 Fantastic, it is nine o'clock on the nose. We keep on beating the drum on this project. It never gets old for me. Investing never gets old, never a dull moment. And going through the ebbs and flows of the stock market, that's for sure. Never a dull moment on social media doing its absolute best to detract from investor's attention. And blind that attention to what actually works in stock market investing, which I think is really, really unfortunate. I think a lot of the reason why this project is so special to me is I don't mind coming on and letting you know that I do, yes, run a YouTube channel. I am not a YouTuber, so don't call me that. Just a regular person, just like the thousands of other people I've met in this life that are normal people. Interesting to have been raised in an era where we didn't have social media at all. And now we seemingly live in an environment where we seek out our social media experience to do everything. Find a mate, invest by a car. Learn how to socialize, I don't know. And I think although it is an era of convenience, I think it's also an environment that can be fraught with distraction. And I think it really does take a lot of people away from the fundamentals of what can potentially work. And I think it allows people to be lazy. And I think it allows people way too much opportunity to put way, way too much stock, no pun intended, in what other people have to say. In other words, everything that everybody says is a gospel. I don't agree with that. I think, I got you Maurish, very good. Now you figured it out. So I've got a special guest tonight we're gonna bring on. Pretty cool show tonight actually. It's been an interesting week in the market for me. Some very interesting buckets in my total comprehensive portfolio that has put us up week over week. I do footstomp that for entertainment only. I think in the grand scheme of things when we're talking about long-term investing and building wealth in the capacity that I want people to think about wealth building. And that's really if most people could just slow the roll a little bit and just take a little bit of perspective and sit back and ask yourself a few fundamental questions as to why you're looking to wealth build how you're gonna go about pursuing that what in the pursuance of that plan could look like aligned with your own specific tolerance to market fluctuation. And I think some of those very, very simple deliberations I think a lot of people would say that it's you need a coach to allow you to do that. I give people more credit than that. I do. I just think anything in this life that we wanna pursue people are more than willing to spend the necessary time bringing themselves up to speed from an intermediate capacity to be able to enter into a certain discipline. And I think unfortunately investing escapes that escapes that all the time. And I'd like to earmark the importance of investing. And I think all too often we give away our ability to give ourselves a chance and align a program that's individual to each and every one of us. So I wanna welcome everybody to the channel the fastest 60 minutes on YouTube. I really just enjoyed doing this project. This is really special to me. Very interesting week coupled in what I was declaring to the gallery before the live stream tonight as being a very challenging year in 2021 for me, been very challenging in the investment arena. Okay, the business bucket is fine. I'm doing a lot of building to cash right now. Certain schools of thought would say that that's absolutely crazy. I beg to differ. And personal household wealth is increasing while the portfolio is just taking a stagnant leg flat in 2021, at least for me. And that is the way of it. Some buckets are doing quite well. The passive buckets are doing well. Those will do well over time as I'm banking on a more predictable path for that wealth whereas some of my more risky strategic buckets are being put to a little bit higher level of risk with the anticipation of getting a little bit higher return on the back end. So it's great to see everybody. Hope everybody's just doing well. I cannot stress enough how appreciative I am on the gallery, the people who make their way in here, especially every week. I think it's refreshing to come in. I hope I deliver on the goods and the goods are that you can sit across from me and really relate and get a sense that I don't mean to portray someone who comes on to social media and has all the answers. Why? Because I don't believe in that. I don't. I think there's a lot of people that for short amounts of time really do fire on all cylinders and it appears as if they have all the answers. But I think unfortunately, like any things those things do die out. And I think unfortunately for the creators of those messages, they struggle when they start to lose that momentum that they have on social media because everybody thinks they're the greatest thing since sliced bread. I've said since the beginning, if you don't see the message in this, seek something else out. It's no problem. But I always come back to foot stomping the importance of personal empowerment, questioning everything, taking ideas and philosophies about investing. We're gonna hear a very unique investing philosophy tonight. And I'm gonna sit back and be a student because the gentleman that we've got coming on has a vast wealth of knowledge to pass to you guys. So you're absolutely in for a treat tonight. That'd be his first introduction on the Independent Investor Channel. We're looking forward to this actually all week. But before we get to Maurice, we're gonna get to the portfolio review for this week. We were mixed this week. We were up. We took a $5,000 increase this week. Nothing too crazy coming off of a fairly poor down week last week. Again, it's been a real mystery to me. And I've defaulted a lot this year to the invest and hold philosophy. I have at times gone through swoons of wanting to add more capital to the markets here. But I like my strategic allocation to the passive buckets right now. I've increased my contribution to certain passive buckets to the level that I'm comfortable with and also saving to cash for some eventual goals down