Dec 13, 2020
In this episode we talk about the hustle and years of hard work that Mariusz had to go though as he is facing an amazing return on investment in his stocks now.
Mariusz is up 5000% and I think this investment will eventually get him to 400X (40000%). In an industry where 10% a year is outstanding result.
This is a story you cant miss
36) Hustling to 5000% return on investment with Mariusz Skonieczny
Transcription by Arianne Elnar
Ney Torres: [00:00:00] Now, let me tell you my side of the story very quickly. Before we start talking about your story. I think… I don't remember if I texted you or Adam from Oroco and Im like “by the way, if you ever do another placement (raising money), please do let me know” and then it was like “we're in the middle of one right now”, and I'm in the middle of Netherlands. And now, I have to take a plane to Ecuador, raise the money and that takes me like two weeks. The moment I want to send the money, my bank account in the United States says you have to be present because of the amount and we're blocking the account until the come and that moment I had to take an airplane and figure out how to get a covid-test again… So in three weeks I was in three continents.
Mariusz Skonieczny: [00:00:54] It's funny. Hey, I guess it was worth it
Ney Torres: [00:00:57] it was worth it. And let's talk about what happened. There was a private placement in Oroco (OCO). That's a company we'd covered… I think in April in this podcast and please tell me the story because now the title of that episode is how you made a hundred bagger or 10000% and now that's turning into 40000%.
Mariusz Skonieczny: [00:01:22] Well, look, it's approaching 400X from the point where I started investing and that's because of Oroco and well, not because of Oroco but I started literally January 1st, 2009. So, that was like the best time to start. So, I had very good, very, very good three years, 2009 was fantastic. 2010 was good. 2011 was good and then from 2012 to 2017, it was just absolutely horrible. I mean, I couldn't get anything right these five years and that's because a lot of my investments were in mining gold, and silver. And as I said before, many times, I mean, these guys are professional fuck-ups. I mean, I have never seen people so incompetent and just playing stupid as they are in this industry. But because of this industry, that's how I found Oroco because if it wasn't for their stupidity, I would have never found Oroco and then when I found Oroco in 2017 that just gave me new life, a new lease on life. And since then, I mean, Oroco is up like, okay, I bought it. I think I put like 60 grands into it at 4 cents. So, I bought like 1,445,000 shares. So, yesterday or two days ago, the stock hit like $2. So, you do the math. That position alone went from like 60 grands to $3 million. So, that's really where you're 300X comes from because I started with $10,000 in 2009. And here this position alone is like $3 million and that doesn't count my other positions. So, really the math is simple. It's nothing really complicated just a huge win and that can happen in investing. I mean, one or two big wins can make your life, make your career. And that's really what happened with Oroco for me.
Ney Torres: [00:03:39] It's amazing. First of all… there's still a lot of appreciation to come yet. Before you tell me the story, what are you going to do next? Are you going to just keep going into stocks? Are you going to retire? What are you going to do?
Mariusz Skonieczny: [00:03:59] No. I mean, I enjoy investing. I'm going to just keep doing this but it's still I'm not exiting the position yet. And actually, since I bought the position, you can trade in and out of it a little bit and maybe I took a little bit of money off after I replaced some of the position with the private placement. So, now I have a situation where I have some shares that are restricted in private placements on some shares are in my account which are liquid. Obviously, the restricted shares or warrants that I have through private placements, they're restricted. So, it's kind of like locks you in for at least four to 12 months. If you're in the US it locks you in for more like 12 months, if you're outside of US, it locks you in for only four, but I am in no hurry to sell them and the liquid position that I have, I keep it because some of my warrants what if let's say they get accelerated. I need to have the ability to stay liquid on that position so that I can exercise my warrants without necessarily touching my outer positions.
Ney Torres: [00:05:26] So, one of the things that most people don't understand is that when one of your positions start going so high is that you constantly wonder “should I liquidate it? Shall I make my position size smaller? Because basically there are other positions just disappear. Not even there, you become Oroco (OCO) or the stock that you are holding. What are your thoughts about that? Because some people say, "Well, it's more than half of my portfolio is too much or do you ride with what? How do you see it?
