Wall Street Unplugged
Episode: 822November 18, 2021

From stock-picking monkeys to security tokens: A 40-year history of Curzio Research

Today’s guest is someone you may have talked to personally: my sister, Christine Curzio. She’s head of human resources and customer service here at Curzio Research (among the many other hats she wears).

Christine shares some of the wildest reader issues we’ve faced at Curzio… and how we implement our mission of always doing right by you, the customer. [1:25]

Now, customer service isn’t all fires to put out… Christine highlights some great feedback she’s received from folks looking out for us. [5:28]

But if you’re thinking, “the customer is always right,” well… think again. We explain why you’ve got to protect your brand and employees… and even be willing to part ways with customers under certain circumstances. [7:28]

We reminisce about the old days working with our late father… and break down the major industry changes we’ve seen over the years—like the advent of security tokens. And Christine shares a funny story involving our dad competing against a stock-picking monkey. [10:05]

We also share some amazing gifts we’ve received from customers… [17:40]

Finally, Christine lays out some key “backend” factors and growing pains that every business owner should be aware of… and how to adapt. [19:55]

Today’s episode of Wall Street Unplugged is sponsored by Masterworks.io, which gives individual investors access to elite blue-chip art.

With inflation on the rise, more and more investors are looking for alternative assets—those proven to hold their value…

And fine art has a better track record during high inflation than both the S&P 500 and gold—returning 23% on average vs. 3.8% and 0.2%, respectively.

For a limited time, Wall Street Unplugged listeners can skip the art auction waitlist—and get immediate access to what the Wall Street Journal calls one of the “hottest markets on Earth.”

Inside this episode:
  • Frank’s sister, Christine Curzio, head of human resources and customer service [1:25]
  • Some great feedback we’ve received from folks looking out for us [5:28]
  • Why you need to part ways with customers under certain circumstances [7:28]
  • How the financial newsletter industry has changed [10:05]
  • Some of the amazing gifts we’ve received from customers [17:40]
  • How to adapt to business growing pains [19:55]
Transcript

Wall Street Unplugged | 822

From stock-picking monkeys to security tokens: A 40-year history of Curzio Research

Announcer: Wall Street Unplugged looks beyond the regular headlines heard on mainstream financial media, to bring you unscripted interviews and breaking commentary direct from Wall Street, right to you on main street.

Frank Curzio: What’s going on out there? It’s November 18th. I’m Frank Curzio, host of the Wall Street Unplugged podcast, where I break down the headlines and tell you what’s really moving these markets. So, I have a unique interview set up today. So, it’s someone many of you are probably familiar with, since you talk to her personally. I’ve got you guys thinking right now, who have no idea who it is. Her name, which we share the last name, is Christine Curzio. She runs numerous divisions here, but you probably know her through customer service, but also does tons of other things for us, amazing things, which she’s going to get to in a minute.

Frank Curzio: But we had a couple of people come on and say, “Look, I have great conversations with your sister. She has a great job, customer service, and you should get on a podcast.” And I wanted to get you on the podcast, Chris. Listen, thanks so much for coming on because this is going to be a really funny interview, because you are the person behind the scenes that gets all these crazy emails and all the crazy stuff. And there are other people that do a lot of work for me, even though my face is what they see. But the people behind the scenes really makes the engine run. I just want to say, thanks for coming on, and thanks for about to share lots of funny stories right now. How’s it going?

Christine Curzio: It’s good. It’s challenging sometimes. And as you know, when you are ready to call customer service, you’re not calling customer service because you’re happy and you want to say, “Hey, I love you guys.” You’re calling because you’re pissed off. You’re angry. You’re so pissed off at the company that you have to call or email customer service and complain and scream and yell and curse. We’ve had colorful adjectives thrown at us, like you can’t even imagine.

Frank Curzio: Like what? What are some of the things that people think of us?

Christine Curzio: Oh my gosh, the F word, three times over and F word and F this. There’re words that I don’t even think that are in any dictionary yet, but it’s amazing. And sometimes, I read these and I laugh because the people are so angry because they either press the button twice and charge their card twice for a subscription. And they want their $4 back. Or they didn’t read that email they received that said, “We are going to charge you for your upcoming renewal of your subscription.” And they didn’t stop that from going through. So they call us, they email us, they’re so angry.

