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How a Hedge Fund Manager Picks Stocks (The Rules He Uses)

41m 49s

How a Hedge Fund Manager Picks Stocks (The Rules He Uses)

The podcast features Imran Khan, a seasoned investor and former Snapchat CSO, discussing how the modern era has made investing more accessible through democratized knowledge and tools like AI. He emphasizes that the core of successful investing lies not in following trends or expert advice, but in deep personal understanding of the businesses being invested in. Key advice includes reading official filings like 10-Ks to learn fundamentals, asking multiple “why” questions to uncover underlying risks, and remaining skeptical of consensus views—especially when they seem overly widespread. Imran highlights that AI can accelerate research and sentiment analysis but cannot replace human judgment or time spent in primary research. He warns against buying stocks based on recommendations, stressing the need for independent analysis. For beginners, he advocates starting small with minimal investments to build confidence, pattern recognition, and financial resilience. He also underscores that trust—both in management and in the market’s transparency—is critical to long-term value. Ultimately, investing is not just about returns but about developing curiosity, discipline, and emotional strength to withstand losses. The message is clear: anyone, regardless of background, can participate in investing with the right mindset, tools, and foundational habits.

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English
Pattern recognition, even building that is a skill ended up itself, because we built a lot of pattern recognition in our previous roles. Right, the question is, do you understand what you're investing? Because if you don't understand, you don't understand the risk. I'm a true believer, market likes to make full of the greatest number of people. Oh, that's a line. Whoa. I'm Shari. I'm Jean. I'm Imran. And we are the Tiger Sisters. We are your Wall Street and Silicon Valley big sisters. And we're a top 10 business podcast bringing late-night sister talk meets boardroom strategy. Today, we're talking about how the next generation should approach investing and how anyone, not just millionaires and billionaires, but anyone, can apply these lessons to their own financial lives. And we're doing it with friend of the pod Imran Khan, who deploys hundreds of millions of dollars of capital as the founder of his head fund program asset management. And he's also my former boss at Snapchat, where he was the chief strategy officer. And also two-time Tiger Sisters podcast guest who welcome Imran. Wow. Thank you. That's an honor. Yeah. Thanks for having me. It's a real honor. So Imran, everyone wants to invest like a professional. You are a professional full-time investor. So how do you identify good stocks and do you have a formula or advice for new or non-professional investors? So I think one of the biggest change that happened in investment actually in my lifetime is democratization of knowledge. So I think if you look at 30 years ago, if you were in Wall Street, you would get one-on-one meetings with management team. You would get to go to conferences that nobody else would get invited and you would can build great relationship with the companies. So if there is any news, you could call them. And that gave you understanding about businesses that an average investors didn't have. With the proliferation of internet, now all the information start becoming publicly available. And obviously with Reg FT, the companies have to file those information simultaneously to everybody. So they cannot make conversation with one other time. But also one of the most profound changes that happened is the proliferation of social media. So now, a lot of the founders and CEOs or senior business executives, they are all on X, are ready or in other places and they're debating about topics. And so in the past, if you're a professional investor, you would go to an user conference and you probably talk to five customers and you'd have some sense about what that business do. But now, because of X, you get to hear about companies' customers from the customers, but also the people who didn't like the product. And so that gives you a much holistic view. And I think this proliferation of internet and with AI will further commoditize the knowledge. And that commoditization of knowledge is actually gives a lot of power to masses. And so ultimately, the first thing about investing is, do you know what you're investing in? Because the biggest mistake people make, even professional investors. And this is why there are many sectors, there's many things I don't even touch it. The question is, do you understand what you're investing? And ultimately, investment is also pricing the risk. And so I think that profound changes that where everybody has access to same information, now it takes that everybody should have their own ideas or own investment and have to make the decision. So I think the first and foremost, what I would say, that look, every investors will have different style, what works for them, they have different investment objectives. But first and foremost, enough to understand what you're investing in, what's accepted going on. So my first formula is, if you invest, try to learn about what you're investing in. Don't listen to somebody else, be educated about it. Yeah. And so much of what we're learning today isn't from like textbooks. Like you said, a lot of it can be found in Reddit, can be found on X and other social media platforms. If someone is new to investing, how do they figure out what is fact and fiction when there's so much information out there now? How do they know what information to trust? Yeah, great question. So first and foremost, companies website is a great source, right? The company spent a lot of time building their investor relations. You know, I worked on an Alibaba IPO, I worked on I was a snap, we took Snap public, you know, companies spent hundreds of hours writing this boring legal documents called S1, 10K, 10Qs. They're boring reading, you know, they're definitely not exciting reading because a lot of lawyers involved, but they spent hundreds of hours putting together these documents. And so if you read those documents, if you take the time to read those boring documents, you will learn a lot about those businesses. And legally, they have to be accurate, otherwise, you know, we have a bigger problem. So I think, you know, first and foremost, you should read those. And that should give you a lot of understanding about the business, listen to what the management teams are speaking. And there's a lot of fact and fiction in social media. And I think that's where you have to have some intelligence to understand who to trust. And you know, I actually do whenever I see something that questionable, I read the comments, you know, and then I try to verify from other sources if that's accurate or not. You know, I think one of the biggest thing that I think what's needed to be invested is be curious because if you're not curious, you're never going to be a good investor. You always have to ask one, not one question, you have to ask 10 question, why, you know, and so, so don't believe in anything. And it goes not about investment and don't believe anything, you read in social media, but ask the question, why, why, why, why, and if you keep digging through it, you will get a pretty good picture. Yeah, so