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.  -- Are there are people in your life that are trying to get you to give up on your dreams? There are aren't there? Somebody's skeptical about you trading. Maybe a mother-in-law, or a mother, or a wife, or a husband. Somebody, it doesn't matter who it is, but their comments hurt. Right? Their comments sting if you listen to them long enough. 'Cause it makes you lose confidence in yourself. And for a trader that is killer. If you lose confidence in yourself as a trader, then there's almost nothing that anybody else can teach you to overcome that. I can give you all the strategies and all the tricks, and all the trading plans in the world, but if you lose confidence in yourself, if you don't think that you can do this, then you can't. The average person on the street doesn't sell options because they are too lazy, maybe lazy is not the right word. Or they're not motivated enough, or whatever. But they don't wanna take that action. They don't wanna learn. It's easier to watch TV. It's easier to watch Real Housewives of Orange County on TV. Or Maury Povich or Doctor Phil, or any of this other stuff that is like, it just lets you check out mentally so that you don't have to think about your own life. Or think about how things could be better but they're not because you don't take any action. Right? And we have this in every culture. If somebody is out there legitimately trying to make their life better, the haters will come in and put them down. The haters will tell them that it's not something that they should be doing, that it's not possible. Who do you think you are? That sort of thing. How to overcome the haters is what we discuss 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.  

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.  -- How do you deal with the emotions of losing money when trading? How do you get over the feeling of being punched in the gut and seeing your hard earn money disappear? That's what this episode is about. There are 4 Steps or Stages that I go through when I lose a hefty sum and I detail them in detail. Losses are part of trading. We will have them. But sometimes, the markets throw us a major curve ball and the losses are larger than we are emotionally ready to handle. And that is why we have the 4 Stages of Dealing With Losses. If this is a path you want to take, this is what you want to do, and I hope it is because it's amazing, 99% of the time, it's amazing. Maybe once a year, you might have a time where you're feeling, at least, for me, I feel this bad. When I was learning how to trade, it was a lot more often. It was maybe once a month, but since it's gotten better, I've been more in control over my emotions, and now it's got a lot less. Follow these four steps, if you have any cover, if you have any losses, overcome them. This is how you do it. This is the plan. If you need any help, reach out to me, and we'll be sure to help you out as much as we can. Peace. Don't forget, trade with the odds in your favor. Links: Trade Hacks Protect Your Portfolio -- 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, welcome to another edition of the Podcast. Today, I really want to talk about something that has been ... a lot of people talk about it, a lot of people as questions about it and it's hard to answer this question because it's different for everybody. And that question is, "How long should it take for me to be successful as an options trader?" Again, it's different for everybody, depends on how much time you put in, depends how much effort you put in, how serious you take it and how much money you have. The less money, obviously it will take longer to build that up into a sizeable amount and if you make mistakes in the beginning, it could affect your confidence if you have the wrong trading plan or if you have the wrong strategy that doesn't fit to your style or your temperament, your risk temperament, then that could affect you as well. But really, all of that is fine and good but really the thing is that does it really matter how long it takes? As long as eventually, you get there or eventually, you're making progress as you go along. Because as we say, the destination is not the important thing, the journey is what makes you happy. The journey is the longest part of it, right? For example, let's say you're on this journey, you're learning how to trade, all of a sudden, boom, you get there, "Hey, I just made a million dollars this year trading." Okay, you pat yourself on the back, "Woo hoo." But then after a while, that feeling, that euphoria kind of goes away. So, it's the journey, it's the learning, it's all the epiphanies you get while you're learning, it's what you learn about yourself, it's how you discipline yourself, how you learn that discipline that really makes you a better person as you're trying to become a better trader at the same time. Another way to think about this is let's say, go back in time, when you were in high school, or you graduate high school, you went to high school, right? You spent four years, five years, maybe you got your masters so, two years after that. Maybe you did some PhD, maybe you did whatever, some more time after that. If you had a doctor, you got more time, and you go to school for four, five, six years in order to go and get a job. So, you graduate, now the days the kids are making, they graduate, they're making 40, 50,000 a year and that's a decent salary, decent starting salary. But it takes a few more years before they can actually go and pay off all those student loans because college is so expensive nowadays, you know? Who knows what it's costing right now. It's crazy how expensive college is right now, and it hasn't kept up with wage growth so, you're spending more to go to college, you're spending several years of your life, you're probably taking that out on loans and then, you're coming out, you're making a decent amount, but most of that money is going to payoff those loans so ... I have some friends who've been out of college for ten, 12 years and they're still paying off their debts. They can't live the life they want to, they can't buy a house, they can't do this because they're still paying off all their college loans, which is nuts. So, let's say you go to college for six years, right? You rack up couple hundred thousand dollars worth of debt, you get out, takes you maybe another four, five years to pay it off maybe. So, we're looking at about ten years from start to finish to get to the point where you're probably making 75,000 a year. I'm just ball parking here, right? So, it took you ten years to get there. Would you be willing to put that time into trading? I mean, if you think, "Man, I've been trading for three months, and I can't get this stuff." Well no, that's not the way it works, you know? Whether you've been trading for a year or two years or five years, you have to put in the time, you've got to put in the effort. And if you do then eventually, you'll see yourself progressing on the option continuum. You'll see yourself moving up from level two to level four to level five to level six and then maybe you'll get stuck. But if you get stuck, then reach out, get some help and then mow to the next level and that's how you keep progressing and progressing and progressing and eventually, you'll be able to get to the point that you want to be where you're making enough money to pay off your bills and not have to do that crumby job that you get $75,000 a year for or go spend more money in retirement or do whatever else you want to do. But it takes time to get there. So, that's what I want to stress to you is that this is not gonna be an overnight success kind of thing. You hear stories, you hear, "Oh yeah, this one trader, he made a million dollars on one trade." Or lately we had the whole Bitcoin thing where people were buying Bitcoin and they became millionaires. There's that one guy ... what's his name? The guy with the curly hair. [inaudible 00:05:09] or something, I don't know how you say his name but he had ads all over the place talking about how he's a Bitcoin millionaire. Well no, he spent a few thousand dollars buying some Bitcoins when they were like a dollar. He got lucky, he placed a bet, he bought a really, really long call option and it paid off for him and now he's trying to get you to give him money to give you advice about Bitcoin because he got lucky. It's not like he has a plan or a trading method where he's gonna make you money over time. He just got lucky once and now, he's just milking it, which is fine, that's cool. Everybody does their thing but that's not likely to happen again, right? It's very rare that that happens and it doesn't happen to the person the first time they're doing it. This guy probably made a lot of bets in other things, he probably put a lot of money into other things that didn't work out and this one thing worked out. So, if you're thinking that, "Hey, I'm gonna make my first trade and I want to make a lot of money or I'm gonna start winning money off the bat," it doesn't really happen that way because there's gonna be a lot of mistakes that you're gonna make in the beginning. You might be trading too large, you might not pay attention, you might not have the discipline to adjust, you might not know how to adjust properly. There's a lot of different reasons why you could be not trading the way you're supposed to do and then hopefully, you do get enough wins under your belt to get you going and to not totally wipe you out and if you're selling options, then that's one win already in your favor because the odds are in your favor when you get going. And that's why I prefer option selling is because when you're new, you have that room to make those mistakes, you know? You sell far away from the money so, even if the stock does go against you, you still have that room, you still have that time, you still have that ability to adjust your trade or get out a small loss instead of the people that are just starting out and then they buy options and you either double your money or you lose everything. And most of the time, they lose everything. So, that's my take on it. You go to college, you spend all that time, you spend all that money, you spend all that effort to come out with a job that maybe you like, probably you hate and takes years to pay off all that debt. Ten years later you're wondering, "What have I done with my life?" Ten years of options trading, your life would be radically different. So, to answer the question, "How long should it take me?" There's really no telling because it's different for everybody, like I said. But if you are disciplined, if you can put in ... I want to give you an answer, I want to come up with some number and say, "Okay, if it's taking you more than ten years and you are working at a full time, then there's something wrong." Right? But if you're gonna go at this full time, all day long, nine to five, whatever, as a job, you're not doing anything else or maybe you're working a nightshirt and you're doing this in the daytime, you should be able to be positive trader within a year. I'm going out on a limb and saying this and again, it doesn't apply to everybody but if you do a lot of trades, you do a lot of paper trading, you do your homework, you do your research, you find strategies that work for you, you do a lot of back testing to find out which is working, what is not working, what works for you, what doesn't work for you and then you concentrate on those strategies, and those stocks and those trades that work best for you, you should be able to be positive within a years time. If not, then definitely you need to get out, you need to get help, you need to say, "Hey, somebody