Ep679: Noel Smith – Always Have Risk Measurements in Place

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Quick take

BIO: Noel Smith is the Chief Investment Officer of Convex Asset Management and the Head of Options Trading at Tanius Technology.

STORY: Noel and his partner invested in Enron stock whose price kept falling. Every time the price dropped, Goldman Sachs would come in and buy like 50,000 out-of-the-money calls. This made the partners hold onto the stock, eventually riding it to zero.

LEARNING: Have risk measurements in place that you know you will not break. Have some percentage that you’re willing to lose.

 

“Learning about options and how they affect the marketplace is much more important than you think.”

Noel Smith

 

Guest profile

Noel Smith is the Chief Investment Officer of Convex Asset Management and the Head of Options Trading at Tanius Technology.

A member of the CME, CBOT, and CBOE, Noel has over 25 years of experience trading volatility, market making, and managing risk.

Noel was previously the CIO and Portfolio Manager of two separate Chicago-based proprietary derivatives trading firms. Additionally, he was the seed investor who financed the launch of global high-frequency trading firm GETCO LLC (KCG/Virtu), which grew to account for 20%+ of trading volume in the U.S.

Worst investment ever

Noel and his partner had a position in Enron, the ninth largest market cap company at the time. Enron started to lose money. Each time the stock dropped 10%, Goldman Sachs would come in and buy like 50,000 out-of-the-money calls. Such stunts would convince people, Noel included, to hold onto the stock. And so the partners kept holding onto the stock as the price went up and down. Eventually, they rode the stock to zero, losing their entire investment.

Lessons learned

  • Have risk measurements in place that you know you will not break.
  • Have some percentage that you’re willing to lose.

Andrew’s takeaways

  • A good investor has set up a structure of how to invest and doesn’t second guess the structure.

Actionable advice

You always have to be able to see the cause and effect of everything.

Noel’s recommendations

Noel recommends learning about options and how they affect the marketplace.

No.1 goal for the next 12 months

Noel’s number one goal for the next 12 months is to develop his business and get more people to understand why options are useful and not to be afraid of them.

Parting words

 

“Thank you for having me today. Hopefully, everyone got something out of this.”

Noel Smith

 

Read full transcript

Andrew Stotz 00:02
Hello fellow risk takers and welcome to my worst investment ever stories of loss to keep you winning. In our community. We know that to win in investing, you must take risk but to win big, you've got to reduce it. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives to join me go to my worst investment ever.com and sign up for my free weekly become a better investor newsletter where I share how to reduce risk and create grow and protect your well. Fellow risk takers this is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz, from a Stotz Academy, and I'm here with featured guests, Noel Smith, Noel, are you ready to join the mission? Yes, I am. So let me introduce you to the audience. Noel is the chief investment officer of convex Asset Management and head of options trading at tennis technology. And most important thing is that Noah is versed in high frequency trading relevant market structure and the underlying technology he's been in the business of managing risk for over 25 years, maybe you could just start off by telling us what is the unique value that you are bringing to this wonderful world.

Noel Smith 01:21
I think one of the things that is more unique about what we would talk about is that my background is proprietary trading and market making. And most of the people that actually work in the sausage factory of the marketplace aren't usually people that are speaking publicly, writing publicly or whatever else, you either get, you know, the eggheads that do white papers, or you have the people that are slaving away in some office tower in Chicago or New York, which was basically what I used to do. And they have no incentive whatsoever to be public, frankly, it's probably the opposite. The more public you are, the more you might talk about things that you can give away to your competition. So most people with my background, don't ever talk publicly. So there's a little bit of uniqueness in that regard.

Andrew Stotz 02:06
And for the people that don't understand it at all, think about my mother listening, and you know, she's like market making. Okay, sounds interesting. But could you simply describe what you did as a market maker? What does it mean to be a market maker?

