Rob Koyfman - Fintech Founder
This episode is brought to you by The Business Brew. We wanted to do an episode that highlighted Rob Koyfman, founder of Koyfin, one of the fastest growing platforms for financial data and analytics to research stocks and understand market trends. Imagine a Bloomberg-lite with tons of high-quality fundamental data, a powerful graph engine that can show it all clearly and a user interface that doesn't look like it was built in the 1990s. Check them out. You won't regret it. Sign up for free at koyfin.com.
Album art photo taken by Mike Ando.
Thank you to Mathew Passy for the podcast production. You can find Mathew at @MathewPassy on Twitter or at thepodcastconsultant.com
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+ Transcript
Bill:: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to The Business Brew. This is your host, Bill Brewster. This episode is brought to you by me...I'm bringing you the episode to meet the man behind the product, the guy who had the foresight to bet on The Business Brew, and one heck of a dude, an all-around mensch.
So, anyway, I want to do a do a fun episode with my sponsors. I hope you guys enjoy it. I enjoyed getting to know Rob over the sponsorship, and it's been fun, and I'm really grateful that he took a shot on me. So, here's his episode. I hope you all enjoy it. Please see the show notes for a promotional code that accompanies this episode. I've got the link in the show notes. As always, none of this is financial advice. All of the information contained in this program is for entertainment purposes only. Please consult your financial advisor before making investment decisions and do your own due diligence. So, Rob, how you doing for the second time?
Rob: I am doing well. Happy Friday.
Bill:: Happy Friday to you. Has anything changed in the last two minutes since we started talking and then you had to shut down your browser?
Rob: Just that my browser's working and let's roll.
Bill:: This is good. So, dude, you want to give some people some background on yourself. How you founded Koyfin and where you came from? I love your story.
Rob: Yeah, absolutely. So, my story before Koyfin is that, I was on Wall Street for about 15 years. So, I started in Goldman Sachs research covering REITs, single stocks, and then move to a group called Portfolio Strategy. When my boss who was the retail analyst David Kostin got promoted to be the portfolio strategist to replace Abby Joseph Cohen. Do you know who that is?
Bill:: She is well known, a favorite of Barron's.
Rob: Favorite of Barron's. When did you start in the business?
Bill:: Well, I guess, am I in the business or am I just an entertainer? I'm still not sure.
Rob: [laughs] But the non-entertainment business, the investing business.
Rob: I think that I've done this moderately, competently for three years, and I probably started learning five years ago, like, deep immersion five years ago.
Rob: Okay, cool. So, I think, a lot of people who have started five years ago wouldn't know who she is, and she was a big deal in the 90s. She was like the person in the 90s. I remember our first lunch when we went out to lunch as a team, the waiter, when he saw the credit cards was like, "Are you the Abby Joseph Cohen?"
Bill:: Wow.
Rob: She's like, "Yes, I am." Because she was on CNBC all the time and really famous. She's a really smart and well-regarded person. My team and my boss was brought into put a little bit more meat on the bones on her analysis. She was just a market forecaster, doing a lot of top-down stuff and we started doing a lot more bottom-up analytics on valuation, and sector rotation, and relative value, and themes, and that's where I got my start.
Bill:: What was Goldman like?
Rob: Goldman was my first job. So, I didn't really know how to compare it. I'd say any company, there was a spectrum of competence across people. I met people who were really smart, and met people who are less smart, and met people who were really nice, and met people who were not so nice. I'd say the one thing about Goldman that I've really come to appreciate since I left is, they do a couple of things really well.
One, they under resource. So, they really make people figure out how to use the current resources or limited resources to the best of their ability. So, if you think about a Goldman's account like relative to like a Citigroup, or a JPMorgan, or anything else. They've really under resource, that's really interesting, and really smart on their part. The second thing is, I think, they have a really good vetting process in terms of promoting people, in terms of vetting people. I think that process is probably a little bit better than at other places, so that you can't really climb up to the top unless you're really delivering value and really good.
I worked at Citigroup as an example after that. Citigroup was great and I'd say the difference between Citigroup and Goldman are 95th percentile versus 88th percentile or something like that. But those small differences are, I think, they matter a lot and they compound. So, at Citigroup, you did have way too many people, you did people at the top that are like, "How the hell are these people at the top?"
Bill:: Yeah.
Rob: So, those are-- [crosstalk]
Bill:: Well, it becomes political, right, if the culture is in a meritocracy, it can infect other areas, I think.
Rob: Yeah, absolutely. The other thing about Goldman is, most of the senior people there are homegrown, they rarely hire people from the outside on the super senior level, on the MTM partner level. That's not the case in a lot of other organizations and then what happens is, when you bring in someone from the outside, they start bringing their entire network from the outside, and you just have constant culture dilution which is not that good.
Bill:: So, that's kind of going on at Wells Fargo, but that's totally different. Scharf came in, he kind of grew up with Jamie Dimon, and then you've seen he's brought in, the whole C suite basically got waxed, and the board turned over, and I think, for there, it's probably for the better. But it is interesting to see how it was like a true cleaning of house.
Bill:: Yeah. So, sometimes, it is for the better.
Bill:: Yeah. Well, but if you got a good organization, you keep the people around.
Rob: Yeah. But organizations are just always very political and there's a lot of, obviously, personal relationships and rivalry. So, I think it's just like very human nature if you bring in someone [unintelligible [00:06:15] people they trust around them, or even like maybe in addition to trust just people that they're used to working, and have chemistry and stuff like that.
Bill:: Have you done that at Koyfin? How are you surrounding yourself with people that you want to build the organization with and making sure that you instill a good culture in your own organization?
Rob: That's a great question. I think that's something that I'm really learning, because I've never had to institute a culture in a company, and it's something that I'm really trying to understand what's the most effective way to do that. I think my set of values are probably a little bit different than the set of values of other-- they are different than the set of values of other people and I just sometimes always assume that my set of values are just going to be the set of values of others. So, as we've grown, I've put a little bit more emphasis in terms of narrowly defining specific things that we would either avoid or look for.
The risk there is that you start naming these values, it just becomes empty in terms of like saying, "Okay, we're all ambitious, and teamwork," and start naming these values, that's just like, "Okay, they--[crosstalk]
Bill:: Yeah, it's just like word salad.
Rob: It's just like word salad. It just like stuff to put on your website. I think, for me, I'm starting to realize what makes me productive, what makes other people that I work well with productive, what kind of qualities, and what kind of qualities to avoid, and thinking about how to institutionalize that a little bit more. So, for me, for us, it's really having a culture where you can debate and discuss a lot of different things. Now, that our team is growing, I think the Jeff Bezos philosophy of disagree, but commit at the end, and you're going to have disagreements all the time. They just need to commit at some point, make sure everyone's really in the same direction. That's like one of these things that sounds pretty cliched. So, obviously, you do that but it's like a value that you really have to instill in people. Because otherwise, not everyone understands that if you disagree with some people, okay, I disagree with some and do something else. That's something that we have to emphasize a little bit more.
