The Option Genius Podcast: Options Trading For Income and Growth

People literally ask me this one question ALL THE TIME… “Allen, how did come up with such a lucrative, safe, and easy way to trade?” I explain it all in my new book Passive Trading, get your free book here  https://www.passivetrading.com/free-book! Option Genius was built with you...the individual trader, the breadwinner, the dreamer, the rock your family depends on ...in mind. Because we know what it takes to become a successful and profitable trader. And that’s exactly what we help you do best. Get your $1 trial of Simon Says Options, our most conservative and profitable trading service here https://simonsaysoptions.com/stockslist-ss-trial-offer.  -- This is a special episode because it is a recording of a one on one coaching call with a student. The questions he asked are probably the same questions you have about trading options. How much can I really make? How do I get started? What do I need? We cover a lot in this call. So listen and learn. And if you think you need a trading coach to help you become a better trader, then email us at help@optiongenius.com     Allen: Okay, all right, so Keith, how you doing? Keith: I'm well, thank you. Thank you very much for talking. Allen: Good, no, no, no, thank you. What I wanted to do is if you could tell me a little bit about your background, tell me a little bit about yourself, and then after that, then we can go ahead and jump into your questions. Keith: Okay, I'll try and be quick. Allen: Just so I get a little bit of a feel, so where you're coming from. Keith: Okay, I could ... I'm the one who'd probably sit there and tell you, 35-40 minutes, my background, but I'm not going to do that. I'm going to try to be really concise and get to the point. I have a full-time ... I have a wife and four kids, teenagers, a full-time job. It happens to be very luckily a good job. A really good job with a fine schedule. I say that for a reason because I've been training for years, like over a decade with no progress. Maybe because I don't need it. It's not like I'm hungry. I don't need it like I want to get out of my job or anything like that. I've just delved into it for years thinking some day I'll get it. Some day I'll figure out the niche I want and someday I'll ... too much time has gone by. I like spending time learning but I feel like now I'm wasting time. I need to actually do something productive. I'm 48 and I'm thinking I want to take my retirement account that's being managed by a firm in New York who's not really doing the job. They have been up until like I said recently. Just like everyone else. They're doing well I think with their niche, but I can look at the numbers and say okay, this isn't gonna do it. This isn't gonna be my retirement. It's not gonna happen. I've got to do something more active myself. That's why I'm thinking, okay I've got to either stop or get moving. I've had some bad losses in the past. I don't really need to go into those. It's just one of those things that a lot of traders have gone through. I don't need to bore you or want to get into that. Enough where I'm like okay, I've had enough. I've got to do something. Like I said, I'm 48. I'm looking into what's the future gonna hold. What am I gonna do when I retire? What's my next leg gonna be like? There's education, kids education kind of a little bit of a factor. My brothers, we talk to each other a lot about things we use to practice together, but I moved away and I still talk to them a lot. We talk about ideas a lot. They're getting into some things business wise after their dental career to account for what are they gonna do in retirement. I look at what they're doing as pretty cool. I know this trading thing will work and can work. I know it can. I just haven't gotten it off the ground. Now I feel more like I have the need to. I don't again, think I've gone into as much detail as I wanted, but I don't want to take all this time just to tell you my background meaning to take up your time. A typical story. I'm not really unique. As far as trading goes, basically why I haven't been successful number one is rules. I know the rules and I don't follow them. I follow the rules in my business. I'm very disciplined in my business with overhead and all that stuff. For some reason trading, I did at the casino. If I ever go to a casino, which is rare, I'm pretty disciplined. I don't have a gambling problem. But with trading, for some reason that's different. I don't follow the rules. I don't do what I'm supposed to do and I've been trying to figure myself out. I think that part of this too is I've got these kids that I'm busy with. I sit at the computer for a while and I like doing it. I feel like I got to figure out a niche that doesn't involve me at the computer a lot so I can hang out with them and do my thing with them and then when they're gone, maybe learn more. Along the way I want to keep learning. Basically, where's my niche? I'm going from one method to another without fulling trying it out. I'm floundering. I finally settled on I want to day trade. I love that. I can't do that. I've got a job and other things to do. Anyway, hopefully I've kept that as concise as possible because it's a lot to that. I've got to the conclusion where okay, it just seems to me like the iron condor/oil trading is what I want to do. Again, I'm trying to keep this- Allen: Don't worry about it. Just let it out. Keith: ... concise for you. Allen: I'm trying to figure out what your goals are. I'm trying to figure out what is the mental blockage here. Why haven't you done it before? The more you tell me, the more it'll help. So don't worry about it. Keith: I've just done all sorts of trading. I've tried all sorts of things, but I don't stick with it. I see another method comes through, I'm like oh let's try this. I see something else come through, oh let's try this. In doing that, I guess I wanted to try out a lot. I took a lot of webinars. I actually probably know a decent amount. If you show me a chart and say tell me what you see, I actually know. I think I know a lot . I can't really put it to work. I thought of you recently because finally I think I know what appeals to me. I know what I want my niche to be. That doesn't mean I can't switch it. At least if I land on something that appeals to me that will work, then I think if I want to delve into something, that's fine. At least don't do that until you've gotten off the ground there. Traders that are making money and traders that are losing money. Simple as that. I'm not on the one side. As soon as I get on the one side, even if it's a little bit with some form of consistency, then oh okay I can branch from there. What appealed to me was and basically it's this whole building an account thing. All these investment opportunities out there that people are getting into that I hear about that I'm thinking, wait a minute. Trading, it just seems like trading is a lot simpler way to build an account than starting some business. It takes some discipline in that. I just think from what I hear about you and other people on the up and up as far as options trading, that it's very doable. I thought about you because what appeals to me is iron condor trading on the indexes in oil trading. It's almost like right now I don't want to do any stocks. I just want to keep it very streamlined. Basically I'm here to ask you. I've got some ideas, but I wanted to find out from you if they would work or if that's how you'd do it. Basically like I said, I've done scans for stocks. I've done all sorts of things. They just seem to make me be stretched to thinly with my whole life. I thought, if I could just streamline this to what I think will work, I can still definitely be ... it's not like I don't want to learn. I want to learn, but I think I want to learn and learn my method and get really good at that and not try to just learn about other things before I've landed on this. Again, what appealed to me is I've been on and off oil. Do I do it? Do I not? Do I do it? Do I not? Finally I thought, you know what? Yeah. I want to tackle the oil thing. I think I want to tackle the iron condor on the indexes thing. My question to you was, what would you, as far as let's take the iron condor thing. I like the monthly butterflies, the monthly calendar, the monthly double diagonals, I've learned those from another source. They're the monthly workforce trade that you just kind of rinse and repeat. You're a big iron condor guy. I guess in order to find out what I would like to do works, would work, if you took ... that's why I'm gonna ask a pointed question. If you took an iron account, let's just call it a hundred thousand dollars because that's just a round number. You just traded iron condors off the XPS and the [rustle 00:09:21], they might be long balled, they might be shorter ones. If you just said, okay I'm dedicating this account to iron condors where I'm not white knuckling anything and just following the rules, what could you do a year percentage wise? You Alan. Allen: Is that your question? Keith: Well, that's one of them. What am I gonna do with my chunk of money that I just transferred to an IRA? That's one of them. Iron condors and oil but I just have some ideas on how I would do it. You might say, no, no, no. That's not how- Allen: Let me come back to that. I'll get you the answer, but let me come back to that. Before we go any further, I have to tell you and everybody listening, first of all, thank you for letting this be recorded. I wanted to record this because like you said, you said you're not unique. I believe that you are unique. Everybody's situation is a bit different. The boat that you're in, the situation that you're in, there are a lot of people that are in a very similar situation. The questions that you had asked me in the email originally I thought of that. I was like wow, there are so many people that are thinking the same exact thing. If we can get this as a two way conversation. You having questions, I'm sharing my experiences and trying to lead you in certain directions. I think it would be beneficial for everybody that's listening. Then I have to preface it and say that I'm not a licensed financial planner. I can not give you specific financial individual advice. It's about telling you hey do this or buy this or securities or what not. I can get in trouble if I do any of that. We are going to basically give you some advice in a sense of what I would do if I was in your situation. What I do because I am in a similar situation to you as well. Maybe I'm a little bit further down the line. I have my answers or what I want to do. What we need to figure out is exactly what you want to do. Then get you on the right path so that you can learn exactly what you need to do so that you can get it done. That being said, I do have some questions for you. The four teenagers that you have, are they going to be going to college any time soon? How old are they? Keith, you there? Keith: Yeah. Yep. Can you hear me? Allen: Yes. I can hear you. Keith: Somehow I got dropped. Allen: My question to you is I want to start off with talking about ... not talking about. Just I want to get a bit more details. How old are your kids? Keith: Senior, freshman, freshman, seventh grade. Allen: College is taken care of or you're still gonna be paying for that or they're doing scholarships and doing their own or how's that gonna work? Keith: I'm not worried about college right now. I've got college taken care of without trading, without trading. I brought that up because it's just something I'm obviously involved in right now and dealing with. Mainly I'm thinking about a future as in retirement during retirement. Allen: Are any of those kids financially minded? Would they be interested in trading? Keith: Yeah, I think so. That brings up a good point and I'll be quick about it. Part of the reason why I want to learn this too is because I want to pass it onto them to some extent. I just feel like it's a great opportunity. If I don't learn it, I feel like I'm doing them a disservice because I know a decent amount about it and if I don't actually land myself somewhere, I feel like I won't be able to teach them what I think I should or lead them where I should. So yeah, I think they do. Some of them, yeah. Allen: Cool. Because you told me that the following of the rules is an issue for you. That's really a mental thing. I think in the past it's because you didn't really take it that seriously. It wasn't that important. It was great, hey this is cool and all, but you lose interest very quickly. I think we really need to dial down on the goal or the why. Why are you doing it? If you really need to figure that out, what is the actual goal that you have? Is it to retire from your job? Is it to have a certain [inaudible 00:14:58]? Is it to buy a house? Whatever it is, we need to make that more concrete. Once it is more concrete and you review that every day before you go into your trades or before you go to work or while you're brushing your teeth, you look at that goal, that is gonna solidify that in your brain this is important. I need to pay attention to this. That's one of the tricks you can use to help you start following the rules. The other one that you can do is, and I talk about this in one of our training camps program. You can get somebody to trade with you. If it's a child or a spouse that's interested, that's great. They don't have to be completely interested, but they have to have ... how do I say that? They have to have authority over you in a sense where you give them some basic information about what you're doing. They don't have to know intricate details. If you're trading iron condors, they don't need to know what are your strikes every day and what is a deuton and all this stuff. But they need to have a sheet where they come in every day at a specific time or they text or whatever and they ask you specific questions. What is your [inaudible 00:16:26] short strike? It could just be them just reading off a sheet. When are you gonna adjust? Are you close to being ... what is your rule for this? What happens if the market goes up one standard deviation? What happens if the market goes down? Then you have to answer them. To them it doesn't matter what the answer is. They're only job is to make you go through that process every single day that you're in the trade so that you follow the rules. After you supplement trade or after you lose on a trade, then they're gonna come back with a separate sheet and say, why did you lose? Give me a specific reason. Then you have to come up with that reason. Then eventually they'll see a pattern. If you keep losing trade after trade for the same reason, they're gonna be like hey dad what's going on. You have to answer to them so you can't just blow them off and say, hey son I'm not answering you today. I didn't focus on my trade, well I'm not answering you. No. That's part of the discipline you have to instill in yourself if you want to do this seriously. When I did it, I was just like you. I didn't check in on my trades. A lot of times if there's not much going on, the markets are not moving much, I don't check in on my trades very much. Then I have somebody else that asks me. It's like, hey what happened? How is this trade doing? How is this trade doing? How is this trade doing? I have to actually go in, log into my computer, log into my broker's account, check everything, and then make those answers. For me, it's a livelihood thing. It's not just for fun. If I mess up, that's money that's not gonna come into the household for that month. I had to figure out a way that okay, I know that this is a problem for me. I lose interest just like you do. These trades are boring because there's not so much excitement every day that's up and down, up and down, getting in and out. There's no dopamine hit every single day. You see it, oh okay. It's moving. Oh yeah, hey market's up ten points. Oh market's down 20 points. Okay my trade is fine. I don't have to do anything. Day after day after that, you forget about it because it's not a routine. You really need to build a habit. If you can build a habit of checking your trades every day, then that's great. If not, you need to use a hack like getting somebody else to come in and ask you these questions. Does that make sense? Keith: Yes. Allen: Cool. If you can find somebody like that, that'd be great. Somebody that's already trading. Somebody that's a spouse or a child that is interested or not even interested but they'll be like, yeah I'm gonna hold your feet to the fire and I'm gonna ask you these questions every day at a certain time frame so that you have that reliability. Even if you forget, even if you fall down on the job, they come in and they're like okay. What are the answers? You just answer them and that's it. It takes roughly two or three minutes of your time every day to just go through them and say, this is what's going on. If you need to do something, then you do it. Most of the time we don't follow our rules is because we don't make the adjustments that we need to. If it's in black and white and the person is standing right there, you're like according to my rules, I need to adjust. Okay well then go ahead and do it. That is something that I would look into as well. You are from what I checked in our records, you have both of our iron condor course and you have the blank check, which is the oil options course. Correct? Keith: Yes. Yes. Allen: Yes, okay. Have you been through both of those? Keith: Yes. Allen: You face another problem that's very common where people get sidetracked. Once you get on one email list about options, somehow you get on a hundred different lists about options and trading and this and that. A lot of these other companies, they'll sell your information and they'll sell their list to other people. You're just bombarded every single day. Bombarded. That's their job. That's the company's whole main goal is to get you to buy more, and more, and more stuff. You got to clean the clutter and you got to get off all these email lists. A lot of them, most of them. If it's not providing you value, if it's just sending you offers to buy stuff every day, then you need to get out of it. One of the things that we focus on is what is the one thing or the one strategy that makes the most sense to you? If you told me I'm looking at oil and I'm looking at condors so I'm gonna take a step back and say, no. Right now you're not allowed to do that. You're allowed to pick one. Whether it's a simple credit spread and not even the condor, or if it's a condor, or if it's the oil, but you can pick one. If you need to go even simpler than that, then let's go simpler than that. Let's just do a covered call. Let's get consistent in that so that you build up your confidence and you build up the account. Say, okay I'm doing this right. In the beginning, I don't know how much cash you have available, but until you are consistent for at least three or four months, I would even say you do this and you do paper trading. You don't put your real money in because as you mentioned, you're doing different things. You're not focused. I don't want you risking your money until you do have that focus, until you have figured out what is my goal. Why am I doing this? You make it a must. This is not a I'm just dabbling kind of thing. It's like, okay you had a realization. You woke up to the fact that hey I'm 48. Time is running out and I'm not gonna have the money that I need, that I want to retire so how do I do it? Well you have all the tools. You have all the courses. You have access to everything that you need. You've already paid for it so you don't need to buy anything else. You just need to find the one strategy that makes the most sense to you and then just plug in and just single minded focus. Put the blinders on. Just go at this and forget everything else. Do not worry about anything else. Do not read all this other crap, all the emails that come in and all the financial media ads and all that stuff. Just focus on one thing that makes the most sense that you think that you can learn or get good at consistent the fastest. Once you have that one and then you put real money at it, you'll start seeing it and you'll start feeling good. Then and only then would you want to break out and say okay, now I'm gonna add strategy number two because I want to diversify or what not. Some of these you don't really need to. In both of these, iron condors on indexes and the oil trade, we have people that are trading these with hundreds of thousands of dollars and that's the only thing they do. I got a friend who lives on Lake Tahoe. He does one- Keith: I know who you're talking about, yeah. Allen: He does one massive iron condor trade every month. Now, it doesn't stay as a familiar iron condor with four legs. He's always adding lines and subtracting and adding contracts and subtracting contracts. He's more into it. He's looking at the Greek. He's managing by what the Greeks are telling him. It changes, it morphs. It starts off as an iron condor and he does just one trade every month. That's how he has his lifestyle living in Lake Tahoe, which is pretty expensive. Then we have plenty of our students in the blank check course, which are only doing oil and are making a living doing that. It's definitely doable, it's possible. I don't think your there yet. You told me that you've been doing this for ten years. You know enough about it. We have this thing called the option continuum which is from option zero to option ten where option zero is you don't know anything about options. Option ten is you're a professional money manager managing money for other people using options. I think you're somewhere in level six or level seven where you know enough to be dangerous. I think that's level five, but you've been studying this so that you don't need a lot of hand holding. You can figure it out. You know the lingo. You know the jargon. You put on trades, you have experience. What we need now is just a little bit of discipline and just picking on one. Just focusing on one and the discipline to stay in that one thing until you go further. Does that make sense? Keith: Yes. Mm-hmm (affirmative)- Allen: The other thing that you had asked me in the email was how I manage my stuff. Up til maybe two or three years ago, I was doing everything. I was doing oil. I was doing more and more oil. I was doing the condors that do all the option genius stuff. Simon puts on his trades for our Simon Says Advisory. I do all those as well. Then we also do the weekly trades. Then I have my own retirement accounts that I manage in which I own stocks in those. Then I do cover calls on those, I do naked puts on those, and then credit spreads on the stocks that I own. I was all over the place doing lots of different things. I got to the point where I hit ... I'm 42 now. This was roughly when I was hitting 40 or a little bit after 40. It was like, okay what do I want to do with my life? I'm spending time trading all this stuff. What comes after you have all the money? With your job, you have enough money coming in so you're not worried about it. What comes after that? What's the next step. For me, I decided the next step was gonna be to help other people and tell more people about options. Also, I wanted to create a way where I could still have the income from the options but not spend so much time on it. And not have the big risk. We don't talk about this much in options, especially if you're an iron condor trader. The biggest risk is a big bear market or a flash crash market. When the market is down 20, 30% in a month, that's gonna kill your iron condor unless you're very quick to the trigger and you're really good at it where you're buying ports and hedging all your positions and what not. As an option seller, we make money in calm markets. If the market is going up, we're fine. If the market is going down, we're fine. Markets going sideways is fine. When we get hurt the most is when the market changes direction very quickly. If it's been going up and up, and up and then boom one week is just down 10%, that's gonna kill a lot of our positions. Or just the opposite. It's going down and then it just V shapes recovery back up. That's gonna kill a lot of positions. How do you remove that type of risk without letting go of the gains or the benefits of options? That's when I came up with something that I call passive trading. I've been working on that, moving over my retirement accounts and transitioning that into my other stuff. We're working on a course. We have a course right now that we've created based on these strategies. We're working with a bunch of people that are in the course right now and trying to get them results as soon as possible. We haven't released it yet but basically the idea of that is we want a foundation. This really depends on how much money you have. If you had 500, 600 thousand dollars or more, that would be your end goal. This is how much money I have, I need to have enough money out of this so that I can live comfortably, retire early, whatever the goal is. If you had this larger amount of money, the foundation would be in dividend paying stocks. Good, high quality dames, dividend paying stocks. Then we would trade around those positions. Meaning we would do iron con ... not iron condors. We would do cover calls and we would do naked puts and we would do credit stripes on those stocks. It's a matter of picking a handful of names. Four, five names that we want to own, getting good dividends from those, reinvesting our dividends into the same stock, and then using options to boost our return on those. If we're getting a seven, 8% return from the stock, we're getting 3% from the dividend, so that would be like maybe 10%. We're adding another 10% a year from our options. We're getting not 10% but we're getting 20%. We're doubling what we could make if we were just in the stock itself. That literally takes maybe ten minutes a month. You're breaking it down and you're making it just cookie cutter. These are the stocks I own. These are the only ones I'm watching. These are the only ones I'm gonna be trading. This is the trade I'm doing, so all I need to do is just if I'm doing covered calls, all I need to do is either roll a call or let my current call expire and sell another one. If you're doing puts, it's the same thing. Either do another one or just roll it. Do another one or just roll it. That to me, is the easiest way for anybody to get started with options and to really ramp up their money. If you don't have that money in the beginning, you don't have four or five hundred thousand dollars to put in the stocks, then we also talk about you can do what's called the poor man's covered call, which is you're using long options or I'm sorry. Leap. Leap options and then selling covered calls on those. Or you just do credit spreads on the same stocks that you want to buy until you have enough where you can actually start buying those and investing in those. What I found, especially in, what was it? This past November when the market ... or was it December? I forgot when it was. November, December time frame, market dropped like 20%. I wasn't really worried because my stocks are losing, yes, but my options