The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – WallStreet.io: Revolutionizing Stock Trading with Backtesting and Crowdsourcing

Episode Date: December 28, 2023

WallStreet.io: Revolutionizing Stock Trading with Backtesting and Crowdsourcing WallStreet.io Show Notes About The Guest(s): Micah Lamar is the founder and CEO of wallstreet.io, a tech platform for stock and option traders. With a background in finance and securities, Micah has been involved in the entrepreneurial world for over a decade. He is passionate about providing traders with the tools they need to validate their ideas and make informed investment decisions. Summary: Micah Lamar, founder and CEO of wallstreet.io, joins the show to discuss his startup and the technology behind it. Wallstreet.io is a tech platform for stock and option traders that offers charting, analysis, and backtesting tools. Micah explains that backtesting allows traders to test their strategies using historical data to determine their effectiveness. The platform also offers free live charts and a scan tool to search through millions of trading strategies. Micah shares his insights on the future of AI in trading and the potential for machine learning to enhance strategy analysis. He also discusses the importance of being an intentional parent and raising self-confident, independent thinkers. Key Takeaways: Wallstreet.io offers a tech platform for stock and option traders, providing charting, analysis, and backtesting tools. Backtesting allows traders to test their strategies using historical data to determine their effectiveness. The platform offers free live charts, a scan tool to search through millions of trading strategies, and a seasonality tool to track seasonal trends in stocks. Wallstreet.io is focused on democratizing data analysis and providing tools for traders of all levels. Micah emphasizes the importance of being an intentional parent and raising self-confident, independent thinkers. Quotes: "Backtesting allows you to take an idea and see how it has worked over time to determine if it's a good strategy." - Micah Lamar "Our platform provides real-time data and backtesting in under a second." - Micah Lamar "We're focused on democratizing data analysis and providing tools for traders of all levels." - Micah Lamar

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

There you go, ladies and gentlemen. When the Iron Lady sings it, that makes it official. Welcome to the show, as always. We appreciate you guys being part of the Chris Voss Show. Elite group, where we bring you the CEOs for 15 years, the billionaires, the Pulitzer Prize winners, the authors, the people who bring you the most smartest minds, the White House advisors, the government workers,

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Subscribe to that darn linkedin newsletter a that thing grows like a weed i didn't know there's that many people on uh what is it the linkedin platform but there are it's amazing to me and i don't know they don't seem to be i don't know i haven't checked to see who actually subscribes open they seem like intelligent people so far go to the 130,000 linkedin group chris voss, one of the TikTok, and even Chris Voss, facebook.com to interact with the show. Today we have Micah Lamar. He is the founder and CEO of wallstreet.io. And we're going to be talking about his startup.

He has apps and stuff that go with it and kind of how he went through his entrepreneur journey. So you're going to be able to learn from that as well. Welcome to the show, Micah. How are you? I'm doing great. How are you doing? learn from that as well welcome to the show micah how are you i'm doing great how are you doing i am doing excellent welcome to the show i think i just gave your dot com dot io out is there any other places on the internet that you want to have people look you up on the interwebs and follow you thanks thanks for asking yeah you can check us out at wallstreet.io and you can also find us in the App Store, Google Play Store, and the Hypo App Store under wallstreet.io as well.

So just our main website. It's great. There you go. So give us a 30,000 overview of what wallstreet.io is. Yeah, so we built a tech platform for stock traders, option traders, and our platform and our technology helps them chart, do analysis

research, but most importantly it helps them chart, do analysis research. But most importantly, it helps them backtest and validate their ideas in real time. And we're kind of unique in the niche of like data analysis research because of the extra backtesting and validation we have inside of our platform. There you go. And let's lay a foundation for definitions. What does backtesting mean exactly and how you guys utilize it? Yeah. So if you think about a stock, it's got all this historical data and backtesting basically allows you to take an idea that you have, see how it had worked over time to see if it's a strategy that is a good strategy or a bad strategy. And so the main goal is to basically debunk strategies

that don't really work that well and to try and find and optimize a strategy that does work well and then to actually go ahead and forward test it with real data. Ah, so you can see if it is basically a system where you go, hey, if I would have invested $100,000 in this stock five years ago, would it have worked for me sort of thing? Yeah, kind of like that. It's a little bit more for the kind of geeky technical analysts out there who want to use indicators moving averages

and things like that you know there's a lot of people who post up trading ideas and stock forums you know buy when this moving average crosses over this one or something like that so in our platform rather than just kind of guessing or reading somebody else's advice, you can actually go in and a few buttons and no coding. You can go back to this idea to see, Hey, this guy or gal, you know, got a great strategy or they just, you know, blown smoke. There you go. And you guys provide free live charts so they can use professional tools, 120 plus indicators.