I'm hearing from you one, read the source material and understand it to be curious and ask why five times, ask all these, you know, follow up questions. And then the third one is basically to apply critical thinking to all of these sort of sources that you're reading through. Incredibly, you know, I'm a true believer, market likes to make full of the greatest number of people. So anything that's a line. Anything that's consensus, you always should ask, remember that market likes to make full of the greatest number of people. So you always have to be very careful, like everybody is saying that. Yeah. That means the risk is not pricing. So are you always contrarian then? No, you don't need to be always contrarian. You know, I think also to think about the timing of a contrarian, right? So the consensus can be right for one year, two year, three year, four year, but at some point, consensus going to break. So this is why it gets really tricky. And I hope I'm not frustrating the audience, but that if you are contrarian, you could be wrong for a very long period of time. I think people always looked at that when the housing crisis happened, I forgot the name of the movie. Oh, the big short. Big short. If you look at that gentleman, he was wrong for a long period of time before he was right. Like Japanese bonds. Yeah. So I think contrarian for the sake of being contrarian is not the right approach either because you could be wrong for a long time. But the bottom line is, you know, by default, you know, market always trying to price what's, you know, consensus, right? Because that's what everybody is doing. And so when there is a non-consensus thing happens, that is the time you see the sharpest move of a stock, of a bond, or equity, so any kind of investment, it could be art. It could be realistic. It doesn't matter. So when everybody tells you something, you know, that is the time you have to be the most fearful that something could go off because at that point, risk probably not pricing. That doesn't mean you have to take a contrarian bet, but at that point, you have to be most fearful. There's levels to it. We thought you were going to make investing just really simple. Let's take 10 seconds to be direct. Subscribing to this show actually matters. Yeah, because our content isn't just random. It's actually really well researched and it's infrastructure and strategy for ambitious people, especially women. If you value that, the easiest way to support us is to just subscribe. It takes two seconds to do, and it signals that these are the types of conversations that deserve to grow. It also helps other people find our podcast. So whether you're listening on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube, please subscribe and follow. Thanks a no back to the show. So this next question is more about meme stocks. So there's a lot of chatter about them and retail traders these days. Do you think the market has become more speculative with Yolo and the rise of Robin Hood and retail traders? And is that a good thing or a bad thing? It's such a great question. And I have a point of view, I think, most people who are in my shoes will probably disagree with me. So I think market is always very speculative. As far as I remember, last 25 years, market is always being very speculative, because the bottom line is when you are buying anything, you are predicting something in future. And by default, predicting future is speculative. And so it is all a speculative. Now, if you look at the professional investors, they're incredibly speculative. Look, in 2008, we took down the entire US economy by speculating things. Who are quote unquote? but incredibly sophisticated, professional CEOs and who made crapload of money. Nobody talked to them, talked to them, Yolo. Trading CDS at that time, it was Yolo. And but because they are quote unquote elite people, we never, they took hits, but we never talked about Yolo as if because they're sophisticated. So the whole idea is, it going back to what I said at the beginning, that we are saying democratization of content, democratization of knowledge because of, and it started with people printing books, because if you look back 500 years ago, the power was concentrated with a small group of people because these are the people who had all the knowledge. And then the book came along and then the start, that's what people hated Socrates, right? Because he was educating people, right? So as you start democratizing the knowledge, more and more people became empowered. And internet accelerated it. AI will further commoditize the knowledge. And so now going back to what I said, that retail investors has the same information as a professional investment investors. And a lot of the retail investors, they're very smart, they didn't get to financials, you know, Wall Street job because maybe they didn't want to do Wall Street job or maybe they didn't have background. Like when I first started in Wall Street, like a lot of people were from East Coast because they grew up in East Coast. How was all their parents worked in Wall Street or their uncle worked in Wall Street or the neighbor working Wall Street and they went to Wall Street. I never heard about Wall Street till I came to junior in college, you know? So a lot of people were like me, they never heard about it. And so they didn't have the knowledge, they didn't have the lesson they never came. But now a lot of smart people has the same information, same skill set of analyzing a business, either they took some accounting class or they took some finance class. Same skill set of analyzing a lot of technology companies because a lot of young Robin Hood crowd work in tech companies, they are very tech savvy, they understand tech better, even if they didn't work on it. So they actually have a very deep understanding about the business and they're actually challenging status quo. And so, and the reality is, you know, it's not right, they're always right or they're always wrong. They've been wrong on many stock, they've been right on many stock. If you're right 51% of the time, you're a genius in a stock market, right? So I think, you know, but they've been right a few times in some great way and they've been wrong on a couple of times too. So, but I think, you know, so I think this demeaning retail investors, I think it's unfair, you know? I'll give you one more example. If you look at some of the biggest hedge funds in the United, in the Wall Street, in the United States, and if you look at their 13F, so 13F is a document that every major hedge funds have to file at the end of every quarter, disclosing what stocks they own, you will see there's a huge overlap of similar stock they own. So there's a group thinking they're going on there too. So, a quote unquote professional investors. So I think, you know, so I don't think the market is more dangerous. I don't think market is more speculative. It's a new group of investors who are coming in. We're seeing pretty significant transfer of wealth is happening from baby boomers, you know, to younger generations. And they take, because they have a lot of information, they're taking more control of their own financial decisions. And I don't really don't believe it's more speculative than a bunch of hedge fund managers doing or what in 2008, a lot of investors did. A little bit contrarian. I think it's fair. Yeah, I like that. Contrarian with the right timing. Yes, there you go. Hey, Sheree, remember when we first started sister's matcha? Imagine