Ep698: Shawn O’Malley – Geopolitics Can Take Your Investment to Zero

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 risks 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 risks and create grow and protect your wealth. Fellow risk takers this is your words podcast hosts Andrew Stotz, from a Stotz Academy, and I'm here with featured guest, Shawn O'Malley, Shawn, are you ready to join the mission? I'm ready. And I was just mentioning my piddly little email. And I really am excited to have you on because you have an amazing email that you're sending out on a regular basis that I want the audience to know more about, I receive it. And I also, you know, get all the downloads and listen to them from your podcasts that you're involved with. So let me introduce you to the audience. Shawn is the chief editor and writer of the we study markets newsletter from the investors Podcast Network, which is the world's largest stock investing podcast with over 110 million downloads. He writes for an audience of over 30,000 readers daily breaking down the most important stories in financial markets. With longer write ups, exploring financial history, the economics behind everyday life and insights from legendary investors, Shawn hopes to help keep people informed about current news while adding the perspective of a long term investor. Shawn, take a minute and tell us about the unique value you are bringing to this wonderful world.

Shawn O'Malley 02:01
Yeah, first of all, thank you for having me on Andrew, it's, it's a pleasure. And I'm excited. And yeah, so I guess just to touch on a little bit, for what we do, it's, I write every single day, along with two co writers, a markets newsletter. And really, the goal was to, I guess, make something that I was interested in reading, but also something that was helpful to people who, maybe you have a sort of intermediate financial background, you know, and, to me, I think it's sort of in a way an underserved audience of, you know, when I was going through my, my journey of, you know, learning a lot about stock investing in financial markets, and I just kept going down rabbit hole after rabbit hole, but it never felt like there was somebody to kind of be almost you, my chaperone and explain, you know, okay, what is the future futures market? What are derivatives? And you know, why the energy markets matter? You know, how, what's the difference between the London Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange, and, you know, just somebody that really kind of connect the dots. And so, my hope, as I was going through, you know, was to kind of make a product that says, hey, you know, this is kind of the couple of biggest stories going on in financial markets. And, you know, we're not a major publication that's throwing the news at you and using complicated jargon. But we're also not, you know, pop culture newsletter, we're not talking about, you know, what, some rapper did or you know, what is kind of going on, on Tik Tok, or whatever, you know, it's, we target kind of an intermediate audience of saying, hey, you know, this is the biggest stories in financial markets, we have a professional understanding, but we're reading it in a much simpler way. And I guess, like, the best way to put it is to try to connect the dots for people and, you know, fundamentally, we're long term investors. And so our hope is to, you know, not to fear monger you, we're not here to tell you that the dollar is collapsing, or the stock market is collapsing, it's just trying to put things in perspective, explain stories, and then kind of suggest, you know, how should this change things or maybe it doesn't change things at all. And then on the weekends, we try to have more fun with it, we try to do some more lifestyle stuff, write about topics, maybe more behavioral, right, because obviously, behavioral aspects are a huge part of investing. And so you know, teaching people that it was more than just the numbers and that there's a qualitative and behavioral side of investing too. So we on the weekends we try to add that perspective. And then on the weekdays, we're you know, connecting the dots for people with financial markets topics.

Andrew Stotz 04:18
And the tagline that you use, I think, is the we study markets newsletter makes investors smarter about markets in just five minutes to read each day. I think the other thing I would add, you know, when I look at finance, I break finance the world of finance into two categories. One and I have the best books in those two categories on my shelf right here. The first category is about picking stocks. And the second category is about investing. And there's so many books and things on investing these days that are great, you know, very foundational print Bubbles and all that. But when I look at the we study markets, but also the, you know, the podcast also that you guys are doing, where you guys are really focused on the stock aspect of understanding stocks and thinking about that rather than trying to come up with big themes on stuff like that occasionally, you know, you guys have guests on the podcast that will talk about those big themes. So when I look at the difference between you guys and others, I think about specific stock and understanding valuation and understanding how to you know how to pick stocks and stuff, how would you describe it? Now, we're going to have a link to all to your, you know, to the newsletter and all that in the show notes. But how would you describe what a listener or viewer is going to get when they sign up? Compared to another podcast? You've already explained it in some ways, but related to stocks versus investing?

