, like, what exactly is it that you know
certain people want, right. So I guess it's a matter of
human psychology. So people think that the more
complicated would I say solutions sometimes are actually
more valuable, but it just depends on the psychology of the
individual. As for myself, I, I love things
and very simple. I, I loved the path of, you
know, the easiest resistance in terms of creating solutions to
problems, because life is actually meant to be easier by
the day. And of course, that's why I very
much appreciate AIAI has come to make life easier and of course,
make decision making accelerated and help us with efficiency.
Efficiency is very, very important, especially in a
scaling of the businesses and of course, achieve business goals
in, you know, record time when it comes to ticker, right?
Like how do you guys simplify the investor's journey,
especially for someone who has never bought a single, you know,
stock or any form of investment before?
So kind of talk through the journey, our model is a 14 day
free trial, no credit card. We want to lower that barrier to
entry as low as possible to get people to start using the tool.
And within minutes you can find you can get up to speed and be
pretty dangerous with the market in a good way.
You can go from beginner to confident Minutes is what we
tell people. We can't guarantee it, but when
you join, you kind of create a watch list, you add stocks to it
to kind of shows you how the platform works with the whole on
sale watch overpriced methodology.
That's what you're looking for green and it's green, Gray, red
is the color coordination. And then you land on the
checklist and you don't have to complete it then.
But the checklist states that 90% of customers that complete
the checklist are able to confidently buy and sell stocks.
And it kind of walks you through, for example, if you
that the checks on the checklist already done, for example, join
the platform. All right, that's done.
Create your first check, your first watch list that is done.
Next step is complete the learning modules which are
inspired by Duolingo. So that's going to have a little
circle like how much of it is completed.
Next up, connect your broker. We're adding broker connections
as we speak. Prior to that it used to say
sign up for a broker. Now you can connect your broker,
in my case that you Schwab automatically connected in
London. The big players are Dejiro, AJ
Bell, E Toro is big in Europe, same thing with Weeble.
So we're connected. Yeah, yeah, etoro, yeah, there's
a lot of broker connections are, are making it easier for people
to connect to ticker. They can see their portfolio and
ticker automatically update every day.
So people love that. And then it'll move on to like
creating a watch list, then set alerts and you're done.
It's really easy. But it's like after, after you
complete those steps, you're off and running and you can we tell
people you can go from beginner to confident investor in
typically 14 days in that trial period, you should know what
you're doing in the market, no problem.
When to buy, when to sell, how to reduce risk, how many stocks
should you hold? And we can talk about all this
if you want to get into it. Other one is like the difference
between wealth building mode and wealth protection mode tickers
wealth building, but also wealth protection depending on what
your strategy is, what your age is.
But it walks you through all that in simple term, you know.
The confidence booster feature, it's actually powered by Open
AI. So how, how does it work?
And like what kind of feedback have you gotten from your users?
Yeah. So we're proud of this feature.
So thankfully there's a guy out there by the name of Phil Town.
He's based at the Atlanta, GA area and he's been in the hedge
fund industry for years. And he came up with a
methodology that's really inspired off Warren Buffett.
It's called the four Ms. You've got the the mass part or what
what he calls the margin of safety.
We call it the same thing that encompasses everything math
related when picking stocks. The second M is the meaning.
That's the business model. How many revenue streams does a
business have and how scalable are those revenue streams?
The third M is the most, how does the business compared to
the competition. The last M, that 4th M is the
management. That's the track record of the
CEO. Doing homework on all four could
take you hours, if not days of research.
Like if you're an analyst on Wall Street, that's going to
take you a long time. We reduce it down to seconds.
Thanks. With the help with Open AI.
In fact, you can log in, look at any stock, and in most cases
you'll see the four M score if it's been produced by users
because that score is a Crowdsource feature.
For example, if you complete it, I'm going to see the score you
got and if I complete it, I'm going to see a similar score and
that'll show the average between us.
The reason is in that Moat section, it picks a few other
businesses to compare against the compares against 4.