Christine Curzio: And to me, we are an up and up company. We’re not trying to take anyone’s money. We want you to be happy. We want you to like what you read. We want you to love what you buy. We don’t want to take your $79 or your $4. I’ll give it back to you. Call me, I’ll refund your $4. It’s no big deal, but I got to tell you the emails that come in and the phone calls. I mean, these people are angry. They’re angry birds. It’s amazing.

Frank Curzio: Well, it’s funny because a lot of times, when I look at the customer service aspect, they’re always the most important to me because one of the things I love about our subscribers too, is when there’s something wrong, we’ll get to those emails in a second. But when there’s something wrong and our team’s really great, there’s a whole editing process, we’re efficient, we’re very fast. I do videos. We get them up the next day. I know, I’ve been in this industry my whole life. It usually takes 3, 4, 5 days from the time someone starts writing an idea, to get it out. We do it the day before and get it out to you, and time’s of the essence with a lot of these stocks.

Frank Curzio: But just to see those emails come in when a link isn’t working, or a question we have with Crypto Intelligence, which is cool because I recommended something recently in Crypto Intelligence, it was on the Kraken exchange. And that was the easiest way to buy it. And it wasn’t on Coinbase or Gemini. And when certain subscribers, and I didn’t know this, because even when you look at Kraken, it says it’s open in all 50 states. It’s not, it’s open to every state except for New York and Washington. And we have subscribers all over the world, really, in every state.

Frank Curzio: And we started getting questions in, and then you’re like, there’s like five or six. And then you’ll email me and say, “I’m getting 10 of these things, 12 of these things in there.” And that gets relayed back to me. And I’m like, “Okay, let me send an alert and get it back to them.”

Frank Curzio: But the communication part’s amazing. And like you said, with customer service, we’re an independent company. I have to show you gains, or you’re not going to subscribe anymore. Also, I was always a believer that, look, if we are full of shit and we give you a product that nobody likes, then you should be able to cancel right away. And a lot of times I bought stuff where I can’t find where the hell to cancel, how to do it. There’s phone numbers, it’s very easy to do.

Frank Curzio: Like you said, for us, the worst thing is chargebacks. Chargebacks are the worst thing. That’s when you call your credit card car company instead of the actual company, even when you call a credit card company, they’ll advise you to call the company, because chargebacks are really, really bad, especially in our business, because there’s a lot of people out there that write really crazy reports and gets lots of lots of chargebacks. When people come into our products, at least they’re solid. They’re good. Most people are like, “This is amazing.” They see videos and stuff, but just seeing that whole process is such a big deal. Because a lot of times when links aren’t working, you’re able send it out right away to other people and down the chain and immediately we’re able to get to it. Which is pretty cool, right?

Christine Curzio: Mm-hmm. Yes. Not only do we have complaints, there are a few and far between some subscribers and non-subscribers that contact us and say, “You’re doing a great job,” or, “We love Frank. He was so funny on this podcast the other day.” But we also have some great subscribers that contact us and say, “Hey, I think there’s a typo in one of your newsletters.” And we appreciate that. We have some kick-ass marketing and editorial folks here and they catch everything. But there is, on occasion, there is something that might slip through the cracks and I’ll call the editorial team or our developer. And they are Johnny-on-the-spot. They fix it right away.

Christine Curzio: One funny thing, the other day we had a guy that said, he sent me a screenshot, he tried look up curzioresearch.com on his smartphone. And he said it’s all fuzzy. It doesn’t look right. And I thought, all right. He said it looked fuzzy on his Apple smartphone. And I said, “Well, get rid of the iPhone and use a Samsung, like I have.” I don’t think he appreciated that too much. And I guess we better watch out because we do have these podcasts on apple, but he laughed. I laughed. And you know what? I sent that email over to one of our developers and sure enough, he fixed whatever bug was there. And 1, 2, 3, it worked. It was beautiful.