Mariusz Skonieczny: [00:06:03] Well, first of all, when you have a position that goes up 50X and you don't really sell, it becomes a huge position just on its own. And to begin with it was already a big position when I bought it but I think that's really very much a personal choice depending on who you talk to. If you ask Warren Buffett, he'll say, "Diversification is good for those who don't know what they're doing” or you will have some things like “you get rid or you concentrate to get rich and you diversify to stay rich” and then you have other opinions such as maybe the generalists in the financial industry: “oh yes You have to have 20-30 positions”. Okay. That is an opinion, and each person is different but if we look at people very successful. They're very wealthy people that come to mind. Well, like let's say bill Gates or Warren Buffett or even Elon Musk. How did they come to that wealth? Well, pretty much they were invested in one company. Elon Musk, one company, Tesla and then you can have people saying, "Whoa, but that's stupid. That's irresponsible." Okay. That's your opinion. But the bottom line is that he became a billionaire or whatever being in one position like this and now everybody is talking about it and on TV, nobody says, "Oh, he's too concentrated." But if you are as an investor-investor in Tesla and I'm not saying that's like good investment. It's just an example. If you are invested in Tesla and you let's say you're 90% of your net worth in it, you're irresponsible and stupid but Elon Musk is not responsible and stupid. He's a visionary.
Ney Torres: [00:07:55] You came from real estate too. You used to do a lot of real estate before doing the stocks.
Mariusz Skonieczny: [00:08:06] Well, when I graduated college which was 2003, I entered the real estate industry because I wanted to learn the real estate and I wanted to learn how to value real estate. And that's how I entered it. And then after I've been at it for a few years, I was investing on my own and I realized that I really didn't have the passion or that much interest for real estate. And actually, when the financial crisis started hitting, I wanted to enter the financial industry and I actually applied for a job with Morningstar because they were in Chicago and it's kind of funny because at that time, so many people were losing jobs. That there was so much competition and I didn't have the background in the financial industry. My background was real estate, so they rejected me. And it's kind of funny because at that point I said to the person who was in charge of hiring, I said, "What can I do. To improve my chances in the future?" And I remember she said, "I suggest you read a lot of books on value investing." It's kind of funny because by that point I already probably read 300 books, but instead of reading more, I decided to write 10 of my own since then.
Ney Torres: [00:09:32] Oh, that's why! Very good. Do you think that helps writing books?
Mariusz Skonieczny: [00:09:39] Help to what? Writing book?
Ney Torres: [00:09:40] There's a lot of effort in writing a book.
Mariusz Skonieczny: [00:09:44] I liked the book business, you see outside of investing when people don't know about me is that when I left the real estate in 2009, I had $10,000 to my name and I didn't have a job. I left; I didn't have a job. Actually, my girlfriend had a job and she was paying the bills. But during the time that my investment was growing, I wasn't touching any of that money. So, I had to come up with different ways to make money by doing small projects. So, for example, I wrote one book and then it was like, "Oh cool. It's selling copies. And I don't really have to do a lot. And it's generating some revenue for me, it's not a lot. It might have generated maybe 400 a month, but 400 a month. That's a lot of money. If you don't have to do anything for it because once the book is on Amazon and it gets recommended, it’s kind of gets its own track record and you kind of generate sales. But the first book was why are we so clueless about the stock market. It was just a general book about investing. So, a book like this has a lot of competition because anybody that comes in, what are you going to pick up? Well, whatever Warren Buffett whatever was written about Warren Buffett or what are the classics? I forgot the names of the classics. Do you remember some?
Ney Torres: [00:11:20] Ben Graham.