So it kind of rank orders and you know, it's gamified like
Duolingo. It's it's a fun experience, but
it can take you about a minute to get through the form
experience per stock. But again, you don't have to do
it if you see the score there already.
So yeah, it's it's powerful. In fact, we tell people when to
buy is when you find an on sale stock, it's green and that four
M scores 80 or higher, getting to 80 or higher out of 100 scale
is really hard to do, really hard to do.
In that case, you've no financial advice here, but that
would be considered a buying opportunity.
You know, a lot of people are very skeptical, especially about
the stock markets, you know, because there's been a history
of people using and Dallasly, you know the market.
So why is just the case? You know that phobia, right, for
the stock market? And what's the biggest myth that
needs to be busted into these worlds?
There's a lot of to unpack there.
We'll get into it. So the skepticism totally get
it. Yeah, that is an issue.
So you know, we teach people the difference between investing and
trading and get this, I'm going to ask you a question here in a
second. 99% of traders lose money in the market.
We are focused on investing and it's specifically called a style
investing called value investing.
That's Warren Buffett style, which is essentially
understanding the financials, the fundamentals of the business
and making sure it's valued significantly higher than the
share price. For example, if you find a share
price at $100 and a fair value is what we one of the many
things we calculate. Let's say the fair value is at
200. That's a 50% discount.
It's like going to the grocery store and buying a gallon of
milk. It's listed at 5 bucks, but that
5 is crossed off and it's listed for now $2.50 or in your case
$2.50 pounds. Pounds.
Pounds, yes, so we. OK.
I was just going to chip this in.
You know, a lot of people weren't going into investing do
not like take into cognizance like the necessary investment
ratios. So let's take for example, the
price of earnings of the entity that you're investing in.
Like these are very important, you know, metrics to analyze in
order to make a well informed decision.
So I'd like for you to incorporate that in your your
what I say response and analysis about the situation.
So we actually teach people and these are actual cited facts off
of Investopedia. Great resource.
The P to E ratio and the P to B ratio, that's price to earnings
ratio and then price to book ratio are both misleading and
I'll get into that. So whether a PDE ratio is high
or low can be good or bad. So how do you make a decision?
Well, you can't make a decision. And unfortunately that ratio and
the P2B have been used for close to 100 years.
I say close to not quite. And these days, that's not how
you value businesses. Thankfully, Phil Towne and some
of his books provided the correct math, which is to look
at the EPS is the number one most important line on the
financial statements. That's earnings per share,
essentially profits of the company.
You want to make sure the profits of the company are not
flat and not going down. They're increasing quarter over
quarter. We do that not just EPS, which
is the number one metric. We also look at revenue, net
income, free cash flow, assets, equity.
Then there's a few lines you want to see decreasing, which
include liabilities, which is biggest liability is payroll and
you have debts. Biggest debt is typically bank
loans. You want to see those going
down, but everything else you want to see going up quarter
over quarter, those are the metrics to look at.
So in our site or blog, we have open source calculations so
people can use, they can go create their own version of
ticker for personal use. In fact, we encourage it because
we we are the only platform on the market that's transparent.
We do have a patent on these algorithms and these processes.
But again, personal use all day, do your thing.
But people appreciate that because they'll read and it's an
eye opening experience when they see, oh wow, the PDE ratio is
actually misleading. It is.
And thankfully Investopedia is the source.
They did their homework and then and then we did our fact
checking on that. It, it makes total sense.
P to B is there's a few more numbers in the equation, but
it's the same thing. Good or high or low.
P to B can be good or bad, higher low PDE can be good or
bad. You can't make a decision.
And of course, you know that aside from just the financial
basis for making these decisions, it's very, very
important to have your own or would I say independent health
check when it comes to these companies.
And there's something I to say, revenue is vanity, profit is
sanity and Cautious Inc. And of course, if you wish
cautious reality, it's actually very important for companies to
have a consistent and sustained continued positive whereas net
positive or cash flows, right. And that actually shows the
ability to meet with, when I say obligations, both in the short
term and of course, the long term.
You should be investing in companies that have a proven
track record over time to demonstrate liquidity and
solvency. So I'd like for you to touch on
that. Yeah.
