 Hi guys, welcome back to the independent investor channel. My name is Ryan. If you really want to learn how to be a kickass investor, I would recommend that you do not fall victim to all the temptation out there to fall into every single next best thing that comes along in stock market investing. Investing all too often is made out to be something that it is not, and I think a lot of people fall victim to thinking that that is the norm and it is not. Investing done correctly has been done correctly by some of the most brilliant minds in investing in the capacity that I am going to demonstrate for you. When I take you into my portfolio, show you the multi-layer strategy that I put forth. There is no fluff. There is no hype in my portfolio. If you're looking for the next best thing, my channel is not for you. I teach value investing 101. Very, very simple. Something that I've done and evolved with. That doesn't mean that there's not some elements of my portfolio that are seeking and higher than average yield. It doesn't mean that at all and it doesn't mean that it can't mean that for you. But I think that where people really fall short and the fallacy exists in stock market investing when the message that's portrayed about stock market investing is that you have to be completely devoted to a gambling or a speculative type of avenue. And people give away 100% to their farm when in fact speculation might play an important role in the portfolio, maybe 2 to 3 or 4%, that they get way too overexposed to the market. It hiccups on them and it costs them thousands and thousands of dollars. And I think that discourages a lot of people from actually enjoying what it is that I demonstrate on my channel on how to be an investor. Like this is a program that you can look at and be like, yeah, I'm an investor and not only am I an investor but I'm a badass investor. Like I always have exposure to the big best companies out there. I mean, are you really proud to own GameStop? Right? Ask yourself. I mean, am I an investor or am I looking to speculate? Or did I take the advice of Wall Street bets because I think that I'm on the right side of a short squeeze? Ask yourself, do I really believe that AMC is the dominant stock play of the future? You know, I think those are some of the deliberations that you go through. And I'm not saying that you can't make money with either one of those stocks. I think if you come on and you say, well, Ryan, you're just sour because you don't invest in those. I'm not sour at all. I'm freaking fine. I'm working with well over a half a million dollars of net worth on a blue collar salary. And I come on and I openly share a message that I don't have to share. I don't. I come on and I share this with the sheer intent of sharing a message that works. That's it. I don't do this to put myself on a pedestal. I don't do this to put food on the table. I do this because I know for a fact that my program works and it can also work for you. Okay. So when we look at, we jump into the element of this is the self-directed Roth IRA account. This is an account that I started many, many years ago, about 15, 16 years ago. This account started with about $1,500. So as we work down the list here, I do want to earmark the passive layer in this portfolio. Which takes up a certain percentage of the portfolio. Okay. And then the active dividend growth element, the large cap growth element. Some of the speculative elements to this portfolio. I think it will be nice when I don't have to refer to these companies as such speculation. I do draw a line. I mean, these are almost bridging. Sofi as a mid-cap company and highly on specifically is verging on breaking into that mid-cap category. Once it breaks $3 billion market cap, it will. I digress. So I will earmark those different layers in the portfolio. But you are going to see that there is a lot of value jam-packed into this one portfolio. And when you want to talk about a badass investor, this is badass, man. I mean, if you took this one portfolio, coupled it with my other six accounts. This is pretty impressive. This speaks to my conviction about how important investing is. It speaks to my conviction on how high I put investing as a priority in my life. And for gaining wealth for my household and my family. And you can do the same. There is no secret sauce. There is no barriers to entry outside of the ones that you create for yourself. And I roll these out very, very frequently on the independent investor channel to share how it is that you can resonate with how I seek out my exposure as well. And how you can do it too for yourself. All right. So on the bottom end, the passive element here is made up by VYM and VNQ. Okay. So VYM is the dividend pang. It's a group of stocks represented through an exchange traded fund offered by Vanguard ticker symbol VYM. It's one of my favorites. Relatively small position in here, 2600. I did previously own this. I did liquidate within the Roth, of course, tax free leveraged it into some other positions that you see here. But decided that I really wanted to build that position back up with the market relatively high right now. And some of my speculative positions working, I will look to leverage some of those speculative dollars when they are rendered back into some more safer predictable assets like VYM and like VNQ, which is the real estate ETF, which fits really, really well into the Roth IRA. Okay. So we've got 15 shares of VNQ and 25 of VYM. That is the passive element in my portfolio. Now, I just want to caveat this. I do have an additional thrift savings plan through