this, Gina and I are on a matcha farm an hour and a half outside of Kyoto. We're in the countryside. We're picking matcha leaves, working and living on this Japanese green tea farm. Oh my God, it was like a freaking dream. But I feel like when that dream turned into a reality, when it actually became a real business in my mind, was when we set up our Shopify. And we even had a countdown to when our Shopify storefront would actually launch. I truly think Shopify is the best place to start your business because on Shopify, you own everything. You own your storefront. You own your relationship with your customers. And you own the entire community that you build. When someone discovers sister's matcha and actually makes a purchase, that relationship feels extremely personal. Oh, I mean, literally, sister's matcha is a family-owned brand in business. And we trust Shopify with all of the backend stuff so that we can focus on what's important to us, which is building our community and communicating with our customers and bringing the best matcha in the world to you. So if you've ever thought of starting something on your own, build something that you love. Get started today at Shopify.com/tiger-sisters. All right, everyone, it's 2025. We have to ask you a question about AI. OK, sure. It's in bulk. Yeah. So how is AI changing investing? And how are you personally adopting it and using it as part of your business? So AI is going back to same point that AI is commoditizing the knowledge. So now you can use AI too to read those boring documents faster. I was thinking that you just put those documents into a chat GPT and get a summary. It gets a summary. But I also encourage still read the document because a lot of the times things are hidden on the finer line item that I don't think chat GPT or XAI is good enough to figure this out that that-- but I think it could be really good to compare documents. One of my favorite things is to compare documents. Because these guys are spending hundreds of hours writing a document. We know that. And so if suddenly one year to the next year of the documents, language changing you should take notice of it. Why they suddenly changing the document, the language. And sometimes these are subtle changes from may to will. Oh, so what prompt do you use? What do you do? So you can upload both documents. We can do what doc, but AI will be faster. So to compare documents, it's a very good way to say that why did the change from may to-- it may happen to-- it will happen. There's a big difference to it. So things like that, or you can see-- you can compare if there's a new data point that dropped in. So that's a great way to learn what changing. So my advice to everybody, always read the first document. And then after read the first document every year, you can just compare documents. Every quarter, you can just compare documents. Because then you can just pick up the incremental changes. But at first, you have to put the time in to learn what's going on. The other thing is it's also a very good way to learn about a business, like get the basic knowledge about the business, right? I actually learned-- I'm very interested about wine two years ago. And I learned everything about wine using chat GPT. And then obviously, I went, got better at it. But the basic, you can learn. And then you have to do primary research. Then you have to do the primary research. The next time we'll bring wine here, make the podcast more fun. If I get invited for the first time. Depends on what wine you bring. So that's, I think, is really really interesting. But the other thing is you can use AI to understand sentiment. So one of the things that I'm really interested is understanding about what sentiment changes in a business. Because as people are talking about different social media or different sub-stack and research, you can just put them in trying to understand how whether people sentiment is changing in a positive or negative direction, that's a good way to understand. Because stock market is a voting machine, as Warren Buffett likes to say, right? So understanding the which way the sentiment is changing is also a great way to understand consensus. So do you go to the Reddit page of the company and just copy all the comments, paste it, and chat GPT. And you're like, what is the sentiment? And how has it changed from the previous year or something? Yeah, you can do that. And long term, I would like to build tools that can automate those things. We're not there yet, but yes. I like this. This is a very tactical advice. Yeah, well, I think it's very tactical. And also, I think it also, it goes to show that it takes some work to like either read the boring documents yourself, because there's important footnotes. Or even just putting into chat GPT. Like, I'm thinking back to myself. I'm like, would I even do that? So I can see how that is a massive differentiator, because you just have so much more information and more data points that you're working with. And these companies spend so much time writing it. So it's definitely worth reading. It's 100%. I think I'll tell you what you shouldn't do. You shouldn't buy a stock, because somebody asks you to buy a stock. That's because for a variety of reason, if that person has a perfect crystal ball, they might have a different volatility pain threshold. They might have different time horizon. None of those things you know, right? So I think you should never listen to someone else to make a decision. You should make your own decision. And for that, you have to do the work. Second, you have to really like what you do. If you don't like investing and trying to do be an investor, probably not the best is ever time. then you can just go to a professional. But as long as you're a professional, If you're interested about the business, I think through law and through technology changes, now everybody has the same information. So, and they're all available, spend the time learning and make your own decisions. - That's very encouraging, I actually think. So Sherry, how do you think about your checkings and savings account? Because for me, checkings is money that I need to use in the next three to four months. And then savings is everything after that, like long term. And because of that, I feel like most of us don't think about the interest that we could be earning on those accounts. Well, the problem is, most banks give you next to nothing, like a fraction of a percent. 