Ep776: Lark Davis – Take Your Profits and Run Away

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. And I want to welcome and thank my listeners from New Zealand for listening today and joining in that mission. Fellow risk takers this is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz, from A Stotz Academy, and I'm here with featured guest, Lark Davis. Lark, are you ready to join the mission?

Lark Davis 00:37
I'm ready. I'm excited. Thanks for having me.

Andrew Stotz 00:40
Yeah, I'm really excited to have you I mean, your topic that you're dealing with and all that stuff is just fascinating and watching you in the way you communicate and all of that. I think it's really exciting. So I'm happy to have you on and let me just introduce you to the audience. Lark is the founder of weekly crypto newsletter Wealth Mastery, which combines insider insights and in depth market analysis to offer cryptocurrency investors the best opportunities to grow their wealth, stay ahead of the curve and avoid costly mistakes. The newsletter has more than 100,000 subscribers and covers d phi NF TS altcoins technical analysis and more. Mark has been a crypto investor for more than seven years and has made millions of dollars while also suffering significant losses in the markets. He has been featured in leading digital currency media platforms, including coin pedia and coin desk providing insights that help audiences consistently make money from crypto currency investments. And you can find him on Twitter and YouTube. I'll have the links in the show notes to all of that. Lark, tell us about the unique value you are bringing to this wonderful world? Absolutely,

Lark Davis 01:53
it's a great question to start off with a very introspective one. When it comes to what I do professionally, it's really about teaching people to fish. It's really, if financially invested wise. And my focus is of course on cryptocurrencies, from time to time, we talk about other stuff, but most of it's about cryptocurrencies. The cryptocurrency market is a very volatile place, a very wild place full of all kinds of misbehavior. pretty nuts. And so what I hope to do with the content that I create, whether it be on YouTube, or x, or the newsletter or anywhere else, and to help educate people on making good decisions for themselves, to not get too lost in the hype lost in the FOMO, and educate themselves, because this is a completely new, a new class of asset. And the learning curve is incredibly, incredibly big. You have to learn about all these things, days and days and weeks, weeks knowledge. So I tried to distill down simple ideas for people that they can understand and explained how market cycles work, how to approach risk in the market, how to stay safe in the market, all these sorts of things. So that's I hope, the value that I'm bringing to investors who listen to the things that I have to say, and my opinions on stuff.

Andrew Stotz 03:15
That's interesting. And it made me think about like, how do you prevent yourself by being caught up in the excitement? And because if you just are on the roller coaster ride, just like all of the news, newsletters and clients and others that you're that you're talking to, you know, are you really adding that much value? How do you separate yourself from that rollercoaster ride occasionally getting on it, of course. But how do you do that?

Lark Davis 03:44
It's hard because the even the best investors in the world can get caught up in the hype, the FOMO the euphoria, you just have to keep reminding yourself of some simple realities is that this is a volatile market, most of the things that you invest in will not make it with from few years from now, if you look at the startup space, they have 90% failure rates, no different in cryptocurrencies, except that the barrier to launching is so much lower, the barrier to raising money is so much lower. So you have all these ideas being sport fascinating ideas, interesting ideas, groundbreaking ideas, nine out of 10 of them are going to fail. And nine out of 10 of the ones that don't fail, probably not gonna do super awesome. They'll just limp by for years. So you're looking for needles in haystacks, but in a cryptocurrency bull market. None of that stuff matters so much because everything is kind of going up at the same time. The whole market largely moves together, up and large moves together down. There's no major outliers when the markets pumping when the markets are dumping, unlike in the stock market where you might have tech stocks selling off and gold miners are pumping, for example, or telecoms are doing really well whatever it might be. There tends to not be a separation in crypto, it's a very small market. $2 trillion market cap around the time that we're recording this video. It's a baby. It's a baby. It's smaller than Microsoft is smaller than Google smaller than Amazon ratio over 2 trillion right? announcement on Apple, right? So in order to not get totally lost in the mania, you just have to keep reminding yourself of how the market cycles work, that there will be a major sell off at some point Kryptos very well followed this sort of wider global liquidity cycle four year pattern, which is largely end up with a four year Bitcoin patterns. And we always seem to have some new catalysts. This sparks the market gets people really, really excited. But even though every time is different, every time ends up being approximately the same. So look, I've been caught up in the hype before without a doubt and convinced myself of things that didn't end up happening. But I was also quite diligent, even those situations, say, Okay, I gotta keep taking money off the table keeping take money off the table, because it could all end up anytime even though I think, hey, maybe we're gonna go further, it could still end at any time, because it's a crazy market. You never know what's gonna happen in crypto and everything can change on a dime. And tomorrow morning, you might be in a very different situation financially. And I've had that lesson smacked in my face quite a few times in crypto. So one thing that I like to tell people these days is about regret theory. So when you're looking at that portfolio, things are getting really crazy in the market, you have life changing money on the table, and the chance to change your life. If you click the Sell, buddy, you have to ask yourself the question, What am I going to regret more? Am I going to regret more if I don't take any off the money, any table off the money? Any money off the table today? And then tomorrow, my investments are up another 20 30%? Or what if tomorrow, the down 20 30%. What if in six months time I everything that I'm holding is down 99% Or 95%. Or maybe you did really, really well and you got the really good coins, you're only down 75 or 80%. Because that's what happens in the cryptocurrency markets. So you have to ask yourself what you're going to regret more in the future that you missed out on a little bit of extra profit, or that you took a massive loss and didn't change your life when you had life changing money sitting in front of you, because so many people make the mistake. So people have made the mistake, I made that mistake, my first cycle. Second cycle, I didn't make that mistake could have taken more off the table should have taken more off the table. And a lot of people will just round their bags every single time and it will come at the exact wrong time to mark which makes it even harder for them. They come in and buy the top. Seven out of 10 people in the cryptocurrency market will come in to buy the top, unfortunately, yeah,

Andrew Stotz 07:19
it's a lot of things you just said there. But you just reminded me of Kahneman Prospect Theory, I believe it is where the pain of loss is 2.5 times the pleasure of gain. And so you know, it's but I was also thinking about, imagine that, you know, you could be in a situation where you have $5 million, but you're sold out and you could have had 50 million, or you have zero. And you could have had 5 million, which one do you want. And I would prefer to have the 5 million.

Lark Davis 07:59
If you ask a lot of people, a lot of people prefer to have that 5,000,001 thing, that'd be one mistake I just wanna make a quick note is that they think they have to sell everything or nothing. And if you have $5 million on the table, you can take a million off the table, you can if you have the balls to let the other 4 million run and guess what it goes up to $40 million. He still did, okay, didn't share the only missed out of $9 million. But you made sure you made money. It's a

Andrew Stotz 08:22
great point, because I use stop losses for stocks and what I tell people when they say I don't want to do that, because, you know, I'm gonna get out of my position when the markets going down. And I'm saying okay, then just do a 20% stop loss that force yourself to sell a little bit, you know, you've got to get comfortable with that at times. And so that's an idea that you've just mentioned, um, one of the things you, you compared the crypto currency market or the crypto market to startups and many fail. Now, when people ask me about they people come to me as an analyst and all that and say, Hey, I got a startup. And I think about investing in this. What do you think about the business prospects for this? And I say, Well, my advice is very generic for startups, and that is only by 10. And they say, Well, wait a minute, I only have this one in front of me right now. And I just want to get your opinion on this one. And my point is only by 10. In other words, you just don't know. So buy 10 And he said what most people say I can't buy 10 Well, okay, that's part of the problem with an angel investing in startups. You don't have that problem in crypto, because you know, there's the liquidities there, there's enough of an environment you could say I'll buy the 10 largest market cap ones or whatever that is. What is your advice for the absolute beginner, you know, some of it's coming to your community they're following. They're interested, they're learning and they're, they're definitely you know, interested. And now it's time for them to take some action. What would you say is for that beginner that really would help them to reduce risk.

Lark Davis 10:03
One of the big things is position sizing and when we talk about cryptocurrencies, we have a wide mix of investors, some people who are coming from the traditional markets who are just adding bit of crypto as diversification they don't have a lot of time on their hands so for those guys know you got a Bitcoin ETF now, congratulations, it's super easy way to get exposure to the crypto space, totally just switch your brain off and just buy bitcoin ETFs hold them long term, you don't really have to think about somebody else handling custody for you all that kind of stuff. So it makes it really, really easy. If you want to get a bit deeper into the crypto space, look at Aetherium Bitcoin, a theory of together the 70% of the cryptocurrency market cap owning those two coins, if you're a very casual investor, you're the kind of guy who's just putting one two 3% into the coins, that's probably going to be okay especially at this relative stage in the cycle. Obviously, if everything's up in Bitcoin support a million dollars of something, your risk rewards very, very much diminished at that point for the cycle. Now, if you are going deeper, if you're the person who you've got very little you've got 10 $20,000 $30,000 portfolio and you want to make it you want to go all in on crypto and you want to make it big time, you have to stop slow down and relax. Because the mistake the luck we're going to make there I come in, they're gonna buy 100 different coins. Again, it's really easy to do, and you're going to lose track of all of them, you will get very very little you're Over Diversification will kill you. You don't need that many coins. 10 is a great number, you can make great money on 10 coins, take your time research and adjust according to risk. This is a mistake I see people make a lot of the time actually just had a message from some guy today. He said 80% of my portfolio is the Shiva the new mean coin. And I just Just what is going on here. This is how people approach risk and it's all jumbled up. Look, if you have a $10,000 portfolio now look, if you want to take high risks, you can take more calculated risks, obviously. But generally when you approach risk in the cryptocurrency space, you want to have bigger coins, be more risk or be more sizer portfolio because they're lower risk. Those smaller coins that $10 million market cap coin that just came to the market and doesn't have a main net net yet doesn't have a working product yet. That's 1% of your crypto portfolio, not your overall investment portfolio, your crypto portfolio, because if it goes to zero, you only lost 1% If it goes up 10x Great, you make good money on it. And I know you're always gonna think all but if I'd only gone all in on that coin, you ever the day you go all in on that coin is the data that goes to zero. So you have to be really careful. And this is one of the easiest way to think for just the layman getting into this market to approach risk. Higher coins, quote unquote lower risk, obviously, they still go down in the big market cycle, lower coins, big risk, much smaller percentage of your portfolio.

Andrew Stotz 12:53
Okay, so that's that's a great primer and the ideas if you really just don't have time, but you think I could add a small amount to my overall portfolio of crypto then go for an ETF that will give you Bitcoin exposure. Things move as you say that the asset class of crypto is highly correlated, it's all moving in the same way. So there, you're just playing this long term, let's say uptrend, then if you say that you're going to invest in individual crypto, it sounds like what you're describing is kind of a market cap weighting style where you say, okay, the total crypto market, you go to coin desk or wherever you know, your data. And then you basically look at the market cap of all of these, you're gonna find that Bitcoin is at the top at, you know, whatever 5060 70%. Ethereum is at 20 30%. And then maybe there's three to five or 10 More, and then basically, you could buy those in the proportion of their market cap. And then what you could do on and this is what I do for my strategies is every, every three months, I just reset that market cap and say, Okay, now I want to allocate in this, you know, in this weighting based upon their movements. And then what I do is I trim the positions of the ones that have grown and then I get into the ones that have come down, it's not perfect, but it gives me a systematic way of doing it in relation to stocks. Does that make sense? Or what are your thoughts on that?

Lark Davis 14:19
Rebalancing I think is really important. I see again, people will get into some meme coin, and I don't mean coins or like, from the outside is like that's completely ridiculous. Why are people investing in this? Cryptocurrency whose only value proposition it's got a dog picture on it, but if you think of it as investing in internet culture, then it kind of makes more sense. But you'll see people who invest in it and they manage risk initially, they say, Okay, I'm a 1% of my coin portfolio and they're fine. Then it pumps that's worth 25 or 30% of your current portfolio, but they fail to rebalance because that position is too big. You have too much stress related around it. It keeps you up at night. The numbers too big. Maybe you've never seen that kind of money before that quickly, especially. So rebalance fencing is that going up can help you manage that risk, it doesn't, you've never wanted it to be 25% of your portfolio. So don't let it be 25% of your portfolio, rebalance down, take some of that money out of that really, really high risk coin that could go to zero tomorrow, move it back up, put in a bid claim vote. And if you're more, take it straight out of the market, put it in some stocks, some gold, whatever it might be, it's a nice way to do it to take that high risk money and turn into low risk money.

Andrew Stotz 15:24
So lots of good principles there. You know, the first one that you mentioned is that take money off the table when you've made some gains. And I think in particular, with the crypto space, that's a, that's not a bad idea. And as you said, you can put it in gold, and you can wait, you know, some of the best investors just sit and wait for something to come down again, and then they get back in. So that's one you've talked about, don't have to force yourself to take, you know, everything off the table, take a portion of it off the table. And that's talking about at the overall portfolio level based upon what's happening in the market with prices. And then at the portfolio level, you've talked about the rebalancing, and diversification of the strategy that you've got to not just put it all down on one, even though there's a temptation. You know, there's 50 60,000 companies that are listed in the stock market. There's 10,000 companies that are in the VT VT ETF run by Vanguard, which I would consider 10,000 of the most large and liquid companies out there that you could invest in some of the every single quarter, one of them is going to be up 1,000% You know, and that doesn't mean that you just put all your money into that one. I think crypto has the same you know, thing. Can you just tell us what do people get when they sign up to your newsletter? What should they expect from that? Yeah,

Lark Davis 16:45
so we're covering all the news basically happening in the crypto space every week the market moving news, you know, what's going on the regulatory scene? What's going on with corporate news, the bigger chain picture on chain, what money is moving around? Who's buying what sort of stuff like that? We look at the latest happening for altcoins. So the real alpha right the stuff that's going to move the markets, you know, this just got a major upgrade coming they're changing their tokenomics things like this. We talked about airdrops, which has been a very big money making space for people basically airdrops, by the way, is a lot of mystery around this. But a very simple explanation for it is you're testing software, you might get paid for it, but reward of tokens in the future. So we've covered those kinds of opportunities and cover technical analysis on the market. So it's a real full package of what's going on in crypto for crypto investors. Fantastic.

Andrew Stotz 17:35
So I have links in the show notes to your Twitter, your YouTube channel and also to the newsletter. So that's the wealth mastery.io. Okay, 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 about the circumstances leading up to an intelligent story.

Lark Davis 18:00
You know, when I was thinking about how to answer this, there's been so many there's been so many, well, should I choose one of the NFT should I choose one of the alt coins, whatever it might be, but actually, I decided to finalize on the Terra Luna cryptocurrency which had a pre famous implosion. Now, I got into that one, round a few dollars and big bag, big bag went up to being worth hundreds of 1000s of dollars. But to compound my eventual misery, they also had a stable coin, which is supposed to be stable and worth $1, linked to that cryptocurrency and there was this push pull mechanism essentially, is that the more stable coins were minted, the more of the Luna token was taken off, the market price went up. The reverse eventually, of course, applied as well. But it was the big hype coin everybody was talking about. Everybody's excited about it big, big venture capital firms were in it. And it was doing a lot of exciting things that a lot of exciting protocols start being built on there. You know, the founder at the time, he was the poster child on social media for a successful founder of a big cryptocurrency and stuff like this. And it all came of course, tumbling down eventually, but it's funny because shortly before I invested my research assistant guy who does the deep dives for the Wealth Mastery reports, he did a report on he's like, I don't know smells fishy. Don't like it. Don't like that. And you find after all that Mike Novogratz is in it, we're gonna go the moon on this one. And we did. We did. Everybody's excited about it. Because mechanics in a bull market worked really, really well. Because people kept minting the stable coins because they wanted to use the applications on the blockchain price of the main asset kept going up

Andrew Stotz 19:48
until it didn't and let me just explain let me ask you to explain the stable coins were backed by US Treasury bonds. I can't remember what gone

Lark Davis 19:56
No, no, no, there it was. What was the backing? So The backing was the Luna coin. Okay, so this is the thing is that you were able to redeem $1 of the stable coin for $1 of Luna coin. If you took $5 Luna coin, you could mint five stable coin dollars. And so people were doing that minting more stable coins to take the stable coins and use them on chain in different applications, particularly this one application called Anchor, which they had huge incentives running for, like 20% API on it, because they were putting the company was putting all these extra incentives on top to get people to keep bringing the money on chain.

Andrew Stotz 20:35
And what was it that convinced people at the time that it wouldn't break that stable? Like, what was it that was just that it was a controlled amount of stable coins, and it couldn't be that somebody's going to issue more stable coins, and therefore, it's going to remain stable one to one. Yeah,

Lark Davis 20:56
so basically, the mechanism, I think it had the potential to work, the problem is too much exited too fast, and became completely unsustainable almost instantaneously. And, you know, I should have thought about it more, I should have seen it more should have realized the same mechanism that made it go up would make it go down and make it go down in a very dramatic building on fire kind of fashion. And the redeeming feature worked. The problem is, is that men did too many Luna coins, and it became this self perpetuating downward spiral. So I was exposed. By that point, I'd already sold some Luna, my Luna position was around $100,000 At the time, that went to zero in about three days. And I had about $700,000 of stable coins. In USD but also complicated with some of that was in a half us t half USD T pool, the pool got raided and was left with only USD stable coins. So then I had more exposure than I thought I was going to actually end up having to this particular stable coin. And then that stable coin D pegged. So day one D pegged from Dollar down to 98 cents. So I thought, well, I need to do something about that tomorrow, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do something tomorrow when I wake up tomorrow woke up. And then it was down to, I think about 60 cents. So that was very problematic. Okay, hold on, this is gonna, this is gonna have at least one bounce at least one bounce. And so I held and it went down even more. And then it did have a bounce, it got back to about 8384 cents, I think about out around 80 to 83 cents. So I took about a 20% loss on that 700k Plus, the Luna coins went to zero, essentially, now I got, I got approximately my initial, I think I saw my Luna coins around five or $6. So I didn't ride them all the way to zero. But I completely erased any profits that I'd had on the Luna coins. So that profit went to zero. But I basically got my initial capital back out from that because my average entry price over time was around five or $6. So

Andrew Stotz 23:13
by the way, what year was that? When was that happening? This was in 2020 soon. Okay, so and I'm just curious, you know, given that you are an expert, you know, and I remember, my worst investment ever was basically investing in a startup. And, and I am an expert, and I lost a lot of money in it. And I felt pretty ashamed. I didn't talk about it at the time. Because I just felt like I should have known better. Eventually, I came to terms with it. And I learned from it and part of what I do with this podcast is share to help people but I'm just curious, like, how did you feel? Once it kind of all wrapped up and you thought, oh, gosh, how did you feel about yourself? Or how did you think about things at that time?

Lark Davis 23:59
Yeah, you know, it's interesting because I look at the two things differently the Luna because I've seen so many altcoins go to zero essentially the Luna was no big surprise was annoying and stressful when it was happening. And I like I said, I kind of had a mental stop loss that okay, if it gets down here, I'm out. And I got out and that was okay, that didn't bother me too much, even though was a huge paper loss essentially lost $90,000 or something of potential profits in two days. Crypto, the stable coin one that was really stressed me out because in my mind, I had put money that I had gained as profits from the 2021 cycles somewhere that was going to be safe in crypto. And so when I woke up and I saw that down 40% I started stressing out like holy crap, I've made a huge mistake. You know, I even though I understood the mechanics, I never thought that it would go this fast and ever thought that this would be the actual indicator should have this sort of market Wide Panic around this coin everybody rushing to the exit at the exact same time I just fear well if it's going to go down then Britain's gonna see coins exit the market, there'll be some kind of orderly no no there was no order was complete disorder complete chaos, a complete meltdown of an entire cryptocurrency ecosystem worth 10s of billions of dollars in the space of 72 hours. So it was quite dramatic, actually. And the reflection on that was really just taking too much risk with money that shouldn't have been risk money. You know, and again, in my mind, I was putting it somewhere relatively okay. But obviously did not turn out to be that way. So it made me reflect a lot on the risks that actually take when I'm messing around, and all these on chain applications. And it also really drove home a lesson about money needs to not stay, profits from the market feeds not stay in the market, you get them out, you put them in your bank, because keeping your money in different stable coins is problematic for a variety of reasons we even saw later on an unrelated issue, but we even saw the USDC stablecoin deepfake, almost 10% around the collapse of I think was the silver gate bank. But I remember one of those big banks that collapse they had a lot that 10% of the Treasury there and so then again, it's this the specter comes back, you know, six eight months later oh my gosh, it's happening again. The stable coins the begging I had a lot of money sitting in USD see stable coins. I take a lot of money out of the off chain at that point. But still, I had, you know, hundreds of 1000s on chain. And here it was now it's the pegging Holy crap. That was a different situation because the mechanics were different. This was actually backed one to one buy US Treasuries. The only difference was that 10% of those treasuries were now in a bank that was going bankrupt. Fed stepped in backstopped, everything, it was fine, but it really drove them a very important lesson about how I approach risk on chain. So

Andrew Stotz 27:07
I'm so let's, why don't we just take a moment and just try to summarize, you've you've already explained your lessons, but I'd love it if you could just summarize 123 The lessons that you learned?

Lark Davis 27:20
Absolutely. One, never put your profits into something that could go down. That was the USD stable coin. Even other on chain stable coins. So be careful. Take your money, take your profits, put it in your bank run away. That's one thing to crypto. The other is make sure you fully understand all aspects of exposure to risk. Because one of the things that caught me by surprise was how quickly everything fell to pieces and how quickly that particular pool that I was in that had half of the USD stable coin half of the USD T stable coin got raided. Overnight, we saw hundreds of millions of dollars exit from the safer stable coin leaving only the failing stable coin behind which I had massive exposure to so fully understand all vectors of potential risk on chain because there's a lot again, the learning curve is massive in crypto, and even after years in the industry, I still get surprised by how I can get screwed.

Andrew Stotz 28:29
So maybe I'll just say a few things that I take away. I mean, you said something that I thought that was really interesting. And that was the idea of your safe place for your money should not go down. And it you know, it's think about it for the listeners and the viewers out there. Think about your literal safe place in your life. Is that your bedroom? Is that your house? Is it your sofa is at your office? Where is that place that you feel most safe in your life? And what is it that makes it safe is that the environment doesn't change, it delivers you know exactly what you expect. And now take that and apply that into how you manage risk. And that is when you have profit and you have wealth that you've generated, put it in a safe place that doesn't go down. And that I think is interesting. And that, you know, that could be land for some people that could be a bank account, you know, just deposits at banks. Some people they may say Well, mine is gold. Yep, gold can still go down for sure. But you know, it has some features. But the main thing I think is this idea of sag segmenting your money that you're investing in speculating on at times from the safe and I think that is super, super important lesson that you've described. The second one is Thailand is interesting place like when I first moved here I got a motorcycle So this was 1992, I had already been driving motorcycles in Thailand, or sorry, in the US. But when I came to Thailand, it just takes it to a whole nother level. And the big thing I always say to people who get motorcycles here, they say, you know, that, like the left or right hand turning lane that crosses in front of you, you know, the cross traffic. You know, normally, when you're driving, maybe at home, that person sitting in the car across from you is not going to pull in front of you, as you're going through that intersection. But in Thailand, you can just expect that they're going to turn in front of me. And it's because of, you know, might makes right and some other things like that. But the point is, is that when it comes to human behavior, expect always expect herd mentality, it is going to always be the case. And if you're sitting on a boat, and everybody starts to run to one side of a boat, you know, the first thing you got to realize is yes, they will capsize that boat. Anything you would add to those two,

Lark Davis 31:04
That's a great, great thought there about herd mentality because it's very, very true. When panic starts panic moves very, very fast. And when it comes to people's money, they panic even faster. And there's I guess the saying is he who panics first panics best in crypto anyway. Yes.

Andrew Stotz 31:24
So based on what you learn from this story, and what you continue to learn now let's think about a beginner getting in the market, making similar types of investments, what's one action that you'd recommend that they would should take to avoid suffering the same fate?

Lark Davis 31:41
Go slow on chain, go slow on chain. And if you're gonna go out and start farming airdrops, you're gonna go out and start playing around with decentralized finance applications, do not put other percent of your money in there. Don't put 50% money, don't even put 5% Your money in there, start very slow. A lot of people always make this mistake, I've got to put all my money onto this thing. Literally take 20 bucks, play around, see how it works. You're not missing out on anything, there's always going to be something new happening tomorrow. And these markets, take 20 bucks play, figure out how things work. See the mechanics understand the mechanics, because things aren't always advertised either. You're assumed that you have to go and read these giants 30 Page technical papers and stuff like this and find some hidden page somewhere where explains that actually there's a 28 day with withdrawal wait time, for example, and other things. So you have to be really careful about these particular issues and how things operate on chain. So go slow test the waters, you often have to do with real money, but you don't have to do with the life savings start small. That's

Andrew Stotz 32:44
great advice. I like to say that people start minimum. So when I started my niece's investing in the stock market, I set up a Vanguard account in their case in the US since that's where they are. And I helped them and I basically said we're going to start with 3000 Because that's the minimum to set up an account. So figure out start small, start with a minimum and learn before you allocate more. All right, what's a resource that you'd recommend? Obviously, one of them is your newsletter.

Lark Davis 33:16
Yeah, obviously, newsletter, we try to keep people up to date on the latest things happening in the market. Aside from that, I would say here to spoilt for choice when it comes to the cryptocurrency market, any major exchange, how about this any major exchange like binance, for example, they've got so many free resources about all kinds of things, they have reports on coins, and how coin mechanics work, and all these sorts of things. So it's actually a pretty great educational resource, these exchanges, and I think a lot of people don't even know those resources exist. So if you're looking for how trading indicators work or on chain things, whether it be how Bitcoin mining works, what a smart contract is, and all the sorts of stuff you can find out on your local exchange, most of the time, the big ones have great educational resources.

Andrew Stotz 34:04
That's a great, that's a great piece of advice, because you know, they have an interest in educating and without the bias that you may get if you go to get educated, maybe from someone else. All right, last question. What is your number one goal for the next 12 months?

Lark Davis 34:21
Number one goal for the next 12 months is to 10x My crypto portfolio in this bull market. So that's, that'd be great. I don't know if we're gonna hit that total goal or not. But if we get halfway there, we're pretty happy. But that's Yeah, I think we're in a very incredible time right now in the cryptocurrency markets that have a huge potential for this market cycle. Hopefully, a lot of the charts we're looking at are showing that this is the start of a new major cycle, but I can always run and lose all my money because that's crypto. teknicks All right, so hopefully,

Andrew Stotz 34:54
there it is, 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. As we conclude Lark 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?

Lark Davis 35:17
Or say with crypto remember to take your profits or the market will take them for you? Yeah.

Andrew Stotz 35:24
And that's a wrap on another great story to help us create, grow and protect our well fellow risk takers. Let's celebrate them 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 upside.