Income Generation By Day-Trading S&P-500 Index Futures (ES) – Fari Hamzei

 

Ever wondered what it takes to achieve success in day-trading? Join us as we sit down with Fari Hamzei, founder of HamzeiAnalytics.com and a seasoned market veteran, who shares invaluable insights on navigating the thrilling world of high-frequency trading. Drawing from a lifetime of market experiences, Fari emphasizes the importance of risk management, patience, and continuous learning. He delves into the complexities of options trading and the significance of staying informed about current events. Fari also provides valuable guidance for aspiring day traders, highlighting the challenges and rewards of navigating this dynamic and competitive field.

Get in touch with Fari Hamzei:

LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/farihamzei

Website – https://www.hamzeianalytics.com

If you are interested in learning more about passively investing in multifamily and build-to-rent properties, click here to schedule a call with the CPI Capital Team or contact us at info@cpicapital.ca. If you like to co-syndicate and close on larger deals as a general partner, click here. You can read more about CPI Capital at https://www.cpicapital.ca.

#avabenesocky #augustbiniaz #cpicapital

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Important Links

• Fari Hamzei on LinkedIn
• Fari Hamzei’s Website
• Fari Hamzei on Instagram
• Fari Hamzei on Facebook
• Hamzei Analytics on Twitter
• Master Traders: Strategies for Superior Returns from Today’s Top Traders
• Proactive Market Timing

 

About Fari Hamzei

Fari Hamzei is frequently quoted by @Benzinga, @StocksNJocks, @CNBC, @Bloomberg, Fox Business and RealMoney. His book, Master Traders: Strategies for Superior Returns from Today’s Top Traders, was published by John Wiley & Sons in October 2006. Per Timer Digest Issue #704, dated January 20, 2021, Fari was ranked #1 for last 3, 5, 8 & 10 YEARS, effectively named Stock Market Timer of the Decade, in this great Nation among over 120 market timers.

Fari is a graduate of Princeton University with a BSE degree in financial engineering and studied equity & debt derivatives under financial pioneers Jack Shelton, Ed Thorp, Richard Roll and Bob Geske at the UCLA Anderson Graduate School of Management. He was a director of strategic planning at Northrop Grumman Corporation’s Aircraft Group. Fari is the founder of www.HamzeiAnalytics.com

 

Income Generation By Day-Trading S&P-500 Index Futures (ES) – Fari Hamzei

Everyone, thank you for joining us. I have a different co-host. My regular co-host Ava Benesocky has been replaced by my good friend Slav and a good friend of the CPI casual team as well. We have a special guest on and we’re going to be talking about somewhat of a complex world of trading and options and futures.

I thought maybe it’s best to bring my good friend who is somewhat versed in this space as well to discuss it and have an interview with. We have my good friend Fari, who I met in Naples, Florida. We spent a lot of time together and enjoyed the stories that he shared about his time in Iran, moving to the US, building military planes, and the trading world. I’m excited to have him on the show. We have Slav. He’s going to be co-hosting.

It’s a pleasure to be here.

Thanks for taking the time.

I met you guys at the same time.

That’s right. Why don’t you tell our audience a bit about our guest, Slav, and we go from there?

We’re joined by Fari Hamzei. Fari Hamzei is frequently quoted by Benzinga, StocksNJocks, CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox Business, and RealMoney. He’s published a book, Master Traders: Strategies for Superior Returns from Today’s Top Traders that was published by John Wiley & Sons in October 2006. He’s well known for Timer Digest Issue #704, dated January 20, 2021. Fari was ranked number 1 for the last 3, 5, 8, and 10 years, effectively named the Stock Market Timer of the Decade.

Fari is a graduate of Princeton University with a Bachelor’s degree in Financial Engineering and studied equity & debt derivatives under financial pioneers Jack Shelton, Ed Thorp, Richard Roll, and Bob Geske at the UCLA Anderson Graduate School of Management. He was a director of strategic planning at Northrop Grumman Corporation’s Aircraft Group. Fari is the founder of Hamzei Analytics.

Welcome to the show, Fari.

 

 

Thank you for having me.

The Journey From Iran To The US

In our conversations, I enjoyed the stories that you brought up, particularly about your father and yourself moving to the US and being involved in building some of the stealth airplanes, there is a level of confidentiality and non-disclosure that you have for obvious reasons. Talk to us a little bit about your background from Iran, making a move to the US, and what your dad did. You came here well before the 1979 Revolution. Most of the Iranian diaspora in the US came right around the revolution time, but you were in ‘74, so it’s well before that. The plan was to come to the West prior to that. Talk to me about that.

I have to start quickly and briefly about my dad. He came from a very interesting father. My grandpa had nine wives. He was in real estate. I would ask him, “Grandpa, what did you do this for?” He was doing a brokerage, but going from city to city, sometimes he would find a good property and he would buy it himself. He said, “I would buy the property, put a woman there. This way, when I come to visit, I have to go to town.” There were different cities in Iran.

He had a wife and he was back in Iran. He was born in the late 1920s anyhow. However, she could manage to raise him and he knew that was not going to work as he was growing up. He said, “I got to pull myself up on bootstraps and join the Air Force High School.” He would feed into the Air Force Academy. It was the capital of the soccer team. He goes to the Air Force Academy and things are getting worse in Iran. He needs to do his best. Three years later, he graduated from the Victoria Air Force Academy.

Shock gives him a compass set. I have it in my dining room. I keep it separate in the cabinet. He gave it to me the day I got my acceptance to Princeton. He said, “I want you to put it on your desk. I want you to remember that. It’s always on my desk as a reminder of the shoes, I can never fit. Why? After that, he was part of the 1st Fighter Wing, became the pilot of the Shah, became the first pilot of the crowned prince Cyrus Reza, and then my mom had me but not born yet.

She talked with him and said, “You have to get out of this fighter pilot business. Why don’t you get into multi-engine and multi-pilot? I’m not going to raise this kid on my own.” That’s probably why I’m here. Most of his buddies in the 1st Fighter Wing had passed away. They were old and they were grunts. They’ve used some of the F-80 force that had been opened up several times.

Iran didn’t have any money, it was a $3 oil price by the NIOC, National Iranian Oil Company. Before that, Angola Iranian Oil Company. They were the British, now it’s called BP. Because those giant companies were so corrupt, Iran didn’t have a right to even audit the books in the contract. Whatever they thought we deserved to get, they’ll write a check and miscued 25% of the profit, but they will compute how the profits are.

There’s a great book on that. I believe all of Shah’s man goes into the details about what the British did and when the Americans came and took over from the British.

You can read The Seven Sisters. There’s a whole section on that. The problem was nobody had any control over it. That led to the ‘53 coup d’etat against Mossadegh because they were nationalized as a whore. Two guys from the 1st Fighter Wing stood with the Shah. One of them was my dad. The other one was executed. By the time I was born, my father was flying cargo and C-130s. I flew a lot quite with him as much as I could. My first picture with him in the airplane, I was nine months old.

