Revolutionizing Investing with Tykr: A Chat with Sean Tepper

Welcome to another episode of Chasing Financial Freedom! Today, we're excited to have Sean Tepper, the Founder, and CEO of Tykr, join us as our special guest. Sean is a leading expert in stock screening and education, and his platform is designed to empower individuals to manage their investments easily.

In this episode, we sit down with Sean to discuss his journey to founding Tykr and how his platform revolutionizes people's investment. We'll dive deep into the key features of Tykr and explore how it can help you achieve your investment goals.

Sean also shares his thoughts on the future of stock investing and education and offers valuable insights and tips for anyone looking to take control of their finances.

Whether you're a seasoned investor or just starting, this is an episode you won't want to miss. So please sit back, relax, and join us for an insightful conversation with Sean Tepper on Chasing Financial Freedom!

Transcript

Revolutionizing Investing with Tykr: A Chat with Sean Tepper

[00:00:00] Ryan: Hey guys, Ryan DeMent from Chasing Financial Freedom Podcast. I hope you guys are having a wonderful day today. On the podcast we have Sean Tepper. Sean is the CEO and founder of TYKR, a stock screener and education platform all in one that helps you manage your own investments. Sean, welcome to the show.

[00:00:20] Sean: Good to be here. Ryan. Thanks for the invite. 

[00:00:22] Ryan: You're more than welcome. I know it was a little bit of a wait, so thank you for waiting, but looking forward to our conversation. So before we get into what you're doing in your business life, little bit about you and your background, and then we'll jump into ticker and start talking all 

[00:00:35] Sean: about that.

Sure. Yeah. Background. You wanna know more business side background or. Hey, throw it at me, 

[00:00:41] Ryan: whatever you want. Sure, 

[00:00:43] Sean: sure. I'll start with business and kind of pepper in a little bit of the actual personal. So I've been in software engineering for about 16 years or so. Worked for some.

Larger companies. Also had a business earlier on in my career. Went through a merger there, but long story short time, I'm all about work-life balance. I don't work around the clock. Some of the hobbies include, I live in Wisconsin, so I enjoy a lot of outdoors, hobbies, , mountain biking, kayaking.

Picked up golf. I'm not going pro anytime soon. But , I have been taking lessons and made some improve improvements, which is great. But yeah, I just love the outdoors. And then my wife and I, we enjoy traveling. 

[00:01:19] Ryan: Cool. Can't play golf year round in Wisconsin. So your game must suffer during the winter unless you've got some type of indoor ranges.

Yes. You can go to, 

[00:01:27] Sean: yeah. There, there's a few. And then we've got a place called Luxe Bay, which is very similar to Top golf. It's like a Okay. Franchise around the world where they've got heaters, but in, in three levels you can hit. The balcony name for targets on the field. They have got different games you can play.

But yeah, try to keep the skills sharp with stuff like that. , 

[00:01:47] Ryan: try. Yeah. . I golf got me through high school and college and Nice. It lacks me now because of work, but one of these days I'll start picking the sticks back up again. And really, I can't go out and just play. I have to grind it out cause that.

That's just where life was. College was a grind with golf yeah. It's, I get it. What got you started with ticker? What drove all of this? 

[00:02:09] Sean: Yeah, so here's the backstory. I graduated in oh six worked for an agency for a year and learned that the most, and I'll try to keep this within a few minutes, just the backstory here, but, I learned that in an agency, the most lucrative service was software engineering.

In those days, this was like 2006 and seven. Social media was like, becoming a thing. But then there's video and then there's, billboards and all the gamut never ends with what you can. Do to market businesses and I'm like, okay, so software engineering is really hot. I'm going to learn that.

Learn how to do WordPress sites in Julan and stuff like that. Started my own business after that. Grew it over four years. Had a few employees. Didn't make any money cuz it was through the recession, . And the benefit was, got to work with a lot of business. So I probably pitched about 400 businesses over four years.

Got to work with 100 of those. So that's about 25 new clients a year. And got to learn everything from like manufacturing to restaurants, hair salons, online businesses, software as a service, and the list goes on. And I was a little frustrated with myself cuz it went through this merger and it wasn't, A paycheck was written and handed to me and Hey, here's your retirement.