Christine Curzio: So, we have a large team here at Curzio Research, and everyone is Johnny-on-the-spot, 24/7, just about. So, we don’t work only nine to five. We’re on the weekends. We’re answering emails on the weekends, at night, holidays, because let’s face it: That’s when a lot of our subscribers have some downtime from their regular jobs, and they’re online reading their emails. And they’re looking at these things over the weekend when they have time. So, it’s important for us to answer that in a timely fashion.

Frank Curzio: Yeah. It reminds me one of those myths in business too, when they say the customer’s always right. The customer’s not always right.

Christine Curzio: Customer is not always right.

Frank Curzio: He’s not always right. And I’ll tell you why. And a lot of people are like, “No way. The customer’s…” You could be mad and with our service, I’m coming out with picks every month. If we look at this year and we look at, say, Curzio Research Advisory, and I’m being honest with you. Last year was a great year. This year was good. But there was a five-, six-month period where the market didn’t do that well. And yet, it’s near all-time because a lot of big technology companies are there, but 60% of the index was actually down over the past six months.

Frank Curzio: So, if you came in six months ago, you got a couple recommendations that are kind of behind, and you hear the market’s up. So, a lot of it is timing, people getting into crypto news know we did fantastic. But who knows if it goes down 20%, then those people came in the last three months… There’s always going to be people pissed, I understand that. But when you’re in an email and I’ve done this at least twice where I’ve kicked people out of Curzio Research, because you’ve sent me an email and you’re good with this, you never annoy me. But if this was a person, both of these people who had been free people, and they subscribe to our front-end newsletter, and I’ve answered their questions.

Frank Curzio: They ask me questions the time and just, over the years, I remember answering them. And then, when you pull up and Google, you can see how many times these people emailed you… And I answer these questions, and they ripped you, and they were cursing at you, and it was bad. And I actually went to them and I gave it to them. I was like, “We don’t stand for this bullshit.”

Frank Curzio: When you say the customer’s always right, they’re not always right. They’re right most of the time, it’s almost like there’s no stupid questions. There’re stupid questions. You could ask stupid questions. If you’re seeing someone say that you admire, that you influence, that influences you. Don’t ask them a question that you could easily figure out in 10 seconds if you did a Google search, don’t waste your time on that. So, there are stupid questions.

Frank Curzio: Jamie Dimon was doing a big thing and someone raised their hand and said something. He was asking about benefits. And then he was just like, “That’s a terrible question.” In front of the whole company. But I could see that even with customer service, but I didn’t want this whole thing to be about customers, that’s not what it’s about because a lot of people have been following for a long time and the history we been in this business. With our late dad, there was a newsletter for a long time, we’ve been doing this for a long time.

Frank Curzio: What have you seen in terms of difference of the business? Because I’ve been, wow, I feel old now, but close to 30 years, you’re a little bit older than me. So, it’s a little bit longer. But just seeing how the business is different from when we were really young. Dad started this thing, it was pretty cool. It’s a lot of big differences now.

Christine Curzio: My dad started this business, the financial newsletter and what he would do is he would write in his chicken scratch handwriting, and my mom would type up the report. Then, he would send it to the printer. It would take two days to print. So, of course, the stock has moved within those two days, and he would bring all of those paper copies home or to his office, at the time. And my two brothers and I, Frank and Nick, we would fold and stuff envelopes and put labels on those envelopes, take them to the post office in crates, and mail them first-class so that all of his subscribers had those newsletters in their hand within two days. But it was maybe a five day process or four day, max. Now, it’s instantaneous. Frank gets on a podcast and boom, five minutes later, you guys are reading about it. So, times have definitely changed. And dad would definitely be so proud of you, Frank, for everything that you’re doing.

Frank Curzio: Yeah. Maybe a little proud. We definitely followed in his footsteps to the point where focusing on the customer and trying to educate and stuff, that never got lost. I remember somebody coming over and they had 3 million in their account. That was a lot while money at the time too. Managing money, and he’s writing a newsletter, you’ll allow to do both back then. Now, you really have to separate those businesses with the SEC, new laws in the last 15 years. That person came in with a few million dollars, and I think we had maybe 75, 80 million under management. So, it was a pretty sizable out. And I remember him looking at it and he just said, “There’s nothing I can do for you because you’re diversified.” She owned 25 different stocks in all different industries.