Bill:: So, let's take a step back. You're at Citi and then you go to a hedge fund, right?
Rob: Yeah, I was at Goldman for about six years. I moved over to the prop trading desk in London and I was there for about a year.
Bill:: Oh, that's cool.
Rob: Yeah, so that was moved--
Bill:: What was living in London like?
Rob: Living in London was-- I moved there in January of 2008. It was an interesting time. It was right as the market was about to tank. London was much different than New York. I loved living in New York and London has a lot of good things about it. So, it's like in the middle of Europe, it has a little bit more of a European mindset, very international, very diverse. It's a very old city.
Bill:: It is old.
Rob: You feel that. So, all the buildings are these like really old buildings. You don't have these kind of doorman buildings that you have in New York. So, I was living in a walk up, I was working on Wall Street. So, I was paying pretty decent rent. Like I remember my sink had a hot and cold different spout and that was like super, like the most annoying thing in the world that I had to turn a little bit hot-
Bill:: Mix your water.
Rob: -and mix your water kind of like in your hands and I was like, "God dammit."
Bill:: [laughs] I didn't come here for this.
Rob: Yeah. Bring me back where there's like a warm mode.
Bill:: How is your air conditioning over there?
Rob: No air conditioning, but you don't really need it.
Bill:: Oh, I don't know. I've been there in the summer a couple times. I've needed it.
Rob: Yeah.
Bill:: I don't understand to any European listeners. You guys got to get on ice cold beer and big time AC. This should not be debatable topics I don't think. I just think there's a way the world should be and those should be in it.
Rob: Yeah, ice water, I feel very strongly about. It's not like-
Bill:: It's right.
Rob: -getting warm water in a glass is just very strange.
Bill:: It makes no sense. It's like part of the refreshment is the cold water hitting my mouth. What are we doing here?
Rob: Yeah. And you figure once they tried it, they would realize the right way to drink water, but yet they're set in their ways.
Bill:: I like how you said that, because it is the right way. I don't want to have a debate about my water is as good as yours. No, cold water is correct.
Rob: Absolutely. The other thing about London at times is super expensive. So, the pound was just kind of the way the currency worked out. It was just a very expensive cost of living. So, I remember like buying a shower curtain that was £50 at the cheapest store there. That's like a $100 when you're translating it back that, so not very pleasant in terms of cost of living.
Bill:: You get around on a tube there, right?
Rob: You get around on the tube, which is really clean, really connects the city nicely, has the cloth seats, which are really-- That's not a-- [crosstalk]
Bill:: We would not do that in America. They would be very dirty.
Rob: I mean, it's pretty dirty in London. I think it's very old school but yeah that's a very weird thing that they have.
Bill:: I enjoy that city. I've only been there a couple of times but I think, it's very cool, it's very pretty. But my most vivid memory was taking a cab somewhere and not asking how much it cost before I went there. And then, I was like, "No, I have no more money for the rest of the day. Thank you very much." Amateur mistake.
Rob: The cab drivers there just they have to study for like two years to pass the cabbie test to know every little nook, and every little street, and London's like a maze. There's no grid system.
Bill:: Imagine how pissed they'd be when Uber gets released. It's like, "Fuck you, guys." [laughs]
Rob: Yeah and when the phone just tells you where to go and stuff like memorizing eight, nine streets.
Bill:: Yeah. Oh, well, there you go. Obsolescence, which is what you're doing to some financial platforms might I add?
Rob: Wow, great segue.
Bill:: You like that?
Rob: That was good.
Bill:: So, I am a pro.
Rob: [laughs] We are definitely innovating on the way that things have been done in the past.
Bill:: What gives you the idea for Koyfin? You were at a hedge fund and when you and I have talked in the past, you've used technical analysis, and you've given me a little bit of your framework for how you see the world. But where were you when you drafted up the idea of Koyfin and how did this all like come together?
Rob: Yeah, so, I was at a hedge fund. I left to look for another job. I started investing and trading on my own for the first time in my career whereas before I had a lot more restrictions in terms of what I can do personally, I was always doing it for the firm. It was the first time I had to pay for the resources myself and I had a decent budget to pay for what I wanted and I had something in mind. But I didn't want to pay for a Bloomberg. I wanted something lower. So, let's say, I wanted to pay a couple of $1,000 a year. I didn't want to pay 25 grand a year. And then be stuck in a two-year commitment, I was like, "I don't know if I could do that."
Just started really researching all the tools out there. So, this was 2016 and we just had all this innovation, and all these really cool things happening, and other verticals and other software verticals. In finance, you use the platforms and use the resources and they were all created 20, 30 years ago and they haven't really been updated.
Bill:: So, what are you using when you're coming out before Koyfin exists?
Rob: I basically started-- I got a Cap IQ trial, I got a FactSet trial.
Bill:: Dude, those are every bit as expensive as Bloomberg though, aren't they?
Rob: About half?
Bill:: Is it?
Rob: About half. Yeah.
Bill:: Oh, I didn't realize that Cap IQ is. I thought Cap IQ is more expensive than that.
Rob: At that time, Cap IQ was about $12,000 or $14,000 a year.
Bill:: There you have it. It shows what I know.
Rob: The other thing I figured like, I'd used Interactive Brokers before and I love Interactive Brokers because it has access to everything. You could trade anything on there. I was like, "You know what I'm sure Interactive Brokers has a bunch of analytics tools that I could use to come up with ideas and do what I need." It's one of the most poorly designed systems in the world. It's just super difficult to navigate and to orient yourself to find anything. It's built by software developers. It's not built by someone who knows what investing is. It's built by someone who's just like, look the data is right there, you just have to hit that and search for it and it's called that. As an investor you're like, that doesn't make any sense. Why would I know to do that or have any idea how to do that? So, it's all like these little app windows that are made in Java that it's very clear that whoever created that had never invested in their life.
Bill:: It's interesting that you say that, I have not used Interactive Brokers. Most of the people that I talk to that do, they say the exact same thing. They're like, "The customer service is really not that great. The platform is not that intuitive," but they all like the product and they're not going to leave.
Rob: Because the product does what it does very well and that gives you access to trading, to invest, and whatever security you want at the best price. But if you said like, "Hey, how's the portfolio analytics on Interactive Brokers?" Once you have your portfolio, you just want to see like your, let's say, some basic valuation measure, or how it is performed over time, or do some scenario analysis, or look at the sector breakdown, or anything that goes beyond that core competency which is buying something at a reasonable price, it doesn't exist.