Mariusz Skonieczny: [00:11:21] Exactly. So, these are the books that you turn to first. So, that particular book, I mean, I've come on $400, $300 a month, it's great. And of course, I could have put more effort into marketing it but is it really worth it? If I have to work all the time to market it just to increase it a little bit. No, why not write another book? So, then the second book really opened my eyes because the second book was the basics of understanding financial statements. So, we weren’t really like just investing but it was how can you learn about financial statements as an investor? Because I remember in college, when I was taking an accounting class, accounting class wasn't really hard for me because I enjoy numbers. I enjoy math, so it comes easy to me. But then when I looked around, people had a really difficult time understanding accounting. So, I figured, well, there's really nothing really good out there that breaks it down to a level that people can understand. Yes, there's accounting books that are a thousand pages long, but who wants to read that. So, I wrote that book and it just absolutely blew me away. I mean, it outsold the other book by multiples and that really kind of taught me a lesson. Like, wow, if you write a niche that's not a lot of competition then you can make some decent money with very little effort so then I thought, "Okay. Well, let's keep writing more and more." Because I had a lot to say and then I learned, okay, just because another book is niche doesn't mean it's going to be successful so that was a lesson. It was maybe too niche and it only sells like two books a month, so it wasn't really worth the effort. And then I ended up writing a book on, for example, I'm sure you've seen it on Gold Production because I was involved in that from this year. So, I lost a lot of money, but I learned a lot. So, that was another success because here is a similar situation as the basic financial statements is people invest in these junior mining companies. They don't have a clue the difference between open pit, underground, oxide, sulfide. Hey, if I write that explain it in a way people will appreciate that. And that book became the second-best seller. So, it's just like writing those 10 books actually taught me a lot about because those are like little separate businesses on their own and when you go through these kinds of projects on your own and then it actually kind of helps you when you analyze investments. It’s kind of gives you a sense of what especially with new companies when they come up with new projects or new products, it kind of gives you a sense whether something can be successful or not. Another project that I don't know if you know that I am in ballroom dancing, competitive ballroom dancer. So, in competitive ballroom dancing, you have to have a costume makeup and all that stuff.
Ney Torres: [00:14:51] How did you end up doing that? What's the story behind that?
Mariusz Skonieczny: [00:14:57] Well, actually it's a funny story because as you know I'm from Poland and I came to the United States in 1996. So, I was 16 years old and my entire time in Poland, I was all about sports. I was in a special track and field school. I was a runner I was a soccer player and then when this whole craziness with and Barcelona, 1992, Michael Jordan and Bulls, everybody was playing basketball. So, I fell in love with basketball and I was excited to come to the United States because as far as I was concerned, I was coming to the US to play in the NBA. Like that was on my mind like, "Okay, I'm coming here, I'm coming to Chicago. Here I come." I had no clue and anything about how it worked but I just wanted to play because in my city back then there was no such thing as basketball clubs that it was just at the infancy and we had soccer clubs but not basketball clubs. So, I never really had a chance to play other than streetball. So, when I came to Chicago, obviously went to high school, tried out for a basketball team, made the team but to numb my surprise. The reality was I was probably not good enough to the standards of the United States. And as a consequence, I never really got a chance to play. I was on the team but I was never allowed to play. I mean, literally the entire season, I got to play in a real game like 30 seconds or a minute. It was, it was devastating to me because this was my dream. I was going to play in the NBA and here we come. At that point I was so devastated. I just stopped sports completely at that point. I really didn't want to run anymore. I was kind of tired of soccer by the time and basketball devastated me. So, that's when I found dancing. So, it's actually kind of funny the documentary that came out on Michael Jordan, the Last Dance because his last dance was literally my first dance at the same time that he was doing his Last Dance. That's when I started dancing and that's the start of it and I never stopped.
Ney Torres: [00:17:30] I love to interview you because you are the epidemy of a hustler. You've done this, this, that didn't quit. Keep going, keeping the five years of a dry spell in value investment. I don't know how many people will go through that and come out of the other side.