Frank Curzio: He’s like, “I’m going to take this, I’m going to take this, I’m going to be charging you and probably own a lot of these stocks.” And that was something I’ll never forget. Because you don’t see, especially on Wall Street, and I’ve been through Wall Street with Cramer and even before that, foreign exchange broker, you don’t see that. Such cutthroat place. And for me, growing up and seeing people who are successful by doing the right thing compared to being wealthy by doing the wrong thing, that always stuck to me. And it’s just so easy to take advantage of people in this industry. And you can get away with it. You can take advantage of it. You saw it back in the Merrill Lynch days because you worked at Lehman for 10 years.

Frank Curzio: I remember Henry Blodget came out with all the internet stocks, I mean, they made billions off of that, and they got fined whatever it was, the firm got fined. He got kicked out of the business. Now, he owns business, inside of making a fortune. But a lot of those people got killed and nothing comes of it. Merrill’s still around by Bank of America. And just to see how this business that I’m in, or this industry is, and how it takes advantage of so many people and being able to be a voice out there going, a lot of this is bullshit, you need to know that.

Frank Curzio: It’s cool. It results in sometimes not having as many friends, have great contacts, but really, telling the truth. But that’s something that we’ve seen. We were around when CNBC was just starting, and then dad called the crash, 1987 crash in writing, which was a big deal. Everybody calls a crash every day now, but there’s only 10 people listen to, and then we had this small, tiny office. And you had all these news vans and that’s when everything took off, he was on Dateline. You could tell them the thing about the monkey. I don’t know if everybody knows that. I don’t know if it-

Christine Curzio: The Wall Street Journal hosted a Dartboard contest, and they wanted to take a chimpanzee and pit him against, I think, three super financial advisors. And our dad was one of them, and the Chimp’s name was Casey, and it was all over the Wall Street Journal. It was amazing. It was a crazy article. But ultimately, my father was winning for a long time. And I think after three or four years, then the chimps picks ultimately won out. But it brought us and him so much publicity, it was unbelievable. Some people said, “Don’t you feel that going against a monkey isn’t that-“

Frank Curzio: It was the beginning part. So, they picked five stocks each, and it was a monkey against my father. I think they had third graders there or something. I think that was the contest. And third graders dropped, actually got embarrassed, because they started losing. And this turned out to be one of the most watched segments on Dateline before everything’s like the murder mystery now. Dateline used to be current events and stuff like that.

Christine Curzio: It was funny.

Frank Curzio: Yeah. And he was on, I think six or seven times, which was kind of-

Christine Curzio: Unheard of.

Frank Curzio: A record amount of people watching it because the monkey after the first three weeks, they picked five stocks, the monkey picked five random stocks. I think my dad picked Boeing, GE, McDonald’s. Five stocks, and one of the companies he picked-

Christine Curzio: Oh, Kroger.

Frank Curzio: He picked Kroger. That Monkey actually picked Kroger, which made his story even better. And this is real. We have this on video. So, I have this on video or VCR tape. So I’m going to put this on my YouTube page. Fantastic. My dad’s a really funny guy when it came to that, and he had the monkey, one of the picks, I think he was some industry, something got taken over. So, he was kicking my dad’s ass off the beginning. They’re like, “This monkey’s doing…” And they really built it up, best guy in stocks, best stock picker ever. The Wall Street Journal, Dartboard contest. He has the all-time wins in that. And you’re talking about lots of famous people who were in there.

Frank Curzio: He won it more times than anyone else. And then as time went on, then dad won. And for me, I’m like when he asked me about it, asked you about it, he’s like, “What do you think about this?” I was like, “It’s a good idea. Just don’t lose.” And then as he was losing, he made more fun of it. And he actually went to the zoo, was hanging out with the monkey, holding the monkey with different segments and stuff and said, “If the monkey outperforms me, I’m going to hire him.” So, it was a big deal. There was a six episode thing which is hilarious. And it was really good at the end. I think he finally won, but just the publicity we got from that and going to stations and meeting Maria Bartiromo when she was a kid, and all these people going to Bloomberg when Bloomberg wasn’t that big and stuff, but just going through that system is pretty cool to see you there and where we are now, I guess. Right?

Christine Curzio: Yeah.