Shawn O'Malley 05:56
Yeah, yeah. No, I, I think that's a very nice way to put it. And, you know, really, I guess I'll backstep a little bit. And so our podcast company, Podcast Network was founded by Preston pitch and Stig Broder son, I think, eight or nine years ago, and they got their start, you know, as individual investors. And I think they met actually on the flight to a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting to go see Warren Buffett, and that kind of started the framework for what their main podcast show we study billionaires would be about, and I think as big as said to me before, you know, they started out covering Warren Buffett and fundamentals of investing and, you know, recognizing that you own a company, and not just a stock. And, you know, it's not just a number on a screen, but it's a real business with, you know, employees and, you know, economic ties. And eventually, I think they realize that you can Okay, you can't just only have a podcast that talks about Warren Buffett. So they started, you know, as the show's called, we study billionaires studying all different types of investors, business moguls, and just comparing kind of the underlying principles, what do they have in common? What do they have in different? What do they you know, what's different? So, and then really, the show just grew from there. And I think, you know, now it's got a pretty good brand recognition. And really, I think, initially, the hope with the newsletter was almost to be a companion to the podcast, you know, not everybody. I think we do a couple episodes a week at this point. And so you know, they're usually at least an hour and not everybody has an hour to sit down and listen to a stock investing podcast. So you know, the hope of the newsletter was that we can kind of be that companion to the podcast, and if like, okay, you know, you can listen to an episode and, you know, that's okay. But you're still kind of reading the newsletter, you're keeping in touch with markets. And you're also, you know, like I said, we try to complement the podcasts and that long term perspective of, you know, being value investors, and really everything that unites. We've, I think, 27 employees at the company, and I think everybody would tell you that they're a value investor. And that, you know, I don't want to make it sound too religious. But we kind of see Warren Buffett as like, you know, maybe our kind of Chief inspiration and a lot of our testing frameworks, trace back to him. So

Andrew Stotz 08:03
great. And for the listeners and viewers out there, when you sign up, and if you're not receiving the newsletter, sign up and get it. It's free. It's great information. But most importantly, when you receive it, click reply, and say hi to Shawn. Because you

Shawn O'Malley 08:19
might, I would appreciate the Hello, yeah, exactly. Real people here, and we read every email that comes in, and we'll happily shoot you a little response to so

Andrew Stotz 08:28
Yep. Great. Well, now it's time to share your worst investment ever. And since no one goes into their worst investment, thinking it will be tell us a bit about the circumstances leading up to and then tell us your story.