help me." Find a coach, find a mentor, reach out, take a course, do something in the field or in the the trade or in the strategy that you have chosen. So, if you decide, "Hey, I want to do Iron Condor, that's the thing that fits me, that's what I want to work on, that's what I want to do," of course, the market has to be conducive to that during your learning time but if it is and you're learning and it's been a year ... you know, and if you're doing monthly options, which with Condors, you probably should be doing monthly options, that's only 12 real trades, right? That's 12 trades but hopefully, you're doing back testing, hopefully you're doing paper trading where you're doing a lot of them and that's where back testing really comes into play where you can actually go back in time. So, if you can pickup a software that will actually let you go back in time and trade day by day by day to see how well you've done, in one year's worth of time, you can do 500, 600 trades. Whereas if you're not doing that, if you're only doing real money, you can only do 12 trades so, the guy who's doing 500 is gonna go through a lot more market's ups and downs and get a lot more experience than the guy who's just doing 12 months so, when you're serious, when you're focused on it, you have to have the right tools and a good back testing software can run you a little bit of money, a few hundred bucks a year but it's not something that's gonna break the bank if you are serious about this, if you're full-time on this. If you're saying, "I have $50,000, $100,000 and I'm going to trade this money and I'm going to turn this into enough money to live off of." Okay, it's gonna be really tough, unless your bills are really small, if you're single or whatever, then you can do it. If you have a family, three, four kids like I do, you're gonna need a lot more than that but in the beginning, you can say, "My goal is to make 25% a year." That would be an awesome goal. If you can get that within the first year and say, "Okay, I'm gonna practice my first year, I'm gonna work, work, work and then in my second year, I'm gonna make 25%," and you get there, that would be amazing. Because from then on, it only gets better, right? You can have more money, you can get other people to give you money, you can improve, whatever not. But even 25% would be awesome. People would be throwing money at you and say, "Wow, you made 25% a year? Here please, please do it for me, please do it for me and we'll split the profits." So, if you can show a positive track record, there's always ways to get more money. But I think that would be a good benchmark, a good place for you to be. So, if you're full-time, it might take a year. Paper trading, back testing, putting on lots and lots of trades, looking at different strategies, doing education, coming up with your own trading plans or finding ones that work for you and then maybe tweaking them a little bit if you want to.  But I would say a year would be a good amount. If you are doing this part time, you got a full-time job, maybe you can spend maybe an hour a day trading and if you can't spend any time at night ... I mean, you're gonna have to put in extra hours. One hour a day during the market open is not enough to really, really get there. Yeah, you can make maybe $1,000 or $2,000 a month and if that's all you want then that's fine for you. But I'm talking about the people who actually want to do this for a living. If you want to do that then you'll have to put in time after the market closes doing your research there, doing your back testing there, that's another feature of the back testing software, it's there when you want to use it so if you work during the day, you can't do any live trades okay, that's fine. When you go home at night for maybe an hour, two hours, three hours, do as many back tests as you can and you can go through them really quickly and get that experience while you're building up, right? And while you're saving your money or while you're learning and that way you'll get years of experience in a couple hours a night so, that would be an awesome thing to do. And if you're doing part time, I would say give yourself maybe three years. Because it's part time, of course. And you're working because you need to save up money, you can't just go into it full time, like I said, with $50,000 or $100,000. But if you're doing part time, you're saving up your money, at the same time you're building up your experience, you're building up your strategies, you're doing all that so, I would say give it a good three years. And at the end of that, you should be at the point where, "Hey, I can make enough money that I can pay my bills." You're not gonna be living in a super mansion but that's not the point, the point is to get to that financial freedom. That point where, "How much money am I making from trading? That's the money that I can use to make my bills so, I'm not getting super rich yet but I don't have to work for a job. I can work anywhere in the world. I can work when I want and how I want, no boss, nobody telling me what to do, wake up in my pajamas. Trade in my pajamas," all those cool things that go along with being your own boss and being able to have that kind of freedom. So again, if you're going at it full-time, I would say about a year. Dedicated, right? Dedicated. Full-time everyday. One year. If you're doing it part time, I would say maybe three years. Some people can do it faster, some people, it will take more time. But if you're serious, you're disciplined, you're at it, I think that would be decent amounts. Obviously, depending on who you are, if you want to put more time or less time and if you understand the concepts better, depending on the market you're in as well. If it's a very stable market, very slow market then you'll be able to accumulate faster. But I think that the paper trading and the back testing definitely are things that you need to do to help you out. And that's the name of the game, right? To get on this journey, to enjoy the journey, it has it's up and downs, it's like a rollercoaster, you're gonna lose, you're gonna win. Emotionally, it's very draining and so, that's why if you can do it with back testing and paper trading where you don't have any real money at stake, you can be a lot more calmer and a lot more disciplined on your investments and your adjustments and your plan. So, that's the case. Remember, don't get discouraged if it doesn't happen overnight. If it doesn't happen within a few months, if it doesn't happen in a year. If you're doing it part time and you've been at it for a year, two years, don't get discouraged. Look at where you were when you started. Look at what you knew and now, look at what you know now. Look at all the stuff that you've done, look at all the trades that you made. Listen to some of the other podcasts about going over your trades, reviewing your trades, looking for patterns, seeing what works for you, seeing what doesn't work for you. Find your niche in trading. Find what works best for you, what you enjoy doing the best, what you enjoy doing the most and then focus on that, concentrate on that, really go in, all in on that one strategy. You don't need 20 different strategies, you don't even need five strategies. If you can focus on one and get really, really good at it, in the beginning, that's all you need. Really. To get you over that hump, to get you to the point where I'm confident in myself, I'm confident as a trader, I know I can make money out of thin air. All I need to do is just focus on my plan, stay disciplined and I can make money consistently month, after month, after month. If you have that, if you get to that point, your life changes completely. 100%. Everything changes for you. That's where we need to go, that's where we need to get to and the simplest way to do that is to put in the time, focus on one strategy, one technique that works for you and then put in the time, put in the effort, pay your dues. If you're doing it full-time, probably a year. If you're doing it part time, probably about three years but then compared to other aspects, you know, compared to other ways of making a living, this is a lot easier. Right? Going to college for four, six years, paying your bill, paying your student loans for another four to six years after that and then working in a crumby job. Or maybe you start ... maybe you buy a franchise, you have to pay a couple hundred thousand dollars in loans and fees and all that to start a franchise and then, most of those go out of business. Most small businesses go out of business in the first five years anyway, right? So you're basically buying yourself a job and you might not like it, you might like it, it might work, it might not work. There's a big risk there. Here, we're talking about smaller numbers, small risks and a lot less time to get to profitability. So, you guys already know this. There's lots of benefits to trading but that's the timeline that I would say. If it's taking you longer than that, again, reach out, get a mentor. If you wanted to go faster than that, I've already told you what you need to do. Get more practice, more paper trades, more back testing. Nobody can really do it for you. If you want to learn it, you're gonna have to do it and go through that practice, go through the motions. You're gonna have to do it trade after trade after trade and that's really the only way to do it. Nobody can take what ... if I wanted to, I can't take all my trading knowledge and just take it out of my brain and stick it into your brain, doesn't work that way. You'll have to develop it on your own. But that's part of the fun, that's part of the journey. Stay on it, stay focused, don't get discouraged. If you do, reach out to us, maybe I can send you some encouraging words or two but it is worth it. The end of the journey ... the journey's worth it, the journey's fun. The end of the journey when you get to the goal, that is awesome and so, just keep at it. If you need anything, we're always here for you, let us know. Help at optiongenius.com. Take care, 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.  -- Ho, ho, ho, here we are, back for another edition of Option Genius Podcast. I wanted to answer a question that I get from newbies, which is what should my first trade be? I remember, it was a while ago, but I kind of remember what it felt like when I first got trading, selling options. It was so exciting, it was so new, it was like a ray of hope because ... I don't know if you know my story but I had lost my job and so, I took this money that my wife had saved up. You know, she worked during college and after that, she got a job as a nurse and she saved up all of her money because she was working at home and all that so, she had a bunch of money saved up when we got married. And basically, she let me use it to try to get to my dream of being a full-time trader. A trader where I'm paying the bills by trading. I had gotten laid off and I was like, "Baby, I can't go back to work, this is not for me. Wearing a suit and dressing up and it's choking the life out of me. Let me try to make it as a trader." So, she agreed and I went to work, I proceeded to basically lose a ton of money very quickly. Day trading, swing trading, futures trading, all kinds of different stuff, buying options. And I did sell some options too because, you know, you read articles and you watch videos and say, "Oh, this is cool. Let me try this thing." So, I was trying everything, I was learning, I was doing things. Most of it was horrible. I would have some wins, it's not like I lost all the time but normally, if you look at it week to week basis, month to month basis, my account balances were just going lower and lower and lower but then, I reviewed all my trades, I sat back I said, "I can't do this, I'm gonna run out of money very soon. What is going on?" Going through all my stuff, doing the review, I found that there were some trades where I actually sold options that worked out in my favor and so, I was like, "Alright, let me focus on this. Let me see if I can just pick one thing and do it and really learn about it." And the more I looked into it, the more I studied it, the more I read about it, I was fascinated, I was enthralled. I was like, "Wow, this is so cool. Why didn't I know about this before? Why didn't I do this before?" The odds are in your favor, the money is really good, it doesn't take a lot of time, there's not as much stress and I don't have to be stuck in front of my corrupter all day long. I remember there were times when I was day trading that you're in the chat rooms, like every single broker or a lot of these websites, they have chat rooms where these guys who are day trading, they hang out in these chat rooms because they're in front of the computer anyway. And so, I remember there was this story of this one lady who she put on a trade and then she really had to go to the bathroom. I mean, really, really bad. She couldn't do it and she was a big trader. She ran to the bathroom, by the time she came back she lost $30,000 in like three minutes. And I was like, "Holy cow." And it broke her, it completely ... she had bankrupted her. I don't know if it bankrupted her but her account was like almost zeroed out, she had margin calls, she had to quit being a trader, we never saw her again in the chatroom and it was insane. That's the kind of pressure that these people are under and I don't want to have that kind of pressure. I mean, jeez, that was crazy. How do you sleep at night? That's why they tell you when you're day trading that you always get out of your trades before the end of the day, before the market closes. Don't go into any trades overnight because that's just insane. You wouldn't be able to sleep at night, you'd be jittery all night, that's not for me. I like sleeping at night, I sleep really well at night and it's all because of the way we trade, you know? And so really, when you think about it, you go back and you say, "Alright, if I was brand new to this, I had never sold an option before, didn't really know what it was about. I understand push and calls but what would the first trade be? What should I do to get my toe in the water? To really just try this out. I just want to see, I just want to get a feel for this." And there's two options really, I think, I wouldn't want to get into anything really complicated. I want to do something where you won't really have to understand all the mechanics behind it. You don't have to know about implied volatility, you don't have to know about the Greeks, you don't have to understand the probabilities and all this stuff. Really, what I would say is, okay, if you have an account already and you own maybe 100 shares of stock, okay? Hopefully it's maybe an ETF, maybe it's a big company like Coca Cola or Disney or something like that. I would go ahead and just place a covered call. That would be my first trade. That would be my advice to go in, take a look at it and say, you know what, let's say Disney is trading at $100. In the next 30 days, I don't think it's gonna get to 110. That would be a 10% gain, it's not gonna get to 110. I want to go and sell the 110 call. And maybe I only get $20 for it. That's okay. This is not about how much money you can make, it's about just getting your toe wet, just doing it, popping your cherry so to speak. And so, that's what my advice would be to be for that. Your first trade, if you have some stock, never done this before, covered call, it's easy to get approved for. Almost nobody gets rejected when you apply to add options trading to your account if you just say, "Hey, I just want to do covered calls." Because that's the one that the brokers for some reason, they really think that's the safest one even though it has as much risk as a naked put on the risk graph. That's another story, we can get into that later so, if you have some shares and you want to just do it and you just want to get a taste of it, what option selling is all about, go ahead and sell one call above where your stock is trading at right now. We don't want to lose your stock, we don't want anything to happen with your stock, we want this option to expire and we want to take that money that we get, right? So, let's say we sell 10% above the price. So, if your stock is trading at 100, we sell 10% above that so at 110, we sell that 110 call option, do it for about a month, maybe a month to 45 days away and whatever you get. Maybe you get $15, maybe you get 30, $40, whatever you get, that money goes into your account. That's yours. No matter what happens, that money is yours, you never have to give it back. And then for the rest of the time, until that option expires, I just want you to watch it. I just want you to look at it and be like, "Okay, I sold it and I got $30 for it," let's say for example. Let's say you got 30 cents for it, which is $30 credit to you so, you got $30 and every day, that option goes down in value. Little bit, by little bit, by little bit, by little bit, it's gonna go down, down, down in value until hopefully, it will expire worthless and you'll still have your stock, you'll still have any dividends that you've gotten from the stock but you've also gotten the $30 that you got from the call option. So, that will give you a nice taste of what option selling is all about. It's very basic, it's the simplest trade you can do and if you hone the stock, you can do that. Now, if you do not own stock you can do that. Now, if you do not own stock already or if you have a small account then covered calls might not be the best for you. There is something that I'll call the, "Poor man's covered call," but that's a little bit more complicated. We're not gonna get into that right now. What I would say if you don't have any stock and you still want to do your first option trade. I would say probably you do something that at our company, we call, "The layup spread." Now, the layup spread is a credit spread with some twists to it. The criteria for getting in and if you want to learn how we do layup spreads, then you can go to simonsaysoptions.com/layupguide and get the guide. It's really cheap and it walks you through exactly how do you pick a trade, how does a trade work and what are you looking for, okay? So if you need, if you've never done it then pickup the guide, it's really cheap and it will go step by step tell you how to do everything. Now, the reason that we call it, "The layup spread," is because in basketball, the easiest trade you can make for most people is the layup, right? You're standing really close to the basket, you just jump up, bank the ball and just throw it into the net and percentage wise, that's the most made shot. So, the other shot ... we were thinking about calling it, "The dunk spread," because if you go for a slam dunk, that's kind of easy, right? That's probably the easiest ... that might be easier than the layup but for myself and for Simon, Simon is the one who wrote the guide and who does these, we really have never dunked in our life and so for us, a dunk is not the easiest trade or not the easiest shot in basketball because we have never done one, we couldn't do one if our lives depended on it and so for us, it wasn't the dunk that was the easiest, it's the layup that's the easiest and so, we called it, "The layup spread," because it's probably the easiest trade you can make and so, that's why we call it that. It's a spread, meaning it has two options, you sell one and then you buy another one but really it's something simple and basically what you do is you find a stock that you like, you want it to be ... for your first trade, you want to find something that's really big. Like an ETF, you can take a look at SPY, that's the S&P 500 ETF, that's a good one. Or find a large company, maybe Apple, Facebook, Google, any one of these large tech companies or just ... those would be good to work with and you see the chart. Now, you don't want to find a chart that's just moving up and down, up and down all over the place, you want to find a stock that's moving in one direction, smoothly. So, relatively if it's going up, you want it to go on your screen, if you look at the chart, you want it to go from the lower left to the top right and you want it to go up slowly, slowly, slowly, not have really, really big moves but small moves and just generally going up, up, up. Or if you want one going down, you do the other way but you don't want it to have big jumps and big movements. You want it to be [inaudible 00:11:48] have a decent slope going up but smooth. We don't want it to look like big hills and have gaps in the middle and what not. So, you go through some charts, find one that you like and then what you do is you want to sell away from the direction. So, if it's going up then we want to sell some puts. So you take a look at the chart and say, "Okay, in the next month of so, I don't think it's gonna drop more than 15% in price," and I can't go through all the mechanics here. If you want to know in detail, then you have to get the guide but the answer to the question is what I'm trying to get to here. So basically, how it works is if the stock is going up, we think it's gonna keep going up, we don't think it's gonna drop but if it drops a little bit, it's okay. We're gonna pick a point where we do not think the stock is gonna go so, if it's training at $100 and it's just been going up, up, up, up, we don't think it's gonna go all the way down to 90 or 04 or 85 or even 80 so, we pick a number or we pick a price where we do not think the stock is gonna go in our timeframe. Maybe 30 days or 60 days, however long we want to sell the option for and then, that's the option that we sell. That is the put option that we sell and then we buy another put option right below it, the next put option there. And you can get into this trade for as little as $100. The average trade is probably gonna be around $500, sometimes ... you do that, that's the spread you have. The probability's in your favor, probably 80 to 90% probability of that working out and you can make 5%, 8%, 10, 12% in that short timeframe of a month or so. So, I think it's a very good strategy because it's less risk, it's very calm. Basically, you're just selling some options, have the odds in your favor, the trend is also in your favor, which is a good thing and then you just sit back and you just watch it and you just let it expire. In this particular strategy though, you have to know when you're gonna get out. So, you can say, "I'm not gonna do anything. I'm not gonna adjust it, I'm not gonna change it. And so, if I'm risking $100, I have an opportunity to make $10 but I'm gonna risk $100 so if I lose it, I lose it." So, in this case if you're putting up $100 as your margin, you're gonna lose $100 if you don't do anything and the trade totally goes against you, 100% against you if it goes. If it doesn't, the other option you have is that you can get out if you're down a little bit or if you can learn to adjust, you can do that. There are different ways to play the trade in the beginning. If this is your first ever trade, I would probably put up 100 bucks and just not do anything, I would just watch it. That's it. See how it goes, see how it feels. If you lose the 100 bucks, see how that feels. That's a learning experience right then and there. You know? It's like, "Oh man, I just sat here, I didn't do anything. I lost 100 bucks, this is horrible, I