I was seated in the second seat, a co-pilot of a C-47 Dakota. The commercial was called DC-3, built in Santa Monica, Douglas Aircraft Company, He comes down, he comes up, and they send him to SOS here, Squadron Officer School, which means potentially he’s a high-ranking officer. He was going to go to the Maxwell Air Force Base. He was there for six months.

He came back and he became a squadron commander for the C-130s and then became head of the Mach operations. He had something like 200 C-130s on his command. On one of the flights, Shah tells him, “I know your son,” my brother. He had an eye injury. The Shah send him to Children’s Hospital in London and Hollis Hospital in Jerusalem. They could not fix it.

One day, on one of his flights, the Shah says, “ think it’s right for you to go to Washington.” My dad says, “Sir, I’m a pilot. You’re spending so much money on me.” “That’s a desk job because I have other plans. Please do this and this gives you a chance to be 3 to 4 years there. Take your son to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. They have full insurance because of their government as a military diplomat. Maybe there’ll be an opening.” That never happened, but a day later, he called me in.

How old are you at this time?

I’m twelve and a half. He called me in and knocked on the door, “Colonel wants to see you.” I knew there was something wrong. He usually doesn’t do that. We were not allowed to sit down without his permission. I come in and he’s got recordings of his studies of airplanes and books and all that. I was standing at the door. He goes, “Please come on in. Bring us some tea.” I’m thinking, “What is he thinking?” He goes, “Look at this.” He gives me a piece of paper and there’s his name circled.

He said, “His Majesty gave this to me. We’re going to Washington. What do you want to do?” I said, “I’ll do what you tell me.” He goes, “We’re going. Do you want to continue next year for ninth grade?” I said, “No, if you allow me, please, I want to go to Tehran American Society. I’ll work on my verbal communication.” We had one hour of library study per week. We had to go show up.

I said, “Let me go through that. I want to work on this because I can read and write very well but I want to be able to communicate with American idioms and slang rather than British.” Those were taught by the wives of the diplomats at the US Embassy. It was a good program. One day comes in. His rank went up and he said, “Our flight is ready and we’re going to go.” The next thing, I’m here.

The Yom Kippur War: An Oil Embargo Story

Talk to us about a very interesting story about your dad’s assistance in the Yom Kippur War that Israel had where the Arab nations all put an embargo on oil and they had difficulty with energy.

If you think about it, what he did created OPEC because the oil went from $3 to $12. I’ll get to that in a minute. We came in and we landed at the Dallas International. There were a couple of beautiful officers. One was a colonel and one was a one-star general waiting for us at the diplomatic terminal. Very different than the normal airport. Just one side, a very posh part.

We come in and then we get sent to the school. I’m in the middle of 10th grade, It’s the first day of February ‘72. I went and signed up for math and physics and they were going forward. He got busy, we would hardly see him. He reported to the son-in-law of the shop, a big and very glamorous outgoing person. His best buddy was Kissinger.

My dad got to know Dr. Kissinger at the embassies. It was very lavish, everything, champagne, caviar, you name it, was coming out of Iran. We got to see a lot of other Air Force attache from other countries. One of his best friends was a Russian one. Shah had said, “We fell into the Eastern block. Don’t piss him off. We have a thousand miles with him of our border.” The other one was the Israeli Air Force attache. He liked my mom’s kebabs. I would say, “Mom, Dad, what’s going on with this guy?” He goes, “Nothing. He likes your mom’s kebabs. Don’t ask too many questions.”

That was the cover. They were doing some deals about F14 over 50, and some of the black boxes will be up there at Haifa, which is a university area campus. Most of the brains of the electronics industry and non-nuclear of Israel are up there by Haifa. Let’s pull back a little bit. In the ‘67 war, Dad goes MIA. He came back with a beard bigger than yours but not as good-looking as you. He was dirty. He smelled. My dad in his heyday looked like a model. Now I didn’t recognize this guy. He smelled.

I said “Dad, what was going on?” He goes, “Quiet. I want to get a shower, bring me some tea, and we’ll discuss it later.” That never happens. What was he doing? He was going from Iran to Turkey, going to Cyprus. At 2:00 in the morning, they would take off from Cyprus, fully fueled, with no lights, no communication, and a Mossad navigator, 50 feet away from war.

Everybody’s calling him, Cairo is calling him, Damascus is calling him, identify yourself, nothing. They were coming at 2:00 in the morning. Because he was a commander of the Mach operations, they were coming to DC 130s. At 50 feet, they’d take off and land. He was the first landing. On the first landing, who did he meet? General Rabin, who later on became Prime Minister and was executed or assassinated, I should say.

Fast forward. Now, healthcare is non-lethal. Popcarts, medicine, water, doctors, nurses. We moved in ‘73. We’re doing a competition for F-15 versus F-18. They should have them pay for it. It’s still $3. They are now bringing the Air Force attache from Israel. He calls my dad and says, “I have to show you something. I can’t read it all.” My dad goes there. There’s a telegraph from the job lobby that says, “Hamzei, I need oil, quick.” He said, “Let’s go to the White House.”

They go see Kissinger and say, “Listen. We are committed after taking with Iran.” Not Iran, not the real government, but the Imperial Court, which ran everything. They said, “They’re 10 to 23 tankers today into Haifa.” Kissinger says, “That’s great.” We’re going to buy with F15 instead of F14.” “We can adjust the price. What are you thinking?” He goes, “Why don’t we start with $12.” Kissinger chuckles. That day, the oil price went to $12, which created the biggest inflation in history.

One of my professors exactly four years later in ‘77, an Oxford professor who moved to Princeton because of the Shah gave him some money. He told me, “Your king doesn’t want to see me anymore because he doesn’t like what I’m telling him. I’m telling him that this inflation is going to bring him down one day,” two years before the revolution. He passed away. It was a graduate course. I remember I went to Princeton at 16. I was a sophomore.

By the time I’m 20, I’m taking 500-level courses like your master’s program, not MBA. For my thesis, I wrote about that transaction because finally F-14 won over F-15 and flew off. The Shah was here and they decided on F-14. Why? Several years before during the command post, there was a Foxbat that flew away from Iraq. Half of them turn back, taking pictures. That happened to be in the early part of the command post when you come in and the Shah had come over because they were preparing for another event.

Of course, the Russians sent the Fox 5 to take a picture and come back at Mach 3. Nobody could get at 80,000 feet. No missile, no aircraft, nothing. Shah went berserk like, “It’s got to stop.” Why my dad constituted the F-14 because of the Phoenix missile. That was the only missile that could knock out the Foxbat.