that I'm selling on these stocks are all expiring. We've had a good bull run for the last several years. Starting in January, I remember I was selling calls on all of these stocks. They're all going up, up, up. I'm still selling calls, again so I'm enrolling them higher, and higher, and higher, and higher, and higher. Then they all went down and then finally all those options expired. I had this big really nice windfall and then now that their stocks are going back up, then I'm repeating the same process. Does that make sense? Keith: Mm-hmm (affirmative)- Allen: That is something you can do as well. That is what I'm focusing more and more on. I'm still gonna be doing oil because I love it. I'm still gonna be doing iron condors. More and more my money is going to the sense because I'm looking at the future. I'm looking like when I stop doing option genius, what do I want to do? What do I want to do with my life? I want to be in a position where I have the money coming in. I don't want to give it to a money manager and make four or 5% after all their fees and what not in a good year. I want to still be able to manage it, own good quality stuff, have good income, at least 20% a year. But I want to spend ten minutes a month. This is what I found looking at a thousand different things. This would be the simplest way for me to get the result that I wanted without putting up a lot of time. I think that was one of the things you asked for. How do you trade without spending a lot of time on it? If you don't have the time because oil is very fast moving and you got to watch it daily. Iron condors can be laid back. It's like playing poker. Somebody told me this about poker. They're like, poker is hours and hours of boredom and then 30 seconds of super much excitement where you have to be on the edge of your seat. That's what an iron condor is. Most of the time it's gonna be very slow, very methodical, very easy to do. Then when the volatility spikes, you have to be ready to change your mentality as well. That's when a lot of people get lulled into a sense of security where they don't move fast enough when the volatility strikes. That's when they get hurt with iron condors. That's the biggest drawback to the condor is that it puts you to sleep. Then when it's time to wake up, you're groggy and you're not moving fast enough. Based on that, I would say you have already two things that you have an interest in. I showed you a third one just now if that's the way you're going. Really what I would like you to do is just pick one of those, focus on it, spend some time on it, spend two, three, four months putting on these trades. Just really getting that experience and just doing it over and over, and over again so that it's second nature. Not paying attention to anything else. Does that make sense? Keith: Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative)- Allen: Because even if you were to ... I would even say go as far as not even paying attention to the news. If you're doing the iron condors on the indexes, forget the news. Don't even watch CNBC or Bloomberg or whatever. Just watch the charts. Watch the volatility and trade based on your trading plan accordingly. You'll do probably better that way in the beginning without all these other instances coming in. A lot of times we don't adjust properly is because oh hey, there's a meeting coming out from the fed in two days. Even though I need to adjust right now, I'm gonna wait for that fed meeting. By then it might be too late for your trade. Forget the news, forget all these other advertisements and stuff. Pick one thing, focus on it for three or four months. If you have to get help, get somebody to help you out and come and ask questions for three or four minutes a day just so that you have to go through the mental process of looking at every single one of your trades every single day. I know you have the time. You said that, right? You have the time, so it's not like you can do it during the day. You don't have to do it at night after the market closes. That's a benefit. If you could do that, if you could do those three or four things that are laid out, I think within six months you'll have a much better idea of how much and how much you can actually do from this. Your question earlier was, if I was only trading credit spreads on indexes, what is a normal return that you could get? I think it really depends on each individual and it depends on the trading plan that you use. Now for option genius, my trading plan is a little bit more conservative and more hands off because we go out a little bit further in time and further away from the money. You can also come in closer to the money with less time, get a much higher premium, get much more greater percentage and then be out of the trade faster. That model, you have to watch it more and you have to be able to adjust faster. It really depends on how much time you can put into it and what your temperament is. If you're willing to take the risk a little bit for a bigger gain, then you might want to go for a shorter time frame. If you want to be more conservative and just be more hands off and just look at it once in a while, then the further away from the money is better. Now I know I've been throwing a lot of stuff at you. What are you thinking? Keith: A lot of what you say makes sense. I understand it. What you said real quickly about the news, it's funny how you listen to the dudes and listen to these events and then later on you look at the charts. It doesn't seem ... the charts still generally speaking seem to do what they were gonna do. It's odd how the news definitely can effect the movement, but overall it seems like you can't look at a chart and look back and go, where was the news? It's just like the chart is gonna do what it's gonna do. I've heard that from somebody else. They go, I don't care what synopsis for the day, I don't watch that. They end up being fine because they end up almost being influenced by pre announcements instead of just going with their plan. That was interesting that you said that too. Allen: That applies only to the indexes. That applies to the indexes. That applies to all the financial news about, oh the chair wars we got going on and the wall stuff and everything else. That stuff is just secondary noise. If you're watching a stock, if you're trading a stock, then you have to know when earnings is gonna be. Keith: Yeah, that is a definite. You're right. I was just thinking about the XPS or the [rustle 00:39:02] when you said that. Just non stock, just indexes. I think that sounds good. I had some more targeted questions about the condors and the oil. I can ask you those later too if you like as it relates to a plan that I was thinking about. I'm not sure how you want to- Allen: Yeah, that'd be fine. Are you in the Facebook group for the oil? Keith: Yeah. yeah. Allen: If you want to put them up there, that's fine. If not, we'll have a group coaching call coming up this month. Towards the end of the month you can come on there and as there. That'll be fine. If you want to send them to me in advance, and then we can do that on the group coaching call. That'll be fine. Keith: Okay that sounds fine. Can I ask you some after we're done with this? Or do you want me to ... Allen: Yeah. If they're specifically, then I would rather do it there. If you have anything about which one should you pick or how much can you make or any of those type of general questions, then we can do it now. Keith: I'll ask you those now then. Here was what I'm thinking before I called you. First of all, for oil, it seems like you're going off a ten thousand dollar account on Facebook when you're putting your trades on. Your two calls or your one put. Generally speaking, what are you looking to do per year when you trade the blank check plan? What's the general idea? Allen: I go into each month and it doesn't matter the account size. I only use that as an example. I had separate accounts that are much larger. For this reason I want to have ... I do this with option genius as well. I'll have a separate account for that with ten thousand dollars so that I can tell people how many contracts I'm actually doing. I always get that question like, how much do I allocate? Do I allocate the whole ... if I have ten thousand, do I put all ten thousand into this first? No. I have ten thousand as well, I'm doing two contracts. That's what you should do. Obviously there's a lot more money sitting in the account. We're gonna save that for adjustments or other trade. That's why. If somebody has 20 thousand, then they can do double what I'm doing if they want to follow along in that way. That's the only reason. I go into each month with blank check looking for or trying to get, or wanting to get 10% and that's 10% on the entire account, whatever is in that account. If it's ten thousand, I want to make a thousand bucks every month from that account. We don't get it all the time. There are months that we're gonna make less. There are months that we're gonna lose money. Overall, if I can get 5% I'm very happy. I feel that it's a wasted month if I lose money. Unless it's something that came out of the blue that I couldn't ... because oil it moves much faster. It can move to the point where we really couldn't do anything even though we followed all the rules. We took a small loss and we got out and we're done for the month. We'll make it up next month because it doesn't stay volatile very long. It doesn't stay volatile forever. We can easily make that up in the next month. In that sense, it's very important that we don't try to, how do you say this? We don't try to win on every single trade because sometimes you don't want to be in it because it's just too volatile. You have to be aware of that as well. Keith: That's good to know. Allen: It's in the rules as well. Part of the rules we talk about, these are the adjustments that we make. If we're doing an adjustment, that's fine. If you're forced to do another adjustment, then you're on the wrong side. We did something wrong either the market changed and it went against us, or we didn't read the chart properly and we're on the wrong side. That's it. If this second adjustment doesn't work, we're done for the month. That's how you limit your losses. Keith: That helps because it helps me look at opportunities. Let's say you've got a hundred thousand dollars. Do I give it to a private lender? Do I invest in this realty or this? A lot of colleagues and friends or doing that with some success. I look at that like for instance at the blank check trader [inaudible 00:44:00]. If I could learn to do even 3% a month, that's 36% a year. That's double what anyone else is doing. That leads me to believe, like jeez, I need to learn how to do this because it's very streamlined as opposed to running a business or doing a new business venture. That's why I was trying to get out of what you're looking to get per month. If I even lowered it to 3%, you probably would say, that's a brief. I don't know. If I say your goal is 3% a month, if that's the case, that makes me feel like yeah, I do need to tackle this because that might be the low end. That's still better than anything else you're gonna do by giving your money to somebody else. The other question I had about iron condors was I always wanted to do a situation where ... Like where's the sweet spot? It seems like it's a 45 day ish pen delta iron condor. That seemed like it reoccurred in some other people's teaching methods also. Let's just say that's the case and I'll ask you if that's true or not in a minute. You take a 45 day iron condor, pen delta and you've got a hundred thousand dollars, I'm using a round number. Say well I'm only gonna put a third of my ... let's say you're doing 50% of your money is in the market out of this hundred thousand dollars because you need to save some for adjustments. I don't know if that's a good rule too. I just talk to myself. 50 is half, half. Then you do a third of your position, meaning I'm gonna put on iron condor today and then ten days I'm gonna put on a second one. Then another ten days, they're all gonna be 45 days out. Then another ten days I'm gonna put on another. I'm basically putting on three a month and then every ten days let's just say they went to [inaudible 00:45:55]. Every ten days I'd be taking one off. I stagger them. Then with watching your iron condors from hell video, I thought to myself well jeez. Or even two a month, I forget how I did the math. Let's say you did two a month so you had to split your position. You're actually doing ... you're staggering. You're having a same day expiration but you're putting, you're staggering them two weeks apart. I thought if you could win on one, your goal and you could scratch on the other and not really lose, on that money you'd be making 10%. You notice you'd be making 10% a month on half of your accounts because half of it is sitting on the sidelines. That would be 60% a year on your account because 10% a month times 12 is 120. You're only doing it on half of your account. Does that seem reasonable or is that way up in the clouds? A 60% number sounds high, but then when you break it down and say I'm gonna win on a one and scratch on the other every month. Even if I don't have an iron condor from hell video, it seems like that iron condor method might fly. Yes or no I guess. Allen: It's more tricky when we're talking about iron condors because there are so many different ways to do it. I would say that if you take a look at it, because we like to think of okay, what can I get in a month? What can I get in a year? You're like, if I can get 5%, then that's 60%. Okay, that's great. Are you gonna do 60% every single year, or does the market change? Obviously I think the market changes. There are going to be some months or some years, if we take a little bit longer time frame. If we go after ten years or 12 years, or 15 years, there will be some years where you're doing iron condors and you're going to make over 100% a year. Then they're are gonna be some years where you're actually gonna lose money. You're looking at a month to month picture. Year by year it's the same thing. There are gonna be some times where you're just gonna hit it out of the park. Then there are gonna be some times where you're actually gonna be negative for the year because of market volatility and it just unexpected stuff going on in the market. Two thousand whatever, a little financial crisis. That was a horrible time for iron condor people because it just kept bouncing up and down and up and down with no rhyme or reason. At that time it was a great time to be out of the market and just be like, okay I'm gonna stay on the sideline until the fix comes down to something a little bit more manageable for my iron condors. What could you normally expect? It depends on the trading plan and what it is. Then the other thing is you mentioned the 4510 delta. That is very common. That is a lot of people talk about that. Putting on the trade, I think that one is pretty conservative. You have a very good chance of making a good amount of money with that. Then also in that iron condor course, I talk about it where putting on the trade is super simple. You go to XBS, 45 days of expiration look for ten delta, boom sell it, done. Anybody can do that. The point of what separates the winners from the losers is how you adjust and what is your methodology for adjustment. I had a friend, he's in real estate. One of his real estate buddies was like, oh man I just got to tell you about this iron condor thing. It's so awesome. He knew that I was trading options. He learned a little bit from the guy and then he learned the strategy and then he came and asked me about it. Basically it's the same thing. It's you do an iron condor XPS, 45 expiration. I think it was 40 days or something. Ten delta, you put it on, and then you just don't do anything. It's either gonna win or it's gonna lose. I told my friend. I said I think that doesn't make a lot of sense because you're losing control of the trade. The reason that we're managing our own money is because we control it and we can use our brains. If you're just putting on a trade and then not doing anything, even if you can tell, look this trade is gonna be 100% loser, then it doesn't make a lot of sense because in the iron condor it's very, very, very, very crucial that you don't have those 100% losers. Because they're very hard to recover from. One of those is gonna mess up your whole year. We use the adjustments so that we can keep our losses smaller and get out at a quicker basis. His whole thing was, that was a strategy. Just put it on and he got it from these famous guys on ... they were with Think or Swim. Now they have their own brokerage. That was what they used to preach. That you put this on and you just don't let the percentages work in your favor and don't worry about it. My friend, he did it for a few months. He was like, this is working great but he's very analytical. He goes, you know what? I want to test if this actually works over the long term. He found somebody. He hired them and they went back in time I think about 15 years. They put the trade on every single month on XPS and rut. The did both. XPS and rut for like 15 years. Can you take a guess of what the results were? If you did that without touching it on both of those for 15 years, what do you think their results were? Keith: I got to believe they're gonna be ... I'm about to be safe. Maybe break even at best just because I've gone to max and lost on a couple. I know that, that blows out. That takes nine trades or ten or 11 winners out of your way. I know that, that ... I don't know. Break even or losing money? Allen: They broke even. It pretty much broke even. After all the fees and everything, they lost money. Yeah, you're right. After doing that for years, he's like, what the hell? He's like this iron condor stuff doesn't work. I'm like, well yeah do it that way it doesn't work. You do it my way, it's a little bit more work, but yeah you can actually do something with it. To me that was eye opening. I was like, this is really cool. This is real legitimate data. What he did to do that was he back tested. That is something that I would advise you to do as well. If you have the time and if you don't want to wait, get a back testing software and go back the last ten years, 20 years, whatever, take your trading plan, your iron condor trading plan and just trade it month after month, after month on the software day, by day, by day and see how you would do. The one I use is called option net explore. I think it's 600 or 700 dollars a year for it. You can buy a shorter time from if you want. The thing is that you can actually trade one month of iron condor in five minutes or less. Keith: That's cool. Allen: Because you go to a specific date and it looks just like your broker software. You type in I want to sell two of these, buy two of these, sell two of these, buy two of these. Commit the trade and then you just walk through it day by day and it shows you the charts. It shows you the deltas of your options, the prices, everything. It tells you. You can even look at the chart before you put on a trade. Say okay, I think it's [inaudible 00:54:08] whatever. This is how I want to do it. Then you just walk through it day by day, by day. Then when your trade gets to an adjustment point, then you can just adjust it. Of course, it's not real time pricing but it's close enough. You adjust it and you commit it. Then you keep going through it. You do that for five or six years and you'll realize this particular trading plan either works or it doesn't. Most of the time you'll find out that the trading plan works. Some of the times you'll find out that you take the same trading plan and you start doing it for real in real money and you start losing money. You're like, what the heck happened? That happened to me a lot too. It was working on the back testing. Why is it not working now? There's a couple reasons. Number on, maybe it's a different market. Most likely it's because you are doing it differently. When you're doing the back testing, you're not looking at the news. You don't know what's going on. You're just looking at the chart. You're just hitting the button. What happened the next day? What happened the other day? You show me the price, you show me the price, you show me the price. That's how you're trading. You're not looking at anything going on around you. Your focused on the trade. It's not like a day goes by where you're not looking at the trade because you're just pushing the button day by day, by day. You're examining the trade every single day. You're completely focused on it. You're not watching the news and you're completely focused. You're just gonna trade better naturally because of that. That goes back to the stuff that we were talking about originally. Keith: That's interesting. Allen: Having the discipline. Keith: That's interesting actually. That goes back to are you gonna be consistent and do it how you're supposed to do it every time? Period. Just rain or shine are you gonna do your consistent rules. Is there iron condors that you can still lose on? I watched your video on iron condors from hell. It almost seemed like you could almost trade your way out of any one of them. At least for extremely small loss or scratch. That way you let all your winners run and you pretty much lose on little or none. Is that not true? How does that work? I saw you winning on ... coming up even at least on all three of those. I thought, well jeez. If he can come even on those, you can probably scratch trade at least every iron condor. Allen: The point of that video was I took three of the worst ones over the years of us doing option genius. I wanted to walk through them. Actually I used this specific software that I just mentioned, option net where I go through it day by day. I wanted to show and expose what is going through my mind. Which adjustments do I use, why do I do it, and I wanted to verbally just go through it day by day so you guys would have a feeling and understanding of what is he thinking while he's making adjustments. Why is he choosing that adjustment over something else? Sometimes I looked at two or three different adjustments. I can do this, I can do this. Which one am I gonna do? Okay I'm gonna do this one. Why? Because of this, this, this. You have a better ... like as if you were sitting right next to me every day. I don't want you to feel that you can't lose. I lose on iron condors. It's part of the game. You're gonna lose. It might be something that you don't control. It might be a different circumstance. For example, it was recently on one of our trades for option genius. We had an XPS condor and it was doing fine the whole month. The whole time it was doing great. Everything is fine. Two weeks before expiration, XPS starts to move in one direction. That put my calls, I think it was my calls at risk. All right, what do I do? I only got two weeks left. Not a lot of time. I can either adjust it to the next month, which is a possibility or I could just get out of it now. At that point, I got out of it now which was a 5% gain or something and I didn't want to take the risk. If you had not done that, because it was not at an adjustment point. If I'm just following my trading plan without thinking about it, I would've just sat there and said oh hey I don't have to adjust yet because it's not at a whatever, 20 delta, 25 delta, whatever the plan was. If that thing kept moving up, and up, and up, and it got to that 25 delta, now my trade is sitting at a loss and I got three days left until expiration. Great. What do I do now? Then it's the only option. Keith: Okay, it's not automatic then. Allen: No. Then the only option is okay I got to take it to the next month. Buy me some more time, which is something I didn't want to do. In those cases I'd be like, okay do I take it to the next month or do I not want to trade it at all because something has shifted in the marketplace? Let me just take a small loss here and get out of it. Then I will wait until things calm down to get back in. Keith: That's a good point because I didn't know whether you would say, no, no you got to live and die by the rules. Because if you do that, you're gonna start cutting your wins. I guess you really do have to be judicious because you don't want to cut your win. You want to let them run, but you definitely want to do what you just did. The question is, how do you know when to do that? Maybe that just goes back to, hey it's got an automatic gain. You've got to have experience and just make some good judgment calls. Make sure they're conservative I guess. Allen: When you're trading with a different account and different trades, you also have to look at say how do I do the rest of the on everything else. In that particular account, I had already done two trades that had already made me 10% each. Here's the thing. I have two trades done that made 10% each. Now I have this one trade that's up 5%. I can either take my 5% and have a very nice month and I'll be done. Or I could roll the dice and try to make another five, 6%. If I lose on that, then I'm gonna wash everything I already made. What's the risk reward in that scenario? Sure, I'll take the burn on the hand in that sense instead of I can make another 5% on this trade, which to my overall account might make an extra 1%. If I lose on this trade, I could lose 20% on this trade. That means for the overall month I break even. That really sucks. Keith: That goes back to the philosophy that I learned. Allen: Burn on the hand is better. What really hurts people is when they have a thinking where they're going into a trade and they're saying, you know what? On this particular iron condor I can make 12% but I'm gonna get out when I'm up 6%. I've seen a lot of people teach this particular strategy and it hurts because your purposely limiting yourself in how much you can make. You're gonna have months where the month is awesome. XPS behaves beautifully. You don't have to touch it, you don't have to do anything. Those are the months where you have to take the maximum. You got to get 10%, 12%, whatever you can make. Then there are the other months where it's a wild child and it's like, bouncing up and down. You're like, man if I could just get out of this with a break even, I'd be super happy. Or even losing 5%. Those are the months both of those are on the different ends of the extreme. If you're going into the thing and saying that I'm only gonna take 6%, even though I could get more because it's so calm, I'm gonna get more. If you only take 6%, then when you lose 20%, then it's just too hard to overcome the math. Keith: That makes sense too. Yeah, I can see that side also. I guess it just takes ... that's a big question that you answered today. It's like, can I do this and just follow the rules and make a little less? I guess if you truly follow the rules to the T too much without using any judgment, then that's disadvantageous too. I can see how you're saying, all right that's another reason for just concentrating on one strategy because then you really become good at it. Instead of being decent at two or three strategies, being really good at one. You might be doing better financially