Noel Smith 02:20
Sure. So when you look for a quote, in something like Apple, or say Apple options, there is a number on your screen and say the apple price is $150. Bid at $151. offered, somebody has to come up with that number. And that number is created by people like me, they say I will pay $150 for 500 shares of Apple, or conversely, I will pay, you know, $1.50 for 50, Apple options or 100, Apple options. And then I will pay, you know, $1 for 1000, Apple options, etc. There is a band around but what I mean by a market maker is the guy that actually makes the market, the person that produces the price that you can interact with.

Andrew Stotz 03:00
And if you think about that, you know, most people would think about a market as well. I thought there's just a buyer and a seller and they come together, why do you need a market maker?

Noel Smith 03:09
Same reason why if you were to buy or sell a car, you probably don't always go to the individual that wants to buy your car, you might end up going to a dealer. And the reason you'd go to a dealer is because of liquidity and time and ease. So let's say you have a $50,000 car that you think is worth $50,000. But the dealer gives you, you know, 48,500 for it, you know that you're losing 1500 bucks, but you're in and out in 10 minutes, and it's a piece of cake and you've got rid of your car. And now you can get a new car, or $55,000 with that same dealer or sell to you for that spread on both sides. That's basically what it is. I mean, it doesn't really matter what the thing is, you're making a market, whether it be BMWs, or Apple stock.

Andrew Stotz 03:47
And if it go back in time, let's go back a couple of 100 years when the US stock market started. And then as it developed, we had you know counters and at those counters were market makers in particular stocks, or dealers and all that. What's the history of market making? Is that would it be the case to say that the history of market maker was that you know, in the stock exchange, there would be certain places where different people would be making a market in a particular group of stocks or individual stocks? Is that how it started?

Noel Smith 04:22
So how it really started is not like that. Okay, so the Dutch started trading stocks with the Dutch East India Company in 1650s, or whatever. But in the United States went to Wall Street a little bit. But the real markets that most people don't really understand that good a lot of this out of Chicago, and those markets came out of the grain markets. So if you are a Midwestern farmer making, you know, growing corn, and you weren't really sure about your crops, so you would go to a futures exchange with the Chicago Board of Trade. And you would sell or buy a futures contract depending on what you thought your harvest is going to be for that year. So the derivatives market in Chicago is really rooted and commodities, specifically grains. And then as that matured, it got into pork bellies and hogs and you know, beans, etc, that matured into other instruments like Euro dollars, bonds, and then options, and most underlying stocks used to trade in New York. And then the derivatives of those instruments were traded out of Chicago. So I think you'll find that if you talk to people like me, that are market making in the option space, pretty much a lot of us come out of Chicago, I'm born and bred out of Chicago. So I'm happy I happen to be born into it. But it's very common to have options guys and futures guys come out of Chicago.

Andrew Stotz 05:38
And maybe for the listeners, you can't see, but you've got all these computer screens behind you. And you know, showing lots of charts and graphs and things like that. Maybe you could just explain, you know, what your investment style or strategy is at convex asset management. So people understand, like, how are you trading versus another, maybe that will also help them understand the story when we get to it.

Noel Smith 06:01
So as a market maker, you know, say for instance, let's stick with the car analogy, because it's something I think anybody can understand. So if you are a BMW, buyer and seller, you're a dealer, okay? If somebody comes to you and says, I want to sell a BMW say, Okay, I think it's worth $50,000, I'll pay you 49, you say, Okay, fine, I'll buy one, one BMW for $49,000. And the guy comes back to you 10 minutes later says something like, well, I've got five more to sell your wish, you would have told me you had six all along, I'll pay you $45,000 for the next five, then he comes back an hour later says I've got 1000 more to sell. And you're like, Well, this is a totally different situation. And I'll pay $20,000. And at some point, as the dealer, the light goes off in your head, this guy is doing something for a larger reason. And when you go from being a pit trader, like I was to being a proprietary trader, which is trading with your own money, then you start to realize what the other side is doing more and more. And then what you really the aha moment for me was, you have this total disconnect between the market making and proprietary trading community, and the hedge fund community, the hedge fund community is basically a marketing campaign. And then you have the proprietary trading community, which is the opposite of that, there is no marketing, the only function for a proprietary trading firm is to make money. They don't care at all, what you look like what you sound like, or anything like that the only function in life is to make money, or lose less same time. And so what I've tried to do is bridge that gap. And that's a long winded answer to your question, which is, what are we doing? We're trying to bridge that gap, we're trying to bring some of the ideas and uniqueness out of the secret of parts of the Chicago and New York trading community that other investors don't really ever see, you know, there's a million Long, short hedge funds out there. Yeah, we're gonna go long Tesla and short, Exxon Mobil, okay, fine. But nobody gets to see the kind of strategies that are being run at like Citadel, Susquehanna optiver, jump, etc, you know, these are the firms that I came out of, and that is the trading that we try to bring to our investors.

