Podcast - Roy Flores

This is an episode of the Latinos Who Thrive podcast, hosted by Victor Escalante. The guest is Roy Flores, an experienced trader in the markets. He shares his background, including his time in the Marine Corps and his successful career in finance. Flores also discusses his introduction to NLP and his journey in personal development. They touch on the importance of having goals, commitment, and grit in achieving success. Welcome to another episode of Latinos Who Thrive, the podcast that celebrates the stories, achievements, and experiences of Latino individuals making waves in their communities and beyond. I'm your host, Victor Escalante, and each week we bring you inspiring conversations with trailblazers, innovators, and everyday heroes from diverse fields, all united by the heritage and the drive to succeed. Whether you're looking for motivation, insight, or simply a reminder of the incredible power of the Latino community, you've come to the right place. From entrepreneurship and activism to arts and academia, we cover it all. So sit back and relax and get ready to be inspired by Latinos Who Thrive. Today we have a very special guest. His name is Roy Flores, who is an experienced trader in the markets, and he's passionate about sharing his expertise with our listeners. He holds a degree in psychology from the University of Houston and a master's in neurolinguistic programming. He served as a captain and jet pilot in the United States Marine Corps before embarking on a successful career in finance and as a stockbroker at Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers. So let's get on with it. And now we have Roy Flores with us. Hello, Roy. Welcome to Latinos Who Thrive. Hey, thank you for having me, Victor. I want to tell you a little bit about Roy. I first met him, and you may not remember this, maybe you do, Roy. I first met you in 2005 when you got on the radar of one of my students that was taking the NLP practitioner training course. He says, hey, there's this guy, there's this guy named Roy Flores that is doing a free intro to NLP. I said, oh, that sounds interesting, because back then there was nobody else that I knew of. Maybe the linguist from Rice University, I believe her name was Judith Roales, something like that. She had an institute, and I knew about her, but other than her and you, you were the only person in Houston, as big as Houston is, that was doing NLP trainings. Tell us how you got started in the field of personal development. I want to know your story. Let me just give you a brief background. Born and raised in Houston, went to Melby High School, graduated. I was in sports, played basketball, football, did a variety of sports. I excelled in school. I was an honor student, and I joined the Marine Corps right out of high school for a couple of years, got out in 1970, got my degree in psychology from the University of Houston right after that, and went right back in the Marine Corps, because I wanted to fly airplanes. I became an officer in the Marine Corps, and I ended up flying jets for a few years. In 1979, made the decision to get out of the Marine Corps, and I got hired by Merrill Lynch as a stockbroker trainee, and did very well in that business, made quite a bit of money, and then the second firm I was with was Lehman Brothers. While I was at Lehman Brothers, I was doing so well that they asked me to start teaching other people how to excel, how do we achieve better results. I was going from the different offices around the country, doing seminars on improving performance, and that's how I got into not only job performance, but I recognized that a lot of it is personal development as well, to excel. In 1986, I was reading a book called Unlimited Power by a guy named Anthony Robbins. This was in 1986. Tony Robbins was just getting started. He wrote his first book in 1985, Unlimited Power. I went out, and he was teaching NLP. He had learned with the founders of NLP, Richard Bandler and Grinder, and he had trained with them. He was doing NLP seminars, and I got really excited, so I went out to LA and did a four-day seminar, and then I went through his certification program out in California, which was a one-month program. I got certified. When I came back home, that's when I started wanting to teach NLP, and part of it is being personal development and self-improvement as well. That's how I really got started, and how do you promote it? Because I wanted to start it as a business. At that time, there was a company here in Houston called Leisure Learning Unlimited. You could sign up for courses, non-credit courses. They had a catalog, and you could take everything from Spanish to gardening to gun safety to almost every imaginable subject, and so I decided to start teaching an introduction to NLP in there, and that's how I started picking up. My business started improving from there, and so I did very well after that. I want to take you back to Melby High School. I recently spoke there to two classes of JROTC. Were you in JROTC? No, I was not. I was amazed from speaking to these students, Roy, that I would say 98% were Latinos. I asked a few questions that were very basic. I'm not talking advanced super stuff. Very basic. They couldn't answer something as simple as, what do you think it takes to succeed in today's