Move forward to the Iran-Iraq war. I was involved with a number of guys who flew there. They were a little bit younger than my dad. They are senior guys. The ones who managed it were at his level except he was here. We had to get him out. That’s a different story. Long story short, they told me that had the F-14 was not bought by Iran, my Dad managed all of that because he was the head of the spear in Washington on this aircraft, Saddam would have been in Tehran.

That’s a close connection I have with the story. I remember being in first grade and this is when Iran is at war with Iraq. Saddam is attacking. He decides to start attacking Tehran. His jets and missiles are coming to Tehran. I remember our first great teacher, Ms. Khorasan, I still remember her name. She told all of us to be calm in class and if the sirens go off, be calm.

We’ll all gather and we’ll go to the bomb shelter halfway through the school, the sirens go off, and her face goes white. We’re all standing up, cheering, having fun, not realizing what’s happening because we’re happy we’re getting out of school. All of a sudden, fifteen hundred kids were running towards the bomb shelter, which is an underground parking lot of this circular underground parking lot of a high-rise building. That’s what’s the makeshift.

It wasn’t built as a bomb shelter.

No, it wasn’t built as a bomb shelter but that story, realizing the sacrifices, obviously a lot of Iranian young military men made, but also the weapons that they were using, particularly the jets, was a result of what your dad had done. Otherwise, Saddam would have been in Tehran easily and the Arab invaders would have been taken over.

That was part of what they had done. Other orders got canceled because Khomeini didn’t understand these things. They didn’t know what the AVAX was going to do, what the F-16s were going to do. They were going to buy another ADF-14s. F-14s were expensive, I understand that. They also offered them a $6 million bribe sitting in a Swiss bank account. Outside of Iran, this is $73. Do you think I would be on the phone talking to you guys if he had taken the $6 million or anybody? I wouldn’t even build an HA. I would take that money and deal with it. If you turn it at 4% more than Stanley or Goldman, don’t you have $6 million worth today?

Just inflation alone.

They will turn it. Those guys turn it faster. You can adjust that. You can adjust on what risk I want.

 

 

The $6 million today, if you look at it as for today’s dollars, that probably equals $60 million today.

If you turn it, you can’t eat that income. He said, “I’m a uniformed man. I have sworn to protect the land, the air, and the water of this country. I’m telling you I’m not going to do anything with that.” People above him took the money, and people at the same level as him took the money. He had nothing to do with it. He came out of the room.

A man of principle, a proud, a patriotic, and a man of principle he was.

He had a break but we came to his family, and all of a sudden, he was not there. He says, “I had a break.” That’s good enough. I believe we were here and all that. No need to get into corrupt activities but I told him that a year before, if the ocean is coming, be careful, it’s not ‘53 anymore. It doesn’t matter if you stood with the Shah back then, you and only one other guy stood with the Shah. The other one was killed in the coup d’etat. He goes, “No, nothing is going to happen.” A year later, he arrives here at the airport.

He says, “I was wrong. My apologies.” I never heard my dad apologize to anybody. Much less to me but at least he understood this was different. The first day, the general, the executive was his boss of the company at Acro Chips. You probably know they used to fly over Tehran. They were like Blue Angels and so forth. I wore a Thunderbird. Long story short, by the time this transaction was being put together, I was looking for something to write in the Middle East. You have to write a thesis and you start your junior year.

I’ll look at things that go by and assign a new advisor. He kept on saying, “Fari, the scope is too big.” I was going to do overall FMS or Foreign Military Sales of all the Middle East. What does this all mean? Do we need this for war or this is to do what Eisenhower was saying on the last day of his presidency saying, “Watch out for industrial zone complexes because they’re like mushrooms. They suck from you and take everything and all that.” As I was writing this, they said, “Narrow, Fari.” They assigned another professor to me, Professor David, who I didn’t know worked for DARPA also.

A person who does a lot of research, eats a lot of grass, and has worked with DARPA, the first advanced research project in this, who did the internet, who did the GPS, they all started on DARPA. Unknown to me, he’s advised me because the airplane has an aerospace professor. I had also Bill Menand, bless his soul. He was the overall thesis advisor. Professor David looked at one of my chapters up to the second compressive section of the TF-30 engine made by Pratt & Whitney in Connecticut. He reports that to his people at Northrop.

He says, “Do you see this kid? On open source, look what he’s written.” There was a debate about whether should it be classified or not. He said no, “Let it be, it’s open source anyway.” A copy of that went to Northrop, a copy went to Lockheed, and a copy went to Boeing. I get a call from the CTO of Northrop, Dr. Don Hicks, a graduate of Berkeley, an undergrad master’s, PhD who worked at the Lawrence Livermore Labs. What’s his specialty? Nuclear physics. What were they doing? They were building B82 and B84 thermonuclear weapons.

He comes to Northrop and becomes a CTO and then he becomes part of the defense science program. What do they do? There are twelve people. They program the football, the one with the president. They do the targeting. If you launch an SLBM from a submarine, you have eight minutes. You cannot do targeting. It’s all pre-programmed. He’s one of the twelve people who would decide on those. He’s 90, 95, or 96 now. I remember talking to him a few months ago in LA. He’s retired, I suppose.

Anyhow, he called me and said, “I would like you to come for an interview.” I said, “When? After I finish my thesis survey.” He goes, “There’s an aircraft to pick up tomorrow. You can ride on that airplane, don’t worry.” They sent a plane to get me out of Princeton and put me to JFK 747 nonstop. I was writing. I was going to finish my thesis. He told me, “You got to finish the thesis. You got to get your paperwork. We can’t take you in without those.” That was in March. The moment I graduated, I got a call from his office saying, “When can you report?”

I said, “Sir, don’t we get summer off? I would go through this thesis. It took sixteen months. Can I get a few months off?” He said, “No, you have two weeks. This office only gives two weeks.” “Why? “ “We cannot discuss that. You got to come in here.” I was there one day before the two weeks. I flew there. They gave me temporary housing in a very nice hotel near their work. The first problem was F-18. The problem was vertical stabilizers. What is it made of? Carbon fiber.

See that connection now? F-18 was going to replace F-14. This has carbon fiber over titanium. They couldn’t drill. My background is I work up approximations. I wrote a program, all combination, not AI. I can’t call it AI, but the early part of looking at doing an event, observing the results, changing it, seeing the results, feeding it to a bigger machine, and saying, “Give me the damn solution.” The solution came about two months later. It took a while. I had access to all the levels and all that, took the data and all that, and then one day, out of the blue, my boss said, “There’s a staff meeting downstairs. Change your shirt.”

