Hey, everybody, welcome back to the Blog. today I wanted to talk about some of the best investments that I've made in my life. And I'm not making this to brag or to gluten, you know, feel great about myself, because I've made plenty of terrible Investments as well. But I want to highlight the ones that have done well and why they did well, and kind of how I focus on, you know, Finding winning Investments and sort of my philosophy behind that. Now, this is going to be more of a conversational video not going to jump around all over on the screen or something. So if you want to stick around, I think there's going to be some value in this if you're interested in investing and, you know, Building Wealth over a long period of time. So let's go ahead. And let's get started with this. So let's first of all, let's start off with stocks.
Let's talk about some of the best stocks that I've had, the best Returns on, and why that was the case. And so what if the realize first of all, is that, you know, of course, I invest in the index funds. Lot of people do that. We're not going to talk about index funds, because it's pretty straightforward, you know, you put money in X funds, whatever. Let's talk about individual stocks. So what I typically do is I'll invest into, I would say, probably three or four companies per year, and that's it. And that's at a maximum. Sometimes it's only one to two companies per year that I really put a sizable amount of money into. And there's a reason for this. One of them is because I don't want to open up the like 50 different fronts. And I have like, you know, 30 individual stock Investments and have to follow all of them honestly, through the difficult to do that. So focus on specific High conviction trades. This is something I learned from the dumb money guys, and from Chris Camillo on his strategy with what he does, but some of my best doc Investments. Obviously, a lot of them happen back in the spring of 2020, but I went pretty heavy into a lot of the gambling companies, because it was very bullish on the idea of sports gambling. In this just so happened because I was writing a lot of papers in college about sports gambling. I was pretty into the the legal aspect of and like, looking at court cases and everything. I don't know what was wrong with being college, but I was very interested in it. And so I knew that this was a wave that was coming kind of like with how a lot of states are legalizing marijuana, right? So we see that happening a lot. You can see that wave moving. But I noticed the sports Trend moving pretty early, and not a lot of other people, I guess, saw it coming. So what I'm saying here is that not that I'm a genius, but that there's going to be times in life when you see an opportunity when nobody else is really looking. And so that's what was the case for me.
So I was buying Caesars Entertainment. I was buying even pain. I was buying a number of other gambling companies, Casino companies, and they've benefited pretty significantly like DraftKings from this massive wave of sports betting. So I was in those pretty early. I think my best one of that was probably Caesars when I was buying it at the massive dip, you know, 15 20 bucks a share popped up to over 100 110 115 a share. So I still have Holdings of those, but usually I will get out of those. Usually I try last at least a year. So I don't trigger that short-term tax. But that was one of my best investments that I've made in my life. Now, we're talk about another stock later in this video, but I wanted to briefly mention the next one. The next investment that I've made that I think is one of my favorite, and and one that I think is really going to do well over the long term. And that is Angel Investments. Some people are going to categorize this as Venture Capital. You can try to use those words interchangeably or whatever. People say that you can kind of just assume that they're going to be pretty similar there. So I've made a handful of Angel investment over the past 18 to 24 months, and I've seen some of them, you know, go up 10x or 20 x. I mean, you know, 1000 to 2000 percent. And I think there's a really great value in something like Angel Investing basically what this is is it's investing into startups or companies that maybe aren't public. They need some cash to really get going. Maybe they're not profitable at first sometimes. And so I'm able to put money into them as an angel investor, kind of like what you would think of, if, like the first person who invested into Facebook to get us started. It wasn't always just on the stock market. You had people who were doing venture capital and Angel investments into those startups. So that's something that has been going really well for me. Of course, you don't want to count your chickens before they hatch. I mean, shared, I could have something that goes up 20 fold, but it could spot her out. I don't know, but that's one that's been doing really, really well, at least on the books.