world? They couldn't answer that. I asked for volunteers to give it a shot. You and I know that there's no dumb answer. There's only a dumb, irresponsive, do-nothing mindset. So I went on to explain to them that the number one reason now, according to science, according to research, is having grit, having the ability to master the mundane, boring stuff. That's why surgeons are so successful, is because they learn all the boring stuff. You take any profession, they learn the boring stuff and they master it by doing it over and over and over and over again. I want you to take us back to your own journey as far as, why do you think you were so successful in the Air Force? It was actually in the Marine Corps, but I wasn't flying jets, yes. You've got to have a goal or a dream, you've got to have something that you're going for. For me, that was always my goal, my dream. When I was at Edison Junior High, they used to call them junior high schools, Edison Middle School over in Southeast Houston, I was 13 years old and one of our teachers had his private pilot license. On the weekends, he would sometimes take students up on a flight with him, and so I went with three other students and when I went on that little airplane ride- That was it. You were hooked. Yeah, that was it. I told Mr. Davis, his name was Jack Davis from Wichita, Kansas, and I told him that this is what I want to do, I want to fly airplanes, but I don't want to fly these little bitty things, I want to fly jets. That became my goal and dream right then and there at 13. So you've got to have a goal, something that you're really passionate about, and then- And then comes the commitment to doing it, in other words, I've got to commit to doing it. One of the things that Mr. Davis, in the ninth grade, this was in the seventh grade, so in the ninth grade at Edison, they select the most outstanding student, and so there's a prize and award for that, and I told him, I'm going to win that, I want to win that ninth grade outstanding student award, and he said, well then, that takes some commitment, and he said, that also takes you having to do things that other students do not want to do. So in other words, you have to do more than what's expected. That's where we get into the grit. Tell us about the boring stuff that you had to master to be able to live up to your commitment. Well, so you have to do a lot of mundane things, like you've got to take classes you hate that you wouldn't normally want to take or do, in other words, you've got to do things you don't really want to do, but you've got to get through them. And so it's just keeping that goal in front of you is constantly something that you have to work on, is here's what my goal is, here's what my dream is, here's what I'd really love to do, and to commit to it, and I'll give you a classic story. I'd already gone through boot camp in the Marine Corps out in San Diego when I was an enlisted Marine, but now to become an officer and go to flight school, you've got to go to Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia, and it's infantry school, okay? And then after that, and it's so hard, I mean, I'd already been through boot camp, so I knew what it was a little bit about, you know, so what I was looking at was that it was so difficult that they would come in and say, anytime you want to get out of here, you can leave, all you've got to do is drop on request. And I kept thinking, well, you know, it's so hard, I mean, it's probably the most difficult thing I could do, but then I said, if I don't complete this, if I don't get through this, I'll never fly a jet airplane, you know, that's something I had to do, and I didn't want to do it, but I had to go through it, you know? I want to circle back to the word commitment. You and I know a lot of Tony Robbins' quotes on commitment. Give us a couple of principles related to commitment, because I see a lot of people that are not committed to being the best that they can be. Yeah, and so I see a lack of commitment. What is commitment? Tell our listeners what commitment is. Well, for me, I don't know what the exact Webster's Dictionary definition is, but for me is to say, there's no other choice, no other option. Exactly, exactly. You burn the ships, okay? You burn those ships. There's no going back. This is it. This is the hill you're going to climb, in which you're going to die, because you've got to get to the top, because there's no other choice. Or die. You know, when Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico in Veracruz, he burned the ships, and he told his men, we're going to conquer, or we're going to die, one or the other. So he said, you've got a choice, so start fixing your mind on, right now we're going to conquer. And that's exactly what they did. I'm sure that you've watched some videos of people that climb Mount Everest. You're faced on a daily basis with issues of life and death. And again, if you don't have that burning desire, that commitment, you're not going to make it. You're going to die. You're going to die or turn back. Yeah, that's right. So that's burning your ships, is the mental picture that I want people to think about is, hey, you know what, there's no, in other words, there's no option here. This is the only choice, and that's it. And that's commitment now. You're committed