CALEB SILVER | Investopedia

Investopedia is often found through a back door, a side door, or through the attic because someone has asked a specific question: "how do I start investing with a thousand dollars?" Or "how do I get exposure to the e-commerce sector without picking individual stocks"? Or "what are the top performing oil ETFs over the past three months?"

Caleb Silver is the Editor-in-Chief and Senior Vice President at Investopedia. In this episode we spoke about:

• How to get started investing
• Biggest mistakes investors make
• How to invest without worry
• What to do when stocks tumble
• Parts of Investopedia most useful to beginners
• Some of the most-searched terms
• An overview of how to best use 
• Investopedia

Caleb is also the host of the Investopedia Express where he digs into the most important stories in finance and global economics. Through expert analysis, interviews with the biggest names in business, and educational breakdowns of the news that moves markets, The Investopedia Express preps you with the information you need to start your week in finance.

Caleb Silver is the Editor in Chief and Senior Vice President at Investopedia. Caleb began his career producing wildlife documentaries in South America and the American southwest. His career in business news began at Bloomberg, where he worked as a senior television producer and was nominated for a 2003 Emmy Award.

Caleb then joined CNN, serving as a Senior Producer for The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, as well as the Executive Producer of CNNMoney.com. Caleb and his team at CNNMoney were nominated for an Emmy Award for New Approaches to Business & Financial Reporting. He then returned to CNN as the Director of US business news.

Caleb left CNN in 2014 to form Frog Pond Productions, a digital production and consulting company, and then joined Investopedia in January 2016 as the VP of Content. He also serves as the treasurer of the executive board of the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing. 

Caleb is frequently featured as a markets, economic and consumer trends expert on NBC, MSNBC, ABC Radio, Marketplace Radio and Cheddar TV, in addition to markets commentary in his daily newsletters.

Caleb received his Bachelor of Arts in art and art history from Colgate University, and received his Master of Arts in journalism at New York University.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Hi and welcome to Stocks for Beginners. I'm Phil Muscatello. Is there poetry in the stock market? And if so, who's the bard of the bourse? My guest today, while maybe not Shakespearean, surely has a shot at being one of the greatest living poets of the markets today. Maybe the only one. Hello, Caleb.

Caleb (52s):

Hello. What can I do with that intro? You got me tongue tied. I'm so bashful, but thank you for saying so good to be with you.

Phil (57s):

Well, it's great on your podcast. I've heard a lot of your poetry on the podcast and I think the markets need a little bit more poetry in them.

Caleb (1m 4s):

No question about it, we got to bring some sort of backbeat to this market: some blues, some rock and roll, some classical and some jazz. It's got it all.

Phil (1m 13s):

Caleb Silver began his career producing wildlife documentaries in South America and the American Southwest. His career in business news began at Bloomberg, after which he joined CNN serving as senior producer for "The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer". He's been the executive producer of cnnmoney.com and director of CNN's US business news. And now he's the editor in chief and senior vice president at Investopedia, in which role we now welcome him to the podcast. So tell us a bit of the history of Investopedia, Caleb.

Caleb (1m 44s):

Investopedia's history runs really deep. A lot of people don't know this, but the site was founded in 1999 in Edmonton, in Alberta in Canada, by four gentlemen who had this great idea because internet stocks were popping at the time we were right in the frothiness of the dot com bubble and business networks. Like CNBC and Bloomberg, where I originally worked and others, were starting to become more and more mainstream and were starting to speak in the vernacular of the stock market and in what sophisticated investors use. Those words, EBITDA, earnings, gross profits, margins became part of just the national conversation. So they said, "Why don't we put together a dictionary on the internet? And there's this company down in mountain view, California called Google, they're trying to index the internet.

Caleb (2m 27s):

Maybe if we put the definitions for some of these terms to help people sort through the jargon, maybe this Google company might point to it." Turned out to be a fantastic idea. They added some test prep for brokerages, for series seven, for banking, for getting into finance as well. So then they had the definitions, a great foundation for a website, plus the test prep that were really helping people understand the financial world and then get into it if they wanted to pursue a career as an investor or in banking.