the line of entering into some different investments outside of the stock portfolio, specifically land investments, which is right in line with my goal down the line. And it's just something that motivates me to keep forward. It's part of my dreams. If you resonate with that, you can borrow it. You can have it. It's a lot of people's goal to have a piece of property that they can call their own. I've had it before. I currently don't have it, but just kind of looking to establish that bucket while some of the other buckets are either static or in a neutral state or actually slowly growing and I'm happy to see that happen. But yeah, 2021 has just been kind of a grind for me coming on to doing the independent investor channel and talking with you kind folks allows me to pulse in with a fabulous community of investors, self-directed empowered investors that are all working toward your individual goals. So let's jump into the portfolios right now. We'll take a look, see and see what we've got going on. But before we do that, we may just do the greatest intro in any intro of any live stream that you've ever seen in the history of YouTube. No, just kidding. It's just pretty cool though. A little bit down on this account, I really haven't added to this a whole lot in 2021. The strategic positions in the large growth category with Amazon and Google, these were purchased with a lot of house money that was made last year, which seemingly everything I touched turned to gold. This year I've taken these positions with some of that house money, put them to work in long positions in some of those companies that I've always wanted to have in the portfolio, but not a lot of addition here down just marginally, week over week on this one. This is the taxable brokerage account that we've got. Roth IRA number one, this was actually up week over week, not a lot of changes in this one as well, looking for some of those speculative growth stocks like SoFi, like these couple stocks that I'm actually very bullish on, highly on really has just been an absolute drag for the last 18 months of the company's stock, progress with the company, absolutely, but continuing to be a little bit of a drag on the portfolio, we've established a nice position here between the 12 mark and it's bottoming price at about $7.50 here, and we've got about our average, just less than $12 here into the stock. So we're a little underwater in it, that's totally fine. The stock we've just continued to hold, get paid our dividends, everything is set kind of the way I want this long. Roth number two, here it is. This was down just a touch, nice to see Alibaba come off of its bottom. It's really been on a downward trajectory the last two months. It's nice to see that catch a little bit of fire, it's nice to see oil come back today, that was nice. Oil had a nice run today, smaller established positions in the passive assets that you see here, especially the triple cues, we will look to build that up over time as I am looking to build that as more of a base in this portfolio, but you'll have to tune into the portfolio reviews or I actually disclose the allocation to each of these. This is just a status update on what we're looking at. And this is the small M1 finance account. This is where all of the ad revenue through the independent investor channel goes. I've moved somewhat away from pursuing ad revenue at all. I think I enjoyed doing the Friday live stream. I've moved away from really enjoying doing just regular eight to 10 minute YouTube videos. I may re-engage in that project down the line, but for right now it's just too much of a time grab and we'll continue to roll out promotional content and the live stream as appropriate. This is nice, this cracked the $18,000 mark so good enough here in the ETF portfolio and then the dividend growth portfolio staring down that 20,000. We came off with the recent small couple percent correction, no big deal, off of the 20 we're staring it back down again. This is one that I'd really like to increase the contributions to, something that if I do have time I'll earmark as far as those dues in the stock market to make sure that you're preserving long-term wealth over time. This is the thrift savings plan. This is my version of some of your guys's have 401k, 403s, 457s. This is mine. This is doing quite well. This is throttling right along here passively, gaining wealth. This is about 20% of my income goes to this right out of the paycheck. So you guys can take a page out of my playbook. You guys can see how a lot of the dollars spread to strategic buckets. And this is one that I do not touch. This allocation does not change at all with the S&P 500, the small caps, and a little bit in the international fund as well. Some call options, I'm not gonna declare to you. We're still sitting on some call options and highly on that we are down. Little premature on that. I think we'll be fine. Those are out to 2023 and 2024, respectively. But I'll update you guys as appropriate 10 call options on each of those at 10 and 1250 strikes. I think we'll be fine. If that stock can't get above $10 within the next two years, we're in trouble, I'll quit investing altogether. And there's the portfolio value, again, up a little bit off that $5 mark. So nice to see that. It's nice to note we can put food on the family. And keep in mind guys, I do joke a little bit about this because I don't want people to look at wealth building and becoming a millionaire or having wealth as being something that is unachievable in your life. I've done this on a blue collar salary. There's nothing special to what I do. I also want to footstomp that obtaining wealth is not a straight line. It's a series of learning. It's a series of making mistakes. It's a series of curvy winding roads and places that you never would have thought you'd be. And in certain times during the short term, we look at where we are and we think, man, are we making the progress that we need? But when you look back two and a half year, five year, 10 years ago, you would have never saw me with this. I mean, I was below $100,000 five years ago. So it is possible if you do make a concerted effort to build wealth and build