Investing Unscripted Podcast 127: Emmet Savage

Note: All transcripts are edited for clarity. We may earn commissions from some (not all) links. Thanks for the scratch.

Jeff Santoro: [00:00:00] Listen up folks, time could be running out to lock in a historic yield at Public.com. You can lock in a 6% or higher yield with a bond account. Here's the thing, the federal reserve just announced a big rate cut, and the plan is for more rate cuts this year and in 2025 as well. That's good news if you're looking to buy a home, but it might not be so good for the interest you earn on your cash.

So, if you want to lock in a 6% or higher yield with a diversified portfolio of high yield and investment grade bonds, you might want to act fast. The good news. It only takes a couple of minutes to sign up at Public.com. And once you lock in your yield, you can earn regular interest payments, even as rates decline, lock in a 6% or higher yield with a bond account at public.com/investingunscripted, but hurry. Your yield is not locked in until you invest brought to you by public investing member FINRA and SIPC. As of 9, 26, 24, the average annualized yield to worst across the bond account is greater than 6%. [00:01:00] Yield to worse is not guaranteed. Not investment recommendation.

All investing involves risk. Visit public.com/disclosures/bond-account for more info.

​

Jason Hall: Hey friends, welcome back to Investing Unscripted, where we ask and answer the hard questions about investing. I'm Jason Hall, joined as usual by Jeff Santoro, he whom we call the voice of the people. Hey, Jeff. Hey, how are you?

I'm fantastic. And I have really good news for you.

Jeff Santoro: Are you leaving the podcast?

Jason Hall: It's the second best news that you could possibly get besides that. We have a great guest. Yes, that means less of me talking. I know you're happy about that, Jeff.

Jeff Santoro: Anytime we have a guest on, it raises the average IQ of our podcast and keeps you from talking as much.

So it's a win for everybody. 

Jason Hall: Yes. In both regards, my wife often asks when I'm talking about the podcast, if it'd be possible if we could just have a guest in our home [00:02:00] sometimes for the same reasons, but that's a conversation. Well, my wife doesn't, 

Jeff Santoro: my wife doesn't think you exist in real life. so we each have our own challenges.

Jason Hall: I still think that's so, so funny. I guess, you know, one day I'm going to corner her in the world somewhere and she's going to accuse you of hiring a crisis actor or something. 

Jeff Santoro: Yeah. Yeah. 

Jason Hall: These are our goals. Goals. Goals are good to have whether investing or convincing your wife that your podcast partner really exists.

Hey, Jeff, let's do a podcast episode. What do you say? Let's do it. Speaking of guests, I'd like to introduce Emmet Savage. Emmet is a longtime investor. Like a lot of people that listen to the show and a couple of the dudes that are on this show regularly kind of got his footing as an investor with The Motley Fool, has grown from there as a professional, become an expert investor in his own right, and now helps millions of investors around the world.

Every single day. Hey, Emmet . 

Emmet Savage: Hey, how's it going, Jason and Jeff? Great to see you both. 

Jason Hall: My pleasure. Emmet , it's great to have you on. It's been a very, very long [00:03:00] time since you and I saw each other.

We were in the green room having a cocktail before we hit record. by my math, it's been, um, Almost exactly seven years ago, since we met in person at a bar in Dublin. 

Emmet Savage: That's right. In the Emerald Isle. Um, you were over here for, what was it? Six months, Jason? 

Jason Hall: No, a couple of months, a little over, a little over two months.

Uh, we wanted to stay for longer, but they made us leave. Um, I didn't commit any crimes, but, uh, here, so we're recording this on October 29th. Emmet , I think it's seven years to the day, and I'm not kidding. 

Emmet Savage: Wow. Actually, I just got over that. I just got over a hangover about two weeks ago. 

Jason Hall: Fair enough. Um, I didn't, I didn't stop drinking.

So, you know, that makes, that makes it a little bit easier. So, all right, well, let's get right to it. Emmet . So it was, we were talking your, you know, your, your background a little bit. I'll let you tell us more of the full background, but like a lot of us, you started with the Motley Fool, but a little bit, you Earlier than some of us.

What's your story? How did you get into investing? [00:04:00] And then where does the Motley fool fit into that? 

Emmet Savage: Well, as you said, and thank you for the very kind introduction. I'm delighted to be here with the two of you. I was. I was born and raised here in Dublin, Ireland, and I've lived about 90% of my life here in Ireland, with the other 10% being split between New Zealand and USA along the way, just kind of working gigs that I took along, along my life path.

Now strictly in my background, I'm, I'm a physicist, but I'd hate for people to hold that against me. In reality, I was born to invest in the stock market. That's my professional higher purpose in life. And along the way, because I was always so interested in the stock market, which I'll tell you a little bit about I studied finance, which, you know, I didn't love.

I didn't love finance, even though. I felt, well, that's what I need to study to be a better investor, but I did eventually study a master's in business strategy, which I completely loved. So I, from an academic perspective, despite having physics and [00:05:00] finance in my background, it was only when I sat down in Trinity College in Dublin.

To study for a master's in business strategy that I go, Oh yeah, I love this. This is great. Cause it's drawing on the right side of the brain. Whereas I think finance is drawing more on the left side of the brain. So, I spent the first 17 years of my, my profession at the bleeding edge of communication technology until this investing thing.

Consumed me fully. So what brought me to investing? Well, I guess that story, if I may tell it and just take a few moments, I mean, I, I dread to be boring, but I'm going to try and keep this relatively interesting. Well, as Jeff would put it, 

Jason Hall: it's not Jason talking. Yeah. 

Jeff Santoro: We're ahead of the game and it can take as much time as you want.

Emmet Savage: Well, okay, here we go. Let me bring you back to 1965 because that's actually where I've got to go to talk about the kernel of my investing life. Because although I didn't arrive on the scene till 1974, really what [00:06:00] began my passion and stock investing began long before I was born. When my father was a child, was a young man in his, in his twenties, he got a call from an uncle of his who had emigrated to Australia.