to that. The word decide means to cut off other options. So when you decide, and you commit, because you can have a decision to do something, but if you're not committed to it, it doesn't mean that you'll follow through. Exactly. So I see when I've worked with corporations, that's one of the things we work on is commitment because for us to improve in a corporation, everybody's got to commit to the final outcome that we're looking for. We're going to get to that a little later, but I want to circle back to you learned the basics of grit in the Marine Corps. And of course, the Marines are very proud of their philosophy and their mindset. Many people that come from the military go on to have highly successful business careers because again, they got the fundamentals, they got the basics. So with those basics, you went to work in Wall Street, Roy. How did you apply those same basic principles to succeed as a trader? So first you got the goal, you got the dream, you got the vision or whatever you want to call it. Then you've got commitment. And the biggest part of commitment is discipline. You've got to be disciplined and do what you need to do every day, what it takes in order to start accomplishing what you're trying to accomplish. So it's that discipline that leads to success, that you do the daily habits that are going to get you there. And most of us are way too lazy, okay? And we don't develop that high degree of discipline that helps you get to where you want to go. And let me give you an example of discipline. When I joined Lehman Brothers, I was pretty good in sales already. When I joined Merrill Lynch in 1979, right out of the Marine Corps, I was a captain in the Marine Corps. And I joined Merrill Lynch and they said, hey, you're going to be selling now, okay? And they said, have you ever sold before? Well, no, I've never sold before. And they said, well, we're going to give you the yellow pages and you're going to start calling people and trying to sell them, okay? And that scared me more than flying a jet off an aircraft carrier. Yes, I can imagine. If you've never sold, all of a sudden you're put in front of a yellow pages book and told to go call strangers who don't want to hear from you. Exactly. Trying to sell them something that they may not be interested in. So how did you do it, Roy? Well, so first of all, the golden dream, the dream was there, you know? By the way, when I left the Marine Corps, my next goal and dream was to make over $100,000 a year. Okay. At first, I don't know why that number was important to me, but in 1979, that number was important. $100,000 a year. I didn't know. That was a lot of money. That was a lot of money. You know? 300,000 in today's market. Probably so. So anyways, I said, okay, that's my goal. That's my dream. Okay. In the brokerage business. What I figured out right away, you got to make so many calls a day. You got to send out so many mailers a day. And so you do that, you know? You're typing up labels and sending out mailers. You're calling people. At that point, it's just a numbers game. Okay? That's all it was. It was just a numbers game. How many calls did you have to make to get one prospect that would say, okay, I'm interested in talking to you? Well, I'll get to that in a minute when I get to Lehman Brothers because that's really where the rubber met the road. But what stayed to me at Merrill Lynch was we were in downtown Houston at a high-rise there right there on, I think, Lamar and Fannin Street. And what we used to have every week, an open door where people would come in and want to open accounts. And Victor, what saved me was people with a lot of money were coming in. We're talking 1980, 81, you know? The Houston Chronicle was selling for like $10 in different places like Detroit and New York City because there was so much work and so much prosperity in Houston. So people would come in the door and they'd say, I want to open an account. And they'd say, okay, well, today is Flores' day. So Flores gets to open up all the accounts on Tuesday. That saved me, Victor. I got all kinds of accounts coming in. I've opened up so many accounts, they sent me to Hawaii for an all-expenses-paid trip for a week. You know, I was doing so well. My second year, I was already doing $100,000 a year, okay? So now at that point, you were an order-taker. You were not selling. Okay, I wasn't selling anymore. You were banking on the reputation of Merrill Lynch, which back then had a stellar reputation as one of the top stockbrokers companies to go to. I actually worked for a division of them selling mortgage cancellation insurance. Oh, really? Yeah. So I got to understand the mentality of the Merrill Lynch ethos. And again, we sold on reputation. We sold on having the prestige of one of the biggest, most trusted companies in the country. I'm talking back then, old school, okay? Yeah, yeah. So I got to thinking, Victor, how am I going to get to $200,000 or $300,000, you know? And Lehman Brothers called me and said, hey, you know, we heard you're one of the rising stars at Merrill Lynch. We'd like for you to join us. We have a system of selling. And this is when I learned to sell. They were doing 100% telephone cold calling, okay? Now this is back in 82 and 83. And you know, they said, we're going to show you how to sell. We're going to