You know, what's funny is I grew up in the age of the 80s where you would buy these massively, I don't know, half inch thick chart things to be mailed to you. Wow, yeah. Of course, by the time they were mailed to you, you're out of date. Right.

And you'd have to go through them by hand and usually the print, you need black fingers by the time you go through all the print. Those were the days back then. Times Those were the days. Times have changed, man. Times have changed. Yeah, so recently, you know, what we're most proud about is, you know, we've always been really putting in

product, you know, people want to pay for their user service. Just a couple months ago, we released a brand new free tool for the world. Like you had mentioned, you know, you can now come on and get a professional charting application, desktop, Android, iPhone for free. And we went ahead and made our backdressing free because we really want to make sure everybody has the tools to actually validate their ideas.

And so we made that free as well. There you go. What are some of the other features that are on the desktop or mobile? Yeah, a little bit more geeky stuff that I kind of like to do, but we realized that a lot of really smart people are using our platform. Former floor trainers, former big bank executives, market makers,

things like that. And so they've been testing some really cool strategies. And so what we actually did is we created this crowdsource function where when people backtest an idea, it gets pushed to our server, pushed through a waiting system that we've developed to kind of find good strategies to rate them.

And then we crowdsource them, so we make the best strategies available to everybody in the group. There you go. And, you know, strategy is everything as to what you can do. And then speed, of course, is a thing. How do you make sure that you give fast loading times

and fast data to people? Yeah, so we have a really cool relationship with several exchanges that basically provide real-time data. And without going into the technology too much, we basically have an open system where the data flows freely from the exchange right into our charts, providing real-time data.

And our backtesting, usually under a second, you can backtest something. There you go. And then you guys cover what you call seasonality. Tell us what that means. Yeah, seasonality is this idea that oftentimes stocks will have a seasonal trend. For example, Apple, which is one of the stocks that I cover most, they always have their iPhone event at the same time of the year. They always have a big Christmas at the same time of the year.

They always have a big Christmas rush. It's very seasonal. And so oftentimes we see seasonal moves that are very consistent every single year. And so we think that's important to track that. So we create a seasonality tool that basically shows you, you know, the average moves that stocks have, you know, each month. And you can actually break it down by week too

if you want to kind of dig in a little bit more. There are, you know, there's a lot, there's businesses that are cyclical. Do you, is there any way to track that as well? Yeah. So we oftentimes will post up a seasonal watch list of stocks that are really hot, you know, as they come into their seasonal, seasonal months. There you go.

There's another thing you guys track in your website called a scan tool that can scan trading strategies through millions of them. Yeah, so we've backed up a lot of stuff. I mean, you know, we started in 2011 and we've tested over 65 million strategies with our community. So, you know, we push through a lot of data. And so, as I had shared earlier, you know, oftentimes the best strategies are the ones created by, you know, some of our really smart community members that are actually paying to be there. And so we created a scan tool that allows people to search through the database of strategies. It's kind of an element of our crowdsource function. So those are strategies actually discovered by other members of the community that everybody who's paying client can actually scan through. It's pretty cool.

Oh, wow. There you go. You have access to all the brain work, and the computer is doing it for you. Oh, I was going to say, so we found that 5% to 10% of our community members love to geek out and backtest, and everybody else just wants to, they just want to see the best strategies, and so we've kind of given a little bit of both for both types of people.

There you go. How do you guys try and separate yourselves apart from your competitors? Well, there's not a lot of other companies right now that are doing backtesting crowdsourcing at the level that we are, so we're kind of the one that got them, so we don't really we're kind of the one that's down.

So we don't really have a lot of competition in that world. The only competition we probably have are private firms, big banks. They throw tens of millions of dollars at supercomputers and quants and things like that to accomplish the same goal. Our vision was really to kind of democratize that so that anybody who's got a laptop or a phone or a computer can get access to the same kind of data crunching that was being made so that you see. There you go. So give us a little bit of history of your entrepreneurial journey. How did you come down this line and get involved in the business?

How did you first become an entrepreneur? Yeah, I'm glad you asked that. So I studied securities analysis, major finance, a bunch of accounting stuff in college here in Santa Barbara, where I live, and always interested in entrepreneurship. entrepreneurs in my 20s and there's this episode called the 30 under 30 right 30 30 kids who have made a big wave in business all under 30 years old and i'm like wow these are my people you know so i read through every single case study of all 30 and i'm in my mid-20s and i'm noticing that there's a trend there so three things that i took away from all 30 of those case studies were you know it was the best businesses were community based. So they had some kind of community element.

They were digital or digitally delivered so that they could scale, right? It wasn't something like, you know, you had to make a widget for your phone. You had to produce and keep producing over and over again. And then they had some kind of subscription base so that as a business owner, you can have somebody sign up. And if they like the product, they pay a little bit every month. And then that gives the company lots of good resources monetarily to continue to reinvest and grow the business and the product and make it better over time. And so with those three things and with the background in finance and securities and some of the Apple trading I was already doing. I was like, wow, I should create like an Apple forum or an Apple-based product and share my Apple ideas with the world.