In 1965, with a tip to buy shares in a business called Wim Creek, which is also the name of a small town in Western Australia that in the sixties had a history of copper mining. Now, I was going to say, I'm going to guess this might be a mine. Don't you know what I mean? Like that's, that's all you have. I can't say that's all you had in Australia, but certainly from an investment perspective, that was the story.

And it's part of the autobiography of Australia and my father and his family. And honestly, every Irish family had zero experience in stock investing. I mean, when I was in college, When I was in college alone in the mid sixties, meeting anyone, I don't mean in college, but anyone in the wild who [00:07:00] had bought shares on the NYSE was akin to finding a talking dog.

It's like, it was like, I mean, it was an alien concept unheard of, absolutely unheard of. So you can only imagine what it was like in the mid 1960s, but nonetheless, my, my dad And his siblings figured it out. They, they, their uncle had rang home at this hot tip. It was like even using a phone from Australia, I think in the sixties, in its own right, you'd look at the phone and go, wow, that person's on Australia.

But anyway they bought into the company they bought shares and somehow they figured out how to track its price performance. It rose marginally and the share price stalled. Now his uncle was very clear on that phone call. He said, don't sell. Until I ring you again, but after a while, the phone hadn't rang and they were keeping an eye and the stock had drifted up a bit and the phone wasn't ringing.

So they decided that's it. We're cashing in. We're [00:08:00] done. He lost our phone number. We're just going to sell these shares. And it was after that, that wouldn't, you know, whim Creek started to rocket and. Sure enough, you know, my dad's uncle rang whatever was months or years later and said, okay, sell now, but it was too late.

You know, at that point they dumped the shares, but what had really happened and what clicked in my own father's head was that here's a mechanism for creating wealth out of thinner. Now, We're all, we're all mature investors here and we know that that's not quite the truth, but certainly when it is akin to magic, you, you know, it left him thinking.

And so fast forward a few decades, as I said, I arrived and seen in the 1970s and in the 1990s, the internet came into everybody's home around the world. We all got a dial up modem, traditional brokers went online, and in a short time, the internet Every person gained access to the biggest capital market in the world, which of course is the U.

S. Stock market. And this is compared to me buying my first [00:09:00] share, which was Dell. And when I dialed New York to buy my first share ever the broker's name was, I think, pain Weber and the commission to buy one. Share in Dell was 80 bucks and I bought 70 bucks worth of shares. So I paid, so like this was, you can just, we, we all, we don't need to debate and discuss how the internet has torn down every barrier to entry.

But, um, I began to invest in stocks as a hobby online almost 30 years ago. And it was at that point that I was studying applied physics, but that passion That my true passion was stock investing and about halfway through my degree in around 94 before Google was ever born or before Facebook long before Facebook was born, I started a blog on Yahoo's GeoCities, which was a website for you guys might remember it, but I'm old enough to remember.

Yeah, right. Exactly. So GeoCities about stock investing. And again, back to that, to [00:10:00] have an Irish guy writing every day about stock investing and studying physics. You know, on a blog, this was, this is just come on this side, it's a polka dotted dog who could talk, it's a freak show. You know, it's a circus act.

It's like, look at, look at the physicist writing words about stock market. But anyway, um, sites like the Motley Fool came into my line of sight, uh, which was born in and around the same time. I could get guidance for, I could buy shares online for 10 bucks a trade, in the U. S. My first broker was Daytech.

And I'm sure a lot of your listeners go, yeah, look, that's everybody's story because it is everybody's story. I'm 49 years old and anyone who's 49 lived this. So, so far, this is by no means a unique story. A few years later, I started writing about. I moved my stock ideas to the Motley Fool's discussion boards which really meant I was reading and learning as I was doing, and I formed some friendships in that community.

And by 2001, 2002 thanks to the dot com bubble, [00:11:00] Again, as with most of your listeners, I'd lived most of the major lessons I had to learn about stock investing. I'd barged to the teeth on margins. I'd clicked a couple of buttons that said, yes, I approve to buy more shares and off I went to the start off.

I went to the market with a new bag of money and you know, I lost my shirt and in the run up to that. You know, the, the, the borrowing to buy it was, it, it, it suddenly did the boundary between investing and gambling becomes very blurred when you're a young 20 something year old. Um, but that's the 

Jason Hall: time, Emmet , that's the time to make those mistakes is when the stakes are low, right?

Versus when you're in your mid forties, you're the getting into your peak earnings years. You've got a couple hundred grand in a 401k, you change your jobs, you roll it over to your broker. The market's going crazy. It's 2020. Yeah. And then you margin up, right? And, and you literally wipe out everything, right?

You learn that in your twenties versus your forties. It's right. 

Emmet Savage: It's a [00:12:00] blessing. If that happens, you're right. I mean, I was listening to rumors. I leveraged up and up and up and next thing I could borrow, borrow more to buy on margins. And, but while I lost every penny, the real gift was I was 26. When all of this, when this palace of ice melted and so like by mid 26, I was back where I started, but at least at a good job at a professional engineering job and I'd given up all these games.

I mean, on paper, I had more wealth than I expected to have saved. By the time I'm my age now, I couldn't believe this big number in front of my eyes but it all disintegrated. But what happened then was I decided and I commit myself to learning properly, which is around that time where I said, Oh, I better go study finance.

And as I mentioned, I didn't love that. Um, but really what I took from this was the stock market is a mechanism. That can take any normal person from a suburb in Dublin through to a suburb in Auckland and New Zealand [00:13:00] through to them living in Midtown Manhattan from modest beginnings and transform their future if done right.

And it is a wonderful, there is nothing like it. And I just have evangelized the power of investing as the two of you have done. And you know, there's only a handful of rules. Once you diversify. Don't borrow to buy, go long, add a little often, and a few other rules that are codified in to your conversations in the podcast, podcast after podcast.

It's difficult to go wrong. It's not impossible, but these fundamental rules and guide rails. I coded into everything like Wall Street and I do, you know, it, it's funny when, when you tell that story, what it reminds me of is what a fun and very different vibe the internet was in the nineties versus now.

