Shownotes
BIO: Edwin Endlich is the Chief Marketing Officer of Wysh and President of the National Alliance for Financial Literacy and Inclusion.
STORY: Edwin’s worst investment was buying Tilray stock at $143 during the early hype of legal cannabis investing. Swept up in the excitement of a “new frontier,” he held on as the price crashed—eventually selling at around 30 cents and losing over 99% of his investment.
LEARNING: The fundamentals always apply, even in new or exciting industries. Don’t let hype replace due diligence.
“We’re in this AI conversation, let’s not forget the fundamentals of the market. Learn from what has happened in this space before. And don’t get too cocky.”
Edwin Endlich
Guest profile
Edwin Endlich is the Chief Marketing Officer of Wysh and President of the National Alliance for Financial Literacy and Inclusion. Edwin has spent his career at the intersection of marketing, fintech, and AI, helping financial institutions tell more human stories in an increasingly digital world. He’s passionate about making financial protection simple, accessible, and even a little more fun — proving you don’t need buzzwords or hype to make banking and technology relevant.
Worst investment ever
There’s nothing quite like the rush of feeling early—early to a trend, early to a movement, early to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. That’s precisely what Edwin felt in 2015–2016, when investing in legal cannabis became possible in parts of the United States.
For the first time, regular people could invest in a newly legalized industry. It felt like history happening in real time, a frontier market ready to explode. Edwin and his friends didn’t want to miss out, especially when companies were going public, and their share prices seemed destined to skyrocket.
One of those stocks was Tilray. At $143 a share, Edwin was convinced he was buying the future. He imagined stock splits, booming demand, and a cannabis empire rising from the ground floor. Instead, he watched that $143 tumble month after month, until he finally sold it for around 30 cents. The emotional rollercoaster of hope, disappointment, and finally acceptance was a journey Edwin will never forget.
A 99.3% loss.
He now calls it his worst investment—not just because of the financial hit, but because of how powerfully excitement and hype clouded his judgment.
Lessons learned
- Every investor thinks their situation is unique. But in reality, the same patterns repeat again and again.
- Markets take time to mature.
- Regulation can shift overnight.
- Early doesn’t always mean right.
- Excitement is not a strategy.
Andrew’s takeaways
- A portfolio isn’t just about diversification by industry or geography; it’s also about diversifying across stages of maturity.
- Stable, well-regulated companies like Coca-Cola or Pepsi behave very differently from early-stage, hype-driven industries, such as the cannabis sector.
- Even large companies, with teams of top analysts, often get it wrong.
Actionable advice
If Edwin could offer one piece of advice to anyone starry-eyed over the next big thing, it would be this:
Do your due diligence. Seriously.
Before you invest in anything—especially something exciting, futuristic, or rapidly trending—slow down and ask:
- Has this been done before?
- What can I learn from past bubbles?
- What does history say about similar innovations?
- Am I investing in fundamentals—or feelings?
Whether it’s cannabis in 2016 or AI in 2024, the pattern is the same. Booms become bubbles. Investors overestimate how fast an industry will mature. And emotion often wins over discipline. But with the right mindset and discipline, you can avoid these pitfalls.
Edwin’s recommendations
Edwin encourages people to empower themselves with real financial knowledge. That’s why he co-founded the National Alliance for Financial Literacy and Inclusion (NAFLI)—a nonprofit dedicated to helping individuals understand money, investing, and financial products.
Whether you’re new to investing or leading a financial institution, NAFLI offers education, tools, and resources to help individuals make more informed financial decisions.
No.1 goal for the next 12 months
Edwin’s goal for the next 12 months is to have a full, uninterrupted conversation with his daughter, one that lasts longer than 10 minutes and isn’t broken by phones, notifications, or distractions. Edwin wants to rebuild community and presence—starting at home.
Parting words
“Stay focused and look to the past.”