and with less stress. That supports that point very well I think. Allen: Exactly. Another thing is we're not algorithms. We're not computers. You have the ability to not just focus on that. You can use your own methodology. You can use your own brain. That's why I've never seen a bot or a trading software that does iron condors or credit spreads that has actually worked over the long term. You have to use your common sense sometimes. Then the other sense was if you're picking one. If you're picking XPS to trade or rut to trade condors on, or if you're picking oil on, those are very specifically chosen where it's only one thing. Even when I told you about my past trading thing, I didn't tell you that I'm in 25 different stocks. No, I was like I've narrowed it down to a very short list of things that I want to own so that I don't have to watch everything. I don't have to focus on everything. Even if you're only trading oil, that's one thing that you watch. Everything else it doesn't matter what's going on in the world. It doesn't really matter. I'm just watching my oil. That's what I'm trading and that's what's gonna work for me. Or if I'm only trading XPS. That's why I don't like doing condors on stocks because they move around too much and the news effects them. Indexes, ETFs, if you don't have the money, those are the best for trading condors. Even then, if you want to focus on one, XPS or rut, or if you want to diversify, then you can do both. Then add the other indexes. Even though all three of them, they trade pretty much close together. A little bit here and there. They normally trade pretty close together. Even if you just do one of those, you should be fine. Keith: Do you also do oil directionally on your own, on the side? Or do you on your accounts just trade larger, but the same philosophy as a blank check? Allen: Very rarely will I play it directionally. Very, very rarely. Keith: That's good to know too because there's times where I want to but I can see how it works sometimes. It'll burn you sometimes. I'm trying to figure that out too. That helps. I'll have to let the dust settle in my brain and take in everything you're saying and develop a plan based on all that, which I think I can do. The only thing I might do is trade on contract. If I'm doing instead of paper trading, at least have some skin in the game by even doing a contract in the spies on our entire condor. At least the max losses are still small. I'll never get there, but at least doing something. [crosstalk 01:06:46] Allen: Then you got to watch it. Then you have to have the discipline to stick with it, follow the rules, and watch it. That's the habit I want you to develop. The simplest way to do that is to [crosstalk 01:06:57] Keith: I think I will if I have money to gain. I think if I have money in the game, the skin in the game, I'll do that more. Allen: That's what I used to say. I found out that wasn't always the case. Keith: Really? Allen: Yeah. You get bored. Even if it's a hundred bucks. All right, got a hundred bucks. Big deal. We spend more. You're going to dinner, you pay more than that. It's like, it's not enough. You have to know yourself. I can't tell you yes or no. Keith: You're right. Allen: You think you can do it? Go for it. I would prefer you focus on one in the beginning because your goal here, it doesn't ... I don't care if you're trading oil or condors or what-you-ma-call-it. It doesn't matter. You're only goal is to be consistent. To be profitable on a monthly basis and to be consistent. If out of 12 months, you're positive eight months out of the year and you lose four, but you come out way ahead, that's great. If you're losing one month and then making money and then losing money and then making money and then losing money, that's not what we want. That means you're out of control. You don't know what you're doing. The odds, putting them in your favor, trading high probability. You're gonna win a certain amount of time anyway, even if you have no clue what the hell you're doing. If you're not consistent month after month, profitable or at least break even, that means you're doing something wrong. That is what I would want all of my students to get to. That level of consistency with one strategy. Then once you get there, okay fine. Now I want to branch out into something else. Go for it. Keith: That makes sense too. It's also a little bit liberating to know that I'm gonna let go of everything else and just focus on one thing. It really is. The streamlining, at least to me, is liberating. I don't like to have all those balls up in the air. Especially when I don't know where they are. Allen: It's so much less stress and so much easier just to manage. It's really, it is. Like you said, it's liberating. We got some people that trade, 30, 40 trades a month selling options. I don't know how you do it. I can't do more than ten, 12 trades at a time. I can't follow all of them. Keith: I've done that before. You lose track of some. I wasn't even watching this and it's down. I totally see that. You really have to narrow it down and if you want to eventually branch out, fine. It's got be gradual. I can see how just throwing yourself in the lines and went too early. That's good advice. Thank you. Allen: Cool. Anything else? Keith: Gives me good perspective. No. Like I said, I'm all over. I may have a question here or there later. I at least want to take in all you're saying and develop a plan. Try it for a few months and then call you with questions once I've actually done something and had a track record with something. Allen: If you're really cool, we could do a follow up and maybe four or five, six months from now. We'll do a follow up. Say, okay where were you Keith? Now what'd you do? Where are you now and what's going forward? Keith: That would hold me accountable. That's good. That really is good. That's good. Allen: Awesome. Keith: Well we'll keep in touch. I really appreciate, yeah. This is very helpful. Very helpful. Allen: Awesome. Great. Again, thank you for letting it be recorded. I think we touched on a lot of different things here. I would expect you to even listen to it a few more times. Anybody else that is in a similar boat as Keith, go through this one again and again. There might be a sentence or two that I just mention and I just glanced over. There was a lot of depth for somebody who actually knows what they're looking for in this particular interview. Keith, this was fun. Thank you so much. Keith: Thank you. Talk to you soon. I will correspond soon. Thank you. Allen: Okay. Great. Keith: Bye. -- LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/ WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP:  https://optiongenius.com/alliance Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps. 

People literally ask me this one question ALL THE TIME… “Allen, how did come up with such a lucrative, safe, and easy way to trade?” I explain it all in my new book Passive Trading, get your free book here  https://www.passivetrading.com/free-book! Option Genius was built with you...the individual trader, the breadwinner, the dreamer, the rock your family depends on ...in mind. Because we know what it takes to become a successful and profitable trader. And that’s exactly what we help you do best. Get your $1 trial of Simon Says Options, our most conservative and profitable trading service here https://simonsaysoptions.com/stockslist-ss-trial-offer.  -- Good day to you My fellow options trader and individual investor. This is Allen Sama coming to you with another edition of the Option Genius podcast. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you very much for supporting us. Thank you very much for accompanying me on this journey as we learn about options, about selling options, about passive trading, about making money while we sleep. It's amazing. I didn't think it was going to happen, but this month marks the 10th year anniversary of Option Genius. Company started 10 years ago, had no clue where it was going to go, what it was going to do, but it's amazing the thousands and thousands of people that we've actually been able to help over these past 10 years. And the really exciting thing is that we are just getting started to really ramp it up because, in the past, options unions were started as a lifestyle business, meaning that we didn't really want it to get very big. We wanted to stay small, just like one website and one service and that's it. But slowly, slowly it's grown. And now, it's at the point where we're like, "Okay, we need to really get this message out there. Get other people to know what we're doing and how it's working and overcome all the obstacles that people have to a safe retirement." Not worrying about money. Not worrying about expenses and all these bills and all this stuff that people ... it's just, life is too short, and then we have to worry about all this money stuff. Right. I really appreciate you listening. Thank you for sticking with us for so long. And if you could do me a favor and just rate and review the podcast. Five stars is better than four, but if you could leave a review for us, that would be amazing. It's easy. It's free to do whatever podcast listeners software that you use. Just rate it and review it in there. That's how other people find us. That's how other people learn about the podcast and start listening and then, hopefully, we can help more and more people get the word out that, "Hey, people need to be selling options," so I appreciate that. Now, today's episode is going to be a little fun one. Video games. Totally, totally, really tangent, right? I'm not even trying to transition in a proper way, and I'm just like, "Oh, leave a review. Okay, now I'm going to talk about the video games." So look video games, all right, I've played them since I was little, and I love them. I still play them. I was an introverted only child, lots of time alone in myself. So you got to stay busy, right? Not that time. Nowadays, the kids, man, everybody's playing online, so you can play with people thousands and millions of people in the same game all over the world. But back in my day, it was just you and the computer. I still remember my Super Nintendo system. I spent, I don't know, countless hours with that thing. It was very fond memories. Very lonely memories, but very fond memories. Nowadays though, I still play, but I play on my phone, and the graphics and everything it's just much faster on the phone even though it's a lot smaller, but you can play anywhere you want, and you don't play the big long games anymore they take hours and hours and hours. Those you used to play on the computer. But the little games that you play on the phone they take two or three minutes at a time and whatnot. The companies that make these video games they make incredible, incredible amounts of money. If you haven't looked into this or if you don't know about it, I mean, it's unbelievable how much money they make. Millions and millions of people are playing these games, and it's not just one or two major games. There's like a lot of these games and millions and millions of people are playing them, and they actually spend money on these games. And these companies are making hundreds of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue every single month. It's incredible. Now, the way these games normally work is there're two ways that they make money. The first one is the most logical one is where people can pay the game maker, whoever made the game to advance, so these games are pretty long, and they're complicated. You have to have certain equipment, and you have to have certain space to be able to play in the game. You have to have land, and you have to have resources and upgrade your equipment, upgrade your characters and all that stuff. You can actually pay money to do that. Some games they have diamonds that you can buy. Some have ruby's or coins or whatever they're called. But in almost every single game, if you want to go faster in the game, you want to progress through the different levels faster, then you can actually put money up, real money, pay to get these coins, ruby's, whatever, and then use those in the game to buy stuff with it. That's the one way, and that's the way a lot of people do it. But there is another way that most of the recent games came out with. Now, the older games, they were out a couple of years ago or a year ago, they didn't have this other facet, but the newer games now they are adding more and more ads to their games. Now, the ads are not intrusive, so they're not in the game. You're playing a game and then just an ad shows up in the middle. No, people hate that. And those are games that people don't play anymore but now if you want diamonds or rubies or coins or whatever, you can watch ads and get those. For example, let's say you want to, if you have time, you'll watch a 30-second commercial, and they'll give you five rubies for that and then you're allowed to do that every hour or two. So every time you watch you get five, five, five, you just add those up and eventually then you can spend those. For the people who don't have the money to spend on the games or who don't want to spend the money on the games, like me, you can actually buy ads, and so this is overcoming one of the obstacles that these game makers had there where kids were playing and kids didn't have money to buy and the parents wouldn't give any money to buy stuff in the game. But now they can actually watch the ads and these game makers are making money from all these people that are watching ads. And it's incredible. It's a two-way revenue source. It's amazing. Who knows, maybe my next life I'm going to be a video game maker. That'd be pretty cool actually. Most of these ads are from Facebook right now. That's just the way Facebook has really tapped into video ads and most of the games that I've been playing lately, they have these Facebook ads built in. Why am I telling you about video games? I'm leading into something. Okay. It's just part of the story. So I'm playing my favorite video game. Right now, it's called Hustle Castle. That's just the name of the game. And this little thing pops up, "Hey, you want to extra turns or spins or whatever? You can watch this video." So once in a while, I watch a video, especially when I have nothing else to do or I'm waiting for something else to happen in the game if I have 30 minutes to kill, I'll go watch an ad. So I say, "Okay, here, let me watch this ad." And this guy comes on, nice looking guy. He has a video, he's in this private jet, laughing and smiling with a bottle of champagne or wine or something. Then he's driving this exotic sports car. I don't know what it was. Maybe it was a Ferrari Lamborghini something, who knows, but he's driving his car around and whatever. And then he's meeting all these other people and they're all well-dressed. They're all laughing and they're smiling and they're walking around, I don't know where they are, in some big office building or something or whatever. And then he starts talking and he goes, and most of the time my phone is off, the volume is off. So I don't know what he's saying, so I just ... The ad was over or whatever the first 30 seconds of the ad was up and then I could skip it. So I just skipped it. And then that ad just kept coming over and over and over again. So I was like, "What is this guy talking about?" And then one time I had the audio was actually on, the volume was up. So he started talking and he says, "Hey, I am the richest option trader in the world, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," whatever else he was saying. And I was like, "You're the richest option trader in the world? Oh, that makes sense. That's why you're in the plane and the car and all that stuff. Okay, cool, fine." And then that intrigued me because he'd said he was an options trader. So I said, "What's this guy doing? Let me see what this guy's all about." Now, obviously, you don't believe them right away but let me check it out. I go over to his website and it turns out that he is a option day trader and the whole point of his website and whatnot is because he's going to teach you how to make millions like he's made, supposedly, but he's doing it through day trading. Now, for those of you who have never done it, day trading stocks or Forex or commodities, futures is very, very hard. Most people lose a lot of money because you're competing in that market against high-frequency traders. You're competing against real good professionals that know what they're doing. You're competing against Wall Street with its hundreds of trillions of dollars and resources and everything. To be a day trader you're competing against all those people. So it's very difficult to make money doing that but this guy, the guy in the ad, he is an options' day trader. So I mean you take the hard difficulty level and you multiply it by 10 because we already know right, on this podcast, we already know that buying options is a loser's game. But this guy, he's taking the risk to extreme because he's buying and selling options in seconds or in really, really short timeframes. But he's buying the options. You can't be an option seller realistically and make a lot of money day trading. You have to be a buyer. Now, I don't want to judge. I don't know. I didn't look into his numbers and whatnot. So maybe he is making a lot of money and I hope for his sake he is and I hope for his students or whatever that people are paying him, tens of thousands of dollars to teach how to do that same thing. I hope they're learning something that they can actually get their money back. But guess what? Day trading is nothing more than a job, right? Are you with me here? Do you understand what I'm saying? Basically, you trade. Okay. Hopefully, you make money and that's it. If you're not trading, you're not making anything. And that to me that sounds really sucky because I want to make money in my sleep. I want to make money no matter what I'm doing. And I don't want to be stuck to my screen looking at my monitor, looking at this chart and that chart, what's happening in the news and having my attention span all over the place. So while this guy was filming his commercial, right, he wasn't making any money. While he's flying in his little private jet or whatever, hopefully, it's his, he's not making any money. While he's renting his exotic cars to show off, I mean, you know what I mean? Sorry. I mean, driving his Lamborghini, he's not making any money. Me, on the other hand, as I record this option I'm sorry, as I record this episode, my options, the ones I've sold, they're decaying. They're making me money even as I'm doing whatever I do in normal life. Theta, which is another word for time decay is just a lingo, just a jargon that we use in options trading. The theta decay of my options is working in my favor, right? I don't need market volatility. I don't need news to make my stocks go up or down. Heck, all I really need is a laptop. Or you could do it on a phone too, but I prefer the bigger screen. Getting old, eyes are it's harder to see now, so I prefer my laptop and I really would prefer my desktop. But you could easily do it on a laptop as well. It's just simple. So you have this, the commercial guy, the day trader options guy, and then on the other side you have me, which is the opposite. Right? I guess compared to him I would be a country bumpkin or I'm just laid back and I don't want to trade a million times and, and I'm still making a ton of money, but I guess it comes down to really what you want. I mean, sure. Yeah. It'd be great to have a private jet. Right? Well, I mean, I don't really fly around that much. I like to stay with my family at home. And since I use my credit card for most of my purchases anyway, whenever you go out, you go to dinner by buy jazz whatever. I use my credit card. I have so many points and miles that whenever we do go on vacation, my points and my trips are free anyway. True, I've always wanted a Ferrari. It'd be really cool to have a Ferrari. I always wanted one but then when you think about it, realistically, where am I going to put the three car seats and the boosters for my kids? Right? We've got three kids, they're all still in boosters and car seats. Where am I going to put them? I don't have any room. So having a Ferrari and exotic sports cars is not really practical. Our house, yeah, we could buy a bigger house, but it's already huge enough as it is. I mean, heck it has six rooms and we barely even use two of them. They're just for storage. Right. So, I mean, I think that if you want to take big risks. If you want to aim and, and go for the home runs and grand slams and get rich quick, then day trading options might be something that you want to look at. Like I said, it's super dangerous. It's super risky. You're going to lose all your money most likely but it might be for you. Let me just keep in mind that you're playing a loser's game in which most traders will lose. Most traders are going to lose their shirt and quit doing that. So I mean realistically the best way to make money in day trading is to sell day trading coaching. I said it, there you go. The best money to make money in day trading is to teach other people how to do it. I mean I really don't know if the guy in the commercial is the richest option trader in the world or not. I mean I hope he is for his sake. Right. I mean, you wouldn't want to be lying or anything. I mean, he seemed like a nice guy, but at what cost? What are you willing to give up for the money? That's a personal thing. I'm sure if you're younger if you're in your 20s you might say, "Yeah man, I want to do day trading. I don't want to work. I don't want to, I don't want to do anything. I just want to be trading all day long and make millions of dollars and have my own plane and Ferrari." And for those type of people, if you're that age, if you have nothing to lose, then yeah, maybe that sounds awesome. And I think that those type of commercials when you see them where they're appealing to that get rich quick type mentality people, they're aimed at those type of people. Younger, nothing to lose, not a lot of money. People gullible enough to pay tens of thousands if not hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars to pay for coaching programs but that's not me. And I don't think that's you either because I mean I don't want to be the richest guy. You can't take it with you anyway. Right. I mean if it were me and I had a lot of extra money, I was thinking about it the other day, A couple friends were talking and they're, "Yeah, the lottery Mega Millions, whatever is up to something." And I'm like, "Oh, cool." And they're like, "You going to buy tickets?" And I'm like, "No, man, why am I going to buy lottery tickets? That's crazy." And they're like, "Well, you never know. You could hit, it's only a couple of bucks, you can put it in ... And I'm like, "I don't even know what I would do with the money. If you give me, tomorrow if somebody calls me and says, "Hey, you won the lottery," or, "Here's $10 million that your rich uncle left you that you didn't even know about." I'd be like, I'd probably look for ways to give it away. I don't know what to do with it. I don't even want it. Right. I would rather have time to spend with my family, to volunteer, to enjoy my life, to travel, to learn new things, to take different classes maybe. That's what I would want to do. But sitting at a screen, day trading, doing a lot of stuff, that's not it. I mean, that is why I designed passive trading as a way to make me more than enough income, but still have the life I love, so that when I do go on vacation right, and we do, our family goes on lots of different vacations and we love going on vacation. But when we do that, I make money the whole time, right? I'm not stressed out that, "Oh, my God, I'm on vacation. I'm not making any money. I got bills to pay. I've got to pay for the Ferrari payment. I can't go on vacation and I need money to make." No, that's not this kind of stress that I want. There're a lot of people say that the thing like, "Oh, I want to be a trader. I want to trade for a living." Oh, that's great. That's wonderful. That's a very aspirational thing. But they look at it and they say, "You know what? In order to survive, I need to make $10,000 a month and I need to make it from my trading each and every month." Well, that kind of stress is going to put you in the hospital because if you have to start over at zero and you have to make 10 grand every month, and if you don't make it, then you're eating into your capital. That is going to, I mean, you're just going to be bitting your teeth and grinding your teeth all night long. You won't be able to sleep because that's crazy, crazy stress, right? But if you follow the things that I've been sharing with you guys in this podcast in these different lessons and the stuff that we teach at Option Genius, you will be able to set yourself up in a way where you get to enjoy trading. You do it in a way that's passive, doesn't take a lot of time. You earn a lot more money than you do in almost any other investment out there. And you get to do it without a lot of stress. And then eventually, yeah, you do get to trade for a living if you want to. You will be able to build up your accounts so that the theta decay and the income that you get from your stocks and your selling options portfolio will equal whatever you're making as income right now, so it's definitely easy to get there. But to make the jump from, you know, "Hey, I'm going to quit my job today, and I need to duplicate my income right away." People, that's the dream that these type of commercials, the riches option traders, the day trading commercials, the trading academy's and whatnot, those are the things that they get you. That's how they sucker you in. That's how they get you to pay for the dream because that's what they're selling. They're selling you a dream. Realistically, if you could learn all that stuff on your own, but they're like, "Okay, we're going to give you a shortcut. We're going to show you a shortcut." Well, I mean, I don't know how they have the time to do all of that because every time that the Mr. Day Trading Option guy is teaching the class, he's not making any money from his trades. So yeah, if he's making money from teaching, then he doesn't have to trade. And I think that's the thing, right? And that's what people ask me all the time like, "Allen, if you're making so much money, why are you teaching people how to do it?" Because I got plenty of free time. Like I said, I'm recording this episode. My options are decaying, and I'm making money just like Warren Buffet says. I mean, it's his favorite and one of my favorite quotes of his, and he's saying that if you do not find a way to make money in your sleep you are going to work until the day you die. And that's what I'm going to leave you with. All right? If you do not find a way to make money in your sleep, you are going to work until the day you die. Folks, keep the odds in your favor. -- LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/ WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP:  https://optiongenius.com/alliance Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps. 