Frank Curzio: Which is awesome. So, I want to say this, you’re in Florida right now.

Christine Curzio: Yes.

Frank Curzio: You came to Florida. Thank you for bringing your cold to Florida. So, I don’t know if it’s COVID or not. I shouldn’t even joke around. She’s like, “No, don’t say COVID.” It’s not COVID, but anyway, I know you want to hang out a little bit more, but I know you’ve been under the weather a little bit, but you plan on moving to Florida, what? You coming here? What’s going on?

Christine Curzio: Well, I don’t know. I have two kids that still live with me, and I’m not sure when they’re leaving, you know how that goes. They’re 20 and 21. So, I feel bad kicking them out. But if they kind of get the hint, maybe I could sell the house in New York and move down to Florida and be with the family down here. So, I’m looking. I’ve got a lot of friends that live down here that are snowbirds here. So, it is very nice here, especially in January, February, March, just to get out of the New York weather. But I have plenty of friends in the customer support emails that have offered to show me around Florida. I always throw humor into the emails, “Where do you live in Florida?” So, I’ve made plenty of friends in the customer support.

Frank Curzio: Alaska, someone sent you something, right?

Christine Curzio: Yes. There was a guy who was angry about something, and it turns out that he’s a fisherman in the oceans of Alaska, and he invited me to come on his next fishing trip and sent me all sorts of pictures of all the fish that he caught. So, that was really nice. I mean, a package in the mail with some fish, would’ve been nice too.

Frank Curzio: That was really remarkable. This is something that really touched me, was the person that was a Navy SEAL, that actually sent an email.

Christine Curzio: Yes. He’s a Navy military subscriber. He’s a Master Chief and hovercraft pilot. He sent us pictures and so many gifts, and one of them is a paddle with some hand stitched information on it. I think Frank is going to show that, it’s hanging on his wall. And it’s signed-

Frank Curzio: I’ve shown this once before. I think maybe through subscribers or something.

Christine Curzio: It’s an amazing piece that he sent and we’re so appreciative.

Frank Curzio: It’s from his group and what he did, they listen to the podcast all the time and just teaching them. And then on the back of the paddle, he has his whole entire unit sign it saying, “Thank you so much for the lessons you taught me.” And this is hand-stitched. Unbelievable, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Something that really did touch me and just so many great people out there. And that’s one of the things I really love about the job, helping people and stuff like that. But not all the emails are bad. Again, it is customer service, but guys, just let you know, if you’re emailing, that’s important part of our business. I always say that with Amazon, Amazon’s the best, because something could be broken and you call, they don’t even ask any questions, they automatically… They send you something else automatically.

Frank Curzio: And you know, it results in me constantly telling that story to everybody else and that spreads. So when you have good customer service, when you’re able to figure out these problems and people are going to be and maybe you come the wrong time. Maybe you have a couple bad stock picks, and I get that. That’s fine. But our job is to make sure that we’re helping you if you have problems. And Chris, you’re doing a good job with that.

Frank Curzio: But I don’t want to leave it there, Chris, because that’s not the only thing you do because when it comes to HR, is important. We’re a small company, so you’re able to do HR and customer service. But another thing is, talk about the business you started with credit card processing, because that helped us out tremendously. And guys, listen up, if you have a business or if you’re a financial newsletter publisher, please listen to this part because this is one of the mistakes that I made running the business that I didn’t think it was a big deal. When everybody wants to run their own business, they want to do what they’re great at.

Frank Curzio: They don’t understand that when we started getting bigger it’s like, holy shit, HR, what do you mean? What do I do with HR? Wait a minute. Accounting, we have to have all this stuff in place where it was just like, “Hey yeah, that guy’s good. Give him a thousand dollars for consulting fee.” It’s a company now, it’s corporation, but the credit card processing, holy shit. I mean, that is very, very serious. And talk about that because you started your own company and that has been a tremendous help for us because we ran into a little bit of trouble with that.

Christine Curzio: Yeah. So, as Frank mentioned, I’ve been in the financial industry my entire life, I was in Lehman Brothers for about 10 years, then jumped over to work for one or two credit card processing companies. And then, I decided that I’m going to start my own, it’s Simply Payments.