It's like none of that. It was all debts and liabilities wiped clean. And I knew at that point the type of business model I wanted to start, which was software as a service. So think MailChimp or Salesforce. Or even Netflix subscription model. , and I'm like, yes, I wanna create that model, but I don't have any ideas.

So I decided, let's go learn how big businesses operate. And I started working for large companies like GE and Kohler. And I did that for about 12 years, 11 or 12 years or so. And in parallel to that, I got into investing, but I started, this was around 2011, I started investing in private businesses, and that's called like seed round investing or angel investing, where you.

Invest in like a new tech startup hoping it goes to a thousand percent. And needless to say, that ever happened. unicorns. Yeah. You got it. And over those, it was like five years I did that and made some money and lost some money as like a break even game over five years and I'm like, this isn't working.

And I knew like guys like Warren Buffet. Charlie Munger, they're able to beat market returns in the stock market. The question is how? I'm like, no more angel investing. Let's go to the public market, the stock market. But I knew these guys, they're not beating the market based in emotions or feeling. You won't see these guys at the casino playing blackjack, right?

No . So that tells us that they're using some sort of math to start their process. And I'm like, okay, so let's figure out the math and. Coming from the world of software engineering, you try to deduce things down to mathematics and logic. And I I read as many books as I could once on the YouTube Rabbit hole.

Found that a lot of the advice is really bad, but there's one guy that stood out, his name is Phil Town and he wrote a few really solid books I'll give him right now. So one is Rule one, another book is titled Payback Time, and he's got a third book written with his daughter called Invested. But I'm like, He's applying some serious math here.

I start putting it to work in Excel. Use that Excel. This was around 2016 and he stated that you should be making 15% or more in the stock markets. I'm like, let's do this. Let's put this to work. So long story short his math actually worked. I added my own spins, so about 70% of the math and ticker, I have to say, I give credit to Phil Town.

but I added my own a little more rigor to it, you could say. And over the next four years, I use this Excel sheet to make returns ranging between 15 and 50%, actually much closer to that 50%. And at that point I'm like, okay, maybe I've got something here. I started sharing this Excel sheet with some friends and some people who like investing and as well as some institutions, and everybody was like, when are you gonna turn this into a software?

People can use it. So this is now brings us to 2019. So it's close to 10 years later. , I finally have my software as a service idea and yeah. Decided let's move forward to this. So it took about a year to build the first version, went live in 2020 and now, Early 2023, we have about 7,000 customers in over 50 countries and it's we would call that a low touch SaaS so people can join 14 day free trial, and then if they're interested and continue using it, you just add your credit card and you're off and running.

So that's the story. 

[00:06:29] Ryan: So let's dig into ticker. So what makes Ticker different than all the other platforms out there? Yeah, 

[00:06:34] Sean: so three reasons why and the first reason I'd say, don't take my word for go to our trust pilot, see what our customers have to say. But we've got a, we've got a 4.9 out of five, but a lot of people say we are the easiest to use.

Coming from my background, which is really project management, a lot of experiences, you have to take the technical and you have to communicate that to stakeholders or your leaders in layman's terms. So get rid of all the lingo. And I see this problem in finance where people continuously use $20 words on Reddit and Twitter and YouTube, and nobody knows what this means.

So I'm like, Take a really simple approach and break it down for people. And a lot of people really like that. So that's reason number one. Reason number two is we are open source so people can literally see our calculations and we tell them, you can go create your own version of ticker if you really want.

but we hope you stay with us. , and people love that. We actually put it out there and some people take it upon themselves and put the calculations into Excel to see if they really match up, which I think is fun, but yeah, that's reason two and number three is, and nobody else is doing this.

People can see my portfolio. , they can see my holdings, what percentage I hold in each and they can invest literally side by side with me and any other screener out there, cuz we're defined as a screener. None of these CEOs, they, they show what they actually hold hold in their portfolio. Same thing on YouTube.

A lot of these guys, they'll say what to invest in, but they never show what their portfolio is. It just drives me nuts. . 

[00:08:05] Ryan: So I gotta get down to the nuts and bolts of this. What Sure. I love that you're sharing all the information. It's transparent, but what makes your stock picking and your system stand out from everyone else?