People literally ask me this one question ALL THE TIME… “Allen, how did come up with such a lucrative, safe, and easy way to trade?” I explain it all in my new book Passive Trading, get your free book here  https://www.passivetrading.com/free-book! Option Genius was built with you...the individual trader, the breadwinner, the dreamer, the rock your family depends on ...in mind. Because we know what it takes to become a successful and profitable trader. And that’s exactly what we help you do best. Get your $1 trial of Simon Says Options, our most conservative and profitable trading service here https://simonsaysoptions.com/stockslist-ss-trial-offer.  -- Today, I have an awesome guest with me. I have Mr. Chris Miles from moneyripples.com. And I am bringing him on because I've learned a lot from him in the past from his audio course and his podcast about how to actually get more money out of what we already get. Right? So, you know, if you read the book of "The Richest Man of Babylon", the idea is to pay yourself first. Well, Chris goes much farther and much deeper into that. And he's all about cash flow. I would say that he is a finance advisor without being a financial planner type of thing. So, he's not gonna tell you what socks to put your money in or what mutual funds to put your money in. But he will actually help you keep more of your money by finding ways to save it, by finding ways to save on your taxes, by giving you ideas that up 'til now have been privileged of the rich. You know? Because the rich, they're not afraid of loop holes. They know all the loop holes because they can afford to pay for advisors. Chris is the advisor to the every man. Is that right, Chris? Is that a fair portrayal? Chris Miles: Yeah. I would say I'm kind of like an anti-financial advisor, if anything. I'm an absolute mutual fund hater. You know? I believe that if everybody's gonna invest in anything, they're gonna invest in things that they could control and do themselves, which is what you're teaching. Resources: http://moneyripples.com/   Podcast Transcript Allen: Hey there, Option Nation! How you doing today? This is Allen back with another interesting episode. Today, I have an awesome guest with me. I have Mr. Chris Miles from moneyripple.com. And I am bringing him on because I've learned a lot from him in the past from his audio course and his podcast about how to actually get more money out of what we already get. Right? So, you know, if you read the book of "The Richest Man of Babylon", the idea is to pay yourself first. Well, Chris goes much farther and much deeper into that. And he's all about cash flow. I would say that he is a finance advisor without being a financial planner type of thing. So, he's not gonna tell you what socks to put your money in or what mutual funds to put your money in. But he will actually help you keep more of your money by finding ways to save it, by finding ways to save on your taxes, by giving you ideas that up 'til now have been privileged of the rich. You know? Because the rich, they're not afraid of loop holes. They know all the loop holes because they can afford to pay for advisors. Chris is the advisor to the every man. Is that right, Chris? Is that a fair portrayal? Chris Miles: Yeah. I would say I'm kind of like an anti-financial advisor, if anything. I'm an absolute mutual fund hater. You know? I believe that if everybody's gonna invest in anything, they're gonna invest in things that they could control and do themselves, which is what you're teaching. So yeah. I started out being the traditional financial advisor 17 years ago and I did that for four years. But, it didn't take me long to realize that even after decades of advice, people were still not any better off financially. They follow that, kind of, crappy advice. And I learned with people that were like friends of mine, they were millionaires and things like that, they didn't believe that advice. They thought that advice was stupid about saving for the long haul and diversifying in all these different funds, which really isn't diversification. Right? It's just putting your money all in the same kind of asset class and just hoping and praying that you're in it for the long haul, however long that is. Even if you lose money, oh well. You're in the market so stay in for another 15 years and maybe you'll make your money back. All that kind of crap that you're told by financial advisors, right? So, yeah. I left that about ... after four years of doing that, I left it, vowed to never do it again, was able to retire in 2006 when I was 28 years old. And then, of course, went through the recession. Actually went from millionaire to upside down millionaire, was in a million dollars of debt when that hit. Was able to dig back out of that without going through bankruptcy and was able to retire again about two years ago. This time with a lot more streams of income and a lot more safe guards in place to make sure that I keep it coming in. Allen: I mean, I'm interested in knowing how you did that both times. How did you retire twice? Chris Miles: Yeah, the first time was pretty accidental. You know? It was March of '06 that I went to a seminar that some of these guys put on. And they were talking about how financial advisors basically suck. And I was the only financial advisor in the room by the way. But I couldn't deny the truth. I mean, when they said, "Hey, high risk create high returns. So if that's true, how is that 90 percent chance of losing create a 90 percent chance of winning? That's dumb. No, you want lowest risk possible, create the highest returns, right?" And things like that. So, I've vowed never to teach about money again. I just basically said I'm gonna do mortgages. I'm gonna teach ballroom dancing at the local university. And so, I did! I was starting to do that but then I wanted to get to know more about what these guys knew. So, I started to learn more about what they did and one really rocked my world because there's people still coming to me asking me financial questions, even though I said, "Hey, I don't want to do that." But I was learning different strategies. I learned about leverage. Like, "Hey, could I use the equity from my house to create more returns?" And things like that. In situations, the focus were on cash flow. That was one of the biggest shift in me was when it was it wasn't about how do you compound your interest and things like that. But how does this actually create real streams of income? Real cash flow? I remember people were asking me questions and one of my friends said, "Hey, do you like doing mortgages?" And I said, "You know, I like teaching them but I, seriously, hate doing paper work." I hate when I tell people, "Hey, I'll be like three or four weeks before we're ... we got approvals. We're done here. So hang tight." And then the next day, they're like calling me up saying, "Hey, are we closed yet?" They're calling all hours of the day. That was annoying for me. So he said, "Well, why don't you find somebody who actually does like doing that?" In a scarcity world like I was in as a financial advisor, 'cause financial advisors teach out of scarcity. It's always lack and never enough and all that kind of stuff. Well, I never thought about splitting commissions and things like that. When he said that, I was like, "Wow! I could do that." So, I found a guy that was really good at doing the paperwork, didn't mind doing the underwriting but wasn't a big marketing kind of guy. Good guy with integrity. So I just said, "Hey, if I basically spoon feed people to you to where they're ready to do it, I just need your help to do the paperwork. Would you split me in 50/50?" And the guy's like, "Yeah, of course." I'm like, "Sweet!" And so, I would educate people for maybe half an hour to an hour max about ways they can leverage their mortgage and refinance and free up cash flow and stuff. They were like, "Great! Well, who do we go talk to?" I'm like, "Go talk to this guy." And next thing you know like a month or so later, I get a check for like a thousand or fifteen hundred bucks. I'm like, "That's like a thousand dollars an hour! That's way better!" This is great! And so, I started doing it with other companies. I even did it with a wholesale jeweler, getting paid five percent on any sale. And I was like, "Hey, these guys are like two, three times cheaper than the malls. Use these guys instead. They're great." Or,"There's other companies." And between these four or five different companies, I was seriously making four, five grand a month passive income. Like, I was doing very little to get. I was only working a few hours a week to make that money. And that's when it hit me 'cause at that point, I mean this is 2006. I only had two kids at the time. So, it was like by July of '06, I'm like, "Dang! That was only four months after I quit being a financial advisor and I thought I have to work forever and save every little penny and be cheap until I was 40 to be able to retire." And here I am doing it four months later with no real money in the markets. Just purely because of referrals. So that was the first way I did it. And then I started building it out of things like real estate income and things like that. By the way, at the same time, I was actually stock coaching and teach people how to trade stocks and options. So every money I was making from that was purely gravy. It was just like, "Well that's extra six grand or so a month. I can go and invest myself." I was having fun with it. So anyway, this last time around though, to be able to hit that retirement nest, I decided to create very multiple streams of income. It's not just from referrals but I was doing it from like my podcast. Can I get paid for advertising and things like that? Could I get paid from certain affiliates? Or could I get paid from monthly programs I have for clients and things like that? Where it's more system based versus me, my own time and attention. Pretty soon, same thing. But this time it wasn't like four or five grand a month 'cause I've got eight kids now with a blended family. Allen: Wow! Chris Miles: So, three or four, five grand a month is nothing. For my family, I've got to make at least 15 to 20 grand a month minimum to even make ends meet. So,  that's why it took me until two years to go and do it again even after the whole nest the recession. But yeah, that's really what it was. Investments, business streams, things like that, I found multiple ways to do it and it's awesome. It's ... truly, the key to freedom is creating that cash flow. Allen: So, how do you classify yourself? Like if someone, "Hey, what do you do?" What would you answer to that? Chris Miles: Depends on who's talking to me. I mean, if it's a business owner, I'll say I'm the cash flow expert. But in most time, I just refer myself as the anti-financial advisor because I'm basically against everything financial advisors teach. Allen: Okay. Alright. So our audience is made up of individual investors with a slant towards selling options. So, we focus more on more passive strategies, covert calls, puts, eye condors, credit spreads sells, those kinds of things where we have the probabilities in our favor. We put them on and then we have the time to go do other things while the trades are working for us. And they're not to the point where we have to sit there all day long, monitor them by cell by cell, like a day trading kind of thing. Chris Miles: Yeah. Allen: So, a lot of our people are ... they are already investors so they already have some kind of amount of money to put in. But then we also have a bunch of people who are trying to get in. So they're still working a day job and they're still saving up money and they're still trying to get ... put together an amount of money so that they can go and open an account and start trading. So for those type of people, could you give us a couple of hints of ways that they could generate more cash flow from what they already have? Chris Miles: Yeah! Absolutely! It kind of reminds me of a situation like I actually have one client right now where ... funny enough, he actually is kind of in a similar situation like yourself. He actually teaches people how to trade options. And he came to me, he says, "Okay Chris, I'm great at this." And his strategies more day trading than he does covert calls and things like that. But he's like you know, for myself personally, I love this and I make good money with this but I need other streams of income. Like, I just can't have this. Like this is a good active stream but I want some passive streams too that I don't have to work so hard for. Allen: Mm-hmm (affirmative)- Chris Miles: And so, I was like, "Okay cool." We'll see good stuff. And so we started looking at these like, "Do we do things with real estate?" Or how about oil and gas? I'll tell you like, it's especially if you work at another job, you get crapped on when it comes to taxes. It's horrible. My business owner clients, they love it because we can do all kinds of things ... strategies to minimize taxes. But, using IRA's is a joke when it comes to ... 'cause you don't really save on tax with IRA's. You're just delaying the inevitable. Especially, right now where we have some of the best tax benefits right now. We're at some of the lowest taxes we've ever had in the last century. It's kind of tough to say, "Oh yeah, let's delay tax until later 'cause yeah, tax are gonna keep going down, right?" All that kind of stuff. So people, most time when they come to me where they've had ... they make several hundred thousand a year at their job or they're doctors and things like that. They're looking for options to do. Definitely, options can be great, but a lot of times we would look for other things too of like, "Hey, can we do oil investments where we can write off everything that we're investing that year to bring your income down and stuff." And heck, you're like, "I want to get out of these stupid self-directed IRA's because they're telling me what I can and can't invest in." Cool! Well, maybe we can do some things to offset that. Maybe we do like conservation easement strategy where we donate land and you can write off four times whatever you donate. And that offsets the penalties and taxes if you're not 59 and a half. Like things like that. That's kind of stuff that I usually run into with situations like this. It's ... the biggest thing is like how do we keep as much money as possible and how do we get the money working for us as much to generate that cash flow? Allen: Mm-hmm (affirmative)- Chris Miles: And yeah. I think it's fun. Allen: Okay. I mean, yeah. It sounds like ... so one of our earlier episodes is, we call it ... I called it the five finger strategy where you have to have five different sources of income if you want to be truly, financially independent. Because when you're trading, if that's the only thing you're doing, if you're trading options or whatever. If that's the only thing you're doing, then you have that stress on the top of your head all the time. That I have to make enough to pay the bills. And it's not like where you're working a job where you go in and you know that you're gonna ... you're in the office, you're gonna get paid no matter what as long as the company is still in business. So being a trader is kind of like a sales person or a real estate agent or something like that where you have make the money in order to get it. There's that pressure on you all the time. If you do diversify and you have other streams of income, whether it's real estate or whatever, you can ... it takes the pressure off of you. And then you actually trade better at the same ... in the same regard. Chris Miles: Exactly! Yeah, and that's kind of like why that guy came to me too. He's like, "Okay, I'm rocking the options world but how can I get some pressure off of me?" And even though from a business standpoint and I tell this to business owners all the time, even people that I'm like network marketing. Like, I'll get people network marketing. They're like, "Oh, I'm set for life 'cause I've got", they might have hundreds of thousands of people in their down line and they're making what they refer to as residual income. And I tell you, I've watched those same people lose their businesses, like lose everything. And I tell them like, "How powerful is it if you can work because you want to, not because you have to?" That you've got other streams coming in and you say, "Hey, I don't need to do any more business. I don't need to do this. I'm just doing this 'cause I think it's fun." I think that the way investing should be. I think that's the way everything in our life should be is like, "Hey, I'm doing this because it's fun." And I'll tell you my experience, even with the people I had trained to do, trading with stocks and options, and any other type of investment, any time somebody said, "I think this is just fun. I don't care if I even make money. I think it's a bonus I make money." Whenever they say that, I'll tell you like when I follow them over the years, they just get better and better at that investment or in that business. They just ... things work out. For some people, they're just doing it for the paycheck. It's like, "Well, how's that different than having a job?" That sucks. So, it's true. You want to have multiple streams of income. You want to take that pressure off yourself 'cause you never know. Things might change. You might have to make ... you have to call an audible. That's what happened to me. That's what I did wrong before the last recession is that I was kind of banking ... in fact, I cut off a lot of those strategies, a lot of those income streams right before the recession. 'Cause I remember I was coming out of retirement. I was starting to teach people how to gather a rat race. And I remember the guys I was working with, his partner said, "Hey, well we can't have you doing these other side activities. We need you focused here." So I'm like, "Alright. But to be a team player, quote on quote, and for the mission, alright, I'll cut off these streams of income", which was so dumb. It was idiotic to do that. And it got me from a place of freedom to a place of bondage. Cash flow is really the key to freedom. 'Cause when you have more cash flow, there's more options. And when you have more options, that's when you have freedom. Allen: Right. Now, so you don't think that ... you've always just said that, "Hey, you hate financial planners." So you don't think that they have any value at all? Chris Miles: No, not at all. In fact, I think most financial planners have a good heart. Their hearts in the right place. What's wrong with financial advice is that they've been sold a bill of goods. And they're taught to regurgitate it back to you. Think about it. A bank, if you look at the rules of a bank. What does a bank want you to do when you give them money? They want you put money as often as possible, give them as much as possible, keep in there as long as possible, take out as little as possible and then take all the risks yourself. I mean, that's basically what a bank will have you do. Now, what are we taught to do with investing from the traditional point? They'll tell you, "Hey, put in money all the time, like every paycheck. Put it in all the time because you need that money going in. You need to start stuffing in lots of money and live on the interest." And they'll you, "Hey, put in as much as possible 'cause man, look how much it'll accelerate. And as long as possible, man that miracle of compound interest? Oh it's awesome." Like, "Imagine what your money will look like in 20,000 years!", "Seven percent off the S&P 500 index off the spider." That's after all the fees they've taken out by your financial advisors and stuff. And then they're telling you, "Yeah, don't take any money out. Like you gotta live on less than an interest." And it always seem dumb to me. I was like, "Wait!" Most time you see right now, most is biased. They'll say don't take out more than two or three percent of your account." So if you're a millionaire, you've got a million bucks saved up in a 401K or an IRA, they're basically telling you to live below the poverty line at 20 or 30 thousand dollars a year. I mean how is that right? I think that's stupid. So you have to, I mean really, I actually ran the numbers if someone wanted to retire in the next 20 years and you want to have a $60,000 dollar a year lifestyle which is not great. That's $5,000 a month. And you factor for inflation? Based on the current just typical mutual funds and stuff like the ones that are in the marketplace right now. You would have to save, I'm kidding you not, like adjust for inflation, everything, to pull out what they recommend pulling out, you gotta seriously save about $10,000 dollars a month for the next 20 years to be able to retire at a $60,000 dollar a year lifestyle. And that's just ridiculous. So it's not that the financial advisors are trying to deceive you but they've been sold everything from banks and financial institutions that are teaching everybody was just supposedly the rules of money. But you've been teaching and what I've been teaching as well is that, no, we gotta throw this thing upside down on its head is that, "No, when we take the investments under our own control. We take less risk, not more. 'Cause the banks want you to take all the risk. That's why mutual funded companies like Fidelity and what not, they're not gonna tell you like, "Hey, we're gonna take some risks for you. If you lose money, we do too." It's like no. They take their guaranteed fees, no matter what. Whether you may get it, they're making money. They take no risk. You're the one that takes all the risk. And that's why you've been taught, "High risk creates higher return." 