And, you know, we're going to sound like three old guys, you know, talking about the good old days, but I can imagine I wasn't into investing back then, but I certainly remember what it was like [00:14:00] when online discussion. Were you, were you in the high 

Jason Hall: school back then? 

Jeff Santoro: I'm not that much younger than you guys.

All right. It's true. It's true. I, people probably think I do because I spend most of the time on this podcast talking about how old you are, Jason. Um, but we all experienced the internet around the same time in our lives. And I, and I think that it's funny. We, we talk a lot on this show about. Yeah. the blessing and, and the curse of the internet now, where you can get literally anything you want to find out within seconds, but then you can also get anything you want to find out within seconds.

So there's like a good and a bad of that. But back then when these online discussion boards were brand new, it was, it was so, you know, just exciting to be like, Oh, wow, I'm typing on a computer and talking to someone in Ireland. You know, that blew my mind when I was, you know, when I was a teenager into my twenties.

So I can, I can imagine it would be just as easy then as it is now to get caught up in something like investing because you find this little community, lose your shirt. So I guess that's, [00:15:00] that's, I guess my point is like, that's, that's a. A story as old as time in a lot of ways and it's, it's, it's such, it's intoxicating feeling like I'm sure people, even now today in year 2024, when you make a cell phone call from your car and talk to somebody on the other side of the world.

Very few people don't, for a moment go, that's pretty cool. I'm driving my car on a motorway and I've just spoken to my friend in, in Alexandria, Virginia, or in, in main street, Sydney. Yeah. Well, I'm driving a car and he's like, he's in this coffee shop in Sydney. We all marvel at technology. Space was involved.

Jason Hall: Space was involved in your communication, right? That signal. It's incredible. 

Emmet Savage: Fresh air, fiber optic, copper wire. I mean, every element in, in, on the periodic table of elements was involved in you talking to this person. So you're right. You're, you're on the money, Jeff. I mean, back in the day. There was something akin to magic where you're like, wow.

And in fact, one of [00:16:00] the Yahoo Yahoo was the hot space for free discussion boards, Yahoo finance. And the Motley Fool was the the hot space for, I suppose, moderated somewhat far more controlled and mannerly conversation. And Yahoo finance would descend into. And a bit, but like things would happen, like for example if I, I hope I haven't, uh, we might fact check this guys, but I think the founding CEO of whole foods is a guy called John Mackey.

And if I'm not mistaken. He was, Oh, pumping. 

Jason Hall: Yes. A whole food anonymous username and he was pumping his stock. He was trying to counter other stuff. He was abusive. It was like he got in trouble. Like he got in 

Emmet Savage: proper trouble. It was a proper Martha's trouble. It was Martha Stewart ask.

I don't think he, he did time, but he, he certainly was there. And when you found like, I'm a, I'm just a young guy and I'm, I've been chatting to the founder of whole foods. Here in [00:17:00] Ireland, like all of this kind of added to the mystique, the dark, like, so it was a very exciting time, but there was nothing more exciting than putting down a hundred dollars and finding based on nothing, uh, nothing whatsoever in the late nineties, that a hundred dollars to turn to a thousand dollars in a matter of weeks, just based on the hot air hype that Floated the balloons.

That was the dot com. Oh yeah. Some of the, some of the metrics, 

Jason Hall: website traffic, you know, these were, these were metrics that companies would float. And when they talk to talk to investors, the things that they would talk about were incredible. Revenue is a pipe dream. 

Emmet Savage: Oh, 

Jason Hall: it was 

Emmet Savage: amazing. It was. And it's, you're so true.

I mean, having founded MyWallSt, I also have lived the, um, the fool's trap of, of Vanity metrics, because every company has a, has a line that's growing up. That's growing fast, whether it's [00:18:00] exponential, uh, or it's the Nike swoosh or whatever way you, they have something. And it's very easy to point at that when you're talking to others going, look, amount of things we've got going on this particular metric.

And everyone's like, wow, if this person is telling me it's important, it must be, I want to invest. And that was like on steroids in the late nineties. I like that. And it's, I like that phrase though. Vanity metric. Like I, I feel like that could be a filter for individual investors. Like find that, find any company's vanity metric and then take it with a grain of salt.

This is true. I think that's a good one. I think you're on onto something there Jeff, because you're right. Every IR deck you eventually realize has some vanity metric. 

Yeah. You know, 

Jeff Santoro: it's um, cause they're going to highlight the best part of the business. Here's a hint. 

Jason Hall: Jeff, here's a hint to knowing which one it is.

It's the one they changed when it's not good enough anymore. It's the one that disappears when it slows down. 

Emmet Savage: Well, isn't that funny? Because even like Netflix now have announced, as I'm sure you guys well know, they're [00:19:00] no longer going to talk customer numbers, but what was quite interesting is they are not going out with a fizzle their last customer numbers were explosive and they announced we're not going to, so it's very cool.

It's a casual flex where they're like, we're not going to talk customer numbers. They're so good. We don't even need to talk about it. Yeah. Like, Oh, look, we just upped it by 15%. Whoops. I tell you, we'll just talk about it. Metric, we'll just talk money from here on in and you're right. So it is till it isn't right.

Right. Now that's, 

Jason Hall: that's interesting.

Jeff Santoro: Hey everybody, we'll be right back, but first a word from our sponsors. FinChat.io is the complete stock research platform for fundamental investors. They have all the standard financial data on more than 100, 000 stocks globally. But beyond that, they have company specific segment end KPI data on around 1, 800 stocks.

So for example, do you want to see Nvidia's data center revenue growth? They've got it. Do you like to track Apple's iPhone sales? They've got that too. Or how about nights and experiences booked for Airbnb? You guessed it. They've got it. And [00:20:00] they just added around 8, 000 ETFs and mutual funds to the platform.

The breadth of FinChat's data is truly one of a kind. I use FinChat every single day as I'm researching the stocks in my portfolio, specifically when I want to see how they're doing on KPIs that FinChat is famous for. So to get 15% off any paid plan, go to FinChat.io/unscripted. That's FinChat.io/unscripted to get 15% off any paid plan today. The link will be in the show notes.