Andrew Stotz 08:06
And so what you're saying, if I understand it correctly, it's what you're saying is that you're kind of a market maker, you're in the middle, and you're able to understand the flows better than let's say, a hedge fund would. Now they just think, okay, I want to buy this, and then they put in an order for it, whereas you're seeing, the example you use about the car is basically starting to as, as you started to, as the seller started to reveal that they had more inventory than you thought, things start changing in the way that you start pricing and thinking about things. And so for investors in your fund, basically, they're able to get you in the middle getting a feel for what that is, and then taking a position in relation to that, or maybe you explain it a little bit more.

Noel Smith 08:51
Sure. So I don't know how much detail you'd like me to go into. But we have basically four trading, things that we do. In no particular order, I'll just kind of go through them, we trade volatility, basically, what we're trying to do is collect money when there's nothing going on. So what we're trying to do is, there is this declination in price over time, and volatility if nothing happens, so if if you have car insurance, and you don't crash, you keep paying premiums, and then you never crash, and then the insurance company collects your premium, and then they never pay you anything, it's just a waste of money for you. The dream on your end is that if you do crash, it's not financially punishing for you. So what we try to do is collect some of that premium from the marketplace. And we do that in various different ways. And we spread it off and other other different ways. So that is a way to make money if nothing happens. So if we you know, we put on a position and we fast forward a month and everything is exactly the same, we would expect a positive p&l if nothing has changed. I can talk about that for three hours, but I'll keep it short. But the next trade is more of a bond relative value arbitrage within the futures options. So we're not creating bonds, we're not creating bond futures, but we're creating bond futures options. And what we're doing is we're looking at a curve on the surface of this options surface. And we're looking at what we think events will make the market move versus what the marketplace is implying. So if there is a CPI number, like there was earlier today, or PPI number tomorrow, and we the bond market is pricing in a 10, tick move for the bonds, and we think it's worth 12. Well, we think 10 is too cheap. And we're gonna buy that and we hope to make two to four ticks or something like that. So that's what we do in the bond trade. Our next trade is a dispersion trade, what we do with the dispersion trade, is we're typically selling volatility in the s&p 500 index. And then we're simultaneously buying the constituents of that same s&p 500 index. So that there is a netting effect between the volatility between what is expected in the index versus the components of that same index can get really wonky. And there's a lot of ways to describe that. But again, I'll keep it short. And our fourth main trade is just volatility. Volatility arbitrage, so we're doing is we're buying volatility and say Exxon, and we're selling volatility and say, Chevron, and we hope that they both go the way we want them to we make money on both sides. So there's a very, very condensed version of what well,

Andrew Stotz 11:15
well explained. And for the futures options you talked about for bonds, ultimately, you're trading the same thing that a bond investor would be trading, which is what's your expectation of interest rates? Or what is the CPI? Tell us about the way the markets proceeding that and then you come up with a thesis, and then you're, you're betting on that thesis, but you're doing it through a different type of instrument than a typical, let's say, bond fund guy would do it? Is that correct? And if so, what do you get from that instrument? That that, let's say, a typical bond investor wouldn't get?