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Go to SoFi.com/tiger-sisters or click the link below to learn more and get started. That's SoFi.com/tiger-sisters. SoFi Checking and Savings is offered through SoFi Bank and a member FDIC. And now back to the show. - So Imran, looking back to your investing career and timeline, what's one or two big mistakes that you made and what did you learn from them? - So first is never buy a stock because it's cheap. This is like one of the common mistakes, a lot of professional investors make. They will say that, hey, look at this company. It's only trading at 10 times speed. So this is really cheap. You should buy it. And sometimes you fall for it. It's like, oh, this stock is cheap. So why don't I buy it? But the reality is, if you think about it, anybody can do a PE calculation, right? It's look at the price. You look at the earnings. You do a PE calculation. Anybody in Wall Street can do it. Anybody with a finance degree. Both of you have a business school degree from grade schools. You can do it. So you are not doing something that nobody else is doing. So if you're just buying the stock because it's cheap, then like you're not doing anything incremental, right? So the stock is cheap because clearly market thinks about something going wrong with that business. And that's where the stock is cheap. So what the question you really have to ask yourself, why this is stock is cheap? What is the fear? So you have to do the work to understand there's got to be a fear that the stock is cheap. And if the stock is trading at the same vine, if a stock is very, very expensive, it's a really bad idea to go shut the stock just because of expensive. Because again, anybody can do a PE calculation. So if a stock is very expensive, market is telling you something. So what I think the next question going back to asking, why, why is this stock cheap? Why is the stock expensive? You have to ask this question. Once you understand why it is, then you really have done the decision, is this true or not true? Is this going to happen or not? Is this going-- is this a consensus? And if this consensus is going back, market likes to make full of the greatest number of people. So if a consensus is wrong, it's a great time to buy a stock. And you will probably generate incredible return. But sometimes consensus is right. And or sometimes consensus is going to be right for a long period of time. And so you really need to understand that. So that's one big mistake I made. And now I just don't-- to me, the valuation should be the last stock. Because valuation at that point will tell you how much risk is priced into the stock. And so you can look at a company and say, everything is going great. And but it's trading at an incredible multiple. That means all the good news, most likely, priced in. So any kind of mistake, it will going to get hit hard. The second is actually what I just told earlier. Never buy stock listening to someone else. Do your own work. Because the reality is, again, if you listen to-- in primarily in my business, we have all these banks call us and say, hey, buy this stock, buy that stock. And sometimes you fall for the track. They said, oh, this guy's so convex, convincing, is great. And you sometimes you might have a mistake of triggering too early without understanding everything. And that's those never workout. So my two big advice would be ask a lot of questions, trying to go deep into it and understand why it's trading, why it's trading. And then the second is, do your own work. I feel like those two are really related as well. It's like, when you see a stock is cheap, I want to understand why it's cheap. And also, what is the-- in reading a lot of the source material, what's the mission vision? Where do they want to go? And how are they going to get out of this hole? It's doing a lot more, like a third-layer pass to better understand this situation. I think one of the most important thing to understand when-- and it's true in every point of light. When people give you your money, they give you their trust. So when an investor, the entire US capital market is built on trust. And because think about it, if you read those documents, nobody really goes check what's really-- like, yeah, they're auditor, they'll sign off. But it's not like SIS is investigating every line item is right. But there has been built on this trust that, hey, anything you disclose is this accurate. You are not hiding anything, any kind of material information. You are not omitting any material information. Your auditors have done a good job. So you're trusting a lot of people when you're buying an equity. So the entire US capital market-- and this is actually one of the reasons America has been very successful, I think, the strong capital market of the US. Because our capital market was able to support businesses that couldn't be support. Look, in a lot of the Chinese companies, they had to come to the US to raise money. We funded your Chinese technology innovation in 1990s and 2010. Nobody talks about it, right? Companies like Alibaba, companies like Tencent, companies like that would not be without American dollars supporting those businesses. So we supported that, and the Chinese capital market didn't support them. And same thing, true for other countries. And so our capital market helped us support businesses. Because they're one of the greatest things about America that is actually OK with failure. And as long you put the right effort, but it's built on trust. So as long you are trusted, but you felt people are fine. So when people give you money, they give you the trust. So the moment you break trust, things fall apart. So if a stock is really, really cheap, you have to ask two things. One, is that something fundamentally wrong with the business that broke the trust. Either management did something, or is the company has doing something that broke the trust? And that's really, really important to understand the trust factor, and that's really drive the value of the business. Because the thing is that if the company-- people can trust the business, trust the predictability of the business, they're willing to pay more money. And the multiple will expand. So the last question we have on legacy and next gen is that for someone who's listening or watching today who feels investing is intimidating or inaccessible, what is one really simple and bold step that they could take tomorrow to overcome that fear and start investing? Start small. OK. If you have $100, and you're intimidated by investing, invest $5. Start small. I think, again, going back to the accessibility of the investment, now you can do fractional share trade in Robinhood. I believe you can do it. But you can do somewhere. If you're taking it, it can't be known. So I think what it does is that the barriers to investing has been coming down for last 30-- at least in my career, dramatically. And I would never be intimidated by investment, because if you're intimidated, do small amount. Try it out. I like that. 2%, 3%, 5%. You can do $5, C1. But only do as long you're curious. Because I think the one of the intimidation you can overcome it. But if you don't have the curiosity, you don't like investment, it doesn't excites you. No need to do it. Because-- and I think it's true for anything in life. Do things that excites you. If you wake up in the morning, it doesn't excite you. It doesn't entertain you. It doesn't give you motivated no reason to do it. Intimidation-- you should never give up anything because of fear if you're interested in something. The way to avoid the fear, try a little-- try-- try-- starts-- if you want-- like I talk to a lot of athletes, right? Like people who do marathon. They don't go run marathon on the first day. They start-- small you know do it a little bit you know and they may not never run marathon but you know you're gonna do more so so the idea is you know you got to take baby steps try something don't go try to put all your money investing in one day this is actually one of the most amazing thing about investing that I learned and and and again I think talking about social equality is that I'll talk about a very successful investors incredibly successful he's probably two years older than me I talked about it I never knew about Wall Street till junior year uh-huh and he came from an East Coast investment family so grew up with investing you know right after graduating from college when I was trying to figure out my life doing you know investment banking and other things you know he went to work for