don't like this. I'm not gonna do this anymore." But if you understand how it works, most of the time it's gonna be profitable so, if it's something that you enjoy doing, then you can look into it further. Because for some people, selling options might just be too boring. Putting on a trade and just waiting for it for a month, man, that sucks. I don't want to do that. I want to be a gunslinger and I'm gonna be a better, I'm a poker player. I want to just, bet, bet, bet and hopefully I'll hit the lottery. If that's you, then option selling is not for you and this is not the Podcast for you anyway. But if this is your first trade, like I said, if you have 100 shares, covered call would be good. If you don't have 100 shares, the layup spread is something that is right up your alley. Now, of course, you could do other things. You could be selling naked puts, you could be doing condors, butterflies, straddles or something. That is pretty popular, strangles and straddles are good for people but I think if this is your first ever trade, you're just looking to get in, you're just looking to get your toe wet, get an experience of what it's really like, covered calls or layup spreads. And again, covered calls are really simple. You can get more information on our website and credit spreads are ... the layup spread is a credit spread with a little bit of the twist and the twist is how Simon actually chooses the trades that he does because you can go into any stock and say, "Okay, I'm gonna do a credit right on this trade, on this stock." But to really get maximum gain out of it, to make sure you win on most of your trades, you're gonna have to do a little bit of digging, you're gonna have to look at the chart, you're gonna have to look at what stocks should you be trading and what stocks you should not be trading and so, Simon actually goes through that in the guide, in the layup guide and you can pick that up if you want to. It just puts more odds in your favor, so to speak, those are the two things I would recommend. Again, if you wanted to learn about covered calls, you can go www.optiongenius.com/covered calls, we'll put the link in the show notes and then, if you want to learn about the layup guides, you can pick it up at at www.simonsaysoptions.com/layupguide. Alright? If you have any questions, please let me know 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... 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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.   -- Hey Genius Nation, so I'm still here at the beach and this episode is going to be a continuation of the last one. If you haven't listened to the last episode, it's called, "Working on your business." Go ahead and listen to that one first so you'll have a better idea of what I'm talking about here. If you can't find it, that's okay. You can listen to this one because it's similar topic, but it's different. I'm going to go more in depth into this topic in this episode and so what I talked about last time was what exactly is working on your business and different ways that you can do it to improve yourself as a trader. In this episode I want to talk about my trading reviews. What I do is every so often I will set aside some time to get away from the office to go by myself and to take all of my trading records and then review them to see how I've done over the past however long it's been since the last review. What I want to do in this episode is actually go through the questions I ask myself, go through the things I look at and then, you know, you can take some of that, maybe tweak your own, add your own stuff and then you'll see patterns. You'll see ways that you can improve, you'll see instances where you'll have revelations and epiphanies about your own trading that you can tweak to improve. I'll show you some of mine later on as we go along. What I like to do is for my review is to go to a quiet place to be alone. It has to be away from the office, away from my normally trade for the most part of it. I personally, I like to go to the beach and I like to go on a cloudy day when it's not so sunny and not so hot. Then just sit back either you can grab a chair, sit on the beach and listen to the waves and review everything or sit in my car with the windows down. I'm in a sense old school when it comes to trading and when it comes to record keeping and I guess old school is better than calling it old fashion, right? Old fashion has a bad ring to it, but I'm old school and so I write everything down on paper. Every trade I do is on paper. Depending on the strategy, if it's a simple credit spread strategy then I will have several trades on one piece of paper. All the information for each trade will be there. If it's a more complicated, like an iron condor or a butterfly or something like that, then I'll have one sheet of paper for every trade. That way I have all the information about what happened. What was going on when I got into the trade? What I was thinking about when I did the trade? What happened during the trade? What adjustments I made? Why? I keep records, I keep notes of all that stuff and then what eventually happened at the end. I take all of these trades. I take them with me and I like to do this at least at bare minimum should be done once a year and if you're doing, if you've been trading a lot, you've been trading for years and if you're doing really, really well then you go one year between reviews. If you are a newer trader, I would do it at least every three months. I mean, if you're brand new you should probably do it every month. You won't have as much to go after but at least three months. Then if you're more experienced then you can push it out to six months. I like to do it at least every six months but at a minimum I'll do it for a year. Normally, like I said, I like to go out and not have it be nice weather outside. Nice and cool. I like to go springtime or in the fall, something like that. That's just me, but you can go anywhere. You can just go in the kitchen table and do it. You can go to the coffee shop, you can go wherever you are where you can just spread out with your paperwork or if you have all your stuff on a laptop, take your laptop, open it up. Be careful not to be doing any trading. We're not doing any trading, we're not watching the news, we're not on Facebook. We are only focusing on our trades and reviewing them and going through them. That's all we're doing. Okay? Make sure you do that. Now, one thing I want to look at is I look for patterns. What trades did I lose money on? Why? What was the reason? I should have written that down but I want to go through all of them. Let's take all the losing trades first and I'll set them aside and say, okay, what happened? Was this something that was my fault or was it something that was out of my control? Was there some kind of surprise announcement that made the stock a little crazy? Was it something else? Something in the economy, something the president said or something some other country did or anything like that. Was it something in my control? Did I not follow my trading plan? Did I mess up? Was I not feeling well? Was there an emergency and I couldn't go to the office I couldn't drive that day and I messed up? Was it that it was out of my control? Now if it's out of my control, I'm not so worried about it because those things happen. You're going to take losses. It's just the nature of the game, but you also have to look at how many times that happens. If you're doing 10 trades and you lose on or if you have 10 losing trades and six of them were outside of your control, you need to find out, dig deeper. Is there anything I can do to limit that? If it's the same thing, if it's, oh they had an earning announcement and the stock loss, oh there was an earning announcement. Well then if you see that, that happens repeatedly that you're losing money on earning announcements, then maybe you shouldn't be trading during earnings announcements, right? That's just common sense. This is the kind of things that you might not see while you're in the trading day to day, while you're doing it every day, every month trying to get better. You might not see this, but when you take a step back, when you're looking at the forest, when you're in the forest, you can't see all this stuff. When you're out of the forest looking at it from a 10,000 foot view, you can see, oh wow, okay, this happened good, this happened bad, oh look at that mistake I made over and over and over again. Let's not make that mistake anymore. Right? These are the kind of things that you're looking for. The other thing I want to look at is how have I done. Right? We all want to know that. What's the profit and loss like? Am I up money, am I losing money? What's going on? You definitely want to know that. Right? Am I up, down, sideways? What? I want to know this, but in fact, this is the most deceiving number when it comes to how well you're doing in trading. That's the first number everyone looks at. "Oh yeah. How'd you do last year?" "Oh, I made a million dollars." "Okay. That was great. You're a wonderful trader." No, that doesn't mean anything. You could have two traders, one lost 100,000, the other one made a million. It doesn't mean that the guy who made a million dollars is better than the other guy. Maybe he just got lucky, maybe he just bet the moon on one trade and he got lucky. That's not the thing that we want to look at. What we want to look at, if you made money, that's great, that's the goal, right? That's perfect. That's wonderful. Keep doing it if you can, but what we want to look at is, did I stick to my plan? Did I stick to my trading plan? That's what makes me happy when I have stuck to my plan, when I know I have a system that works over the long-term and I'm sticking to it. Whether I'm up or down, doesn't really matter because eventually the odds are in my favor. It's going to turn around. If I'm losing money but I'm sticking to my plan, I know that it's going to turn around and eventually I'm going to come out ahead. Right? That is why it's more important to stick to the plan if you know the plan works. Does that make sense? I learned about this in poker. If you play poker, you know that you could play a hand perfectly and you can still get beat and that's when people go on tilt. They're like, "Oh, I played it perfectly. This and that guy beat me." Well, you know, that's part of the emotions of it. You can't go on tilt, but it's okay. That happens and it happens in trading. You could do everything perfectly. You can still lose money. That's okay. That's why we have stuff like asset allocation. That's why we have stuff like diversification. That's why we have, we don't just put all our money in one single trade every single month. You can spread it around so that if one thing bites you, you're okay because you got other lines in the water. You got other things that are going to make up for that, and eventually even if that one thing bites you, eventually in the long run, you're going to come out ahead because you're following the trading plan and the odds are in your favor and the strategy just works right? That's why it's important to have a good strategy. Follow the plan and that way you don't have to worry about anything else. If you lose, you lose. Next month you make it back, the month after that you make it back. If you have a good record and say, "Hey, if I lose this much, I'm going to get out." If you follow that, then you should be able to get it back. That's one of the things that's really important. One of the things people tell me was iron condor, it's like, "Oh yeah, you know, if you lose it on a condor you lose nine times what you could have made." No, that's ridiculous. If