Noel Smith 11:49
So your assumptions are very reasonable, but unfortunately, incorrect. Yeah, so a bond, a bond on a call. And so a bond investor is going to look at, you know, what Powell was saying, and where do we think interest rates are gonna be, so they're gonna look at a CPI and say, okay, CPI is coming in, in line. So we think that, you know, rates are going to top out at 5%, in May, and then they're going to, you know, the fed fund futures or the Eurodollar market, saying that we're gonna go down through the end of 2023, and 2024. And so there's this kind of shape of the curve. That is relevant to me. But I'm more interested in the instantaneous move of a CPI or Non Farm Payroll number or whatever else, because the market price of that straddle. In other words, the simultaneous purchase and purchase of call and purchase of a put has some kind of distribution around it. And what we're basically saying is that distribution is either too wide or too narrow. And we take the opinion around that. So we're not saying that I think that Paul was wearing glasses today, therefore, he has a slightly different vibe in his whatever. And we're trying to, you know, come up with some kind of voodoo as to why we think that rates are gonna go up a quarter point or down or quarter point, or up a quarter point 30 days, hence, I have no idea any more than anybody else on that stuff. But we do have an opinion on, say, non farm payrolls, because we have dozens and dozens or hundreds of data points, saying that non farm payrolls with these conditions will typically move the bonds 25 ticks, okay. And then if they're priced at 35, ticks, well, then we can make a trade there. So what we're doing is we're using specific math to make a judgement as opposed to something that is more nebulous, like, What words did Paul not use? Or did Yellen use in contrast to Powell three seconds later in some other different speech, that's tough to me is to a morphus. And too difficult to price. So what we're doing is we're using specific math to come up with a judgment. And that judgment is an extrapolation. We're, we're looking at past data, like everybody else, and we're coming up with a present value, and then we're forwarding that value, we're coming up with something that we think is correct.

Andrew Stotz 13:54
And just my last question, just because I find it fascinating. It's not an area I know a lot about, but in your space, you know, you're doing a lot of, as you say, high frequency trading. Does that mean that you do not have longer term themes or views? Or do you also have longer term themes or views about things? Just curious, like, how does your thinking, you know, lineup?

Noel Smith 14:22
So I'm not currently high frequency trading, it is a different business. I have a background in it. And I have association with it, but it's not my core business right now. So I have the same opinion as everybody else. I'm like, say Tesla cars, they're cool cars, they're they're fast and all this other stuff. But the Tesla stock I have no idea if it's worth 192 or 182 or 202. I have no opinion on that. If anything, I think it's probably worth like 90 Do you know not 192? I mean, it seems so high to me. But, but here we are. We look at usually running snapshots of volatility and the reason we use volatility is because We find it to be the most actionable and accurate information. And the reason it's accurate and actionable is because the smartest money in the world typically goes into the volatility markets, because they get so much leverage. And if they're correct, they can be very handsomely paid. So the information that you can glean from that we find to be more useful and more, we're more able to pinpoint it, as opposed to, again, what is Paul doing, what kind of a hat is Paul wearing? And therefore we kind of, we tried to divine some information from Paul's hat. That to me is, it's I'm being silly, but it's not that far from what CNBC does, right? They come up with some kind of weird narrative about the marketplace, and something else that I just find to be irrational. So what we're really doing is almost all of our judgment is math based, there is some discretion, but it is a minority of our judgment.

Andrew Stotz 15:56
When I started as an analyst, it was 1993 here in Thailand, and that basically meant we were just leaving the chalkboard era, where people were putting up quotes on the chalkboards. And we were into the digital era, where and what was funny was that, you know, I worked with different, you know, brokers, and most of their volume was local traders. And they would come in to the, to the, to the brokerage, and they'd sit down in front of these boards with all of these LED lights. And what was kind of surprising to me was, there's a lot of grandmas and grandpas that came with their lunch bales. And they came and they traded, they all knew each other, and they had a lot of fun. And they traded and they watched each other's trades, and they talked, but they saw those flashing digital lights LEDs as like them trading against their friend in the room in some ways. And I always used to try to tell my students as well as the clients, like, there's something going on behind that with millions of people. And then there's people that are really experts in that company. But then there's people behind those people who are betting on the behavior, not of the stock, but on the other people's reaction to that behavior. And then there's people behind those people who are trying to understand and profit from the behavior of that second group of people's interpretation of the first group of people's interpretation of you know, and I think when I think about what you're talking about, a lot of what what you're doing it sounds like is basically understanding the behaviors of the market and figuring out how do you profit from it with that? Am I wrong again, in my explanation, or let me know. So