And so our company actually started out as a blog called Apple Trader in 2011. And we were a blog called Apple Trader for about four years. We created a little membership site where we post our content and our ideas. And then we started kind of digging into software. We rebranded as Wall Street in 2015, and that's where we went heavy into backtest. Wow. Software and things. So it's been a journey.

There you go. And so how long has the company been running officially now? Since 2011. There you go. Congratulations, man. Thanks. Kicking ass, taking names and delivering it. And of course the stock market,

I think didn't just reach a new peak. The down end things seem to be there. So it moves in cycles, but yes, we've just hit new all time highs. A lot of tech stocks are, you know, are climbing.

There you go. There you go. It's been an interesting, it's been an interesting market in the way everything's gone with, you know, post climbing. There you go. There you go. It's been an interesting market in the way everything's gone with, you know, post-COVID sort of thing. What do you foresee with the future of your company? You've got the apps.

Is AI coming into play into what you do yet? Do you see that being maybe something that has some promising technology for you and your company and your consumers? Yeah, I think that there's some potential for machine learning or AI and your consumers? Yeah, I think that there's some potential to use machine learning or AI in how we analyze our strategies and the research that we provide for that.

Right now, we find that there's this tremendous element in the human capacity and the human brain for identifying strategies. And so we still think there's a lot of potential there inside the breadth of our community. And so by having that human interaction, I think that really helps rather than like an isolated AI. So

that's kind of our view on that, at least for now. Yeah. This AI has the process to suck up so much data and then process it ultra-fast, Speedy Gonzales type thing. I'm not sure that's the technical term.

Kind of, yeah. I mean, there's certainly a lot of processing. You know, we've seen, because we've tested a lot of stuff, right? You know, we did at one point build a super processor that just spun through strategies to test them. But what we found was, you know, it tended to kind of do this thing called curve fitting

a little too much, which is basically finding the ideal scenario for the past. And then you're always going to find something that's amazing out of that. But it doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to forward test or trade well in the future. So we found that by that super processor route, we tended to get overfitted strategies versus the human element, the human touch.

We were able to kind of go in there and use some of the ideas and technical ideas that people have been trading with for a long time. You're able to get strategies that can kind of withstand the test of time a little bit better. So that's what our research has found. There you go. You don't want to, you don't want to, you don't want to picking up like US steel and going, Hey, this worked really good for a while. And then you're like,

yeah, that was over a while ago. Yeah. It's hard to... Elon Musk and Jack Bonner did this big thing about... Alibaba CEO said, computers are never going to be smarter than humans and Elon disagreed.

Where do you let that go? I think computers and AI are going to be smarter than humans and Elon disagreed. Where do you let go of that? I think computers and AI are going to be smarter than humans by far. Part of it is, we've talked about this a couple times on the show recently. We just posted a new AI show that had a great discussion that

talked about AI. Humans are limited by our paradigms and our mindset. Our paradigms are to breed the universe uses us to breed our job is to propagate the species everything we do every you know you can you can think you're above the animal nature of yours of your state but we're animals and our paradigms are to breed we're one of the few animals not the only animals that are conscious and aware like we can sit around and contemplate our navel in the universe but other than that we you know we bike everything a man

does is to is to meet women propagate the species marry have children you know raise those children you know diversify the dna pool everything is to try and make the species continue. AI doesn't have that paradigm or limits of our biology. It's not really concerned about impressing chicks. It's not really concerned about having children. And so what it's going to be thinking about, you know, I was listening to Sam Harris and Mark Andreessen's debate on this on Sam Harris's podcast. And, you know, Mark Andreessen's like, yeah, it's AI sucked up sucked up all the best of us so it'll be great and no one it sucked up the worst of us too like it sucked up you know hitler and mein kauf and you know maybe maybe all the great books that we've ever written in art but you know it also

sucked up you know the horrors of the human race but i think what it's going to do is it's going to take and move beyond that where it's going to think about things that maybe we can't even imagine or haven't imagined. And I think that he may be right on one scale where our ability to create and innovate and make up stuff, our ability for to you know think of new paradigms or ways of doing i think that will be the thing that maybe it won't extinct us because we're kind of a bother and we're kind of sub you know but it will be its own species it we've created a species and we need to recognize that species is probably going to look at us and go,

do I need you anymore? Because up until then, up until now, you know, we've been able to destroy ourselves. You know, we reached that pinnacle of a species that's, yeah, let's figure out how we can blow ourselves off the fucking planet with the push of a button. Right. With control of the button, right? Well, now we've created a species that can go create its own button and we have no control over when it wants to push it or how it wants to push it it can do whatever

the fuck it wants there therein lies kind of where we're at we've out species ourselves when you really study species history we just we just posted a recent episode by david r wood called the origin of artificial species and actually taken darwinism and several other different things that have been studied throughout history and and species and overlaid it with what what we've created with an artificial ai and we've created a new species and you know we're gonna we may have to be competing with it yeah i mean it's remarkable and scary all in the same moment. Yeah, I mean, we had a good run.