Christine Curzio: And one of the important things about an online e-commerce business is that you definitely have to have some sort of a refund policy. You have to be in touch with your customers. One of the things that you don’t want to ever have is an enormous amount of chargebacks. When someone calls their credit card bank and lets their bank know that they didn’t like or never ordered this and they want to refund. What they should always do is call the company first. And that’s what we always tell everyone, all of our subscribers, if you’re not happy with something, call us, we’ll talk about a refund, prorated refund. These things are extremely important.

Christine Curzio: In addition, once you hit a certain percentage of chargebacks, the credit card company can actually shut you down. I’ve seen that with so many other companies out there. The e-commerce industry is very high risk because you don’t have to have the credit card in hand. And it’s a little bit of a dangerous situation if you are in the e-commerce business and you don’t pay attention to your customer service. So, being in the card industry has definitely helped us tremendously. We are able to minimize those chargebacks, minimize the request for the chargebacks and also manage the credit card processing companies expectations.

Christine Curzio: There’s a lot of things that we can do. There’s some things that we can’t do, but being in the payments industry, especially now after COVID, no one really uses cash anymore. Everyone is using cards. So, this is something that, again, being ethical right from the get go.

Christine Curzio: I remember my parents had their business, their financial newsletter business, and they had to have a credit card machine so that they could charge people for subscriptions for my father’s newsletter. And those salespeople for those credit card companies were terrible. They would charge a thousand, $2,000 for a credit card terminal. Now, you can get those credit card terminals for a hundred and $150.

Christine Curzio: And I do the same thing, as our parents and Frank, I talk to the people and I make sure that they are comfortable with what they have. I don’t try to tell someone, “Oh, you should switch over to me right away.” We don’t do that. I’ll tell them, “Let me look at your statement. Let me see what your credit card rates are. You’re fine. The rates that you have right now are fine. Stay with the credit card company that you’re with. I’d love your business, but your rates are not so bad.” So, it’s all about being ethical as well.

Frank Curzio: And one of the things that I would say is because what our business, and if you’re thinking about doing what I’m doing, the barriers to entry are extremely high if you get past, I would say a half, a million dollars. Below that, nobody cares. It’s okay. But when our business, when we started growing this, we send out promotions. And in the two time we could generate a lot of money, in two weeks, if the promotion’s really good and people like it, everyone’s signing onto the products. And that’s what we do here, and I want to sell products at the right time. I don’t want to sell a product every single day, every single week. It’s like, “Hey, this is really working. This is what I’ve been telling you to get into crypto. This is what I’m telling you to get into small caps.”

Frank Curzio: And when we do that, we come up with a big promotion and a nice theme, and I’ll go with my copy team and I’ll tell them, “Listen, this is the idea I want people to come in at. This is going to be their first experience. I really like this name. I think they’re going to make money off of it.” And we write a whole copy package. And when people come in, you generate a lot of that money in a week or two. And that triggered the credit card process. They basically have a financial publishing industry. They view us the same way they would view as the porno industry, a lot of risky industries. And they held our money, significant amount of money. How long did they hold that at Chris?

Christine Curzio: They held about $500,000 for almost two years.

Frank Curzio: And that was something that I wasn’t prepared for. And you could borrow off that, we didn’t have to. And we had cash in the bank, but it got to the part where it was like, this is two years ago, two and a half years ago before we even did anything with the token where, we weren’t established with them. So, they don’t know who we are. And they’re like, “Who the hell’s generating all this money right away in two weeks. What the hell are you doing? What’d you sell?”

Frank Curzio: So right away, it’s all system based. All red flags go up, and they haul, and they call, and they’re like, we have to wait. Now, they’ll see we have money in the bank, cash balance. We can cover it. They see our reputation, they see our chargebacks so low, but to get to this point was very hard.

Frank Curzio: And that was something that was really unexpected. So, in this business, particularly where it’s like a two-week period you can generate a lot of money where a lot of our sales come in, I would say maybe a two-month period, it’s not like recurring, some of it’s recurring, but our industry it’s like a lot of it would come in certain periods, like a week period, a two-week period over a year, it’s like two months. And that’s what triggers it.