you're going into an iron condor trade or any kind of option selling trade and you're going to say that, you know I'm either going to make this amount or I'm going to lose the maximum amount. It doesn't make any sense because if you lose the maximum amount that just wipes out all those trades, all that work for no reason. You need to have a stop loss. You need to have an amount that says, "Okay, if I lose this much then I'm getting out because the trade is not working in my favor." Right? You figure that out. What that works for you, is it 20%, 25%, 30%, whatever it is per trade that works out for you, that's what you have to set it at. You have to figure that out based on your trade temperament. Are you okay with risk? Are you not okay with risk? Do you want to be really, really close? And say, "You know what, if it goes against me even a little bit, I'm going to get out." Whatever it is, you have to find out what works for you and create a trading plan that works for you. You take a trading plan that you know works. Take one of mine or whatever, and then you can do it the way it's supposed to be done first so you understand. Then once you're good at it, then you can start tweaking it to go with your own risk appetite, your own risk temperament. That's another thing I look at. Some of the questions I ask myself, is my win loss record acceptable? Okay. If I'm doing, let's say credit spreads with a 80% probability of profit, I should be winning eight and losing on two, that's what the math tells you, right? If I'm winning on six and losing on four, that tells you there's something wrong here. My win loss is not acceptable. I need to do more research, I need to find out why. Right? If you're doing straight out buying puts and calls, and if you're doing it on a 50/50 coin flip, you shouldn't be winning at least 50%. If you're not, then something's wrong with your strategy, your trading plan, what you're doing, and you need to go back and adjust that. Another question I ask are, am I keeping my losses manageable? Now we all are going to have losses, can't get away from it. No way about it. You could do everything perfectly, you can still lose money, but are you keeping them manageable? Like I said earlier, do you have a stop loss in place that you are being strict with? If I'm saying that I'm not going to lose more than 25% on a trade and I have three or four trades in three months where I loss 50% or 60%, that means I am not keeping my losses manageable and I need to improve on that. I need to work on that. I need to focus on that. That tells me right away, oh, big big red flag, hey, it didn't just happen one time. It happened multiple times. Right? One time, it could be an anomaly, you know, maybe you fell asleep at the switch. I don't know. Multiple times, we have an issue and it's systemic and we need to fix it. Okay. Another question I ask are, are there any months or are there any circumstances in which I do better or worse? This is something you might not normally think about. Are there any months that are better off? Is some kind of seasonality coming into play? This doesn't just happen with commodities. It actually does happen with stocks as well. There are certain stocks that do better in certain months for option sellers than in other months. There are certain months that are better off for option sellers and it varies by trader, depending on your strategies, depending on your risk tolerance. For me, this is when I found out, you know, going back through a few years of records, I found out that my best month is December. That is the best month I have. That is when I make the most profits and most of my trades turn out to be winners. The way I trade, I do the best in December now. I don't know exactly why that is. I assume it has to do with how many days off, there are a lot of days off. There's the Thanksgiving break, there's the Christmas break, there's a New Year's break in there so the markets are closed many of those days. There's also the thing about, you know, people are taking time off for the holidays, they're not really at the top of their game. They're not really motivated. Right? Everybody has that, "Oh yeah, you know, I'm going on holiday," kind of mentality. A lot of the traders on Wall Street, a lot of the floor brokers, a lot of the hedge fund guys, they take off. A lot of them take off the whole month of December because they already know what they're going to do for the year. Maybe their hedge fund or whatever has already made good money so they pack it up and they say, "All right, we're done for the year. Let's go. Let's go on vacation, let's go to the beach." Then there's also everybody being happy because, you know on Wall Street at least because people are spending money left and right for Christmas. There are many issues where it's a lot of positivity in the atmosphere. A lot of relaxation in the atmosphere. I think that is why my particular style that I like to do works better in December. That's just something you would have to figure out for yourself after checking your results for a while. I've noticed that there are some months that are worse. Obviously if there's a best month and there's going to be a worst month, right. Some months I don't do good as well. I don't do as well. When I want to take a vacation, guess which month I'm choosing. I'm going to go in those lower months. Knock on wood, every month overall has been positive. Going back over the years, it's not like, okay, every October is horrible for me, but I do have more losses in October than normal. Is it October? I think it's September actually. In September or October I will cut back on my trades. I will trade less. I will go in with higher probability, I will be more on top of the ball, I will pay attention more, I will take on less other commitments. That's just because I know my own trading habits. I know my own records, right? I've been doing the reviews, I know where I'm strong, where I'm weak, and so if I'm weak in a particular month for whatever reason, maybe the market is just more volatile that month. If that's the case, then I need to be on top of it. It's not a normal month, you know, you'll see the seasonality, you'll see all these patterns when you do these reviews and then you'll realize how you can adjust so that you can flat line it, because every month you want to have a winning month. Right? The way I do it as I go month by month by month, those are my little subsections of the year. So I want to have a winning month. Every month. Doesn't happen all the time, but most months should be winning months. Most year should be winning years and if I find these patterns that can help me turn a losing month into a winning month, then that's all better. Right. That makes a big difference on my whole return for the whole year. Another question I would ask myself is, are there any stocks that I should stay away from or are there any stocks that I should go all in on? Stocks do change their patterns from time to time. A stock could be a great stock for a year, two years, and then something happens and it changes where it's not good to be selling options on anymore. That happens a lot. A new CEO might come or they might go in a new direction or they might sell off part of the company or they might get into financial issues. Who knows what, there's stuff that goes on. For example, Chipotle, I'll give you that example. This one for me was an awesome stock for a long time. Chipotle was awesome. It couldn't do no wrong. It was just going higher and higher and higher and I made a lot of money trading Chipotle. Then they had their health food scare, you know, they had the E. coli breakout and some people got sick, so they closed down one store. All right, one store. That's an anomaly. It's a blip. It's okay, everything will be fine, but then it happened in another store and another store and they had to ... They had a whole big issue and for a while Chipotle was a stock that could not be traded in my view in selling options sense because it was too unreliable. It was too volatile. You didn't know what was going to happen. You don't know if they were going to shut down more stores, go out of business, you know, get shut down by the FDA. You didn't know what was going on. That was a stock that we had to stop trading, before it was great but then all of a sudden, boom, it switched, it changed. That happens. You have to go through your results and say, okay, you know this stock was great for a long time. Now it's changed so I need to stay away from this stock. Let me take it off the radar. Let me take it off my screen so that I stay away from it. Because if you say, okay, hey, I traded whatever, Apple every month for the past year and the probabilities just didn't work out. I should've won eight out of 10 times and I only won three out of 10 times. Okay. If I'm following my trading plan, then maybe it's the stocks problem. Maybe it's a stock that's the issue, not me, not my trading. I can take that money, take it out of Apple, stop trading Apple for a while and put it into some other stock and hopefully the numbers will change and I'll start making money. You can't fall in love with a stock or a trade. Like I fell in love with Chipotle for a long time. I loved it. I did it all the time. I did it every month, but then it changed and I had to realize that and I had to look at it and say, this is not a one time thing. This is not a one month thing. This is a fundamental change in the stock movement. I had to stop completely trade again. You have to stay on top of those things. Then there's on the other side, there's the stocks that you want to put more money into because they just happen to work, you know, month after month they just happen to work. They're very calm, they're very reliable, they're very steady and they just work. Chipotle was like that. That would be something that, okay, I'm going to focus on this stock, I'm going to go all in on this stock, and by all in I don't mean like 100% of your money. I mean like a little bit more than the other ones, you know, but you focus on it. You read the headlines, you listen to the conference calls, you know what's going on, you know how many stores are opening, you know what their dollar per customer is, you know all the details about that particular company so that you can tell if something changes, right. When you know a company, you know, okay, hey, there's no big surprises coming up. I know what's going on. You can put more money to work in that company, you can maybe buy some shares, sell some covered calls, do some spreads on it and make more money while the going is good. Keeping in mind that the going could change at any time. While it's good, time to cash in, time to do that. You might not realize that until you do your review. One of the stocks that I realized I was doing really well with last year was Intuitive Surgical. This is a stock that has been doing really well, but it wasn't on my radar. I was trading it and I was like, oh, this is a great chart. I was trading it every once in a while but until I did my review I didn't realize. I was like, whoa man, that's done a lot of trades and they've all worked. They've all done really, really well. Okay. Maybe I need to do this a lot more often. Okay. Maybe I need to go researching more, learn about it more what's going on with this company and maybe I need to put more money to work. That's another thing that you would find in your reviews on. Well those are the questions I would ask and then after I'm done with all my questioning, after I'm done finding whatever patterns I could find, then what I do is I go back to the office. I have this software that's called OptionNET Explorer, OptionNET Explorer. It's a