[00:08:18] Sean: Yeah It's nothing glamorous. What we do is, and this is the key word, rigor. There's a lot of people, I'll give context here. So there's a lot of people on C n, BBC or any other kind of news hat, right? Exactly. They'll give stock recommendations, but they'll look at. Very minimal data. They'll look at a P D E ratio and then they'll look at market cap, and I won't go into that right now, but they'll look at two numbers and then say, that's a buyer, that's a sell.

And that's ridiculous. That's let's say you're the GM of a football team and you're looking for a new quarterback and you're like, I'm on a guy with black shoelaces and six one, and that's our right. There's there's no sufficient data. to make a logical decision. . So with Phil Town, fortunately he looked at, and I'll break down the numbers here.

He looked at everything on the income statement, cashflow statement, and balance sheets, such as five years of revenue growth. That's your top line. Your sales. , five years of income statement. Your income growth, five years of e P s. Then you jump to your cash flow statement, that's your free cash. You wanna look at five years there.

Then you wanna look at your debts, liabilities, assets and equity and your balance sheet. And overall, when you put all these points together, we're talking like 50 or 60 data points, minimum, not two points. And what I did is, and this is something filled didn't do, but I created a scoring system from zero to a hundred.

Kept it really simple, just a scoring system. We around the world are universally acclimated towards. Hundred points is really hard to get and that's a really good score. So it really grades the stocks based on all those data points. And we teach in the onboarding. You actually don't need ticker cuz you can go to these income statements and visually look like, are the revenues increasing year over year?

Is the income increasing year over year? It's really simple, but of course ticker saves you a lot of time and it's a little more accurate than eyeballing it if you'll so, so that's how it works, that's why it's different. 

[00:10:16] Ryan: So is it a plat, forgive me, I, I can't remember everything about the platform, but can people invest directly from ticker or is it just a screener to where you find your asset or you find your picks?

Yeah. And you go to your brokerage firm or your online and portal, whatever you're using to then now buy that stock. 

[00:10:34] Sean: Correct. We are a screener, an educational platform, and. , we found that creating a brokerage in each country, it's a lot of legal red tape. . And it's really costly. And we were moving so fast that to get a brokerage credential in every country, it would take decades,

So we're like, let's lean into the education. That's really what separates us. The tool is powerful, but people really find education separates us. So it's That's the direction I'm going think dual lingo, which is a language learning app. It's like we don't want any boundaries to serve any countries.

We wanna be able to serve everybody. So yeah, you can't buy and sell on our platform. You have to go to a broker. I personally yeah, use TD Ameritrade, but to cross the globe, we've got a list of the top. Brokers in 

[00:11:17] Ryan: every country. So for comparison, since I'm familiar with it, vector vest. So where do you guys fit in to that space?

[00:11:25] Sean: Yeah. Vector Vest is a competitor. They're a stock screener and they're I'll say good things always about competitors. Vector Vest simply Wall Street seeking Alpha cn, B C Pro, there's also Motley Fool Pro, or I think premium. But these are all decent platforms. I will say, You have to have some competency with financial education.

There's a lot of technicals and platforms like that. They give you a lot of signals, so it's very hard to make a decision. So what we do is, yes, we've got the scoring system, but we actually let people know if it's on sale, green. If it's watch, which is gray, it's neutral, or if it's red, overpriced, and a lot of these platforms, they don't give you definitive decisions.

It's kind, here's another metaphor. I'm sorry I used these dumb metaphors, but let's say you're sitting at a stoplight. and instead of green, yellow, red, you've got a factor in. Okay, so if we've got a wind rating, we've got a traffic rating, we've got a daytime rating because of different parts of the day, have different ratings and you don't get a definitive yes, go forward or stay.

It's like these platforms I go to just blows my mind is how can a beginning, a beginner investor really know when to buy or sell it? It can be impossible in some cases. You can't make a decision. 

[00:12:39] Ryan: Agree. I've tried a lot of those platforms. I've been on vector vest for almost 10 years and I think it's the only one that I know that has buy, hold, and sell. Cuz everything is a stoplight with them and there's a lot of different things that go into it. Yes, there's a lot more technical, you are correct. You've gotta spend the time to go through it. But once you can put a system together and it, works for you.