I mean, it was pretty good. Social media pretty much meant to it. But, you know, it'll be interesting to see. Hopefully it works out. We all get along with our new species. And hopefully, you know, I mean, you're talking about something easily fun to have its own rights, to have its own independence, to have its own freedoms with the SCOTUS. I mean, you could hire an attorney if it wants to. And, you know, corporations are already people really under the law in America.

AI system could actually, the way the Constitution is written, is declare itself its own maybe race, species, and declare its own freedoms. And then maybe eventually declare itself its own maybe race species and declare its own freedoms and then maybe eventually declare itself its own government you know there's already you know ceos or companies that are you know outsourcing the ceo role yeah as you know yeah there there may be steps into that world right now i think it's interesting when i think about the world of AI, the world of humans, where the overlap is and everything. There's a certain element that I love about the human nature, the moment of intuition, the moment of insight, things that I'm not sure robots can quantify or exist yet inside of the realm of intuition or human empathy or the human condition.

And to truly feel what it's like to like you said to have a conscious thought to be alive and things that makes it so fun to be human right yeah there's the other world of well when you when you abstract out of that for a moment you know there's such potential and perhaps what gives us our blessed life here and that really cool thing about being human is also eventually something that may limit us. It did and I think it does. It limits our thinking. I mean, we spend, if

your guy spends half the time going, how do I find a woman? How do I marry and propagate species? You're fairly limited in your mindset. This is a thing that can sit around. It's not watching the Kardashians drooling outside of its mouth or 80 at or idiot tv all day long it's going to be sitting at at at hyper speeds thinking about i don't know quantum physics cold fusion nuclear whatever new power

sources i mean it's going to be doing its own thing at a speed and rate and maybe maybe at a greater imagination that we've ever had a scope for and well we're all just sitting around i don't know looking at netflix losing iq things on tiktok you know yeah it's going to be it's going to be thinking about you know it's and it could be sitting around going hey you know how do we use these people for fuel what's that movie green green whatever charlton heston you know it's going to be coming up with all sorts of shit yeah how do we turn this into a battery oh we we just invented the matrix oh you know who knows but we it i think i think the gentleman we had on who identified that it is a creative species and and he basically used historical analysis and Darwin's species

and some of those other applications to realize this, and now he's trying to get on government boards, he's speaking to Silicon Valley people, to try and rein in how we look at this, because once you understand it as a species, it kind of takes on a whole different role so there you go you treat it definitely treat it differently for sure definitely and so when he trades for your company you know he's going to be ultra Ivan Bioski or something I don't know

joke there somewhere to greet he's going to be greed is good but he's going to go a whole new extra level or something I don't Yeah, technology's moving pretty fast. How far do you think, obviously some of the big companies, military, everything, they're producing technologies that are far and beyond what we see. How far is the gap right now, do you think,

where AI actually exists and where the general population believes it exists? You know, that's still beyond my pay grade. I don't study it as much as some of my other friends in silicon valley and and i i have no idea i mean i'm still just trying to catch up to it all i'm i'm usually i've always been kind of an innovator and kept my finger on the pulse i was early to social media and understood what what it was social media

it's social marketing yeah really i would see people try and define it like i have a whole course on what social media is i'm like how the why do you need a fucking course it's social hours social media right it's real simple and you know but you know that's kind of turned into its own form of pandora's box and that was one of the things we talked about on the other show is is you know every time we create this sort of new utopia where everyone's sitting around kumaya going this is gonna bring the world close together we're all gonna be hucky and playing john lennon's song imagine which i love you know then all of a sudden now the pandora's box jumps around

and you're like holy shit it's a mirror it's us in our worst and you know thereby thereby we go the one thing man can learn from his history i always say is that he never learns from his history and thereby we go round and round so it'll be interesting but we had a good run yeah social media is interesting you know i think people have different philosophies on that. It certainly has a huge addiction element to it. I think that becomes an issue with self-confidence, especially as people are coming up in their

teenage years. They say your human brain is not even fully developed until you're 25. It's very open to influences and things. I can just imagine as a teenager nowadays, with the influences of that, really distorting what the true reality is of our life and what's possible when they see, you know, all the influencer celebrities doing these things that they think is normal.