Hey, Investing Unscripted listeners. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Yellowbrick Investing. Yellowbrick is an aggregator of the best stock pitches across the internet. By tracking thousands of blogs, newsletters, fund letters, podcasts, and more, they're able to collect and summarize the best stock pitches from all over and bring them to you in one single place.

Think of it like a modern value investors club. I have to say, this is pretty cool. I can just type in the company I'm interested in and get a bunch of different stock pages from across the internet. It helps me think through new [00:21:00] ideas and find opposing points of view on the stocks I'm interested in.

And the best part is access to Yellowbrick is completely free. Try it for yourself. Simply go to joinyellowbrick. com and search a company or ticker you're interested in. You're bound to find a great report on just about any company. That's joinyellowbrick. com.

Jason Hall: So Emmet , let's, um, let's pivot the conversation a little bit here. So talking about that, going through that period, the. com bubble, and then the crash and a lot of years of kind of wandering the desert for the market, but also. I think it's interesting to think about your timeline being in your mid twenties, sort of hitting restart.

You're in a good position. Good job earning. You've, you've learned that you made mistakes and not that the market was rigged, right? So you learned the right lessons. I think that's an important thing to, to stress there. Let's talk about the next period of ramping up. So you get the point where now you have expertise, you've learned, you can look back and you say, you know what?

I'm, I'm a veteran now. I know what I'm doing. I can start helping [00:22:00] other people. And this is an opportunity for me as an entrepreneur. You found the predecessor to what is now MyWallSt. Let's talk about that journey. 

Emmet Savage: Yeah. Well, the origins of MyWallSt goes back to a small advert that I placed in the Irish times newspaper about 20 years ago.

And it simply said something like, if you want to learn everything you need to know About stock investing come to this hotel at this time, and if you're not 100% satisfied, don't pay and at that time I was heading up the radio engineering function for a large telecom operator, as I said, and this hobby of mine was too big to ignore.

It was just too big. Bigger than my interest in my day job, which means you really have to start to think about your day job 

Jason Hall: So, for, for context, for some of our younger listeners, yes, it used to be completely normal and not weird or creepy to advertise for people to meet you in a hotel room in a major news publication. 

Emmet Savage: Now, what I have to make clear, it was a [00:23:00] conference room in a hotel. It wasn't Emmet 's personal hotel room.

It was a classroom, but they so happened to have a hotel around it. It wasn't, uh, there was nothing Hollywood about it whatsoever. Room 123. Yeah. So your honor, I insist, I swear to God, I thought there'd be loads of people there. But you know, what really pushed me to accept that my passion was bigger than my profession and really was the birth of MyWallSt.

MyWallSt was founded in October, 2013. So it's 11 years old at this stage, but what really pushed me over the edge to set it up was one word, which was belief and the backing. And belief of others is key is absolutely key to anyone doing anything. I mean, I'm brave, but I'm not that brave. I read a piece in the Harvard business review a few years ago about the attributes of true entrepreneurs.

And as, as we. Probably all know NBA courses will have you believe that this resilience and [00:24:00] entrepreneurs have the ability to get back up and they've been knocked down and they're generally optimistic and they only envisage a better future and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All of that is true. However, this Harvard business review piece also said that almost every successful entrepreneur from Henry Ford.

through to Mark Zuckerberg had someone at their back, whether it's a life partner, a husband, a wife, a mother, a father, who just says to them, you can do this. You can do it. And that's an incredibly powerful feeling because really decisions are a consequence of our feelings as opposed to, you Data, you know, we, we act on our feelings.

Um, so that you're, uh, 

Jason Hall: you're, you're welcome. I'm so glad that, uh, 

Emmet Savage: and I really, it's just, I hope you got the flowers. I mean, hold on. Is that your doorbell ringing 

Jason Hall: to be clear? It was, it was not me. Yes. I've always believed in you, but it was not. Indeed. It was not me, but no, I, I, 

Emmet Savage: I, You always had my [00:25:00] back, but For sure.

But this was a couple of years before we met and yes, but, but you know what? You can have it. I mean, what the hell? Nobody else. This, this to me. You can have the

Jason Hall: but you know, it's interesting though. You, you, you, you, and, and I think that's true, but I think there's also, and maybe I'm overgeneralizing here, but it, it feels like one of the things that I've seen too is that a lot of businesses. Startups particularly they get big. There, there wasn't a lot of belief when they were small, maybe people thought that the founder was crazy, you know, walking away from a really good job that you have, you're set for life, right?

You just keep doing that. And you're, what are you doing? Like, you're crazy for doing this. And a lot of times those are the ones that turn out to be successful ventures in the longterm. And a lot of times the, the, it seems like maybe the. Inverse of that can be true to somebody who's a really good cook and they throw great parties and somebody tells them they should open a restaurant and two years later they have no money and no restaurant.[00:26:00] 

Right. Yeah, 

Emmet Savage: that's true. I mean you, I think the nature of, of the human condition is we will hear more about successes, especially in let's say the Silicon Valley world. We open a newspaper or magazine or online and we read about the successes. We don't read about the graveyard. Of failed efforts. That's true.

You know, that chef who was taught by. Yeah, for sure. That chef who was told by his mom that he makes the best Bolognese ever. And he should open a restaurant like your dad, right? There's so many entrepreneurs who gave it a shot and that shot didn't work out. But I am one of those people don't believe in the word failure because if everybody sets out with the right intent, nobody's going to start something with the wrong intent that might make suboptimal decisions.

Right from what industry they're choosing to whom they decide to surround themselves with. But really that, that we, we hear about the successes. So Mark Zuckerberg's name falls off everybody, [00:27:00] everybody's lips, but his cousin Throckmorton Zuckerberg is the unheard of guy who started a shoe factory that didn't work out or whatever.

But, you know, so. The second kind of element to success is apart from having somebody who says, you can do it and I've got your back is I believe a co founder who compliments your your weaker areas with strengths because no one person is good at everything. If you're remarkably big visionary, you're going to find reading legal contracts, an absolute bore and, uh, you got to find someone who's really good at operations.

