Meet Max Helsel, CEO of Conjure

BACKGROUND

I graduated from Michigan State University about a year ago with a degree in finance. I love everything about trading. The stress, excitement, disappointment, elation, and everything in between. I began trading derivatives, options mostly, sometime in my junior year.

I found a trading niche that I absolutely loved — volatility. There’s one particular ETF based off the VIX that has tight spreads, healthy volume, and liquidity: UVXY.

Maybe you opened a new tab and searched UVXY, and now you’re wondering why anyone would ever get involved with such a trash stock. When you trade options, the only thing that really matters is whether the underlying is going up or down, and at what speed and certainty.

All the straight volatility ETFs steadily lose “value” over time because of the relationship they measure, price/duration of VIX futures. This trend is called contango, and by trading options to capture this downward range, you can make (or lose) serious money.

It’s more fun than anything else I’ve traded, because you trade based on the entire market at once. You watch the news and see a story unfold real time as the market reacts. Volatility is like the heartbeat of the market, reflecting the stress and uncertainty of everyone involved.

Eventually, my trading activity led me to learn more about cryptocurrency. At first, I was looking at digital assets as something to trade. Once I had begun to learn more, I realized the potential to build with them, thanks to their underlying technology.

YOUTUBE

I decided to launch a Youtube channel back in summer 2017, to try my luck and see the first-hand effects of the Adpocalypse.

Here’s what I did to build the channel and accumulate content.

There’s a good amount of accounts on YouTube that take segments from long videos, and present them as short clips. This makes it much easier for a viewer to consume and share.

Here’s a brief example:

Elon Musk has a 40-minute interview during a conference overseas. A video of this discussion is uploaded to the internet in its entirety. As a content creator, in this scenario, you begin by watching the entire video and making note of any interesting topics or questions.

The next thing you’ll want to do is to segment out these highlights, and create small, 2–5 minute consumable clips. Then, slap some catchy titles on top of them along with an attractive thumbnail and you’re pretty much good.

A short clip titled “Elon Musk on the Dangers of Artificial Intelligence” performs much better than the video it came from, the 37 minute “World Government Summit 2017 A Conversation with Elon Musk”

After a while, you begin to get a measure on the climate of YouTube — popular topics, hot niches, trending people, etc.

To my surprise, the channel took off pretty quick. I spent a total of about 3 months working on my channel and building the content library. At the end of those three months, I think I had around 3,000 subscribers.

But what really surprised me was the growth of the channel after I had stepped away from it — it has 17,000 subscribers currently.

I had everything monetized as well, to test whether or not certain topics and titles would trigger demonetization (they did).

Unfortunately, and ironically, my entire channel was stripped of monetization a few months ago, with vague reasons cited and limited options to options to get it back.

HOBBIES/INTERESTS

I like basketball, woodworking, reading, and gaming.

Follow Max on social media:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/maxhelsel

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxhelsel