Don’t Trust Youtubers | Podcast Episode #419

0:07
Hey, I’m Ryan Mallory and this is my Swing Trading the Stock Market podcast. I’m here to teach you how to trade in a complex, ever changing world of finance. Learn what it means to trade profitably and consistently, managing risk, avoiding the pitfalls of trading, and most importantly, to let those winners run wild.

0:25
You can succeed at the stock market, and I’m ready to show you how. Hey everybody, this is Ryan Mallory with shareplanner.com’s Swing Trading the Stock Market. In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about not trusting what you see on YouTube and other social media websites as a whole on the apps, whatever you want to call it.

0:46
I look at most of my social media stuff on websites. I know there’s apps for pretty much all of them, but I guess I’m old school a little bit in that way. But I really try to keep the apps off of my phone just so I’m not always looking at that stuff. But in any case, when it comes to finance, there’s a lot of people, particularly on YouTube. You also see it on Tiktok, you see it on Twitter, you see it on StockTwits. A lot of people holding themselves out to to be these like, you know, Warren Buffett’s in the making or the next greatest traitor that’s out there.

1:20
And let me tell you, that’s probably one of the worst things that you can do. And I know you’re probably thinking to yourself, Ryan, Well, you have a YouTube channel, you have Twitter, you have StockTwits, you have a ton of different channels. And I do. But it also goes for me too. When you’re listening to somebody, when you’re seeing what they have to say, don’t just trust them right out of the gate. There should be a huge period of credibility building that those people need to undergo with you.

1:45
So that’s what today’s episode’s about. We could have a guy and we’re actually, I’m going to give him a guy’s name, but I like to give everybody a Florida redneck name being I’m from Florida and pretty much grew up in a redneck environment. So I like to give good Florida redneck names to everybody. And for this one, I’m going with Bernice.

2:02
Bernice writes Hey Ryan, my name is Bernice and I have just started listening to your podcast. I’m absolutely interested in learning how to trade. I’ve been paper trading for a little bit and also going through YouTube to learn anything someone has to offer. I have so little to start with and I want to learn how to build it up. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not expecting to become a millionaire. Heck, 1000 year would be great. Any information would be appreciated.

2:26
So I wrote back to the guy said, hey, give me a little bit more, you know, about your background, a little more about what you’re hoping to achieve and the type of trading that you like. And I, you know, make a podcast episode out of it. So Bernice writes back, says 48 years old. I work as a pipe fitter at a refinery, married with two kids, 18 and 16. I’ve been looking into what else I can do to make a living. I got turned into forex trading from a friend at work. That’s obviously getting into it. I’ve watched about every YouTube video and about trading that there is. It interests me more than anything else. Obviously new to this and want to learn what I can about it.

2:57
I took a couple emails, but I got enough information to work with. Obviously, I’ve done a lot of podcast episodes on the beginning Trader. Even the last one was heavily tilted towards that, and this one’s a little bit more towards that, but I wanted to do it with A twist this time and that would be here. You have Bernice looking and watching a lot of stuff on YouTube now. I like YouTube.

3:17
I’ve learned a lot of different things on YouTube. My AC, for instance, broke last week. I was going upstairs and it was like a wave of heat just hit me. It was like 85° in in the upstairs room and I tried to work through it and it nothing was cooling down. So then I put a thermometer up to next to the air vent and was blowing out like 87° weather.

3:37
So on a Sunday afternoon, I’m like having to call somebody. I know I’m gonna pay through the nose for it, but thankfully somebody came out there. It was like $200.00 to get them out there and then another $100 to replace a capacitor. So I felt like I probably got off on the cheap end of things.

3:51
Nonetheless, before I did that, what did I do? I went to YouTube how to make your AC that’s blowing hot air to start running cool again. And you know, and I, I got videos and I watched a whole bunch of them. One of them was to throw a whole bunch of water or take a hose.

4:07
But don’t, you know, take the nozzle off of it and just hose down the outside the the the mesh coil. I don’t know the exact name for it. I’m not at what you would call the handiest of people. I watch YouTube videos hoping that I can get a little bit lucky and and find a hack on there.

4:20
That didn’t work. Then it talked about, you know, pouring some water on the compressor did that. That didn’t work. So these people had good intentions trying to do these videos and trying to help you out probably, and they had like 200, three, 100,000 hits. But in the end, it didn’t help me out at all.

4:36
And I ended up paying $300 to get somebody out there to fix it. Again, it was the best $300.00 I spent because let me tell you, there’s nothing worse than a hot Florida house on the verge of summer. Well, I guess in the middle of summer would be worse, but nonetheless got it fixed threw it about it.