If you're very good at. Strategy and vision. If you are somebody who loves the limelight, you've got to find somebody who hates it. I mean, I'm pulling examples out of thin air, but when I set up this business, my wife and I sat down and she said, here, she got a big sheet of paper and she said, I want you to write down the name of everybody you've ever worked with, whose work ethos you just [00:28:00] admired.

She said, I don't care if it's the person who's emptying the waste paper basket in your office. And they just, you know, they do it better than the other people. Or if it's, you know, someone who's running the local, the local barista right through to the CEO of the local CEO of Pepsi, you just write down everybody who's you, whose work ethos you've admired for whatever reason.

So I wrote a Dan, she wrote down her names. She said, now put beside all of those names. She put down four categories. And I think one was. Visionary artistic, operational, and something else. I can't remember what the other one was, but she said, put two labels against your name. She wrote my name in the middle.

What two are you? And then give everybody else two of those labels. And by the end, there were three names. Out of about 40 that were the opposite of mine, and there was one name that just jumped out. So I walked up to John Tyrrell, the co founder of MyWallSt, I said, Hey John, I'm going to get out of this joint.

I'm leaving Vodafone. Will you join [00:29:00] me? I'm going to found a business. Here's the mission. The mission is to get the world investing successfully. That's all I know. And And he said, and I said, we're going to create a billion successful investors, and it's going to take more than life we've got left in our body.

So it's going to take longer than we're going to live. So I said, that's there on him. We've got to figure it. And he said, I'll be back to you. And he went home, spoke to his wife. She said, I have your back. As my wife said to me, and he met me the next day and he said, let's do it. And that was the beginning.

We hopped on a plane. We flew to Alexandria, Virginia. We walked into the Motley Fool. I met one of the senior leaders in there who I had a great relationship with. And he said, we've got your back and we'll invest. And that was like, A goosebumps moment, because like, to be honest, when somebody says they have your back in all these different ways, the way John Terrell said to me, the way my wife said to me, and the way the Motley Fool and the key people in there who made that [00:30:00] decision said to me, you feel power charged.

You feel ready to take on the world. You feel like a bull in, in a global China shop. 

Jason Hall: That's that's wonderful. Um, it's great. Great story. 

Jeff Santoro: I love that. 

Jason Hall: My takeaway from that is you need a great idea, somebody that can do all the stuff you can't, somebody else's money, and wives that won't leave you. 

Emmet Savage: But all of that is true, but it's what's quite interesting is that People and money will not get you a great idea, but a great idea will get you people and money.

Um, actually a great idea won't always get you great people, but certainly in the hierarchy, cash will follow the people. Yeah. So, you know, I, I once spoke to a young entrepreneur and he pitched to me his business idea, which was nice, but he was thinking small. And I, I said to him, look, if [00:31:00] I was opening a coffee shop tomorrow, I would not say, Hey, I'm opening a coffee shop on Grafton Street, which is the main kind of, as you know, Jason, the main shopping street in Dublin.

I wouldn't say we're opening a coffee shop on Grafton Street opposite Bewley's and our angle is if you wear glasses, you get a balloon. I wouldn't say that. I would say. We're opening a coffee shop on Grafton Street in Dublin, and in eight years, we're going to take down Starbucks, and if they don't invest in us, they're going to be sorry, and we're going to go out to Ethiopia and buy as much coffee as they will sell to us, and we're gonna, and by saying that a lot of different things happen, one, the person who's listening realize you're either a maniac A diluted maniac, and they better back you.

Because if this crazy guy is right, I'll have missed investing in the next Starbucks. So there's just two entrepreneurs get a picture of what it is you want to do. And when you tell the story multiplied by a thousand, because someday. [00:32:00] That will happen. I spoke to, um, Reed Hastings, I'd say 22 years ago, 20 years ago.

One of the best decisions I made in my life was to buy shares on Netflix at a very, very, very, very early stage at a dollar and 20 a pop. And the reason I bought shares In it was, and thankfully didn't sell, and that's their little casual effects. I'm sorry, guys. I, that's my 300, excuse my 375 bagger. I just have, but, um, well, I, whoops, I'll pick up that name.

I dropped. But like he, at the time was saying, we're going to have 20 million customers. And I was like 20 million, there isn't even 20, a million people on the planet, you crazy thing. So like, like this is, and at that time there was him talking big. So I mean, this is the thing to entrepreneurs everywhere.

When you multiply your dream by a thousand, you, as you are saying, it will blush. For the first while, because, you know, it's crazy for me to say, we're [00:33:00] going to create a billion investors. There is a voice in my head knowing, do you know that I, like, I'm not Zoolander. I know that's one in seven people. And I understand the dynamics and language barriers of this planet.

I've looked at a little bit, but it's. Really only there to articulate. What you're trying to achieve, whether you achieve it or not, you know, that's, that's another thing. 

Jason Hall: Well, it's funny because, uh, Elon Musk, and I'll, I'll be honest in a, in a lot of ways, I'm not a fan of Elon Musk, but the thing that I admire the most about him is as much as.

The financial media bashes Tesla for missing targets and deadlines and goals. He sets audacious goals. And even if they take twice as long to reach them, they do have done incredible things, right? So there is something for that to be said for that audacity as a founder, as a visionary. Yeah, completely 

Jeff Santoro: agree with that.

Yeah. And the other thing too, is in, in so many aspects of life, [00:34:00] whether you're an entrepreneur, you are just CEO of a company, or even in my, My, in my day job, I met, I work in a school district and I've in education, having a clear goal for a lesson you're teaching or something you're trying to accomplish within your classroom is the sure, the surest way to ensure that kids will learn something.

So I love finding places. side of my profession where just being goal oriented, where will I be 10 years from now? Where will I be 20 years from now? Where will I be at the end of this 40 minute class with these kids is, is such a clarifying moment to have in your own head. And then a lot of times, It helps all the pieces kind of come together and it drives all the decisions you have to make moving forward because like, do I do this or that?