Well, that's kind of what I just touched on.
And those are some of the lines we look at.
For example, I'll get into the numbers here if anybody's really
a math nerd like me. So you have the three
statements, you've got the income statements, then the cash
flow statement and then the balance sheet.
On the income statement. We look at 3 lines, revenues,
net income and EPS. Net income and EPS are very
similar. If you ever look at those in a
chart, the numbers like we should in bar chart format,
they're going to be very similar because EPS is just net income
divided by outstanding shares. That's the the difference.
So that's sheet one. Sheet 2 is the cash flow
statement. We look at one line, which is
free cash flow. And like you said, you want to
have a lot of cash available because you can buy other
businesses. Oh.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
You can buy other businesses. You can invest more in marketing
and sales. You can hire more people a lot
faster. It's a great place to be.
Then on the last sheet, we look at 4 lines.
Look at the assets equity. Yeah, it'd be assets, equity,
liabilities and debts. And you want to see the assets
and equity increasing, liabilities and debts flat or
decreasing. Ideally you want to pay off
those bank loans. And in some cases, you want, you
don't want to fire people, but if they can remain flat, like
for example, if you see your liabilities flat, like you have
100 people in the business, but your revenues and your profits
are skyrocketing, that's the type of business you want.
But if you got a business that you're increasing the revenue
and the liabilities increase at the same rate, that's like my
first business, that agency, it's not a scalable business.
So those are the, it's 8 lines on the financial statements.
And we look at the growth quarter over quarter, over 16
quarters maximum, two quarters minimum.
And the two, I say, because there are IPO stocks that
recently go public, they don't always give us the history of
their financials when they were private.
They don't have to by law. It has to be when they go public
from that day forward. But it's kind of nice when a
business goes public and gives us a few quarters of financial
statements because then we can use those to calculate the
scores in ticker. But that's, that's really the
just of it. That's the math at a high level.
And it's a lot of calculus that puts everything together.
But those are the things we look at.
Stop talking in one second. We do have another tab called
ratios. It's kind of a nice to have, not
need to have, but there people can look at like the return on
assets, return on equity, return on invested capital, the net
profit margin, the P to B and the P to E are on there.
But we do give the little flags to let people know like hey high
or low, it can be good or bad. But here you go if you want the
numbers. You know, we've actually focused
a lot, a lot on the quantitative analysis.
Is there any form of qualitative analysis you know as well that
goes into this decision making model?
Yeah. So that's what that 4M tool,
everything in Ticker is quantitative because fortunately
publicly traded companies, as you know, all their data is
public and we source it from two data providers.
They just give us raw data sets. We process like a million data
points a day. Actually, it's a few million
data, data points per day pulling from these two
providers. And then we run all the
calculations on whatever stock you like, whether it's Apple,
Tesla, Palantir, the list goes on.
Now with the qualitative, that's the non math as we know.
That's where that M confidence booster comes into play.
That's it looks at not just a few ratios like return on
invested capital, return on equity, return on assets, but it
actually gives us its own rating and as a very rigorous prompting
we had to engineer took about six months of trial and error
and it kind of rolls everything up to provide a score that's
that zero to 100 want to be over 80.
It looks at the qualitative factors.
For example, we ask it and one of the questions is, hey, how
would you rate the scalability of XYZ business?
And it's looking at the number of revenue streams in the
business and how scalable those revenue streams are.
For example, do the revenues and profits increase faster than the
liabilities? So in like that's really hard to
do manually. Like if I would ask you, hey,
XYZ stock, how many revenue streams does it have and how
scalable are they? Well, guess what, you got to go
to Google, you got to go to this platform that you got to put it
all together and and fortunately Ticker does it in seconds and
gives you a score on that specific metric.
Well, nothing short of fantastic, you know that is this
would I say debate, ongoing debate in the market space, you
know, when comparing different investment vehicles or so to
speak. So we have cost talks, we've got
ETFs and even a crypto. So for persons that are just
starting out like what's the advice?
Yeah, yeah. Again, no financial advice here,
but I'll break everything in a category.