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They're for sponsoring this portion of the video, as you can probably tell. I'm very excited about venture capital in general, and I'm really excited that it's going to be open to many people as well, who are maybe not accredited investors. So I have three more Investments that I want to share with you that have really performed well in explain why they've performed well. And this one is probably going to be my favorite here that I'm about to talk about. And that is by taking a spread on debt. So basically what I mean by this is debt is really, really cheap right now. I think a lot of us know that you can pick up debt if you have good credit, or if you have assets, you can pick up debt for 2% 3% interest. And so what I do here is I basically just build a spread on debt. So I'll borrow money at say, two and a half percent interest. And then I will lend that out, or I'll find a way to get that money at a stable, say, eight, twenty percent apy on that. So just to do some quick numbers on this, let's say that, for example, you borrow money against your house and don't don't go out this please, because there's a lot of risk if the calculate something. So don't just go out and do this, please. But let's say that you, you can pull five hundred thousand dollars out of your house, and and you can get it at like a tube to two percent interest rate, three percent interest rate, right? Let's say 3% and then let's say, you can take that five hundred thousand dollars that you borrowed against your assets, and you can lend it out at a 10% rate, and you're paying 3% on that 500000 that you pulled out. And so if you follow along here, you can see you're making like a 7% spread their on five hundred grand is about five thousand dollars per year extra for really doing nothing. I mean, for just late, making your money work for you, or if you have good credit, you could possibly think about doing this as well. Once again, please don't go out and do this, because there are a lot of risks involved with this as well.
Like if somebody defaults on that debt that I'm issuing a somebody else, or if I'm doing something in the crypto world, like with stable coins and current protocol, you can get twenty percent yield on that. We're going to make a whole video on that, because it's, it just sounds Wild on how to get AP wise. But even something like the series 1 savings bond that the US has you can put up to ten thousand dollars into their netting 71 2% from the federal government. So you could take out debt at a lower rate, put it into that and make a spread on that. So you can see kind of how that works and how that operates. You know, there's a lot of problems with that as well, but that is something that's makes me a decent amount of money every year, and it's basically free. I mean, I don't really do anything besides just move some money around us from different accounts, and that's the basics of it. So the investment that I want to share with you that he's arguably probably my best performing of all time in the stock market. It's Build-A-Bear Workshop, which that sounds just stupid. It sounds really, really stupid saying this. And I'm only mentioning it now, because I've sold off almost all of my position, and I've been selling it off because, you know, it's a small cap company. I didn't want to mention it last year or earlier this year to my followers, because it's a small company. So I didn't want to move the stock price. So I can now, because I've been exiting the position here, but Build-A-Bear Workshop. The reason why I went into this is because I love finding stocks or companies that are so neglected by everyone else by Wall Street, but they're still pumping cash. They're still pulling in a lot of cash. And, you know, there's times when you can just find like the perfect that you're in the perfect moment where everybody's looking away. And you're looking at a company saying, how is this company valued at 40 million dollars when they're pulling in? They're profiting million of dollars every year. You just run the basics on that. You're looking at, you know, PE of five of six, and you're like, well, you know, this certainly has a lot of potential here, at the very least, to pump some cash. And so that's kind of why I started going with Build-A-Bear.
I started building out that position. Eventually, people started to find it, and they started to to buy it. And so Build-A-Bear went from, I think it was at maybe two dollars or share back last year to over twenty dollars a share plus. I did some options in that. So it worked out pretty well from Build A Bear. I don't want to just sit here and, you know, act like I've made a lot of money, because I've certainly lost a lot as well. And I want to talk about one of my mistakes that I've made after this next Point here. So the other investment has done really well that I think it's pretty obvious. Probably it's Bitcoin. Okay, now I'm not a Bitcoin maximalist, but I'm very pretty deep into crypto, especially these days. And there's a reason for this, because I like to read at least a book a week. And so I've been reading crypto books lately. And I think once you start to expand your mind into the crypto world, it's insane, the, the level of intelligence in this community. I mean, look at something like Facebook. They're struggling to hire people, because everybody's going to web three and, and crypto projects all the smart people are. And I've a book right here, actually, what highly recommend reading this? It's called token economy. It almost feels like a textbook, but I absolutely loved it. I just thought it was so informational.