Well, which one gets me to that goal? Do I do this or that? Well, which one gets me to that goal? So 

Emmet Savage: yeah, that's 

Jeff Santoro: a connection I made. So I love that 

Emmet Savage: because I mean, when you think about teaching their higher purpose of teaching is, you know, that when you teach, you're going to touch a [00:35:00] life forever. If you do it well.

So that little person or that not so little person is going to have a better outcome in their entire life because of your job, there's the higher purpose, and then you bring it right back down to the KPIs of the week, and they're like, well, we got to teach this kid, whether it's the alphabet or Third order, non linear differential equations, whatever that, that thing is.

Hopefully not 

Jeff Santoro: the same kid. Oh 

Emmet Savage: yeah. Well, this is true. Yeah. So, and that's where like that co founder, back to John, like where he will wheel me out to paint the big picture and then he'll stand in quickly and go, and here's the KPIs for the quarter where I'm like, what? Um, so there's kind of, um, a necessity to have those two frames of reference.

Very clear. And also remember that no matter who you're speaking to, they're not listening for long and own, but you, you'll only bring somebody in by short to sync messages are being the most charismatic speaker, you know, that you can imagine. 

Jeff Santoro: So you mentioned that the, [00:36:00] the original goal was to make a, make a billion investors or teach a billion investors how to invest.

I forget exactly how you framed it when you mentioned it a few minutes ago. So I want to pivot the conversation a little bit to maybe ways you can You think about how new investors should step into that, right? So you told your origin story of, you know, the early days of the internet and making connections across the world and doing a lot of dumb things, and thankfully it was at a time in your life when you could do that and not, you know, bankrupt your future.

And we talk a lot on the podcast about new ish investors and people who are on that learning journey for themselves in a different context here in 2024. So I guess that my question is what are some tried and true Hmm. Things that you think like a new newish investor, maybe not day one, but maybe in the first six months, the first year to kind of keep in mind as they step into their own journey.

Emmet Savage: I love that question because to me there are six golden rules for an investor irrespective of whether they only heard [00:37:00] about the stock market today for the first time or whether they've sat on the sidelines for 30 years, and decided today is the day. And before I tell you those six, which I'd, I'd love to hear if you agree, I think it's missing one, but when we founded MyWallSt, the government said, here's some money to spend on academics to help you do research on the market opportunity.

And we ended up collaborating with a couple of universities in America to understand why don't people, why doesn't everybody invest in the stock market? Why isn't it just 100% of everybody does it? And the university set about this very academic study of that phenomenon and why, why, why doesn't everyone give it a shot?

And they, they boiled down the barriers to only two categories. One was emotional and the other was rational. So people who do not invest have either a ball of emotional concerns, which is Worried about losing money. I don't know anybody else who did it. My mother never did [00:38:00] it. My father never did it.

And they're emotional. And then there's rational things like, What broker should I choose? What should be my first share? How much should I invest? They're all binary answers. And when you break out the barriers, they almost fall into just two silos. So when we founded the business, we We wanted to have a formula that effectively addressed the, the, the ball, the greater ball of problems that exist in everyone's mind, because we're all just a big old complex wired system of 

Jeff Santoro: biases. Like, did you get, do you, did you get a sensor in, in that research? Did it, did anything come through that told you the, the, how much those two facts, like was one of those factors the bigger barrier than the other? Because my assumption with having no background in this is that the psychological pieces of it are the bigger barrier than simply the, what brokerage do I choose?

Entirely. The 

Emmet Savage: emotion, the [00:39:00] emotion had about an 85 % weighting and the number one dead weight. And that was fear of losing money. I don't want to put a thousand bucks down and find it's 80 bucks in six months. Even if you've just told me I bought the next Dell. And I always choose that example because it was Dell that literally flipped a switch in my head to never, to never be unswitched again.

And was that I realized. At the end of 1999, that Dell shares had gone up 1, 600 fold in the 10 years from the first day of January 1990 to the last day of January, December 1999, it went up 1, 600 fold. So 2, 000 investment turned 3. 2 million. To me, this was like, No, no, no, no. That can't be true. That can't be right.

But it is right. So that's great story to get someone excited and you could tell someone they've bought the next Dell, but they don't like it if they put a grand in and it's only worth a hundred bucks now. Even if you said, [00:40:00] this is all the attributes of Dell, it's going to be the next Dell. This is the next big thing.

I promise. People hate that. And that's the greatest emotional deadweight, but I've drifted from your question. I mean, your question is simple. A simple framework for an early stage investor, six rules. Let me hit you. Number one, it's very simple. Get started. So whether it's your first day, everybody has a relationship with their first, whether it's their first meaningful relationship, the first album they bought.

If you're. Mine and Jason's age, uh, Jeff, the first, whether you subscribe to Spotify, no, no, Hey, I'm old enough to 

Jeff Santoro: have cassette tapes and everything. I'm 

Emmet Savage: there. You go. So your first game, first day at the gym, first day of college, first, first, first have a, we all fuse a relationship in our mind. It doesn't mean it's the first is the best.

It's rarely the case, but number one was just get started. Second is just think longterm. Like if you go in with [00:41:00] this. Buy and hold philosophy in the knowledge that it outperforms the market over the long term. You are already gearing yourself, so decide you're starting and decide you're just going to let it burn away in the background for the very long term.

The third rule. So get started. Think long term. Third rule is never borrow money to buy. Just, we can explain why, but us grey haired guys will show you why. I mean, the the annihilation of wealth. Call that the hammer rule. Call it the hammer rule! I mean, your broker goes, you want some more cash? I got it over here.

You want it? It's all gonna go up! You're gonna be rich! You want it? And it's kind of like, that is like never, ever borrow money to buy to double edged sword. What goes up comes down and leverage really hurts in the way down. And for your very, very early stage investors just to explain if your broker owns, loans you a thousand dollars and your folio is worth 3, 000, but the market crashes.

And your folio falls to one and a half thousand dollars. You still owe them a grand. [00:42:00] And that kind of is it's when it's a lived experience, it hurts. So the third rule is never borrow to buy. So in other words, invest within your means. Fourth rule is diversify. I always say a minimum of 12 stocks across different markets and sectors.

