 Thank you guys for tuning in to the first episode of The Prince of Investing with myself, your host, Prince Dykes. Today our topic is going to be something that you've been seeing in the news and the markets all over the world, the stock market is reaching new highs. We've been in a bear market now for, not a bear market, but we've been in a bull market now for the last couple of years. But to talk about this today, I brought in a very, very special guest, got the editor and chief of Yahoo Finance, Mr. Andy Sory here. He is live with us. Right now he's in Silicon Valley. Usually he's probably out in Wall Street, but today we're glad to have him. And Andy, how's it going? It's great, Prince. It's a pleasure to be here with you today. Definitely, definitely. Thank you. For people that don't know who Andy Sory is, can you please tell us a little bit about yourself? For sure. And like you said, Prince, I am the editor and chief of Yahoo Finance, which is the biggest business news platform on the planet with over 60 million monthly unique users and people come to us to check out their stocks and business news and all kinds of financial data. And I've been here at Yahoo for about two and a half years. Before that, I was the editor of Fortune Magazine and Fortune.com, which is of course a great old school business magazine. I was there for 29 years. And at the same time, I was a TV anchor on CNN for a number of years on their morning show American Morning and appeared on television radio from time to time all over the place. Awesome. That's a magnificent resume, I would say. Thank you for taking your time out to come see little, little Prince Dikes on the Prince of Investment. I'm glad to have you. I've been watching you for years across the globe on TV. All those other good stuff. And when I finally met you, it was an honor to see that you was actually a cool person in person. Thank you. And as you see, you spend a lot of time on Wall Street. The Dow Jones today, finally, all three major indexes, finally cooled off and the Dow Jones stop from his 10-year consecutive day run. Right now, we see a lot of young people. We see all this activity going on until the market, all this bull market is running a while. Do you think that this is a fake market or a fake positive? What do you have to say about what is your state of how the economy is? Is this the real market right now? Well, taking kind of a longer view, Prince, I mean, this is the long, slow recovery from the great recession of 2008. And, you know, that was the worst financial downturn that we had since the Great Depression in the 1930s. So that we knew the recovery was going to be something that was stretched out over a long period of time because things were so weak at that time. And it's been stretched out over this nine-year run. And lately, you know, I would say the stock market, the gains have sort of accelerated and people are really putting all the bad times, the last of those bad times from 2008 behind the view mirror. And that means we start to maybe hit something that's a little dangerous where people become complacent. They think good times are going to last forever. They think things are going to continue to get even better. Now, I know before you catch me on this that, you know, things are not great for all Americans everywhere. But in terms of investing in the stock market, it has been going up and up and it's been, you know, really red hot. That's true. So, like, you know, my platform before I started here on this show, the investor show, we have people that are brand new to the world of investing that, hey, I never heard of this concept, but I see this red hot market going on. And I'm thinking, hey, should I jump in right now? Or should I be a little cautious right now? Because, you know, we all know the market runs by emotions, a fear and greed. People are looking a little greedy right now. So, what advice would you have to them? Would you just sit on the sideline? Or would you say, hey, you know what? You need to go ahead and jump on this grenade. That's an excellent question. Well, when you say jump on a grenade, I'm going to tell you, heck no with that. But no, it's a real question and I know there are a lot of people struggling with it, including myself. So, if I've got some extra money on the sidelines and, you know, I see a stock or see a mutual fund or an ETF that I want to buy and I wait two weeks and it goes up and I'm like, oh, man, I missed it. So, a couple things, France, first of all, I think it's probably unassailably true that we're closer to the end than we are at the beginning. Right? I mean, it's just a fact, right? So, but that doesn't mean that there's more upside and it doesn't mean you shouldn't get in. I would not, however, at this point, mortgage the farm and put all your cash in the market because, you know, at some point, they're going to take the punchbowl away and the party is going to end. So, I think it makes sense, you know, particularly if you're under-invested, you know, to put some money in. Suppose you had $100 of cash, you know, when you put $10 or $15 on being sort of metaphorical. So, 10 or 15% of your cash into the market at this point. Sure. Would I put all of it in? I would probably caution against that. Now, I know the market's going to go up another 10 or 15% because I said that