wealth without tripping over your skis and getting into a big hurry. So with that, I really appreciate you guys kind of staying with me for that update. I know people enjoy that. I enjoy rolling it out to you guys. It validates why we invest, okay? Results speak for themselves. And it's always important to earmark where we are with progress. So with that, I'm gonna bring Maurice on to introduce himself. Kind of let us know what he's working with and we're gonna actually share his channel with the group here. Maurice, how are you? Go ahead and test that audio. I know you were troubleshooting on the video. How are we looking? Yeah, can you hear me okay? Yeah, I got you loud and clear. Welcome. Yeah, I didn't have the correct microphone connected and I just got this eraser webcam. So I'm testing it for the first time. So yeah, thank you very much for having me. You look good. Yes, you're clear. Introduce yourself please to the audience and let us know where we can find you at first off. Yeah, so my name is Mario Sconecine and I run two websites. One is a public website called Classic Value Investors and the other one is a private membership website called Microcap Explosions. Obviously Microcaps stand for very small capitalization companies and I also have a YouTube channel which I don't even, I think it's YouTube slash my last name, my first name. So yeah. I focus mainly on smaller companies, microcap companies anywhere between let's say 10 to 500 million market cap. That's my specialty. Fantastic. Mario, is this something that can apply to the masses? Is this something that an everyday average investor which I consider myself to be, is this something that can be learned over time? Is this something that can be dabbled in? Is it something that you would recommend that investors get involved with with both feet? How on that, how do we approach this? Cause it is a little bit of a niche market here and I don't know how it applies to the broader investing community. Well, I do think anybody can do it. However, it does carry more risk because smaller companies tend to be riskier than larger, more established companies. But then at the same time, if you are the kind of person that wants to roll up your sleeves and get maybe more active in your investing, then you can definitely go into that space but I would probably go slower instead of just jumping in with two feet because like in general, I always look at it like it doesn't matter the size of a business. You see, if you look at it from the point of view of how the financial media or how the financial industry talks about smaller companies is very much in a negative way. Whether they call it penny stocks or whatever names they wanna choose it, they talk about it negatively. And if we step back for a second and we think about the kind of businesses that we see around us, around our neighborhoods, what do we see? We could see like a laundromat or we could see like a local grocery store or a convenience store or even like a, let's say, a hundred unit apartment building. They are all local businesses and in our life, we wouldn't call them negative. We wouldn't assign negative connotations to them because we look at them as businesses. And if you took, let's say, a hundred unit apartment building that could be worth, let's call it $5 million, depending on the location, many people would not have a problem like having their entire life savings in an apartment building like this. And they would consider it very safe and many, many people that are in real estate, they do. But if you took that same apartment building and you put it in a public vehicle, then all of a sudden it would be called a microcap and it would be called toxic and risky and don't touch it. So, I look at it from the point of view over business. I don't get involved in stories that could turn into something. I get involved in real businesses that have real customers that have real products that have solved real problems and they just happen to be maybe on a secondary exchange. So it might not be trading on NASDAQ, it might be trading on OTC markets over the counter or it might be trading on TSX Venture or it might be trading in Canadian stock exchange. It doesn't matter to me where it's trading, what matters to me is the quality of the business. That's what I wanna look at. And a lot of times, I can go into these secondary exchanges and there's not very much competition because the entire financial industry doesn't wanna go there. So I can go in there, I can look at those businesses one by one, decide if I like them. And a lot of times there might be certain changes or they might be introducing new products or going into new verticals and maybe down two years down the line, they might have plans to uplist to NASDAQ. So I can go and I can grab them when very few people are paying attention to and I can take my time to study them. There's usually no analysts cover it. So I can get on the phone, I can get the CEO on the phone, I can really study the situation and buy it cheap. And then when it does upgrade to NASDAQ down the road, then the whole, the entire world gets exposed to these names. And of course, usually a re-raving happens. Wow, that's incredible. Are you looking at the entire micro cap grouping or do you look to try to specialize Mariusz in any of the niches? I know we talked before you came on and into this week about my offering these promotional content videos through the channel. And I think a lot of those companies, they are so small and they're so unknown and they are subjects, usually to short selling type of activity. Hedge funds love them, they'll go right after them. The junior mining space has complained about this for a long, long time. And I think they're fighting and saying, no, we have legitimate businesses, but do you have any specific niche that you like to cover or do you just cover it all, Mariusz? I like to pick the companies that I can understand. So I'm taking it straight from Warren Buffett's philosophy, right? I want to understand what it is that I'm investing and I want to pick businesses that are good businesses. So what do I mean by good businesses? Well, I want businesses that let's say either have