'Cause they want you to actually believe that you have to take all the risk. And that's just bull crap. You don't. Allen: Yup. Yup. So, in your ... like for your clients and what not, what type of financial products do you recommend? Chris Miles: You know, it really depends. Everybody has their own recipe. I mentioned earlier, we talked about finding things that light you up. What are the investments that you're just like, "Wow, that'd be fun!" It could be ... if it's options trading? Sweet! Let's make that like your active investment. You're totally rocking it and building up your cash and everything possible to make more. Then outside of that, cool, maybe look for passive streams. And that could be in different aspects of real estate. It could be in oil and gas. It could be with different notes or funds. I know funds out there that'll pay you consistently 10 percent a year but paid out monthly. So, if you got $100,000 bucks, they'll pretty much pay you about $830 ... what was that? What is it? Like $830 somewhat dollars a month just on that. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to worry about it. You just let them take care of it. They're investing their own stuff. Allen: So what type of funds are those? Chris Miles: That one particular company, that one's one that invest in mortgage, like delinquent mortgages. And they help people refinance and so this is buy-out huge portfolios of mortgages from banks and then try to refinance people and keep them in their home or help them sell their home and split the equity and that kind of stuff. Allen: Ah, I see. Chris Miles: So, I mean, and like the one company I've referred people to, they're actually reports of the FCC every year. They're monitored by them. But they're own portfolio usually makes at least 39, 40, 50 percent a year. But they'll pay investors, people that basically loan money to them like 10 percent, paid out monthly. Allen: Wow! Chris Miles: Not huge. That's like, for me, that's the low-end of the return scale. I like higher. I mean I know other funds that might do 12 percent or more if you let it reinvest. Turn-key real estate. I have turn-key being hands off, you don't have to deal with anything but you get to collect the checks. I mean, some of those can easily do at least 10 or 12 percent a year. And that's just cash on cash. That's not including the tax benefits or appreciation or the fact that they're paying your mortgage down for you which could lead to easily 20, 30, 40 percent year over year cash on cash return. Allen: So what would be an example of turn-key real estate? Chris Miles: Yeah. I'll give you an example. Recently, I bought a property in Memphis, Tennessee. And I didn't have to find the property, I just used a turn-key provider that found the properties and said, "Here's a list. Which one do you like?" I said, "Well, that one looks sweet. That one's paying 14 percent cash on cash right of return, so I'll take that one." Bob that, after interest rates kicked in a little bit when the interest rates climbed a little bit, it ended up being more like 11 percent cash on cash. So I basically put ... all of a sudden, I put about three grand down. But my cash flow was $270 bucks a month. Allen: Mm-hmm (affirmative)- Chris Miles: And then, the next are $120 bucks a month that's going towards paying down a mortgage. But that's like phantom income. That's like filling net worth and that becomes more important when I sell the property down the road. But the cool thing is actually just recently, we just raised the rent on the renters another $55 bucks a month and they signed a one year lease again. So now it's the ROI's now jumping up. Now it's like $320 or so a month. Now, my ROI's like about 13, 14 percent. Allen: Nice! How many of those do you have? Chris Miles: Those ... I've got a few of those, actually. And then we got like things like multi-family. You could do things like fourplexes, you can even go bigger. 'Cause if you got a lot of cash, our thing is you drop them like 30 grand or 20 grand down as a down payment, you've got like $500,000 dollars. That's a lot of properties to buy. So better is you can go look the fourplex route, which you might put down like a $120 grand or something on. And make money off that. In fact, I just had a deal recently that came across and I was already leveraged from my own money. But there was an offer that came across for a 55+ senior community where I can't remember how many units were in that deal. It was like $2.65 million dollars down payment. But the cash flow was already paid 'cause they were already in it. There was already people paying for it. There were already ... the cash flow was already $311,000 a year. So $2.65 million dollars down for $311,000 a year passive coming in. And the thing that was cool about that is they're still raising the rents. So, they're still trying to make more and more cash flow on that deal. I actually ended up sending it out to my clients. I'm like, "Hey guys, maybe ..." I knew a few of them could do it by themselves but they probably weren't wanting to go on that big. So, I'm like, "Hey, partner up. This is an awesome deal! That's almost a 12 percent right of return from a big deal like this." I mean from that much cash, that's hard to do. Allen: Yeah. Chris Miles: That's not including any appreciation or anything else. That was just purely from the cash on cash returns, you know? Allen: Uh-huh. Yup. It's just that, I think, for most people and I'm sure your clients included, it's ... unless you're really tapped in, it's really hard to find these type of investments. And then, it's hard to know if it's a good investment or not. Right? Chris Miles: Exactly. And that's why you have to have the right relationships, the right connections and stuff. 'Cause, yeah, I didn't have to find those properties. They basically found me. That's what's beautiful about it is that there's an over-abundance of deals out there. That's why I tell people like, "Don't just do something 'cause they'll pay you a lot of money. Do something because it actually is exciting to you beyond the money." There's plenty of things you can do ... there's a million and millions of ways to make millions of dollars. Allen: I'm sure you know that but there's so many people that'd be like, "Well I don't know any of them. I can't find any of them. Where do I find all these deals?" Chris Miles: Well, you know and that's what I teach on my podcast show. The Chris Miles Money Show 'cause like recently, I had a really popular episode with a guy that he actually had him on my show, I think it was like, five years ago. Like early on. And he was talking about real estate and what not and it was cool. Well, I started to see in some of his emails and his emails started turning towards short-term rentals, like Air B&B rentals. And I had a few clients were like, "Hey Chris, what do you think about doing air B&B? What about buying a property and doing air B&B on it?", which I'm like, "That could be cool." But this guy, he's like, "Hey, you know what? You don't even have to buy the property. What if you go to a building, like an apartment building and say, I know you got a ton of these units up for rent right now. How about I just rent all these from you. Let's say there's like six of them that are unrented. I'll just rent all these six units from you. I'm gonna sub-lease them to somebody else but don't worry, I'm gonna be doing all the cleaning. It's gonna get cleaned every week. We'll even clean the vents that you won't do, that your own tenants won't do. We'll keep this probably in better condition than any of your other tenants. And you're gonna get paid every single month. And you don't have any more vacancies. And then you go and you just furnish the place and then you start collecting in like a couple of thousand bucks a month of passive income from the air B&B rentals. And you have your own team that's coming in and that's managing the property so you're not managing it yourself. I mean that kind of stuff is ... that episode right there when he's like, "yeah, you could drop ten grand and furnish a place and you end up making that money back within a year and a half. Then it's just like your cash flowing net at least a thousand bucks a month above and beyond your rent payment." He's like that's ... when you think about that. That's like a 50 percent rate year over year rate of return. That's pretty incredible. More of an active investment? That's a thing about it. There's so many options out there you can do. It's just a matter of one, figuring out what lights you up. That's a lot of times when I have to discuss with people. It's like, "Alright, let's investigate some of these and see which ones you lean towards." Then, create a road map from there, a game plan to get you out of that rat race so you can quit that job or work because you want to, not 'cause you have to. Allen: Okay. Now you also have ideas on how to help people with their taxes, right? How can they ... so like, if you were to give our audience some tips on ways that they can reduce some of their taxes? Chris Miles: Yeah. It depends where you're coming from. If you're already a business owner, you've got lots of opportunities. Sadly, most accountants don't teach you that much what to do. For example, like this year, you're allowed to pay your kids $12,000 dollars a year ... your minor children $12,000 dollars a year tax-free. So I remember I had a woman in California that she had six kids. And she was only paying them $6,000 a year. When she found this out, she started paying them $6,000 a year, saved her $13 grand a year in taxes. And the cool thing is she's still using that same money to pay for the same crap that she was paying for before; schooling, extra curriculars, all that kind of stuff. College savings, if they want to save for college or whatever. But that's like tax-free money. So, if you can get yourself in the business owner status and if you're not there, say you're working for a company or whatever. Then, it's like, "Okay, can we get you to do professional investor status?" And that can be tough to do. There's things to do. It might not be you. You might have to get a spouse to do it depending on who works the least. You kinda have to work ... you have to usually work about an average of 15 hours a week to hit the professional investor status. But if you do, you can actually start claiming losses on your taxes. Making money there. There's things of that. I mentioned a few of those things from the investment world. There's like the oil and gas. You invest a hundred grand in oil and gas this year, usually you can write off at least $85,000 of that. So if you're like, "Hey, I'm making $250,000 a year. I want to get down on the next tax bracket. Cool! Maybe you dump a hundred grand on oil and gas and get the tax write off this year. But then starting in the second year, you start getting cash flow from the investment. Possibly even a 200 or 300 percent rate of return after three to five years on the reposition and sell off their land shares that you're a part owner in and stuff. Or do you do that conservation easement strategy where you donate land, like I mentioned before. You write off four times the amount you donate. So if your land share is $50,000 bucks, you write off $200,000 dollars off your income tax. Things like that. There's so many cool things you could do. It's just depending on where you're coming from. If you're ... the sad thing is if you're an employee, your options are pretty limited. It's pretty much either you get to that professional investor category or do a few of those types of strategies ... those investment strategies. Allen: So now, let me go back. You said for the .. you can pay your kids if you have a business. And now, obviously, the kids have to do something in the business where you have to be able to say that they're providing some type of service. Then you also mentioned that you could pay them $12,000 this year. Now, I've heard of that and I'd do it with my children but we pay them six. Chris Miles: Yeah. That's kind of like until this last year in 2018. Allen: Okay. Chris Miles: Yeah, it used to be $6,000 but then recently with the whole Trump tax plan, they said, "Hey, you can actually do twelve with your kids." It's also justifiable, you can't just pay them for doing nothing. You pay them like you pay any adult for. If it's cleaning or if it's helping you with marketing if you're in business and that kind of thing. Obviously, you gotta be a business owner of some sort. It could be filing. It could be computer work. Come on. You have them help you build a web page if they're better at that than other people, you can easily pay them at least twelve grand a year. Allen: Exactly. Chris Miles: All kinds of stuff. It just depends on your business, the nature of your business and what you can do. The challenge with me is I've got eight kids trying to figure out how to pay them all that much is pretty tough. Allen: And this is only for this year or is it for until they change the tax code? Chris Miles: Until they change it, yeah. Allen: Okay. So there's no time period that says, "Okay, this will be enacted for the next three years," or something. And then it has- Chris Miles: Not that I know of. But, like I said, in two years, we have a new president and new tax bill comes through and who knows? But yeah. In the meantime, we can definitely exploit that fact. Allen: Wow. Yeah, okay. Chris Miles: That's one strategy. Another one that's pretty cool that a lot of accountants never teach because a lot of them just ... by the way, if you ever have an accountant that says, "Oh I'm conservative." What it really means is they're saying, "I'm ignorant." 'Cause they just don't know the tax laws. So they're conservatives 'cause they don't want to go and learn any new strategies. So they just tell you the same old crap. Like for example, there's one and in fact, I had an accountant that told one of my clients, "You cannot do that. That's against tax code." So I found freakin' articles, even in like New York Times and stuff for like this corporate rent strategy as an example. Where if he had a corporation, especially if you work from home, and heck even if you don't work from home. Maybe you just have a home office, you could actually pay to use your house say for one day ... one day's use. Almost like you would for a hotel. If you've ever booked a hotel, like a meeting space or something like that, whether you had people coming there or maybe you just meeting with a potential client or whatever it might be, you say, "Hey, alright, I'm gonna book this hotel meeting space. Yes, I'll pay for the wireless internet. Yes, I'll pay for this. Heck, why not pay for lunch too or catering." You start to add it all up, it's a lot of money for a day's use for a hotel. Well, not too uncommon, you could pretty much see like a day's use of a hotel could be easily be at least ... for cross country, it's different state by state but cross country, like $1250 bucks let's just say for a day's use of a hotel. Well, you could do that same thing by renting your corporation, renting your house from you, personally, for that one day. Now, if you know about rental laws like you don't get tax on rent until it passes 14 days in that year. So, let's just say you only pick one day out of the month that you do something. And it could be something with clients. It could be something not. It could be you're doing a planning meeting inside your own house or whatever. Whatever it might be, you basically use your home for that day's use of business purpose. Well, if you did that for 12 days a year, that's fifteen thousand bucks that you've been paid personally from your corporation. So that's a write off from your company. You're getting a company write off. But that income is income tax-free because you haven't surpassed the fourteen days. So depending on your tax bracket, if you're in a pretty high tax bracket, that could save you at least five or six grand. In fact, I had ... I tested it once. So, I actually ... I had an accountant who forgot to count it and I said, "Hey, hey, go back. This thing right here, this expense, this income is actually should not be counted as income 'cause that was 11 or 12 days of those corporate rent payments." And so he put it back in, he's like, "Oh, let me adjust that." And seriously, it was a six grand savings that year. Allen: Okay, so let me get this clear. If you have a property that you rent out and you  collect income, you collect rental income on that, whether it's a house or a car or whatever- Chris Miles: This is actually for your own home you live in. Allen: Right. Okay, so it's only for your home? Chris Miles: Yep, just for your home. Not talking about the rental properties. This is just for your own house. Allen: And if it doesn't exceed 14 days, there's no income tax on that? Chris Miles: Correct. Yep. And then, tax usually ... if you go over 14 days, it's passive income tax. You're taxed like you are for real estate but as long as you don't go over 14 days a year, that's income tax free to you. Allen: Wow. I didn't know that one. Yeah. Chris Miles: Yeah. It's pretty awesome. I have actually, I have one friend. He has a bigger home and he's like, "Hey, my accountant has me justifying $1500 a month ... or $1500 for that day's use. So he's like, "I'm going all the way up to the 14 days." So he's basically writing off like 21 grand a year. That's saved him probably at least 7 grand in taxes that year. And you're still getting paid. That's the cool thing. You're still paying yourself. But rather than paying yourself, you have to pay income tax and social security tax and everything else, you're taking that totally income tax free. Allen: Hmm. And so how would you ... you have to still report it as income but the accountant should know how to handle that, right? Chris Miles: Yeah. You have to let them know, of course, that that income is from however many days it were in that year for that rent payment. You just have to classify ... tell them that 'cause if you don't, then they will just count it as normal income. But yeah. You just have ... and they can use ... if they know the strategy obviously, they'll see, "Oh, there's that rent payment coming out of your business and there's the income. Perfect." Allen: Awesome. Cool! Yeah, so I think those two tips could save people a lot of money. But both of them, obviously, you have to have a corporation. And I think one of the ... couple of episodes ago, we talked with another one of our traders who had gone ahead and started trading inside of his corporation for an asset protection. That was the main reason, for asset protection, but then he also was able to take out all these expenses as deductions. And then the losses were also classified as differently than on his personal. That helped out a lot as well. Definitely, I think, it'd be good for most traders depending on how much they actually have and how much they could actually save. They could probably easily do this and open a corporation and just do all that stuff out of it. That's really cool! That's really cool stuff! Chris Miles: Yeah. Allen: Is there a way where people can get a hold of you? 'Cause we're out of time here but I know that we could keep talking and I'm sure you have lots of other strategies as well. But is there a way for our listeners to find you and get a hold of you? Chris Miles: Yeah. Like I mentioned, you could check out the Chris Miles Money Show that's on iTunes or you could find it online that way. There's also my website, moneyripples.com. That's M-O-N-E-Y-R-I-P-P-L-E-S dot com. Even if you have questions specifically, you might just say, "Hey, let me send an email Chris." You can just send that email to Chris with a C-H. So, Chris@moneyripples.com. Allen: Cool! Thank you. And before you go, I got one last question for you. Chris Miles: Yeah. Allen: So, let's say, you ran into somebody and you really wanted to impress them with your financial knowledge. Maybe this person is a big whale type person and you're like, "Okay, I want this guy as a client. I'm gonna give him one tip that's just gonna knock his socks off." What would that be? Chris Miles: That's not an easy answer 'cause I always adapt to the person. For me, usually it's mostly listening. All I have to do is usually ask you a series of questions and just find out like where you are and usually, I'll find out something like, "Oh, hey, have you considered this?" So, it could be like conservation easement, like, "Hey, here's a way you can write off four times and get massive savings if taxes are a big pain." Or "Hey, passive income, you want more of that? Dude you can totally rock your world by making passive income over here and doing this kind of stuff." It's not hard for me. It really just depends on the situation where they're at. I would say, probably for me, to knock their socks off, I usually do less. I usually do less talking, more listening. Allen: Mm-hmm (affirmative)- Okay. Alright. Alright, Chris! Well this has been an interesting conversation. Those of you who are looking for more passive streams of income, that are looking to save money on their taxes even, do reach out to Chris. Like you said, there are lots and lots of ways to make money. We just have to find them. So, appreciate it, Chris! Thank you for spending some time with us. Chris Miles: It's an honor. Thanks for having me on your show. Allen: Alright, take care. Chris Miles: Alright, see ya. -- LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/ WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP:  https://optiongenius.com/alliance Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps.   