So when you join Ticker, one of the first educational articles,
and this is one thing I didn't mention, is when you join every
day over like 30 days, you get a new investing tip.
Now if you'd like, you can skip each of the emails, you can just
read them all in one go on our site because they're all listed
there. Tip 1234 in a list and for
example, the first one is investing for trading.
The second one I believe is wealth building mode verse
wealth protection. Now a lot of people get confused
about the difference between stocks, ETFs, index funds, and
mutual funds. Stocks are for wealth building
mode. Now, what we mean by that is if
you have a timeline to retire that's five years out or more,
you should be in individual stocks, 10 to 15 stocks.
For example, Warren Buffett, how did he make his first million?
He had a private investment company that was investing in
about 10 stocks. So that's why we tell people
about 10 to 15 stocks. That's where you want to be.
That's a sweet spot. Now, when you start nearing
financial independence or retirement, then you want to
consider moving to an ETF, index fund, or mutual fund.
Essentially, it's the same product.
It's just a group of stocks, sometimes bonds and stocks, but
the best returns you're going to get are about 8 to 10% per year.
Typically ticker while building mode.
We tell people we can't guarantee it, but we tell people
you should be arriving between 15 and 50% per year.
For example, my returns averaged over the last 10 years plus
around 3035% somewhere in there. So, and it's not, it's not hard
to do you know, definitely outpacing the market without a
lot of effort. Now getting into index funds,
ETFs and mutual funds will give you the differences between
these. So people know and then we'll
jump over to crypto. So index funds and ETFs have an
expense ratio of about one point, I should say .1%.
So what does that mean? Just for holding it?
You are charged a certain dollar amount, in this case point 1%
for just holding the product. With stocks, you don't have an
expense ratio, so they're roughly the same price just to
hold it in your portfolio. Mutual funds on the other hand,
same product, but the expense ratio is not .1%.
It can be as high as .5 to 2.5. It's very expensive.
What you're paying for is more people managing the mutual fund
if you want that, and you have more Peace of Mind because
there's more people touching it and you can get on the phone
with them and be like, hey, what stocks are in this mutual fund?
If you don't feel like looking it up online, fine, teach their
own. But like I tell people usually
go with ETFs or index funds because you're going to get the
same returns. Now, the difference between
index funds and ETFs, there's one big major difference.
It's called intraday pricing. So when you buy an ETF, let's
say at 1:00, 1:00 PM on a Tuesday, you're going to get the
price at 1:00 PM on that Tuesday.
Now, with an index fund, you don't get it at 1:00 PM.
You have to wait for it to get to the end of the day and then
you get the end of the day price.
Even if you bought it at 1:00 PM, does it really matter?
No, because you're getting the same returns over time.
So those are the differences between stocks, ETS, index funds
and mutual funds. Crypto.
We have crypto and ticker, but you cannot calculate where
crypto is going because there is no income statement, cash flow
statement and balance sheet. However, we do have it in the
tool because we do have tracking mechanisms.
So you can keep track of it. You can also set alerts on it.
It's all in one clean location and we tell people with crypto
and their other financial institutions that say the same
thing is try to go 5% or less of your net worth in crypto.
It is highly speculative, of course.
That's how. Yeah, yeah, you can't calculate
it, but if you want a small percentage, go 5% or less.
I've heard of too many people though, they'll take a second
mortgage out on their home and go all in on some small crypto
coin. It's like it's just a losing
situation. Very, very stupid.
A very, very risky gamble, but I think one reason why I like the
ETFs is the diversification of the portfolio.
It's kind of makes it people safer pretty much or or would I
say relatively safer. Is there a minimum amount that
you know the average person needs to begin investing you
know with meaningfully or is that a myth?
So we tell people we use analogy.
It's like jumping into the deep end of a swimming pool, like
your first time when you're a little kid.
It's really scary. After you do it the first time,
you realize this is not so bad. So we tell people start with
like between 100 and $1000 and just buy a few stocks.