a strong brand name or they are developing a brand name that it's strengthening over time or maybe businesses that have recurring revenue models. Maybe they're a software as a service or something that they provide on a regular basis because then if you have a recurring revenue model then every January you don't start from zero. And maybe businesses that have some kind of network effects. So Warren Buffett defined a moat. So you have a castle and you have a moat around the castle and the castle represents a business. And what you want is to have a moat around that castle so that it protects you from the competitors and a brand name or switching costs. If for example, you have a banking account there's switching costs. Usually people don't switch. So I want to have those businesses that either have a brand name or a switching costs or maybe have like what they call a network effect. So for example, eBay has a network effect. The more people that are using eBay more sellers want to offer eBay and it kind of snowballs from there. So, and those modes don't necessarily have to be only in small companies. You can have a small gas station that's located on a great corner and it might have a mode because of its location. So those are the kinds of businesses that I like to focus on. I try not to focus on businesses that have just stories. So for example, if you look at the mining companies and a lot of the companies that are mining they do trade on those exchanges. So I don't really look at them because if you talk to the CEO of these mining companies every single one has a discovery, okay? Every single one has the next gold mine that will be in production. So, and as you said yourself, building wealth you go through so many mistakes. So I have been there and I have done the mining stocks and I actually have a video series called Why I Hate the Mining Stocks and I have like stories beyond stories about what can happen in this industry. So now I don't want to ever touch mining company. I don't usually go after pharmaceuticals or any bio or any life sciences because I have no idea. I'm not great at biology. That's not my area. So when I see it, if they're playing with molecules or this or that, no, that's not me next. I go from one company. So when I let's say look at, let's say TSX Venture or Canadian Stock Exchange. Recently I found one interesting investment opportunity on Canadian Stock Exchange and I went through every single company on the Canadian Stock Exchange. It was a total of 700, one by one looked at them. And if it's a mining or oil and gas or pharma, I just throw it away. But then when I look at them one by one, then of course you'll find interesting companies, interesting stories and you might be like, wow, I didn't know this was happening in this particular industry. I wanna find out more. But you find very, very interesting opportunities when you do it like this. Can you expand a little bit on some of the niches that I see? You mentioned the internet of things, certainly with cryptocurrency, certainly with plant-based food and alternative diet type of options for people. Some of those niches, they do have multiple companies within each of those niches. And I appreciate you discussing the moat, but how strong of a moat can a microcap company have? When I think of a moat, I think of Procter & Gamble. You've got brand loyalty that's rooted in for decades and a dividend to boast for 50 years. Is it a sensitive moat or is it something that's been established or it's been established in the short term that you feel is really, really strong and can stand the test of time? So speak a little bit, if you're gonna get rid of the mining companies, what are some of the trends that you're seeing, Mariusz, in some of the companies that may get you excited about or maybe you would pass on based on those specific areas that you're looking at? So let me give you an example and I'm not gonna give out the names because I don't give out the specific names because it's not fair to my subscribers, but I will just talk in general about one specific industry. So one company that got my interest was a company that provides a software as a service for the environmental space for the governmental agency in the food safety industry. And so, for example, restaurants. Restaurants have to have certain procedures and they have to be checked by the counties and so it's a lot of work for counties to make sure that all the restaurants are compliant with the laws. And so that space is a very niche space. There's only like three players in that space and two of them are larger and then there is a third player. That's a smaller one that I just found and they developed a technology five years ago. They bought this technology five years ago and it took them about four years to take it to a point where it's sellable, it's commercial and they released the product about 2019. They are absolutely killing the competitors. They are killing them. They are taking the clients from the competitors literally from week to week. And I'm talking about a competitor had 99% market share in the state of California and they are just taking clients every week. And this kind of software, software as a service for the governmental agencies, it has a lot of switching costs. So the competitors knew that there was switching costs and over the years, they didn't really keep up and they didn't really improve the product because they could literally abuse their clients and the clients weren't gonna leave. And so in such situations, when you see a competitor stealing clients from the big names, you know that there's something going on. So that's when I investigated it and I realized that the technology gap between the big boys and then the small player is so huge that the clients are leaving. And also that's where also studying the dynamic between the competitors is important because the big competitors, how did they get into the positions that they wear? They did this by acquiring companies. They never developed their own product, they just acquire. So they are pretty much run by MBAs with fancy calculators and they never developed their own product. So now we have this small company that