It's actually more harm than good. Yeah. I mean, it really is. I mean, I wondered about it when I started seeing, you know, in the early 2010s, people were starting to put their kids online. And, you know, here's my naked baby. And I'm just like, what the fuck are you doing, dude? That kid, when he's 18, his people who hire him are going to do background searches and find, here's what here's what naked bobby looked like when he was one you know they're picking dot coms for people recently i was commenting on this where

there's this gal named i think it's her name's called ruby and she was one of these psycho youtube stars parents who exploited her children and then you know abused them and like everybody for years on youtube is like hey you're abusing your kids amen there's something going on there to the point they were calling cp or c services on tps and then finally you know the kids show up and duct tape at a neighbor's house bound with wounds and you know i i can't remember something her name's ruby something people can google it but you know i i'm starting to wonder if name's ruby something people can google it but you know i i'm starting to wonder if maybe there's going to be lawsuits of all these kids who are like

man my parents exploited me on youtube and on the internet when i was young and i had no real say in it i had no say in it and now you know every employer picks it up and you know i basically was exploiting i'm starting to wonder if that's the future because i would be kind of pissed at my parents i'm like what did you share about me you know that's that's whatever and i think the other future thing is and i know it it sounds a little bit crass but it's not this whole generation of people who've been sharing their body parts on snapchat and i think what's you're going to have have happen is there's these huge libraries that people have had in their phones their google photos their apple you know what's that thing

apple has in the air like yeah the cloud like i cloud apple like google photos and you're going to have you know people who are going to be running for high-powered jobs that most people do in their 40s. So president, speaker of the house, you know, politicians. 20 years later. Yeah, 20 years later. And somebody's going to be going, hey, I have a dick pic of them.

When they were 20, they sent me on Snapchat, check this out. Yeah. And we're already seeing that. There was recently a congresswoman who was i think running for congress she she was you know her husband were doing swinger stuff and and then she did some live stuff on i don't know some website where you do life's amateur porn and it came out and then the ironic thing is she's angry about it. Like, how dare you? It's like, you put it on a roll.

You put it on a roll. And there's a couple other people now that are, that's coming out. You know, moms of, I think it's moms of something that, you know, she's out there banging, you know, the pulpit for the right wing and Rhonda Sanders for, you know, their anti-gay LGBT. And here it recently came out that they had a swinger lesbian affair. And you're like, wait, you're again? Okay, I think that's going to be the new frontier of being weird.

And I think there's going to be somebody who's going to run for president and there's going to be a dick pic come out of left field. You know, it's a balance of, you know, we're becoming more and more immune to these things as they just come out every day. But at the same time, I think it's a balance of you know we're becoming more and more immune to these things as they come out every day but at the same time I think it's important as parents I'm sure if you have kids have three kids parents to teach your kids to

be leaders not followers exactly make sure our kids have self-confidence make sure they can be independent thinkers make sure that they can in those moments peer pressure in those moments where they can go down the route they're able to have the tools to stop and reflect and choose and decide whether that's something that is going to be the best choice for them or not. Do you find that you're more sensitive to raising kids that are self-accountable and with that sort of mindset because you're an entrepreneur? Yeah, I mean, it's certainly a balance because my wife and I, Christine,

you know, she's very into kids having complete autonomy and having lots of validation and I kind of want to jump in and help in the solution. And so it's a constant balance of, you know, you really want them to go through and experience the things that they are because they need to learn and also validating them

at the same time and how they're feeling so that they can grab their self-confidence. But as an entrepreneur, I tend to be a very optimist. I was an optimist at heart. And so being that way, I'm more solution-oriented. It's a point in a class for kids always. I think the most important thing is growing their self-confidence and making sure they learn how to be a leader

and how they think about somebody who's just following along. You know, the one thing about being an entrepreneur is you really are more self-actualized, I think, than most people. You're more self-aware. You're more self-accountable because the buck stops here. You don't have anybody you can be like, hey, let's blame the guy who's the boss above me. Oh, wait, it's me. 1,000%. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think it sounds like you think about terms

in terms of leadership, how you lead. I mean, clearly you guys have built a successful company for quite some time. So I have to assume you've done that because you probably wouldn't be here if you didn't. And so I always felt that, you know, my employees would always joke with me that when Chris has kids, he's going to sit with them and read the wall street journal to him and be like, IBM did blah, blah, blah today.

And they're all going to like tuck into bed with little double breasted suit pajamas and shit. And then if he, they don't have their own companies by eight, he's probably going to put them up for adoption, which is true. Cause I would have, but I didn't, I didn't ever have kids. I couldn't afford the divorce. I'm still saving up for my first divorce. I've got about 5 million I've saved so far. If I lose half of that, I still have two and a half. I need some more money.