Bill:: Hmm. Interesting. Yeah, I got to try that out because I do want some access to international stuff and they seem to be best at that. But maybe I'm not right on that.
Rob: And the really good international stuff, so, you could trade any market. If you trade in terms of options, or futures, or currencies, that's like a commercial for Interactive Brokers.
Bill:: Let's say, we're just talking.
Rob: Yeah.
Bill:: What do you do when you were using them? Do you do stuff like that?
Rob: Invest in all those things that I just mentioned?
Bill:: Yeah.
Rob: I'm definitely like a--
Bill:: Like, who's Rob as an investor?
Rob: Yeah. Rob as an investor is a mix of stocks like fundamental, very basic fundamental analysis, high level options, really overlaying options and thinking about can something be expressed in options market with more leverage or like a better risk reward, and then having just a macro view, having a top down view on what's going on, whether it's where we are in the economic cycle or which sectors are performing, or what rates are doing, or what FX is doing and just making sure I have some kind of view or just understanding what's going on there?
Bill:: Do you know what I like about the Koyfin homepage a lot is that, you can see like global yields everywhere, you got commodities right there, it makes sense to me why you've oriented the page in that way? Because most other sites that I go to it's like, "This is the S&P, Dow, and NASDAQ, right?" It's like, "Okay, cool that doesn't give me any view of what's going on everywhere." So, you can see like your top down bent or whatever in the way that you design the product. I think that's cool.
Rob: Yeah, definitely, there's a big influence on what I want to see. That's like the starting point and then, we'll take into account what our users are asking for and build stuff that we get feedback on. But it's definitely the starting point and stuff with my own trading style, and my own process and looking across the market. But even today, you're very focused on equities and you're very fundamental investor, but if people start or investors start talking about yields or yields are a big problem or a big topic of conversation, you want to look that up. You don't want to go somewhere else and start digging around or if something in China is blowing up and you just want to see kind of okay, "I just want to put that into context versus my own holdings or just see what it looks like over time."
You should just have access to that information. That's something that Bloomberg does really well. So, out of all the platforms that I've used before, I think, Bloomberg is the best one. I think Bloomberg is the best one because it has that all in one data offering, so that you can look, if you know how to look it up, you can look up anything in the world on Bloomberg.
Bill:: Yeah, but you need to know how and that is not the easiest thing in the world.
Rob: No, but once you learn how to search the FLDS codes and the top pages, there's definitely a ramp up and a learning curve for Bloomberg. But once you learn the shortcuts, how fast can you just access stuff by just typing stuff. Bloomberg came up with all these innovations that were in the 80s and 90s that are now like other companies are like, "Oh, we have shortcuts on the keyboard. That's an innovation." Bloomberg has been doing that for like 40 years, or instant messaging, or data visualization. I think they've nailed a lot of good things. I think Bloomberg is the best, most useful platform out there at least the way I look at things.
The other thing they did really well is focus on the analytics. So, they provide a really good layer of data. But then you could graph stuff, you could really analyze using their charts and their tools. That's not that like in Cap IQ in fact say, you can't really do that. Those are much more primitive platforms for those types of analytics. I think, Bloomberg does that really well and that's something that we've tried to build on is really focusing on data visualization and graphing part.
Bill:: I was just going to say, do you know somebody else that does it real well as Koyfin?
Rob: [laughs]
Bill:: Because I'm looking right now at the market dashboard and I like how if I click on US sectors, I like how-- I don't know, man, to me the way that you use visuals, the way the colors pop, and the way that you just default to graphs, it's a very smart way to just default people into visual representation. I don't know if what I'm saying, if I'm expressing it exactly the way that I want to but it makes everything really easy to see out of the gate.
Rob: Yeah, that's something that we definitely focus on and try to do. So, there's three paths on Koyfin. The first path is being able to browse dashboards that we create for you. Because there's just so much financial data out there, sometimes, you don't know what you want to look for. You just want to just see what's going on in a particular area. So, it's exactly what the homepage is for to just orient yourself in different markets and what's performing well today, what's not performing well today. And same thing on the sector page. So, if you didn't have this sector dashboard and I'm sharing my screen right now, so, I'm not sure if people could see the-- [crosstalk]
Bill:: I hope they can.
Rob: I hope.
Bill:: I think they can. I think, they see Bill, Rob and Rob screen. But if it doesn't work that well, that's my technical problems, not Rob's.
Rob: Yeah. Everyone, you have to visualize what I'm saying in your head.
Bill:: [laughs]
Rob: The sector dashboard that we build is just like a way to take all the major US sectors, all the subsectors to be able to sort them by different performance metrics like one day change, or one-week change, or one-year change. Then, be able to graph those on the right to be able to visually see what's performing, what's trending so that we all know energies doing well this year, over the past year, but breaking this down in one dashboard, and you don't have to build this yourself. You got to get this really nice orientation and see where everything is in perspective, and this will give you a really, either one a sense of what's going on to maybe lead you to ask questions and get new ideas in terms of certain trends that are happening in sectors, or countries, or factors.
The fact that dashboard is one that's really used by a lot of our investors, and that seeing how the different factors look over time. Obviously, everyone has some factor exposure. It's really hard to neutralize factor exposure out. So, I think, it's really helpful to just be able to see which factors are trending, how they're performing, so that your portfolio investments don't get caught up into one of these vicious factor rotation cycles that occur every couple of months.
Bill:: Small cap value with a big year, they just had to wait for a while.
Rob: Small cap value. Let me pull that up.
Bill:: Yeah. 15.5% so far.
Rob: Yeah.
Bill:: I mean, value in general is doing okay.
Rob: Value? This is the year value. Yeah.
Bill:: Yeah, which we'll see if it sticks. I know a lot of value people hope it will, time will tell.
Rob: Yeah, it's due. So, if we look at the 10-year performance of, i'll just pull up this just do growth versus value.
Bill:: [laughs] I don't mean to laugh like that. It's funny, too. Because I talk to people all the time about this, specifically, my man, Toby and Jake Taylor on this Value: After Hours show that we do. But man, you look at how those two factors traded, I mean, not in tandem, but they were like lines that crisscrossed till 2012 to 2017 and then boom. This just like alligator jaws.
Rob: Yeah. Big widening and if we just expand this and look at it.
Bill:: Wow. That is really interesting to look at.
Rob: Yeah.
Bill:: What if we go further back? Can we go further back?
Rob: This is based on the ETF. So, this is since 2000.
Bill:: Look at how much growth underperformed from 2000 to even 2017 [crosstalk]
Rob: If you take 2000 as your starting point, we're just back to where we started.
Bill:: Yeah.
Rob: [laughs] Actually, we're just getting back to normal being 2000.
Bill:: That's right. Yeah, which we can debate the assumption in that statement.
