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.
Camillo argues that any regular person can become a top investor by staying observant in daily life and making one or two big bets when they spot a change early—using a separate 'big money account' funded by small lifestyle tradeoffs. ✦ AI generated
Chris Camillo · My First Million · 2026-07-29 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 70:29
“Does this influence you, Sean? Uh this is your second time talking to him. Are you uh has your actions changed since December?”
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 my entire life. And 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 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 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 gamecher 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.
verbatim transcript · starts at 70:29
70:11a bigger number for me is going to make no difference in my level of contentment or fulfillment in life. And I like the concept of grinding and creating and building and taking risk, but not if it's to like get a bigger number. So like if I'm going to do something the next 3 to 5 years, whatever my next thing is, like I want the journey to be
70:36as fun as the outcome. So okay, my outcome that I want is to land the top 20 global podcasts by developing two or three shows over the next few years with people I believe are unbelievably talented. I want to build a great team around them. I want to like I want to it's the gamemanship of like can I do this? There's tens of millions of podcasts. How can if I landed a top 20,
70:59how wild would that be? How? But I want the journey in trying to figure out how to win, how to get there to be fun. And I know I love working with creative people. I kind of because I've been stuck in podcast world for the last seven years. I kind of get it, right? So like I and I love it. So like whether I end up winning or losing and by the way,
71:22if I win, I'm looking at I'm looking at adding to my charitable foundation. And that's like my number is not for me. It's for it's for the foundation. But the journey and how we get there will be fun regardless. Like cuz I'm going to be around creative people. I'm going to be in a sector that I love. I mean when in history could you take a few million
71:41dollars and start a media company which is exactly what I'm doing right now. Like could you imagine like 20 years ago you couldn't do that. You just couldn't do that. Right now you can you can land the top five show globally if you if you execute in 3 years, two years, right? Like isn't that wild that like you could do that out of one studio with like 10
72:02people, 10 or 15 people. Like how exciting is that that you could play in this game and you could have a top five global global media show in a couple years if you can find the right person and the right team and the right format. To me that that journey of just attempting to accomplish that is maybe the funnest thing I will ever do in my life. So I'm really looking forward to
72:30this next thing that I'm doing. Hopefully we win, but even if we don't win it, damn guys, I'm at a point I'm going to have fun. I'm going to have fun trying. [laughter] Okay. And but and by the way, like I tell this story to a guy. I had I had I had lunch with a guy, massive exit. This I don't know how much he's worth, but it's a
72:50lot. And and I I talked to him about this story and he said, "You know what, Chris? I'm going to buy this bonsai shop that me and my daughter go to." He goes, "Cuz it's my favorite thing in the world. Me and her go there and we just hang out there and I'm going to buy it and like this guy's going to end up spending more time with his daughter.