back testing software. What you can do is you can actually go back in time to a certain day put, you know, I take all my losing trades. Let's say I lost money on my Chipotle trade. I'll type in Chipotle. Go to the day I put the trade on, I can look at the chart from that day. I can look at all the options prices from that day and then I can put my trade on as if it's that day and then I can walk it forward day by day by day and I can see what my trade was doing. I can see what the stock is doing, I can see how my trade is doing, how much is it up, how much it is down, what the Greeks are for that day for those options. It's basically as if I'm going back in time and walking through the trade day by day by day. Since this was a losing trade, I can take a look at it and I can say, okay, this was happening, this was happening. I should have adjusted here, but I didn't. I should have done this here, but I didn't. Oh wait a minute, I did this instead, or I just did too late, I just did too early. I can try to figure out why the trade didn't workout. If it's my fault, then I can take notes and I can work on that. Now, not every trade can I actually learn something, from some trades. You just leave it up to fate and you know, they just didn't work out. That's fine. But a lot of the trade, especially in the beginning when you're learning, you can go back and realize and say, wow, I really messed up here. I needed to do this instead, and it just didn't work out because I didn't follow the plan or I didn't do that particular step or maybe I used the wrong type of adjustment. You could do one type of adjustment, maybe it didn't work out, but what if you had done a different adjustment, you can go back in time in the software and do that. That's what I like to do with all my losing trades. This is how I like to do my reviews. Just sit back, take a few hours, go through all your paper trades, go through all your paperwork. If it's on a laptop, it's not as ... That's why you can have computerized stuff to track all your trades, but you got to have a good bit of information on every trade. You can't just say, the stock was at 100 and I did the 110 calls. No, what was going on with the stock? When is earnings? How volatile has the stock been? What's the delta on the stocks on the options that you're trading? What do you think is going to happen with the stock? Is there any news coming out? How many days to expiration? All of these types of information you have to know and you have to record it so that when you go back and you do your review, you can actually tell why stuff happened and why it didn't happen, why it worked out, why it didn't work out. Was it your fault or was it not your fault? If it's your fault, why was it your fault? What did you do wrong? Then how can you change that to make it better? That's the name of the game. That's how we play. Put on a trade, record everything. Do the trade as best as you can, and then once it's over, record the final results. Then after a while, go back and look at all of them together because if you look at a trade that happened a month ago, you still remember why you did what you did. You still have some bias, like oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember. I didn't adjust because this guy came on the radio and he said this, this, this, this, and I believed him so that's why I didn't adjust. Okay, but six months from now, you're not going to remember why you didn't adjust. All you're going to remember, all you're going to notice on your records is I did not adjust on time. I messed up. It doesn't matter what the reason was. It matters that you did not follow your trading plan. I mean, if you want to write down, you could write down, hey, this guy came on the radio and I didn't adjust because of him. Well, if you have that in your paperwork and you realized that you've been listening to this guy regularly, you'll have an idea of when he's right and when he's wrong. Actually you're logging it down. If you go back and you say, you know, I lost money on these eight trades and on all eight of them I was listening to this one guy. Well dang it, I got to stop listening to this guy. There you go. You found your pattern and then the next time that you're going to review, you'll be like, oh, I didn't have any losses because I stopped listening to that guy. That's the purpose of the review. You go back, figure out what you did wrong, see if you can improve upon it and eventually you want to get to a place where you don't have to review ever. But because we're human, because we're people were emotional, that never happens. You can always learn by going back and reviewing. It doesn't matter how many years you've been doing this, you always have to go back and review and then you can take it even a step further if you want. You can have somebody else review your stuff. Somebody that knows how you trade, somebody that knows the strategies, right? Then you give them all of your documents, all your paperwork, and say, I would like you to review my stuff while I'm not in the room and see what kind of conclusions that they draw from your trades. I mean, that's taking it to the whole next level, but you don't need to do that right now. Just focus on yours. I'm sure you'll learn a ton every time you do this. I still do and that's why I do it on a regular basis. That's it. Pretty simple. All right guys. Talk to you soon. 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.  -- Genius Nation, this is Allen, coming to you from the sunny sandy beach of Galveston, Texas. Galveston is a beach town about an hour and 15 minutes from home for me. And so, I come here once in a while to just relax. And today I'm here, no wife, no kids. I'm actually gonna be doing something, working on the business as I say. That's the topic of this podcast. The cool thing about the beaches in Texas are that you can actually drive on the beach. Not every beach allows it but this one does. Most of Galveston you can drive on the beach. And so right now I am parked on the beach, sitting in my car about 15 feet away from the waves, from the water. And so if you can hear the waves, if you can hear the seagulls, that's me sitting on the beach. And I actually expected a lot fewer people here today. It is a weekday and school has started but there are still a bunch of people here, so I guess nobody told these tourists to go home yet. But glad they're having fun. And I'm here to actually do some work. I'm away from the office. But I took a day off today, drove down here, made a day of it. And what I'm gonna be doing is called working on the business, instead of in the business. That is a subject that I first heard about in the book called, The E-myth by Michael Gerber. And of course you know, it's about the e-myth, it's the entrepreneurial myth. That's what he's talking about. And it's a book about how to improve your business. And of course trading should be treated as a business. So trading is my business, one of them, options and this is another one. I'm gonna be working on both of those. But the idea between working on your business versus in your business is, you know there's two types right? Like I said, in the business is what you do on a day to day basis to keep your business running. On the business is what you do to actually improve it and actually grow the business. So, if you take an example of an accountant, if you're an accountant, working in the business would be meeting with clients, fielding out paperwork, doing peoples taxes, managing your employees if you have any. Anything that you do on a day to day basis. You know, paying the bills, paying the rent, all that kind of stuff. That's working in your business. You have to do it to maintain the business to keep the doors open. But that's not gonna help you grow. So working on your business for an accountant would be something like figuring out a way to get new customers. Or looking at maybe purchasing some new software, looking at some new software that might make things easier and smoother. Or going to a continuing education type event where you're learning about new techniques or new loopholes in tax law, or whatever you guys do. In the E-myth book, Gerber actually talks about and gives an example of a baker. So this lady she's making pies. But she's not getting ahead. Every day she makes the pies, she loves making the pies, and every day she's exhausted at the end of the day because she bakes the pies, and she sells the pies, and she cleans the store, and at the end of the day, she's just really tired and frustrated, and she can't get ahead. He explains to her that, all that stuff, you're working in the business. Making the pies, cutting the apples, baking the pies. I think we got an ice cream truck coming. All of that stuff is working and taking care of customers, cleaning the store, that's all working in your business. It's not gonna make your business grow. In order to make your business grow, what you need to do is create systems for everything that you do you in your business. And then once you have systems then you can actually, hopefully give it to somebody else, or streamline it. And then you take time away from the business to actually work on it. You know, how do you get more customers? How do you work on making your systems? How do you improve your recipes and all that kind of stuff? So in trading, if trading is our business, then for us, the day to day stuff is the actual trading. You know we think, oh yeah that's gonna improve my business. But no, that's the day to day stuff. That's working in your business. You're not actually gonna improve your trading that much by just doing trades. That's not how it really works. We think, I need more experience, I need more experience. Putting on trades for the sake of putting on trades is great, but it's not gonna get you to improve unless you actually work on your business and go back and review those trades. Listening to the news, that's again, reading the newspapers, or reading CNBC websites, or all that kind of stuff, listening to conference calls, working on your taxes, working on your profit and loss statement, all that kind of stuff, that's all working in the business. It has to be done. We have to do it. It's annoying sometimes, it's frustrating. And eventually hopefully you can get to the point where you can hire somebody else to do a lot of that stuff for you. You know, your taxes and what not. You can pay for more expensive subscription services that will listen to conference calls for you. And then just give you like the cliffs notes of it or something. I don't know. But what I want to focus on is working in the business because we're already working in the business. You already know how to do that. Working on the business is what I want to focus on. And that's what you do to become a better trader. And one of the things that I'm here to do, and what I urge you all to do is, take some time every few months to sit down with all of your trades and actually review them. Look at the ones that worked. Look at the ones that did well. Look at the ones that did not do well. Just go over everything and try to find patterns. Try to find why did I mess up on this trade. You know, I've been trading this one stock every month for the last two years, but I had these bad months and these three trades. Didn't work out. Why? What was the reason? So try to figure that out. Back testing would also be something where you're working on your business. Back testing all the trades that you did not do well on. Or back testing new strategies if you've come up with something. Or a tweak to a strategy that you already have, a trading plan that you already have. That would be working on your business. Improving