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 argues that intelligence and pedigree don't matter for observational investing. He gives the example of Tesla investors — ordinary people who drove the car, recognized it was a game-changer, bought the stock, and achieved life-changing returns from that single investment. ✦ AI generated
Chris · My First Million · 2026-07-29 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 43:51
“temperament probably matters more than IQ. You're born 7 feet tall like a freak for basketball — I don't think the average person can be a top 1% investor.”
And a perfect example of that is Tesla. Okay, I actually wasn't early into Tesla, but do 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 gamechanger and they put some meaningful not even that meaningful just some reasonable amount of money into Tesla stock and that one investment made 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 with 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.
verbatim transcript · starts at 43:51
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