4:54
But the moral of the story is is that YouTube didn’t fix my problems. Now there’s been other times where I’ve been watching some videos on how to make Detroit deep dishes. As most of you guys know, if you follow me on on some social media platforms like Instagram, I’ll post some stories on the my pizza creations that I do in the backyard on Friday nights in particular.

5:11
And one of the things I’ve been trying to get into recently is deep dish and it’s hard to get it right. So I watch the videos and they help to a certain degree, and I think I’ve gotten a better understanding as as a result of watching it. But as a whole, YouTube can help you in some ways and then other times it’s not going to help you.

5:30
And I think trading is one of those areas where it’s very difficult to find really good information that can actually make you a better trader. So that brings me to the title of this podcast episode, The Pitfalls of YouTube. Now, my background with YouTube and I feel like I’ve matured over the years when it, or at least there’s been a little bit of a journey for me on YouTube.

5:50
I started off probably like 2009, 2010, the videos were horrendous. So don’t go back and watch some of those videos. I mean, they were they were really low quality. And then probably around the pandemic, and that’s this is probably where a lot of you guys found out about me. I had a huge surge in viewers on YouTube. I mean, everybody was at home watching YouTube videos all day.

6:11
And so my videos were going from like, you know, five or six hits a day to gosh, like 40-50 thousand. I mean, I was getting a ton. It was really shocking. I mean, enough so to where I actually had people running into me in like restaurants and they knew who I was, which was that was the only time that’s ever happened.

6:29
But it was kind of crazy that that was happening. But one of the things that I realized that in order to maintain your viewership, you had to keep getting more and more sensational. You had to come up with these thumbnails that were just going to like strike fear into the hearts of traders and to make them worried that a crash was imminent.

6:42
And you were doing that for essentially for clickbait. And it started bothering me a little bit because fortunately, during that time in the beginning stages of COVID, the market was crashing for about 5 or six weeks there, you know, and then in 2022, you had another big market pull back. But it’s very difficult to just try to sensationalize everything about trading cause much of trading is actually boring.

7:08
Trading is not like this thrill seeking adventure. And I think where people get themselves into trouble with trading is when they actually do make it a thrill seeking adventure and they start losing tons of money as a result. They get into options, they get into these high volatility products and they lose their hides on it.

7:18
And so when you’re going online and you’re looking at these different videos, and I look at them too, I’m always, you know, exploring different things, seeing if anybody catches my eye. But I, I feel like I have a pretty sensitive filter for when somebody’s, you know, just throwing a bunch of crap out there. And I, I, I usually can tell pretty quickly whether or not this person’s legit.

7:41
But what I have found is that the more real and the more honest that you are with people, the less views you’re going to get. And it goes back to this old comic that I saw where you had two people and each person was sitting at a different table.

7:53
And at the front of one table, it said inconvenient truths, and at the other table it said convenient lies. And there was a long line for the people that wanted to hear the convenient lies, and there was nobody in line to hear the inconvenient truths.

8:08
And I think that’s a lot of what you see on social media. What they’re going to tell you is how you can make thousands upon thousands of dollars a day or millions of dollars a year, or maybe even millions of dollars by tomorrow. But those are just convenient lies to sell you a story that is not possible.

8:24
And so those are the ones though, that are going to get the most clicks because it’s plain to somebody’s emotions, plain to somebody’s hopes. When I tell people you gotta manage the risk that the profits take care of themselves, am I right? Yes.

8:39
Is that gonna be what gets me clicks? No. I always joke about it, but I’m usually the the person people come to last. People get on the hype train of all these different products and all these different ideas.

8:49
And then it’s usually me they come to at the very end. It’s like, God, look, if you look at the emails that I received, it’s pretty much that. Oh, yeah, I’ve lost about, you know, everything. And now I found your podcast and I wish I would have found it sooner.

9:01
I do too, because the principles that I’m trying to tell you are true. They are right. They will help you to stay in the game longer. But what everybody else is doing, they’re Yolo and their money into crazy options, and people are trying to follow them and they don’t care if you lose all your money.

9:15
They don’t care. The premise of what I’m doing is that I care because in the end, I want to be able to lay my head down at night and be able to sleep knowing that I’m not setting somebody up for failure.

9:27
I don’t know why that doesn’t resonate with other people in terms of what they do on YouTube and what they offer, but they don’t seem like they care.