and you're going to come back after me and say, you know, I didn't get the upside because of that stupid guy you had on your show, Prince. But, you know, listen, you know, you talked about bulls. There's three kinds of animals on Wall Street. Bulls, bears and pigs. And pigs get slaughtered in the end. Wow. Okay. That's a good one. I never heard about the pig. Be careful not to be too greedy. You said that yourself, agreed that. Yes, because, you know, right now, you know, people who have no idea of never investing into the market, some people are becoming more socially aware of, hey, it's this thing about investing. I want to get into investing. I want to do it for my kids, but I'm always told to buy low and sell high. So if I went into, let's say, Walmart, for example, today, and it was a box of cereal was 30 bucks, you know, I'm probably not going to buy it. I'm going to say, wow, this thing is the outrageous price. So some people are wondering, hey, am I really going in here? Am I behind the $30 box of cereal? Or should I just wait? Should I just wait for this next economic collapse that happened in 2008? And that was a question that, you know, I was, that was a question I was having last year. I thought, hey, we're going into a presidency and, you know, historically during election season, we run into a bull market. But I thought that after we elected our new president, President Trump, I thought that, hey, the market is going to go through a very bearish moment, then we're going to get new policies and then it's going to slowly uptick. But all we saw was after the election, in the futures market, we saw a bearish trend, but then it didn't translate when the market opened. When the market opened, it started down, but then it went up. And then from the election to now, we're seeing this thing continue to go up. So people are kind of saying, hey, well, why is this coming from? And we just had a jobs report last week. Unemployment is at an all-time low. But you made a statement earlier, where you just said that, hey, you know, it's not a good time for everyone right now, but we just looked at the lowest unemployment that we've had in forever. How could that be? Well, you, okay, you touched on a number of points. Let me address a couple of them. Number one, yeah, the box of cereal was probably closer to 30 bucks than 79 cents, you know, or something like that. One of those real dirt cheap store brands, things you like to buy in at the cereal. But the problem is, Prince, I'll be honest with you. I don't know, if I don't have the fortitude to buy in in 2008, I mean, I get scared. I know that I'm supposed to like, oh, here's my moment. But all I do at that point is feel really kind of lousy, you know, and I'm like, okay, I'm not gonna do anything. Now the smart people, the great people, and you know, we met at the annual meeting of the greatest investor of our time, which is Warren Buffett's annual meeting, the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting in Omaha. And when he sees those down moments, he's like, I'm in, this is like my time. And it's hard to do. I know it sounds easy, but it's hard to do. So that's my first point. Another point I wanna make, and we can talk about this forever, because everyone loves to talk about this, which is President Trump. Everyone wants to talk about President Trump. I tell you something, I go to China and people wanna talk to me about President Trump. And everyone in China, it's just like America, they all have opinions. Some people love them, some people hate them, but everyone wants to talk about them. I think it was surprising initially. Everyone said, oh my goodness, he's such a maverick. He's so out of control, he tweets. The market's gonna go down. But if you thought about it, and the market responded to this notion, which is he's all about businesses being able to do their thing. Now I'm not passing judgment on that because business taken too far can cause excesses. But he wanted to deregulate, he wanted to cut taxes. Now the interesting thing is, so far he's, well, I guess to be fair, he's still working on it, right? Like none of this stuff has really happened particularly. I mean, he's got a new Supreme Court justice. There have been some movements on trade. He's done some things in terms of having companies build factories here, but in terms of cutting taxes dramatically and dramatically deregulating, repealing Obamacare, those things that he said were gonna spur the economy. He hasn't done yet. So my point is, again, not to pass judgment, but my point is to say that the market has moved up a lot, Prince. Thinking these things are going to happen. When we talk about what could make the market go down, I will tell you that if these things don't eventually happen, tax reform, deregulation, repeal of Obamacare, again, for better or for worse, whatever you think about it, if they don't happen, it's likely the stock market will respond negatively because it's moved up in anticipation of those things occurring. So I think that's something to really pay attention to because everyone asked me like, oh, okay, the market's gone up so much. What's gonna make it go down? And right now there are no immediate catalysts, but I think these things are out there. And then the third thing that you brought up that if you don't mind me rambling