The fifth rule is. Buy what you believe in, you should not own an asset. If you don't fundamentally just even like it or understand it, have a hunch. And the fifth rule is invest what you can, when you can. So the nice thing about stock market is you can throw 50 books at it once a month, and it doesn't ask for any more.

If you buy a property as an investment, which is a, has been historically an Irish sport because in, in Ireland, certainly up until about 10 years ago, the word investment was just a proxy for. Buying a property or buying a piece of land, but it demands a lot more from you. If you own an apartment, you're going to know what a demanding investment is.

Whereas if you buy a share, you can buy 50 bucks more in a month or 50 bucks and a half a year. And so it's get started, think long term, [00:43:00] never borrow to buy, diversify, buy what you believe in and invest what you can when you can, because this is the most beautiful sport in the world. There's nothing like stock investing.

Jeff Santoro: Hey everybody. We'll be right back. But first a word from our sponsors. Heads up folks, interest rates are falling, but you can still lock in a 6% or higher yield with a diversified portfolio of high yield and investment grade corporate bonds on Public.com. You might want to act fast because your yield isn't locked in until the time of purchase.

Lock in a 6% or higher yield with a bond account only at public.com/investingunscripted. Brought to you by public investing member FINRA and SIPC. As of nine 26, 24, the average annualized yield to worst across the bond account is greater than 6%. Yield to worst is not guaranteed, not an investment recommendation.

All investing involves risk. Visit public.com/disclosures/bond-account for more info.

Hey, Investing Unscripted listeners. My name is Brett, one of the hosts of the chitchat [00:44:00] stocks podcast. If you love Investing Unscripted, we think you will love listening to chitchat stocks. On our show, we research individual stocks, interview investing experts, and well chitchat about investing every single week from hot stocks, such as Nvidia and Celsius, the hidden small cap gems.

We have something for every type of investor. Follow the chitchat stocks podcast on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple podcasts, and start discovering new investments today. 

Jeff Santoro: The one that you said that jumped out to me. Is my, I have a family member. I've told this story on the podcast before, but obviously you've not been here yet. So I'll tell it to you. I have a family member who has always been investing in stocks just a little bit throughout her life. And she.

Would only buy one or two or three different stocks at any given time. So there was no diversification and because she's older than me, she was investing all through like the. com time and all that stuff. And the story that she tells all the time is [00:45:00] she bought Cisco. Like I don't want to say literally because that gets overused but pretty much at the top of the huge spike in 000 whenever it was and I don't think to this day it has Regained probably not so and it's the story She tells me all the time and why she still does a little investing but she's so scared to lose money because that is the That's her understanding of the stock market.

And, you know, as I've gone on this journey myself over the last couple of years of learning a lot, I've been trying to tell her like, that's not, you can avoid like the ruinous aspects of owning 

Emmet Savage: more. And you know, one of the golden rules that I think it's not quite a rule, but if we're going to talk about six, if we're going to talk about six rules, one that isn't quite a rule, and it's a little bit culturally outdated wording, but there's no angels in wall street.

Nobody remembers what you paid for a stock. Except you, so there's no higher power waiting to pay you back what you're owed and a real cognitive bias I [00:46:00] believe is knowing I paid a hundred bucks for this stock and that's worth three bucks and I'm not going to sell until it's a hundred bucks because that's the way it works.

Well, I'm sorry, that's, that voice is inside your head and occasionally we make bad decisions and for every great decision I've made there, as I said earlier, is a barren wasteland of atrocious decisions in my wake. 

Jason Hall: Yeah. It's amazing how we do compound one bad decision by another bad decision. Um, that one in particular really sticks with me.

And that the idea that something that you've acknowledged sucks and that you don't want to own anymore, you think it's going to go back up to what you sold it for. Yeah, it doesn't. Yeah. 

Jeff Santoro: so, I, I think what I lIke, I, we talk a lot on the podcast about having frameworks and I, this is the point I was trying to get to when I was telling a story about my family member.

If you don't, if you're new to investing and you don't have some sort of guidelines, you will make one of the mistakes that you're six. Kind of points prevent you from making, right? Um, [00:47:00] what, this is Jason's phrase, but I'll steal it. We like talking about frameworks, not rules because the frameworks make you think and rules just tell you what to do.

So I love the fact that you have this like really simple kind of six point framework to just guide, guide people towards, and then, you know, you learn over time and you decide which of those six you, you think are most important or, or least important, or maybe you would add one or what, take one away.

The one that you had on your list that resonated with me, we just talked about this, I think on the last episode or, or maybe two episodes ago, the idea of liking what you own. And someone asked us a mailbag question about basically sin stock investing. Like, how do you feel about investing in.

And industries are stocks that you don't really believe in what they do. And sure. You know, we, we, we went back and forth about, well, there's two ways to look at it. You can take all those profits and do good with them. You know, you can get really rich off of tobacco stocks and then go donate to the American cancer society, or you can just avoid them entirely because you don't [00:48:00] want to be invested in them.

And I, I personally, I, there's no nevers in my philosophy, but I, I don't want to own things I can't root for that. That's totally the question that makes it less fun. Yeah. 

Emmet Savage: But to your family member in the surgeon, but to buy what you believe in would actually, if your family member was committed to that.

And you said to her, Oh, guess what your broker accidentally sold your shares in Cisco. Here's the spoils of the sale tip 5, 000. Do you want me? Do you want me to tell them to buy Cisco again? There's a, there's a reasonable chance that she would go, uh, I don't know. What do you think? Uh, you said, well, I, I actually prefer this opportunity over here in, even though in this kind of perfectly liquid game that we're playing, it's almost a hack.

The thought hack for that cognitive bias, because if she doesn't believe in Cisco, if her broker accidentally sold those shares and said, Hey, you want to [00:49:00] buy it again? And she said, no, well, then she doesn't believe in it. And I think, you know, that in that situation that worked example, she didn't believe in Cisco.

She just wanted them to pay her back what she believed was owed. 