Great. But you do. I'm with you. Simplify the process. Make it easy for anybody to come in and invest. I'm with you. I'm all for that. I just have, I've grown to love vector vest and because I have I have seven different automations that go through it, which they've come a long ways and over the years to where it automatically trades on my trigger.

so I don't have to really manage anything on a daily basis other than check, see what's going on. Sure. It gives me notifications, so it's a little more sophisticated, but I do like the ability to bring. Wall Street to Main Street. And I think that's where you guys play a vital role of what you're telling me if I'm, am I 

[00:13:37] Sean: right?

Correct. Yeah. We really do focus on the beginner investor cuz there's so many people flooding in the market because they heard a comment from a friend or saw something on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, what , the list goes on. So how do we. Simple for those people to get in and start investing right away.

[00:13:54] Ryan: Is there, and excuse me for not knowing this cause I'm not on the platform. Sure. But what about size limit, purchase size and portfolio management? How does that work with ticker? . 

[00:14:05] Sean: So no limitations there. We tell people when you get started, your objective is not to make money. It's to increase confidence.

So we tell people to start with between a hundred and a thousand dollars. It's like jumping into the deep end of swimming pool. Just wanna jump in, get your toes white first, and then, and you can allocate from there. We do have different guidelines through, like we, we do teach people that you want to be investing 15 to 30% of your paycheck.

If you can't get there, that's okay. Start small and work your way up. But by investing every paycheck, you are your, you're building your wealth well in advance. You're speeding things up. Over five, 10 years. equate to a big 

[00:14:46] Ryan: chunk of change. So when I'm starting out, or when people are starting out, how does fractional shares play into all this?

Because now you've got the online platforms that are allowing you to buy fractional shares. Do you guys teach your clients about fractional shares 

[00:14:59] Sean: at all? Who cares? It's overcomplicated. It's if you buy, 10% of Google share or the whole deal, it doesn't matter because no matter what, if it goes up by a hundred percent, you're making a hundred percent.

It's don't dwell on if it's fractional or not really doesn't. 

[00:15:16] Ryan: Okay. No, I'm just curious cuz a lot of people get into it. And then how do you guys work with the hype that's out there? You talked a little bit about before, I we have these meme stocks that are out there that everybody's going crazy for.

Yeah. And I was just like, oh my God. Just tune that crap out and stay focused on what you need to do. And you've got. Oh my gosh. GameStop is one. What's the movie theater that they've pumped up to? Oh my gosh. The movie Theater chief, a 

[00:15:42] Sean: m c. Yeah I've got 'em all. You've got Koss headphones was on that top 10 list, right?

Yeah. 

[00:15:47] Ryan: Remember them and then, yeah. Bed Bath and Beyond got in there and they're on the verge of bankruptcy. Yeah. I mean it's just, it's crazy. So how. How do you play with, or how do you handle that with your clients and is that something part of the educational process or just not really spoken about?

For? 

[00:16:02] Sean: Fortunately, because of the rigor of ticker, it fails all those stocks. Those are all overpriced. . Okay. And it's pretty easy because if you, again, remove ticker from the equation and go look at the income statements, you'll see actually walked a guy through this. Like he really wanted to invest in a main stock.

And he's if everybody's saying it's a great deal, I'm like, let's go to the income statement. In year over year, you could see the revenues declining each year. I don't know about you if I were running a business. Do I want my revenues to go down every year or go up every year After I ask that question, he's yeah, this is a horrible business model.

[00:16:37] Ryan: So how often are your green lights, whatever you're calling it, is it green, gray, and yellow? Red. Red. Yeah. How often are those updated? Are they off updated when their financials are put out? Quarterly, monthly. 

[00:16:51] Sean: Quarterly. Okay. Typically quarterly. But the share price, if it goes way up or down, that can make an impact as well.

But it's typically every quarter when those earning statements come out. . 

[00:17:03] Ryan: So typically, how long does a person stay in a stock, a trade? At least a trade per position? 

