Investing-101

Chris Guazzo, former president of Rye High School’s Investing Club joins marketing intern Rebecca Degter to discuss the basics of investing.

Summary – Cents of Security Ep. 5

The following is a summary of a live audio recording and may contain errors in spelling or grammar. Although IBKR has edited for clarity no material changes have been made.

Rebecca Degter

Hi, I’m you’re host Rebecca Degter and today I am joined by the former president of Rye high school’s investing club, Chris Guazzo, whose fascination for investing began during the short squeeze impacting GameStop among other so-called meme stocks. By following the news during the GameStop short squeeze, Chris realized that anyone could become a successful investor. He is here today to teach us various financial concepts such as the S&P 500, sector-specific investing, and much more! As a college student, practically no one reveals the basics of investing. Through Chris’s wisdom and advice, you too can become a future investor. And because Chris touches on a lot of interesting concepts, such as starting to think about retirement using a 401k plan and staying abreast of the financial markets by subscribing to our Traders’ Insight newsletter. For additional information on these concepts and more, take a look at the links in this episode’s show notes to help you learn more about investing from Interactive Brokers’ Traders’ Academy. Now, tune in for what they don’t teach you in the classroom, ‘investing 101.’

Hi, Chris, can you tell me a little bit about your experience running the investment club at Rye High School and what the goal is per se.

Chris Guazzo

So, at Rye High School, running the investment club was a pretty challenging experience because it opened up a lot of doors of opportunity, but also a lot of things that I had never experienced. With the club, to focus on the goal, I’ll take from our mission statement where we say: ‘students will learn various means by which to analyze stocks and other types of investments such as high yield bonds and private equity, as well as participate in stock simulations and learn valuable real-world knowledge from guest speakers.’ So that kind of summarizes what we focus on; we try to focus on bringing information and financial literacy to high school kids who are kind of learning about the investment atmosphere and how they can kind of get started and get involved.

Rebecca Degter

That’s great. So as a beginner myself, how should a beginner start their investing journey?

Chris Guazzo

When you start your journey, it would probably be best to set some goals for yourself. With investing, you can go for generational wealth, or you can go to have fun and try to pick stocks. Most importantly, set a goal, set the outcome that you want to achieve and that way you can stay focused along the way. And you can take time to have fun on the side, but also can still reach your goals by the end.

Rebecca Degter

Awesome. So, let’s bring it back a little bit to the basics. Can you tell me what investing is in a nutshell?

Chris Guazzo

So, investing is finding, oftentimes, a company, but it could be a real estate property. But finding something that is undervalued by however you determine value and then purchasing it in an attempt that its value will increase, or it will provide a passive income flow.

Rebecca Degter

Awesome, so how do people invest with little income? Is this even possible?

Chris Guazzo

One of the best ways is to join your company’s 401K— if they have a 401K match policy or to invest in a traditional or Roth IRA.

Rebecca Degter

Why are you unlikely to “win” when picking stocks?

Chris Guazzo

Stock picking and trying to find the perfect company can be a very difficult challenge. I’d say that one of the best examples on why that challenge is difficult is when you look at hedge fund managers who spend 80 hours a week with hundreds of people on their teams— they themselves struggle to find the best companies that will always beat the market. And so, for you, as somebody who’s trading as a side hustle or on top of your real job, it’ll be hard for you to have the time and have the availability to research every company and to find the best options to invest in.

Rebecca Degter

Chris, what resources do you use yourself to find out more of this information?

Chris Guazzo

So, I’m a big fan of the Interactive Brokers newsletter as well as their Trader’s Academy. Their Trader’s Academy has a lot of videos and resources that can help young traders understand what indexes are, what options are, what futures are. But as well, they have more technical analysis that can focus on candlestick patterns. I’m also a big proponent of Bloomberg Live TV; even if it’s something I just have running in the background through my headphones, it can help me just take in more information and hear about different perspectives on the current economic landscape.

Rebecca Degter

Can you tell me a little bit more about the S&P 500, because I always hear this word thrown around and I never really know what it quite means.

Chris Guazzo

So, the S&P 500, in and of itself, is an index, and what that means is it’s a collection of the 500 biggest companies on the U.S. stock exchanges, and it measures how their stocks change, whether they go up or down— based on different things in the market, whether it be interest rate changes or it just be earnings calls for each individual company. So, what it does is the index measures the market but if you want to invest in the index you have to buy ETFs, exchange traded funds, and those are created to best model the index. If the index goes up 1%, the best ETFs will also go up 1%. If the index goes down 5%, the best ETFs will also go 5% because the goal of the ETF isn’t to beat the index, it’s to match the index as perfectly as possible.

Rebecca Degter

That’s great, so how did you yourself get into investing?

Chris Guazzo

What sparked investing for me was the GameStop short squeeze because it was the first opportunity I saw where retail investors, the small guys, the little guys, were able to fight against the Wall Street banks and fight against the big conglomerates in attempt to save a company that a lot of people cared about, and a lot of people valued. And I think that that avenue of investing really opened the floodgates for me because it just sparked my interest and caused me to start reaching out and find things like the Interactive Brokers newsletter where I could gain more information and increase my knowledge base.

Rebecca Degter

I hear a lot about sector specific investing. Could you tell me a little bit more about that? Because I know we glossed over the S&P 500 before but I really want to dive into the nitty gritty at the end of the podcast.

Chris Guazzo

So that’s a great question. Sector investing is oftentimes done through the S&P 500, where the S&P 500 breaks down into, I think 13 different sectors which go from consumer spending, consumer goods to communications to military applications and defense companies. So, when you look at sector specific investing, you can look at something like the energy market. The energy market and a lot of the oil and gas companies are held very tightly to the price of the crude oil per barrel. That price can fluctuate a lot, whether like a Middle Eastern country limits their production or whatnot. So, when you focus specifically on a sector, you can be more prone to specific moves within that industry.

Rebecca Degter

That’s all so great. OK, so what are you doing now? What are you hoping to do for a career or college? I hear you just graduated high school, huge congratulations.

Chris Guazzo

Thank you. Next year I’ll be attending SUNY Binghamton. And while I’m there, I plan to graduate with a Bachelor’s Degree for Business Administration in three years thanks to the amount of AP credits I took in high school. And then with that 4th year to still kind of have that four-year college experience, I plan to take advantage of Binghamton’s one year MBA program. So that after my four years of the traditional college experience, I will have an extra set of qualifications to take me to that next step into the workforce and help me go down whatever path I choose.

Rebecca Degter

Lastly, do you have any advice for young adults everywhere?

Chris Guazzo

I’d say the best and absolute best thing you can do is increase your knowledge base, look out for new information, look out for newsletters, stay on top of what’s happening in the news every day, stay on top of what happens if the Fed increases interest rates and how that will affect you. Stay on top of whether inflation is predicted to go up or down, educate yourself, go online. In a new world with endless amount of resources and endless amounts of online links and online websites, there is always more information to be found and always more ways to educate yourself. And then, lastly, I’d say set goals; be realistic in your journey and set manageable goals that you can kind of hold yourself to, but at the same time, if you’re not meeting those goals, don’t put too much pressure on yourself. Not every day can be a win in the stock market, and not every day can be a great day investing. But it’s about every day learning from those mistakes and continuing to push forward.

Rebecca Degter

Well, thank you so much Chris, for joining us here on IBKR podcasts.

Chris Guazzo

Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a great experience!