Phil (2m 56s):

Well, that's something I've always noticed with Investopedia. If I start to look for a term or a piece of jargon, the first result that comes up is often Investopedia, well, most of the time it's Investopedia. It's a great tool for that. Just for finding out, you know, you hear some term like free cash flow and you put that in and up it comes on Investopedia.

Caleb (3m 14s):

Yeah. That's not easy to take that top spot, but we've been around since 1999 and we put a lot of effort and a lot of money and a lot of people power into updating and expanding our terms library, because that is the foundation on which we're built, because there's new financial terms all the time. But even the old ones need updating, they need a new case study, they need a call-out to bring people into the modern world because the definition of EBITDA or free cash flow, that doesn't really change. But our perception and the way we think about it changes because the world around us changes. So we are constantly updating our terms, our definitions and our articles to make sure that they are as recent as possible and as relevant as possible to our readers. And that is how you stay number one in those search results.

Caleb (3m 57s):

It's not magic it's effort And it's time in this business.

Phil (3m 60s):

You're not from a financial background. What are some of your own investing mistakes and what are some of the lessons you've learned writing about financial topics?

Caleb (4m 8s):

Yeah, I am not. Although I did grow up with a father who was an investment banker, still is. So I was kind of on the outskirts of it, reading business plans and understanding how businesses are formed or what were the solutions they were trying to provide. But in terms of finance, in terms of investing, I had no clue, I grew up in the restaurant business. And that's the business I really understood well. I got that, you know, the cost of goods and how you sell them and how you market it. But when I became, or started investing for the first time, I made a ton of mistakes and that was in the 1990s, the late nineties, the dot com bubble. I thought I could outsmart all the experts out there and pick the next internet stock that was going to go to the moon and I made a ton of mistakes there. But my biggest mistake didn't come until well later when I was a pretty seasoned journalist during the financial crisis, Lehman Brothers, one of the storied investment banks in the United States, it was 110 years old, was failing at the time.

Caleb (4m 57s):

This was right as the great financial crisis was coming to a head. And the stock went from something like 90 to 19. And I said to myself, "No one's letting Lehman Brothers go out of business. This will never happen. This stock right now is valued and the company is valued so low compared to the amount of money it has inside its bank, I'm buying the stock." And I went in and I went in hard with a very big purchase thinking I could outsmart everybody. Sure enough, it went to eight, then it went to three and then it was out of business and I lost all of that money. Didn't get out, didn't put a stop order in. Just let it happen and watch it unfold in front of me. And it taught me a pretty valuable lesson. I'm no smarter than anybody out there. And if I don't diversify and think carefully about where I'm putting my money, I'm going to get burned right out of the stock market.

Phil (5m 41s):

And that was really the only bank that was allowed to fail was to, so you could say it's bad luck, but it's also, as you say, a bit of bad planning and not being diversified because there were so many opportunities to pick up the pieces off the floor at that time. Weren't they?

Caleb (5m 55s):

Yeah. And there were plenty of banks that did get rescued. So why did they leave and go at the time I was covering it as a journalist. I was knee deep in what was going on in the financial crisis. So I shouldn't have been investing in those stocks anyway, because I knew what was happening, but I thought I was smarter than everybody. And I thought I could make a fast buck because I just thought the stock had gone too low. You could never think that. And they expect to be right. So plenty of other banks were rescued. Plenty of other mergers happen that allowed some of these banks to live on. But for some reason, Lehman Brothers was the one they let go maybe as an example to the other banks. And it was an example to me about not betting on things that I have no idea of how they're going to play out,

Phil (6m 34s):

Why the term catch a falling knife is used in investing

Caleb (6m 38s):

Absolutely one of our most popular terms. And you could probably say same thing about what's been going on in the investing world these days, the stock market and the U S has been crumbling we're in correction territory. Everybody thinks they know where the bottom is going to be. We don't we're animals, animal spirits rule the stock market. That's what we are. And it goes by emotion and a lot of cases. And then sometimes the mysterious things happen that we just can't explain. And that's just the way it is. So we have to be smart. We have to be diversified and we have to have good risk management strategies if we want to invest for the longterm. And that's what we're all about.

Phil (7m 10s):

And just to clarify a term, because I've been saying this on Twitter this morning, because we're recording on February 23rd. And there's an argument about whether we're in bear market or correction territory, but I think S and P 500 as of right now is in correction territory. 10%. Is that correct? That's right. It's not a bear market.

Caleb (7m 31s):

No. A correction is a 10% draw down from the most recent highs for an index for a stock for a commodity. That's a correction. A bear market is a 20% or greater decline from recent highs. But if you look inside the stock market, there are bears roaming all over it. Half of NASDAQ stocks in the big NASDAQ index are down more than 50 or 60%. That's not only a bear market. That's almost a depression for some of those stocks. So bears are roaming everywhere. You don't have to have it in one of the big indexes to know that it's happening. And if you look in cryptocurrencies, it's just been ravaged. So that is more than a bear market. That is a, an angry, angry market there that you might call a depression for some of those assets.

Phil (8m 8s):

And that's where we circled back to our first point, which is don't catch falling knives.

Caleb (8m 13s):

That's right. Don't try to catch a falling knife. Don't try to time the market. We always say time in the market is better than timing the market and when stocks or securities or whatever you're invested in starts falling precipitously. It's not a great time to sell. It's also not a great time to buy. You got to let things shake out a little bit. And right now we're in that period where anything can happen and it's happening pretty quickly out there. But these are the times that try investors souls.

Phil (8m 37s):

So someone's coming into the market today and they're listening to the podcast because their interest is being picked. I've realized I've got to get their financial act together. What's the best way to get started right now?

Caleb (8m 47s):

Well, it's never been easier to invest in the stock market. So you don't have to have $10,000 or $50,000 or be an accredited investor. You can start investing literally with $20 today, and you could start by buying fractional shares of stocks. If you want to buy stocks, that means you don't have to afford the $2,000 a share or whatever Amazon is trading at. You can buy $20 worth. It's a fractional piece of that. So you can do that. But I always say for folks getting into the market for the first time and even experienced investors, index investing is probably the easiest way to go. And the one that's going to allow you to sleep at night, why? Because it gives you access to an entire index, whether that's the S and P 500, the Dow Jones Industrials, the Russell 2000, you can pick your index or what we call ETFs, exchange traded funds, which trades like stocks, but they're really just like indexes index mutual funds, but they trade every day.

Caleb (9m 38s):

Every second of the trading day, like a stock gives you access, gives you diversification and gives you the ability to get in and out without having

Phil (9m 46s):

One of the points that I'm always thumping the table about on this podcast is that ETFs is the simplest easiest. Most cost-effective lowest risk way of getting into the stock market. However, if you want to start looking at individual stocks and here, we're talking about the barbell approach than what the core satellite approach, where you can have a lot of your portfolio in index funds or ETFs, and then start learning about how to buy individual companies. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah.

Caleb (10m 18s):

I'm all for investing in individual companies, as long as you take a diversified approach or a barbell approach, as you say. So let's just say you're fascinated with space exploration while there's a lot of public companies out there you can invest in, but if you bet everything on one company and they have problems with their spaceships or their launches or regulatory problems, then you really put all your eggs in that basket. But if you buy an ETF that addresses space exploration broadly, then you can invest in the companies that are taking people to space. You can invest in the companies that are building the rockets. You can invest in the companies that are doing the mapping and the telemetry exercises that these spaceships need to use. So there's all kinds of ways you can surround that investment by using an exchange traded fund versus saying, I know which one of these stocks is going to win in the end, because the reality is we don't even know.