I said, “What’s the occasion?” He goes, “The head of the F-18 program, a three-star Navy admiral, direct report to Reagan. He wants to see what you’ve been telling us.” I said, “I don’t have a presentation. I’m not ready for this guy. Why are you doing this to me?” He goes, “Fari, we’re in a war zone here. We can’t move the airplanes. There are 24 of them sitting behind each other in the assembly line.” It was the longest assembly line in the history of the US in the US complex. It’s where the P-51 Mustang was built. Without that, we couldn’t have hit Dresden. If we didn’t hit Dresden during World War II, from Great Britain, you could have Hitler here.

Dresden was all bearings and oil and all that. All the main items used for military operations were in Dresden. If we got pictures after Dresden, they were flat. It’s because these P-51 Mustangs were their escorts. That bill we bought many years later. It is 1 mile long. I walked in there and he said, “We’re paying $100,000 a day.” You are a smart real estate guy. What was the interest rate in 1980?

Nineteen percent. Buns and gutter recession.

You have to realize, we pay $100,000 a day, and then we are over budget. You have about 195,000 hours behind. They report your hours because you have a different scale. It’s not dollars. Plus 100,000 per tail. If we did nothing, each day we’d lose $2.4 million at 80%. They said, “You’ve been saying this and we were in this luck fight because you’re saying you have solutions. Make your stuff.” I changed and put the new shirt on, and this guy came. He’s a head of the F-18 program, a three-star admiral. He had a bunch of other admirals with him, junior level as his butlers. I figured they had a special box for communication sitting their way. Most likely it was encrypted and hacked in.

He says, “You’re the rich kid, where do you go to school?” I said, “Somewhere in New Jersey.” He laughed. He said, “I’ve read all your stuff. I know who your dad is, all of that. I’m going to make a deal with you. How many days do you need to test this capsule of yours?” I said, “Sir, I knew it was going to work out. I wasn’t sure. Three days.” He turned around and said, “I’ll give you five days.” If you F this up, I’m going to have you and your family shipped back to Iran.” I knew he could do that. He’s taking a phone call to Reagan. My heart is doing this. I got my green card. I’m applying for citizenship. My dad is in an asylum. He has a death warrant in Iran. He worked for Zahedi, part of the Shah, the first part of the conference, and knew Kissinger.

He helped out the Israelis too.

One point about the Israelis that comes off. They made a deal late at night when all the kids were asleep. He told us, “Get out of here. I got to talk to him.” They made a lobby in Washington because the Israelis do not have the Navy-grade black boxes in F-14. This general says, “We will update it for you. Just bring them to Israel.” That flew next round. They went to Sinai, went to Haifa and they would be called. They would be painted. What does painting mean? There was a missile that was rocking on you. They were painted by Syrians because it was going too high.

Transition From Corporate Job To Trading

We can do a completely separate show on this whole thing. Let’s transition. To say you’re a brainiac with the stories you’ve shared is an understatement. Talk to us about the transition from your W-2 job as it’s known as a director working at Northrop. From there into this world of trading, you use your brain power. What was your start in the world of trading?

I was almost there. Once I got the F-18 fixed, I was a target. I had a target on my back because a thousand people got fired. They were reporting wrong things. I solved the problem by digitizing the assembly. I left. I got a call and they said, “Come for an interview. Bring your documentation and you have to meet some lawyers.” I have to sign a nondisclosure. That’s a lifetime. The guy I met was the original chief designer of the B-2 bomber. He wouldn’t tell me what I was going to do or why.

He said, “You’re starting today.” We went there. The first thing I said was I would love to go to Stanford. They said, “We’ll pay. Not at Stanford. We can’t pay for Harvard. Too far. We need you here. There’s a reason you’re here. You have to be executive program, you have to go at night.” The closest school there was UCLA. UCLA, what did they do? I didn’t know that unless I signed up. Number two driven school. I went there and within a year, I said, “What the hell am I doing this for?”

I want to do what I learned at UCLA, options and futures. I was a student of Geski, the one who won the ‘87 crash, dynamic hedging. He has a payoff curve for mortgages. If you have a mortgage you’re paying off, he’s getting a little piece of that. That’s packed in a mortgage from Goldman. Wade is the guy who did the big sprax. I couldn’t say no.

These brains are gold mines. If you look at PBS, what they say about the Blackstone model, it’s a trillion-dollar formula. It changed our lives. These are the guys who finished Blackstone. It’s time to buy a box market. If you go to our website, you can buy, you can see which, that’s what Slab did. Long story short, I was dying to get out of B2. “What? I want to do this.”

I’ve been also recommended before. I was running a little options trading operation for my desk for a bunch of VPs. They found out that they couldn’t do anything because they couldn’t go against the VPs. By the Blackshore model program, the HP 67 with the printer. I would do pricing. Merlich, Antoine, but I got a client for this one you take. We sell the overs and we buy the others. I was in arbitrage. I was in derivative, but I was pro-grabbing it.

At that time, are you working and trading or not?

I’m working at Northrop and trading, but I can control people because of my normal writing. What I’ve done was this black box operation and material VPs. The one that would say, “I got to take advice.” I was crazy, like to Hawaii. They go, “How much do you need?” I was like, “Five grand.” They gave me five grand back then. What do they do for me? I do what I want. One of them used to order the dining to make breakfast. My immediate boss came to me and said, “What the hell are you doing? I can’t see him in this guy. It took me a week or two weeks to get a permit to see him. I got to go to the secretaries. He’s here in the morning at your office.”

I said, “You want to tell him something? Go. Do you want to fire me? Fire me. Are you going to answer him?” They will shut up. Where do I get the money to trade that? By that. We took a little, yeah, somebody saved here, we never took three, I brought some gold coins out. We liquidated those and went to buy them in 1980, March, remember Silver Crash? We bought the Dow at 729.

I wasn’t born yet, Fari.

The Dow was 729, and who helped me? Gil Caffrey, they got with the Tigers. Tiger, not Dan, they drop. The hell of it, which is a big short. It’s in my book. You’re reading about it, you’re getting your copy. It says, “Buy America.” He hangs up, and I call him back. There’s noise, all that. This is a huge market crash. Move down, big audience. Slap notes, that’s the signal, you got to buy this thing like last October, two weeks ago.

Monday, two weeks ago, when you get a move like that, you got to buy it. I know it stinks, you hold your nose, close your eyes, you buy. March 23rd of 2020, when COVID hit, things were rough, but we had to do it. You get a couple of days, you’re getting thrown off, it comes back up. Long story short, that’s the hard way I learned how to buy stocks. I bought equal dollars, of like eight names of Dow 30. You didn’t have an index back then, you didn’t have futures, you didn’t have anything back then.

Only a few stocks and options. The direct work was relatively quiet. You had more commodities than you had the stocks. Anyhow, six months later, my dad says, “My boy is so smart.” I said, “Dad, we are trying to go to school. I got the clue from my classmate and Lucas used to go on a floor at YC.” I said, “He’s a former YC.” “You mean he doesn’t see the crash?”