9:35
And so going back to Bernice and this question here about watching all these videos, that’s great that you’ve watched a lot of videos, but I’m gonna tell you, 99% of the people that you watch on YouTube cannot be trusted. There’s some OK people out there.

9:47
I think I’m one of the OK people myself, but what I do, it’s not going to get clicked. I think I did a video just yesterday and that was probably like 150 views, far cry from like the COVID years.

9:59
But why is that? It’s because I’ve wisened up a little bit. I’d rather not try to figure out how to sensationalize the truths that I’m trying to say in order to get clicks and rather I’d just rather talk to you guys in plain speak.

10:10
And rather I’d just rather talk to you guys in plain speak. I think that’s one of the reasons why podcasting has been much more better for me because I’m able to do and podcasting something that resonates with people because it’s just a conversation. It’s hard to sensationalize on podcasts.

10:26
That’s why a lot of your Youtubers don’t have podcasts and if they do, they’re having guests on and they’re letting them talk instead of themselves talk. I have never had a guest on this podcast and I think that speaks to the knowledge that I’m trying to bring on a weekly basis, twice a week actually.

10:43
But one of the things about trading is that it’s time consuming. Trading will will take a lot of time. I talk about having side gigs, having things that you do on the side because swing trading will have its down times, but by and large, there’s a lot of research that you gotta do.

11:00
There’s a lot of watch lists that you gotta comb over each day. And so to think that you could run a YouTube channel where some of these people are putting out multiple videos every day. There’s I think there’s one that meet Kevin guy.

11:11
I think that guy puts out like 7:00 or 8:00. I’ve looked at how he does it. It doesn’t even seem possible. I don’t think you can actually be a trader and be putting out six or seven videos a day.

11:21
At least I haven’t figured it out. Sometimes when I’m doing those videos, it’s the last thing I would really want to be doing. I’m tired. But like you take yesterday, there was a pretty significant move in the markets and I wanted to talk about that a little bit ’cause I know it’s probably on the minds of a lot of people. So I did that.

11:35
One thing I would also encourage you guys to do, check out swingtradingthestockmarket.com. That’s my service that goes alongside of this. This is all my stock market research. So one of the things that I do is my research that I do. I put it out there for everybody. I just don’t keep it to myself.

11:47
So swingtradingthestockmarket.com.com allows you to see that you’re going to get my daily watch list, stocks that I’m watching as potential trade setups each day. And then I’m gonna review the watch list like I would do myself.

12:01
If I wasn’t even doing a podcast or I didn’t do shareplanner.com or anything else, I would be reviewing my watch list. So I provide you guys with my reviews. And then on top of that, I’m gonna do the big tech updates and I’m going to do updates on the stock market as a whole.

12:09
Plus, beginning of each week, I’m gonna give you my master bullish and bearish lists of stocks that I’m gonna be pulling trade setups from. So you get all that swingtradingthestockmarket.com. And it supports this podcast too.

12:20
So one of the things that I would also tell Bernice here, when you’re starting off with trading, it is hard to start off with like a couple $100. Here’s the reason why. It’s not that you can’t trade with just $100. It’s difficult to do risk management with just a couple $100.

12:30
Because personally, I think that you wanna start off probably with at least $1000 and you’re not gonna make money trading with $1000. You’re not gonna support yourself. You’re not gonna support your family.

12:41
I had a family member who I’m not too fond of come up to my wife the other day and he’s like, hey, I just made $1000. I actually, I think it was they inherited $1000.

12:52
And I heard if you put it in the stock market, you could really get rich off of that in a in a few years. No, in a few years, if you’re lucky, you might be sitting at like 13 or $1400 total. That’s including the original.

13:04
That’s if you’re a, a good trader investing wise. Yeah, you could probably do that, but you better hit those stocks, right? That’s the thinking that’s very pervasive with a lot of people with trading, and it’s just not true.

13:09
But what I want people to do is whether they’re trading with $1,000,000 or they’re trading with $1000 is to have the same risk management principles, meaning that you’re planning out your trades. You’re not getting into too large a positions because in the end, I don’t care about the dollars.

13:31
I get that there’s probably not that big of a difference if you’re trading with a 50% position with $1000 account versus a 20% position with $1000 account. Let’s say you get a trade on a 50% position with $1000 account, that goes up 10%. You made $50.00.

13:47
That same 10% with with a 20% position on $1000 account, it’s $20, OK 10% of 200, OK, you made an extra 30 bucks there. That doesn’t even cover sometimes the sandwich that I get for lunch.