Noel Smith 17:39
I feel like I've been too critical? No, you're not wrong. It is. There are several different levels of information you can focus on. And any one of which can be correct. We focus on volatility simply because we feel like that's where the most action is, you know, coming up with a discounted cash flow model on Tesla, that's a fine business. But I would never have bought Tesla stock based on any of that training. However, I can buy Tesla options all day and participate in the madness of Tesla going from, you know, zero to a zillion. And, you know, by one of my first forays, and that was the tech bubble, right, you know, I was standing on the floor, and I saw everyone, people assume that nobody knew the tech bubble was a bubble. That's nonsense. Everybody knew. Everyone knew these companies had no profitability is two guys in a closet with a stock with a sock puppet. Everyone knew that was not sustainable. But you know, for every guy that was so smart, not making a trade, the guy standing right next to him was making $10 million a day, you know, trading these crazy things. And eventually, the guy who's not making any money, because he's too smart to make money starts doing it too. And that's how bubbles. Right, exactly. That's exactly right. And that's, that's where the people who don't have good risk, your risk tolerance is in. That's how they get wiped out. Yeah.

Andrew Stotz 18:57
Well, I really appreciate you taking the time to explain it to area that I don't know that much about and I know you've given the listeners some really good background. One last question related to that is just for a young person that says, I want to do that. What is the best pathway to it, I guess, studying math, or are there any ideas about how to get started in what you're doing?

Noel Smith 19:20
Yeah, if you're consuming this in real time, you want real advice. One of the one of the most underappreciated jobs where you can actually do something compared to your peers, is become a meteorologist. It's one of the best hottest things that's out there right now. If you can forecast the weather. And you can program you can basically start a roughly half a million dollars a year at three dozen firms I can think of it is one of the most profitable trades and the last few years has been net gas and energy and people that are able to forecast weather well and put that into code. They can write their own ticket.

Andrew Stotz 19:55
Well, there's great advice. So now it's time to share your work. first investment ever and since no one goes in, and their worst investment that year will be, tell us a bit about the circumstances leading up to it, then tell us your story.

Noel Smith 20:08
I don't know how to answer the question because there's so many bad trades. I've just had innumerable bad trades. The first one that comes to mind is Enron, and I don't, it's probably my biggest loss ever, in terms of ego, absolute dollars. Being wrong for so wrong for so long. It was just a disaster of all kinds. So Enron was like the ninth largest market cap company. And, you know, it was, you know, pretty, you know, I don't know what that analog today would be. But you know, a really big company that you see trade all day, every day. You know, not quite Google, but something less than Google, but not by much. And so we had a position and Ron, we started to lose money in it. And when I say we, I really mean my partner, and we run the company. And we would sit there next to each other, and dialogue over trades pretty much all day every day. And as Enron started to lose money, the tricky part about Enron was the information that came in as it was going down was even more wrong. So typically, what happens is when a stock goes down, or something moving, like bonds in 2022, bonds are going down, everyone was short term, a lot of people made money being short bonds, the problem with Enron was that people would come in the socket go down 10%. And then Goldman Sachs would come in and buy like, 50,000 out of the money calls. And we're like, ah, you know, do we really want to get out of this thing. Now, when you know, somebody's out there trying to buy, you know, 100 million dollars worth of upside. And so we stuck with it. And then you just pick, pick that story and repeat it like 10 times, it just each increments and run didn't just go down, it went down and rip back up, down or rip back up. And there's just so many head fakes, and the information and the quality of the information and the size of that information was such that it basically made us write it to zero, which was a very costly mistake.

Andrew Stotz 22:06
And how would you summarize the lessons that you learned?

Noel Smith 22:11
So this is the one review my partner and I only had one trade, where he and I were like, kind of mad at each other? Well, we had to Kmart, Sears and Enron, where I said, I know why we're doing what we're doing. But what we're doing is wrong. Maybe we should stop doing what we're doing. And his answer to that was, well, we make a lot of money doing what we're doing. And I don't want to change the process, because of new information. And that makes sense to me, too. So he persuaded me and we both voted zero. And we both never talked about it again. That was that, that's how it went. But having risk measurements in place that you know, you will not break it all real traders don't don't really break their risk measurement, right, everyone, if you're a real trader, I kind of pause on that. Because basis risk is a different type of risk that a lot of guys get blown out on. But when it comes to straight, you know, prices go up, prices go down. Almost nobody that's a professional really gets that worked by that. Typically, you know, you have some percentage that you're willing to lose. And then no matter how much you think it stinks, you just get out. And we didn't get out of Enron. At some point, we're like, Okay, well, now it's five bucks, who cares? Because it would even be worse if it went from five to 20. And we sold it all at five, from when we brought it from 60, or whatever it was. So that was a disaster. You know, I don't even know what to tell the audience as to like what you learned from that other than what they already know, which is never be wed to your trade. To me and Ron was no different than any other stock, they're just, you know, three or four ticker letters and a ticker symbol. And there's, they're indistinguishable from each other.

Andrew Stotz 23:52
And maybe I'll share a couple of things. I mean, the first thing is that particularly companies that are I would say good or big, they tend to go down over time. And as you said, you know, that, you know, it has a shoot up and all that. And so then it started to go, but it takes time for it to unfold. And so, I think that's a lesson, you know, it's not all and that's the hard part is trying to figure out which one is this the one that's really going down to zero, but don't expect it, you know, it's just going to be easy. It's going to be hard as it's going down trying to figure out what to do. The second thing that's really mean you know, what I'm thinking about when you talked about like applying the system and the you know, like your business partners said, you know, I don't want to, you know, break the system and we're making money from it. It's such a hard thing because a good investor has set up a structure of how to do it and I have a structure in my mind quantitative my I would call mine, slow quant in the sense that you know, we don't trade that off. And the main thing is that every time that I've overwritten my system and my structure, I've ended up underperforming. And I've learned to not second guess, the structure. But I've also learned that there are occasionally times that I need to break the structure. And to me, that's like the hardest part of the whole thing. How do you think about like, how originally? Do you stick with something? Or do you have to break it at some point? I'm just curious how you handle that.

Noel Smith 25:35
So the other trade that I didn't, you know, you asked for one of my worst trades I gave you, Enron. But my other answer, my other answer would have been much more contemporaneous to today was folding volatility of downside puts in 2022. So just last year, we had a bunch of downside puts, and our main signals told us to get out of the market and in Delta, one fashion and the beginning of January. So that was golden. That was perfect. But what we did is we held long downside volatility in the s&p 500. That was a just a tremendous drag on our p&l. That was, you know, so we, you know, we got out of the car, wait for it to crash, and it just never did, you know, and so we got out of our Long's and we just waited for our long puts to pay us. And the market went down, and we lost money on our long puts, which is absolutely maddening. So to answer your question, we ended up exiting a lot of those trades in June, simply because it kind of like the Enron thing, they're just losing money. I don't know when they're gonna stop losing money. And it's all I can stand on, I can't stand anymore. That's it. And actually glad that I did, because it would have continued to lose money today, you know, the 20% or 30%, that those are two wingy were like 12 to 17% downside, and the s&p 500 continues to die, the options. So that is just something that we violated our own rules in the sense that we exited a lot of that. And I'm glad that we did, but we had it on pretty big because it worked so well during COVID, those puts really paid well. So that same structure we had on the 2022. And it never paid. Yeah, so we did both.