He was nice enough to take the call and he told me what to do. I didn’t know anything. He goes, “You better study better than that.” I was ordered from Dad. He couldn’t say no. I started running the library, books from the library and started reading. I said, “Learning by Blackshirt and programming, why?” My broker was trying to sell calls against my position. I was long in stock, selling the calls. If it goes up there, win-win.

They take the stock away, and at that price, and I already cut it. I’m going to get money from them for selling it, and if they go to my part, they won’t sell it. If it doesn’t go to exactly that, I can sell it next month. Next month, it becomes income. If it’s it, kills it, goes through it, punches through. I get a long-term capital gain. Winner winner, but I got intrigued by what this is, this Blackshore model, which in simple words, if you look at YouTube with the discussion about that, it’s a three-dollar form, that’s what PBS called it.

Understanding The Basics Of Trading And Investment

One more before you get into the details there, our audience is more real estate-focused, but we wanted to bring you on. Why don’t we break it down, like most people understand buying a stock, and selling a stock, they understand investing in index funds through mutual funds and ETFs. They heard about day trading. Some of them might even trade here or there. What has been the impetus in this space is like the ‘99 dot-com bubble where a lot of people came in. You also had recently with what happened with COVID and another one.

 

 

With the pandemic, the money swashing around, the lockdowns, and the ease of access to the market through free platforms like Robinhood. A lot of movements have come in, but those are your everyday retail type of traders. People understand the trading space on some level, but then it gets more complex from there. We’re talking about options, futures, and margin trading. Why don’t you break those three points for us, what they are, and the mechanics of it?

Several options. We all have it. You have a car, you need insurance. Insurance requires a good option. You have a property that a bank says you got to have insurance, fire insurance, that’s a put option. If something happens to that event job, the price of that property, it’s the put level that you insured for. You have no loss. This is what you’re going to lose but after that, the insurance company is going to pay you. The only exception of all the insurance companies go bankrupt at the same time, then there’s no way to pay you.

There’s a list of work, we’ve got a list of stocks, a list of futures and options. You deal with an exchange. Exchanges in the US are controlled by the Federal Reserve and they are AAA credit-rated and they are SRO, Self-Regulatory Organization. What that means is that they have to enforce certain rules. That means if the client is weak, they’ll go bankrupt. Don’t let them bankrupt the exchange. That’s a bigger problem. The buffer is the broker, so they enforce these rules. A very simple example of an option is the put option.

People are crazy about crypto. However, most of it is unlisted and unstructured. Share on X

We all have it. I have it, you have it, he has it because we drive a car, we have to. It’s dumb not to have it even if your car is paid for if you hit somebody who’s going to hurt for that. That’s an option. The other side is calls. Push for it, move down, call for up. For example, people are crazy about crypto. If you think about it, crypto is like a call option. The problem is, it’s not as listed, it’s not as structured. When you go to an earning, your earnings report comes up at the end of the year. A lot of my friends who are not that sophisticated, went and bought it altogether.

Expensive. Shares are big. You have volatility. The smart move is to buy what’s called at the money or but, or out of the money, one strike out of the money option. Now, what does it do? It reduces the money you put out, and you’re bidding the good over a certain price. Let’s say they gave you 3% down, 1.5, let’s say what you were. You’re still paying 1.5 for one share. If you buy one contract that controls 100 shares, 100 shares of the cash would be $12,400 at $124,400. If you do one contract, you may have four months off, let’s say November. Now maybe trading at, I don’t know, $10.

That’s only 10%. Now why is that high? It’s because it does take a lot of time. As a good example of that, and so we have to be careful, but you’re putting 10% of the money, 5% of the money, 8% of the money. Now if it goes above a certain level, you have a right, not the obligation, right to exercise. You get it, once it goes to that level, the stock goes above it, and you can buy it. It’s called in the money. Once it gets in the money, it makes sense for you to exercise. If it doesn’t, you let it expire, and touch it.

You’re not under obligation. The reverse can happen, I should mention that. You sell a car, or insurance companies are selling you a port. You bought the port, they sold it to you. They’re obligated. Whoever sells is obligated. You can also do it on the call. Let’s say, my friend who’s a crazy guy sold $260, it’s a slap, you got to appreciate this. He sold $260 on Tesla when the stock was at $259. I’m sorry. He sold, not the call, put. He sold the put at 260 when the stock was 259. I got $8 on this. This is easy. For two weeks, what happened?

Two days later, the stock end was $240, it was $230. He was freaked out. I mean, totally freaked out. His girlfriend called him, he said, “What happened to him?” I said, “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in several days. I called him, I said, what’s wrong with you?” “You told me not to sell that. I did and I didn’t get out.” I said, “You schmuck.” The rule in this game is you can be wrong, but not too long. It’s okay to be wrong, but you can’t sit there, start crying, be a crybaby. You can’t be nagging about it. You’re a human being, you’re in charge, you’re flying an aircraft. You need to land that properly.

Fari, we’re pressed for time here. We got 30 minutes and we got a lot of stuff to cover. Let’s go to the next one here if you want.

Gaining An Edge In The Competitive Market

I’ll ask a few questions. Essentially, start off with the ecosystem of the financial world, which we separate into two segments, which are casual and retail traders, the participants in the markets with the instruments we stated above, whether they trade stock options or futures perhaps, and institutional investors. We know that we have large hedge funds that utilize different types of strategies. Some of the big banks and trading floors, like we mentioned earlier. Break this down for us and distinguish the retail institutional traders and other participants in the marketplace, how a retail trader that comes under your wing can get help from you, and how they gain an edge in this marketplace. It’s a very competitive market as we all know it.

 

True. First of all, you’ve got to be mentored either by a system that you’re trading with, a website to a website, or a person. I run a system here called ORBP, Opening Range Breakout Port. You were in the ES room and you saw what Thomas did. That’s manual. Two different issues. As you grow bigger, you’re going to use more systems, especially if you work for a major bank, because they won’t allow you to go on your own and be a cowboy.

No John Wayne, you can’t do that. You have to have logic. You have to show your portfolio returns daily and mark to market daily. You have to show what your risk appetite loss. Not what my risk is. No, but you have instruments underneath to protect that move. What if you went to sleep half a mil for this month and you woke up and Putin, Trump’s buddies, were going to Poland?

That half a million of you is worth maybe 60,000 negative, all gone. Those are things that you have to put in your wallet. Usually, they want 3,000 trades from you. You’re coming to apply for hedge funds now, they want 3,000 trades. They take the tickets from you, from your brokerage, and they send them to a third party to verify those trades happened, and then you have an interview. That’s the transition.