The only objective at that point is to just become educated using
Ticker and then get some confidence by buying your first,
second, or third stock. After that first step in that
first month, the next step is try to invest between 15 and 30%
of your income. Now if you can't get there,
that's fine. Start small and work your way
out. But if you can arrive at that
range, 15 to 30%, you go out five years with compound
interest, you go out 10 years. And this is on individual
stocks. Like for example, and I have the
numbers like we can do an Excel sheet side by side, but you will
make twice the amount of money going to individual stocks over
10 years compared to an index fund, ETF or mutual fund.
The fact that I know 20 year olds, 30 year olds and 40 year
olds that are piling into index funds, ETF and mutual funds.
You get the wrong tool for the job.
I mean, that's fine. Like you were stating that it
protects your wealth. Keep it there.
Maybe go 20% into a bundled product.
But I would like if you feel like you're behind and most
people do feel like they're behind, you want to accelerate
that process. Warren Buffett style investing,
10 to 15 stocks. It's still diversified enough,
but still at the same time focused enough so you can get
those bigger returns and put yourself in a much better
position. For example, I got a friend of
mine here. I'll I'll stop talking here.
He has made about an average salary in the she's about 55
average salary making about 50 thousand $60,000 a year.
Just an assistant at a business and her dad taught her to invest
in a focused portfolio of stocks and find stocks with a strong
balance sheet. He didn't have Ticker, but he is
is teachings are in line with Ticker.
But her Apple stock now on its own, it's over $1,000,000 and
she's making an average salary because she had the discipline.
She just put a little bit into Apple every paycheck and she's
got a few other stocks she shared with me.
But I've got dozens of stories like that.
People that don't have big income and they've got a multi
$1,000,000 portfolio because of the discipline of 15 to 30% into
a few individual stocks. It is.
Seriously, if you haven't heard the phrase compound interest is
the eighth wonder of the world. There's.
How's your rationale? I, I was actually waiting to to
to mention that because that was Albert Einstein's statement.
Yeah, correct. He said our compound interest is
the 8th, you know, a wonder of the world.
And are you able to to explain how that strategy, right, is
able to help those people who feel left behind, right.
And of course, what they can do to have a meaningful retirement
adopting the eight one of them. Yeah, So this this is one thing
I'm really passionate about, which is helping people get back
on the right track, get the amount of people losing sleep
every day and the stress around money.
Get this. These are statistics from CNBC
and it's pulled from a user base in the US, so doesn't have
London or the UK involved. But get this, it's over 50% of
people are. What is it financially stressed
And 70% are not on track to retire by their targets.
Retirement age, which in most cases in the States is 6570% are
behind. Only 30% are on track.
So what do you do? Well, option A, you can get a
second or third job, no thanks to that, right?
Or option B, why not make your money just work harder for you?
Start to deploy some of that capital you have sitting in
those funds. Power down in your 4O1K, keep
your 4O1K moving. That's fine, especially if you
got a company match. Let's start moving more capital
into individual stocks. And if you want a little help,
talk to a financial advisor. In fact, we're starting to see
more financial advisors using Ticker coupled with their
strategy. Wealth protection mode is what a
financial advisor's job is. Most people don't know that
they're not going to build your wealth, they're not going to
build your business and they're not going to Polish your resume.
They're not going to pick individual stocks for you.
That's not their business models to protect your money.
So they'll, they'll go like 20%, Thirty percent, 40 percent, 50%
protection mode, sometimes as high as 80.
And then let's move some of that into wealth building mode,
individual stocks. And that's where again, they
don't know. They're not stock picking.
Their job is, I mean, all day they're talking to people,
they're a fiduciary, that's their job.
So then they'll use Ticker and empower their customers to just
use a platform. Here you go.
Use a percentage of your income, use Ticker, deploy that capital
and start accelerating. We can track it together.
You know our Speaking of Tikar, you guys are now in 50 plus
countries and of course with over 12,000 customers, what was
the hardest part of scaling up globally?
So a lot of my experience especially at big business and
this is how big businesses grow so fast is through channel
partners. You can do YouTube ads, Facebook
ads, Google ads, you can do SEO, you can whatever marketing
strategy you think is cute. Like people can do that.