Mariusz Skonieczny: [00:17:48] I mean, it was just absolutely terrible. I just thought that I'm cursed and going back to now what I was going to say about the ballroom dancing and the costumes. So, when you compete in ballroom dancing you have to have costume and make up an older and then now those costumes are custom made. You don't go and to JC Penny and especially, I'm talking about for the ladies for the dressers they're custom made. So, because they're custom made they're expensive and if you go to these competitions, they can go three, five, $4,000 for one dress. And so, my partner always wanted to learn how to make those costumes because they're not made the same way regular clothing is made. And there was literally no information out there how to make a ballroom dance outfits. We saw it as an opportunity to create a product and if you look at the ballroom dancing and people who know how to make costumes, what do they want to do? They want to make costumes and for me it was how stupid. It's time-consuming it takes you 80 hours to complete one dress. Yes. You're going to get paid $5,000 for it or a little bit less, but you, you put so much work into it. How about creating instructional videos to teach the world on how to make ballroom dance costumes, but we didn't know how to do it. Well, we found a designer from New York that knew how to do this. I had a video camera. I knew how to make instructional videos because I already made value investing in university at that point. So, I already invested in the camera and I said, "Look, let's make instructional videos. There's no one in the world doing it. I have the camera. You do it. You create these videos." We created like six instructional videos on how to make a dress, how to make a shirt for a guy, how to make pants for a guy and it turned out to be like 13 videos we released them. And we started selling them all over the world. I mean, you name the country, China, Germany, any country Ecuador, because there was nothing out there. So, if you actually go to Google and YouTube and you type how to make ballroom dresses, our stuff is going to come up because no one else bothers to do it. Every other costume designer is wasting their time making dresses and we made the DVDs. So, it took us what a week or something to put it together. This was a lot of work but we made like over $60,000 selling those DVDs all over the world and we didn't spend a penny on marketing. So, these are the kinds of things that I've been doing over the years. And it always thinking like, how can I create a product that doesn't take a lot of my time is scalable, has huge profit margins and I have more products. A little product like this that it's not a huge money maker, but it allowed me to go through these tough times. It allowed me to create income stream that I didn't have to have a job for the last 10 years because of these little products.
Ney Torres: [00:21:17] My respect, man. I admire you, hustler. I really like that… well I also have paid my fair share too… but I've also gone through four or five years where everything I touched just goes goes to hell and just nothing, nothing works, but what keeps you going? Because you didn't stop, you didn't sell your stock and didn’t go to find a job or something else. What kept you going?
Mariusz Skonieczny: [00:21:44] I don't know. I don't know. Sometimes when so many things go bad your way, you like reach deep inside and you realize that you're stronger, you are stronger than you thought. And I remember one time I was looking at this motivational guy was talking about failure and I will never forget, I don't know what his name is, but he said something like, "If you fail so many times in a row, think of it as a down payment for future success." I mean, I literally cried when I heard that because this was at the time where it was bad and little did I know that I was just around the corner to hit, I mean the best home run I could have ever imagined.
Ney Torres: [00:22:38] And best homerun I have ever heard of too in investing, by the way. I've been studying this for 15 years and 400 baggers is something you just don't hear about. Maybe a myth… now it's just unbelievable. And it just cannot imagine the moment you were… because what you found, people have to understand is what you found is not luck. It took a lot of skill and a lot of hustling. I don't even know how you -- I've heard to before, but can you tell me the story, how did you find Oroco and all of a sudden, what did you feel that moment you were holding or looking at those pieces of paper and be like, "Oh my God."
Mariusz Skonieczny: [00:23:17] Well, I mean, I found it because I held a different stock in the mining industry. That was a complete disaster, but that company bought a property from Oroco in 2014. So, I was aware of Oroco in 2014 when it was at 1 cent, one penny. At that point, I didn't buy it. Well, I bought a little bit, but I didn't buy a lot of it because it was a completely different thesis. It was trading for less than cash. I knew that there was something going on with some copper. Copper that they told me in a conversation that, "Oh, we're involved in this copper play." I didn't know the name. I didn't know. It was like, "Oh, a small percentage." It was nothing there. It was nothing there to interest me, but as with many of my investments, I just keep following them, keep following them and one time, three years later, I saw unusual activity on the CEO was buying stock and I looked into it. I found this website about the lawsuit I called the company confirmed. So, you're right. When I looked at it at that point, I couldn't believe my eyes. I think I bought like 700,000 shares the first day or couple of days. And I went to sleep and I couldn't sleep. And I said, I need to buy 1.4 million shares. I need to just buy so much that's humanly possible. I remember also that day I was reading this book and I took a picture and that day of the quote, and it said something like, "That one of the successes in life is to be able to recognize when something -- forget about that. I can't even remember the quote, but it was very profound. It was something about like, you need to know when to say no to an opportunity. And I just literally took a picture of the quote and I think it's somewhere in my phone. That's what happened back then. It was just like, I couldn't sleep the next day. I woke up, sold a bunch of my positions and load it up like never before, and the rest is history.