a well known hedge fund manager you know very very early on you know so by the time I was talking to him 10 years after he had 15 20 years of experience about the market he has gone through the cycle so you know it's really interesting is like the pattern recognition gets so much better as you do it longer and longer and longer you know like I've seen that with myself right because you see a thing and you like oh I've seen this kind of story five years ago I've seen this story with somebody else 10 years ago this was a similar situation so you start recognizing patterns yeah and as you start recognizing patterns or you connect the doc you get better and better at it so investing is one of the many things in life that longer you do better you get it yeah I feel there's so much to unpack there because pattern recognition even building that is a skill in and of itself yes because once you build that as a skill you can actually apply it across a lot of different verticals so like I think one of the reasons why we've been able to build tiger sisters as quickly as we have over the last year is because we've built a lot of pattern recognition in our previous roles right and so like being able to take things that we learned even in completely different industries and apply it to this totally different industry and totally you know new world to us is something that I think people don't realize is really powerful yeah it's a pattern recognition you know it's very important in relationships it's really yeah you know I a lot of times you know that if you don't know anything you don't know what to expect you know so the pattern recognition is really really critical so so the reason I was saying that start small yeah even if you are really really enthusiastic because you don't want to put all your chips right away before you start recognizing all these patterns so to me would be start small build your investment muscle you know start figuring out the pattern also it will also tell you is your pain tolerance yeah you know and again it's true for everything in life nobody I know ever became very very successful for a long period of time who doesn't have a very strong pain tolerance you know because if you invest money you will lose money and that's painful but a lot of people don't have that pain tolerance but it's true for athlete it's true for you know if you found a business and so so you really have I've seen so many people when they lose money they just get so the cancers can't talk you know it impacts the life it's like so many hedge fund managers have seen it impacts the life it's the impact the relationship with the wife like it's a complete mess and these people should never come to investing you know because it's miserable life for them yeah and so so I think what you need to do is you know like make sure before you fully dive into it one you build this pattern recognition skill set and second you learn where your pain points are and can you can you can you survive through this pain point you know because when you are pain you cannot take the pain you make mistakes and do all the above by by doing small experiments that start small starting small yeah you know and listen I failed to do that with my children because they haven't shown interest at least as of now but if you if parents are listening if your young kids try to get them interested early start with the fake money or whatever you know but more longer they will do better they will get we want to write a book we want to write several books but one of them we want to be a children's book maybe it'll be a personal finance book for children right I mean I mean co-written with Iran no I think the financial sophistication is very important right and and because then you can control a lot of things you know not only just investing but also how to manage your money and things like that like a lot of people you know like you know I think it's much easier to ruin your asset than earning you know like it's very you can lose a lot of money very fast you know so the financial discipline is very very important I think that's it for our questions we'll move on to our our segments okay okay I'm scared okay let's take the first question what's the silly superstition you like anyway oh that's nice that's so sweet are you superstitious I am somewhat superstitious you know like there are some stocks I can never make money there's some companies I always make money so I'm and the things that I can't make money sometimes I'm like you know I just let's not even bother life is too short no I'm I'm a bit superstitious you know I like it's completely not accurate but you know sometimes you left I twitch you know it's considered bad you know they are so so sometimes I get nervous if I my left are the same thing right I twitch it's good I know so sometimes in my right I twitch I get happy so so it's by and then sell that's why I don't do that investment that way but you know then uh you know my mom is pretty superstitious so all right wild one okay I'm nervous about the wild one what travel I'm creating have you ever broken something on purpose no I'm boring different wild one he'll find my life is pretty boring he broke a company I'm very rule breaker by shorting them just kidding you don't do shorting actually I have a very funny story to say that'll only get me to okay I'm actually talk talk about because this is what is this one to say what part of yourself is borrowed from someone else that's too deep for me so have you broken something I'm gonna give a snap story example okay that's that might get into me travel okay hopefully everyone doesn't listen to it uh so do we repeat that question is that have you broken something on purpose right um have you broken something on purpose uh yeah so I think you know early days you know as you know I was a snapchat early days of snapchat advertising there are a lot of uh pushback about a lot of debate how to say pushback about what snap advertising should look like you know and who are the people should be allowed on advertising on snap because one of the concerns was there are a lot of direct response advertisers you know are bad for the user experience and uh you know we don't want like people you know advertising mortgage or things like that and I was in charge of building the advertising business you know along with my colleagues and we wanted to uh we wanted to bring all sorts of advertisers so that we can really understand our algorithm and testing and things like that and then there are some people you know would see those advertisements and they would freak out and they would create this email chain and mortgage debate so we decided to uh basically break our advertising algorithm in states or cities that where all the snap employees were so they can't see that and and and and so some ad would not show up in New York or Venice or a lot you know places like that uh and only would be showing in where there is no snap employees so that we're not having this internal debate you know because we were moving fast and trying to figure out you know what's the best ad algorithm stack to build and you want it to have as many advertisers coming to the platform because so that you can show the right ad to the right person or you would test it in a different country. Sometimes you don't need to dog food your own ads or your own products sometimes you do sometimes you don't really said what doesn't know can't hurt them. Awesome thank you so much. Thank you thank you for talking with us.