And we do generate about 17% of our leads from our YouTube
channel, another 17% from SEO. But that's not where it comes
from. The majority come comes from
other businesses, channel partners.
So we partner with other fintech businesses that serve retail
investors, bloggers that talk about finance or investing
Youtubers, other Youtubers that talk about finance or investing,
other influencers. You know, that's a great
marriage and we we do a Rev share with them.
So it creates a win win. But you look at how big
businesses grow so quickly. That's essentially what they're
doing is they're partnering with other businesses and how do we
get to 1,000,000 people in one day, 10 million people in one
day. Our model is the same thing.
So it took a long time because you got to get your product.
If you're building software, you have to get to your product
maturity, something that you know, users are happy to use
their, they feel empowered, it's got a good look and feel it save
some time, make some money. But then on the business side,
it's got to be a positive reflection on their brand.
If you come out of the gates with an ugly looking software
and want to partner with XYZ business and that business has a
million users, they're going to be a little apprehensive with
sharing your tool. So it took, I mean, we're, we're
now starting to get to some big partnership opportunities, but
it's 4 1/2 years. Not too many people would
continue grinding away to get big partnerships.
We're talking like exposure to millions of people we're facing
here. And it, it takes a long time.
It, it's a grind. It's like big grind, you know?
The grind, you know, when you look at what is reaching behind
me, it says it's not over when you lose, it's over when you
quit. You know quitters don't mean and
don't quit. That's good, so.
Very, very important, you know, to us founders, you know, I'm a
founder myself and you know, I always keep that at the back of
my mind. You know, a lot of people quit
too early before their breakthrough.
So you actually host your own partners as well.
Payback time. How's that helped?
You know your personal brand and your professional brand.
Did some good homework on me. However, this little snippet is
actually a little old. So I did decide to shut down
Payback time. We found payback Time, which was
a pot, I'll keep it short for your audience was really a
podcast on helping people build businesses.
And over 3 1/2 four years, I actually didn't generate any
leads for Ticker or any partnership opportunities.
And I found it was actually getting in the way of me because
I'm the main sales guy reaching out to partners, right?
It's one of those deals where you got to like, you got to cut
things out of your schedule that are getting in the way of what
really matters. And so the podcast had to go.
If if anything were to happen to Ticker, for example, were to
sell to a large financial institution, the immediate next
step I was, I would do is probably create a venture
capital firm and just help startups.
I'd probably do mentoring, but I probably spin up payback time or
version of it, maybe rebranded or something because I loved it.
I loved it as a great way to network like what you're doing.
It's a beautiful business, but again, it just never translated
to an ROI to Ticker, so that's why shut it down.
Now. However, we do have the Ticker
YouTube channel and all the content I produce for that.
We actually create an audio version and launch it on Top
Stocks, which is a podcast we have.
So it's just the recycled YouTube content in audio format
that came as requests because some people are like driving to
work or doing something. They're like, Sean, I can't
watch YouTube. How do I listen, right?
You probably get the same thing. Right, How do I get so so I'm
hybrid, you know, I'm on YouTube.
I'm also on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Podcasts,
basically we're available almost everywhere.
So you pick your option, pick your poison video, audio, we
serve away. And of course, I think I love
Spotify for the fact that they're hybrid.
You can actually choose the the video or audio option.
And of course, YouTube, YouTube Music also is that option.
You choose whether you want the audio or the I love hybrid
models. You know, in terms of, you know,
your leadership legacy, when it's all said and done, what do
you want to be remembered for? Gosh, I would say really making
a positive impact on people, especially financial outlook.
You know, they always, what is it health and wealth are like
right up there with the the two things people are really focused
on a lot and it can cause a lot of stress if you're not healthy,
What do you want more than anything to be healthy?
And if you don't have money, what do you want more than
anything, you want money. So to ease that stress, again,
I'm surprised not a lot of people are doing it like we are.
Yes, there's a lot of Youtubers and people talking about finance
and giving some good advice and some not so good advice.