Edwin Endlich
[spp-transcript]
Connect with Edwin Endlich
Andrew’s books
- How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
- My Worst Investment Ever
- 9 Valuation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
- Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming’s 14 Points
Andrew’s online programs
- Valuation Master Class
- The Become a Better Investor Community
- How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
- Finance Made Ridiculously Simple
- FVMR Investing: Quantamental Investing Across the World
- Become a Great Presenter and Increase Your Influence
- Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming’s 14 Points
- Achieve Your Goals
Connect with Andrew Stotz:
Transcripts
Andrew Stotz:
Matt, Hello, fellow risk takers, and welcome to my worst investment ever, stories of loss. To keep you winning in our community, we know that to win in investing, you must take risks, but to win big, you've got to reduce it. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives, and I want to thank my listeners from New York City tonight, after having had a mayoral election recently. Fellow risk takers, this is your worst podcast host, Andrew Stotz from a Stotz Academy, and I'm here with featured guests, Edwin. And like Edwin, are you ready to join the mission?
Edwin Endlich:
I am ready to talk about good and bad decisions. Let's do this.
Andrew Stotz:
Yes, that's the fun of this show. So let me introduce you to the audience. Edwin is the Chief Marketing Officer of wish and president of the National Alliance for financial literacy and inclusion. Edwin has spent his career at the intersection of marketing, FinTech and AI helping financial institutions tell more human stories in an increasingly digital world. He's passionate about making financial protection simple, accessible and even a little more fun, proving you don't need buzzwords or hype to make banking technology relevant. Evan, take a minute and tell us about the unique value you are bringing to this wonderful world.
Edwin Endlich:
Ah, the unique value to this wonderful world. That's a great setup. Yeah, my, you know, journey was pretty non traditional in terms of where I ended up here. You know, I really wanted to be a TV writer. When I was a kid, I wanted to write comedy shows. I wanted to do all of that. And so when I came out of college, I worked at Dave Letterman for a while, and then and then at Comedy Central, and realized, wow, this is hard and very competitive, very stressful. And so ended up I got pulled in to write some small videos for this new website called YouTube that had just launched in the early 2000s and that kind of turned me on to marketing, and that's where I've been ever since. And have been a you know executive in that field for now 20 years, and it's been amazing, but I've been fortunate that I've gotten to spend the last almost 10 years helping people understand their finances better, being able to sort of understand risk, reward, their legacy and what They plan on leaving behind has been a big focus for me. So I feel like that's the value I'm bringing to the universe today is a sense of help and support for those who need it around their finances. Interesting.
Andrew Stotz:
And do you still write a lot? Or are you writing a lot less, you know, if I heard you write, I was thinking to myself, gosh, writing is so hard. Sometimes when I was young, I didn't really like it. I preferred reading. I ended up writing a lot, but not necessarily by choice. But do you enjoy writing? Are you writing much these days, or
Edwin Endlich:
I still write a lot? You know, I started as a copywriter in marketing, and I've always continued to write that, to the chagrin of our creative teams that I manage. I will still need to write things because I just feel like it has to sound a very specific way in my head. And so, yeah, so I do write, I probably should delegate more, but I don't.
Andrew Stotz:
And what, let me ask you about the work that you're doing and like, what's the biggest challenge or the biggest problem that you see that you're trying to solve?