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. Accessibility to financial information has democratized investing, allowing retail investors to access the same data as professionals through social media and AI tools.
  2. The foundation of smart investing is understanding the business behind a stock, not just relying on external advice or market consensus.
  3. Critical thinking and curiosity are essential—investors should ask multiple “why” questions and verify claims by cross-referencing sources like company filings.
  4. Market consensus often reflects groupthink; when consensus shifts, it signals potential risk or opportunity, requiring caution and deeper analysis.
  5. AI enhances investment research by summarizing documents, comparing financial statements over time, and analyzing sentiment, but human judgment and primary research remain vital.
  6. Never buy a stock based on someone else’s recommendation—each decision must be grounded in personal due diligence and independent analysis.
  7. Investing should begin small, with fractional shares or minimal amounts, to build confidence, pattern recognition, and resilience to market pain.
  8. Trust is foundational in investing; a company’s credibility and transparency directly influence valuation, and breaking that trust can severely damage long-term value.

Summary:

The podcast features Imran Khan, a seasoned investor and former Snapchat CSO, discussing how the modern era has made investing more accessible through democratized knowledge and tools like AI. He emphasizes that the core of successful investing lies not in following trends or expert advice, but in deep personal understanding of the businesses being invested in. Key advice includes reading official filings like 10-Ks to learn fundamentals, asking multiple “why” questions to uncover underlying risks, and remaining skeptical of consensus views—especially when they seem overly widespread.