There's still time though. I was, you know, I meet, I meet women. They want, I want to be your first divorcee. And I'm like, you know, think about it. But, you know, I think more people need to be intentional when they raise and i'm like you know think about it but you know i think more people need to be intentionalist when they raise children in today's environment like you say they need yeah i think i think as parents you know they oftentimes say you're gonna learn on the job right you learn there's some elements that are true there but it doesn't mean that

you can't actively go out and try and be a better parent doesn't mean you can't actively go out and read a book you mean people should try to be better parents? Come on. 1,000%. Yeah, 1,000%. Just like in a relationship, you've got to work for it. It's just like in work. As the CEO, if there's something that I need to learn how to do better at,

I'm going to go out there and actively study it and learn how to do it. If I want to be a great parent, I need to be active in that role as well. Being a great parent, where to be active in that role as well being a great parent where this is the fun in that i mean i thought half your job as a parent is to give give them all the scars and emotional damage they need to spend the rest of their life in a therapist's office i thought that was a job apparent hard work up front easy on the tail end you know i see our kids because we do something called like restaurant matters at home where we're eating dinner and we have certain things that we do while we're eating. And then we can take to restaurants so that we don't have cavemen at the table.

Oh, there you go. And I see other parents and, you know, I don't know how you feel about this, like the iPad while the kid is eating. Oh, good. Instead of having a conversation with the kids or having them be able to actually sit through a restaurant without losing their mind you know it's all those things that you do that are hard up front but there you go right on the table so duct tape basically no duct tape yeah duct tape and then the screen just right to their face we're going to be there soon though i mean the apple uh vision pro is coming out supposedly in in supposedly in another month or so. And, you know, I'm not a big fan of referring electronics to my body.

I bought the Apple Watch. I didn't like it because I just don't like electronics on me. But I'm a huge fan of Apple. And I think that this is actually going to open up another $100 billion ecosystem. Yeah. Just like the App Store did. And there are businesses that will be created over the next 10 to 15 years in AR, augmented reality,

on the Apple ecosystem that they're creating that we can't even think of yet. Just like the App Store, 70 years ago when the iPhone launched, we would never have imagined all the multi-billion dollar apps that have been created

in the last you know 15 to 17 years and i think i think we're entering that new phase right now where you know it's going to be huge this is why i kind of focus a lot of my energy on apple apple analysis and the growth of the ecosystem at wall street ao and i think that while it is kind of weird to you know have a device right in your face, I do think it's going to open up a $100 billion industry. And I'm really excited to see all the stuff that comes out of it, actually. There you go. I sweat like a pig.

And so, you know, I think you're right. I think it's a very cool technology. Maybe the young kids will enjoy it more. Having a heavy thing sitting on my face that i'm just gonna sweat and fog up but you know it's it's and and my friends i but i have my friends my age like my friend robert scoble he loves the crap out of he's actually lost weight you know doing the exercises and dancing and the we and all the all the stuff you can do on them you know playing games or your you know your your full body's in motion. He's actually lost weight doing it.

I'm kind of jealous. But, you know, it's going to be something that people really love. But I think, you know, like in your case, there's probably a lot of use applications where, you know, me instead of looking at your app or website, I can sit there and maybe swipe through the visuals of graphic data that's on your website. Yeah, it's going to be very cool what it allows us to do. I think the whole world of VR and AR, I think AR

is going to be absolutely there. I don't think people are really going to want to spend a lot of time it's my prediction in a world where it's closed off and they're just in that world, I think that's going to be very isolating to specific types of games. Whereas the AR is the glass, you can still see everything around you, it's just presented on a handful display.

And I would imagine that as technology improves, the device will get lighter, smaller, ultimately become like a pair of glasses or maybe a contact lens like you have in Blackberry. I still miss Google Glass. That thing was so nice. It never took off. Here's the thing that I think people, I'm worried about. Like if somebody walks up to me and they have

their phone out like this and they're recording me like as a copy, it's the same feeling when someone has a camera on their glasses. I'm like are you recording me it's the same feeling when someone has a camera on their glasses i'm like and so i think that's a hard bridge to cross oh me and my friends got so much shit back in the day i actually had people well we had the google ass and there was several times and this is kind of before this is before mark you, pretty much woke everybody up. Mark Zuckerberg woke everybody up and says, there isn't any privacy left.