on. Is that right? Okay, the third thing that you brought up had to do with this point about jobs. And it's very interesting what's going on in the economy. And there's some places, and let's face it, this idea of people not having jobs and feeling disenfranchised had a lot to do with why President Trump was elected. People were disillusioned. They were unhappy. They didn't have jobs or they didn't have good jobs or their jobs were going away. Whether it was in a factory or a coal mine or whatever. But at the same time, as you said now, the unemployment rate has gone to a low that we haven't seen since before 9-11, to give you an idea, a very historical low. And there's states like the state of Maine all the way in the Northeast, for instance, the opposite side of the country from where you are, where the unemployment rate is so low they don't have enough workers to fill jobs. The governor of Maine has just released prisoners from prison, non felony committing prisoners who are near the end of their terms. In other words, people who haven't bought checks or haven't paid parking tickets enough so you gotta go to jail and they're coming near the end of the term. He's letting them out of jail to go to work. Number one, number two, there's a program in the state to find people to come to Maine to work. They don't have enough workers. So the whole point is that there's two points. One is geography, you gotta be in the right place. And two, and most important is skills. As you mentioned, I'm here in Silicon Valley and this place between San Francisco and San Jose right here in Northern California, the San Francisco Bay area is absolutely booming. They are building, I'm surrounded by, there's Googles putting up six or seven buildings, Apple's new headquarters going over there, Facebook's got a new campus. I mean, all these incredible companies that you hear about are booming, booming, booming. And all the people here at Yahoo and these other companies, what do they have, Prince? They have skills. Many most of them have computer science skills, engineering skills or at least skills in human resources or in marketing or in sales. So it's people who can navigate through the digital economy and you don't have to strictly speaking be a computer science or electrical engineering person although those people are the cream of the crop. You just have to be able to deal in this world in the same way that we are. I mean, pat ourselves in the back, Prince, here we are talking on Skype. You know, we're doing some stuff and we're using technology. And so those are the people who have the skills to succeed in this economy and those are the people who get the jobs. Wow, nice, nice. But Andy, I'm glad you said that before I speak to you about a couple of things. We're gonna take a quick break right here on Think Tech Hawaii to look at a couple of things. You guys stay tuned as we give you more analysis of the current market and investing. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Hello, I'm Helen Dora Hayden, the host of Voice of the Veteran, seen here live every Thursday afternoon at 1 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. As a fellow veteran and veterans advocate with over 23 years experience serving veterans, active duty and family members, I hope to educate everyone on benefits and accessibility services by inviting professionals in the field to appear on the show. In addition, I hope to plan on inviting guest veterans to talk about their concerns and possibly offer solutions. As we navigate and work together through issues, we can all benefit. Please join me every Thursday at 1 p.m. for the Voice of the Veteran. Aloha. My friend, mother, what big eyes you have. She's saying all the better to see you with my dear. That's so cool. What are you doing? Okay, cool. Research says reading from birth accelerates the baby's brain development. And you're doing that now? Oh, yeah. Yeah, this is the starting line. Posh. And this is over. You're dead. Read aloud 15 minutes. Every child, every parent, every day. Thank you guys and welcome back to the Prince of Investing right here with your host, Prince Dykes. As you guys already saw, we have the amazing guests and the story on the line. And if you haven't heard what he said earlier, I'm gonna give you a little bit of a recap, right? So Andy was speaking about, yes, we met in Omaha, Nebraska early this year at 2017, first shot halfway. And he was speaking about the fear and greed cycle. And I was very intrigued to hear someone of Andy's fortitude of the financial markets, he said, hey, when 2008 came, I was pretty fearful. It was hard for me to jump in and invest unlike some of the greatest investors that we've met, the greatest investor of our time, Warren Buffett, when he looks at an economical downturn that happened in 2008, he jumped in. Myself, where I was at in 2008, I was just learning about investing, right? I was just coming onto the market. I was just giving this thing a try. I was just trying to learn and educate myself. And when it happened, I said, man, you know what, my parents was right. They was right that I should have left this market thing along. But now learning and learning the cycles that we go through in the business cycles, I learned that that was a great opportunity. But Andy pointed out that, hey, it's not a great