your mindset is another thing that you could be doing you know? Working on yourself. Your mindset as in, what are my goals? Can I accomplish more with what I'm doing? Or why do I feel certain ways? You know, meditation is something that I've been looking into as a way to calm my mind and increase my results. A lot of traders that you read about, the more successful ones, they admit it. They say that they do trading. One of the books that just came out recently is called, oh man I forgot the name of it. Principles is the name of it by Ray Dalio who runs one of the biggest hedge funds in the world. And so he talks about how he meditates on a regular basis. And whenever he gets scared or whenever his mind is out of whack, he'll just take time out and just go and meditate for five minutes, and it calms him. So that is something. Learning how to do that would definitely help you in your trading. That is something that I would classify as working on your business. Working on controlling your emotions is another one you know? So worry, fear, anger, all of these things that we feel on a regular basis when we're putting our money at risk, all this stuff is something that you don't want to have impact your trading. And so when you're working on that stuff, that's working on your business. Getting yourself to do better. Education would be another one you know? Taking a class, taking a course, anything like that would be working on your business. Where you're actually trying to improve. Things like listening to this podcast. That's what you're exactly doing. You might be doing it in a car, but it counts you know? You're improving your thinking. You're learning new stuff. And that's also working on your business. I mean, in trading it doesn't take too long to work on your business you know? You don't have to spend an hour on it every day. But every few months is when I take some time out and I look at it. Especially once you have your systems in place. You know, when you have your trading plans in place. If you have all that stuff down, then it's not hard. You just follow your trading plans on a day to day basis and then once in a while you sit back and say, all right, how can I make things better? How can I improve it? If you don't have your trading plans in place already then that's the first step. You have to know exactly what your trades are. How you're gonna plan them out. How you're gonna do them. And then you review if you follow the trading plan. If you're not following it then you need to work on that obviously. But that's the first step. And then at least a couple times a year, you should spend a day from wherever you trade, wherever you normally trade get away from that environment. Go out to nature maybe if that's your thing. Go to the beach, go to the forest, go by the river. Go to the mall if that helps you. Go to the coffee shop, whatever. Somewhere you're not distracted by the trading. You know, you don't have your laptop with you or it's not open to your trading account. And we're just sit to thing. Sit back, review and think right? And you want to do this alone as well. Don't take your spouse with you. This needs to be done alone. Go over how things are going you know? How have you been doing the last few months? What your emotions have been like. How have you been feeling physically as well, your health? You know, because that also has an impact on your trades as well. If you're not feeling well, maybe you don't trade as well. So you need to check that as well. And then plan for the next few months. If you're happy with your latest results, if you're happy with what you've been doing from the last time you reviewed, that's great. Keep doing it you know? And you should go out and celebrate and say, hey I'm doing great. This is wonderful. I'm gonna have some fun. I'm gonna enjoy myself. If not, if you're not doing that well, if you think you can do better then work on improvements. That's the game right? We learn something. We create a plan for it. We create a system, a trading plan, and then we try it out. And if it works great. If it doesn't work we correct. And that's the only way to get better you know? Try, fail, change, correct, and then try again. And then you follow the patter until eventually you get to a place where you are very happy with your results. And it's definitely doable. It's definitely possible. If people have done it before you, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to do it as well you know? Ray Dalio is a guy who starts off with like almost nothing, and builds up a multi billion dollar hedge fund. If you want, go read his book. He'll show you the way he thinks. He explains stuff, how he did it. He's done a lot of podcast interviews lately since the book came out trying to promote the book. So listen to those and you'll see how he thinks. And then you can try to incorporate that when you review your own stuff okay? And then just be looking to get better. Just looking to get better. That's all we're doing. Just doing it one day at a time. One trade at a time. Just looking to get better. So make sure you're working on your business. It doesn't have to be all the time. But in the beginning I would say maybe every couple months just step back and say, all right, how can I make things better you know? And then when you are more established, I like to do it at least every six months, four months kind of if I can, if I can afford it, to get out and do it. I would like to do that. But at least once a year, I do, do it. Normally I wouldn't be out here on such a sunny day. I forgot that it's gonna be so hot today. I thought it was gonna be a little bit more cloudy. This might be an abbreviated version for me because it's baking out here today. But anyway, that's it for today. Work on your business, and in the next episode what I'm gonna be doing is actually going through a little bit of how or what I'm gonna be looking at when I'm reviewing my own trades all right? Talk to you soon. 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.  -- I don't know too many people that would not like to have more money, do you? But I do know a lot of people that want a lot more money, and even more people that don't have much money. When it comes to trading and investing, well, if you want to do it, you've got to have money, right? Well, kind of. There are ways to get into investing with no money, and that is what this episode is all about. Join me as I give you 2 Case Studies of gentlemen that got recently got me to invest with them. One of them had limited capital, the other had none at all. But I and others still handed them thousands of dollars to invest for us. Learn the tricks they used and how you can use the same methods to get you started when you have no capital to trade.   OptionGenius.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.  -- Buenos dias genius nation, como estas. How you doing? This episode we're going to call it The Ultimate Options Trading Strategy. Really what I wanted to do is I want to talk about option strategies and which one is the best. I got the idea for this episode thanks to a couple guys on the Options Traders Alliance Group which is our free Facebook group. If you want information about that just search on Facebook for Option Traders Alliance or look in the show notes, we'll have a link to it there. Thanks to Dan Gibson and Ken Gilstrup for that. From what I could tell, these guys they were just, one of them asked a question, the other one responding, just a couple guys. They're on the lower end of the option continuum, a couple of lower traders just looking for some kind of direction. If you don't know what the option continuum is or where you are on the continuum, you can check out Episode 21 and hear all about it. It's a great question, which is the best option strategy, because when it comes to selling options there are well over a dozen strategies that you can use. You've heard all the names, all the crazy names, some of them; the iron condor, the credit spread, the calendar spread which is also the time spread, the butterfly, then there's the iron butterfly, and then there's the broken wing butterfly, there's the covered claw which can also be called the buy right. There are naked options so there's naked puts, naked calls, the straddle, the strangle, the ratio, the back spread, the box, the bag, the double diagonal, on and on and on, and that's just to name a few. Then, each of these strategies can be manipulated so that there are unlimited variations. You have, let's say the iron condor. You have the, some people call it the high probability iron condor and then there's the low probability iron condor. Then, there's the unbalanced condor, and then there's, some people have been calling it the weirdor which is like a mix of the iron condor and the butterfly together. There's so many different strategies out there. The question becomes which one is the best, which one do I trade because you can't do all of them, you'd be crazy. It would take you decades and decades to actually learn all of them and become good at any of them really. If you're a new trader and you just want to quickly get up to speed which is the easiest, the fastest, the most money making, that's what we need to know. Before I tell you the answer I want to talk about Simon. You see, Simon was a lot like you. He was trying to figure out all this trading stuff and he had tried all the different techniques, different types of trading, and he was pretty fed up. When you spend lots of money on courses, when you spend hours and hours learning about Greeks, and probabilities, and volatility, and all that stuff and you still cannot make it work you get pretty upset, am I right? You guys know what I'm talking about because you've probably done the same things; taking courses, watching videos, listening to podcasts like this one, I know there's a whole bunch of them out there because none of them give you the secret and then you get really, really upset about it. You just want the answer, why don't they just give you the answer. Boy, I wish it was that easy. For Simon, by the time our paths had crossed he had spent close to three years learning about options. In fact, he was much more knowledgeable about certain aspects of options than I was. To this day, honestly, maybe I shouldn't say this but to this day if you ask me to describe to you what Gamma is I don't think I could. I know it's important, I know it's one of the Greeks, and there's ... I know what it is, in my head I can, I just can't put it down on paper.  