But like we're going a step further and providing the actual
tool. Like here you go low barrier to
entry. I actually didn't give prices
before and and this just saves people a ton of time where
prices are in line with Netflix. It's like starts at 15 bucks a
month or 99 a year to get into the base tier and people really
appreciate that our competitors around the same price.
It's like you want to make this easy to use.
Of course, if you're looking at this from the UK, you're going
to see pounds. You have a a tool called paddle.
I won't go into detail, but it converts the pricing based on
where you're located. So it makes it a global tool,
not a not AUS tool. That's a lesson I learned
working for GE is create global software.
Don't just create AUS software. But anyway, that's that's a
legacy I want to leave really made a positive impact on people
specifically around the topic of finance.
Oh, wow, I, I, I love that positive impact is statement or
what I say a compound word that is very, very dear to my heart.
And let's go through the quick fire round.
I have a quick fire round questions for you.
Fun and fast. Are you ready to rumble?
I'm ready, Rock. Let's do it.
OK. So number one was the first
stock you ever bought and how did you perform?
First stock I ever bought was actually PayPal and that had
performed very well over the years, but that is my one dud in
My Portfolio as we speak out of 10 stocks I hold.
But I'm still very bullish on it because it's a payment tech
platform, highly scalable business and their new CEO over
the last year has been making wise choices.
So I'm I'm very bullish over the long term on PayPal.
I am bullish on PayPal. It's something that is going to
continue to stay relevant. You know for the first year if
you you need to write out the troughs to get to the peaks.
You know number 21 book that changed your financial mindset
forever. Probably going back almost 10
years, I read Good to great for the first time.
I was like, that was the first really impactful book.
I of course read the whole list of Hot One friends and influence
people and. And Richard Cornell.
Yeah, the usual suspects, but yeah, good to great was yeah,
good book I read. I've got bookshelves all around
the room you can't see, but like I'm always trying to consume
some kind of marketing sales leadership.
I love that grin up. My mom used to say read as a
leader and I think I agree. With that good advice, yeah. #3
ice cream or golf to unwind? What's your go to?
Did you say ice cream? Yeah, or golf.
I oh gosh, can I say both? Or leave A twist.
There you go. It you know what it would, it
would make golf much more difficult because managing
melting ice cream out there on a hot, sunny day.
So I'm all about experiences. Of course I love ice cream, but
I got to go with I love playing golf and I love being out there
with friends. So golf is the winner.
OK, there you go #4 what's one thing people assume about
investing that drives you crazy? They'll say the market is rigged
and and my response to that is, no, you're not seeing what
they're looking at, which is again, profits is #1 if you
literally just follow profits, in most cases, you're going to
make a positive return. So many people over complicated.
The market's not rigged. We're looking at profits.
And I work for big business businesses and I was in those
boardrooms. Guess what they're talking about
every quarter? Profits where the profits.
Profit is sanity, you know. Yeah.
Are they increasing quarter over quarter?
That's it. It's not complicated.
So #5 If Teeker had a theme song, what would he be and why?
Oh man, I got to go to my one of my favorite songs.
Thanks to my parents for getting me into 70's rock.
Peter Frampton. Do you feel like I do almost a
15 minute song? If you if you know it, you know
it goes out there, then know it. I, I need to find that song.
I need to find that song, you know, but we've actually come to
the end of today's episode. I always say that an attitude of
gratitude is good attitude and the SI unit for measuring life
is time. So if somebody shares their time
with you to share their life with you.
So thank you today for sharing your time, your life educated
and of course, inspiring us on the platform.
Love and respect to you all the way to your side of the pond for
wishing you the very, very best in all of your endeavors.
So do you want to leave a shout out to anybody?
And of course, please advise our audience on the right thing to
do in terms of disseminating the valuable information.
Always leave it with two things at the end of a podcast #1 is
you can. If you want to learn more about
Ticker, just go to ticker.com, tykr.com and then I'm very
active on LinkedIn. Sean Tepper, easy to find.
Yeah. Any questions there, reach out.
OK, Thank you very much. And of course audience, you know
what to do. Share, like subscribe, share
with your network basically. And of course, until I see you
again, stay out of trouble and be good guys.