train you. You're going to go to New York City. You're going to be trained in how to sell. And all you have to do is do everything we tell you to do and how many times we tell you to do it. Again, it's a numbers game, but now you're better at selling as well. This is now influence and persuasions. Yeah, you knew you were knowledgeable about the product because you had had the training at Merrill Lynch. So you could talk the language. You could convince people because let's face it, we buy from people that we like, that we trust, and people that are knowledgeable in what they do. Okay? That's right. That's right. So you had the knowledge. Well, you had developed the charisma, the ability to be likable. And of course, if you were an ex-military officer, you could easily develop rapport to have that trust. Yes. So you had all three factors going for you. So now tell us, give us the suspense, it's like, what was the number of cold calls you had to make per day to get one warm lead? So we shot for five warm leads a day, five of them. And it took 300 telephone dials. You have to dial the telephone 300 times. Now, we couldn't do 300 dials by yourself. So we had college kids that would come in and dial the phone. And if they got somebody on the line, they'd say, Roy, it's Mr. Jones. And so I'd pick up the line and say, Mr. Jones, hello, my name is Roy Flores. I'm with Lehman Brothers in Houston. I trust you're familiar with our firm. And so, I mean, we had the whole spiel, man. I mean, so we had dialers dialing all 300 dials a day to get five warm bodies. Wow. And that's what it took to get five of them. And you got five warm bodies because if you did that every day, you got 25 a week. That's 100 a month. And at the end of the month or during the month, you would try to pitch those 100 people on a particular stock that you're working on to sell them over the phone of that stock. And typically, our closing rate, if you were just horrendous, your closing rate was 10%. So you would open 10 new accounts a month. And by the way, they had to be minimum $20,000. So you would open those accounts. Victor, you're selling a stock over the phone. Yes. Unseen. And unseen and thought that the customer doesn't know anything about. And keep buying off of your recommendation, your persuasion skills. Exactly. And Victor, in those days, the guys got to write a check or the gals got to write a check, put it in an envelope, put a stamp on it, address it to you and mail it to you. Yeah. It's not like you can get on a smartphone and just click send and you're done. There was lots of friction in the process that they could have said no or they would get cold feet to where they would reconsider what they had just committed to. They were already getting the check in the mail. Yeah. In spite of that, you were able to thrive, Roy. To what do you attribute your success? It comes back to the same old thing, Victor. You got to have a goal or a dream or a vision. And I knew what mine was, was to start making well over $100,000 a year. And then you got to have the commitment and then the discipline. That 300 dials a day, you got to dial. By this point, you were actually liking what you were doing, weren't you? Because no one ever succeeded at doing something they hated. So what was it that you liked about the industry and about the sales process? Well, number one, that people are looking for it. Even today, people are still looking for a way to make money. Right. And if you can show people a way to make money, then there's a high degree of interest in this. And we were dealing with people. We would buy a list of people that were actually cards, three by five cards, of people that had already been identified as having a lot of money or real high level executives in corporations. And we had hundreds of thousands of those leads. So we were calling people that already had a lot of money. But guess what? They're always interested in learning how to make more or how to manage their money better. So that was an industry that everybody had an interest in. In other words, money is, you know, probably everybody's number one interest. And so the other part of it was, if you've ever seen The Wolf of Wall Street, that, you know. I haven't seen the movie, but I've seen so many different references about it. Basically, it's about greed. It's about greed. And that, you know, they would tell you, go buy a big house, go buy a big car, because now you're going to be motivated to pay for that house and that. Now you've got it. Yeah, you've burned your ship and now you've got to pay for new ships. So that's what they encourage you to do. The other part was, now that I was also teaching brokers how to become very successful, because I had already done it, the travel, Victor. I was going to Miami. I was going to New York. I was going to Los Angeles. They put me up at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York City. They used to put me in at the Park Lane Hotel across the street from the Central Park. You know, we're talking in 83, 84, Victor. That was probably about $400 a night, you know. And so you're being treated like royalty. They're taking you to the best restaurants. I would take my wife with me. And so, I mean, it was just phenomenal, you know. You're listening to Latino Survive with special guest Roy Flores. We'll