Edwin Endlich:
Yeah, so you know, when I was part of the foundation of the group that started wish, which is a financial protection company, and that really, at the end of the day, it's a life insurance company. And, you know, a big challenge for many people is kind of, like, why I'm excited to be here today is, like, they just think it's an awful investment, and it's just, you know, not worth our time. It's something old people get. It's something that you only take out a life insurance policy if you're going to kill your spouse. That's what I've learned on Netflix. Is that so a big challenge for us and for and for me personally as a storyteller, was, how do you educate people about a financial like a legacy that they want to leave to their family, that they want to protect those who need them. And how do you make that story interesting? How do you make it new? And how do you make it not feel stodgy and boring, that is a pretty big challenge for us that I've been excited about. And how. Hyper focused on
Andrew Stotz:
interesting when I was born in 1965 and in that year when I was born, my dad bought a life insurance policy for me, and the premium was, well, the premium, the premiums have ended now, and I don't have to pay them anymore. This, it's been accumulated, and it's limited as much as a payout is. But the point was, you know, for many years, he transferred that to me when I was 18, and I paid $125 a year for that premium. Now, now at the age of 60, I realized like it would be enough, probably, to fly my body home, come out of it. Luckily for me, I don't have a family that I'm worried about leaving something to. So that's a little different. But that was just kind of interesting that my dad, I didn't know about it, and of course, until I got out of, like, high school, or maybe it was a university, when my dad said, Okay, now you can start paying this.
Edwin Endlich:
Like, thanks, Dad. Exactly,
Andrew Stotz:
exactly. Well, now it's time to share your worst investment ever. And since no one goes into their worst investment thinking it will be, tell us a bit about the circumstance and leading up to it, and then tell us your story.
Edwin Endlich:
You know, I bet it's very familiar to a lot of people who were around in that 2015 2016 time period when the world of cannabis investment became possible. Before that, there was nothing you could ever do to invest in, you know, anything other than you know, alcohol and tobacco, maybe firearms, I guess you could. But all of a sudden, in around that kind of 2016 there started to be the possibility for investments in the cannabis space. And you know, me and my friends who were just blown away that we were living in the time when this was going to be possible, we just didn't want to miss out. And we felt very much like we were going to be the ones who invested in companies when they were still being discovered. It was a new frontier. And, you know, some things came out in IPO, and we were like, You know what, Tilray, it's $143 a share. You know what? I bet that's gonna split 567, times in the next couple years. Let me go all in now. And so I think, yeah, I think I bought it 143 and I think I sold it last year at around 30 cents. So I would say that 99.3% loss may have been my worst investment, but there was such a excitement and passion around just being part of something new, being part of a movement, that you just didn't want to say you were too scared to invest, or you were too conservative, or you thought it was a blip. All of us just wouldn't let that train leave the station without being on it.
Andrew Stotz:
Yeah, that's it's not uncommon, you know, people, we get excited about these new things. There were, there were actually drug cannabis businesses. It was called drug dealers. I was one of them when I was in high school, you know, but it wasn't a legal way of investing in cannabis. But I had one of my guests who also lived in Thailand a long time ago, named Lance Depew, and he's a really, really experienced analyst, and he talked about how he bought a shipping stock, and it just went down and down and down, and at each stage he talked about why he didn't sell. And then it was like, I don't know it was 20 or 30 years. And then he was like, and then I finally sold. And I thought, like, even, like, a really experienced guy, sometimes you just, you know, you're just gonna lose. You know, it just is going to happen. But maybe you could explain a little bit about, like, what your feelings were like, as you saw, it started to go down, and then, you know, eventually it's like, okay, obviously you get to a point where, you know, you've completely given up. But I'm just curious, like, what were your feelings like, why, why not sell at this point? Or did you have any of those thoughts as you went as it went down?
Edwin Endlich:
Yeah, I think it was really challenging, because there was always a voice in your head that was telling me, this is uncharted territory. This is new. No one's ever experienced this, which I think, as an investor, you always think you're the only person who's ever experienced this type of investment. You're the only you know. You really think you are unique. So you tell yourself, like all of those you know, fundamental things that you're taught as an investor don't apply to this situation I'm in. I am in a unique environment. There's never been a market like this. There's never been a product like this. It's not allowed at like a federal but it is at the state level. So that's why, as soon as that opens up, that's going to shift. So you always felt it's like we were just one bill, one election cycle away from everything turning around. But again, everyone says that about every investment they have, when it starts to go down, you always think we're just one portfolio analysis away from turning this around, where one good meeting with shareholders can turn this around. So that, to me, was very tough. Was always thinking, I'm unique. What I'm going through is the only time this has ever happened, and what I think is going to happen is, is, is absolutely possible.