[00:17:10] Sean: Yeah. As Motley Fool teaches, and I will agree with them, why are you selling? , right? You should be a net buyer, , getting in, doing your homework, and then keep buying that same stock over the years.

Now, there are cases, like for ticker, for example, you receive alerts. If a stock changes from on sale to overpriced, that means the ship is sinking, something is happening to the business, and it's time to get out. So in that case, as you can sell, so typically we like to hold long term. By long term we're talking six.

A year, three years, five years, something like that. And I've got a lot of case studies and a lot of customers that have done extremely well by doing that. Unfortunately, there's a lot of platforms out there. They're too shortsighted. They teach people to buy today on a Monday and they're gonna sell next week Wednesday.

And it's, it just blows my mind why? And then you ask what the returns are. , they're matching the market. That's why you're over-engineering this. You're making it too complicated. Stop thinking about when to exit. It's think about great businesses and then keep buying those great businesses every single month.

[00:18:14] Ryan: I'll check it out. I have no problem. I don't go in and out very quickly because Vector vests has multiple Timing mechanisms and they have three of 'em. One is truly way too fast on the market and it'll bounce you pretty quickly. They have one that's middle of the road and there's one that's really late and I've created, they've allowed over the years to open up the data to where you can actually.

Work with it a little bit to where you can create your own, I want wanna call it a marker, and I've created that for myself. Not doing too bad. It's okay. Sure, but could it be better? Yeah, but I don't spend a lot of time on it. It's not my, it's not my full-time job no. My full-time job is real estate investing in going through that whole process.

Real estate investing, I should say, not just investing that, that's, day job. . I really like the ability to see the data, like what you guys are sharing and I'll go into ticker and I'll check it out and we'll maybe even have a follow up conversation. That would be cool to see what that looks like, but Sure.

How, how simple do you make it for your. Clients or investors to come in and actually see the data to where they can come in and say, I can make an educated decision today and tomorrow I can execute and buy some shares. 

[00:19:21] Sean: Yeah. So our interface, once you get in, it's it's got the score in every stock right there.

And you could literally go make a decision thereafter. You get, just for context, when you join, you get a welcome email, thanking you for joining the program. And then we have a list of tips that's sent out every day over the next like 24, 25 days, although there's a link. From that welcome email, you can read them all in one go.

And it teaches you things like when to buy, when to sell, how to reduce risk, the four different investment categories. You got value, which were based on value investing. Then you got growth. Dividend and speculative, those would be the four. Stuff like that. So really if you go through the training, it's wow, you've got this holistic view, this high level view of to get a really strong understanding of not just businesses but the market and pretty strong confidence.

Move forward from there. So you can invest on day one, but after a few days, it's like every email jumps up that confidence just a little 

[00:20:14] Ryan: bit. That's pretty cool. And then, with the market being choppy in the way it is today, how are you guys fairing with what you guys are doing on the platform? 

[00:20:24] Sean: All credit goes to Phil Town.

This is called Stockpiling. Stockpiling. Seriously. And Warren Buffet teaches the same thing. Be greedy when everybody else is fearful. So we are buying like crazy. I've got a quick story for you. So this is about one of my podcast guests. He's a plumber, was a plumber. and he, this was back in 2008, the market just crashed severely.

The housing crash, you remember that probably like yesterday, like I did. And he had some cash. He had a hundred grand set aside. He was very frugal and he had enough common sense to invest in Ford. Now Ford was the only. Automotive stock that did not take the bailout where his GM and Chrysler did, and he knew he had enough common sense to say, okay, if they're not taking the bailout, that means they've got a strong balance sheet.

We'll check this out. In just over a year, he turned a hundred grand and over. Into over 2.5 million. And he was in his early thirties. He was done and out. And so he went all in on Ford. He did. He's it was a bit risky but . I've had other people do the same thing with strong. Businesses. I had another guy, same thing, became a millionaire just investing in one stock over eight or nine years.

That was traveler's Insurance And insurance is mandatory in the US right? You can't not pay it. And they've always had a strong balance sheet, especially through the two thousands. And that story just repeats as people buying great businesses and you buy even more when the market's down. So right now I just spend, every penny I can find in the street is going right into TD Ameritrade.