be right back. Are you ready to unlock your full potential and embark on a journey of limitless knowledge and boundless creativity? Look no further than Wizard Academy, where dreams become reality. At Wizard Academy, they are not just a school. They're a community of visionaries, dreamers, and achievers. Whether you're a student, a working professional, or someone looking to reinvent yourself, Wizard Academy has a place for you. I know because I'm a graduate of the World Changers class of 2007 when I worked in print media. Imagine being guided by industry experts where innovation knows no bounds and where your passions are transformed into skills. Their cutting-edge programs span technology, business, arts, and more. You'll discover the magic within you, and you will do it with confidence. At Wizard Academy, they embrace diversity and creativity, and they celebrate your unique journey. So be sure to join them in the heart of innovation where the extraordinary becomes ordinary. Visit them at www.wizardacademy.org now to explore their lineup of courses, faculty, and the incredible success stories of this community. Your future is waiting. Unleash your inner wizard today. We're now returning to Latino Superdive with special guest Roy Flores. What were you teaching? It's like, what was your system that you mastered that made all the difference for the stock brokers that you were training? So some of it was NLP. A lot of it was personal development and self-improvement. Just to give you an example, in NLP, we talk about the modes for learning and understanding information. So there's visual, you see it. Auditory, you hear it. Or kinesthetic, you feel it. So all three, and that's how we learn best, by getting it in all three. But most of us have one that's a preference, like mine is visual. I got to see it for me to understand it. So I came up with ways of, just to give you an example, in the co-call, part of the co-call, I would say, Mr. Jones, let me ask you a question. If I could show you an investment that you felt could make you 50% return over the next year, would you have an interest in hearing more? So I said, could I show you, visual, an idea that you felt could make you 50% over the next year, would you have an interest in hearing more? Yeah, you hear all three. The visual, the kinesthetic, and the auditory. Auditory. So I was designing presentations using that, but also asking questions and getting people involved in the sales process. What are some of the power questions that you can ask, and the way you can ask them to get people involved? Because normally a salesperson does all the talking, and you don't want to do that. You want to ask questions and have them talk and be part of the sales process. So that's what I was designing, those kinds of things, in the selling process to get people to be more successful. Let's transition into, you actually developed an expertise for picking stocks. That's correct. You actually developed a system through which you could have a nice return on your investments. Talk to us about that and how that came about, because now you're doing that consistently for individuals, and you actually have classes. We want to hear more about that. Tell us about the system that you developed for being able to pick winning stocks or to study trends. Did you ever come up with your own newsletter to where you made recommendations? Yes. We've had students, and I've got a PowerPoint, and I actually share some of those newsletters in the PowerPoint that I've written all the way back to 2008, back even further, and I've got several of them over the years. But I want to know your system. I want to know your system, because what is unique about your system in order to be able to minimize your risk and have a nice return on your investment? Here's what I will tell you right now. Why is it that most people do not make money in the stock market? Well, number one, they don't have a plan. Okay. Yes. So I set up a plan for students on how to plan how you're going to allocate money. If you have $100,000, how much do you put into one stock? You don't put it all in there, so you develop a plan. But the biggest part of my plan, Victor, is that when you buy a stock, you must have a stop loss. It doesn't matter if you buy a stock or you buy gold or oil. It doesn't matter whatever you're investing in. You have to have a number, a stop loss, that says, I will only let it go this far. The reason people don't make money is when they invest, they're willing to lose it all. Now, they don't do it consciously, but that's exactly what they do when they buy a stock. How many people do you know, when they buy a stock, they say, you know what? I better put a stop loss in here, you know? And so I'll give you an example. If you buy a stock at $20 a share, expecting it to go up, and it starts to come down, you're wrong. You already made a mistake. So now the question is, how much are you willing to be wrong? And for most people, it's 100%. Of whatever I invested, 100%, I'm willing to be wrong. Not that they make that decision consciously, but subconsciously, because they didn't put a stop in, you know? The numbers could go way down. And so what ends up happening, Victor, is people take way too big a loss. Think about it. If you lose 50% in an investment, now you've got to make 