Shawn O'Malley 08:41
Yeah, yeah, I'll throw some context here. And you know, I guess, to say, up front, you know, I'm pretty young investor. So, you know, a lot of the way I see the world is a continuous learning process. And so my worst investment story, I guess, starts back with, I think, April 2020, I had been sent home from school because of the COVID lock downs, I was a junior in college. And so, you know, kind of, I think I spent a couple weeks definitely doing nothing productive. But I realized that this was going to be an extended lockdown. And, you know, maybe I should actually make some useful, you know, ways to manage my time. And so I started going for long walks, and actually started listening to Preston and sticks, podcasts that we study billionaires podcasts that we were just talking about. And like I said, I started out, you know, just loving all the Warren Buffett content and getting really into value investing. And around that same time, I think oil prices went negative. And I remember, you know, not really understanding futures market, not knowing anything about oil at all, but it felt like one of those moments where it just felt like there was fear in the air and blood in the streets. And, you know, obviously oil prices could not stay negative forever. And so that seed kind of planted in my head that hey, You know, I don't really know what I'm doing. But this feels like some sort of opportunity. And I think I bought into some oil and gas stocks around that time and I held them. And then maybe over the next year or so, I started to develop this sort of outlook that, you know, some of the inflationary pressures that we ultimately saw manifest, I had an inkling that those would probably come through I mean, hindsight bias is 2020. But I actually wrote a paper and my senior year of college, I think, fall 2020, heading into 2021. And I basically outlined, you know, a plan for investors of how to manage the sort of post COVID inflation, or that, you know, COVID era inflation that I thought would come from the lock downs of the stimulus and all that. And so a big part of that strategy included energy stocks, and commodities. And so I laid out that thesis and I started thinking more and more about, you know, okay, how do I hedge inflation, and I want to, you know, have this exposure to energy prices. And actually, what I ended up doing was sort of very naively, I started looking for, you know, the most undervalued energy stocks, and you might know where I'm going with this, but a lot of those names were in Russia, actually. And some of those companies like Gazprom, I think they had eight 10% dividends, and they're very cheap on a price to book ratio, price earnings ratio. And so I bought into the E R U S, ticker ETF. And so I did that I think I did that right at the end of 2021.

Andrew Stotz 11:37
Is the Russia ETF, Russia? ETF? That's

Shawn O'Malley 11:41
correct. Yep. Yep, yep. And I mean, I think it's like 70%, oil and gas companies, and then a bunch of banks that essentially lend to oil and gas companies. So it was less of a bet on Russia. And it was more trying to find a creative and cheap way to really play, I guess, this inflation and energy price spike that I was trying to foresee. And, you know, I probably just got lucky in predicting it, honestly. But, you know, flash forward, I held that investment for a year. And it actually turned out, it started looking pretty good, right, we started to see inflation, and, you know, energy stocks really started to rally. And so I was thinking, I was pretty smart. And I remember heading into 2022, January 2022, you started hearing all these rumors about, okay, you know, Russian troops are gathering around Ukraine, and there's going to be an invasion, it felt like conspiracy theory stuff, honestly. And I really played down the risk. And I just thought, you know, it's like, well, you know, I don't really think there's no way there's going to be a ground war in Europe, I couldn't wrap my head around what the repercussions of that would even be. And so I just sort of kind of had this confirmation bias and blindly held on to that investment, I think it was 5% of my portfolio navy. So, you know, we're not talking about a major chunk of money. But, you know, this is a college kid, or recently out of college at that point. So it felt like a lot of money to me. And I just kept telling myself that nothing was gonna happen. And every single day, I started reading, you know, going internet forums and reading articles and trying to find ways to convince myself that this invasion of Ukraine wasn't going to happen. And so funny enough, I was February 2022, I was in the middle of a concert, and, you know, having a great time, and I looked down, I checked my phone, and I, you know, just start seeing this flood of alerts about what was going on in Ukraine. And, you know, of course, I don't want my story to overshadow any of the tragedy that's going on there. But I think, a couple of days after that, the stock or the ETF, er, US stopped trading. And, you know, it never even occurred to me that, you know, an ETF a basket of securities could go to zero. I, you know, I could maybe wrap my head around a single company going bankrupt, losing all its money, but you know, ETF seem like, you know, you hear all the cliches that it's diversified. And you've got this portfolio of different companies and different industries and operating all around the world. It felt like there was no way this could totally go to zero. And essentially, that's what happened. I think it's lost 99.99% of its value. So I'm probably actually one of the few people that totally just watched an investment instantly. An ETF investment instantly go to zero. So yeah, it was not fun at all to have that happen.

Andrew Stotz 14:39
How would you describe the lessons that you learned?