opportunity for, he said it is a great opportunity, but it's harder to do than to talk about. Then he spoke about the unemployment rate. We have historic lows unemployment rate that came out last week, and that he spoke about up in Maine, it's probably too cold. That's probably why they can't find people about how the governor has a program of allowing inmates to come out of prison early, non-threatening inmates to come out too high. And he's right now in Silicon Valley, even though he's based out of New York, he's in Silicon Valley. He was saying how it's booming there, how all these companies like Google and Facebook, but he was speaking about the skill set because we've seen a very low unemployment, but people are not feeling happy about the everyday job. And he said, yes, we know about the whole buy low, sell high, but it's easier said than done. Right now if we, like President Trump, he tweeted out or he said that, hey, if North Korea was to make any more aggression towards the United States, they'll be faced with fury, fury, don't quote me on that, but he was saying, hey, you know, if you mess with us again, we're gonna do something. And some people kind of attribute that to the market kind of reacting to that to fear of a possible war. If we were to possibly go to war, and you're looking at companies start to go into a depression or a recession, it's hard to sit back and say, hey, you know what, let me invest into this company. When Ford stock dropped down to a buck or something like that or less than a dollar when it was going through his hard times in 2008 and automobile crash, it was very hard to just jump in. So a lot of us right now, we're looking at this opportunity as like, hey, where are we right now? Are we getting close to the peak? Cause we know we have four cycles, right? We got the trawl, which I don't think we're in a trawl. Then you have the expansion phase, which we very much so looks like we're in expansion because of, you know, your low unemployment, your uptick in your housing sales, and all these other leading indicators. It kind of points that we're in expansion, but right after that expansion, you have a peak that's followed by a contraction. So right now we're like, okay, how close we're in this expansion phase, but how close are we in this expansion phase to the peak? If this is an expansion and this is the peak, where are we at right now? So a lot of you guys want to know, should I be investing right now? But my thing is, if you don't invest right now, what is your alternative, right? What else can you do if you don't invest? And do you want to chime in on that? If people don't want to invest right now, they're trying to almost time the market, something that the most elite professionals that I know you've known and met and spent time around, you spent time around the greatest investors of all time, and people are trying to time the market. I say, hey, you as a regular Joe, blow me, I'm not going to try to time the market. I would just say, hey, invest consistently on a consistent basis. And if we keep going in expansion and we go to a peak so big, and we go into a contraction, you continue to invest to dollar cost average out in the long run. Because what about the people who was bearish of the market two years ago? Look how much opportunity costs, look how much they missed for the last two years. Am I right on that, Andy? Yeah, you mentioned that phrase and I want to just jump on that principle. It's a very important concept, which is dollar cost averaging. And I have done that in my life and with great success, that I'm not smart, I'm not good, but I just, I'm trying to be consistent. It's like a baseball player. You just be consistent with your swing, hit your pitch, just have a system. And dollar cost averaging, which means taking the same amount of money and say you want to buy one stock, say it's Facebook or whatever, and the stock keeps going up, you keep killing yourself, but if you just buy $100 of it every month, and some months you'll buy less shares because the price goes up and some months you'll buy more as the price goes down, but you're always putting money in and you can see your cost of Facebook will change every month because the stock goes up and down, mostly up right now, but at some point it may go down. And so you are not trying to time the market and you're sort of, you're putting your emotions out of the equation. See, that's what's most important. It's like, I believe in this company and this stock over the long haul, I don't know when the best time to get in is, but what I'm doing is I'm putting my money to work all the time, every month consistently and over time I feel that's going to pay off. And speaking of Facebook and these kind of great growth companies, I just want to say a word about that if I might, Prince, and that is these companies are always too expensive. The stocks are always going up, you're always killing yourself. You're always like, shoulda, shoulda, shoulda. So that's why, and I had this with Starbucks for many years, and then I just said, I'm just going to jump in, make the plunging and kind of dollar average a little bit on it. And it worked out over time quite nicely. And one of the best things, people are going to tell you this stock, this stock, I think one of the really, and it's hard, but one of the