100% just to get the break even. And that's tough to do, to make 100% return. So why would you want a stomach of 50% loss? So no, you've got to stop it out. You've got to have a limit to stop that. What else? And then, so you've got a plan, and then it's got to have a stop loss. Then you've got to be able to, to a high degree of accuracy, try to determine which direction the market is going to go, or the stock is going to go, or oil, or gold. And for that, we use—this is so unique and so different because only about 2% of the population uses—it's called technical analysis. So when you're studying a stock, there's only two types of analysis you can do. One is either fundamental analysis, and that is when you study the earnings per share, and the sales, and how much debt do they have, and what's their management team like, and all of those positive things on how you determine how good a company is by the amount of money they're making, and the product, and how well it's selling. But technical analysis, Victor, looks at chart patterns. How a chart pattern, and how to read charts in a way that lets you determine to a high degree of accuracy which direction a stock, or the stock market, or oil, or gold, or soybeans, or whatever you want to, you know, euro dollars, or whatever you want to invest in. What direction are we going? Because in order to make money, you've got to get direction right, okay? And this is very predictable based upon the history of stocks. Is that correct? Oh, yeah. So, you know, the stock market's been around over 200 years. Yes. So there's cycles, Victor, in the market. So, you know, cycles come and go. Most people think, oh, stocks, you know. No, they go up and they go down. And they have very predictable cycles if you know how to read the chart patterns. So that's what you've got to do is be able to predict those cycles when they come. Now, the other part that we do, Victor, is we use a process called selling short. Selling short is to make money when the stock market is coming down. So we can make money just as much or more when the stock is going down as long as we have made that decision or that determination that this stock is getting ready to go down, or oil is getting ready to go down. We can sell short and make money when it comes down. So up or down doesn't make any difference to us. I'm not an educated investor. Talk to us about selling short. What does that entail? Okay. So let me give you an example. If you've got a piece of paper to write on, this would be really beneficial to you. Okay. I got my piece of paper. Very few people, probably less than 1% of the population knows how to sell short. Okay. All right. Listen up, listeners. This is the secret. So let's suppose that you'd identify, which I did years ago when I was doing work for them, Intel is going to come down. Okay. Intel, I said, is going to come down. They were roughly at $88. Actually, they were $100, but I told them at $88, you need to sell short. So at $88, here's what I suggested. Sell 1,000 shares of Intel. The symbol is I-N-T-C. Sell 1,000 shares right now. Okay. At $88. So they deposit into your account immediately $88,000. Now you just sold something that you don't own. Okay. So how does that work? Well, the process of how this works is that when you sell something short, instead of buying a stock, you're selling a stock to start the investment. And when you sell short 1,000 shares, the brokerage firm loans you those 1,000 shares of Intel, which you then turn around and sell in the open market. And then you turn around and sell it in the open market for $88. They immediately deposit $88,000 in your account. Okay. So think about that. There's $88,000 sitting in your account. Now you've got to come up with some of the money, half of it, to be able to do this transaction. Okay. But you've got $88,000 sitting in your account. It shows up in your statement. Now you can't touch it because if you borrow something from someone, what do you have to do in the future? Pay it back. You've got to give it back. So somewhere in the future, you've got to buy back those shares that you just sold short. At $88,000, you've got to buy them back. There's $88,000 sitting in your account. Now let's suppose that the stock goes down to $30 a share. Okay. And by the way, you can do this in one week, one month, one day, one year, two years, doesn't matter. Okay. So once you sold short, you've got to buy it back. Sometime in the future, you've got to buy those shares back. So if it now goes down to $30, and I tell you, Victor, buy those thousand shares now at $30 a share, the cost for you to buy back is $30,000 to buy those costs. The cost for you to buy back those thousand shares is $1,000. How much do you have sitting in your account? $88,000 is sitting in your account. Yes. And it only takes $30 to buy them back. How much do you have left over? $54,000. And that spread is your profit. That's your profit. And so you made $54,000 when Intel went from $88,000 down to $30,000 if you sold a thousand shares short. If it was $100,000, then you're talking $8,000. Okay. So did you ever become a day trader, Roy? I teach day trading. We teach all kinds of trading. Okay. So in our school, we teach all kinds of day trading. Some of my students work in the oil and gas business. They actually work in the Gulf