People literally ask me this one question ALL THE TIME… “Allen, how did come up with such a lucrative, safe, and easy way to trade?” I explain it all in my new book Passive Trading, get your free book here  https://www.passivetrading.com/free-book! Option Genius was built with you...the individual trader, the breadwinner, the dreamer, the rock your family depends on ...in mind. Because we know what it takes to become a successful and profitable trader. And that’s exactly what we help you do best. Get your $1 trial of Simon Says Options, our most conservative and profitable trading service here https://simonsaysoptions.com/stockslist-ss-trial-offer.  -- Giddy up Option Nation! Welcome to another episode. Today we're going to be talking about financial planners. And really the title is, What Your Financial Planner Really Thinks of You. Because although you might know it, he doesn't think as much of you as you think. A couple weeks ago I was in Austin for a digital marketing seminar event type thing. Now before I started Option Genius, I was a marketing manager for a small publishing company and I mean I geek out on marketing stuff. Especially online marketing stuff. I can't get enough of it. Now at Option Genius, we get most of our clients online. Now a large portion do come from referrals and I do have a book coming out that I'm working that we're gonna get people from there as well. But most of our customers find us online. Either through ads that we run on Google or Facebook. We get people from our Facebook page and our Facebook group, the Option Traders Alliance. We get people from our YouTube channel, Twitter feed, all that stuff. So I mean to me, all of that stuff is really, really interesting. How do you get more people to come to your website? How do you get them interacting with you? All that sort of thing. So I went there to meet with people and talk and learn what strategies are there. At the event they had us doing different workbooks and exercises to really figure out, who's the person that we want to target? And where is the person hanging out and all this kind of stuff. And at the end, they wanted to show how to apply all the things that we had just learned to real businesses. So they did what they call hot seats. So everybody, anybody that wanted to come on stage and be helped by the speakers, they could put their name in a hat. Everybody did and they picked three different people. One of those happened to be a financial planner, who's on the hot seat. So I was like, okay this is going to be interesting because I might be able to use some of this stuff from him. I mean, he's a similar market, right? And whatever they help him with, it could help me as well. So they asked him, "Hey what's your business? What do you do? What do you want? How can we help you?" He said that he wanted more clients. That's what he want, more clients. And the normal way that financial planners get clients is by word of mouth or they do stuff like educational seminars and stuff like that. Hey, call us and we have a free booklet or something like that. But this guy, he had a unique request, and that's why he was at this online marketing event. He didn't want to talk to anybody. He wanted the whole process to be automated, meaning from the time people see the ad, to they go to his website, to they sign up, to they get more information, to they send him a check. All of that he wanted all automated. He didn't want to deal with anybody during that whole process. Because what he said was, he hated talking to people that were not going to become a client. I mean, that's literally ... he's up there on the stage. I think they even recorded this on video. This guy's up there as a financial planner saying he hates talking to people about financial stuff that are not going to become a client. Okay, that's kind of rude. I don't know?  But then they asked him, "Okay, fine. What do you do right now?" I mean, they didn't want to judge him, right? So they're like, "Okay fine, what do you do now to get clients?" So he said that he and his partner, they held free informational seminars. So they have a lunch, they pay for lunch, and they invite people and people come and they talk about finances and this and that. And that they were getting a lot of people to come to the seminars, but none of those people were becoming clients. So then you gotta ask, hey what type of clients does he want? To which he replied, and I'm going to quote him here, okay? This is his words. He wants clients that are, "Really rich ones. I don't want to deal with low level people, I want clients with over a million dollars to invest." That's actually what he said. And he wasn't even ashamed to say it in front of all these people. I was like, my God! So people who don't have a million dollars are low level people? And they're not worthy of getting financial advice? You can't help them? Huh. With that kind of attitude, I mean, no wonder he wasn't getting any clients. Geez! And then somebody from the audience, they raised their hand and they asked him, so how much does he charge? And he said that he charges a percentage or a flat fee. He could do both. But mostly he charges ... No actually, sorry, they asked him how he charged. Was he a percent guy or was he a flat fee guy? Because lately more and more people are going towards the flat fee brokers, the flat fee advisers, because it's better for the customer. It's better for the client, right? So he said that he was a percentage guy. He charges a percentage of assets under management. Just guess how much that this fellow charges. Now knowing a little bit about his mentality you might already ... you might get close. He charges 5% of assets every single year. So if you give him $100,000 he's gonna take $5,000 out of that as his fee for just dealing with you, okay? And then the investments that he will put you in, the funds or whatever he puts you in, those are probably gonna charge you 1 to 2% or more every year as well. So just to break even, his clients have to get a 7% return, just to break even, right? I mean, listening to this guy made me want to throw up. I was nauseous. I was like, this guy, he can't even get 8, 9%. The stock market averages 8%, this guy is nothing special. This guys another bumpkin off the boat or whatever and he wants to make ... he wants to charge 7% in fees so that his clients get like 1 to 2% a year. The sad part is, that nobody else in the room was nauseous. Nobody else was offended. Nobody else was upset. They were looking at him like that was normal, because it is normal. I mean, 5% is really high, but the sad fact is that there are idiots all over the world right now claiming to be financial experts who do nothing but take money and put it into different funds and they charge this much. I mean, heck you could do that for yourself. The majority of individual investors do not need a financial planner. 'Cause when broken down into the basics, investing in options are not that difficult. That's why it's awesome that you have decided to learn this stuff for yourself. And I applaud you for that and I want you to keep going and save the money that you're paying these rip off artists, okay? Now, in the building where we have our office, right next door, is a financial planner. Really nice guy. Really smart too. I mean, it's just him and an assistant. So he's not really, really big. He doesn't have 100 people working under him, but he's been at this for a long time, okay? And actually, mainly, it's just the assistant because he's in the office maybe a couple of days a week. And maybe like around five hours a week, on a busy week. Whenever we see him, he's either coming from his workout or going to his workout, so he's always in a t-shirt and shorts. Unless, on the odd occasion when he has to meet a client, that's when he'll actually have like a suit and tie on. But that's very, very rare. And the assistant, she's just there to answer the phone if it rings. Which we hardly ever hear it ringing. Most of the time she's just on her phone playing games or on Facebook, or even napping. Now to this gal's credit, he's been doing this for a long time. So he has built up his book of business. He has his customers, people who like him and trust him. They've given him money to invest and he also does 401 programs for some small companies. So he does very, very well for himself. And in fact, he's going to be retiring soon. The only thing he's waiting on is for his daughter to graduate so she can take over the firm for him. He was going to sell it, but now she wants to get in, so he's gonna wait for her to graduate, train her a little bit, and then he's gonna back out and let her handle it. He's gonna be actually the first financial planner that I know that is going to be retiring before age 65. Can you imagine that, right? Financial planners are supposed to be really, really good at investing. They're supposed to know how to make money in their investments, so they'd be the ones that you would find being retired. It should be hard to find a financial planner, but it's not. There are thousands, millions of them all over the place. It's easy to find. And unfortunately for my friend, it's not that he's being able to retire because of his investing prowess, okay? It's not the investments that he puts people in that are helping him retire. It's the fees that he charges his customers. Now when I first moved in the office I sat down with him a few times and we would talk. I told him what we do and he told me he knows a little bit about options, but he said that his compensation wouldn't allow him to get his clients involved in options. And I was like, "What does that mean? What do you mean, you can't put them in options?" And he was like, "No, I can't. I'm not allowed by the fund companies," this is what he said, he's "not allowed by the fund companies that he represents to tell his clients about options or other investments that are alternatives." So he could get in trouble by the company's that he represents if he started advertising other funds. Investment funds, like real estate funds, or options funds or what not. He couldn't really do that because the company's that he works with, that's he obligated ... contractually obligated to, they don't have those type of investments. I mean, I was like, well to me, the whole point of a financial planner, of anybody going to a financial planner, is for them to tell the investor what are the best, best, best alternatives out there for that person? And if you are limited because of a contract, or because of who's paying you money, then you're not actually working in the best interest of the investor. Even though that's the case, this whole Wall Street business model, has worked really, really well for him. I mean he's about to retire. He's doing good, he only works a few hours a week. People give him money, he puts the money into different funds, some of which give him a commission, and then he charges his clients a percentage of his assets. Of their assets. So if the markets do good, they that's awesome! We're gonna charge you even more. If the markets go down, well we'll blame it on the market, but we still get our fees. And that's the whole module, the whole business model of Wall Street, right? It's a great business for my friend the planner. And the way it works ... Because it works, Wall Street makes it seem that investing is too complicated and that you need help figuring it out. You, Mr. Individual Investor, you should go do whatever you do for a living. Focus on that, because you're too stupid to figure it out. You don't understand PE ratios and revenue models and accounting principals. You don't understand. Don't bother your pretty little head with all that stuff. We are the mutual fund investors, or we run Wall Street! We can do this. We do it on a full time basis. We've gone to Ivy League schools and gotten an education and all this stuff, so we are much better at it. So we are worth the fees that we're charging you and you should give us that money because otherwise, you're going to lose all your money! And most of the time, it's not even about beating the market averages or doing as good as you can. Their whole pitch is, you should give your money to us so that you don't just lose all of it. Which is a totally wrong way to look at it, right? 'Cause I mean the alternative, it's not ... The alternative is not, okay I'm going to give my money to a mutual fund or I'm going to lose all of it. That's not ... Those are not the only objectives out there. Those are not the only alternatives. You can just keep your money in cash and you won't lose any of it. And you'll still do better than the mutual fund if you do that, right? So I mean, these guys on Wall Street, they take your money, they charge you a fee for the privilege of taking your money, and then they get to play with it. And if they make money, cool! They'll take more from you. If they lose money, oh well, it's the markets fault. It's not our fault, we did a good job. And I mean, if you look at it, it's gonna be super, super hard for you to go to Wall Street and find anybody that actually loses sleep because your money is at risk. You know? I mean, you put your money at risk, you will lose sleep if you're investing in a way that is too risky or you're not comfortable with it, you're gong to lose sleep. But these folks on Wall Street, they don't lose sleep because your money's at risk. The only thing they're concerned about is to keep their assets under management and their fees high so they can continue what they do. That's the truth of it. And recently, I mean, Jack Bogle the founder of the index fund, passed away. And my hat's off to this guy. He was responsible for saving people millions and millions of dollars that they would've just lost in terms of fees. And you can go read all the stuff that he wrote. He wrote ... There were several books written about him. He's the founder of Vanguard. There's a reason why they have such low fees. If you have to go to a mutual fund, then you should be in a Vanguard or a T. Rowe Price. 'Cause those two are the ones with the lowest, lowest fees out there. Vanguard, in fact, they are corporate structure is different. So they're ... The way that the company is structured, they don't have ... They're not a public company. They don't have to keep making money for their investors. They're privately owned and all that stuff, so they're able to keep their fees lower. And that's the whole reason for that company. Now even though there's oodles and oodles of research out there that says that mutual funds do not beat the averages, that hedge funds do not beat the averages, there are still guys out there, these stock pickers, that claim that they can beat the markets. I mean, they're on CNBC, they're on Fox Business, they're on Bloomberg and Reuters every single day telling you what to do and what not to do and all that stuff. And you look at most of them and they all have losing records. Or they will be able to beat the averages that they compare themselves to, which is really sad. I mean, there are a few people that can beat the markets. But those guys are doing so well that you already have to be mega, mega rich for them to manage your money. And most of us are not in that boat. We don't have millions of dollars to give them. So that's why we sell options. And it's pretty hard to beat the averages just by picking stocks. It is. Mutual funds can't beat the averages and neither can most hedge funds. No other investment class has done as well as the stock market over time. So, why do I think that I can beat the averages? Why do I keep saying that selling options is the better way to go? Because when you take the averages, you take the stock market returns, and you add options into the mix, you get more bang for your buck. You get appreciation and time decay working for you in tandem together, right? They work together, so you get appreciation and the time decay. That's exactly what I'm going to be covering in my upcoming book. How to use stocks and options together to not only beat the averages, but achieve your financial goals in a way that you can do so in your spare time? But I'm getting ahead of myself, I don't want to talk about that right now. We'll cover that more in detail later on. But for now, if you use a financial planner, maybe you've used with them ... maybe you've used that guy for years. Maybe you've been with him, maybe you trust him, maybe you like him, maybe he's a family member, I don't know. But dig a little deeper. Look into the fees that you're paying. Look at the returns. Compare the returns to the overall markets, to the index funds, would you be doing better? Ask questions. And if you don't like the answers you get, well then my friend, it's time for you to put the odds in your favor and join us as an option seller. Take care. -- LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/ WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP:  https://optiongenius.com/alliance Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps. 

People literally ask me this one question ALL THE TIME… “Allen, how did come up with such a lucrative, safe, and easy way to trade?” I explain it all in my new book Passive Trading, get your free book here  https://www.passivetrading.com/free-book! Option Genius was built with you...the individual trader, the breadwinner, the dreamer, the rock your family depends on ...in mind. Because we know what it takes to become a successful and profitable trader. And that’s exactly what we help you do best. Get your $1 trial of Simon Says Options, our most conservative and profitable trading service here https://simonsaysoptions.com/stockslist-ss-trial-offer.  -- Allen: All right, everybody. Welcome, Genius Nation. We have a special edition today. We have a video podcast episode, and I'm today here with Mr. Virgil Hughes, who is a full-time trader. I wanted him to get on the podcast to share his experience, to share his stories, how he got started, what he does, so that he can explain to you how he trades for a living. But I also wanted, and what really spoke to me about Virgil, is that he mentioned that he uses his time away from trading to actually give back to other people in the world, and I wanted him to come on and share that message as well and to share with us what he's doing and how he's actually making the world a better place. So, Virgil, how you doing today? Virgil Hughes: I'm good. Thanks, Allen, and thanks for having me on. It's a pleasure to be talking with you and sharing your story as well. Allen: Yeah, no, I mean I always love talking to traders and the students that come through our system. We've been doing this for a while now, so we have a lot of people that reach out to us and share their success stories. And I think that really, for me, that has actually given me more of a passion of giving back and helping out and sharing their stories as well so it's not just about me talking about myself but it's actually other people are doing well, and I want to share their stories as well. Virgil Hughes: Good. Allen: So that's why we're here. And so, Virgil, tell us, how'd you get started in trading? Virgil Hughes: Well, it's a little bit of an odd story. I think I've always been engaged or interested in the financial markets, but I spent a career as a CEO doing turnarounds, and that was more than full-time. And at one point, I was diagnosed with cancer and- Allen: Wow. Virgil Hughes: ... had to step back and had tried to get back into the workforce and had a relapse. Allen: Oh, my. Virgil Hughes: Eventually, I just said, "I got to figure out something else." And so I started doing some trading in the futures market and then learned about options and so I traded half heartedly for a number of years while I did some consulting but in the last few years have been doing it full-time. Allen: Okay. So, I mean, how are you doing health-wise now? Virgil Hughes: Oh, it's long gone. Allen: Oh, that's wonderful. Virgil Hughes: Fortunately, cancer is a distant memory now. Allen: That's great. Virgil Hughes: [crosstalk 00:02:58] Allen: I mean, I can imagine doing turnarounds, that sounds very stressful. I mean, I- Virgil Hughes: Yeah, it's extremely stressful. You have a lot of people that don't like you. Allen: So you were like the Richard ... What was he? Richard Dreyfuss guy in Pretty Woman? Was that him? Virgil Hughes: No. Not quite. I can't think of a good cultural icon to compare myself to, but companies that got broken because somebody screwed up, I would come in and fix them. Allen: And that would probably mean letting a lot of people go. Virgil Hughes: Well, people get comfortable doing what they're doing, and even if it's wrong. And so I would have to help them see the light or help them see the door. Allen: Awesome. All right, so what are you trading now? What are your specialties? Virgil Hughes: Well, mostly just equities and options and combinations of equities and options. And I've, over the last year, been introduced to your crude oil trading process, and so I've done that as well. But mostly just combinations of equities and options. Allen: Okay. And how much time are you spending doing that right now? Virgil Hughes: Well, over the last six or eight months it's probably been, oh, half-time. Over the last four weeks, as crude has collapsed, it's been more than full-time. Allen: Just watching the markets, right? Virgil Hughes: Yeah. Typically, I can spend some time checking on the markets and the rest of the time doing what I do. Allen: Right. Okay. And so how long did it take you to make that transition from dabbling in the market, learning about it, to going and saying, "Okay. You know what? I'm going to do this for a living [crosstalk 00:05:19] time"? Virgil Hughes: Yeah. I don't think it's a matter of time. It's a matter of when you decide to do it. And what happened was I was running a chain of hospitals and felt called ... I just left and felt called to do the non-profit full-time, and that meant that I needed to have some source of income. And so I just took the knowledge that I'd gathered and just started doing it. [crosstalk 00:06:04] I think some people maybe their minds work differently, but for me, it was just a case of, "Okay, now time to get serious about this and do it." Allen: So I mean, because a lot of people, they reach out and they say that, "Hey, I'm really hesitant or I'm really scared because I don't know what I'm going to fall back on." But I think it sounds like you found your why, you found your purpose, like, "Hey, I am going to do this thing, and nothing's going to stop me. And for me to get this, I have to succeed at this other thing over here, which is trading." Virgil Hughes: That's exactly right, Allen. Yeah. You put it very well. I don't think I can elaborate on that. I found my purpose, and so this is how I'm going to get there. Allen: That's awesome. That's awesome, because a lot of times, people, they don't know. And that's one of the things that we've repeatedly, we've told people, "If you want to get good at trading, it has to be done. If you make it a must," and this is Tony Robbins talking, but, "If you make something a must, then it's going to happen," right? Virgil Hughes: Yeah. Allen: And if you have your why, if you have your reason behind what you're doing ... because when it comes to trading, at the end of the day, how do you know if you're a successful trader? Well, you have more money in the account. And in the beginning, for people who don't have money, that sounds like, "Oh, that's going to be awesome. I'm going to have more money. I'm going to get to go out. I'm going to spend money. I'm going to buy stuff." But then you get to a certain point where that's not enough anymore. And I see a lot of traders, in the beginning they do really well and their accounts grow, but then they get to that point where money is no longer the motivator, and they lose focus. They lose interest. And so then they have a relapse and they lose all that money, and then they start back over again and they grow. So there was this one exercise that I read about in a book, for people who don't know their why. Basically, it was to sit down with somebody, like we're sitting here, just sit across from somebody that you know or that has your best interests at heart and just ask you a question like, "Hey, why are you doing this? Why do you want to get into trading?" And then whatever answer you come up with. "I want to make more money." Okay. "Why do you want to make more money?" "Well, because I got to pay my bills." Okay. "Why do you need to pay your bills?" And then you just keep asking that. They just keep rephrasing what you're