[00:21:56] Ryan: It's amazing because we're taught not to do that when the market is tanking it's, yeah, it's I do a little bit different. I'm with you is when everyone's nervous. I'm trying to find ways to do something different. And right now, and I'm not meaning to digress, but I will a little bit.

We have a problem in America with small business owners. There's 12 and a half million baby boomers that do not have succession plans and they wanna sell their businesses. , I'm in on that. I'm like all, I'm totally all in. So it's similar to what you're doing? , I'm going in all in and trying to find myself four or five business acquisitions that I can go after and take care of, but at the same time, in the stock market, I write it down.

So typically I'll do that through an E T F, but I have some other avenues. But when it goes down it's very simple to find it in vector vest. They make it very simple to write it down for the day. And then I get. It's just another avenue that I play when I have the time, but I'm with you, is I want to create value and make sure that I'm buying the right stocks.

And there are some stocks that I'm doubling down on right now that I feel are healthy. I'd be curious and this'll be something we can have a follow up with, is, the matchup of what I find on vector vest versus, versus ticker and see what happens. I like that because the more information you can give your clients or users the better off they are.

And if it's something that you guys have, That Victor Vests doesn't. That's awesome because it just empowers more people to go out and be confident in investing. 

[00:23:19] Sean: And we do get a few investors that like to. What I call triangulates, which means they try to get two or three sources, other platforms and see if they all are green per se, and then they'll make that buying decision just to increase that confidence.

What we're doing is we're gonna be adding analyst ratings to ticker here in the next hopefully month or so. This is as we're recording, it's beginning of March. Hopefully by April. But anyway, that way people can come to One Source ticker and see of course the ticker rating, but then the analyst ratings in one location.

So the idea is come in a ticker, increase your confidence and make your decision. Don't go down the YouTube or Internet Rabbit hole. It can be misleading at times. , 

[00:24:00] Ryan: I gotta ask the question. I still think analysts at times are part of the Talking Heads also because they're getting funded. At some point in that process, they're getting paid.

For that review. There's a little bit of, there's a little noise in that correct. Information 

[00:24:15] Sean: they provide. Yeah. So I could talk about analysts all day and there's some good ones and there's some not so good ones. I will say full transparency, I like the guys at Motley Fool Chris Hills.

Yeah. Chris Hills a great host and other guys that, like Jason Mozer comes on. And they're good guys. And I like to hear what stocks are recommending. But unfortunately a lot of analysts out there, they're driving clicks cuz clicks equal revenue for the media company. , right? So what can they do to drive clicks?

And the other factor is when you read an article by the analyst, ask what kind of business experience they have. Have they built and sold a. have they worked for publicly traded companies that helped significantly increase revenue or optimize profits? , in most cases, these guys have been sitting behind a computer looking at data most of the career, not actually building businesses.

And that, like I tell our audience, you don't have to have worked for public companies and worked in a C C E O role or whatever. Think about the business experience you have, whether you run a small. Or me, you work for somebody in your industry. You probably know more about that industry than other people.

So that goes back to Warren Buffet saying you wanna buy what you know. Like me, I know tech really well, but I don't know pharmaceuticals. I have no like pharma. No. So do I invest in pharma? Absolutely not. So back to your analyst, it's like these people, most cases, they don't have that business experience.

They're really driving clicks. 

[00:25:43] Ryan: And that's sad because a lot of people don't know that. And they take, they you go on, the talking heads will have somebody come on and they're gonna say, oh yeah, bye bye bye. And it's you go look at the stock and it's are you kidding me? And it's. 

[00:25:53] Sean: Yeah I'll hear that on another podcast. Somebody will mention a stock, and I always go over to ticker to see, let's see, it'll be some company I've never heard of, and I'll look and I'll be like, oh my gosh, that's got a 25 out of a hundred. Yikes. No. 

[00:26:07] Ryan: So what type of coverage do you guys have for stocks?

Are you on all the major indice? 

[00:26:14] Sean: So we've got 30,000 stocks in the platform. We've, like I said, we've got customers in over 50 countries. We are working our way to get the entire global footprint. We won't get every stock on the platform, but our next jump will be we've identified a data provider that can get us from 30,000.