13:59
So it’s not going to make a big difference from a dollar standpoint. That’s why I don’t think that it’s good to to really be focusing on the dollars, especially with the low dollar accounts, because what you’re trying to do is establish yourself as a person who can, regardless if it’s $1,000,000 or $1000 that you’re trading, but you can extract consistent gains from the stock market.

14:19
And so if you start getting caught up on how much money you’re going to make from the trade from a dollar standpoint, you’re gonna start saying, OK, I’m gonna go $1000 long on this position. You may make money off of it. You may even double your account by doing that.

14:30
But are you really learning what it means manage risk when it comes to trading? There is a person on Tiktok, somebody sent this to me and I don’t I don’t even have TikTok on my phone. I had to go again to the desktop and look at it.

14:41
But this woman, I kid you not, goes on there and says let me give you a life hack. If you make 2% a day in the stock market starting with I don’t even know what she said was it like $100 or something like $300 or something. It was it was in the hundreds.

15:01
But if she says if you start and make 2% of that, all you have to do is make 2% on your account every day, you’ll have forty, $50,000 by the end of the year.

15:11
Now, I know that there’s only 260 days of trading throughout the course of the year, unfortunately, but by the end of year two, you’ll have like 3 or $4 million.

15:22
I don’t have a lot of hair left, but that about made me want to just go scorch earth on the hair that I had left. I mean, I just want to pull it all out, but that’s the kind of crap that you’re hearing out there. That’s the mindset of a lot of traders.

15:33
They want to make 2% a day, and they actually don’t think that they’re expecting much out of the market in doing so. Guys, I’m gonna tell you, nobody makes 2% a day in the stock market.

15:39
If they did it, they would have the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme ever created. And a lot of people on social media, too, they will tell you how they fly with private jets because of all this money.

15:52
And a lot of, I swear every one of them are like 21 years old. In fact, I’ve been seeing some now that are like 16 and 17 years old.

15:59
Yeah, because I made good sound financial decisions at 16 years old. I can now fly around in this private jet. No, you ain’t, because we all know what you’re doing. You’re going to a Hollywood set or they, they actually have these things all over the country.

16:12
You can go and do videos and and essentially like the body of a plane, it’s not flying, but they have like graphics on the outside to make it look like it’s flying. And you can do all your videos. I mean, a lot of people have done that and they’ve been called out for it.

16:25
I know there was a guy still out there selling, selling his services that acted like he was invited to the Harvard School of Business. And no, it was a company that actually sells the backdrop and it will provide the people in the audience for you to give a speech that makes it look like you were invited and got to talk at the Harvard School of Business.

16:42
But no, you didn’t. And then the reviews. Oh, but look at my reviews. Look at my reviews, guys. I’ve had these same companies that everybody’s looking at for reviews call me and actually give me their, I don’t even know how they got my phone number honestly, but they will call me and then they will, they will try to tell me about what they they have to offer and how it can help me out and everything.

17:01
And then they say, and if you get a bad review and you don’t like it, you can just delete it. Nobody’s gonna say anything. So they’re not getting reviews in an honest manner. Anyways. I can lament about this for for a really long time, but it’s important for you guys to know that when it comes to social media, who you’re following, who you’re listening to, make them build that credibility with you.

17:23
Heck, make me build that credibility with you. I shouldn’t be just taken at face value right out of the gate. This is your first time listening to me. Don’t trust me right out of the gate.

17:32
You shouldn’t. You don’t know me. I mean, I personally, I think I’m trustworthy guy, but on the surface, if you’re just listening to me for the first time, you should make sure that I’m building my credibility with you over time.

17:47
I go to church every Sunday and you know, I’ve sat under a lot of pastors over the years, and one of the things that I’ve learned is that there’s a lot of pastors with a lot of different opinions and views on things. There’s certain things about my Christian faith that I won’t compromise on.

18:00
There’s certain tenets, you know, Jesus Christ is the Son of God. I believe in the Trinity. Those aspects, those are things that I will not allow even a discussion on because they’re matters of principle that have no room for deviation from.

18:15
But beyond that, there’s a lot of other scripture too that talks about different subject matters, different topics, different parts of theology. And so I’ve heard a lot of pastors give a lot of different opinions on a, on the same subject, but they’ll provide different opinions.

18:29
And if I take every one of them at face value, I, I won’t even know what I’m believing ’cause I’ll have heard so many different variation. So what I always do, I never even the pastor that I sit under that that I really like and has a lot of credibility with me, I still will take everything that he says and I will put it back up against the Bible because I think that is the most important part.