saying, and then just asking deeper, deeper, deeper, why, why, why. And it's a simple process, but if you do it right and you still go deep enough, you'll find something about yourself that totally blows your mind. When I did it the first time, I was like, "Oh my God. I never knew that I felt that way inside." And I think for you, it was a little bit easier because you found out right away. You're like, "Hey, I'm going to go do this non-profit thing, and nothing's going to stop me." Virgil Hughes: Yeah, that's exactly right. For me, trading is simply a means to an end, and the end is outside of myself. It's not so that I can put more money in the account. It's not so that I can build a bigger house or something like that. It's so that I can get over to Africa more often or that I can bring on people who can get over to Africa more often, that sort of thing. Allen: Okay. So I do want to talk about that, but before we get into that, can you give our listeners any advice or any tips or tidbits that you picked up over these years to help them on their journey as how they can get to where you are? Virgil Hughes: With trading or- Allen: Yeah, with trading. Virgil Hughes: Okay. Wow. Allen: Or it can be anything in life, generally, but mostly ... because most of our guys, they want to know, "Okay, how do I get to where Virgil is?" Virgil Hughes: Wow. Well, the thing that comes to mind right now is, first of all, every trader is different and every market is different and every season of every market is different. And so you have to find your own style. You have to find what works for you. Maybe it's futures. Maybe it's an indicator that you know how to trade really well. John Carter uses The Squeeze. Somebody else uses this. Somebody else uses Bollinger Bands. The best advice that I can give is be in the game and keep accurate records of what you do and what works and what doesn't. And eventually, something's going to click, and you're going to say. "Look. You know what? I can do this, and this works for me." And maybe it's Forex or maybe it's futures or maybe it's short options. Maybe it's long options. Maybe it's trading MACD. Who knows? Something at some point is going to click, and then it's stepping out of the boat. I mean, it's literally stepping out off the cliff and just doing it. As you well know, Allen, when you take a position with a short put, you know that there's a possibility that that thing is going to keep going down, and you just have to get in there and do it. And I think, for me, I spent years buying different training programs and this person's advice and that person's advice and subscribing to different services, including yours. And at some point, you just have to say, "This is what I know. I know how this works, and I'm going to take responsibility for it." As a friend of mine wrote, based on that movie, that Tom Hanks movie, he wrote to me the other day. He says, "There's no crying in trading." And that's right. You got to man up and just [crosstalk 00:12:42] Allen: There's a lot of crying in trading. We might not admit it, but there is a lot. Virgil Hughes: There is crying in trading, but we can't ... Allen: Yeah. It doesn't make anything go away. It doesn't make it easier. Virgil Hughes: Yeah. [crosstalk 00:12:55] got to man up and take it. Allen: Right, so, okay. So it took you years, and you did all these different things. What did you find in the end that worked for you? Virgil Hughes: What works for me, and I don't want to give specific trade type details because [crosstalk 00:13:17] Allen: No, no, no. Just general. Just [crosstalk 00:13:18] Virgil Hughes: Yeah, I don't want somebody to take my advice and say, "Oh, this works for Virgil. I'm going to go do this." But what works for me is [crosstalk 00:13:27] Allen: Yeah, financial disclaimer here. Trade at your own risk. Virgil Hughes: Yeah. What works for me best is a combination of selling short options around long positions and then with a smattering of other more exotic kinds of things. But you got to keep your position size small. Shorts, triangles, and BCT trades. I have not really gotten into butterflies and back ratio spreads and stuff like that. Allen: Yeah, the very exotic strategies. Virgil Hughes: Yeah. I know that people do them well. I explored at one point the ... you build a net with several different calendar spreads and stuff like that, and it looks intriguing as all get-out on the graphic chart on thinkorswim, but one strong move, and that's blown out of the water. You just got to learn risk management and how to adjust. The trades that require a lot of adjusting really aren't good trades, and people will tell you that they make a living doing it. Bully for them. I'm glad for them. I got work to do during the day, and then I'm in Africa four times a year. I need simple stuff that I can put on and actually leave for a few days because if I'm without internet, I can't have my account be blown up. And I wish I'd taken that advice the last four weeks. Allen: Okay, so I think what I'm hearing is that the base or the bulk of your positions are in stocks, in equities, and then you're selling foots against those? Virgil Hughes: No. It would be in equities or very deep in the money [crosstalk 00:15:50] and then selling individual options or spreads around that position. Allen: Okay. Okay. Yeah, we actually have something that I'm working on right now. It's called passive trading, the passive trading formula, and a lot of that is the bulk of it, really how do you set up trades? How do you set up your portfolio in a way that it only takes a few hours to manage it for a month where [crosstalk 00:16:20] still earn the money but it's just there regularly growing, growing, growing. So that's cool. You mentioned BCT. For those of you who don't know, BCT is the blank check trade, which is our oil course. You can find more information about that on OptionGenius.com. Okay, so Virgil, you've mentioned Africa a couple times. What's that all about? Why are you going to Africa? Virgil Hughes: I spent this time doing my work as a turnaround guy, and that's just hard work. And I always felt that there ought to be something else. And then when I got diagnosed with cancer, something clicked and I just said, "I got to think outside the box." I went to Africa on a church mission trip in 2012, and had always heard about the concept of micro lending, but ended up doing a bit of research on that before I went and was able to see some great examples of how a small loan helping somebody start a small business can make a huge difference in a person's life in an undeveloped country or an underdeveloped country. For us- Allen: So this is microfinance you're talking about? Virgil Hughes: Yeah. Yeah. For us, what would be pocket change almost for an American can help somebody in an under-resourced country set up a business and can make all the difference. So I ended up chartering a non-profit in 2014 after a couple of trips to Africa. And then in 2016, yeah, I left the hospitals that I was running and felt called to just do that full-time. And so that's what I've been doing. We have a non-profit. We're federally tax ID'd, so we're a registered charity, and we have operations now in ... We're in four sites in Kenya. We're starting in the Ivory Coast. We're starting in Ethiopia, and depending on some negotiations, may be starting soon in Haiti and have been invited into even more countries than I've just named. So there's a huge need there, and it makes a huge difference. Allen: So you're a US-based non-profit that is lending money directly, or are you going through a local intermediary? Virgil Hughes: Yeah. Well, what we do is you have to follow the banking laws of the countries that you're in, and each one is different. And so normally, what we're doing is we're working through an intermediary in that country. That's an issue in and of itself because you got to find a trustworthy intermediary that's not going to make off with your money or charge you huge fees or something like that. But normally, our first effort is to find a good partner in that country that we can trust and through whom we can work and then begin the process. Allen: Okay. So it sounds like ... because I mean, I've read Muhammad Yunus's book. He started this in Bangladesh, and it helped a lot of people. And I've given money with Kiva.org, and they do something similar to that where you can pick the loans and you can give it to certain people. And for those of you who don't know, micro lending is really, really small loans. What range do you give your loans in? Virgil Hughes: Well, at this point, typically it's between US about 125 to US about 1,000. And I got a couple of pictures that'll blow you away, but I'll give you just one example. My very first trip, we spotted an opportunity among the- Allen: Yeah, so if you have those pictures, let's put them up. Let's see. Virgil Hughes: Yeah. Okay. Give me just a minute [crosstalk 00:21:31] Allen: Cool. Sure. Yeah, no problem. Virgil Hughes: ... some pictures and ... Hang on. Allen: Yeah. So from what I know, there's this guy, Muhammad Yunus, in Bangladesh who was a professor, and he found that there were women in the main city there of Dhaka or in the little towns where they were trying to make, I think, baskets or something. But for every basket, they got paid very little for the actual amount of work they were doing because there were so middlemen. And so the idea was he found one lady and he said, "I'm just going to give you the money that you can go and skip all the middlemen." And it really changed her life. And one thing I'm going to ask you, Virgil, is how do you make sure that they give you the money back? Because in the Grameen Bank, which is Muhammad Yunus's organization, they have it where the women, they form a group, and then each woman is responsible to make sure the other women pay back the loan. Virgil Hughes: Yes. First of all, can you see my screen here? Allen: Yes. Yes, I can. Virgil Hughes: It should show two stories. And this is a very poignant story. The little guy you see on your left is a little kid that I met in an orphanage in the hill country of Kenya. And he was in the orphanage because his mom disappeared. His father had passed, and his mom was struggling to take care of him, to provide. There's not a lot of jobs in the mountains of Kenya, and she was praying with her pastor every week and stuff like that. She got a job offer from a company in the Middle East. Allen: Wow. Virgil Hughes: And they told her, "Well, leave your son with some friends or relatives. Come out. Get established, and then when you're established and comfortable, you can send for your son." So she did, and they never saw her again. And they did get a couple of calls that were cut off within 30 seconds, and they came to the conclusion that she'd been kidnapped and trafficked by the people that- Allen: Oh, no. Virgil Hughes: It was a false offer, and it was just a sham. And she's probably been trafficked into the sex trade. Allen: Oh, boy. Virgil Hughes: And so the other picture there, the woman with the sewing machine, similar story. Her husband left. She's got four boys, but because an American gave $125 for a sewing machine, she has a small tailoring business, and she's able to support her family. What's $125 to you and me? That's $10 a month. Allen: Yeah, that's nothing. It's a dinner. Not even. Virgil Hughes: Not even a dinner, but this woman has built a business with it. And that's what happens. That's the promise or the opportunity from this kind of small lending. You had asked a question too about how do we get the money back. Yeah, well, Muhammad Yunus was a genius in more ways than one, and we do exactly what he did. We help set up what we call ... The technical term in the industry is a savings and credit association, and I'm going to go here. Here's a good example. We help people set theirs up. It's actually like a homegrown credit union where it's 15 to 30 people getting together to save together, to be responsible together for each other. They learn to take out loans from the group and pay back the group. We use those groups as a springboard for training where we teach them about good money management. We teach them about some business skills and perspectives. And Yunus actually didn't go that far. He made the group responsible for the loan. We and some others have taken it a step further and we're actually providing training within the group. And what we discovered is that the training is more of a life-changing thing than actually the small loans because only about 20% of the people will take out a loan, but the training affects everybody, and everybody learns from it. Allen: Okay. So the small group, it's not just loan holders but just anybody who's interested in learning? Virgil Hughes: Right. Exactly. So, like I said, we've taken the concept that Muhammad developed and tweaked it a little bit. And, like I said, an easier term is a self-help group, and like a little credit union where it's owned by the people. They're saving together, but they also help each other. They can give loans to each other from the group without ever coming to us. It serves as a social insurance. If somebody gets sick, breaks a bone, something like that, the group can step in and help them. So, like I said earlier, our process is three parts. One is helping them set up a self-help group. Two is providing some key training, and then three is the micro loan. Allen: So the loans are given from you guys or from amongst themselves, like they pool their money and then they share it? Virgil Hughes: Yeah, both. Allen: Both. Virgil Hughes: We encourage them to lend to each other, and then we also we teach them business principles. We teach them how to develop a business plan. We teach them how to assess their product in their market. We teach them how to assess the market itself. And then we insist that they put together a small business plan. And we're not talking about a Wharton MBA here. [inaudible 00:28:28] about some basic principles that have been structured to be at this level, and the same thing. We're not looking at a 50-page business plan, but we are looking for people to think through their business and their process and then get the advice of their group. Then the group submits it to us, and we'll look at it. Allen: That's awesome. It says here on the slide, it says, "Our goal," of your organization, which is NewVines International, your goal is, "One million adults in self-help groups hearing the gospel, praying together, receiving business skills and training, and providing for their families by 2028." Virgil Hughes: Yeah, that's correct. Allen: Okay, so now I got to ask you. How many have you gotten to? Virgil Hughes: Well, that's a fair question. What we've found is that the best way to achieve that goal is not to just go out and try to set up small groups. What we're finding is that the best way to achieve that goal is to develop effective relationships with leaders in different countries. And so we end up doing what I call train the trainer, and so we will train a group of leaders to go out and work within other churches and community ministries to essentially expand the network. Hang on a minute while I flip through some ... Here we go. So here is a group of trainers in the mountain country of Bomet. They have graduated our program and ... I'm sorry. The mountain country of Kenya. They graduated our program, and each of them will be responsible for reaching out to between six and eight different churches. Then over on this side, this is about a dozen people from Western Kenya representing a whole group pulled together by an NGO, which is the equivalent of a non-profit in a foreign country. And this happens to be an orphanage/medical clinic ministry. But it serves as a center to pull together a group from about six or eight local denominations. And so these guys, we're training them to go back to their denominations and each one would then be working with anywhere from six to 20 different churches. So our first goal is not to just go out and set up a bunch of groups. Our first goal is to find leaders and train trainers to go out to train other trainers. Allen: That's awesome. That's great. So it's building upon itself, because once you're in the field, then they'll just keep passing on their information and their knowledge and it'll just get bigger. That's awesome. Now from what you said earlier, you were saying that you trade for a living, so you trade to pay your expenses and your bills, and then while you had your position with the hospital company, that's when you started this organization, right, this charity, this foundation? Virgil Hughes: Right. Yeah. Allen: And so you funded it yourself, and now you're at the pace where you're able to accept more ... because it seems like you're doing a lot of work, so it would be pretty hard for just one person to fund it. So you're seeking donations, and you're opening it up to more people. Is that correct? Virgil Hughes: Yeah. Allen: Because I've just recently a couple weeks ago I was looking into starting a foundation myself, and there are different ways to do it. There's different structures. There's the charity, and then there's the private foundation and then there's the family foundation and all different ways. Some of them can accept donations. Some of them cannot. But yours can? Virgil Hughes: Yes. Ours is a 501(c)(3), which is classified by the IRS as a public charity. So we can accept donations and do accept donations. They're tax deductible, and so we have a level of accountability as well to the US government. Actually, technically it's to the attorney general of the state in which we're chartered. But yeah, we accept donations, and like I said, I pay my own bills through the trading, and then the donations that we get are ... We call them partners. Our partners fund the travel and training that we do. Allen: Okay. Yeah, because a large part of most charities that I've seen is human resources, is marketing, administrative work. And I have a friend that she works for an NGO, and I was talking to her and I was like, "Hey, I'm thinking about starting my own foundation. I'm just learning about it. You already have experience in running one of these. Would you be interested in running mine, because I don't know what to do with it. I'm just going to fund it." And she goes, "Yeah, I'll run it." And I'm like, "Okay, how much money do you make doing that? How much do I have to pay you and whatnot?" She gave me a figure like mid ... not mid six figures, but it was over six figures. And I was scratching my head. I'm like, "Every dollar I give to you doesn't go to the people that we're trying to help, right?" And she's like, "Yeah, but I'm worth it, and I deserve it because I'm doing a great job," and this and that. And I was like there's a total disconnect right here between ... There's the employee mindset and then there's the employer mindset and just totally different disconnect. So what you're doing is basically you're not taking a salary. You're not taking any money out of this organization- Virgil Hughes: Correct. Allen: ... because all your expenses are paid for by the trading, which is awesome, which is a great way to do it. Virgil Hughes: Yeah. That's correct. Yeah, so every dollar that we get in helps me either get over there and do training or goes into the loan fund, with the exception of about 2%. I still have a website up. I still have to have an audit at the end of the year. I still have to, from time to time, buy a new computer and stuff like that. So there's a fractional amount of what I would call administrative costs [crosstalk 00:36:06] and things like visas. You got to get a visa every time you go and that sort of thing. So there's some administrative costs, but- Allen: You got to get your shots. Virgil Hughes: Shots. Yeah, that's another one. Allen: Yeah. It's part of the job, right? Virgil Hughes: Yeah. Allen: So let me ask you. Now, from what I learned, most charities and organizations, they are required ... To stay a charity, they have to give away at least 5% of their assets on a yearly basis in order to maintain their 503c charter. And then with the rest of the money, they can actually invest it. So are you actually trading the money that you- Virgil Hughes: No. No, I would never. I talked about being a turnaround guy. All of that was in the non-profit world until my very last job was running a for-profit hospital chain. I would never trade money that's given to a charity. In fact, there's actually some IRS rules about that in terms of the ways that you can invest that money. And I think trading would be a clear violation of the IRS rules about that. Allen: Oh, really? Okay. Virgil Hughes: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Allen: All right. What is your website so that people can find out more information? Virgil Hughes: Sure. It's www.newvinesintl.org. So that's N-E-W-V-I-N-E-S-I-N-T-L dot O-R-G. Allen: Okay, and that's NewVines International if you want to search it online. You'll be able to find them. Cool. Virgil, anything else? You have any other advice for our listeners? Virgil Hughes: I wish I did have something that was insightful and would catapult people forward, but unfortunately, I don't, Allen. It's just plugging away, keeping at it, and eventually something clicks. I guess the advice would be just that. Keep at it. And there are going to be hard times, and financial markets can knock your socks off. But part of trading is to get back up and go at it again and keep your account size small or your- Allen: Your risk small. Virgil Hughes: ... position size, your risk small. Yeah. Allen: Yeah, I mean, it's just something that I talk about a lot, and it's like you don't need 100 different things to work. You need one to work. You just need that one thing, like you said earlier, the one thing that you find that you're good at, and then you just keep doing it and you keep doing it and you keep doing it instead of looking for 15 different ways to trade, 15 different strategies to work out. You find one thing that works that fits your risk tolerance, that fits your temperament, how much money you have in your account, and even how much you want to trade. If you want to sit in front of the screen all day, then yeah, you can day trade, but then you won't be able to do stuff like this. If you're more of a passive trader, more of an options seller, then you can still earn enough money to survive and to live a decent life, live a good life, and then with the rest of your time, you can go and help other people, which is amazing. And it's something that I've always wanted to do, but unlike you, I never felt that strong enough urge to say, "All right. I'm ditching all this stuff, and I'm just going to go do it." So that is awesome, and I think you're leading by example. So if there's anybody out there that wants to do what Virgil is doing, I think I'm pretty sure that if you reach out to Virgil ... He's also on Facebook, if you want to reach to him there. I'm sure he'll help you and guide you and say, "Hey, you know what? Try this or go in this direction or whatnot." It's been a pleasure to talk to you, my friend. Virgil Hughes: Yeah. Glad to. If anybody wants to reach out, I'm here. Facebook, Virgil Greg Hughes. And I got to say it's been a wonderful journey. This is where life is at is getting beyond yourself and doing something good in the world. Allen: Yep. Yeah, it is. I mean, it's more than just leaving a legacy, because I mean, we talked about this earlier. After you get to a certain point where it's like, "Okay, I've made enough money. Now what?" People ask me all the time. "Allen, why do you have Option Genius, and why are you doing all this stuff? If you're so rich or you're doing so well trading, why don't you just go live on a beach in Hawaii or something?" I was like, "Yeah, you could, but after a while, you get bored and actually you want to help other people. You want to give back." Virgil Hughes: [crosstalk 00:41:22] it still becomes kind of empty if you do that. Yeah. Allen: Yeah. Yeah. There's only so many pina coladas you can drink. All right. All right, folks. Well, we appreciate you tuning in. like I said, contact Virgil if you have any questions, and we'll see you on the next episode. Virgil Hughes: Good. Allen, thanks so much. It's been an honor to be with you. Allen: Thank you, Virgil, for having us. Virgil Hughes: Take care.   References: NewVines International, Inc. -- LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/ WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP:  https://optiongenius.com/alliance Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps. 