Shawn O'Malley 14:44
Yeah, yeah. Well, first of all, you know, I guess it sounds sort of ironic because I've been talking about, you know, owning real businesses and value investing a lot of stuff that Warren Buffett talks about, and obviously I was not practicing what I preached or what I was listening to and So I really did just see, especially international securities and equities as sort of just, you know, it was all a big game. And you know, it's just a matter of how you diversify and what you get exposure to and the idea of financial or even political risk seemed distant and maybe unimaginable to me. And so, I'd like to think I haven't overcorrected. Too much sense. But I do feel like I have a very real perspective on, you know, how geopolitical events can affect investments and in you know, not just geopolitical, but domestic politics. You know, you can have elections go wrong, or you can have laws change or tax, taxes change, regulations change. So there's really a lot more to the universe of risks that I think I could have ever maybe appreciated as a 22 year old out of college who thought he was just, you know, instead of buying Chevron and Exxon, I was buying, you know, Gazprom and Russia and I was getting a 10% dividend and what could go wrong?

Andrew Stotz 16:06
Yeah, and you had some cool things to tell your friends to like, man I'm owning, right? Yeah.

Shawn O'Malley 16:13
I thought I was so sophisticated. Yeah,

Andrew Stotz 16:15
I'll share a few things that I take away from it. I mean, when I grew up in America, we had, we used to go out and play his kids. And we had garter snakes. He was called, and we had water moccasins, I think they were call them were we in one of them was poisonous, and one of them was harmless. And now, as I'm older, if I'm looking at those two snakes, I know which one is harmless, and which one is poisonous. But when I was young, and when a young person is out playing in the field, and they come across those two snakes, they don't yet have the knowledge or experience to know which one is poisonous and which one is not. And so, I oftentimes see people take on, you know, my podcast is all about reducing risk, right, I'm trying to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. And one of the things that I see that most people do is it's like, if you could imagine going into deserts, you know, and, you know, it's full of rattlesnakes. And, and, and then you can imagine a baby, walking through that desert, a little tiny kid. And imagine now also that they're deaf. So they don't even hear the rattlesnakes. And, you know, they're not going to survive that walk through the desert, because they haven't learned. And they're not aware of all the dangers that are around them. So I think the first lesson I take away from, you know, your story is, you really, it takes time to become aware. And really, one of the ways that people become aware is by doing it. So a lot of times, people on the show will say, what's your advice for someone that's in that situation, they just do it and you're gonna learn. But so first thing is, you know, understand that there's risks everywhere in your first job is to understand those risks, and you're not rewarded for not understanding them. You're not compensated for your lack of knowledge, just like if you didn't know that a safety belt would save you from a high speed crash and certain death. And therefore you didn't put on your safety belt. The world doesn't say or God doesn't say, oh, sorry. Oh, you didn't know. So we'll let you live? No. The second thing is, when you think about Warren Buffett, for almost his whole career, he only invested in US stocks. It was only later in his career, that he started to build up a sizable portfolio of international stocks. And when you build a portfolio of international stocks, you're not investing in international stocks. You're investing in a currency. And you're using that currency to invest in international stocks. So you have to at least understand the currency impact. And there's a huge complication that that brings, not to mention the local laws and all the other things. So investing in international, particularly if you're in the US, you know, it doesn't necessarily make sense for a lot of people to spend that much time getting focused on specific international things. And then the last thing is, just to reinforce the concept of diversification, though you were owning an ETF that was diversified in stocks in Russia. You highlighted already well, actually, it was really oil stocks, and it was bank stocks that lend to oil stocks. So you kind of now particularly you understand the concentration of that risk. But if you were to go and do that, again, you know, one of the ways to do that is to say I'm gonna own 10 ETFs on the 10 countries that I think have the best prospects. And now you're diversified a little bit more. But those are some of the things I take away anything you would add to that.