Rob: Right.
Bill:: But that's interesting stuff. That's the kind of thing that I think when you see it, it's much easier to internalize than when you're reading it. That's what I really like about what you built.
Rob: Yeah, definitely kind of like being able to visualize it, and being able to put into perspective, a long-term trend helps. So, we have a bunch of these market dashboards that we put together, whether it's factors, or global yields, or commodities and very similar structure, we just sort of lay out all the assets there, you can sort them, you can visualize them, you could really see what's going on. Then, we have a couple of analytics functions that are pretty useful. So, for those people that love charts, we have a function called Lots of Charts, where you select an index or an ETF and just look at all the charts from that index. So, basically, let's select maybe the ARK ETFs. So, this is the ARK ETF and just being able to see what's trending over the past five years being able to sort this by market cap or by performance.
And just orienting yourself on the different trends and as you mentioned before, I think, technical analysis is super useful. It's something that's become part of my toolkit that I use in addition to fundamental analysis. So, I love like, this is a function I created for myself, because I love running the charts and see when the trend is up, where the trend is sideways and when the trend is down, and where the trend is turning. This is a really effective way to do that.
Bill:: What are some of your favorite technical patterns to look for?
Rob: The way that I started thinking about technical analysis is, I went through this phase of thinking technical analysis as total bullshit and just laughing at people that would use it. Then, I went through a phase of understanding or learning why it could be useful and having a bunch of experiences that taught me that technical analysis could be useful and then, trying to use all these different indicators and getting really specific about to, am I using RSI or MACD, and what level, and then, the final phase of where I am now is really simplifying technical analysis and just saying.
Technical analysis is all about identifying a trend and a reversal of trend. So, my favorite things to do are just identifying support and resistance levels, and then, seeing when companies or assets break those, and that's a huge signal to me. As a lot of investors know that the price moves before fundamentals, so, it's always interesting to me when price is moving and the fundamentals haven't caught up with the fundamentals haven't shown that. That's like the first inning of a trend or the second inning of a trend, and those are the most interesting trends or interesting traits to think about.
Bill:: Hmm. For those that don't know, MACD is Moving Average Convergence Divergence and RSI is Relative Strength Indicator.
Rob: You're a resident technician here.
Bill:: Dude, I got deep into Doges, and reversals, and all types of stuff. Bull flag patterns, and I like technicals. I don't use them a lot. But I don't think that they're as hocus-pocus as a lot of my fundamental brethren might dismiss, or you know that, I guess that one of the things that I think, I would be more apt to use technicals if I was buying some of the higher valued momentum names. I think that I would probably have a little bit shorter leash on, which maybe doesn't make any sense. Because you probably want to just buy those near long-term trend lines from a technical standpoint and just let them go. I don't know. I talk about this fucking company all the time.
But like Qurate, when the earnings came out, it got destroyed. I certainly would have gotten blown out if I had some technical stop loss. Look at that move on earnings recently. So that like clearly breaks support, and then you're out. But I actually liked the fundamentals there. So, that's why I don't use them as much here. You are not going to like this chart. It is actually the long-term one. [laughs]
Rob: I think, this chart is, if you look at over the past few years, it's definitely looks like it's consolidating sideways. So, I don't think there's obviously short term, its trending down, medium term its trending up. I think you're absolutely right. If you're purely technicals and the stock breaks the support level, you're stopping out here and sounds like you didn't or you either. I'm not sure what you did, but-- [crosstalk]
Bill:: I almost threw up. That's what I almost did.
Rob: [laughs]
Bill:: Thank you. It was a terrible day in my household. But I had it figured out by the end of the day. Yeah, at noon, I was supposed to record a podcast with somebody and I told her, I said, "I actually can't record with you right now because I don't have a clear head." So, I learned for those that know what it might feel like when a fairly concentrated position goes down 30% a day, I got to live that. That was fun.
Rob: Man, it's amazing that you have the fundamental framework or you thought about or whatever kind of analysis you did. I'm sure it was a rough day but it's all part of the game I guess.
Bill:: Well, you know what, it was. I was just sitting there like, "What am I missing?
Rob: Yeah.
Bill:: Because I do fundamentally like, it's really weird to have these two competing thoughts in your head. But I on one hand think the market can be completely rational at times and I also have massive-- The longer I do this, the more I have respect for the market.
Rob: Yeah, I don't think it's black and white in terms of technicals. I think, you just have to use it as part of your arsenal. Sometimes, there's been times where there's been just these technical patterns, which are super strong, whether it's a breakout or a breakdown, and then, it just reverses the next day or a couple of days and you are like, "Ah." Technical people like to call that a bull trap or a bear trap, and it just their way of saying like, "Hey, this just goes against what technical analysis was to say." But you're absolutely right. There's any technical framework, you could find examples in history where it didn't work, whether it's a head and shoulders pattern with a lot of these growth names. There were just a bunch of breakdowns in June and July and just kind of recovered and continued on.
I think, marrying technical analysis and fundamental analysis and other things, I don't think one is the ultimate answer. For me, at least using them in conjunction and combination is really effective. So, maybe, I can tell you like a story of how I started using technical analysis. So, at Goldman Sachs in 2006, one of the things that our clients wanted at the time were short ideas. Were like, we have massive leverage to the upside and we're long a lot of different names, and this is when a lot of fun started doing swaps, and baskets, and putting on leverage. It was really hard to short anything because everything was going up, and there were LBOs, and it was just the very difficult to find shorts. So, what I was tasked to do was find a framework to identify shorts. It's like what makes a good short like, how can we identify a good short?
So I basically took all this data that we had, which is all equity data going back for four years and I started looking for, what is a short? Is it the opposite of a good long or is there something about a short that's different? So, I started doing all this data analysis and all this backtesting. The first result I got, which was very strange is that, the strongest factor to predict performance was past performance. I was like, "This is really weird. I was expecting valuation, or margins, or earnings, or whatever it is."
The strongest factor that I was finding was past performance. I'm sure a lot of people right now are like, "Oh, you found the momentum factor." I didn't know about the momentum factor at the time. I was just doing the analysis and the backtest and I was like, "This is crazy that previous performance is the number one predictor of future performance." There was someone sitting next to our group and he was an academic. This guy, Charlie Himmelberg, he was running credit. He was like, "Oh, that's the momentum factor you discovered" I'm like, "What?"
Bill:: [laughs] Over what timeframe is this valid for, that you determine?
Rob: So, it's three-month performance, six-month performance, 12-month performance. It is a very strong- [crosstalk]
Bill:: Indicator of the next.
Rob: -predictor of the next three months, six months, 12 months.
Bill:: Yeah. That makes sense.
Rob: The second strongest valuation was like thinking about high valuation, low valuation, but it was a much weaker signal. So, you know, statistically significant it was much weaker. Then, the other thing that I found was those-- then I started asking myself like, "Why do people look at fundamentals? If fundamentals don't predict what's going to do well, what's not going to do well?" Well, future fundamentals do, historical fundamentals don't. So, if you just buy the stocks that are growing the fastest or buy the stocks where margins are the highest or anything historical, it doesn't predict the future. But if you actually shift the analysis and say if I can actually buy the stocks with the biggest margin improvement, with the prospect of margin improvement, or buy the stocks with the biggest prospect of earnings growth, or sales growth, then, that's a very strong factor. So, that's what fundamental analysts need to do, is they need to predict the future, not the past.
Bill:: Yeah.
Rob: That's I think, something that a lot of people look at least when they're starting out in this and they look at historical, whatever fundamentals and they forget that their job is to like, the bottom line is, you need to predict the future. Sometimes, it's agreeing with the market, and sometimes it's disagreeing with the market or expectations.
Bill:: Yeah.
Bill:: So, that was my first experience and be like, "Well, there is information in price and just something that sat with me." Then, the second thing is, I was in Caxton, which was a macro hedge fund in 2008 2009. When I joined Caxton, it was the day that the Bank of England lowered rates by hundred or 150 basis points. It was October of 2008. And the first day I started, Caxton was the day that basically everyone on the floor started jumping up and down, because they had made $2 Billion on that trade. They were just long receivers, and basically, there was a huge macro trade that rates are going to go down, and the ECB had raised rates earlier that summer, so that wasn't priced into the market. And literally, I was like, "This is great. I love this place." [crosstalk]
Bill:: [laughs] Did you walk around and take credit? Like, "You're welcome. You can all win now." [laughs]
Rob: Yeah, correlation is causation. Yeah, exactly. So, I was just like, "Wow, these guys are really, really smart. They made a lot of money in 2008. And beginning of 2009, everyone was just super bearish at the firm just like the world is going to end, and just credit, and just all these pictures, and analyses, and just government debts about to explode, and all this other stuff. We had all these bearish trades on, and I was doing work on the banks, and I was like, "Wow, these banks are screwed. There's no way they're going to get out of this. We should short more. "
So, banks are trading at half book value and I'm like, "We should short more," and in March, stuff bottomed, in April, stuff started rallying, and basically, the CIO of Caxton D'Angelo pulled me to his office, he's like, "The technicals are all turning bullish." I'm like, "Technicals? What are you crazy, like the world's going to end?" He's like, "All the banks, all the retailers, they're all starting to act bullish." He's like, "You have to learn technicals." I'm like, "Are you kidding me? That's beneath me." Basically, maybe really understand the market is saying something that disagrees with my fundamental view, our fundamental view, and we need to understand that why that is and what's going on. That was when I really started reading books and really started to think about what it means for what technicals apply.
The market is always moving before fundamentals whether it was 2007, when the banks and home builders were selling off for a year for 2009, when things bottomed before the fundamentals, or even COVID of April 2020, when everything started rallying very strongly, and everyone was scratching their heads and be like, "This is crazy. The world's going to end. Why are things rallying?" Then, six months later, it was like, "All right, so, COVID isn't as bad as we thought," and all the stimulus and recap and all this other stuff. So, again, I don't think technicals are the only thing you should look at. But I think, I have a healthy respect for them really try to understand like, what is the market saying something that I'm not seeing or something that's going to be changing in the next six months.
Bill:: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. I think, in 2020, I remember when the Fed Zooka came out, and that bounces pretty nuts, and then, I was waiting for a sell off, and it never came. And thankfully, I allocated some capital to equities prior to that. But yeah, it would have been nice to get a little-- I probably could have gone down in the quality spectrum once that all started to rip and really. But that's hindsight. I was worried about survival. I wasn't worried about making as much as humanly possible. So, that's fine. That it is interesting, right? The market is super smart.
Rob: The market is smart and I've always thought about this, and I don't know the answer. I don't understand how a bunch of people who don't know what's going to happen in the future. There's information and then the market has some kind of smart predictive abilities. Everyone's trading rates right now in Treasuries are confused why yields are going down. It's like, the market is saying something.
Bill:: Yeah, well, you pull up the yield chart?
Rob: Yes.
Bill:: What do you think is good to pull up the 10-year and--
Rob: 10 is good.
Bill:: Yeah.
Rob: I think, people are just very confused why inflation's ripping and yields are trading sideways. That was the same confusion, and if I pull up the 20-year chart. I remember when I was researching Goldman 2006, 2007 when yields started going up, like inflation was ripping here.
Bill:: Yeah.
Rob: And people were like, "What is this- ?" This was the whole conundrum. Why are yields so low? There's information that the 10-year yield is not going up. And I think, the markets just implying that whenever the Fed has to raise rates, the economy is going to slow markedly. So, this 10-year yield is trying to predict or trying to understand what the inflation and the nominal growth outlook will look over the next 10 years, not over the next year. I think there's just so much leverage in the system that once we start taking away that, that's the most that's going to slow down the economy pretty dramatically. So, I think, there is a lot of value in kind of like just watching the 10-year yield, and what it's doing and without even having a prediction, I think, there's a lot of value to that.
Bill:: Can you on the platform, I don't know how to do this, but can you do a 2-10 spread?
Rob: Yeah. So, you could do a spread, but we also have the yield curve. So, US yield curve 10-year, two years.
Bill:: Yeah. That's what I'm looking for. Interesting.
Rob: The yield curve is on a macro level real estate, because when the yield curve is steepening, you basically have reflation, you have traditional inflation dynamics playing. Whenever the yield curve is flattening, you have the opposite. I think, that affects kind of a lot of different assets. I actually think the yield curve has peaked. I think this is probably the peak of what we're going to see in the cycle. The reason I say that is when I look at the yield curve versus the ISM and I'll just pull this up here, and I'm just going to make these on two separate charts. So, if you sort of go back and think about these cycles, as the ISM bounces from 2009, 2002, and this yield curve tops out and [unintelligible [00:38:59] top, that's where the peak is. I think, we've had the same thing like I think, the ISM has peaked here, it's bounced back. I think the top of the yield curve has already been set. So, I think, going forward, you're going to see their sideways or down yield curve. I think that matters a lot for growth and assets.
You've already started to see the-- if you look at the yield curve for 30-year, two year, and we put that on a separate chart here, that's not moving sideways. That's flattening pretty dramatically. So, the really long in the 30-year versus two-year has been flattening pretty obviously since March of this year, when the Fed posture started to change. So, I think, the 10-year, two years is going to follow that pattern as well.
Bill:: So, just watching you click through this and pull those charts up, and then you're like, "I want to put it on a different chart." One click, it's all very intuitive. Your background is not software engineering, right? How did you make this vision become reality?
Rob: Yeah. So, one is I have a great talented team. So, it's been luck to find a good team that I have today and really building on that. The other thing is, my first job at Goldman, my boss, David Kostin. He was super into data visualization and charting. So, his reports when we would [unintelligible [00:40:17] the reports, we would focus on lot of how we're presenting the charts, and what we're showing in the charts, and what colors we were using. And that's totally different than what everyone else is doing on Wall Street. So, if you look at the average Wall Street report and the charts in there, they're just like, throw up Excel charts, which is default settings, and stuff like that.
He can introduce me to this whole world of data visualization of Edward Tufte of thinking of how do you present that effectively and how do you convey information? So, even though, I'm not a designer, when I see something, I know what's wrong with it or where it should be, my co-founder, Ritchie designs, the whole platform. He and I, we work together to really make sure that its sort of intuitive in the way it looks. But one of the reasons that I started Koyfin is, I thought, there's a lot of improvements that could be made on graphing on user interface, that older platforms like FactSet, and Cap IQ, and YCharts, and Morningstar who have good data and who have pretty good functionality, they just don't have that really effective and powerful data visualization that you would find from like a tableau or one of these other platforms that's really focused on graphic.
The one software that I think is really good and that inspired me to start Koyfin was TradingView. It focused on charting and technical analysis. So, it doesn't have a fundamental of a macro stuff or not as in depth as we do. But when I was starting Koyfin or when I was thinking about Koyfin, I started playing around with different platforms, and I found TradingView and I was like, "Wow, this is web based. You don't need a terminal, you don't need to download anything. It's super-fast, it's lightweight," and basically, I said, "I want that, but for more assets, and for more analysis, and for more stuff." So, I think they've done a really, really good job on the analytics layer as well. They just raised a pretty big round that over a Billion valuation. So, good for them.
Bill:: Well, I hope that you are on your way to the same thing, sir.
Rob: One day.
Bill:: Yeah. Do you have a focus on including conference calls or something on the platform in the future or is it going to remain what it is today? Because I think, what it is makes a lot of sense. It's just kind of interesting, a world where I could log into my Koyfin app, and listen to the conference calls or get a transcript or something. It could make a lot of sense for the future as you pull up the transcripts.
Rob: [laughs] As you were talking, I just shot a note to my team and we just built it.
Bill:: I appreciate that.
Rob: This is how fast we deliver features. So, we do have transcripts for every company in the world. We have the full transcript that you can see, we have all the filings which you can see for all the companies, and then, we have using significant events. So, we just started bringing on Reuters news into our platform. So, getting all these results and getting these stories, and then, the next big product feature we're working on is to be able to search this stuff with one field. So, it's like, if you wanted to search like pricing power or whatever term-- [crosstalk]
Bill:: Yeah. You can bring it up to all of the times that it's been mentioned or whatever, right?
Rob: Yeah, exactly. So, seeing that, that visualization. So, we actually do have access to P3s. We haven't integrated that into our system yet. But we do have the transcripts right now.
Bill:: Quarter, I've been using them to listen to stuff and I think that it's a nice offering to be able to let-- I think, it could be a nice addition to the platform. Because then it's like, "Oh, I just go to Koyfin for everything all the time." If I need to listen to something, it's just like an additional hook.
Rob: I've seen a lot of buzz around Quarter. I haven't used the product, but it seems like they've done a good job and made everything accessible and you could fast forward and find stuff.
Rob: It's a lot better Borsa tried to do what Quarter basically-- Borsa started it and then Quarter took over whatever the hell they started and destroyed them.
Rob: So, that's interesting. So I heard of Borsa-- Can you just elaborate on what makes Quarter better than Borsa?
Bill:: One, I think, something and I'm just going to assume that we're going to keep some of this. So, I apologize to the people that started Borsa because I was a big fan when they started it.
Rob: Yeah.
Bill:: I think that one of the things is what makes Koyfin great, the interface, when you sign on to the app is fantastic. It's just like a little bit slicker and it works as I want it to work. They have the access to any company that I'm looking for I have immediately. I don't know, man, I just think there's just something a little bit better about Quarter in almost all the different-- Like whatever I'm going there for, it's just like a little bit better than what I left at Borsa and I feel bad for saying that, but it's also true.
Rob: So, it's like the meat and the actual the bulk of the core of the offering is not all that different but it's little thing that's it's the access, it's the ability find stuff that's different and improved.
Bill:: Yeah, I think so. They've got like events, unless I'm completely mistaken. But I'm almost certain that they have events and I've been waiting for events to get on Borsa. Basically, what it became is there was just a small little friction point that came up on Borsa. I was like, "I'll just go to Quarter." Then, I started to use it and I was like, "Oh, this is legit." It's interesting and I think, it is somewhat applicable to what you're doing too, what I see you building is where the world is going. You just need a little friction from other people's platforms to get people onto yours and you're going to keep them.
Rob: Yeah, absolutely. I think, with us, we have one user persona for us or maybe former institutional investors, or maybe financial advisors that today have maybe a shared resource to something like Bloomberg. Koyfin allows them to customize the system on their own desktop, have their own personal account, obviously. And then, the second type of persona are the individuals who've never had a Bloomberg before, haven't had kind of this functionality, that leap or that additional opportunity and functionality is really an improvement of what they had before. So, it interesting serving both of those user groups.
Bill:: How did you get started, man? I remember that maybe it was 2018 or 2019, everybody on FinTwit started to tweet about Koyfin, you got to start using Koyfin. Were you giving candy bars to people to try it or what was going on?
Rob: Yeah. Basically, recruiting all the people in India to tweet about us. Now, I think, at a certain point, we hit critical mass in terms of functionality, and then, we had really some early FinTwit ambassadors that really loved our platform. So, Liberty started using our platform pretty early on and has been just an incredible supporter of our platform.
Bill:: Minion.
Rob: Minion, but also just doing a lot of stuff in the background that most people don't know about. So, it's just a really great supporter and friend of Koyfin, and getting feedback, and serving as a copywriter, and offering advice, and making introductions. He's great. Then, Shomik, who is a FinTwit personality, Shomik, on Twitter, and he invested in Koyfin. He's brought so much value to us. I feel bad that he gave us money because we should be paying them.
Bill:: [laughs] Well, I have a feeling if you do your job, you'll end up paying him just fine, but yes.
Rob: Yes, I hope so. He's just always hustling and one of the most pleasant people to talk to.
Bill:: Isn't he so nice?
Rob: He's so nice and is genuine. He's just constantly nice and he's great, he's great. Was it Elliott or Shomik that introduced us?
Bill:: I think, it might have been Elliot that was the catalyst between us finally doing the sponsorship. But Shomik had introduced us before too. It might have been both.