most important core fundamentals of investing is great American growth stocks. Like if you strip out, like, oh, I like to buy turnaround stocks or I like to buy European stocks or Asia. I like the Chinese market. I am telling you that stuff is way too hard. It's complicated, you believe me, you may get lucky and buy the Chinese stock market, make a million dollars and more power to you, but I guarantee you, you do not understand the Chinese political system because people in China don't. It's very opaque, you know? So, but what you do know is I'm going to Starbucks all the time, sir, my friends. Everyone's on Facebook, Amazon, I'm buying all my stuff in Amazon. You know, this gets back to Peter Lynch, the portfolio manager, Fidelity Magellan, another legendary investor. Buy what you know. If you see it, I mean, this is one, and just one last point here. When I have this little thing, when I start shelling out all my money to something, I'm actually getting a little mad. It's like, wow, I set up a prime account on Amazon. I'm just buying all my stuff there now. That's like, well, why shouldn't I be back on the other side of the equation and be kind of an owner? You know what I mean? Like when I see a company that's taking all my money, that's when I think about buying that stuff. And, you know, I think those kinds of thoughts, that kind of thinking may be beneficial. Now, I wanted to hit onto something that you said earlier, Andy. You said that, hey, that kind of indicates that you quote me from, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but it kind of said that, hey, we're in the speculative market right now because everybody's expecting Donald Trump, or President Trump, to do such great things with these policies, reform, Obamacare, repeal, Dodd-Frank, all these great economical policies, cutting tax reform, all these things that are supposed to be great for business. So people are kind of cooking the market and kind of saying, hey, when these things take effect, they're going to be great. But you're saying, so people are kind of speculating that, hey, when these things come, great things are going to happen. And if they don't happen, that's when we can see an economical downturn. Am I correct on that, Andy? Well, I wouldn't use the word speculating. And I think maybe they're expecting. I think there is some speculation, but I wouldn't say that, oh, it's all based on a hope and a prayer because businesses in America are doing really well right now and earnings are improving. And that's one of the fundamental things that drives stock prices is earnings. When earnings go up, stocks go up. And so companies are earning good money right now. So I think you combine those two things, Prince, that they're pretty good earnings. And then people are expecting, have this expectation of President Trump's policies to be beneficial. But I do stand by that point that I think that there's probably more downside than upside, say with tax reform. If tax reform does not go through, I think there's downside. Clearly, if tax reform does go through, I think there may be some upside, but I think a lot of those gains have already been realized that the people have been anticipating that. Maybe I'm wrong and maybe the stock market goes up a lot more and that's why you should dollar average. But that's my feeling. And I think just to maybe expand on a point I just made a little while ago about American growth companies, the real story of our time is the digital revolution. And that's why this year I'm here in Silicon Valley and I know maybe I sound like I'm drinking the Kool-Aid a little bit, but let's face it, these companies, like my parent company, Yahoo, like Google and Facebook and Amazon, they are changing the world. And that is a story that's been going on for a while, but it's not stopping. It's not going to be over in the next two years. And I got to close out here and I want to say, what is your final thing? Would you want to wrap it up and let everybody know out there about this market and about investor? What's the best advice you can give them? All things in moderation, France. Like I tell you, although, as I said, I don't always follow that my own advice. Sometimes, you know, I think a little indulgence every while is fun. You know, people are like, oh, should I buy Bitcoin? I mean, listen, that's a story for a whole other day. That's to be a tiny little funny money that you like to take to Las Vegas. But I think that being a little cautious here but putting some money in by dollar averaging, moderation, I think is always a good plan. Okay. Definitely, guys. Hey, that is Andy Sory from Yahoo Finance. My name is Prince Dix. This is the Prince of Investing. Guys, as you already heard Andy Sory say, dollar costs average. Take away the emotions out the market. Don't try to time the market. Pay it like it's a bill. Put a little bit of money to the side every single month. And if we do, if you are in expansion, you get a piece of the expansion going into the peak. And if we do cut it back, you just continue to buy it and you just forget trying to time the market. But anyway, guys, my name is Prince Dix. Thank you guys for tuning in. Until next Tuesday, I'll be right here on Think, Take, Hawaii. Coming to you guys live. And I appreciate you guys. Thank you. Peace. Be safe. I'm out. Thank you.