Caleb (11m 3s):

And here's a great example of that. Jeff Bezos who founded Amazon famously one of the richest people in the world has said to his, his company, his entire staff, we may not be around in 20 years. The greatest companies in the world go through these enormous booms. And then they fade away even a company like Amazon might not be here in 20 years. So if you look back into the history of publicly traded companies in the U S or really around the world, what happened to a lot of those great companies that were once the giants that we don't even talk about it anymore? General electric is a classic example, still a very great and interesting company, but it used to dominate the stock market and dominate the investor consciousness in the seventies and eighties. We barely even think of it anymore as part of the mainstream companies that we would invest in today.

Phil (11m 51s):

So what are some of the main mistakes that investors make?

Caleb (11m 55s):

Well, they try to time the market and they try to decide that they know exactly when the right time to buy a stock or an ETF or an index fund is. And you can't really do that because you don't know when that's going to go up or down, but you do know if you look at, and you do your research, you can look at the history and the history is not always the best guide for the future, but it does give you a pretty good example of how things play out with his individual stock or this index fund or this ETF. So you can look at that. And investors are constantly thinking that they have the answer or that they know better, or somebody told them the answer that they have a lot of respect for. So they're going to go with that idea and they put all their eggs in one basket. So the lack of diversification is the biggest mistake that investors make, but also risk management.

Caleb (12m 36s):

Now, investors always have to ask themselves, what is my threshold for loss? How much of a loss can I take and still be okay? And if you can't take a loss of more than 10% or 20% the stock, market's probably not the best place for you to be because 10% drops like the one we're experiencing now, bear markets. These are not bugs of the stock market. These are features these happen over time. You have to be able to invest for the longterm and take those downturns and then invest more and be there when the stock market picks up again, because traditionally it always has for the past 150 years or so. So that's diversification. That's also having that time horizon and knowing your threshold for losses. And if you could say, I can't take a 10% loss, there are ways to set up your portfolio where you can stop out of that trade if you don't want to be involved in it anymore, but that's risk management.

Caleb (13m 22s):

So you have to have the risk management, the time horizon, the diversification approach, and the ability to know that you can't control what happens inside the market, but you can control how you invest, whether that's regularly every month, or if you do it every quarter, you can control those things, but not what happens inside the market and

Phil (13m 44s):

Experiencing the loss. The loss is only crystallized if you actually sell out. And that's part of the psychology of it, isn't it? That your portfolio might be down 20% in a correction as may or may not happen very shortly, but you don't necessarily have to cop that loss until you actually sell. And that's part of the psychology of managing your own emotions.

Caleb (14m 4s):

This isn't, it that's right. You don't take the loss until you sell and you don't take the profit until you sell. So you have control over that. And that's one thing that investors don't realize. And a lot of people will say, when the market's down, like it's been lately, all my 401ks and tatters, well, yeah, it is on paper, but you also are not cashing out your 401k tomorrow, unless that's what your plan is. And if that's what your plan is, you shouldn't have been so heavily invested in the stock market anyway. So you have control over when you buy, when you sell and you don't realize the losses or gains until you actually do so. And then there are tax implications too. So even if you made a lot of money on a trade, you got to remember that you're going to pay taxes, whether those are short-term or long-term taxes. So you got to think about all of those things as an investor, but the way to do this, especially for beginners.

Caleb (14m 46s):

So they can sleep at night is to buy into index funds and buy a little bit. Every month, we call that dollar cost averaging. One of my favorite terms, which is make it automatic every month, I'm going to spend a hundred dollars on my favorite stocks or my favorite ETFs or my favorite index funds. I'm going to just set it up automatically through my account. So I don't even think about it. I don't know where the market is. I don't know where it's going to be. I just know that I'm going to continually invest. And by doing that over time, you can take advantage of the magic of compounding and compounding is that fairy dust, that magic dust, that sprinkled over the stock market that allows your investments to grow exponentially over time. But you have to be regular about it. You have to be patient and you have to make it automatic.

Caleb (15m 28s):

Otherwise your own psychology and the animals in your own mind will take over for you and tell you when to buy or sell. And that's no way to win.