the military, that of which is 100% passive. So that coupled with this really kind of help complement each other. And that's really where I come with a lot of justification as to why I do what I do in this portfolio, specifically adding a lot of single stocks and large cap growth, some speculative in here. And to really identify that this portfolio is super, super important to continue to earn money in because every dollar earned in this is tax protected at $59.5. So we want to try to build this up as quickly and responsibly as we can without getting crazy. And I think we're doing a pretty good job of that. So we get into the large cap, dividend element, value category, start off with Apple computers right here at the top end of 75 shares. Geez. That's badass. A $10,000 bill on Apple computers. That's fabulous. A new investor could tune into me and be like, okay, this got talks different. And I do. I do. I don't sit there and, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think words are idiotic when it comes to investing. That's awesome. 75 shares in Apple computers. You can say what you want about the company, whether or not you think it's going down or up. I'm an investor. And to be able to invest in the best technology company out there as far as, you know, product, product that they offer quality of product, where they're going with their technology, where they're going with their ecosystem. It's right there at the top, baby. Apple computers, man, you just got to own it. It's that simple. I got my portfolio and I would consider it somewhat naked if I didn't have this incredible company in my portfolio. I'm down about 8% than it. I obviously entered into it. Post-split, it came off. I entered it around 132-ish, I think. Something like that. I think long-term, this will be great. It's just a position that I want to own long-term. And I look at it that way. I look at it that way. Is this a company that I want to own 10, 20 years down the line? Can it get me? Or help get me to my financial goals down the line? And yeah, I think down the line, I can justify just giving Apple computers and my inherited Roth IRA to them in the capacity that it's going to grow to. And I'll put my odds on the side of Apple computers all day. That's just how my deliberation and thought process works. Right below it in the healthcare with Ab-V, as well. Nice 25 share position, nice dividend payer, $3,000 bill there, up just marginally at 2% in Ab-V. The two below that are some speculative names that I took some small positions in. I really like to both of them. The first is Affirm Holdings and the second is Asana. The ticker symbols are there, AFRM for Affirm and ASAN, A-S-A-N for ASANA, Inc. Those are some interesting plays. Affirm allows you to buy and pay later. I have that function through my specific Shopify site at independentinvestorgroup.com. That's powered through Shopify, allows customers to buy the product now and pay later. Kind of like a layaway type of opportunity. And then Asana is a data and analytics within the workplace to analyze efficiencies or lack thereof and give recommendations for how they can improve efficiency within the workplace. I'm fascinated by these two starting 25 share positions in each of these. I think these are going to be hyper-growth companies. I wanted to grab both of them and did. Right below that, Alibaba in the discretionary space, 25 shares represents a pretty big stab at this. Alibaba is out of favor in the eyes of the stock market right now with some of the negative sentiment. I could care less. I took this as a strategic buy. I was trading the position within this over the last couple months. Took some really nice house profit in Alibaba. Felt like it was a little bit overbought in the 235s, 240 range. So that's where I took profit and I swung it back into this position at around the 215 range. Obviously, you can see here I'm a little bit down, not too bad, but I think that it'll base here. I think it's an entry right now in Alibaba. So I'm good to own 25 shares here, $5,000 bill in Alibaba. We're a good city group, fantastic, financial, global payer over 50 shares. We're up nicely 15% in the company. What else can I say? Salesforce, the most bullish in the large cap Dow component here, large cap technology space with consumer relations management software. They are the best in the business, came off a fabulous quarter. $6,000 bill and fills up a nice element of cloud computing within the technology space placed within a Roth IRA of a self-directed nature and the rest is history. Absolutely fantastic. CrowdStrike right below it is in computing security and it is done within the cloud, which is an interesting play here. CrowdStrike is really one of those companies I'm very excited about. This is not for the faint of heart. This has been all over the place. I have been down huge, I have been up huge. It's all over the place. Right now, marginally down just over 1%. I'm happy to see this thing just static for a while because, like I said, very, very volatile trading range here, very, very high growth company in CrowdStrike. But I think it's the best in the business at what they do. So very important to earmark, again, in the large cap tech space, cloud computing cybersecurity subsector. Right below that in the telecom space is one of the largest positions in this. Three shares of Google. I wish I owned more to own Google here at $7,290. We're up marginally 5% in the position. Very, very nice. This is a long position for me. It's one that I just want to hold and hold forever. And in 20 years, this thing ought to get me