Ney Torres: [00:26:15] Well, man. Wow. I'm reading one of your books and I'm doing some due diligence in tankers and you put some videos out there, so that was, that's how I found you but then I'm reading your books. And I before the interview and I find the last page, like 10 minutes before the interview, but Oroco has been explained, and Im like “what?!” And then we have that each of you and I'm like, forget about the tankers. Talk to me about the Oroco and what I've seen since April is even more interesting. Just like you created a group, you created your own webpage. By the way, what's the name of the webpage?
Mariusz Skonieczny: [00:26:56] Microcap Explosions.
Ney Torres: [00:26:57] And you post in there your best ideas basically. And you created a group, not only that you created this web page, you created a group that will raise money to invest in Oroco. And that will you become your own catalyst into the stock, which just blows my mind, like what I've seen in the last couple of months, have you done? It's been really inspiring. How did that happen?
Mariusz Skonieczny: [00:27:26] Well, it actually started with the tankers. I got involved with the tankers and started making videos about the tankers and the kind of attention that I got was just mind blowing because the last four, three or four years, mostly I was talking about Oroco because it was my biggest position and there was really not much to talk about. So, I talked about Oroco and you have 20, 30 people following you, but nothing big. At that time, I had a Twitter account and someone reminded me, "Hey you have a Twitter account. I'm like, Oh really? And Oh, you have like 400 followers. Oh, I didn't know. Okay." So, I started making videos about tankers and the amount of publicity that I got from these tankers was just mind-boggling. I mean, it was crazy. Because I'm like, "Yeah, tankers are good, but don't you people have anything else to do other than talk about the tankers?" I mean, it was exciting. It was something new to me and I did own the tankers. So, when I own something and then I can be passionate about talking about it because I'm not just I'm truly owning it. So, I believe in it. And so, my channel started to grow, and my number of YouTube followers started to grow and more and more people were kind of asking if I have a newsletter and I used to have a newsletter in the and it was actually during the time that the mining industry destroyed me. So, I was obviously talking about some of the miners and they lost money. So, didn't go that well and also, I was only charging like $199 per year and it was just consuming all my time. I did it four, five years during those horrible five-years. And after that I was like, "Okay, I'm not going to be working 40-hour weeks. And writing a newsletter that makes me $10,000 a year. I can go and flip burgers at. McDonald's probably make more money. So, I stopped that newsletter and then when people in 2020 started asking me about, "Hey, do you have something that I can subscribe to? I was like, Oh, not again. No, I don't want to do it. I I've done it before. Not interested." But people kept asking me. So, then at some point I was like, "Fine, fine. I'm going to make a video and I'm just going to say it like I don't want to, I pretty much said it. Look, I don't freaking want to do it, but you keep bugging me to do it. So, let me do this. If I were to do this and let's, I said, let's call it Microcap Explosions. If I were to do this, number one, it's not going to be cheap. Because I'm not wasting my time for $200 a month, I said, it's going to be $1,500 and that's it. And if there is enough interest, then I'll do it. If there is not, I'm not doing it." So, it's up to you guys and I'm saying this on the video, it's up to you guys. Here is a signup box. If you are interested put your name, email and if I get enough people, I'll do it. And I said, and don't play games with me here. Don't put your name there, if you halfway interested that I'm not interested in maybes, I'm interested in people who are going to do it. So, I put it out there. I put the video out there, I put the sign-up box and I was like, okay, let's go. I have a gas station, 20 minutes’ walk. I went to the gas station to get like some junk food and pop and I'm like, okay, see what happens? 30 minutes later, I come back and there's like 30 or 40 people that already signed up. So, I was like, Holy shit. Okay. I guess there is interest. So, so then I'm like, okay, we're doing it within a week I built a website. And now we have about 150 members. Now that we have this membership website where I present them with my best ideas that most of them. Right now, the ideas that are we have about 10 ideas all of the 10 I own but there might be an idea in the future that I will write about that I don't own because I only have limited amount of money, but right now everything is that I own is there. So, one of the things that I wanted to do for my members is to give them access to the management because I always pick up the phone and I called the management. So, I was doing interviews with management and I also thought, well how about doing like a live call with and I asked Oroco