Phil (15m 33s):

You have a lot of experience of the data from Investopedia. What are some of the most searched terms in Investopedia?

Caleb (15m 40s):

Well, it really depends on what's going on in the world. So these days, as we're looking at the situation with Russia and Ukraine, we're getting a lot of questions about the top oil producers, or how much oil Russia exports, or how to trade this spike in energy prices or how to trade against it. So we have some opportunistic readers who are always looking for the angle of how they should play it, but we also have people who are coming to us constantly just to learn, what does this mean? When I see this term out there, like economic sanctions, which is super popular right now, what does it actually mean? And how many sanctions can a country take before its economy is threatened? So we're getting a lot of that, but generally people have intentions when they come to us, very few people, browse Investopedia. I'm one of the very few people that do it, but very few people do that.

Caleb (16m 22s):

Most people come to us through a back door, a side door, through the attic underground because they have a very specific intent and that intent can be, how do I start investing with a thousand dollars? Or how do I get exposure to the e-commerce sector without picking individual stocks? Or what are the top performing oil ETFs over the past three months, they have a very, very specific intention. And so we try to have very specific answers for whatever those questions are. That's why we have so many articles on the site over 36,000.

Phil (16m 53s):

So which parts of Investopedia are most useful for beginners rather than coming in through the back door or the attic, as you say, where can we direct them straight away? That will be most useful for them right now.

Caleb (17m 4s):

Yeah. Intro to investing, investing, basics, investing fundamentals. How does the stock market work? What is a stock? You ask Google or any search engine. You use those questions. You're going to see Investopedia at the top of those results or come right to the site and type that right in our search bar. We're going to have that answer for you right then and there. So the very basics of how it works is something you should know. You wouldn't go drive a race car without reading the manual and really learning and practicing how to drive it. Same for investing. You know, this is your money. This is your hard earned money, and this is your livelihood and the wealth you want to build over a lifetime. Start at the very beginning as Julie Andrews likes to say, cause it's a very good place to start, but because without those fundamentals, without that foundational knowledge of how things work, when things don't go the way you think they're going to go, you're going to find yourself in a panic situation.

Caleb (17m 47s):

And that's not the way you want to feel as an investor. You don't have total control, but you do have control over the things that you can control. We want you to learn that through investing basics, intro, to trading, intro, to investing, how do I start investing with $10,000 or a thousand dollars? All of that will put you on the right path. And then when you're in that article, you're going to see on the left margin of that, you're inside a journey because we know that people have a very specific question, but it's usually tied to another question. So we try to put our content together in a way that makes sense for the reader. So that if you've asked us that question, how do I start investing a thousand dollars? We're going to give you the answer. And on the same page, we're going to give you a guide for your next steps. How do you sign up with an online broker?

Caleb (18m 29s):

How do I do risk management in my portfolio? How do I select the right ETFs? So start in with a very basic question. And we've got a whole galaxy of information for you.

Phil (18m 39s):

Kayla, you've been fortunate enough to meet one of the great investors, Charlie Munger, who runs Berkshire Hathaway with Warren Buffet. And he once told you that he has no patience in life for people who don't have the capacity to change. And that you think about this as an investor and as an editor every day. Tell us about that thought. What's it mean to be open, to change? Well, this

Caleb (19m 1s):

It's coming from Charlie Munger who at the time, I think was 88. When he told me that he's all of about 96 years old today and still add it still the chairman of the national law journal and the vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. And I was fortunate to go to many meetings for Berkshire Hathaway in Omaha and interview Charlie and Warren. And what Charlie was trying to say was even him, even Charlie, who is very wealthy man, several billion dollars of net worth and has had a great investing career needs to be able to change his mind when things don't work out the way that he might've thought that might even an investor like Charlie Munger. Who's one of the richest people in the world and has decades of investing experience needs to be able to change his mind when things don't play out the way he thought that they might.

Caleb (19m 43s):

And he was talking at the time about investing in certain sectors that Berkshire Hathaway used to never touch. They would never go near Apple or Amazon or any of those other companies. But we were talking about the fact that so many companies have come really out of nowhere over the past few years and change the economy and change the way we operate as consumers and really change the investing landscape. We were talking about that, but we were also talking about human nature in general. So if Charlie Munger, who is a person, I have a lot of respect for as an investor and as a business person has the capacity to change his mind. Then certainly Caleb Silver. At the time that I had that conversation with him, I think I was in my late thirties or forties. I have the capacity to change my mind and make different decisions based on the data in front of me, not just as an investor, not just as an editor, but as a human being.

Caleb (20m 29s):

And I think that's such an important lesson for me. You know, you have to have the capacity for change and empathy to understand where you need to make that change.

Phil (20m 37s):

And part of this as well. And taking this a step further, as you have to actually understand that whatever thesis you're coming up with about a particular company or a particular sector, or your view of the market, it should be tested somehow. And I always counsel people that you've got to try and align yourself or make connections with other investors. So you can actually test your ideas as well, even if it's just on Twitter, which is a great tool for testing

Caleb (21m 5s):

Twitter and FinTwit, as we call it has become a great laboratory for ideas and for sharing of information and some of the best personalities out there. That's what they're doing. They're not promoting their own game. They're not trying to pump and dump stocks. They're talking about ideas and they're pointing out things that are happening in the market that are useful for investors at any level. And I think that's a great place to learn, but also just have that, whether that's a focus group that you get together with or friends that you like to invest with, or just people that you have a lot of respect for just to bounce ideas off of. And the beautiful thing about investing is that it's this never ending educational journey. I'm the editor in chief of Investopedia. I've been in business news for 26 years right now.

Caleb (21m 45s):

I still have so much to learn. And every single day I'm learning about something new. I'm learning about the situation in Ukraine. I'm learning about the commodity production that comes out of the world's bread basket as they call it. Right now, it's something I didn't know anything about. I have to learn about it to be able to speak about it, but it's also fascinating as an investor. You're constantly learning whether it's about a new company, a new management team, a new strategy, a new development web3, 5G. You pick it, there's always something happening. So it's an educational journey. And if you do it right, you can make some money. And so that's why I love it so much. And like I said, it never ever ends.

Phil (22m 20s):

I'm loving it so much because you're finding out about how economies work and what's making them tick over the last few years, I've been learning about space companies, you know, and you think, okay, well, space companies are just, you know, they're throwing rockets up into the sky, but it's also about the companies that are getting those shoe box style satellites into orbit, being set up there by Elon and creating a business using that capability or biotech companies and how long it takes for a biotech company to, to get FDA approval. For example, there is so many little aspects of the investing world that I wouldn't have known about. And I'm so grateful to learn about.

Caleb (22m 57s):

Yeah, it's like getting an education. And instead of having to shell out $85,000 for it, you're actually investing in trying to participate in that upside, which is fun too. And even if you're not going to make an investment and that's a decision as an investor, you can make to the decision to not invest. It, doesn't stop you from learning about it because you may want to change your mind later. And that's the fun part about it. Or you could say I would never invest in, in an oil or a fossil fuel company because I believe in ESG or environmental investing. And I do that set, there are changes happening inside some of these big energy companies that are fascinating and will change the trajectory of the energy complex for decades to come. I don't want to invest in them today, but I might in two years in five years.

Caleb (23m 38s):

So I want to learn as much about them today as I can and follow this movement. That's just one example. You could pick space, you could pick e-commerce, you could pick robots, you can pick water conservation, pick any sector you want. There's a way to invest in it. And there's a way to learn about it. And that's the fascinating and beautiful part of what we do.

Phil (23m 55s):

And interestingly, speaking on Charlie Munger and changing his mind is that he's gone very long on Alibaba at the moment hasn't he?

Caleb (24m 2s):

He has, and that's unusual and he's

Phil (24m 4s):

Taken a margin loan out to get into it as well.

Caleb (24m 7s):

Right? You'd never think that Charlie Munger and the folks that run Berkshire Hathaway would want to expose the portfolio or even their own portfolios to the uncertainty of what's happening in the Chinese economy. But he's looking at, you know, an economy of several billion people that is going to produce enormous wealth over the next few generations and the company right in the middle of all of that is Alibaba because it does have financial services. It does have this huge internet presence, writ large it's in gaming. It's in almost every aspect of modern Chinese life. And the Berkshire Hathaway crew has been better invested in, in electric vehicles out of China before. But the fact that they would go after what we would consider an internet or a FinTech stock of that magnitude is very interesting, right?

Phil (24m 49s):

So Caleb, a quote from you from Investopedia is when you hear about companies meeting or not beating expectations, you don't have to care too much about what's happening with individual companies, but if it's inside the retail sector and a lot of companies in that sector are missing expectations. That means sales are weakening and that the consumer isn't spending as much, which is a bad sign for the economy. So you can get signals in all kinds of way, can't you. And this is an example of what

Caleb (25m 15s):

Absolutely we call that trend following. So we always get very antsy right around corporate earnings season when companies present their quarterly report cards to talk about how the last quarter, when and how things are going to go possibly in the next quarter or the next year. And so much has made, especially in financial media and guilty as charged about those earnings expectations. Are they going to meet, are they going to beat? Are they going to exceed? And the reality is, especially in times like this, the market is so choppy and on such a Razor's edge that even companies that are producing great results for the prior quarter are getting sold off by investors because they're not hearing enough good news. They're not impressed enough. So we're in that period where nothing is good enough for investors these days and even terrific results. Aren't helping the stock in many cases.

Caleb (25m 55s):

So that's why I don't pay attention to too much of that. And I leave that to financial television cause they have to cover the stock market. Like it's a game, but for individual investors like me, like us, where the company meets or beats its expectations, if we're invested in that company and we're not invested in it for those quarterly results, we're invested in it, hopefully for the longterm. And we believe that it has this trajectory of future growth in front of it. And that's what we're doing as investors, we're making a bet on future profitability and future growth. But when you see an entire sector start to have real problems like the e-commerce sector or the retail sector or any of the sectors these days, but especially in, in retail, because inflation is such a huge issue these days, then you could read a lot about what's happening writ large with the economy and how consumers are feeling.

Caleb (26m 41s):

I'd like to go deep into these companies, reports to find out what people were buying at a Walmart or a Target. I'm fascinated by that in terms of our behavior, but I'm also a tuned as an investor to what is this common theme we're hearing, spending less, every time they go to the store, buy more online, picking up more curbside than going into the stores where they can get up-sold on other programs. So I'm reading always through the trends to find out what's happening across the sector. Before I make a decision about one company or another,

Phil (27m 10s):

Just a little interesting point that you made through there was about the noise of financial television. And that's another important thing is to tune out the noise.

Caleb (27m 18s):

Absolutely. And I made a lot of that noise because I was in financial television for a long time. This is a financial television is to inform people and let people know what's going on and bring some thought leadership and expertise and editorial excellence, of course, but it's also to sell advertisements and financial media is built on, on selling advertisement. So they want to cover the stock market on a day in day out basis. Like it's a game. And I understand that completely. There's the pre-market, which is the pregame, there's the opening bell, which is the kickoff, right? There's the halftime show, which is half-time midway through this trading day. There's the closing bell. As we get down to the final hour of trade and then there's the aftermarket, let's wrap it up and analyze what went on and talk about what's going to happen tomorrow.

Caleb (28m 2s):

That's a classic television programming mechanism and I totally understand it and I'm guilty of it too, because I used to produce a lot of that television now that I don't have to do it. I have a lot more time to be thoughtful about how I want to address my audience and how Investopedia should be communicating with its readers and it's newsletter followers and social media followers. And that's a great Liberty. Then I'd have to cover it. Like it's a breathless thing that we got to get through the trading day. Only two minutes to go. And the stock market's down at its lowest levels. I'm not trading on that information. I'm an individual investor here for the longterm. Now, if I am a day trader, then maybe I care about that, but I'm not. And most people aren't and the people that are day trading and that are good at it. And there are very few of them are not watching financial television to figure out what to do.

Caleb (28m 45s):

They have their own signals set up and they have their own sources and they have their own technical patterns that they're following very different from watching financial meeting going, oh, I have a great idea that I just heard on that trade. I think I'll do it myself. So I

Phil (28m 60s):

Caleb with fellow podcasters, tell us about your podcast.

Caleb (29m 3s):

Well, I launched "The Investopedia Express", which was a takeoff from our morning newsletter, which we created a couple of years ago, "The Investopedia Express", because I always thought that we should be in audio journalism and I love radio. I had a radio show in college. I just loved the medium and I love what's happened with podcasting over the last several years. And I, I listened to some terrific ones, so I wanted to get into it as well. And I can't help myself because I'm am a, a suffering hip hop freestyler. So I always opened the podcast with a little freestyle, but I try to bring on real thought leaders, whether they are big time investors like a Ray Daleo or even a Charlie Munger, who I hope to speak to and in may, but also people that are talking to retail investors and reaching audiences that we reach, but also audiences we don't reach at all.

Caleb (29m 46s):

And that has been really something that I've loved to watch over the last couple of years, there is a new set of financial celebrities and influencers. Some who are very good that are reaching communities that never get this kind of information. So I'm bringing a lot of them onto my show as well. The approach I like to take with the Investopedia express is that of the educated investor. I am not going to tell you what to buy, sell, or hold or what to do with your money. I am going to tell you how to think through things like what's happening with Russia and Ukraine, or how to think through trading or investing through inflation. What's happened in the past. How do these things usually resolve? What do we need to know about these price spikes that could affect us as individual investors? I think education is the key to making better decisions and that's how I've learned.

Caleb (30m 28s):

So that's what I'm trying to do with "The Investopedia Express". And we have some fun with it. We let our, our listeners recommend the term of the week. And we, we explain that term of the week. We always close the podcast with an inspirational quote from somebody. So we have some fun with it. It's probably the most fun I have in my job because I get to be me. And recently we also launched another podcast called "The Green Investor" powered by Investopedia for folks that want to get into investing along with our environmental conscience folks, whether it's ESG or sustainable investing or impact investing, whatever umbrella you're putting it under. There is a growing field of interest among investors. I'm interested in it personally. So I created this podcast to address that need and try to educate folks on what it means to be a green investor.

Caleb (31m 11s):

And guess what? I'm learning a ton in the process cause I'm kinda new to it too.

Phil (31m 17s):

So Caleb, apart from the podcast, and we've already mentioned the Investopedia site, what are the best ways to find out more about Investopedia?

Caleb (31m 22s):

Well, we are so easy to find on all the social media platforms @investopedia. Find us on, TikTok find this on Instagram, find us on Twitter. We're pretty active across all of those platforms. Our YouTube channel has great investing lessons. Some of the interviews we've done with celebrity investors and financial advisors, but also some rarely, really practical examples of how to start investing, how to trade, how to set a stop order or a limit order the basics. So we have a lot of that available, but we couldn't be easier to find if you know the name, you're going to find us wherever you're looking for us on the social media platforms at Investopedia. And I'm @calebsilver. I do a lot of promoting of our content because I'm proud of it. And you couldn't have an easier site to find on any platform right now than Investopedia

Phil (32m 3s):

Caleb Silver. Thank you so much for joining me today. It's been a great pleasure meeting you.

Caleb (32m 7s):

Thanks for having me. It's been a real pleasure talking to you.

Stocks for Beginners is for information and educational purposes only. It isn’t financial advice, and you shouldn’t buy or sell any investments based on what you’ve heard here. Any opinion or commentary is the view of the speaker only not Stocks for Beginners. This podcast doesn’t replace professional advice regarding your personal financial needs, circumstances or current situation.