In the old days, when I would work for Morgan Stanley Prop Division for one year, and a week I was invited to an 85 broad, which was the main training operation of Goldman. Two key heavy-duty ball brackets, white shoe back. They were not trading customer’s money. Those I was in were from the Prop Division. That means it was a network company. It’s a shareholder equity. You go to the balance sheet, it’s a shareholder equity. Assets minus liability. They would put that to work. At Goldman, we had 21 different systems that traded the commodities, each for its asset.

Just to touch base on these systems that you speak of as well for the audience, these are automated systems. Are they a bunch of algorithms that do calculations, the background, the data they utilize to do, to crunch the calculations are strictly based on data that’s generated by the marketplace itself, like through volume and price or sentiment.

Let me explain that. It’s a variety of things. When I work on it, price and volume. I have a special indicator of zero lag, the ability to trigger and it’s monitoring it. It goes through a rule-based code. My ORBP is about 9,000 lines of code. There are about 15 sub-routines. Total is 9,000 lines of code and it’s a high level. If something goes wrong, you trace it. You write it to a file, you go take a look. My ORBP took the hassles with someone from PlayStation who was a higher-up. It took us about. By the time we perfected it, it was about 10 months, 11 months.

The problem with most systems is they do not test for all market conditions. They only test one side – the upside. Share on X

It started early fast. It was functional, the first month, but you have to see different environments. The problem with most systems, they’re not enough tested. They go through one market site that’s offsite only. People who wrote the code early on and they don’t have much experience. In November, I started working, they’re bankrupt now. That could change. You have to go through flat markets, sideways, up market, down market. That’s one. Also, sometimes you have to tweak it for special assets. If somebody trades, for example, crypto, that’s not different than trading something like JPL, Voltaic Financial, or Chase Manhattan.

The behavior is different. What we try to do is sometimes arbitrage it, too, like over there at Morgan, because that was a lot of money because of shareholder equity that is there. It was also to raise the bond market. What we’ve done here is adapt this new system for Nasdaq-100 and S&P to crude oil and treasuries. Now we treasury 30 years, why? It’s because of how big that market is. You cannot move it, so big, so it’s got depth. We are it, we trade one long, one short, that’s it. It’s a lifetime.

When you say the depth of the market, the market you choose to participate in, there are a lot of participants in these markets, such as the treasuries, of course, billions and billions of dollars and because of such large participation, the liquidity is super high. It would take a monumental amount of money to move the market in each direction. It’s less prone to overall money.

Very bad news. Only say some bad news. That happens to everybody. It was a moment from Labor, Mr. Keating was yesterday in the news, that the final Labor, BLS, is going to give a write-down on the amount of new jobs created by 1.5 million, which came out 818, 800,000. The left and the right went fighting each other on the political side about that. BLS doesn’t every year. As a matter of fact, this interim, the final is done in January. That means people have no memory.

Few students in these markets, especially treasuries, can understand what the non-farm payable can do to you. Every year, every presidency, every writer, that doesn’t matter. BLS is a government agency that works for the Department of Labor. Every year, about this time, they give you an estimate, and they finalize. Now that data was good, why? It’s because of the error in the collection of the data. The surveys are perfect. These are the things that I’m thinking about to adjust.

Building A Well-Diversified Portfolio

Let us touch on another very important topic here. Like here at CPI, when we chat with retail investors or institutional investors who have invested with us, what we quote is how large institutions like university endowments, family offices, hedge funds, and sovereign wealth funds, whenever they want to diversify their portfolio, a portion of it goes into private equity, particularly real estate private equity. We’re like, follow suit with them. Put a portion of your net worth within our product, which is let’s say US multifamily through these syndicated deals.

When it comes to a well-diversified portfolio having exposure to this type of financial instrument or trading, what is the advice? What is the thesis there? As you guys both talked about some large banks have a trading desk and they exercise in options, futures, and a type of trading. Is this selected and reserved for the super sophisticated and your average day trader or should this type of strategy be part of a well-diversified portfolio?

There’s an old rule at the CME. I used to teach at CME and CBO. There are two larger exchanges, options of futures. CME, once you get inside their education department, your website shows up on a drop-down menu under education, which will give you some guidelines from their experience. Remember, this is the largest futures exchange in the country. It used to be six months. If the person survived the first six months, they’re probably a good trader.

Most people will blow up the first month or the second month. For the first three years, I made no money. That’s why I have an ex-wife. I kept losing. The problem was she wouldn’t let me take a big chunk, which comes with small, and with the panic fast, and you let go, so weak hands, like poker. Now I start raising some money, that I start upping it, and I’m trading a lot better. I’ve learned now, you can’t panic. You have to be alert, but you have to have enough firepower to hold your position as a buffer, but also add at the right time, double down, triple down as it changes.

 

The key part, you have to have a very fancy indicator, zero lag, and then immediately respond. You don’t want to signal two weeks from now and say, “I’m not sure I’m done today. We want zero lag.” That’s one route you have to go. Now they have changed that statistic. It’s not six months. Maybe folks should write this down, 90, 90, 90. It says 90% of the time, 90% of the account is wiped out in 90 days. What does it tell you? Why did I do my website, Hamzei Analytics? We go to dot-com. At dot-com, I was writing code for measuring options.

I chose an option because you could predict the future using settlement differences. The stock sells in three days, and options in one day. Used to be back in five days. I observed one day, but I would look at what is intensely more market makers, the flow of exchange, and then I had a source that would tell me

what it is for. One of my books talks about that. Exact, actual examples, examples, of the communication with CNBC, with some of the hedge funds, show exactly what I did. They kept on telling me it was not going to work. It did. They didn’t know how to interpret the data.

You create that data, problems that there’s no benchmark, so it takes time for yourself even to put together. You could come up with ways you get a little smarter. I was put on a map because of my doll ratio. Nobody had done it. I was on CNBC for three years, almost every day. Not personally, but my data, it would say my voice, but this happens, and here’s what he’s saying. I used to get out of TV in the morning with they were both asking. You need to have some edge. The option is very hard.

In this example, you used the dollar-weighted put call ratio that you created as a sentiment indicator of the forecast and participation in the market.

At the extremes. When you’re not extreme, let go. That’s not a signal. We’ve got 500 names in there. We’ve got all of the 500s, every day we give 3 or 4 signals. You go look at it, it was gold. Let me throw you gold. Take a look. This is going to happen. We’ve documented those. Where everybody would say, “Are you nuts?” I have favorite people at Wall Street, technical analysts, financial strategists, also the financial news services saying, “Fari, this doesn’t make sense.” I said, “I’m not here to create the news. That’s your job. Go find it.”

The data says something different. Why? The smart money is on options. I felt because of dot-com, and you brought that up, I’m going to refresh to that because of what happened dot-com, it was a joke. It wasn’t 401(k), it’s 201(k). I broke out, wiped out. My thesis was they’re going to go up in leverage. They have to, you have to walk up the leverage ladder. Why? It’s because they have less money for their income as the requirements are going to change. You have to make the same amount of money with less amount of cash, you’re going to go up. I thought, “Forget stocks, even though I have to touch them. Go into options and go to futures.”