like, "I started this, would you do a live call with me where I invite my members and they listened to you and then they can ask you questions. Oh yeah, sure. Let's do this." So, we did this and one of the members. I said at the end of the presentation how can we participate in private placements and that really just kind of surprised me. I didn't think about it. I participated at that time in one private placement, but it didn't even occur to me like, "Oh, there might be out of people that are interested in it." So, that's kind of how it started. And I thought to myself, I called Oroco after this and I said if there is interest for raising money, like, would you be interested in that and say, well, there's enough interest. We can definitely consider it. So, I sent out an email to all of the people and I said if there was a private placement, can you guys give me an idea? Are you interested? And if you are like at what amount would you do? And within three days, a hundred people responded. I started adding the amounts and it's like $4 million. I was like, Oh my God. So, then I called Oroco and I said, look, forget the hedge funds, forget the majors. Fuck them all. We can do this on our own then they were like, Oh wow. $4 million. We can do it. That's how the first private placement came along. So, that was at 60 cents. We as a group… and it wasn't just Microcap Explosion members, but we were more at that time we were more than 50% of the placement. But that placement, which was I think in September, that was the catalyst. Because at that time, people were like, where are you going to get the money from? How are you going to raise the money for drilling? And this entire time I was hearing, “Oh, this hedge fund is interested. That hedge fund is interested”. So, when this came along, like I said, fuck the hedge funds, screw those stupid idiots. They can't see value. We'll do it ourselves. So, that's how the first private placement came along. And you know what happened next? The stock goes from 60 cents to over a dollar and when it was trading around dollar 40 couple of weeks ago, we started having this conversation again. Hey, yes, we have $10 million in the bank or approaching $10 million we need to get our goal is to be at 30 million. We already spent about five on the property. We have 10 in the bank. That's great. But if we could do more than we were not going to have to interrupt the drilling. We can just go straight up all the way to the finish line without needing to raise more money. So, I did the same exercise. I said, Hey guys and your part of Microcap Explosion. So, you've seen that, hey guys if, if we were to do the private placement, because at that time we didn't decide, “Hey, what's your interest?” And then people started responding back. And then I thought that, well, they participated at 60 cents. There's no way they're going to do what they did in the first one, like four and a half a million, no way. I thought they'll probably do a million. Pardon because the price is doubled. The price was to like 140 and then I didn't even know at that time what it would be priced at. But I still didn't think they were going to do a lot and then start email starts coming in and I'm like, wow, we're three, four, five, six, seven, $8 million and I'm like, this is insane and now in the first private placement, we had like 80 people that participated this time. It's like over a hundred. So, then I'm like, okay, this is what we have. So, it was like, okay, let's do it and we started the private placement and the stock price is a $1.40. It was priced a $1.20, which at that time was like 15% discount. We start submitting. You start submitting the applications and a week later the stock goes crazy. Again, it goes over $2, so I'm sure some of the people were worried, is Oroco going to reprice it? Exactly. What's going to happen? We're going to be able to close it? Well, but that's the thing you get with Oroco is that the integrity is they promise you that they're going to do it and they're going to follow through. And that's what happened. Yes, the stock price ran up to over $2, but it doesn't matter because when we started the private placement then they already reserved the price and people already submitted their applications. Some of them, if you remember, we started on November 20 and this was Friday. This was Friday. And I sent out the applications after the market closed on Friday. And what did I say to people? I said, you have 24 hours to complete the application. And some people were like, "Really? Oroco wants us to complete the application over the weekend. I said, no, it has nothing to do with Oroco. I want you to finish it in 24 hours because I know if I tell you have 36 hours, you're going to take a week." So, really from Friday to Sunday, 80% of the applications were submitted and people already started wiring money and yes, it took two weeks because of situations like yourself, for example I mean, you were holding the private placement, you were delaying it and I mean, you and other people because you couldn't get the money fast enough. You had to go and wire it from here. Why from there, but that's why it took so long.