Jeff Santoro: Yeah, 

Jason Hall: that's a good point. I think this is a good follow up to that question that we got, Jeff, because one of the things that we didn't say that I was thinking about after the fact, and this really kind of brought it home for me, especially when you were talking about it is I don't like the idea of arbitrarily limiting your pool of potential investments as hard enough as it is to find great stocks.

And if you limit areas for ethical reasons, it makes it even harder, but it definitely risks having borrowed conviction. And that doesn't, that's a terrible way to invest in a great way to, to find more losses. So I'm glad you brought that up. Jeff, I think we're running kind of out of time here. We got a couple questions, lightning round questions we can get to.

And Emmet , we need to give you a chance to fully pitch what you're, uh, what you're offering. 

Jeff Santoro: we talked a lot about MyWallStreet, but I don't know that we've ever given you the [00:50:00] opportunity to like truly pitch what it is and why people should check it out. So why don't we start there? 

Emmet Savage: Oh, well, you know, you gave me a plenty opportunity there. I mean, our mission is to get the world investing successfully. And as a, I said to you just when we're backstage on a green room, our apps on millions of devices around the world.

So if you want to learn how to invest, just download the learn by MyWallSt app. We ask for nothing whatsoever. 

Jason Hall: And it's, you'll see it, you'll see it in the show description. You'll see it in the transcript as well. MyWallSt, one word street is the abbreviation ST MyWallST. Easy to find.

It's the most popular app with that name you'll find in the app stores. 

Emmet Savage: So all I ask for your listeners is go follow me on Twitter. It's https://x.com/emmetlsavage. And you'll see a pin tweet on the top with a photograph of my TD Ameritrade account, or sorry, I mean to say Schwab Schwab or TD Ameritrade.

My Schwab account from about a month ago, which shows. My, my best investments. And I've been fortunate enough to have several [00:51:00] hundred baggers, but believe me, I've had a hell of a lot of bad mistakes. So the only two asks I have is follow me on Twitter. And if your listeners are enjoying Investing Unscripted and be out, if they got this deep in the podcast and they're not, why not?

Why not listen to stock club? So stock club is my podcast. And I believe that listeners of Investing Unscripted would enjoy stock club equally as much. And my co hosts and I talk about stock market, the U S stock market every week. And it is our love and our passion as it is. It's yours, Jason and Jeff.

So please listen to stock club. It's a good, a good podcast store near you. 

Jason Hall: Awesome. All right. I have a question for you here. We got the, this is a short lightning round here. The first question you want to give us an answer. We know a couple of your best multi hundred bagger stocks. What's your worst individual stock buying decision?

Oh, 

Emmet Savage: well, I've had so many stocks and [00:52:00] businesses that just went bust, so I could list them all, but I think the greatest loss I suffered where I took a decision and click the button was a business called superconductor technologies, which was down 99. 9%. It would have to grow 1000 fold to pay me back what it owed me.

So I'm going to put superconductor is my worst. Uh, and investment per se, but I, but let me just tell you one other thing is not lightning. The worst decisions I've made as a collective group were all sell decisions. 

Jason Hall: Yeah. Yeah. Usually selling too soon. Selling too soon. Oh, 

Emmet Savage: I bought, I sold Mercado Libre 17 years ago.

Jason Hall: Oof. I 

Emmet Savage: mean, yeah, 

Jason Hall: I might've bought it from you. 

Emmet Savage: I hope you did. 

Jason Hall: I am. I am. Jeff, do you have one last question? 

Jeff Santoro: yes. This isn't really a lightning round one either, but we just talked about this. So I'm, I'm curious what your take is. We did an episode a couple of weeks ago about [00:53:00] asking the question, how much research is too much research?

So where do you fall on? On that spectrum do you think you can actually spend so much time learning about a stock or a business that it actually becomes an impediment to making good decisions? 

Emmet Savage: Yeah, because the day you know least about a business you own, It's the day you've bought it because that's day one, everything you've done up until that point is academic.

You really, it's so odd that the, as you follow your investments and hopefully hold them for tens or dozens of years, that the day you actually know least about this company is the day you've bought it. Now, when you've gotten to that point, you've satisfied a bunch of check boxes in your mind, but I have become more comfortable with less research and trusting my intuition a little more, but I would equally say that you can only trust your intuition when you've actually honed it for, for a very long [00:54:00] time.

Like a musician on stage, just like a jazz musician, I just get up there and play. I trust my intuition. Oh, really? I think I'll do the same. Uh, hold on, kid. You better go learn the trumpet first. So like, yeah, I suppose being more distinct, I. I read until I'm happy to say, answer this question. I would buy, I would take 10, 000 from my auntie and invest in this business for her.

I would take someone else's money and make, and there is no, there might be check boxes in my mind, but I don't need to research and research and research. If I broadly think of business has an addressable opportunity, they're making headway, they're growing revenue and they've got to, and they're doing things.

Well, I will get to a point where I'm satisfied. 

Jason Hall: So you're saying, It takes exactly as long as it takes.

Emmet Savage: Yes, it does. It does. But I do watch a business for a long time before I absolutely pull the trigger, but doesn't mean that I'm every day trolling the internet or looking at X saying, right. What's everybody saying?

It will, it will exist in my [00:55:00] consciousness for a while before I jump. 

Jason Hall: All right. Emmet Savage, my friend, this was wonderful. Thank you for joining us on this 

Emmet Savage: great Jason and Jeff. Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure. Hopefully, uh, you'll have me back another time. 

Jason Hall: Oh, yeah. I'm sure we will.

Once again, Emmet Savage co founder of MyWallSt. Easy to find. Find him on Twitter. Look in the description of this episode. Look in the transcripts. You'll be able to find him on Twitter, go in the app store, find MyWallSt, download the app, check out his podcast. You can find all of that right there on his Twitter.

It's super easy. Let me send this home. Jeff. We love to give our answers to these hard investing questions. Have great successful investors like Emmet come on our show and give their answers, but you got to come up with your own answers, people. No borrowed conviction here, but I believe in you, you can do it.

All right, Jeff, we'll see you next time. 

Jeff Santoro: See you next time. 

​