of Mexico drilling oil. Okay. And they're out there on those drilling rigs sometimes for two, three, four weeks at a time. Yeah. So some of my students can only invest once a month. Yeah. So I've got to show them how to trade on a monthly basis. I've got some students that trade eight, 10 times a day, 12, 15 times a day. You know, they're looking at it. Okay. A five minute chart in and out, in and out, in and out. Okay. So tell us how you are teaching your classes and your students, Roy. Go ahead and tell us now. So the way technical analysis works, these are chart patterns. These chart patterns will work on any timeframe. So in other words, I may be looking at a monthly chart or I may be looking at a five minute chart. It doesn't matter the mechanics of how those charts work are the same. In other words, and I'll give you an example in just a minute. But so the mechanics are the same. I can trade a five minute chart pretty much like I do a monthly chart. All right. So the chart patterns are basically the same, no matter what the timeframe is. So what you as an investor have to do is decide what's going to be my timeframe. In other words, do I want to invest once a week or once a month or 10 times a day? You know, how often do I want to look at my charts and how often do I want to look at these things? So we give them very specific lessons. And the first lesson is called the trend line. And I'll tell you about that in just a minute. But we also use one other thing that very few people are familiar with or very good at. And it's called Japanese candlestick patterns. Have you ever heard of that, Victor? No. Japanese candlestick patterns have been around. They were invented by rice traders in Japan 400 years ago. So these patterns have been around for over 400 years and they still work today 400 years later. So we combine that with our technical analysis to give us another indicator that we're on the right track. In other words, if we've determined that something is probably coming down and then we have a Japanese candlestick pattern that agrees, then it's no longer a 50-50 bet. Now the odds are way in our favor. And that's the kind of trading we like to do when the odds are in our favor. And remember, Victor, in everything we do, we always have a stop loss. In other words, we're only willing to lose so much money and it's always small losses in an account so that we can't suffer catastrophic losses. That's when people get killed by losing 50% or 60% of their money. And that's what, in the crash of 2008, almost everybody lost somewhere between 60% and 80% of their accounts. And that's catastrophic. Why would you want to do that when you can plan not to ever take a catastrophic loss? So that's part of that. And by the way, when I was talking about Intel going from 88 down to 30, if Intel went from 88 to 100, you're losing money now. Because you sold short, expecting it to go down, and now it's going up. So if you have to buy back your shares at 100, you've now lost $12,000 because it's about $12 per share. What's 1,000 times 12? Yeah. So you're losing if it goes up. So you always have a stop loss. But you've got to trust your chart patterns because the chart patterns tell you where you need to go and which direction you need to go. OK? It's a high degree of accuracy. Let's get back to the current market. Tell us about crypto. Are you versed in the crypto space? Yeah. A lot of my students are in crypto. I wrote in December 2021. I have an email I can send you and your students as well, or your listeners. I can send them an email on talking about crypto. And at the time, crypto was about $55,000, $60,000. And I recommended shorting it at $44,000, expecting it to go down. I told them I thought it would go down all the way to $3,000. It went down to $15,000. So had you shorted it when I said sell short at $44,000 and recovered it at $15,000, let me do the math for you. Now, you wouldn't have gotten it at $15,000 because you didn't know that was the absolute bottom. But let's just say at $20,000, you would have bought back your crypto. This is on the crypto futures exchange, by the way. OK. So you can trade all the cryptos. So let's just do $54,000. I mean, I'm sorry, $45,000, I think. I'll send you the email when we finish the call. But if your listeners want to get it, I'll give them my email address in just a minute. So if you covered, let's see, in one year that made $24,000, and you multiply that, you would have made about $5,000 in less than a year. OK. And by the way, that would have cost you roughly about $2,500 to do that trade. OK. So that's crypto. And now here's the thing about crypto that you have to recognize. We're on a tear now. We're going back up. We're in the $70,000 range now. So probably it'll go back up again. And so again, as long as the charts say up or down, then that's the direction we trade. Cryptos are now on an upswing. So yes, sooner or later, they'll only go so high, and they'll come back down. And we'll trade it on the downside, just like we did in December 2021, when it went from $40,000 down to $15,000. OK. So and I sent out the email before that ever happened. So again, my predictions are very accurate, because we know how to read this chart pattern. OK. Do you follow similar steps as Warren Buffett, or is that a totally different model? Warren