Andrew Stotz 27:16
Yeah, it's fascinating. I mean, I recently my model started to give me some indications to go into Financials before Silicon Valley Bank. And we did put a small position on it. And in the end, I decided to override the model and exit the position. Because what after what happened was Silicon Valley Bank, I just felt like, there's just, I just don't see the upside in it. So I ended up getting out of it. And really getting out of that position was also just for my own comfort, I don't want to spend the next 12 months defending the position that, you know, could be under just a lot of pressure. So it's very real things that you're discussing, which is pretty exciting. So based upon what you learn from this story, and what you continue to learn what action here comes the hard part, what action would you recommend our listeners take to avoid suffering the same fate?

Noel Smith 28:10
What is it that you're losing? And how do you fit the data? So do you say that? Well, I've been long volatility in the downside for 25 years, and you're 25, which is 2022. lost money? So does that mean all the other data is now invalidated? And this is the new regime? Or is this just an outlier? And everything is the way it always has been? Or is it with the advent of your date expiration options, things have all kinds of changes, they always continuously are. My answer to that is, you always have to be able to see the cause and effect on a lot everything. The major difference in 2022 was interest rates moving a lot, right. And that affected, really everything. And then if you're looking at the s&p 500, it would basically go down and crash up, go down crash up, which is almost the inversion of what you typically would expect, you know, go up and crash down. And why is that and you have to see the unseen. And that's such a stupid thing to say in a lot of ways, because I mean, I can't tell you to see what you don't see. But what I started to realize is that all the people that blew out in COVID, with volatility weren't there for 2022. And a lot of the portfolios that are there that people buy protection on, were being pushed to the sidelines because of interest rates. With the ascension of interest rates, people were starting to de risk. And when you don't have a car, you don't have to go out and buy car insurance. So there is less to insure. So that is one of the reasons that I kind of figured out after some losses that you know, when there's less things to buy volatility on or buy insurance on. The need for insurance isn't there. So if you do have a crash, there's no payout.

Andrew Stotz 29:57
i What's a resource that you'd recommend for our listeners?

Noel Smith 30:01
Well, selfishly, our website convex aim.com is more information about what we do. But what we do is fairly complex, and I in no way want to sound condescending. But it's not something that most retail people can really just, hey, well, I like what that guy does. So I'm just gonna go do what that guy does. Learning about options, and how options affect the marketplace is much more important than you think. If you don't already know understand that, because options often will drive the primary thing that you're thinking about, even though you think that options are derivative of the thing, which is true, but a lot of times the derivative will drive the thing. And that's something that I think anybody can get an education on.

Andrew Stotz 30:41
Great. Well, last question, what's your number one goal for the next 12 months?

Noel Smith 30:48
To really develop my business and become, do more things like this, let people know that, you know, I understand the business that I'm in. And I'm new to the public part of this business because it was never in my best interest to be public. But I wanted to develop my business and get more people to understand why options are a useful thing and not to be afraid of them.

Andrew Stotz 31:10
Right. And that's, I have links to your company's website and any other stuff in the show notes so everybody can go check it out. Well, listeners, there you have it another story of loss to keep you winning. Remember, I'm on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. If you've not yet joined that mission, just go to my worst investment ever.com And join the free weekly become a better investor newsletter to reduce risk in your life. As we conclude, no, I want to thank you again for joining our mission and on behalf of a stocks Academy I hereby award you alumni status for turning your worst investment ever into your best teaching moment. Do you have any parting words for the audience?

Noel Smith 31:50
Thank you for having me today. Hopefully everyone got something out of this.

Andrew Stotz 31:54
Definitely we know I got a lot and I know my listeners did. We appreciate you being on and that's a wrap on another great story to help us create, grow and protect our well fellow risk takers. Let's celebrate that today. We added one more person to our mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. This is your worst podcast hose Andrew Stotz saying. I'll see you on the other side.

 

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About the show & host, Andrew Stotz

Welcome to My Worst Investment Ever podcast hosted by Your Worst Podcast Host, Andrew Stotz, where you will hear stories of loss to keep you winning. In our community, we know that to win in investing you must take the risk, but to win big, you’ve got to reduce it.

Your Worst Podcast Host, Andrew Stotz, Ph.D., CFA, is also the CEO of A. Stotz Investment Research and A. Stotz Academy, which helps people create, grow, measure, and protect their wealth.

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