Frank Curzio: But that was something that surprised me that I wasn’t ready for. I’m like, whoa. And thank of out. We were in the right position. And we weren’t spending money wildly and crazy, but $500,000 is a lot to any small business and you’re paying your employees and they’re like, “No, we’re holding this because we want to make sure.” You can get all these cancellations and shit like that. And I’m like, whoa.

Frank Curzio: And that goes to tell you how our industry is because our industry is treated that way. Because there’s a lot of aggressive promos. The reason why I started my own business, it’s a lot of shit out there, and there’s a lot of chargebacks, and once they saw what we did, that was one of the things that came up.

Frank Curzio: But I wanted to break that down, because there are other businesses there that you do in online stuff, but just be prepared for that. That was a risk I didn’t see coming. And you helped out tremendously with that, thank God because that could have significantly hurt the business. Which is crazy. Anyway, so Chris, thanks so much for coming on. I’m curious to see what the emails are going to get. Guys, if you have any negative emails about me, about my performance, Chris, what’s your email? What’s your email, at customer support?

Christine Curzio: Support@thebronxsuit.com.

Frank Curzio: Yes. That’s where it is. But it’s just like our support email and which is why, Chris? What’s our support email? I forget.

Christine Curzio: Support@curzioresearch.com

Frank Curzio: It’s everyone’s first name @curzioresearch.com, but I make them say it anyway. So, it doesn’t matter. Even you, christine@curzioresearch.com. But thanks so much for coming on, Chris. I really appreciate it. You’ve done a fantastic job to see where we are, now. And again, the people behind the scenes, who you don’t hear from, none of this works unless you have those people here, which is amazing. And by the way, her son is Joe, who I have on this podcast, who is the young investor that’s investing. And you guys love those interviews because he was humble enough to come on and talk about his mistakes. I know a lot of people have the same mistakes. We always get great emails from Joe’s on. So, if you’re going to yell at Joe, I wouldn’t do it to Christine. I’d do it to me. Because big mama is going to out.

Christine Curzio: Remember, I see all those emails.

Frank Curzio: She’s got all your addresses, remember that. You got all their addresses. So, think about that before you want to send a negative email and say shit, just remember she’s got your address if you’re a subscriber.

Christine Curzio: That’s right.

Frank Curzio: But thanks so much for coming on, Chris. I really appreciate it.

Christine Curzio: Okay. Thanks for having me.

Frank Curzio: All right. Good stuff. So guys, leave it there. Hopefully, you enjoyed that interview. Look, customer service is extremely important to me, right? For my business. We’re not looking to sell you crap, and it makes no sense for us to sell you something that you’re not going to be happy with. And then a month and a half later, you’re pissed off and you’re sending us negative emails, and you’re pissed off and just writing all bad reviews about us all over the place for the next 12 months.

Frank Curzio: For us as a business. That doesn’t make sense. That never makes sense for us. So, if you do have problems, if you think you could better our products, that’s another way to use customer service as well. But I get updates from customer service all the time. It allows me to send alerts on many of my newsletters to let me know what you guys are thinking, what you guys are focused on. It allows me to gauge sentiment, especially with crypto, where I get lots crypto questions or different things and what people are thinking about. But it’s a very, very important aspect of the business.

Frank Curzio: So, guys, feel free to write in, again, constructive criticism, whatever, it makes our company better. The more things we could fix up and make better, that’s what we’re here folks for long term. Thanks again, Christine, for coming on. Appreciate all your support. Questions and comments are free to email frank@curzioresearch.com. It’s frank@curresearch.com. I appreciate all the support guys. Love you guys. And I’ll see you next week. Take care.

Announcer: Wall Street Unplugged is produced by Curzio Research, one of the most respected financial media companies in the industry. The information presented on Wall Street Unplugged is the opinion of its host and guests. You should not base your investment decisions solely on this broadcast. Remember, it’s your money and your responsibility.

Frank Curzio
Frank Curzio, founder and CEO of Curzio Research, is one of America’s most respected stock experts. His research is regularly featured on media outlets like CNBC’s Kudlow Report, The Call, CNN Radio, ABC News, and Fox Business News. His Wall Street Unplugged podcast—ranked the No. 1 “most listened-to” financial podcast on iTunes—has been downloaded over 12 million times.

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