Claim◆Video · 43:51 — 46:09

An ordinary person with below-average IQ can become a top 1% investor by being a pure observational investor — you only need one or two home runs over 20 years.

Camillo argues that anyone can achieve elite investing results through this method, using his own background (bottom 25% of his high school class, below-average IQ) as proof, and noting that a single early Tesla investment made many ordinary people top 1% investors. ✦ AI generated

Chris Camillo · My First Million · 2026-07-29 · original ↗

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“Your audience, what do you think the average follower of this show looks like? Do you think the average follower of this show is capable of being a top 1% fundamental investor competing against literally hundreds?”

I would say that being a top 1% observational investor, just a top 1% investor generally, is easily doable if you're willing to aggressively adopt being an observational purist investor. And the reason I say that is because what I actually do is so simple and so straightforward and I've seen over the past seven or eight years since I've been public about this on YouTube and I have, you know, hundreds of thousands of followers. I have people around the world writing me near daily. They are dentists. They are janitors. They drive trucks for UPS. They work in a parking lot checking out cars. Okay? And they will DM me, hey Chris, I've been watching you for 5 years. I started doing this. I was early to this company or to this company based on what I observed in the world. It's that one investment has changed their entire life. And I tell people if you have one or two home runs over 20 years, one or two home runs over 20 years, meaning you find something early and you put a meaningful amount of money in it, that could put you into the one or 2% range of all investors over that two decade period.

verbatim transcript · starts at 43:51

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43:51investor generally, is easily doable. if you're willing to aggressively adopt being an observational purist investor. And the reason I say that is because what I actually do is so simple and so straightforward and I've seen over the past seven or eight years since I've been public about this on YouTube and I have, you know, hundreds of thousands of followers. I have people around the world writing me

44:26near daily. They are dentists. They are janitors. They drive trucks for UPS. They work in a parking lot checking out cars. Okay? And they will DM me, hey Chris, I've been watching you for 5 years. I started doing this. I was early to this company or to this company based on what I observed in the world. It's that one investment has changed my entire life. And and I

44:56tell people if you have one or two home runs over 20 years, one or two home runs over 20 years, meaning you find something early and you put a meaningful amount of money in it, that could put you into the one or 2% range of all investors over over that two decade period. And that's all it takes. And a perfect example of that is Tesla. Okay, I actually wasn't early into Tesla, but

45:21do you know how many terrible investors otherwise? I mean, these are people that hadn't done anything in their entire life in the investing world and probably haven't done much since are 1% investors because they were behind the wheel of a Tesla in early days and they realized this is a gamecher and they put some meaningful not even that meaningful just some reasonable amount of money into Tesla stock and that one investment

45:47made them a top 1% global investor for like a 10 or 15 year period or 20-year period and changed the trajectory of their entire life. They're not hyper intelligent. They're probably like any regular person. They're probably like most of the people that watch this show or any other show. And it's all about just understanding that that's all it takes because most people never even try this because they think I can't compete

46:10with pedigreed investors from Wall Street. I can't spend 6 hours a day doing technical trading. They don't realize you don't need to. You can just go on with your life. Live your life. Just keep your mind open to potentially early discovering the next big thing. That's it. That's literally it. Like that's all you have to do. What are the things you have most high conviction in right now?

46:34>> Um my highest conviction trade I'm like a broken record on this. It sounds so weird because it's not a small company. It's Amazon, guys. Like I I have more money in Amazon. This the most concentrated position I've had in a really long time. I always say the most concentrated position I've ever taken was Nintendo when they came out with the Wii because I was at the E3 conference

▦ Tesla ◉ Chris Camillo

Around this claim

Evidence · 2

Observational investing — detecting change in culture, consumer behavior, or technology and connecting it to companies that benefit or get harmed — is the simplest and most effective investing method for ordinary people.Chris Camillo · My First Million · conf 90%Ordinary people can become top 1% investors by making just one or two great observational trades over 20 years—they don't need to compete with Wall Street.Chris Camillo · My First Million · conf 85%

Extends · 1

Any ordinary person can become a top 1% global investor by catching one or two home run investments over 20 years using observational investing.Chris · My First Million · conf 65%

This moment responds to

explains mechanism → You initiate a trade at the point of information imbalance and exit as the world starts to appreciate that information — the exit window is when other investors come to terms with your thesis.Chris Camillo · My First Million rebuts → Second-level thinking—seeing something different from the consensus and being right about it—is the key to superior investing, but it cannot be taught; it's a form of insight some people simply have and others don't, like height in basketball.Howard Marks · My First Million