Up to 60,000 stocks. So that's, wow, that's a pretty solid footprint. 

[00:26:34] Ryan: Oh yeah, it is. So with your ratings and so forth, when does it typically say, okay, it's time to get out, and when does it typically say it's time to buy? 

[00:26:44] Sean: Pretty simple. Like when it turns green. Something positive has changed. Yeah.

[00:26:49] Ryan: Score wise. When does it turn green? Is it, is that magic sauce or is that just Nope. You can 

[00:26:54] Sean: share. I'll give you that. So what we do is we look at the margin of safety and the score. So if the margin of safety is, and this is going back to Ben Graham, who's, Warren Buffet's teacher, you wanna look for a margin of safety of 50% or greater.

So if it's 50% margin of safety and a score of 50 out of a hundred, that's when it turns green. It turns red. If you flip that equation and now it dips under margin of safety of 50 and dips under a score of 50, that's when it turns red. Yeah, it's pretty simple. We. , like I said, we've got it all on the site so you can see see how those cool metrics work.

[00:27:26] Ryan: From an educational standpoint, I know you're, say you're sending out emails and so forth. Is there an educational section of the platform where people can watch videos or anything to that extent to continue growing their knowledge? 

[00:27:37] Sean: Great question. Your timing is perfect. So right now we've had the automated emails that come on every day, and then you've got the free education section, the ticker.com.

It's like our front facing site, and you can read all the articles one by one in a row. A big request has been courses, so we are launching what's called ticker edu. It'll be in a separate url, different website, but people, if they're interested, they can do a deep dive. And the first course is almost done as of the beginning of March.

It's called Stock Investing for Beginners. It's the first course and it's about 65 videos. They all range between two minutes and 10 minutes, and it's a deep dive, and I actually teach people in the course how to invest. Ticker to give them that full transparency. But say if they wanna save time, they can use ticker.

So that's course number one. Two others, I'll keep high level here. The second will be how to maximize the power of ticker. So that's really how to use ticker to maximize biggest results. Third course will be how to generate passive income with stocks, which is using covered calls. . I have quite a bit of experience with options trading.

Super risky in most cases. , except for covered calls where you make money no matter if the stock goes up or down. So it's very safe. 

[00:28:49] Ryan: And do you guys have any intentions to integrate with stock brokerage websites? So you can trade electronically, without having to go back and forth between ticker and your brokerage?

[00:29:01] Sean: Not to build, but through maybe a partnership or if there was a merger or anything that I, the broker I have identified or we have identified has the biggest footprint as interactive brokers. They have access to over 200 countries. There's a lot of brokers other, but they just don't have the access.

The other company have my I am is PayPal. They've been talking about integrating stock trading in their platform the last two years. , I know there's a lot of red tape and that's what they're probably dealing with right now. But similar to what they did with crypto they're in 200 countries.

It's nobody else has that big of a footprint. I would love to partner with Dan Schulman, the ceo and PayPal and say, Hey, we can help your audience as we teach cuz we're talking to brokers right now. The big issue is a lot of people join in at a hundred, between a hundred and a thousand dollars, and they sit for three.

Six months, one year. And the problem is these brokers are, Generating revenue that way. It's transaction fees in most cases and sometimes those small fees, sometimes a little larger. But as we teach these brokers, we can get your people off the bench and in the game we want them investing, right? 15, between 15 and 30% every month.

Yeah, long answer short, , we want to partner with a broker to make it easier to make those trays right. And ticker. 

[00:30:21] Ryan: And then what percentage of your clients actually sign. Open up a brokerage account and start trading within 30 

[00:30:29] Sean: days. Good question. And that's we're, we have to create a custom data interface to see that I am trying to talk to a lot of our customers and we do, people hear people saying, yes, they are trading within 30 days, but we need the data.

We need all of our customers to see what percentage. Cuz you can add your own portfolio and we have a portfolio tracking tool in. Platforms, you can see returns over time. And we'll be leveraging that to see, to help answer your question with data , in other words. 

[00:30:59] Ryan: Yeah, so you can actually create a manual portfolio on ticker once you purchase it through your stockbroker, so then you can watch it on both 

[00:31:06] Sean: sides.