Shawn O'Malley 20:20
I think that's a great way to put it, honestly, maybe better than how I put it. But, you know, I feel like, especially maybe what I was sort of a victim to in a sense was you look at these, what sort of the point you are the last point you made there if you know, need to for oil and gas, stocks and banks and stuff, and you think that that's adding diversification to your portfolio? And but you know, reality is, if you don't under, like you said, you understand the risks that you're taking, and, you know, I had knew nothing about the cultural dynamics of political dynamics, the laws, regulations, nothing ownership structure, I didn't know anything about it. And in Russia, right. And so, you know, that really actually made me reassess, I started looking at, you know, places in my portfolio where I felt like, I didn't understand things. I thought I had a thesis or something. And I realized I was investing in carbon credits. And I think I had shares in a uranium trust and gold miners. And I honestly, I think I was just investing in things because it was cool to say I was invested in them, right. I mean, I was sort of a college kid. And you know, how many college kids you know, that are invested in uranium? Probably not many, right. And so I think I liked the idea of being invested in some of these things more than maybe actually, I understood why I was invested in them. And, you know, since probably the learning lesson, and this could be a bit of a tangent conversation that we could go down if you want to, but is I've looked at my, you know, investments and exposure to Chinese companies and Chinese stocks. And in many ways, I see similar risks, you know, that, especially with the variable interest entered entity structure, which is essentially, a lot of these Chinese companies think Ali Baba that trade on US stock exchanges are essentially not, because of foreign ownership laws in China, you're not actually owning, you know, shares in those companies directly, you have some sort of ownership, complex ownership structure and companies that are often based in the Cayman Islands, it's essentially a holding company that has these contractual agreements to exchange profits with the actual, you know, maybe Alibaba and China. And so, you know, I figured out that, or, you know, I learned about that structure, and I went, Okay, you know, I thought I could just, you know, click a box in my 401k, and say, one 30%, emerging markets exposure, and then in that emerging markets fund, there's 30%, exposure to China. But you know, it's not a match unimaginable that you have a similar situation where, you know, there's not even a direct war between the US and Russia, but you had, you know, essentially these financial sanctions that made it impossible to own Russian securities or to have any sort of capital flows. And that's why the E R Us Russia, ETF essentially went to zero. To me, I mean, it's unimaginable that you could have some sort of Fallout I, you know, I'm not going to pretend that I can place odds on that, that probability with what it would be with the US and China, but you can imagine a scenario where you have some sort of sanctions, and maybe it's illegal to own Chinese stocks, or maybe on the other end, the Chinese government bans the V structure, and they don't want companies taking investment from the US anymore. And so that was actually an area, you know, where I decided that I didn't want to take those risks anymore, because of, I guess, the learning lessons I had in Russia, or in Russian ETFs. And so, you know, we'll see whether that was the right decision. But you know, ultimately, we just, it continuous learning and getting comfortable with the risks that we're taking. And that since that was kind of my learning lesson, that's a risk that I don't feel comfortable taking anymore.

Andrew Stotz 23:42
It's interesting, because I started my whole investing career in Thailand. I never invested in the US. So I had to look at things from a very different perspective. And that definitely helped me I made my mistakes along the way. But one of the things that I want to mention to the listeners and the viewers is that if you haven't invested internationally, and you're thinking that you want to one idea is to check out the VT fund buy, or the VT ETF by Vanguard. I don't have any interest in recommending that. And I'm not saying now is the right time to buy it. But the reason why I think it's an interesting one is because it owns 9543 stocks. And basically, I use that as a guide. Like that's it, there's 10,000 investable stocks in the world. And this, this fun owns all of them. And they're dealing with all the issues of how to trade the different markets and all of that. And so, a good starting point is to go to the website of Vanguard type in VT fund, look at it, study it, think about it, because that is as diversify. Now that includes US stocks. So that would be basically your global and local diversification if you're a US investor, but it's a great place to start to Then build knowledge over time. And the other thing that I reminded about is Jeremy Siegel's book stocks for the long run, which came out many years ago. And it's first edition. I remember getting that when I was a young analyst. And it had a really interesting thing at that time. It said that emerging markets, underperformed developed markets. And I was like, how can that be emerging markets are booming. But it's because of the currency devaluations. It's because of the expropriations of assets, its government actions, all of these things, have kind of one off events that cause a disruption that hasn't been caused in the developed markets. And that's one of the reasons why you don't get the return in emerging markets that you're dreaming you're getting, because I haven't looked at his latest numbers on that. But it this is a great example of why emerging markets don't always live up to what people hope. And the last thing I would say is that I think, you know, unfortunately, I have to say that it appears like America is on a warpath with China. And it seems like, yeah, they won't be they won't be satisfied, both Republican and Democrat, they won't be satisfied until there's war with China. And the dangers of that have to do too with the construction of MSCI indices. And, you know, they've been trying to slow walk China into the emerging markets indices, but they can't stop that, you know, but at some point, it's very, very likely that China could be demanded to be removed from global indices and be demanded to be removed from portfolios. And so I do think that what you're talking about, there are some serious risks of them.

Shawn O'Malley 26:43
Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, to your point about the possible war of China, I mean, you have somebody like Ray Dalio, who's been a phenomenally successful investor in the US, and you know, it's intimate relationships in China. I mean, he's essentially been warning for a couple years now that we're on a collision course. So I don't think it's crazy to say that, and I will point out one thing, I, this is not an ETF that I'm invested in, but I kind of raise it as maybe a novelty interest. And so, you know, what I started doing was I wanted, you know, exposure, exposure to emerging markets somehow in my portfolio. And like you said, a lot of these indexes are heavily weighted towards China. And you think maybe you're investing in South America and Africa or India, and you're actually, you know, almost majority of portfolio might be in Chinese equities. And so there's a, it's called the Freedom ETF, I believe it's ticker frdm. And they sort of an interesting approach where they waited an index, I think, I think there's 100 stocks in the index. I don't remember.

Andrew Stotz 27:42
They created this, I believe.

Shawn O'Malley 27:45
Yeah, yeah. It's a really, it's a really interesting product. Yeah, you know, again, I don't know if it's going to be, you know, a successful investment for you. Like I said, I don't necessarily own it. But it was really interesting, this idea of, you know, where they essentially have, you know, no exposure to authoritarian countries, you know, anywhere and they do a ranking of, you know, how favorable the rule of law is to businesses, and, you know, the risk of terrorism and, you know, political risk, is there a stable democracy? Do you have freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom, protests, all that stuff. And they basically come into a rank, do a ranking system of, you know, the top countries that are categorized as emerging markets that are also the most free by their definition. And I think they claim they use third party, you know, data, written research to essentially build that ranking system. And then, yeah, so you know, unfortunately, even still, though, you have, I believe, last time I checked, they had a 22% Exposure to Taiwan. And then some of the other big ones are Chile and Poland, which I found really interesting, you don't really see those names as prominently in other emerging market indexes. But I'd say, you know, unfortunately, with Taiwan, just because, you know, that is a vibrant democratic country that I would generally, you know, want to be invested in, but unfortunately, you know, it's at the center point of this US China tension. And so, you know, it's hard to imagine a Fallout and relations between the US and China, if there isn't some sort of breaking point on Taiwan, and you interject that uncertainty into it. And, you know, really, ideally, that would be a place I would probably want to avoid too, but on a comparative basis, they certainly have far less exposure to China, because usually, maybe they have 30%. Other emerging market indexes are, you know, maybe 30% weight to China, and then they have a 15% weight to Taiwan too. So if you kind of group those together, you're looking at, you know, 40 to 50%, emerging market allocation to those two countries that are kind of the crux of the largest geopolitical risks that we've that we see right now. So,

Andrew Stotz 29:48
so the link to that I'll put in the show notes freedom ETFs and as you say that I'm just looking at the waiting right now, Taiwan 21% Then South Korea, 18, Chile 18%, Poland 15, South Africa six, Brazil five, Malaysia five, Indonesia five roughly. So you get a picture of what they're doing. In fact, I've tried, I wanted to get the founder of this on the podcast, and I haven't yet got them on. So I think it's an interesting one. I think for the listeners out there, these aren't recommendations, but their ideas that we're saying, you know, check them out and learn from them. So we'll have that in the show notes. So, let me ask you, you know, based upon what you learn from this experience, and what you continue to learn, what would be one action that you'd recommend that our listeners take to avoid suffering the same fate?

Shawn O'Malley 30:49
Yeah, it's a great question. And it's one, I ask myself a lot, you know, to some extent, I can cop out and sort of say, you know, you just have to, you're just kind of to learn these lessons for yourself. But in some ways, I hope maybe this is a lesson that maybe I've learned for you. And so you won't have to make that same mistake. But, you know, generally, whatever I point people to, and again, this kind of taps back into our roots of, of being, you know, kind of our framework for the world is very much inspired by Warren Buffett and Benjamin Graham and value investing. And, you know, his annual shareholder letter, so he's been writing for, you know, some 50 years, 60 years now, are just packed with nuggets of wisdom. And I promise you if, you know, there have been a lot of great stories of investment mistakes shared on the show, but, you know, Warren Buffett and his lifelong career of investing has made a lot too, and he's not, he's not shy to share them, either. So I think those are a really compelling place to go through and you get a snapshot of history, you know, it's really interesting, you know, to read a letter from 1973, right? There's archives, and you can go year by year and read every single letter, and you can see 1973, and it's noticed the Fed gonna raise interest rate and inflation is high. And, you know, oil prices are surging, you see these headlines, you know, you see, you know, I guess Buffett talking about those headlines, and in many ways you realize, I always say things don't change. But, you know, there is some sort of realization that we're not living through maybe as unique of times as we think, right. Of course, history is never quite the same, but it often rhymes. And I really think it's interesting to kind of go through and read those archives, and you're gonna learn a lot about investing mistakes, you're gonna learn a lot about how to run or find great businesses, great management, you know, compounding goodwill, and treating people well running businesses the right way. But also, you know, just getting a snapshot of time and maybe some perspective of, hey, this is what was going on in 1978. And we're still talking about the Fed and 2023. And I don't know maybe how important is it actually to be obsessed with what the Fed is doing or whatever. So

Andrew Stotz 32:51
great. And we also will have the links, as I said, in the show notes to your, to your newsletter. Last question, what's your number one goal for the next 12 months?

Shawn O'Malley 33:02
Yeah, well, you know, honestly, I feel like my head is down pretty focused on the newsletter in many ways, and I see it as, in many ways, sort of a passion project. And I really want to make financial markets understandable to as many people as possible, you probably need a little bit of basic financial literacy to read the newsletter, maybe understand it, but after kind of a very low base, the hope is that we can, we can make it as understandable for as many people as possible. So my goal is to hit 100,000 subscribers for the newsletter within the next year. And, you know, keep growing the message from there and just teaching people you know, kind of the whole point of your podcasts be open and honest about your mistakes, focus on what you can learn from them, studying the best investors, what they've done, right, what they've done wrong. And then also just putting the news and markets and context and like I said, you know, looking at what the Fed is doing, and then I don't wanna say take it with a grain of salt. But, you know, understanding how that fix fits into, you know, not maybe not just today's headlines, but 50 to 100 years of historical financial markets context. So yeah, my mission is really, I think similar to yours is to empower as many people as possible and, you know, create a newsletter that I would have liked to read daily, maybe three years ago when I was starting my journey of learning about investing really passionately so

Andrew Stotz 34:20
great. Listeners, there you have it another story of laws 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, Shawn, I want to thank you again for joining our mission and on behalf of a Stotz 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?

Shawn O'Malley 34:54
Yeah, no, thank you for having me on. And yeah, the newsletter is called we study markets. And I hope Uh, I can count you as a reader one day. Thank you.

Andrew Stotz 35:02
Fantastic 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 words podcast host Andrew Stotz saying, I'll see you on the upside.