where I want to be and then some. And again, it's one of those that I look at the portfolio and I think, man, portfolio looks kind of blank without Google in there. It's just a money-making machine. It is the ad space king along with Facebook. It complements the Facebook position that I have in the other portfolio. And just glad to own it here in the large cap growth category. Google, G-O-O-G-L with the voting rights shares. IBM Old Tech has been on an absolute tear here, 27 shares. We bought this relatively low. We had an opportune. I figured, you know, if I was going to keep trying with IBM, eventually I would win with it. And it's just like me to not own the company when it does this. But it's nice to see that I actually had conviction. It was really surrounded around the Red Hat acquisition and their hybrid cloud business, which is really the unspoken gem of IBM. Their legacy business will always continue to be good and really solidify that dividend that they pay that I enjoy so much. But the hybrid cloud play with IBM is the big one in Old Tech. So, you know, hey, look, if you're going to say, hey, this portfolio sucks and this isn't my way, that's great. You're all entitled to your opinion. But first and foremost, good on me for coming on and sharing my actual portfolio. This is it. This is how it shakes out. And I would contend this is pretty badass. This is an incredibly well-crafted portfolio. The allocation is good. It gets me good exposure to all of the big companies that I want exposure to. Some passive growth and some speculative growth in the portfolio. So it makes sense to me and if it makes sense to me, then it's good to go. Hopefully it can make sense to you guys and how I seek out success in the market. J&J, one of my favorites in healthcare, dividend king. So we're looking good there at 25 shares. I took a little bit of profit off of Johnson & Johnson. That position was getting a little bit out of control. Felt like it was relatively fair valued. I think you can buy Johnson & Johnson at any time. But if you can get it out a little bit of a discount, you're doing better for yourself and it very rarely ever provides that entry. So there's a few stocks like that. Procter & Gamble is another one. Johnson & Johnson, if you can just buy it, go ahead and buy it. Unlike Kimberly Clark in the Staples category, which is a good buy right here. I think you're at 129. I think it's a really good entry to pick up this fantastic Staples company. So we're right below it, Coca-Cola in the same sector as Staples. You can pick up the dividend king anytime you really want. I think there's a little bit more of an opportunistic opportunity with Kimberly Clark. So you can see there, Coca-Cola up over 6% doing well there. McDonald's is kicking ass. Fantastic. So absolutely couldn't ask any better in the discretionary space there for McDonald's up close to 20%. Merck there, we just had the spinoff of Organin. And those shares are right below. I've emboldened those shares up a little bit. It's come off a little bit. I think that's due to just the new reemergence to the market. And I think they'll be fine. I like everything I read there with OGN. That's another little bit of a speculative play. I'm okay with that. It's a really good suite of medicines that they've got coming out and really good portfolio of patents that they have on their suite of medicines at OGN. Royal Dutch Shell, Big Oil doing great. Compliments the Exxon position that I've got here, which is huge. Took that into just the darkest of deepest of waters for a while and just held true on it. And I'm being rewarded for that conviction on Big Oil. And I do see these coming back. I see them coming back in a big way. And we'll just continue to own them and rake in the dividend. We're totally fine with those. Raytheon in industrials are very nice. Sofi in the speculative growth. That compliments my highly onholding in here. We're just continuing to be an investor in these companies because I think long-term those are going to be the real moneymakers. In this portfolio, I've got some strategic price targets set for them. We'll reevaluate and we'll roll those out to you guys in time as they materialize as those businesses need to have a chance to get their footing and address their market that they're going after. And so that rounds out the portfolio review, guys. Really, I mean, you can say what you will. Everybody's got their own application when they look to deploy their strategy. I would encourage you to do the same. This is my independent investor opportunity that I roll out to you guys. This is what makes sense to me. And what makes sense to me may not, in its totality, make sense to you. What can make sense to you are the deeper themes that I earmark, passive investing, even in growth investing. A little bit of a speculative element to the portfolio. I have it all, right? Those are the themes that should resonate to the masses. And that's the badass element to the portfolio that I speak about. As if you appreciate the message, want to make sure and subscribe to the channel. Leave your comments at the bottom of the video. Share the video with anybody out there that you know would enjoy in a few minutes, sitting across from a YouTube content creator with over 25 years of investing experience, sharing a very, very mature six-figure portfolio. I do that for transparency, blowing down barriers for new investors to entry to their wealth of building journey, looking to empower one investor at a time. Guys, thank you so much for tuning in to the message. And good luck in your investment future.