Ney Torres: [00:38:40] Yeah. It's such a short notice and I wanted to raise my amount to the last minute. And then I got an email saying, sure, you can raise it and the next thing we're closed. And I was like, Oh my God.
Mariusz Skonieczny: [00:38:50] Well, I mean, think about the pressure within the company where the stock is hitting $2 and I'm not saying they told me this but if I'm the CEO, the stock is running to $2 and I'm doing my private placement at 1.20. Of course, you're going to be like, Oh, there's going to be a lot of angry people but you know that you started it you got a hundred or 150 people involved. You have to follow through with the promise and close it. And because it's relationships, but the bottom line is that so the group, my group Microcap Explosions raised like $8.3 million out of 15 and a half. So, if you look at it, just like you said, we are the catalyst. And us and other people that Oroco already has relationships. We created this. The company’s market cap went from 4 cents to whatever 30 without us. And then in July or whatever we appeared and we just ignited this thing and pretty much created $400 million market cap while the professionals, hedge funds, all of them missed it. And I kind of find it funny because I see these knuckleheads on Twitter talking all kinds of nonsense about whatever they want to come up with, but the reality is that they missed it. And the reality is that the little guys, all of the little guys like us saw the opportunity, finance the company ourselves and create a success without praying to hedge funds and brokers. Please, please give us money for drilling. No, we're like, we don't need you. We can do it on our own and especially now that they have $30 million. Hedge funds, you know what you can do. I'm not going to say what I really want to say because I might get in trouble with Oroco for swearing a little bit too much.
Ney Torres: [00:41:06] And the podcat too, and the Apple podcast so have you thought about starting your own hedge fund?
Mariusz Skonieczny: [00:41:12] Me? No. Well, see, that's the thing. That's the thing is that the experience that I had during those five years that destroyed me. Because yes, I started managing money in 2009 made huge amounts of money in 2009, but you know how it is in managing money, they want to see results. So, yeah, after I was up 400% in 2009. I got a lot of clients and then they did okay in 2011, 2012. And then those five years absolutely destroyed me. I lost every single client except three. And those three that stayed with me every single one became a millionaire. One guy started with $30,000 and he just emailed me last week like I cannot believe I started with $30,000 and I'm a millionaire. I mean, of course I could say, Hey I'm the greatest thing on the planet. Give me money. No, no, thank you. I just don't want to do this anymore. Too much stress instead here's my website, Microcap Explosions. Give me your $1,500 a year. Do whatever the hell you want with your money if you lose it, don't complain to me but be responsible for your own investment decisions. I'm just providing you with ideas. I tell you what I invest in and you do what you want with this money. That's how I want it. Yes, I can have a plan to be the next Bill Ackman or whatever. I really don't care. I just want to have a good life does it really make any difference if I have several million or billion who cares it's it doesn't matter.
Ney Torres: [00:43:10] Exactly. That's what a good value investor will say. All right, man. It's been really a pleasure to talk to you, man. And hear more about your story anything else you would like to say before we finish this episode?
Mariusz Skonieczny: [00:43:23] No. No, thank you thank you for chatting again. And let's continue monitoring some of the investments that we have, continue monitoring Oroco and I just hope that we all prosper.
Ney Torres: [00:43:38] I like to think in relationships in decades, so I'm sure we'll be seeing each other for a while. Well, thank you so much. This is all for today. See you on the next occasion.