developed their own product that they have so much passion. I mean, so much passion. When I talk to the CEO, he has so much passion for the product, for the industry. You could see how they developed this new product with caring about the client, asking the client questions. And I remember he was telling me that when they were developing this product, they would always ask the clients, what do you need, what do you need, what do you need? And then he said that when you take those questions and you integrate them into the software that you're providing, it's almost impossible for the competitors to beat you when the competitors don't care about it, when they all care about this bottom line. So in such a case, I can see that this company is building a moat from day by day, and they are also building the brand. So it's not too important for me whether they already have the moat today. What's important to me is what are they doing to build it? Because with larger companies that are trading on New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ, I can look at companies like Adobe or Microsoft and you look at the financial statements and they look pristine. Every year earnings per share grow, the revenue is stable and growing and then the profit margins are stable and growing, returns on equity look fantastic and stable. So they are mature companies and their report card, their financial report card looks so good that the entire financial world wants to invest in them. What I am interested in is knowing what created that financial card, knowing why Microsoft looks so good on paper, why Adobe looks so good on paper, why does it have such huge profit margins? And when I know the why's, then I can go into the smaller companies and I can say I can see the same thing developing. So today their financial card might not look as great but I can see what it's gonna look like in the future because I understand the why's. Okay, so how would you rate now in 2021 the micro cap environment? Would you say that it's never been a better time to be an investor with the technology that we have now, was it better 10 years ago or is it gonna be better in 10 years as technology develops from your pulse? What does it look like here in 2021? Has it never been a better time? I would never answer it in terms of as a whole group as a micro cap or as a small space. I am excited myself because of the companies that I chose. And I don't really care what the entire group is doing as long as the companies that I chose are doing what they're supposed to be doing. And also another important point about those smaller companies is that if you do get involved into those smaller companies you have to have a very high tolerance for volatility. And I mean very high because smaller companies there's not as much attention. So there's also not as much liquidity. I've had situations where I bought something. I went to take a nap and I was 30% down after I woke up from the nap. And that's just it goes with the territory. Yes, we love to make money when we make it quick on the way up but it doesn't feel that great on the way down but I always tell my subscribers or people who are interested in it is like, look, there are some advantages here. You can, if you choose the right companies if you do the proper due diligence you can make tremendous amounts of money but it is not a straight line. And I kind of appreciate how you started at the beginning it's not a straight line. My, as a Charlie Munger would say if you cannot take a 50% haircut in your entire portfolio once every few years you don't belong in the stock market. And I would say then the microcap space I would say that that 50% haircut happens more often than it does in the big names. Wow. Wow, well stated. Well stated, Maryouche. Tell us a little bit about yourself if you wouldn't mind how did you get into this and how did you evolve into this microcap investor that you are? You're obviously very, very sharp and I appreciate you reaching out to me early this week. Very cool. I'm glad to share that because I think I think to your point about there being a negative light on the space it's been that way for me for 25 years of investing. It's always been a space that is just deemed faux pas don't touch it, you'll lose. And are we, are we do for more of a paradigm shift in that people look at it a little bit more collectively maybe you're saying, hey, don't let my secret out Ryan but if there are pockets of value in microcap investing then why don't more people succeed at it? Or are they succeeding? And they're just not saying anything about it. Well, the model is not scalable for, I mean, think about it from the point of view of hedge funds or financial advisors, they run big money, okay? Or the entire financial business is based on gathering assets under management, okay? Financial advisors, hedge fund managers are paid a small percentage based on the amount of assets that they manage. So let's say if you are a hedge fund that manages $10 billion, there is absolutely no way that you can go into the microcap space and invest in companies that are let's say 10 or $100 million market cap, you are too fat, too fat for it, right? You have to go after apples, after Microsoft, after Teslas of the world, simply because of your size. And if you are a financial advisor, you probably also, if you are successful financial advisor, let me say it, you probably have a thousand clients. So are you going to go and research some little dinky company that has a market cap of 20 million and you can really deploy only maybe a million dollars into it without seriously affecting the stock price? There's no way, you just can't go into this space. So I am not really worried about getting too much competition. I don't think there will ever be too much competition simply because of how the investment world is set up. So I mean, that's good news for individuals who take their investing into their own hands because if you only have $100,000 to your name, you can go into those tiny spaces and you can benefit from those little arbitrages, but big hedge funds can't. But because that space doesn't get as much attention, you have to be better yourself. You, if you