Imran highlights that AI can accelerate research and sentiment analysis but cannot replace human judgment or time spent in primary research. He warns against buying stocks based on recommendations, stressing the need for independent analysis. For beginners, he advocates starting small with minimal investments to build confidence, pattern recognition, and financial resilience.

He also underscores that trust—both in management and in the market’s transparency—is critical to long-term value. Ultimately, investing is not just about returns but about developing curiosity, discipline, and emotional strength to withstand losses. The message is clear: anyone, regardless of background, can participate in investing with the right mindset, tools, and foundational habits.

FAQs

Start by learning the fundamentals of the business through official documents like 10-Ks and 10-Qs, which are legally accurate and publicly available. Focus on understanding why a stock is cheap or expensive, not just its price.

Always verify information by checking official company sources and cross-referencing with multiple independent sources. Ask 'why' multiple times to dig deeper and uncover underlying truths.

The market hasn't become more speculative. Retail investors now have the same access to information as professionals and are often more technically savvy. The rise of retail trading reflects greater financial empowerment, not increased risk.

AI can summarize complex financial documents, compare annual reports to spot changes, and analyze social media sentiment. However, it should supplement—not replace—reading original documents and deep understanding.

Buying stocks simply because they're cheap or because someone else recommends them. The key is to understand the underlying reasons for a stock’s price and assess the risk, not just follow trends.

Start small—invest just $5 or 10% of your budget—and use fractional shares or apps that lower entry barriers. The goal is to build curiosity and confidence through small, manageable experiments.

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