Rob: I may have used all my connections to try and break him through to you. [laughs]
Bill:: Well, I appreciate that, man. I think it was super. You know what? I'll tell you what, real talk. And I said this in the read. It made me really proud that your brand wanted to associate with my brand because to me, I really appreciate what you're trying to accomplish, and I respect how well you are accomplishing it. And I'm trying to accomplish something and to hear that somebody else that I respected, respected me like it meant a lot. So, thank you for that.
Rob: No, that's awesome.
Bill:: I couldn't have thought of a better first sponsor.
Rob: Yeah, that's great. The more I listen to what you're doing, and the way you do it, and the feel, the types of guests that you've had, and your audience is like, "This is who we want, and this is who we want to be associated with it." I'm really glad that it happened and thanks for having us sponsor this season.
Bill:: Yeah, man. I think, what we have in common is, there's a way that finance has been done and I think that now it's our time to do it our way. It's fun to iterate on what has come before and then have people accept and enjoy what's coming next. I don't know how long I'll do this, but I have a feeling that Koyfin is going to be around for a long time.
Rob: If I could be long your branding and your podcast, I will definitely be long.
Bill:: Oh, I appreciate it. I don't know how long I want to be it, man. There's a lot of editing and stuff like I can't imagine going through the building pain of what you must have gone through with Koyfin to get it to that critical mass. How much more work was it than you thought it would be?
Rob: Like a thousand times more than I thought. It's a lot of work and it's a lot of-- Man, just building a product in software, it's really hard. When I was also starting to sell as always, I try to speak to some VC investors in the beginning and they're like, "Who's doing this stuff?" I'm like, "It's me. I'm doing this." They're like, "No way. We need a team." I'm like, "Are you kidding me? I'm really smart and I could--" Now, I like, there's just so much to do that if you don't have an A+ team overcoming the odds, you're never going to do it. The engineering side, the sales side, the operational side, the customer service side, the product side, man, it's all hard but it's fun. It's nice to be in a spot where we're at on the trajectory that we're at.
Bill:: Yeah, I'm at the point now where I need a team around me because it's like, man, to do the edits, and to do the research, I'm like, "I don't do anything else." Then, it's like, "I'm doing booking and it's just gotten--" It was one thing when it was a fun hobby. But to go to the next stage, I've realized like, "You just can't do it alone. There's no way."
Rob: Yeah.
Bill:: I'm sure it's a lot harder for you than it is for me. I have audio show that I pop on.
Rob: No, you have to think about acquisition, and you have to think about marketing, and you have to think about the oppositional stuff, and the headings. I'm sure it's enough work for several people. So, I don't know how you do it by yourself.
Bill:: How are you thinking about the next leg of growth for you?
Rob: We just started monetizing. We were a free platform until June. We introduced our paid plans and that's been converting nicely. So, we are growing at about 15% a month over the past several months. Then, we're looking to do our Series A pretty soon. So, we've been starting to talk to investors about that. We're in a really interesting space, there's a lot of things that are changing, a lot of things that are being disrupted. I think this whole concept of there being a professional product and a retail product, I think, that's a really interesting thing to try and disrupt in terms of having a product that's more prosumer having a product that hedge fund managers are using as well as individuals, even though, we do have more individuals using it than pros and it's kind of cool. So, our next phase of growth is to basically expand the team, build the product faster, and to think about kind of like acquiring, and distributing in a little bit more scalable way.
Bill:: Yeah. it's clear to me from who I talk to, their pros are using it. So, the issue for you is going to just be, how do I get more people on the platform and then how do you figure out what to charge? How was it moving from a free product to the charge product because sometimes moving upstream like that is slightly difficult. You want to put something more exciting on the screen than Qurate? I think, people are probably a little tired of that.
Rob: I'll go to the homepage where we have.
Bill:: You do whatever you want. Just you got [crosstalk] old Qurate transcripts.
Rob: [crosstalk] transcripts. Yeah.
Bill:: [laughs]
Rob: Since 2014, just trying to demonstrate the breadth of our data. Charging was really an interesting experience. I'm always just self-conscious about our product, and just like, we need more, we need more, we need more before we start charging. The advice I've always gotten from other founders like start charging early, just see what people pay for, and I'm like, "No, no, no. We need more product, more product, more product." Once we started charging, we just learned a ton about what users will pay for, what they're using, what they're not using. We had so many people using our product that just were never going to pay us, and it's because they're just students or individuals who are just $35 a month. That's a lot of money when I'm paying $10 for Netflix. That's probably been the biggest source of pushback since we introduced our [crosstalk]
Bill:: Can I just say something real quick? If people are comping the amount of spend that they're spending on a financial product to what they're spending on fucking entertainment, their minds are wrong. This is what I got and I'm not saying that I'm worth this super follow thing on Twitter. I'm not saying that. But I set my price at $9.99 and people were like, "Dude, that's Netflix."
Rob: [laughs]
Bill:: I was like, "First of all, if you don't value what I'm putting out as much as Netflix, that's fine. But you don't need to pay me." I think, I'm bringing some decent value to-- If you get one thought for the $35 a month off Koyfin, that could save you so much money in a trade. You can't comp it to watching squid game or whatever. It's insane.
Rob: Yeah. So, that's exactly how I thought about it with our pricing. I was like, "Look, we find you one trade, we save you one mistake a year, and that pays for itself."
Bill:: Yeah. 10 times over.
Rob: So, here's the pushback and the other the flip side of the argument, which is interesting. So, one is, you have a lot of individuals who are starting out, who are just managing $500, $1000, $2000, $3000. So, paying $400 versus $100 is actually a big percentage of their portfolio.
Bill:: I am sympathetic to that argument.
Rob: That's kind of interesting. I was just like, look like the average person has $50,000 or $100,000, but there's just a big distribution. Particularly, over the past year, when so many new investors have gotten into investing, that's a big difference. So, you can sort of see that. The second thing, which is really interesting is individuals don't value analytics as much as they do recommendations. One of the things that is interesting that we hear from individuals like, "Look, I pay $400 for this service or that service to tell me what to buy." But to pay for a service that provides analytics, I'm not sure if that's valuable to be.
That thought after like really think about it, but it's just so different than what I'm used to and what you're used to in terms of what you use a system like this for, and that's how beginners think about. It's like, "Hey, I'm paying $400 or $500 for someone to tell me what to buy," and they're providing value by actually giving me trade recommendations versus giving me data and analytics that I'm not sure. it's cool and I'm finding things. But they haven't associated that value it, even though, they think there's something there.