Andrew Stotz:
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, you it is true, you know, it's kind of a new industry. It's going through a lot of, you know, growing pains, and people aren't figuring out, like, how does this work? Even in Thailand, Thailand was actually quite liberal when they kind of legalized cannabis. And so we have shops everywhere. And, I mean, you can't help but think there's a boom going on. But what they didn't realize was, okay, the legislators were going to change, and, you know, things were going to change, and then all of a sudden. But can you remember a day when you were like, Okay, I give up. I've this is pretty much lost money. Is there any particular day that you thought, okay, there's no more hope now on this
Edwin Endlich:
I think, I think there was when my daughter started high school this year, and it was at the beginning of the year, and I had a real aggressive goal of how much I wanted To be set up for her college fund when she started high school, you know, I thought, and I really did imagine, the cannabis investments were going to be a big part of that equation. So when she started high school, that was when I said I would look at my portfolio and had this dream of, I laughed to myself, I cannot believe I invested only this much, and look at the returns. And so when she started high school on September 9, I remember looking at the portfolio and saying, You gotta let go. It did not help in any way she could barely get, like, you know, a fast food lunch, yeah, that I've got for college, let alone tuition.
Andrew Stotz:
Yeah, so let's, let's talk about, maybe you can summarize the lessons that you learned from this? Yeah, I
Edwin Endlich:
think you know, I learned that the you know, even the things like you were saying when you're just talking about the experience of it's a new product. No one knows that this is going to work out or not, like legislation could change everything I learned that applies to every investment, that there is nothing unique about that, that things are always going to need to find a footing, that there could be transitions. It could change any second. So I really learned that the market fundamentals applied really everything, and that's why they're called the fundamentals, and that I really needed to kind of check my ego at the door, check my belief that we are in unprecedented times, which I think people love to say all the time. So whether it's going through covid, going through this or that, you always want to say this has never happened before, when it has happened before. And there are people you could talk to. There is real advice to be given and to not ignore that. And yeah, I learned. I learned a lot.
Andrew Stotz:
Yeah, that's and I would say my takeaway too, is when you construct a portfolio of stocks, you not only want to think about, you know, combining different stocks, but you also want to think about different stocks in different stages of their life. So let's take another drug, like Coca Cola or Pepsi or whatever. You know now that's all the regulations about that, and the way that that works in the industries and stuff like that is pretty stable. Not to say that it couldn't get messed up, but it's pretty stable, whereas the cannabis thing is at an early stage. So it made me think like diversifying across stages of development or life cycle of a company, also makes sense. That was another thing I would take away from that. So let's, let's now go back in time, and let's think about when you and your friends and others were thinking, and, you know, everybody was thinking, you know, this is exciting. This is cutting edge. We've got to get in based on what you learned from this story and what you continue to learn, what's one action you'd recommend our listeners take to avoid suffering the same fate? Let's think of. Young man or woman today that's enthralled just as you were, what's one thing that they can do
:to help them not lose it all?
Edwin Endlich:
Yeah, I think you know, a parallel for me that I'm seeing now is with artificial intelligence in terms of just the unprecedented amount of belief that we've never had technology like this come out of nowhere, when, in fact, we absolutely have, and we have made mistakes in the past of where our investments were. We've had a bubble in this same sort of way before. So I definitely feel like you know the things I've learned from the cannabis experience, I really am trying to tell to evangelize for people to use today around this artificial intelligence conversation as well, and see some of the pitfalls that we had in the early internet days of the 2000s where I think we could learn a lot from that. You know, we saw so many companies in the early 2000s feeling like they needed to create all their technology from scratch, in house. It needed to be theirs. They needed to own it. And they really lagged behind a lot of other companies who just formed partnerships with technology. And so I kind of look to things like that to say, hey, as we're in this now, boom of this AI conversation, let's not forget the fundamentals of the market. You know, experience that has happened in this space before learn from it. And don't get too cocky.