The future is going to happen. Did that happen again? 2008. Happened again in 2020. Each time the average guy is getting chopped off each limb at a time. Now they’re taking bigger risks. That’s more dangerous for me as a service provider, as an IQ provider for this huge market. Half the US population is in the stock market, half of households, through direct or indirect, through their pension plan, through their company, through 401(k) or individual investing. My PMT or Proactive Market Timing was right for ten years. It was the number one in ten years.

These people won’t know what a PMT is. Proactive Market Timing is one of Faris’ products that he offers, which gives you signals to participate in changes in the market.

An average user can use that. I want to have my question asked. Should this type of financial instrument and this type of investing be part of well diversified portfolio? You talking about some potential clients or investors, you have larger investors from golf states that are looking to invest with you, or I’m not sure if they have already.

You have to be ready to change your mind when the market conditions shift. Share on X

They don’t use the PMT. They do the futures system trading, but for a person with the average portfolio of let’s say half a million or a million dollars for retirement, they’d be stupid if they’re using it. We stay out of the market when things are ranked or we go short when things go bad. We make money on each side. If you look at my chart for Diamond Digest, I was short going into the COVID March 2020. We turned that night. We said the week before, it’s on our webinars, it’s on YouTube, we can’t change the time, it’s that. Go there. We said, “We’ll be several days, you have to be ready to change your mind.” “Fari, I cannot.” “You have to, it’s a mouse room. I’m doing the thinking.” No question. On the way down, rotate, so that’s called timing.

Leaving that aside, I would still want to have this answer. If you have a family office that’s got a hundred million dollar total value, what percentage of that money should be invested in this type of financial vessel?

Essentially, actively managed futures.

You could do both. I always say the best strategy is both options and futures because they have different uses, but I would say, first of all, let’s protect the nest egg, the big amount. That is the long position that a good stock driver makes. You need to time where the top is. Like Tico said, “I am closing my longs.” People laugh. Do you see what happened today? It was one of the biggest drops today. I’m good in the morning. Now, what do you look at? There are some internals. You look at the internals. To me, the story of a stock is not the price. It’s derivatives. It’s the put-call ratio. It’s the volume breakouts.

 

These are like that you look at. Also, the Sigma channel, because Sigma channel shows how in nature, things repeat. Those of you, if you monitor that, you get good timing. Now you can also do an ETF, which is a small version of the market. It’s a big S&P, you can do SPY. He recommends it on all of his own SPY. First, you have to protect the big guy, the big portfolio. I would say you need to hedge 50% of that. If you have a million-dollar portfolio, at least 500,000 should be hedged with some good option, if not more.

That’s being managed by a professional, like a fund manager like yourself?

No, these things you don’t need to. Let’s say you have Fidelity, but if you got half a million-dollar account, you’re going to be stupid not to get PMT because I’ll save your ass when things go down, by the way, my friend. I’ll tell you when to get back in. That’s add up plus we add an option tray to it, which is what? It’s the nuclear option. It makes it go, it’s a rocket, it’s a Saturn. We combined it to, that’s our most widely used. No dominated.

Predicting The Fed’s Future Interest Rate Decisions

We’re going to bring you back, Fari, we’re going to bring you back on and do another podcast on, again, the products and mechanics of it. Let’s run, we have 15 minutes, we have 14 minutes. Let’s run through a few things. Let’s make predictions with you. The next meeting, the feds meeting in September next month. What is your prediction? They’re not going to have increased rates. You’re going against what the markets are saying 80%. You’re going against that.

I haven’t seen 80%. As of now, what do you call it?

73%.

As of yesterday, the best was 65%. I’m going to see it.

Still, that’s 65%. You’re going completely against that. You’re saying no change.

Against the grain.

I have no Tico selling on the speed. No changing.

How about the next meeting? How about the next Fed meeting?

December 25th. Here’s the problem. GDP is 2.8. GDP, they’re behind the eight bar. GDP is 2.8. They don’t want to make a mistake again because their name is blue. Their name, their address, they’re behind, so they want to do reverse angle, wrong again on the other side. You could make a mistake in shorting the lows of Monday.

Fair enough. How about the next meeting? We got to run through a few of these questions.

I said March. I know the past December. December, I think, 18th is my birthday. That is another meeting. It goes to the election and they are still hot. We began, they came slow.

Let’s talk about the election. Real estate guys, we love Trump. The reason for that is because of bonus depreciation.

No, you got to look at all the predictive models, all the measures, look at Vegas, look at England, look at also IEM, he’s in toilets. That’s people’s money on the fly. He was like 82 to 10, 82 to 17. That’s a popular quote. It’s not the electrocology. If you get that ratio, by the way, last time was this bad and he lost. This is a lot worse.

10 Championship Rounds To Financial Freedom

Let’s get one. You got a quick question before we get to the Ten Championship Rounds to Financial Freedom. Slav, do you have a quick question? Go ahead. We’re going to do the next questions. We’ve got twelve minutes here. This is a rapid-fire series. We’re going to ask you ten questions.

I need some cover.

 

 

Ten Championship Rounds to Financial Freedom. Let’s start with the first one. Question number one. Who’s been the most influential person in your life? I have a feeling. I know the answer to that one.

Bill Caffrey.

I was going to say your dad, but all right. Why was he influential?

He got me involved in this. I was still. I have no truth making B2s, but B21s. He was with me, he was in my book in 2006, he was with me in 2001. I remember seeing him one day, he had lost $3 billion. His face was wider than this wall. I knew something was wrong, but he couldn’t tell me. A month later, I read in the paper, I asked him, and he said, “Sorry, I couldn’t tell you.” Of course, they can’t, because they’re a nation. This large nation and they own us. They own this world. They make the number what they call it in Wall Street. They make the famine. They make the wars. This is what these guys do to get to your success. It is true.

By the way, can you show the audience the book that you authored because I think you have it on your desk there?

We’re putting another book a lot better than this. There it is. Maybe we won’t wait for that.

I’ll run through this. Besides the book you’re showing, obviously, what is another book that you could recommend to the audience that would be more interesting?

I’m working on that. It’s called Blondes for Dummies. On our website, this is suggested reading. I don’t want to sound like that but by category. When I say options, read back to that. If you want indicators to chart, it’s there. He gave me a lot of ideas. I saw a gap in the market right after dot-com, but I have an idea. I know he was not doing anything. It was a stress. That angle creates my CI. That indicator has been started constantly in these spaces since January 2002.

Let’s go to the next question. Fari, if you had the opportunity to travel back in time, what advice would you give your younger self?