want to invest in Tesla or Microsoft, you can go on the internet, you can go to YouTube and there's plenty of advice that you can get. There's plenty of research reports, whether it's good or bad, right? But there's information out there, okay? And, but if you invest in a few smaller names, a lot of times you're the only one. You're the only, you have to figure out on your own, is this a good business? Is this not a good business? Is this business gonna grow? You can of course call the management, you can get them on the phone and you can get their story, but you have to roll up the sleeves. You have to be comfortable with being an independent thinker instead of a follower. I think we lack that. And I think I remember a time where social media and the access to information, I remember getting my stock information through the newspaper, right? That was my introduction to the stock tickers and the financial page of the local newspaper. I'm 44 years old now with information being so prevalent and right in your face. I think that has really leveled the playing field for those that want to seek out that information. So, Murray, you should tell us a little bit about how you got into this. Tell us a little bit about yourself and what drives you to seek this out. This is what you do for a living. Is that correct? This is one of your many jobs. So how did you get into this? What perked your interest in this? So I graduated from college. Well, first of all, I'm from Poland. I originally came from Poland. I came to the United States when I was 16. In 1996, I'm 41 now. And so when I came to the US, I finished my first year of high school in Poland and then I finished my second, third and fourth in the US. And then I went to Indiana University for I got my finance degree and graduated in 2003. And so at that point, I was always interested in investing. I was always interested in money. When I was a little kid, I wanted to be a cashier because I saw that cashiers at the grocery store counted money. So I was interested in the topic. And so, but I didn't know after college, I knew I didn't want to get a graduate degree because I thought college was already wasted enough of my time. It was time to go. And I was a good student, but I just didn't feel like I was getting, I was getting enough from college. So I was ready to start. And at that point, right when I was finishing, it was 2003. I read the book, Rich Dad and Poor Dad and got me interested into real estate. And, but I figured what is the best way to learn about real estate investing is to become a real estate appraiser. So I became a real estate appraiser because I wanted to know how to value these things. So I became a residential real estate appraiser. Then I moved up to being a commercial real estate appraiser when I was valuing or appraising apartment buildings, office, retail, mobile home parks. And then I moved up to being a commercial real estate broker. So I was working for a company called Marcus and Milichop. I was part of a team that sold apartments. And during that time, the financial crisis hit, 2008, 2009 financial crisis hit. And I was already kind of investing on my own in the stock market. And what I realized at that point is that I truly didn't have the passion for real estate. I realized that real estate as a business, it's not a good business because the buildings don't really have a mold. There are commodities, this apartment building and this apartment building that are usually the same. And the business in itself is capital intensive, meaning you can't really grow revenues without building new units. So I literally when the financial crisis happened, I went to my boss and I said, December 31st, 2008 is my last day. And that's when I went full-time into stock market investing. My girlfriend was working at the time. She said, just go into it full-time. I'll pay your bills and we'll be able to do it. So I've been doing it January 1st, 2009, started with $10,000 to my name and it took me from there to today, I took that 10,000 to about $6, $7 million now. So it took me about 10 years to take it from that to where it is today. But like I said, it was not a straight line. It was a wild, wild ride. I mean, wow, looking back at some of the moments, sometimes I'm like, how am I even standing here? I thank you for sharing that. That's a personal story and I didn't mean to pry, but that's where the good stuff is, you know? Really is. Everybody goes through the curve, but I always tell people, it's like, look, don't just look at the success. It was really hard. It was really hard. It was a lot of volatility, a lot of mistakes. So what you are getting from me now is all the pain and all the mistakes that I went through, you're kind of, not that we won't make any more mistakes in the future, of course we will. There's always another mistake around the corner, but at least I have that 12 years behind me that now when I look at a company, I know what I want and I know what I don't want. And that's probably the more important thing. When people tell me now about some of the mining companies, gold, silver, this, I'm like, no, you go ahead and have it for yourself. Thank you very much. No, I'm the same way. I'm the same way. I can't justify putting a dollar in them. I just can't do it. It's just too much risk. I call these companies, they are professional fuckups and I'm sorry for my language. It's okay. It's well said. Well said. Just too much risk on the table really and they may go through a spot of small success but it's very capital intensive. And when you're looking to invest in one singular company, you're putting way, way too much in the stock of what you say is normally a story, right? Everybody's gonna hit it big. So that's incredible. I've got to ask you a couple things. Have you ever authored any books, Mariusz? So I actually wrote 10 books in total about investing. Do we have access to that if we kick over to your YouTube channel or do you have those linked on the Amazon? Yeah, so if you type in my name to Amazon, they're all listed on Amazon and you can buy them as paperback or kindle. Fantastic. If you have patrons in this community that'll probably kick over and help you