Correct. We, right now it's manual. We are working on a C SV import. In other words, you can export like an Excel sheet or CSV from your broker and import right into ticker just to save time forward. That's coming up pretty soon here. 

[00:31:19] Ryan: Cool. It sounds like it's a pretty interactive site and it gives, somebody that is a novice access to something they never had before.

I This is I'm in the affordable housing space and one of the things we run up. people not being financially l literate when it comes to that because they weren't given the skills. And you're giving people the skills to trade stocks, and that's really cool. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It changes people's lives.

They go from being a renter all their lives to being a homeowner and understand how they can create that as an asset. Now you're giving them the skillsets, look at, you can start with a hundred bucks. I'll teach you how to buy stocks. and then going forward, set aside, 15 or $20, whatever it is on a monthly basis, and just put it towards that and make sure that you're managing it effectively and it'll grow.

It'll grow your money over time. 

[00:32:10] Sean: That's it. That's it? Yep. You're my new pitchman. 

[00:32:12] Ryan: It, yeah. You don't want to hear the amount of people I talk to on a daily basis. Unfortunate. It's unfortunate, but it's fortunate. It's one of my callings is we created a nonprofit a couple, about a year and a half ago, and all we do is financial literacy.

Coaching and so forth. Teaching people just how to manage their money cuz a lot of people that come to us to buy houses have been left behind through the financial system. I have people that will come buy a house from us, no joke will come with a bag full of cash and say, okay, I'm ready to buy a house.

And I'm like I can't do anything with that. , there's so many regulations around that. I can't just take your cash. I wish I could, but I can't. So then you have to teach them that. And that's one of my passions. And that's really cool that you're teaching people how to trade, increasing their probability of making money and not getting discouraged right out the shoes.

Right. , but also teach them what to look for. So now they've got s they, now they have a set of skills that they can pass on to their kids or to others and bring them back into ticker. 

[00:33:12] Sean: Yeah. And I echo that comment. There's people again, you sh our Trustpilot reviews are really, thank God, I mean they're really good.

They're 4.9 out of five, but these people say literally in a week they can go from like complete beginner to like somewhat expert cuz it's just cut through the clutter. Layman's terms, let's get you up to speed, and a most efficient path forward. And there's some people say it can take a month, but still it's like in less than 30 days you can be ready to rock and do very well in the market.

[00:33:39] Ryan: That's really cool. That is totally cool. So we're coming up to the end of our time here, but before we go, best way people can get ahold of you, but also tell 'em where. Access to ticker because I think that's gonna be a valuable tool for some of our listeners. 

[00:33:55] Sean: Yeah, pretty easy. Url, it's ticker.com.

T Y K r.com. That's one place. LinkedIn, I'm very active on LinkedIn. Just Sean Tepper, there's not too many Sean Tepper out there. . Fortunately I stand out that way. But yeah, LinkedIn is another way and with the trial, it's, we don't ask for a credit card. You can literally just add an email address or sign up with I think Facebook, Google, or Apple, and your 14 day free trial.

After that you can upgrade. 

[00:34:19] Ryan: And then what is the monthly cost? 

[00:34:21] Sean: So we are at 29 a month, but we're moving to a yearly price of 99 a year, which is like a 70% discount. That's good. , it was about a 33% discount. We did some homework on other B2C platforms out there that really have significant numbers cuz we know we can get to in the next few years and we wanna get to a million subscribers.

We know it's possible, but we've got to create a price point that as really advantageous for people. So yeah, that should be coming really. really soon here. 

[00:34:53] Ryan: That's great. We'll put the link to ticker in the show notes so people can get ahold of it. And we'll also link your LinkedIn account in there so people can reach out to you.

So sir, I thank you very much for coming on the show. It's been an honor great conversation. Thank you for creating, the platform that you have in ticker, because it sounds really cool. I'll be honest guys, I'm gonna go try it. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go take a look at it. I'm gonna play. I might even do some simulations with some of the stocks that I pick and see what happens.

I really think you have something, so I wanna check it out and I'll definitely let you know. Cool. Thanks 

[00:35:24] Sean: for the time, Ryan. This was great. You're 

[00:35:26] Ryan: welcome. Have a great day. You too.