Steve McDonald: Hi, everybody, I’m Steve McDonald. This is your Market Wake-Up Call. If you’re a fan of my “Slap in the Face” Award, you’re going to love today’s call. It flies in the face of what the mainstream media has been reporting since the Obama days: the idea that only the top 1% in this country can make any money.

Chief Trends Strategist Matthew Carr, our guest today and the editor of The VIPER Alert, was a poor kid who made it off the bottom. He’s here to tell you how he did it and to share the market and practical wisdom he developed in the process, which he used to make a fortune. I’m going to add a few tidbits as well. Most people call them street smarts, but no matter what name you give them, I know after you finish watching this video, you too will be a believer in Matthew’s system.

Welcome, Matthew.

Matthew Carr: Hey, thanks for having me, Steve.

Steve McDonald: It’s my pleasure. Let’s get right to it. Tell us about your start, what you learned on your way up and how that has fit into your system, which, by the way, has the highest returns in the history of The Oxford Club. That’s not too shabby.

Matthew Carr: Well, it all goes back to the fact that growing up, my family didn’t have a lot. We were constantly on the move, chasing money from California to West Virginia to Florida – all over. And because of that, not having any money, when I wanted money for comic books or anything that I wanted to buy, I had to go out and make it on my own. I had to earn my own money. So my siblings and I all started working very young.

We worked in our dad’s restaurants, mowed lawns, pulled weeds, cleared brush, and handed out flyers, menus, or coupons to video stores door to door, back when that was the thing. This wasn’t while we were in high school or college. This was while we were in middle school. Today, it’s a much different world. What my childhood instilled in me is to be unafraid of hard work. When you grow up poor, it’s the last thing you ever want to be again, and you realize there aren’t any shortcuts. That approach never goes away.

There are strategists and investors out there who have better educations than I have and who are smarter than I am, but I know I can outperform them because I am not afraid to get in the trenches and do the hard work. So every day before the sun comes up, I’m already at my desk reading research reports, running screens and pulling data on companies. That’s how my systems continue to outperform… because they have all that hard work put into them.

Steve McDonald: In your most recent report, you state that the success that you’ve had trading – and it has been significant – is the only way you can make money in the market. Talk about how you came to that conclusion and why you think it works so well. Just for the folks who may not know you too well, what was that record return… 1,500% or something?

Matthew Carr: The record return was Columbia Sportswear (Nasdaq: COLM) for a 2,733% gain.

Steve McDonald: Good God.

Matthew Carr: And that was just over a couple of months’ time. If you annualize that, that’s a really high return.

In terms of what I think are the best ways to make money in this market… there’s always been this debate between value investing and momentum investing. And there are plenty of strategies out there that focus on each. Well, I happen to like both. I want great, high-growth companies that are at the top of their industries in terms of revenue, profitability, earnings and income. They’re gaining market share and have these enormous opportunities on the horizon. But I want to buy shares of those companies at a steep discount to future growth. So I want the best of both worlds. To me, that’s the only way to make money in the markets right now.

I spent a few years designing and refining a system that does exactly that. It looks at the whole universe of stocks and pinpoints the companies that have these fantastic growth and momentum metrics, but also have shares that are trading often significantly below their 52-week highs and are cheaper based on future earnings compared with their competitors. That’s the key. And the great thing is in these volatile markets like we have now, the system finds more and more opportunities each week.

Steve McDonald: I love sell-offs. I’ve said that. I’ve written about that a hundred times. There’s nothing better in the market than a sell-off. It’s the only way I can make any money.

Matthew Carr: One of the great pieces of advice I ever learned was when we had a big sell-off early in my career, and I asked, “Should we tell all of our people to sell? Should we tell them to get out?” And the editor, who I actually did not like at that time, told me something that changed my life.

He said, “Pull up a historic chart of the S&P 500, all the way back. Go in there and find the dot-com crash, Black Monday, Black Tuesday, Black Friday and the Great Depression. Find all these big sell-offs. They’re not big. They’re just blips.” The markets eventually head in only one direction, and that’s up. And so as long as you always remember that, you’re always going to make money.

Steve McDonald: I hear this all the time from people. They come to me with their portfolios and say, “Hey, will you look at what I’m doing? I’m not making any money.” I said, “Well, you’re earning 4% and your advisor’s charging you 1%, so they’re taking 25% of your earnings.”

But you say in your report, “You have to stop Wall Street from siphoning money off your accounts.” Tell our folks why this is so important and tell them how to do it.

Matthew Carr: Well, last year we had this unprecedented moment in the markets. It’s not that it wasn’t a terrible year for investors… it was. But it was the first time that the hedge fund industry outperformed the S&P 500 in a decade. It did this not with these enormous gains, but it simply did it by losing less than the S&P did. So there are investors who are paying massive fees to these hedge funds, and the only two times they’ve beaten the markets in the past decade were in 2008 and 2018.

My VIPER System portfolio returned more than 20% last year. We had gains as high as 850% on plays like Vipshop (NYSE: VIPS). Compare that with the S&P 500, which lost about 4.4%, and the hedge fund index, which lost a little bit more than 4%. We outperformed by focusing on companies that are the best of both worlds, those value and momentum stocks. These high-growth companies that are trading at a discount.

The way I see it, investors have two choices right now. They can keep doing what they’ve been doing – following bad advice from Wall Street and paying big fees to hedge funds – and continue losing money like they did last year. Or they can break free from that and start targeting stocks that offer high revenue growth and best in class returns that are also the cheapest compared with their peers. That’s the only way right now that I think you can make money as well as beat the market.

Steve McDonald: Matthew’s got a full report. Just click on the link below. It’s all about making it off the bottom, but more importantly, how to keep Wall Street from taking it from you. This guy’s numbers are for real. You’ve got to take a look at this one. I promise you it’s going to be worth your time.

Matthew, as always, thank you so much for being with us.

Matthew Carr: Thanks for having me, Steve.

Steve McDonald: It’s my pleasure, and for everybody here at the Market Wake-Up Call, I’m Steve McDonald. Thank you so much for being a part of this. We’ll see you next week.