I would have gone to Chicago earlier. I would go to Booth. That’s the number one driver’s school. I would get a job as a runner. I go through life, complaining to myself, “You shwuck. Why did you stay in the night?” There was nothing for this. There’s nothing on the West Coast because we’re hours. The IQ is in Chicago. Muscle is in New York. That’s big money. Here’s the IQ. These are brainy guys in Chicago. Why? That’s where you leverage. They use a strategy. For example, long, short, or flat, three strategies. Either you’re doing the stocks or you’re doing futures.

We go to options, there are 28 strategies. I want you to look at this as a mouse pad for me to look at it. “What does it look like? Look at it. We’re going to do this.” That’s the difference, a big difference. I should have gone there. I was potting around. I have a portfolio in real estate and it was back in ‘93. Remember Charles Keeney, legal savings. First, the lines of my code were written, and then the real estate dropped to a toilet. I couldn’t short it. I said, “This is wrong. I need an asset that can be long-term. I can start slowly getting rid of the properties.” The last property was sold in 2007.

We’ll get to that. Let’s keep going.

I was stupid.

Next question. What’s the best investment you’ve ever made?

I put $300 per customer on Google before earnings, it was October 2013, I believe. I went by Sigma levels, I bought the three Sigma. People said, “Fari, you are a sucker.” I said, “I know, I’m only paying $300.” We were in it, we do auto trade. You know auto trades, you don’t have to trade yourself. It goes through the machine for the options. In Chicago, we have an interactive that executes that for us, famous workers. Every 300 that I paid in twelve minutes became 12,000. The people on the other side had to settle.

Options were closed. Two minutes later, I called a lottery. I spotted that, and there was a fight after that, I’ll get it. Ten minutes to go. Two minutes later, they reported after it closed. They have to lock. They have to lock options before they report. Do you know what Google did? Google opened that level and went up to a hundred. I went to a meeting that afternoon as I’m coming in, they’re borrowing. I said, “What’s happened? How is she the aftermarket?” I said, “No, I was trying to come here.” “Fari, this position is going to be mega bucks tomorrow.” I said, “What?” It says, “I think 12,000.”

You ever said, “No, sh*t, no bullsh*t. You don’t know what you’re doing.” At least 8,000. It turned out to be 12,000 changes. Now, what happened on the other side? You go bankrupt. Don’t say I got paid, I went to the exchange but a lot of brokers on that side, they say, who is this sucker from Iran? Who’s on the immigrant? He’s giving us free to render, we’re going to keep it. Let’s go have a steak. The next morning, they lost business. How many of these are we sold through automated programming? The next day, the issue was allocation.

 

 

We have six minutes. I got to run through six more questions. We’ve got a minute per question. What’s the worst investment you’ve ever made and what lessons did you learn from it? It can be philosophical too if you want. You can answer it.

Doing the game stuff. GME, I was in NQ and ES. I made some money on ES. I lost one at NQ. All that same time, within 4 or 5 hours. Also one more thing, I had the knock. What the knock is? Next year, the computer went to Intel. The CPU melted like Chernobyl. The next day they have a new one from Intel. They sent me a new one, they said we want that back. You got a couple of days to send it to us. I said, “I don’t know what happened.” “What do you mean burn to?” I said, “I don’t know. I opened it. There’s a hole in there in your CPU because there was so much activity on that.” The game is stuffed, do you hear me?

Next question. How much would you need in the bank to retire today? What’s your number?

I have no idea. If I sell my company, I’ll be retired for a long time. Tico will retire.

In our private conversations, you’ve talked about $300 million for your company possibly, right?

Somewhere in that range, I would say 100 -plus. You think about the time you can sell it when the market is torched but then when things heat up.

A hundred million is a good number. I think 100 million is a good number.

1.4 sold to Morgan, and 2006 October, went to the chart. He sold at the top. Let’s kill, I’m not kidding. I would like to say, that if I retire 100 million-plus, I’m happy.

Perfect. 100 million, that’s a good number.

A million or two doesn’t count anymore.

No problem. If you could have dinner with someone dead or alive, who would it be?

Soros. Never been a Berkshire Hathaway guy. Do you know why? Simple. A number of trades that Warren Buffett has done, is one day of trading for all his life, is one day of trading for Soros. Soros dictates. I also know his right-hand man. He is the head guy for Soros. As a matter of fact, I did an analysis for him in February of 2007. It was the biggest hit on our blog.

Let me run through these three more here quickly. If you weren’t doing what you’re doing today, which is great trading and managing your fund and what have you, what would you be doing now? Do you have any aspirations to do anything else in life? What would you be doing now if you weren’t doing this?

I can bet on this. This is fine. I got here, I was here at 6:00 this morning. I went to bed at 2:00. I slept four hours. Energy drink is nothing.

Love it, next question. I think you’ll like this one. Book smarts or street smarts?

Street smarts, definitely.

For an academic, for a guy who’s been in multiple universities, you say street smarts?

Yeah, that’s why I make this. I make this as a part of our, and it’s good, emails of my own personal email. Not the services and the option for gallons, but I need to get me out of me personally. It’s that we change that because, I mean, I remember I got to this conclusion, but I was not now I was in Chicago. I was doing it with TF. He knows my volume profile. I did another time frame.

I got to a point where I said I should open on the fourth floor, open the window to all the principal, and all the harvest staff for nothing. It is what you do there that is important. How did I learn that? Teaching on the floor, going to deal with his characters to learn from them. How they rotate, for example, the first strategy was they would buy 20 names of Russell names, Russell 2000, and send the future against them. It’s a mechanical thing. Please don’t make any money. No, because we’re going to waste all this time and get nothing.

Last question for you, Fari. If you had a million dollars in cash and you had to make one investment today, what would it be?

Just buy subsidies. It’s not the right time. We’re too high up. The US should be doing long-running. If you want to know, but if you’re going to get to, you’re going to see something in September where people are going to give you money to take their stock away. I would buy a SPY. Fully diversified, 500 games, and that’s a fake 500 best horses in the country. Best management, that’s what they’re on the list. The list is changing. It’s becoming management, that mouse sheet and products. Those three give you the investment-grade stock. All of it, come buy this.

Last thing, please, I always said it’s going to be on podcasts. How can people reach out to you and learn more about your services?

Go to my website. We have it on Twitter, you can follow that.

Spell your website, please.

Hamzei Analytics. You put an active funnel that’s on Twitter. The website is on the Microsoft cloud because our reach now is global, truly global. We have activity coming from every different country. Dot-com.

Perfect. Got it. Thank you so much. I appreciate your time and your wisdom. I appreciate you sharing your background with us. We’re going to bring you on again.

We’re going to get to a nitty gritty.

We definitely do.

We’re probably some pieces here that created good and then there are some holes in it. We should do another one to fill the holes but you don’t have to review it.

Sounds good. Thank you so much.

Give me a few days in advance notice.

Thank you.

Sounds good, Fari.