People literally ask me this one question ALL THE TIME… “Allen, how did come up with such a lucrative, safe, and easy way to trade?” I explain it all in my new book Passive Trading, get your free book here  https://www.passivetrading.com/free-book! Option Genius was built with you...the individual trader, the breadwinner, the dreamer, the rock your family depends on ...in mind. Because we know what it takes to become a successful and profitable trader. And that’s exactly what we help you do best. Get your $1 trial of Simon Says Options, our most conservative and profitable trading service here https://simonsaysoptions.com/stockslist-ss-trial-offer.  -- Welcome Genius Nation to another exciting episode of the Option Genius Podcast. This episode, we're going to be talking about 2019, and what's going to happen, or what I think is going to happen. Now it's called the prediction episode. And I hate predictions, mostly because most of them are, you know, wrong and people are pulling stuff out of thin air. But last year's episode, where I made predictions for 2018 was so popular that I decided to do again and just have fun with it. Really, that was one of the episodes that we got the most feedback on, one of the most feedbacks. And people were listening to that episode all the way to the end of the year, really. We had some comments, emails, that came in towards the end of 2018 where people who had just found the podcast were like, "Hey, I listened to your 2018 episode, because I want her to see how you did and what was right and what was wrong." A couple of things, I actually had chuckles on, so I'm glad I was able to make them laugh. But the way I do prediction, is really I try to look at trends. What is going on? What has been going on? And as they say in trading, the trend is your friend. So the trends will probably continue. So if we can identify these trends, especially if they're long term, if they have been occurring in the past and they're going to continue to occurring. Then those are things that we can actually benefit from in a financial sense. Right? So for example, the aging population of the United States, more and more people are getting older. The boomer generation is older. And so there are ways to monetize that, if you want to. See those are the types of trends, something that's not going to just be a flash in the pan, and just go away in a few months, but something that's going to continue for a long term. Those are the types of trends that I would like to identify. Those are the trends that I would like to invest in. And just, put your money in and take advantage of this over, and over, and over again where you don't have to watch it, and monitor it, and really be more passive about it. So before we get into the predictions of 2019, let's take a look back at what I said was going to happen in 2018, and see if I was actually right, or if I have egg on my face. So prediction number one from 2018 was that AI, artificial intelligence, is going to be used more and more in daily life. This is a trend, right? This is something that is occurring. This is something that we see. So this was kind of an easy prediction. And AI was more ingrained in almost all aspects of life nowadays. More and more cars have the self driving features. We have these firms, these financial firms, like Betterment that are money managers who are mainly using AI to manage people's money and allocate it in certain investments. The Quant Funds, the hedge funds that are run by algorithms and computers. They made money this year, while most funds lost money, and the marketing as a whole was down. So all the index funds were down. And most of the stock picking funds where they actually have people doing the work were down. And if you're interested in this, in AI, and learning about what's coming down the road, where we might be going as a species, take a look at the book called "The Singularity is Near" by a guy named Raymond Kurzweil. I mean, this is crazy, crazy stuff that he predicted years ago. Now not all of it has come to fruition yet, but we are much closer now than ever. And basically what he calls the singularity is when man and computer will be basically one. I mean, we're still human, but computers will be part of our brains is what he's saying. And we're not there yet. But I mean, do you know anybody who still doesn't have a smart speaker in their home? Right? One of these Alexa Echos, or the Google Home, or the Facebook Portal, or any of the others. I mean, everybody's got these things. So it's moving more and more in that direction with smart homes, and smart doorbells, and smart alarm systems, and all this stuff. I mean, the quote unquote smarter our homes get, the more stupider we get, because we're using our brains less and less and less. But that is seeming like what the future is going to be holding. So this one particularly, I was right. So I'm one and oh, so far. Now, prediction number two from 2018 was that the stock market will actually be up in 2018. And I missed on this one, but only by a little. I mean it was up for the whole year, until November when it dropped about 20% and then we ended down somewhere around 6% for the year, depending on which exchange you're looking at. And well, I mean it was over done, market going up was overdone. And the feds started raising interest rates, which was inevitable. Growth also seems to be slowing down. So earnings growth, share growth, all those things, revenue growth, those are slowing down. And so those were particularly the reasons why the market was down. It was down a little bit, not too much, and for those of us who were long stock or long index funds and ETFs, and then we were selling calls against them, we actually turned out a really good year. So if that's something that you haven't been doing, I would suggest you do so even, especially if you don't think that the marketing is going to continue to go up 20% a year. All right, so far I'm one and one. Prediction number three was that oil prices will be higher. And oil was at $60 a barrel at the beginning of the year. Currently as I record this, it's trading at $52 a barrel. So I was wrong on this one as well. But again, just like the stock one, I was right until November. And then oil tanked, from $77 all the way down to $42 and then rebounded in January of 2019. So why? Well OPEC really, they decided to take back their production cuts. So they had cut production and that had sent oil higher and then they came out and said, "Hey, you know what? We're not going to do these cuts anymore. We're going to put more oil into the market." And prices dropped. That was the main reason. And once they did flood the market, oil prices started to drop. But there was something else at play here as well that I want to talk about. You see, being long oil was a very easy trade. You listen to what OPEC is saying and you follow along with it because over the last couple of years, two, three years, they've been spot on. So when they say they're going to pump more oil, prices go down. When they say they're going to cut back on oil, prices go up. So it's been pretty easy to see that. And long oil was a very, very crowded trade, meaning that there were a lot of people who had long options, and long futures contracts in oil where they were just buying them, thinking that the price is going to go up and up and up. And so when the price started dipping, the price started dropping, these algorithms, these funds that use computers, started selling and that caused margin calls on a lot of futures trading firms. That caused panic selling, which caused more dropping of the oil price, which caused more margin calls, and more selling. And in the end it was a bloodbath that blew up many futures trading funds and firms. And it wasn't pretty. And that's why you have a drop from 77 to 42. I mean, that's almost a 50% drop because not because of a huge major fundamental change, but because of the way these firms were trading the futures markets. And so that part has now, it's over, the selling on that is over. And since then oil has actually rebounded. So, it's up about, it was at 42 at the low. Currently it's right around 52, so it's up $10 since then, which is about 25% from the low. So what is oil going to do next year? It's hard to tell. So I'm not going to be making a prediction on this one. But I do believe that oil is going to remain steady. It's not going to be as volatile as the November. I mean, most of the year was not that volatile. It got very volatile in November. And so at that point, if you're trading oil, like we do have our blank check trading course where we trade options in oil. One of the first things I said was, "Hey, if you don't need to be in the market, don't be in the market." The volatility is getting super high. Just take a step back as option traders and options sellers, we don't need to be in the market every single month. We do not need to put our money at risk when things are going crazy. And so that is why you really need to look at volatility as well as what is the stock doing, what is the market doing, to keep an eye on volatility as well, especially, well, we'll get to that in my future predictions. Prediction number four from last year, 2018, was that China would be more independent and stronger. And I was right about this one. As I record this, the US and China are at odds right now, and going toe to toe in a trade war. They got terabytes on both sides. And they're trying to talk it out and it doesn't seem like they're going anywhere. This was unthinkable 10 years ago, I mean, even five years ago. This was unthinkable. But it is happening and the Chinese are not backing down. I mean trump had a trade war with Mexico and Canada recently, right? And both of them made concessions fairly quickly, and those are pretty big markets, especially Canada. But China is holding firm. So they are getting stronger and stronger. They are becoming more dominant in the world, especially certain parts of the world where the US is not. And they're taking over, and I would say that their influence is even greater than the Soviet Union was at the time in the 80s. So that leaves me two for two in my predictions. The last prediction of 2018 was that it was going to be a great year for option sellers. And it was. It was truly. The majority of the year, we had low amounts of volatility and put spreads and non directional trades worked very, very well until the end of the year though when the markets dropped. The VIC spiked, and people that were unprepared, they got hurt. So although the markets were down themselves, I'm going to say that option sellers still came out ahead at the end. So after my first year of predictions, I'm going to end up three and two. So I won three and I lost two. Okay, so let's look at 2019. What is on the horizon? First of all, I'm going to say that interest rates, I believe, will be higher at the end of the year and inflation will be higher as well. In fact, you can already sense and feel the inflation in consumer goods like food, travel, and any kind of services that you pay for. So to tame inflation, the Fed will have no choice but to raise rates, two times, maybe three times, maybe more. Hopefully not more, that's going to kill the stock market. But at least two times, maybe three times. And that will put a damper on a lot of things. So I would say for prediction number one, interest rates will be higher. Inflation will also be higher. Second prediction is that we are actually headed for a recession here in the United States. Now this one is a little bold, I think, because most pundits out there are saying that we will not have a recession in 2019. But I do think there we will have one. Now to have a recession, you have to have negative growth for two quarters, meaning the economy has to contract for two quarters in a row. And so you will be in a recession for a while before it is officially called a recession. So let's say, whenever you hear this three, let's say for the next three months you have negative growth and then another three months you have negative growth. So six months from now is when they would say, "Oh, you know what? Hey, we're in a recession." It's a lagging type of indicator. So even though you'll start feeling the effects of it now and for the next six months, it won't be called a recession until six months from now. Okay. So I see economic activity slowing down in at least the back half of 2019 if not sooner. We're not going to have much growth in the first half. We will have inflation, and layoffs in the second half. And then in 2020 they'll actually come out and say, "Hey, you know, we were officially in recession and that it started in 2019." So that is my prediction. It won't be called the recession until 2020 and they're going to try to keep that as far away into the future as possible, because we do have elections and all that stuff coming up. But I think in 2020 they're going to say that yeah, we're in recession and it started in '19. So that leads me to prediction number three, which is that the stock market, will be lower. Last year, I said it was going to be higher, this year I'm saying it's going to be lower. And as I record this, the S&P 500 is at 2,600 right around 2,600. So I believe it's going to be lower at the end of the year. Now again, this is contrary to most analysts. According to most analysts, the markets should be higher next year, because what they're saying is that when January is a positive month, the market overall for the year is positive. So, that's the way it normally happens. I think this year is going to be an abnormal year.  I don't know what we're going to do for the rest of February or rest of January. Market has been up a little bit so far. We did have a little bit of a Santa Claus rally at the end of the year of 2018. That normally bodes well for the markets. But I think growth is going to stall. I think earnings will stall for most companies and after a decade of strong stock market, we're going to have another year of declines. So that's my prediction there. Onto prediction number four. Everywhere you look, and this is a little bit more localized. So everywhere you look now, when you see financial ads. Now if you are a trader, if you are an option seller, you see ads on Facebook, you see ads on Google, you see ads following you around with the remarketing. And eventually you'll subscribe to something like a download, a free PDF report or some something and you'll buy some small thing, and you'll get on these email lists. So then once you get on one email list, it seems like you get on a thousand different email lists, because then everybody starts selling you and sending you emails about buy this and buy that. And so when you look all over at these financial ads run by these financial newsletter companies that want you to give them money for their financial information and research, a lot of the marketing you are seeing nowadays and it started in 2018, but it's really going to, it really picked up towards the end, is about pot stocks, right? Marijuana, that pot stocks are going to be the next boom in investments. You probably already understand this and now you have to understand why this is. Okay. Why all of a sudden is there this huge focus on marijuana? Well, because financial newsletter companies have to keep coming up with new ideas to pitch you. That's what it is. They can not just come out and say, "Hey, we want you to buy our newsletter and we're going to give you stock picks." Even though that's exactly what they're doing, right? They're going to be like, "Hey, we're going to show you how to get rich." Well, that's what everybody else says. So they have to stand out from the crowd. They have to make it enticing and mysterious. So even in their ads, they're going to be talking about this big opportunity or there's big amazing company, they're not going to give you the name, they're not going to give you exactly what it is until you actually give them some money. And the way the financial newsletter space is right now, it's dominated by a few companies that are owned by the same people. So I mean it could be all one big company, but for whatever reason, they've broken it up into several different sister companies that are all fighting amongst each other. So they do cooperate in the sense where they share their promotions and they share their email lists and stuff like that. But they are set up a separate company so that they look different. And so if you've heard of any of the names, like Agora Financial, Stansberry Research, Weiss Research, Palm Beach Letter, Oxford Club, Money Map Press, and I mean they got like a dozen others, all of these guys are owned by the same people. They all operate the same way. They try to entice you into buying their cheap newsletter for like $50 or $100, and then they hit you up with, "Hey, buy this thing for a thousand dollars. Buy this thing for $10,000. Buy this cruise for $15,000." A year ago, it was cryptos. That was the big thing, "Oh, cryptocurrency market, cryptocurrency market." Now, pot stocks are the big idea. I mean, who knows what it's going to be next, I don't know. But these guys are super smart. They're super creative. They're going to come out with something that will be new and mysterious to give us, to make us give them our money so they can tell us about their research. And myself, I don't think that most individual investors should actually be wasting their time on pot stocks. I'm going to get to my prediction. I'm not at the prediction yet, but when it comes to these marijuana stocks that are talked about in these new letters and whatnot, most of these are very small companies. Most of these are going to be knocked out of business, they're going to go out of business by themselves, or they're going to have somebody come in and knock them out of business before they make any kind of money. So I think that most individual investors should not be wasting their time on pot socks, but take it for what it's worth. Now, this ties into my prediction, which is prediction number four is that more and more states will be legalizing marijuana. Again, this is a trend. You can probably see this yourself, right? It's not something out of left field. They are already 11 states that allow it for recreational use. So it's legal for everybody. More and more are coming. Heck, I mean, I'm in Texas and Texas is going to have it up for vote very soon in the government. And Texas is as conservative as it gets. In fact, in Congress, they now have a congressional cannabis caucus, led by a representative from Oregon, which is going to try to get pot declassified, so that it is not treated the same way as other narcotics. Right now, pot is the same as crack, or cocaine or, all those other ones. But they are trying to make it so that pot is not as bad, and is not punishable by jail time, and fines, and whatnot as the other ones. If that happens, then it'll actually make it easier and more compelling for other companies to get involved in the marijuana trade. Now Canada, the whole country of Canada, it's legal, in the whole country. And the tax windfalls that are being collected by Canada, and by all these states that have already made it legal, I mean for everybody else, for the rest of the country, I think it's going to be a race not to be the last one to get to the punch bowl. I mean, you have all this money collected in taxes, and these governments are spending more than they collect. And that just seems like it never changes. But they going to see this as an additional tax revenue and if they see more and more states, like a domino effect. A few of them have already been doing it now more and more are going to be racing to it. And so I say that we'll probably have about 20 states legalize it for use by anyone, by the end of the year. And I think 30 of them will allow it for medicinal purposes. So medical reasons, for pain relief. So hopefully by the end of next year, you might have more than half the country allow pot for one reason or another. That's going to be a tipping point. And so in 2020 it might be a free for all. .And we might have legal marijuana everywhere, who knows. Or maybe just one or two states that are left holding out. But it's going to really change a lot of things. So the one company that I want to buy, to take advantage of this would be Philip Morris, ticker PM, because, I mean, they've been making cigarettes and smoking. They know about it, they know marketing, they know distribution. They have all the channels already there. Everything is laid out. As soon as they get the go ahead from the federal government that we're not going to prosecute you, they could go in and just blow up everybody in every state. The only limitation would be that the way the laws are now in each state, you actually have to draw or grow the marijuana in that particular state. You cannot take that marijuana to a different state to sell it. So you have to grow it in that state and then you have to sell it in that state. Actually, I'm not too sure about the selling of the actual goods. But I think you have to grow it in that state and you have to sell it in that state. I don't know about those, like those edibles, you know, like the gummy bears, and the chocolate bars. I don't know if those can be transported. I don't think so. But if that's the case, it'll be a little bit harder for Philip Morris. But I think they're going to be the ones that really hit a home run with this, or at least for recreational use. Now for medicine purposes, big Pharma, the big giants, Pfizer, Merck, all of them, they will make it a pill to some point, or an injection or something and they will dominate that field once it becomes legal. And so that's why the little companies that you have now, they're recommended by all the financial newsletters, those guys are going to be put out of business by these big firms once they come in. Now they might make a little bit of money for a year or two until everything becomes legalized. But the point is that right now, it takes such a huge investment to get that going that they might not ever get their investment back, before they're shut down, or put out of business. Now you might get lucky if you're an investor in one of these, and they might get bought out by a larger company. Philip Morris might come in and say, "Hey, you know what, we're not going to start our own nursery or pot growing facility. We'll just buy a couple that are already there." And then you might get bought out at that sense. And that might be lucky for you. But I wouldn't bet on it. I wouldn't say that that is the only way to make money. You never want to be an investment, in a stock and investment, hoping that the only exit you can have is a buyout. So that's prediction number four. On to prediction number five. This one is a little bit of a negative. I'm saying that real estate prices are going to drop. Now this one is going to be hard to gauge, right? We don't know if I'm going to win on this one or not, if I'm going to be right or not, because it depends on location. But overall, I feel that it's going to be a buyer's market, in the US when it comes to real estate. There're going to be fewer, fewer buyers in the market, and fewer sales overall. Now we're already seeing this happen. So if you look at the earnings calls, the earning reports of the larger home builders that we have, they already report fewer and few people coming in to see the models, right? They're having fewer closings. They still have people coming in that want to buy a house, to get in before interest rates go up too high. But they're looking at cutting down their expectations for 2019. They're not going to be constructing as many homes, because they're not seeing new people come in, saying that, "Yeah, yeah, we want a house six months from now. We want a house a year from now." And I'm seeing this effect myself as well, because an investment that I was in, which was, it was an investment where they were buying properties that are broken down here in Houston, they were fixing them up and then they were selling them. This investment actually did very well, but the fund is closing down, because there are too many investors like them. There are too many people that are chasing these deals of the messed up houses. There aren't that many houses there. There are more people chasing them, trying to buy them. And there are not enough people buying the homes, when they're fixed up. So that is leading to smaller and smaller profit margins for these fix and flippers. So the people running this investment decided to just shut it down and return all the money to investors instead of trying to keep doing it and go after smaller and smaller margins. And I'm hearing more of that sort of thing happening all over the country. Not just in Houston. But in other areas as well, like Atlanta, Denver, and others. So if you are looking to buy a home or a business property or even a business itself, you might want to wait. Or I mean, you could put in a low ball offer. Right? And just sit on it. And just let the person know and say, "Hey, you know what? Here's my offer. I think the market's turning and I think this is a legit offer. I'm ready to buy if you agree to this offer. Now I know it's less than what you were expecting. But keep my offer, keep my phone number. And if you ever decide to change your mind, let me know." And then just keep calling that person back after a couple months, two, three months, give them a call, "Hey, I'm still here. My offer's still valid. You want to do it, let's do it." Eventually I think there's a good chance that you're going to buy whatever you want to buy will be cheaper in a year or two. So, keep your powder dry. Keep some cash on hand, and be careful. So that's it for my 2019 predictions, much more dire than last year, unfortunately. But it does seem that there are dark clouds on the horizon. Now, I wish I was wrong. I wish I will be wrong on the direction of the markets and real estate, and other real assets, but we won't know until next year. That's the whole thing about predictions, right? I would love to hear what you guys think of this episode. Email me and let me know. If there's something I'm missing, please share that as well because I learned from you guys as much as you learn from me. So I hope you have an amazing year. Be vigilant, be careful on any risky ventures and maybe keep a little more cash than you have in the past on hand, because when things go down, that's great time for people who have cash to be able to buy stuff really, really cheap. So take advantage of that as well. And remember trade with the odds in your favor. -- LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/ WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP:  https://optiongenius.com/alliance Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps. 

People literally ask me this one question ALL THE TIME… “Allen, how did come up with such a lucrative, safe, and easy way to trade?” I explain it all in my new book Passive Trading, get your free book here  https://www.passivetrading.com/free-book! Option Genius was built with you...the individual trader, the breadwinner, the dreamer, the rock your family depends on ...in mind. Because we know what it takes to become a successful and profitable trader. And that’s exactly what we help you do best. Get your $1 trial of Simon Says Options, our most conservative and profitable trading service here https://simonsaysoptions.com/stockslist-ss-trial-offer.  -- Should you trade in your own name or a Corporation? How do you protect your assets? Do you even need to? In this episode, I talk to individual investor Brian Canter who explains why he trades inside a Corporation, how he set it up, the benefits, and pitfalls. This is an episode every serious trader needs to listen to.   Resources: Moore Research Center - mrci.com Momentum Structural Analysis -olivermsa.com Anderson Business Advisors - andersonadvisors.com -- LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/ WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP:  https://optiongenius.com/alliance Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps. 

People literally ask me this one question ALL THE TIME… “Allen, how did come up with such a lucrative, safe, and easy way to trade?” I explain it all in my new book Passive Trading, get your free book here  https://www.passivetrading.com/free-book! Option Genius was built with you...the individual trader, the breadwinner, the dreamer, the rock your family depends on ...in mind. Because we know what it takes to become a successful and profitable trader. And that’s exactly what we help you do best. Get your $1 trial of Simon Says Options, our most conservative and profitable trading service here https://simonsaysoptions.com/stockslist-ss-trial-offer.  -- Genius nation, it's time for you to lean in. That's right. I said it's time for you to lean in. Recently I was interviewed on the Live Your Passion podcast. It was a lot of fun. It was fun we talked about a couple of things especially about how I live my passion and how I discovered my passion and all that. But when I was telling my story and I was doing the interview, I shared that when I got started in trading I had a really, really rough time. Why do most traders lose money? Because they are stupid? Lazy? Nope. In this episode I reveal why most traders lose money and why you will too if you do not make this one small shift in your thinking and your trading. This is an exciting episode with a lot to learn from... Resources: Book: Think and Grow Rich Podcast: Live Your Passion Podcast -- LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/ WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://optiongenius.com/alliance  Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps.  

People literally ask me this one question ALL THE TIME… “Allen, how did come up with such a lucrative, safe, and easy way to trade?” I explain it all in my new book Passive Trading, get your free book here  https://www.passivetrading.com/free-book! Option Genius was built with you...the individual trader, the breadwinner, the dreamer, the rock your family depends on ...in mind. Because we know what it takes to become a successful and profitable trader. And that’s exactly what we help you do best. Get your $1 trial of Simon Says Options, our most conservative and profitable trading service here https://simonsaysoptions.com/stockslist-ss-trial-offer.  -- Brad Pitt starred in a show called MoneyBall. It's about a guy named Billy Beane. That's his real name. He's a former ballplayer who was hired to take over as the general manager of the Oakland A's. One of the worst teams in baseball at the time, they were doing okay but they had a problem. See, they're not a ... They're called a small market team, which means that they don't have a lot of fans to draw from, and so they don't make as much money as other teams do. And so their budget is much, much smaller. So they need a budget in order to hire the best players. So if you want the big home run hitters, you want the, the names that everybody knows, you got to pay him a lot of money. And the Oakland A's, they didn't have that budget. His job, Billy Beane's job was to recruit a team of players that could win games with the budget one third the size of the other teams in the league. So Billy did something controversial. He stopped focusing on the players and started focusing on what actually wins ball games: getting on base. If you get on base, you will games. And in trading it is the same thing. You win on your trades, you make more money. Small hits: singles, doubles and walks. Small hits: winning on trade after trade when the odds are in your favor. Hear about how you too can win in trading by taking the unconventional route. -- LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/ WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://optiongenius.com/alliance Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps.  

People literally ask me this one question ALL THE TIME… “Allen, how did come up with such a lucrative, safe, and easy way to trade?” I explain it all in my new book Passive Trading, get your free book here  https://www.passivetrading.com/free-book! Option Genius was built with you...the individual trader, the breadwinner, the dreamer, the rock your family depends on ...in mind. Because we know what it takes to become a successful and profitable trader. And that’s exactly what we help you do best. Get your $1 trial of Simon Says Options, our most conservative and profitable trading service here https://simonsaysoptions.com/stockslist-ss-trial-offer.  -- Theta is an option sellers best friend. It is the money we make. If you put on a trade, an option-selling trade, you can look at it and say, how much theta is this trade? If the stock does not move that whole day, that's how much that your trade will decay. That's how much money you will make in your trade, because the options will be worth that much less at the end of the day. Now, theta decay, I don't want this to be a big lecture on theta decay, but theta decay does go in a exponential curve and whatnot, and we can cover that in a later bit. But my point here is that the more theta we have, the more money we make, and when the markets are closed on holidays we still get the theta, but there is no risk, since the stock's price is not moving. Stocks are closed, the markets are closed, there's no even after-hours trading. There's nothing, it's just closed. And the options that we sold are losing value every day. There's a theta decay rate, there's an amount every day that the option loses value. That sounds like we're getting something for nothing. That's like free money, huh? I mean, that'd be kind of pretty cool. But do we really get a free day of theta on a holiday? Kind of, not exactly. Kind of, all right? Let's get to this. Now, if you think about it, the weekend is the same thing, because the markets are closed, so more free money, right? We don't even have to wait for the holidays. Every weekend we get free theta. So let's just do this, let's go in on Friday close to the close, sell a whole bunch of options, get the theta decay on Saturday, get the theta decay on Sunday, and then on Monday morning at the open we buy all those options back. Oh man, that's like free money. No risk. That is a wonderful, can't lose scenario, right? Well, you wouldn't be the first person to think of that. I hate to break it to you, but everybody knows that. Everybody knows about theta and the weekends. Sellers do, option buyers do. So yes, we do get the theta decay every day the markets are closed, but how much we get is the issue. And there are ways to take advantage of how the theta decay works. Which will be revealed in this episode. -- LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/ WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://optiongenius.com/alliance Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps.