Transcription
So I made 30 million the year of the pandemic, uh, trading on an account that started with 4 million in it. I turned 4 million into like 34 million or something like that. I was up 35 million at one point, but it was because I was converting Chinese newspapers and medical reports. I was using Google Translate on every single person in China that was in the medical industry talking about COVID when it was breaking out over there.
I became obsessed. I was like, this is it. This is the big one. This is the one I've been waiting for my whole life. Not like happy that we have a global virus, right? But I knew that things happen really big that the world just cannot mentally grasp until it's right in front of their face. If you can capture a little bit early, these things only come around so often. AI is one of them, right? Robots, but at the time it was COVID.
So I took, dude, I took like 10% of my account buying weekly puts, and I lost all my money every week for like three weeks. I lost 30% of my net worth in three weeks because the market wouldn't move. I was like, this is crazy. A virus is about to literally stop the entire world as we know it. We're about to have our first pandemic of our generation, of our lifetime. We never knew this was possible. The market's going to crash, and it didn't crash.
No one was talking about it. I'm like, why is no one seeing this? Why is no one seeing this? I remember CNBC had this episode the first day the market dipped 2%. I was watching CNBC, and I never watched CNBC, only to see when they would see what I was seeing and start talking about it. All the guys on Fast Money were like, this is the moment we've been waiting for. The market dropped 2%. Here's your chance to get back in, to get in the market cheap.
I was like, what? The market was breaking all-time highs. It dipped 2%, and their reaction was, what an opportunity to buy more. I almost put my fist through the television because I was going to go broke if this happened a few more weeks. So I just got to stick with it. I did it again, weeklies. Another way, I was basically buying puts on the S&P, and I was buying puts on casino stocks and airlines.
So it's casino stocks, airlines, and then the S&P at large. And then when it hit, it hit. Man, it hit. It was like it hit, and I know I feel terrible talking about this in a positive way because it's the most devastating thing. In my mind, I'm like, I can't do anything about the pandemic, but I can make money and then use that money in a good way to help people. That's what my life is about.
That's why I put all my money in the foundation, right, to help kids. But I was like, I'm going to make a lot of money. With money comes power, comes leverage to do good in the world. That's my whole philosophy. So yeah, it hit big, and the money was insane. It was way bigger than what you just saw on a daily basis.
The craziest part was the whole time I was like, this is wild because there are like 15 companies where this is actually a good thing, not a bad thing. Shopify, Amazon, Peloton, companies that make anything that would be advantageous to people that don't leave their homes anymore. You know what I'm saying? Like RVs, RV companies, and pet companies. You know, all the stuff that ended up booming because of the work from home.
But I was like, it's too early. The world doesn't see it. So I had all these companies ready to go, and I was going to buy call options on all of them. But I was like, I can't do it until people are like flushing this trade out. I waited two days after the market bottomed when it started to come back up. I was like, I think it's time.
So I put on all my long trades, got on my short puts, all my long trades, and that's when it got really nuts. What would you say your biggest dollar amount day is? A few million dollars, three million in a day or something like that. Yeah, but for an account that started off at like 4 million, you know, like at the beginning of the year, the account was 4 million, four and a half million.
So it was crazy. And then the worst part is after that year, it messed up my head, and I went a little crazy. You know this because I met, had dinner with you shortly afterwards. You were telling us about it. All right, all just, it is what it is. So I'm going to put it out there. I got into NFTs. Okay, I got a little... We all went a little crazy during the pandemic. We all go crazy in our own ways.
Okay, I went nuts because I joined this text group with a lot of really interesting people. It all started with that, you know, Logan Paul was on a chain with Gary Vee and about 12 other guys that bought CryptoPunks. One of my buddies was on that. Soon as they got off of that, he texted our group. He was like, guys, I just got off this crazy Zoom with Gary Vee, and we're all buying CryptoPunks.
I was like, I want to buy a CryptoPunk. So I bought my CryptoPunk, and then it just went nuts. The whole NFT market went nuts, and I just got addicted. It was fun. We were all stuck at home during the pandemic, and I had this really cool group of interesting people, and we all got into NFTs together. We were talking about them at 2, 4 in the morning.
We were just having fun with it. It was like little mini communities. It was one of the funnest things I had done since I was a kid. Little pieces of art were kind of investable, and we were all kind of mentally insane from the pandemic anyway. Nothing was real. There were meme coins, there was GameStop. I was like, this is the future of art, you know?
I went in deep, and I ended up actually not losing money, believe it or not, because I actually sold most of those NFTs relatively close to the peak. I saw what was happening to the market. It was a liquidity issue. You have to have additional liquidity. When I realized that Coinbase, their NFT marketplace, wasn't really anything that anyone was going to do, I was like, I got to get out of this.
The problem was I was so consumed by NFTs that I missed the entire reversal of that market the next year. I held on to some of those positions too long, and I wasn't shorting the market where I definitely would have been if I wasn't so distracted. I probably lost 100 million that I could have made that year, I think.
I also did... I had this concept of working with the creator economy to build real businesses. I partnered with this ice cream kid, Dylan. I remember that. Yeah, poured millions of dollars into doing a super fun ice cream shop in Manhattan. For various reasons, like a multitude of reasons that were out of our control, that business didn't work.
But it's not about the money I lost in that business; it's about my time. So I became really distracted for about a year and a half, two years. It was a critical two years when I could have really killed it. After that whole experience, I said, that's it. I'm back. I'm not letting anything else distract me.
In fact, I said I'm not investing in startups anymore for the most part. I used to take, I'm in 100, almost 150 startup investments, right? I was like, too much of my time. I'm going all back into a thing I'm great at. I have a 17-year track record of like 70-plus percent annualized returns in the market. What am I doing doing anything else but that?
It had to be insane, right? Why would I do anything but that? So I got back in it, and I've been back in it now for a couple of years. I've had two of the best years in my trading. It's wild. It's been wild, and you know what? I love it so much because I'm re-engaging with my community again.
There are like thousands... You know, we have 50,000 on our Discord, like thousands of people that do this type of trading, social AR trading that I kind of wrote a book about, you know, 15 years ago. They love it, and we're just like a community. We're looking for change in the world, and we share ideas.
I'm back with Dave and Jordan. We're doing weekly shows again. We're just talking about the stuff we see. A lot of times it's little stuff. It's a brand popping or a brand falling apart. Like I talked about that right now. You know, Nike, I think, is still falling apart right now, and there are other brands that are really hot I'm investing in.
So we try to get ahead of the trends and invest in them. It's literally that simple. And how fun does that sound?