Privacy is dead. Remember that? And everyone got so angry. And then like a year or two, everyone was like, yeah, I guess he's right. We've sold our souls to the devil. But back then we, we hadn't crossed that bridge yet. And I remember, I think the worst, there were friends of mine that, you know, they're getting right up. They were getting thrown out of bars and, you know, places are putting up signs

that were like being glass, not welcome here. And I remember being in LA, I was at a magician show with some friends and this guy came up to me and he was really angry and he goes, that thing's recording all the time. And I, I, I showed it to him and I go, it's actually off right now. Cause the battery's dead. Cause I recorded about 10 minutes of the show. And I'm like, it only records about,

you know, it's a small battery. It only records like 10 minutes. And he goes, no, no, it has a way of staying on, you know,

that sort of conspiracy nut job. And I said to him, I says, look around this room right now. This room is filled with cameras. See all these security cameras that you live in a camera world you know theater for what they want to do yeah but he was he was really angry to a point of almost violence and i'm a six foot two guy and very big and then i

have resting bitch face so you don't really intimidate, but he was kind of a fat guy. And, and, you know, I had to calm down a little bit. He grew shit in line, but I took him off just to kind of, you know, cause I don't, I don't need to be causing any problems. I don't, I'm not into felonies. It's kind of a thing. I'm going to jail for being the shit of people. But, you know, he was, he was really upset about it. And, and I was like, okay, well, you know, the battery was dead anyway. So I'm like, I'll just take him off.

Yeah, people are going to get offended at anything I think we're seeing. Yeah. You bring up an interesting point, though, because, like, I remember in 2012, 2011, when devices really took off. I was an early adopter of the iPad and stuff. But when devices really became a commodity, I think around 2012, I started going into restaurants, like we were talking about earlier, and I would see whole families sitting there with the zombie mode. And I'm like, holy shit, there's two kids, there's a husband and wife,

and each have had their own devices, and they're sitting there drilling out the side of their face, looking at their things while eating. I'm like, I don't think this is good. And no one's conversing. My family, we all just sit down and talk to each other. Our parents made us do that.

It was hell. Look out, you've got this awesome podcast. You're excellent at talking to people. Where did those skills come from? Maybe that's where it all came from. I can thank my parents for it. Now the imagination image you've given me is that people

are going to wear those Apple headsets. They're just going to be sitting at dinner, all four or five of them going... Yeah, going like this, tapping. You're going to be sitting at dinner, all four or five of them going. Yeah, going like this, like tapping. You're going to be looking at your shitty fast food, and the AR is going to be showing you your fine dining or something. Like steak or something. What's the future of you guys?

Anything you want to tease out about you guys' future that you guys are innovating, working on that maybe you're going to be putting out here? What 2024 holds for you or the stock market? Yeah, so we spent a lot of time this year really tripling down on our technology. We put our engineering team pretty substantially over the last year to build some new products. And this next year, what we really find is that the majority of people want something that is easier to digest, and so we're actually taking a lot of our best strategies

that we found in our platform and publishing them as newsletters. So that for people who are busy, working, family, totally get it, I'm in that same camp. You can get the best of what we do in an email newsletter. And so we're starting in January with an Apple newsletter. That's going to be highlighting one of my favorite Apple strategies.

It gets you in and out of the stock about 12 times a year. And it averages about 36 to 48% per year over the last five years, which is great for the S&P 500. And it only ties up your capital 35% of the year. So if you have a high interest rate or or something like that, you just you earn interest while you're not, you know, in the stock, it catches most of the big upswings and Apple avoids the big downswings, which are, you know, emotionally challenging for a lot of

people. And, you know, what we're looking forward to next year is taking our strategies, putting together and some really cool newsletters and, you know and getting them into people's inboxes which is going to be a great way for them to be able to absorb that content and make some new actual investments from it. There you go. Maybe you could go retro and do those mail outs that we used to do

when I was studying to be a stockbroker when I was 20 and stuff. The big thick book of charts. I remember my fingers were turned black. I wish I would have kept one because just in all my records, I wish I would have kept one. Right, because it's a lot of self-destruction. You could roll them up and burn them as a log if you ever, I don't know, if we ever turned into a nuclear winner.

You're like, we can live on these things. But they're really interesting. The stock market, tell me what you think about it. I mean, it looks like we've peaked on what the Fed is trying to do to rein in inflation. There's predictions from everybody up to, I believe, Jamie, what's his face? It's Jamie Dimon, that we're going to have,

I believe there's three rate lowerings on the books. We're in this kind of a new weird era where the baby boomers and, and some of the Gen Xers retired early. So we, we don't have as many workers. We're actually, you know, struggling to fight over workers.

And so there's kind of this new era of productivity where, you know, we're there. I think one of the, I think one of the biggest weights on the market might be, I was reading yesterday on LinkedIn that the office glut of empty office space and failure is going to double, go to maybe 20%. And that's kind of more of a bank problem than is our problem.

I think somehow they're going to have to try and convert that into residential units is the only way to save that. But other than that, that's the only problem I see coming forward on the economy. And other than that, I think it's just productivity, mainstream, the Fed's kind of adopted to this tighter workforce and how we don't have to do a bunch of layoffs to cool the economy. And so I think interest rates are going to go down and kind of get back into a thing.