Bill:: That's crazy to me. I'm not saying that it's wrong and I kind of get it. But that is so insane to me because fundamentally, if you're actually buying something, you're saying, I can out think the market or something, I think, that's what you have to logically say to yourself. So, to then rely on someone else's trading system, but not want the data to analyze the decisions yourself is insane to me. That makes no sense. Just go index, stop paying anything, and go do something else with your life.
Rob: That's what a Motley Fool has half a Billion dollars of revenue a year.
Bill:: You know, I just interviewed him.
Rob: Oh, yeah?
Bill:: Yeah. Which I was super happy to be able to do. Really, really interesting guy. I interviewed David, not Tom. But yeah, man. They got a good thing going. I said to him, I said, "You know that my hesitation coming to the Motley Fool was the marketing." I saw we bought Amazon at $1 and I was like, "Oh, yeah, right." Some of it's a function of the strategy he runs. But the pushback that he had or not pushback, but the explanation that he had to me, which I found compelling is he was like, the problem is, I actually did that and I actually held Amazon. But there's a lot of people on the internet that say that they bought it, but they sold it at like a buck 50. It's hard to convey that point in internet advertising. So, it's just a nature of the beast. But I thought that was an interesting comment that he had.
Rob: The CFA might have issues with that, how that performance was measured?
Bill:: Well, yeah, that's a fair comment. Yes.
Rob: I started trading and investing in the 90s when I was in high school. I remember the Motley Fool like, started to publish, and I was reading them, and I remember it, the first stock ever read on their platform was Bell FB is like a Canadian supplier that they were writing about the valuation. Still remember it 30 years later.
Bill:: All right. So, do we need to get to like a Seeking Alpha type recommendation engine and then we'll charge $80 a month, and I'll be part of your Series A? [laughs]
Rob: That's exactly right. Look, at the end of the day, you got to solve a problem for people, and it's a really interesting point. The way I interpreted is, I think, we have to provide more conclusions to people rather than information on data. So, what I'm thinking through is like, "How do we get to that end point in terms of just telling people what's expensive, what's cheap, what's outperforming instead of giving them the tools to do that?" I think, having both is important. So, what we're going to do is really percentile rank, a bunch of different variables like valuation, and growth, and momentum, and short interest, and really allow people to get a quick view of what not a recommendation per se, but just really the conclusion of stuff and really direct waves. I think that's going to be pretty interesting for audience.
Bill:: I have no idea if you get this pushback from people generally. But the other thing that I have always associated you with visualization. When I asked the transcript question, I go to some other source for the transcript. So, tying, I don't know somehow like getting rewiring my habits to Koyfin, because it's so distributed right now, right? It's an interesting problem to have to tackle.
Rob: Yeah. And we have so much functionality in that our platform and constantly see from users that they just don't know what's on there.
Bill:: Yeah.
Rob: The way Bloomberg solves this is they put a rep on every customer's office. There's a Bloomberg rep on the Citigroup trading desk that was walking around every single day on that trading desk helping people discover stuff with us whenever I speak with users. Even users that are like power users that have been with us for four years, and I show them something like, "Wow, how was I supposed to know that's there?" I'm just like, "Ah, that's pretty challenging and we need to do a better job of just educating people in terms of what's there and how to use stuff."
Bill:: Have you ever toyed it all with the idea of having some sort of community feature where it becomes message board-y or not really?
Rob: We do have something like that in the feedback form. So, if I click on feedback, we have general questions and stuff like that and feature suggestions. So, people comment on this and will reply. So, there is that sense. What we want to do or figure out a way is, for like a news article that comes out our transcript just having a thread where people can comment.
Bill:: Yeah, that would be cool, and then you could have different people discussing takeaways in a longer form but it was tied there whatever. That would be pretty cool.
Rob: Yeah, that's something we'll definitely play around with.
Bill:: Shomik was talking to me about doing this at the pod. How do you create a community around the podcast, or the platform, or whatever you're trying to do? I'm still not sure exactly what the answer is to that for my particular situation.
Rob: Yeah, big picture. It sounds like a great idea. Just kind of hard to [crosstalk]
Bill:: [laughs] Yeah, that's right. It's like, "Cool, man." If you could make sure that you tell me exactly how to execute it, get it done, and then have people come on, that would be awesome.
Rob: Yeah, it's pretty easy, but just create a social network around your audience.
Bill:: That's right. That's exactly right.
Rob: How hard can it be?
Bill:: Yeah. So, I don't know, man. It's fun to build this stuff though. I have never created anything before this and I haven't created anything near what you have. I think it would be very rewarding to have a ton of users and get feedback that your visualization in your head came to fruition. The closest thing that I have found myself as somebody said, "I view your show as like, if I was at a bar, I get to eavesdrop on a conversation of people that I think are pretty interesting." I was like, "That's why I'm holding the Scotch glass in the album art." That's the whole purpose of what it was supposed to be. So, it's like, "Yes, somebody gets me."
Rob: But even like, your show is just having thousands and thousands of-- If you're physically talking to 10,000 people, imagine in a stadium and you are just like, "Hey, let's have a conversation with 10,000 people." Then, you're doing that every single weekend, just broadcasts, and I'm sure you have the viewers and listeners in every single country. I know people have reached out to Koyfin because of your show from a lot of different countries. So, I know, you have a pretty international-- [crosstalk]
Bill:: Well, good. I'm glad that I could help get the word out, man. You know, it really did mean a lot to me. So, I'm glad that it worked out. Do you want to talk about anything else? I'm here for you, man. So, you tell me?
Rob: No, I think, we covered everything. I'm going to provide a discount link in the show notes and wherever you think it's appropriate to put so. Giving anyone who's listening 20% off of Koyfin for any plan. So, we don't really discount, but I think, it's pretty important to do it for you. So, if anyone has not signed up yet, feel free to use that discount code and get 20% off.
Bill:: That's awesome. Well, thank you very much and I will promote that in the pre-show read, and we'll drop it in the show notes, and I appreciate you coming on, man. It's been fun to get to know you and it's been a fun chat.
Rob: Cool. Thank you so much.
Bill:: How is the reception to our pod where people like, "What was this dude doing? He's talking about pod stocks and Qurate." [laughs]
Rob: It was great. It was great. Normal kind of like didn't hear anything. I think with us, we went on a bunch of different tangents.
Bill:: Yeah, we did. [laughs]
Rob: I think, some of the other guests were like very kind of housekeeping and talking about their trade ideas where we just started like going off.
Bill:: Yeah, I had a good time, man. I look forward to seeing you. You're a little bit south of me, right still? You're like there permanently, right?
Rob: Miami Beach, absolutely.
Bill:: Yeah, I'm going to come down in not too long. So, hopefully, we can either get some cocktails, or some coffee, or whatever. But I'd love to meet you in person.
Rob: I'd love that.
Bill:: All right, man. Thank you very much and have a great day.
Rob: Thanks, buddy. You, too.
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