Buffett uses more of Benjamin, what was the guy's name? They wrote a book on Graham and something. They wrote a book on assets that make money, right? And they look for value in a company. So they want a product like Coca-Cola. That's one of their big holdings. They're looking for value. He looks at Apple Computer because of the value that Apple Computer has. Yes, we got to look at value. But here's the thing. The company can be making money and have all kinds of value, but they can still drop in price because the market isn't just driven by the financials. It's driven by psychology as well. And let me give you an example of this. When Intel was at $100 a share, they knew that a downturn was coming in their industry. And I'd already told them that I expected their stock to go down to $34 when it was $100. So they started getting lean and mean. They started getting rid of debt. They started closing plants that were not as profitable or not as efficient. So they got lean and mean. And so their stock went from $110 a share down to $11 a share. Wow, here's a kicker. At $11 a share, they were in better financial shape than they were at $100. So what's the difference? Why are they such a low price when they're better financially off? Well, it doesn't matter how good financially you are. If nobody's willing to pay you more than $11 a share, that's market psychology. Nobody wants to pay more than $11. You got to wait for the market to tell you which direction it wants to go. And the only way to determine that is through technical analysis, the way we designed it. Through these technical patterns. Roy, how much does it take to get started with you as far as playing the market? So I've got some students that start with just doing very limited things. They're very small investors, $2,500. But I recommend a minimum of $5,000. And then I've got some investors that are well over a million dollars. So everybody runs the gamut. But it doesn't take a tremendous amount of money if you're a small investor to get started. I mean, heck, you could do it with $1,000. But the problem is it's extremely limited to what you can get. You need volume. You need volume in order to be able to develop momentum. And you need to be able to buy two or three different things. You can't rely on just one thing. Right. Okay. So you need to get two or three different things. Okay. I saw that with a roommate of mine that he was a day trader. And he was plugged in directly to Wall Street. And he lost half a million dollars. He held on to MCI and down to where it went down to zero. And that's, I told you, he didn't have a number, Victor, that said, I'm only willing to lose so much money. Exactly. Yeah, it goes down. We ask stock traders to put a 20% stop loss in. So if you buy a stock at $20 a share, and it comes down to 16, which is 20%, you're out. And that's already entered in the computer. So you can be in Hawaii, and it's going to kick you out. So you're not willing to take any more than that as a loss. We'll have your email address in the show notes. Roy, how else can people get a hold of you? So I have a website for trading, and it's called powertradingsecrets.com. Powertradingsecrets.com. We'll also have that in the show notes. So when you're at powertradingsecrets.com, we ask for your information, and we'll send you some of our emails and some information as well. So that you can contact us. And then if you want my cell phone, you've got my cell phone. You can publish that as well. Okay. You can publish my cell phone. But powertradingsecrets.com, once they fill out the information, they start getting some of these things. And on occasion, they get some of my predictions, as I said, have been very, very accurate. But the key, Victor, is you cannot take huge losses. You must limit your losses to set very small losses. And Victor, because people don't have a plan, as a broker, I saw many times people buy a stock at $6 and watch it go from $6 to $66, and then back down to $3 a share. Okay. Wow. Because they had no plan. They had no exit strategy. So you've got to have an exit strategy too. Okay. Any final words, Roy? Yes. So I have two rules that we teach our students by. And rule number one is don't lose money. Okay. And rule number two is don't ever forget rule number one. So that's a good philosophy. All right. So now, obviously, we do take some small losses. But again, your overall account should never be losing money. Okay. Because your losses are small and your gains are big. That's the way you win in this. The only way to win is you limit your losses and you capitalize on big winners. You've got to have big winners to make this work. Okay. Well, I want to thank you, Roy. And it was good reconnecting with you. It's been a few years since we have seen each other in person. Exactly. Exactly. You came to my office, gosh, I want to say about five years ago. Oh, it was more than that. Yeah, it was about 100 years ago. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Five life back. When you're having fun, right? Exactly. So, yeah, Victor, be sure and let people know. And we'd like to answer all their questions. So be sure and put my cell phone up there. And then you've got my email, too. So go ahead and do that. Love it. All right. Well, that's going to do it, friends. Until next week, go out and thrive.