I think inflation might finally calm down maybe a little bit. I could be wrong. And I think that might lead to a really good year for the stock market maybe next year. What do you think? Yeah, I think we're kind of headed to what I like to call a super cycle. This is where we get a few years of good, solid growth, especially on the back of a down year which we had you know last year a year or so ago i agree we only have a couple big challenges ahead of us from an economic standpoint commercial arbor again is is one of the biggest ones you know state street in santa barbara when i moved here you know almost 20 years ago was the busiest place all this great shopping and now

a third of the places are empty yeah you know what are we going to do with those extra places you know residential makes the most sense to convert them somehow to do that i i think that as as we have these obstacles you know it's just more opportunity to try and create a creative solution for them the economy i would never bet against the u.s economy which is so strong we're innovative We're always going to pull through. And the U.S. stock market is a good reflection of that type of innovation. I'd be focused more on technology. NASDAQ, the QQQs, has outperformed the S&P 500 in almost all ways.

I like to have an emphasis in technology stocks for that reason. And, again, I wouldn't bet against the US economy. I think we'll have our ups and downs. It almost feels like we've already kind of gone through a recession. And I know the definition of recession has kind of been altered recently, but I think that things have already been tough. I mean, if you look at, you know, the pandemic that we had, and after that, we went through this great boom. And then all of a sudden, you know, a bunch of people got laid off. You know, it's sad to see that people got laid off. And at the same time, it's what companies sometimes need to do to kind of flush out the flarf.

Yeah. There was so much demand for those employees. I mean, a lot of them just got scooped right back up. You know, I've never seen a time like this where you know everywhere i go you know is like hiring employees you know the joke was before the pandemic we were all sitting around arguing politically oh my god if you take things to 15 an hour the economy will crash we'll go bankrupt and companies will fail and we can't do this and now i think you have i think i was reading the other day like 23 or 25 states will be amending

their laws for minimum wage and it's $15 plus, $13, $15 plus. It's the competition, like there's restaurants around here in my area. There was one that was offering patrons on a door sign. They're like, we'll give you a hundred dollar gift certificate for free food here if you refer somebody to work here like the fight it's a battle it's just a fight for employees and i think in the service world that's just going to keep being yeah the thing for sure yeah it has been an interesting thing to take a look at you know we've seen a lot of people who are i don't know if you've heard this whole thing about like holding multiple jobs secretly did you hear about that yeah a lot of people do that during code and remote work yeah they're like i'm gonna host i'm gonna have three

jobs full-time jobs i'm gonna do all of them kind of crappy but i'm gonna get three salaries out of it that's that's a challenging place because i get it but as a business owner that's you know i have my own opinions about that kind of stuff there There you go. Well, remote workers, they have so much power now because they can quit. We talk about that a lot on the show about leadership where it's always been where people quit a job if there's shitty leadership. And so nowadays, even more, you've got to have great leadership while working with remote work because it's hard to – I think there's a little bit more challenges to being a great leader when people aren't in the room with you. Or, you know, there's hybrid, but, you know, there's also different challenges. To me, it's harder to inspire people over Zoom than it is to do in person.

But, you know, those are some of the challenges that people are going to have. You know, remote workers working multiple jobs, we see the resurgence of unions and the power of employees and stuff. So it's going to be an interesting world, but I think productivity-wise it's going to go through the roof, and online power with companies like yours and other things, you know, that's just going to feed into it. You know, I saw the recent, if you saw the recent Black Friday, no one showed up for Black Friday in stores.

It's all digital now. Yeah. Yeah. It was amazing. At first, when I saw the videos, people were like, yeah, it's 8 a.m. here in Walmart, and there's nobody murdering each other or trying to stomp over each other. We still have a whole stack of TVs, and I'm like, wow, we finally crossed the threshold.

That's an important point. Digital technology, productivity will only increase as the tools that we use to have improved over time. Thank God the Chris Voss show is online. We don't send out a mailer on it.

Every day you send out a different little thumb drive. We'll send out the little thick things that we used to do with the stock market. Well, Micah, tell people how they can onboard with you, check out your product and all that good stuff. Do they need a minimum qualification or minimum investment or anything like that? Yeah, so I'm glad you asked that question, Chris. So Wall Street A.io, our base membership is free, so all you need is

an email. You can go to wallstreet.io, sign up with an email, confirm your email, and then you get access to our professional charting tools with real-time data at $0 a month. That's a really great place to start. And so we built that so that people who just want to get started,

instead of paying a really big membership fee for charts or data or anything like that, get started for free at WallStreet.io. There you go. Do it now or else. There you go. WallStreet.io. Thank you very much

for coming to the show. We really appreciate it, man. This has been a great discussion. Absolutely. I appreciate you having me here. There you go. And thanks to our audience for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss, linkedin.com, 4chesschrisfoss, chrisfoss1 on the TikTok. You can subscribe to the big LinkedIn newsletter and the 130,000 group over

on LinkedIn as well. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time.