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?
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