Andrew Stotz:
Yep, great advice. It reminded me when I was doing my PhD at a Chinese University, and I had a cultural class that I had to learn, you know, history and culture of China, and I wrote a paper and an article about comparing the Chinese railway system to the US railway system. Basically, I found kind of the dates that I wanted to count as ground zero. In America, it was, let's say 18. You know, 1820 or whatever, that year was, 1850 and in China, maybe it was 1900 or whatever. And then I counted that as year zero. And then I looked at the number of the kilometers or miles of train track that each one did. And what I saw was, in the US is just, it was just crazy, the bubble that was happening in train track, because, you know, it was a speculative bubble. There was a huge amount of capital put behind it, whereas China's was kind of just always steady up, but America's went up massively and then eventually clashed down. And now China has now exceeded the length of the railroads in the US. But what was interesting about that is that was a bubble. We saw bubbles in cars when they first came out without, you know, hundreds of 1000s of car companies that then got consolidated down to a small number. And then air travel was another, you know, major invention that basically has brought us all around the world and has changed the world massively and that was a bubble that's now come down to earth. So why wouldn't AI or any other thing be a bubble? So that's a great reminder for all of us that people get excited. So what's let me ask you, what's a resource that you recommend for our listener of yours, or any others
Edwin Endlich:
you know? For those you know, I'll do my shameless plug for my not for profit, which is Natalie, the National Alliance for financial literacy and inclusion. You know, I really, you know, struggled in my life to understand financial terms, understand a lease, understand investing. And so I, you know, helped start a not for profit, that is really all about allowing people to kind of get more education on their financial lives, and to work with financial institutions to ensure that they are educating their customers. And so if you need any help, or if you are at a financial institution, you should check out, n, a, f l, i.org naturally.org. For all the great work that we are doing,
Andrew Stotz:
excellent. And I'll put that in the show notes. So for those interested, make sure you click on and I got it right here. N, A L, f l, i.org national alliance for financial literacy and inclusion, empowering communities through financial, education and innovation, which is exciting. All right, so what last question? What's your number one goal for the next 12 months?
Edwin Endlich:
Oh, my number one goal for the next 12 months. You know, I really want, uh. Uh, to have a full conversation with my daughter that does not stop after 10 minutes, right? That's a big goal for me. I'm really trying to connect there. We try to be a human, really trying to put my phone down and, you know, make those human connections. I think, you know, this election cycle in New York that we've just had, I think it's more important than ever for us to kind of get those human connections back in our lives, and to feel part of like a community again, is kind of where I'm focused this year, is to feel that connection again.
Andrew Stotz:
Oh, that's great. I just posted on my Instagram a hug that I was giving my mom. I was standing behind her, she's 87 now, and I was standing behind her, and I was holding on her, you know, and she was kind of holding on to my arms. And the caption I put in, which is what I always tell her, is,
:
you know why I'm hugging you?
Andrew Stotz:
Because I can, yep, and I won't always be able to, because she will be gone. And so in spirit of what you've just said, Let's hug the people while we got them with us, and let's hold them and let's cherish those relationships. So I admire you know what you've just discussed, and I can't wait to hear more about it 12 months from now. Well, here, yeah, listeners, there you have. It. Another story of laws to keep you winning. Remember, I'm on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. And as we conclude Edwin, I want to thank you again for joining our mission. And on behalf of a Stotz Academy, I hereby award you alumni status for turning your worst investment ever into your best teaching moment. Do you have any parting words for the audience?
Edwin Endlich:
Oh, you know, stay focused and look to the past. Fantastic.
Andrew Stotz:
And that's a wrap on another great story to help us create, grow and protect our Well, fellow risk takers, let's celebrate that. Today, we added one more person to our mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. This is your worst podcast host, Andrew Stotz saying, I'll see you on the upside. You.