support. I might do it after I close down the live stream but I can't do it for another 15 minutes or so. So thank you for that. And actually you see two of them, two of them are about gold, gold mining because as I was at some point for several years involved in those companies, I learned a tremendous amount about how gold is produced, the whole process of mining and financing because if you don't know how these companies get financed, you have to know how they get financed. And so at that time, when I was involved in these companies there was, I felt like there was not enough information on the subject for the general investing public of how it goes from gold being in the ground to gold being produced. So I wrote a book about it, gold production from beginning to end and I showed in the book on how this whole thing is produced but even with this knowledge, I tell people, don't ever tell me about another one of those. I don't care how great the story is, just keep it for yourself. Yeah, I think that's prudent. I've looked at them not with any intent of taking any investment and I've never owned one or do I ever intend on owning them. I am dabbling in some micro cap investments now but it's really cool to get to talk to somebody who does this on a day-to-day basis, Mariusz, because I think you're right. I think to really get this to fit into that category, the very rare category of people who do this and succeed at it long-term, you really have to devote yourself to the craft. I think you would agree with that. What do you do any type of other investing? Value investing, real estate, anything? This is it, huh? Well, yeah, this is it. I mean, you said value investing? Certainly. Well, you see, I think that people like to put things in buckets. This is a value stock or this is a growth stock and you know, and it's fine but have you ever seen a discounted cash flow analysis model where you take future cash flows and you discount it to presence? So growth is a part of the equation for value and so just because I might be looking at a company today and I might say, okay, it's worth this much and I can only buy it for 50% of what it's worth this much. But if I look at it into the future, if I can have, based on my research, if I can say, well, by the end of five years, their revenues should be around this level or it should be around that level, I can kind of predict of where it's gonna be in the future, where it's gonna be worth in the future so I'm not completely opposed to overpaying for something today as long as I have a high certainty that down the road, three, five years down the road, it's gonna be worth more than what I paid for today. So yeah, and also you see, when it comes to people ask me, for example, how do you find these stocks? Because people like to have a computer find them stocks. They use various screens, stock screens and there's nothing wrong with that and they like to put certain parameters, find me something that grows at this rate or is trading at this P or that P and it's all fine. But I like to look for companies by looking at the exchange and looking at every single company on the exchange because I like to find things before the computers can find them and so the example of the company that I told you that is killing the competitors in that health space industry, at today you can look at it and be like, well, it's not too cheap, it's reasonable but the profits are not there but that's okay because sometimes with these smaller companies, the CEO makes a decision that sacrifices a bottom line in the short term so they might be like, you know what, we're gonna spend more on marketing and because marketing is part of the income statement, as an expense, it might show that they're losing money but it's a conscious effort and they could, if they wanted to, they could make the company profitable right now but then they're sacrificing growth. So it's not so easy just to say, oh, it has to be a P of this. I wanna understand where the revenues are gonna be and I wanna know why they're gonna be there because I don't just wanna take out the calculator and say, well, if it's gonna grow at 20% per year for the next five years, well, why? Why is it gonna grow at 20%? I wanna know why it's gonna grow. I wanna see how it compares to the market. I wanna see how hungry the customers are and a lot of times, have you heard of a term called Scattlebot? Okay, so in investing, a Scattlebot is learning about a company from people that are involved in the company. So if you just look at the company's website or the filings, you are looking at just one story given to you by the management. But if you talk to the customers or to the suppliers or to the employees, former employees, directors, I try to get those people on the phone because when I talk to the customer, I wanna know, tell me, why are you buying from this company? Tell me, why are you buying from this company and not the other company? And then you get on the phone and you talk to some employees and you see how things are within the company or you talk to their directors. Why are you the director? How did you meet the CEO and all this? You get a different story. And I'm not saying that you have to get a perfect story because nobody's perfect, no company's perfect, but at least you get a story that you can then make a decision instead of being blindfolded and thinking that everything is perfect. No, no, no, just find out what it is and then you can make a decision on whether you wanna get involved in it or not. Wow, it's pretty incredible. So listen, for our audience, I just wanna, for transparency, Maryouche reached out to me and I said, hey, got a couple ideas here. I said, well, why don't you come on the live stream and introduce yourself? I hadn't met Maryouche, but now I've known him a week and now I know him a lot better. And I just want everybody to understand that, you know, very, very interesting. I was very intrigued. This was a lot of fun for me, Maryouche. If you could be so kind as to run down your products, your website again, as well as your YouTube channel, place where we can find you. And that way, when this goes live, and we have a lot of international viewers that can't catch the Friday live stream, they'll catch it after the fact, you'll get a lot of following from that. So if you could please take us out with that and then I'll look to finish up the live stream in a couple minutes here. Yeah, so just my name, take my name, just put it into Google or YouTube and my YouTube channel will pop up. And then my public website, classicvalueinvestors.com. So classic, like a classic car, I'm a value investor, investorswithaplural.com. And then my membership website, microcapexplosions.com. Very nice, very nice. Maryouche, on behalf of the channel, I'd like to thank you for coming on and spending your time with us. It's very enjoyable. I know my audience got a lot out of it. I really appreciate it. I'm going to kick you off and say thank you. Really appreciate it. We'll do it again someday. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thank you for your time. Have a good one, Maryouche. Very well. Bye now. Very cool. Thank you, Maryouche. Thank you. Some of the cool opportunities we have on the channel, absolute success story. I was kind of blown away at the segment in the channel where he was talking about, and I think it speaks to a lot of people that success can come from any pocket, anywhere. I think the common thread there was that I didn't sense any give up in talking to Maryouche. And that was really refreshing to me, and it's a lot of the reason why I do this. You can tell by looking at me. So I hope you guys actually got some of that value out of that. I want to thank Maryouche for coming on to the channel. That was a lot of fun tonight. This is just an open door forum. So you never really know what you're going to get on the Friday live stream. I do jump at the chance to have guests on the channel. And, you know, I don't know what you're going to get. But I do jump at the chance to have guests on the channel. And Maryouche reached out to me directly and we were glad to oblige. When I do edit this, I will probably put his information within the description as well. So people can relate with who's the one talking, and then they can jump down and segue over there. I think the beautiful thing about social media is that very thing is the connection element. I would have never had the opportunity to meet Maryouche, right? Otherwise, and neither would you. So glad to bring him on the live stream tonight to connect with some of you guys because I know there's people out that are absolutely interested in the topic. Some of our more seasoned investors that may want to segue into another niche that might be something that's really worth checking out there. So very, very cool. I see a ton of people in the gallery here. I got Ben in the group. It's shot out to you, my friends. It's great to see you. Very cool stuff. Victor is in the house. Great to see you guys. Terry's tuning in from New Zealand. Very, very cool. Really appreciate you. And thank you so much for your loyal support over the years. Really appreciate that. All good. Wouldn't be the same without you. All right. Thank you so much for kicking it off and keeping us all on the show. I think it's really important for people to be able to get all charged into this topic because it's a lifelong project. It really is. And the weeks go by. They go by quickly. We continue to roll this product out for people. And I think it's really important to continue to foot stomp the investing opportunity for people. I think it's really, really cool, man. I got my boy, Matt Money in the house. He says he tries to wake up every day and do what I do. And I think it's really important for people to be able to do that. And I think he's talked about, you're not going to be able to do that. You really didn't need to find. I think if you related with what I picked up from Marius, I would go out on a limb and say that he enjoys this. Okay. And that's part of the pedigree to success in anything that you do. You've got to enjoy it. I picked up on the piece where he talked about being a commercial real estate broker and moved away from those folks out there that have had multiple careers in their life. I think it's something to be said about making sure that you're spending your life the way that you want to. And in an independent nature, that's absolutely what we're all about here. So very cool. I didn't get to get into highly on tonight. I thought Marius would probably bonk me on the head for taking an investment in this company. Not a micro cap company, but definitely in the small cap category for sure. And it's been a real drag. It really has. I think the silence on the line here has really dried up and it's got a lot of people on edge here. I think what Marius talked about tonight, actually, I've kept thinking about highly on and getting all the information from the SEC documents and as well as the website. But how is it being perceived from the company's perspective, the customer's perspective? And I think that's an interesting angle that he plays there to try to understand why those products are even being bought in the marketplace. We talked a lot tonight about a lot of companies and you won't talk to a CEO that doesn't have an aggressive story to tell you about their company. You will not. I've yet to see one. But the real question is at the end of the day, are they delivering customers delivering product to their customers in a way that's fulfilling a niche filling a need? And I think that's the deeper understanding and question. I really enjoyed tonight's dialogue. Guys, I'm going to send you out. I've got Matt Money here. Kyle, they will roll into the next. You guys are welcome to throw that link before I shut down the live stream in about 15 seconds. Kick over. Keep the discussion going. Great to have you guys on the live stream tonight. Thank you again to Marius for joining us. Very, very intriguing, very cool, very unique opportunity to have him on the channel tonight. So we will back be back next Friday, nine o'clock Eastern Standard Time on the fastest 60 minutes on YouTube. We will continue to beat this drum to empower one investor at a time in the investing opportunity. Guys, thank you so much. Be safe. Have a great weekend. Catch you next Friday.