18:48
Is what he’s saying in line with what the Bible says? Now, no, this isn’t a Christian podcast, but it’s a great example of how as traitors we need to be taking everything that everybody’s saying and evaluate for whether or not it appears to be right.

19:06
If a person saying that they can make 2% per day and they’ve been making it OK, how was that even possible? What product out there is yielding you 2% per day because in this line of thinking you’ll have no losers.

19:20
Let me let me tell you, when you are starting off trading, if you can be 50% right, that’s amazing. You can be 40% right? That’s amazing. That’s how hard trading is.

19:31
And so don’t get caught up in everything that these people are talking about. Bernice is looking at 4X videos and let me tell you, 4X has a lot of shysters in it and there is a lot of ways to lose a ton of money. It’s much easier to blow through your account trading forex than it is with equities.

19:49
Just like I talk about how it’s much easier to blow through your account trading options than it is equities. Just like options, it’s very easy to blow out your account trading forex, trading futures too. No different.

20:02
So with all that being said, what’s the take away from all of this guys? Know who you’re listening to online, know what you’re talking about. I don’t care if it’s me or somebody else. Look, if they are on YouTube and they’re putting out quality videos every single day, they’re not trading.

20:19
I do 2 podcasts a week really because it’s something that I really like doing. If I’m having a good week or a bad week, I, it doesn’t matter. I look forward to doing these podcasts because I actually like it.

20:30
I’m sitting in a room by myself. I’m talking off of this e-mail that I got. It’s conversational. I like that part of it and it and it’s really an opportunity for me to to talk about things that I haven’t been able to talk about ’cause I’m sitting in a room by myself all week long.

20:45
So I enjoy doing it. Could I do three or four podcasts a week? Probably not. I mean, there’s some other things that I’ve thought about doing, but it’s something that I have to do out of love and passion because there’s not a ton of time left anymore for me, especially.

20:57
I have a family of three with three kids and I have a wife. Yeah, I want to spend time with them too, you know. But yeah, these people are putting out like three or four videos a day and they’re high quality. Trust me, I’ve tried to do that.

21:06
It’s not possible. I mean, the amount of editing for some of these videos, it’ll take like 12 to 15 hours to do. And So what I’ve done on my podcast, you might have noticed it. I’m really no frills anymore.

21:18
And I used to have a background and all that stuff. I’m I’m pretty much done away with that. I just have AI have a fancy web camera shooting right down at me and it takes out the background, puts me on the charts. Boom, there you go.

21:27
I do my videos in like 40 minutes. I’m I’m done, but what I want to be able to convince people is that the content that I’m providing is rich in content, rich in knowledge and being able to provide you with information that you’re not gonna get from these fancy guys who are, you know, doing their trading videos from their fake private airplane.

21:49
What I want you to do is I want you to realize the actual realities of trading, that it is difficult that it is going to take some time and that you’re not gonna be good at it right away and that you need to gain experience and that you need to gain skills over that time.

21:59
With that being said, I do have an Old fashioned here that I did. This one is Angel’s Envy. It is a Kentucky Straight bourbon. It’s not the right. The right I actually think is way better than the bourbon Angel’s Envy.

22:15
But this one, I don’t think it’s that good of a bourbon. Whoever I was hoping that would be amazing in the Old Fashioned. It was and it was. It was really just watered down.

22:23
So that was that was disappointing. I would say on a scale of zero to 10, I’d give this probably like a 5.9. It’s just not that good guys. The angels envy bourbon makes for a horrible old fashioned.

22:38
It just isn’t there. Evan Williams, which you can get for $30 a full handle of it 10 times better. If you enjoyed this podcast episode, I would encourage you to leave me a 5 star review on whatever platform that you’re listening to me on and send me your stories. ryan@shareplanner.com.

22:55
I will read your e-mail and I will try my very best to make a podcast episode. As long as it is topical and has a story to it, I will make a podcast episode out of it.

23:03
And don’t forget to check out Swing creating the-stockmarket.com where you can get all my stock market research. Thank you guys and God bless.

23:07
Thanks for listening to my podcast, Swing Trading the Stock Market. I’d like to encourage you to join me in the SharePlanner trading Block where I navigate the stock market each day with traders from around the world.

23:21
With your membership, you will get a seven day trial and access to my trading room including alerts via text, e-mail and WhatsApp. So go ahead, sign up by going to shareplanner.com/trading Block, that’s www.shareplanner.com/trading-block and follow me on SharePlanners, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook where I provide unique market and trading information every day.

23:41
If you have any questions, please feel free to e-mail me at ryan@shareplanner.com. All the best to you and I look forward to trading with you soon.