I'd have to look it up and look for the ways to explain it, I'd have to show you on a screen. I couldn't just simply tell you what it is but Simon, he can do that. Simon knows all the differences, what is implied vs historical volatility and what the numbers should be, and how to set up the different probabilities. He knows all about that stuff because he spent all that time learning about it because that's what he though was the answer. The more he learned the more complicated he made his trading, the more complicated he made his trades, the more intricate. He added in different indicators, some that nobody's ever heard of before. He added in all these rules. He added all this other stuff to make his trading better, to give him a better edge. That makes sense, when you think about it. You take a strategy and you improve it, you put your own spin on it, you craft it so that it works better. Then when you come up with something that you think is awesome you back test it over and over and over again. If you can't do that then you do paper trading and you have to do it hundreds of times. If you can't do that, if you don't want to do that, then you have to use real money to test it and hopefully it works. Usually though it doesn't and then you end up back on the drawing board. I remember when I first got started I wanted one simple trade that I could do month after month after month like the holy grail. I found ... I really like butterflies so I tried to do a butterfly on McDonald's, and I came up with some rules and then I started back testing it. I think I back tested it for four years, month after month after month after money after month, say about 40, 50 trades, whatever that is, 4 x 12, 48 trades. It was profitable and I was ecstatic. "Oh man, this is awesome, this is going to be so awesome." Then I did it with real money and I ended up losing, I don't know how many, I think it was $8,000 really quickly. That's what Simon was doing as well and for him it wasn't working, and that's when he came to me. That was his main question. He's like, "Allen, I know so much but I still can't make it work. Am I doing something wrong or does this stuff just not work? Please Allen, tell me that all my hours and years of trying to learn this stuff has not been in vain because my brain is just going to explode, I can't take it anymore. My self-confidence is in the gutter but I know so much about options, I know more about the people who write these option books, I could probably teach a college course on options. Allen, please help me." Well I got to tell you, if this stuff didn't work, this job option stuff didn't work, I would be flat broke. I can say, for those of you who are still skeptical, that yes, yes it does, in fact, does work. I can point out to dozens, and hundreds, and even thousands of people who have made it work and who it's working for. The problem ... If it's not the trading then maybe the problem's with Simon. It's either the trading work or the person doesn't work. Well, the person was Simon and the problem was not Simon either. The problem was all the nonsense that we as traders and learning traders get bombarded with every single day. We get bombarded on the financial media, we get bombarded in our emails. We get bombarded on Facebook, and Twitter, and all over social media. The ads are all over the place and all the ads are people pretending that they are amazing traders making oodles and oodles of money, and the only way to get the same results is to pay them to teach us what they're doing, that's the only way to do it. It's the magic bullet, it's the new thing. There's this new trading system or this new indicator or there's this new chart pattern or this new whatever that we have to pay to learn how to use so that we can also become wonderfully rich and super successful. It's like everybody else out there is so smart, and rich, and successful but we are not. No matter what we try it doesn't work, am I right? Do you feel that frustration? Have you been through this or am I by myself? I don't think, I'm not by myself because we get emails every day from people. Ken and Dan were talking about this same exact thing in the group today so you know what I'm talking about. Here is what you need to do, here is how you overcome this. You stop listening to the noise, stop believing all the crap. Go back to the basics, back to the fundamentals. The truth is that every single strategy that I mentioned earlier works. There are people out there making money with each one so you can make money if you only trade covered calls. Yes you can, you can be profitable consistently if you only trade covered calls. You can do the same thing if you only do strangles. You can do the same thing if you only do ratio spreads, and on, and on, and on. You don't need to be a master in everything, you don't need to understand 14 different ways to adjust your trade, you only need one strategy and that's the answer, that is the ultimate strategy. That's the best strategy, it's the one that you choose, the one that makes the most sense to you. There are lots of different strategies out there because they have different uses, that's true. Once you become a very advanced trader, once you are on the upper end of the continuum if you're on level nine or level 10 and you are already consistently making money then yes, go into the other strategies. Until then, you stick to the one strategy that makes the most sense to you, that's the one you start with or for many of you that's the one you re-start with. That is the one you keep doing until you figure it out because that's what I had Simon do. We identified together out of all the different strategies he preferred to trade credit spreads so that is what he focused on. That's what his time on to figure out. He spent time on figuring out the best way to enter a credit spread, he tested dozens of ways to adjust, and then he tested exit strategies, a whole host of different exit strategies. Eventually, he discovered the best way to trade credit spreads that worked for him. Now, maybe his way won't work for you but that's okay with him because it works for him. That is all he does now, he only does credit spreads. He doesn't bother with iron condors or naked puts, he only does the spreads, the credit spreads his way. He has molded the strategy so that now he calls them layup spreads. A layup spread basically is a credit spread but with Simon's special magic, his method to enter, to manage, and to exit.  If you want more information about the layup spread and why they work so amazingly well you can do so at simonsaysoptions.com. Now, I hope this makes sense to you. The best strategy is the one that makes the most sense to you and the best way to learn how to trade is to just focus on it until it works for you. Now, it might get boring, it might get repetitious, it might get monotonous, yes maybe but that's still what you need to do. I know we think that trading is all sexy and high flying and buy this, sell that, do this, do that. The reality is, if you trade well most of it is extremely boring and then there are certain pockets of craziness but most of your trading should be boring. If you are consistently making money then you know what I'm talking about. If you're flying by the seat of your pants, and if you're putting on dozens and dozens of trades, all different types, all different strategies on all different stocks that you never even heard of before because the chart looks good, then you are in for a very wild ride and so is your account balance. With our account balance what do we want? Do we want up and down roller coasters? No, we want slow and steady increase. In order to have that you have to be trading in a way that is actually boring because you know what you're doing, that's why it's boring. You've mastered it, because you've excelled at it. The alternative is to do what you're doing right now jumping around from strategy to strategy. I know what you thinking. Say, "Hey Allen, what about diversification, don't I need to diversify? If I have maybe some earnings trades over here or maybe I have some naked calls over here or maybe I have some box spreads over here." Yeah, you should diversify if you have an account that is well over six figures and you are already consistent and profitable. That's it right there. If you are over six figures, and I'm talking about mid-six figures; $400,000, $500,000, more than that, and you are already consistent and profitable then you can diversify as much as you want. If you're on the top end of the continuum, level's nine, level 10, then you are making money so you are going to stick with what you know automatically. You're going to go to the bread and butter and you're going to do those every month or every week or whatever your timeframe is. Then with a little bit of extra cash you're going to try other stuff. That's the smart way to do it. If you don't have over six figures, if you're not consistent, if you're not profitable already, then forget about diversification. Until you can make money with one strategy month after month, trade after trade. You have to be consistently profitable before you add another strategy to your arsenal, are you getting this? Is this sinking in? Yes? Hope so. Anybody that tells you otherwise is full of it and probably just wants to sell you something, that's the truth. Stop all the noise, stop listening, stop jumping around, because the noise is there, the offers will always be there. If it's not options it'll be Bitcoin. If it's not Bitcoin it's going to be marijuana stocks. If it's not marijuana stocks it's going to be sports betting, that's the newest thing that's going to come on, right? The Supreme Court just announced on Monday that states can now make it legal to bet on sports. Well, guess what? There's going to be stocks on sports betting and they might even have options on sports and betting and all this stuff. Who knows what they're going to come out with in future? That's going to be the new hottest thing. If you keep jumping from one to another, to the another, to the another, you're never going to get good at anything, you're never going to be profitable, you're never going to be consistent. Go back to the basics, back to the fundamentals. Choose one strategy and work on it until you know it inside out and you are profitable because that is the name of the game, that is the goal. That is the only thing that matters. I don't care what strategy you use, I don't care how you do it, I don't care when you do it. If you are profitable you are winning. That's the only way to know if you are winning, I don't care how much you know. I don't care if you know more than me, I don't know if you know more history than me, I don't care if you know more math than me, more about statistics, more about options, more about everything. If you are not profitable it doesn't matter so go back to the fundamentals, go back to the basics, one strategy. You focus on it, you work on it, you back test it, you paper trade it, you real money trade it until you are profitable. That's it, that's the answer. Now, if you can't figure it out, if you already tried, you tried your best and you can't do it, then reach out to me, maybe I can point you in the right direction. Maybe I can work with you like I did with Simon and we can identify what it was that works best for you or that makes the most sense for you, and then how to actually implement it. In the beginning you don't need complicated stuff, you don't need complicated indicators. You don't need complicated chart patterns, you need a strategy that you understand, that makes sense to you and you need to do it in a way where you can explain it to the third grader. Then if you can do that then you tweak it. Then you work on it. Then you look at, like Simon did, you look at the entrance of the trade, you look at the management of the trade, you look at the exit of the trade, and then you improve your percentages. That's how it works. Right now, Simon, like I said, he's only doing one strategy and, yes, he is well over six figures in his trading account. That's okay, it doesn't matter. He doesn't need to be doing anything else. I know people who only do one iron condor every single month. They do it on the same underlying, they do it on an index, and they trade literally over $100,000 worth of one iron condor every month. That's the entire trade, that's the whole strategy, one iron condor, six figures in that condor, every month. I hope this makes sense, I hope this is sinking in. I hope you got to this this. Then finally, no matter which strategy you choose, whether it's the condor, the credit spread, the ratio, the butterfly, I don't care what it is, whatever it is, no matter which one you choose make sure that the odds are in your favor. Peace. Resources mentioned in this episode: Option Traders Alliance Facebook Group SimonSaysOptions.com Podcast – Episode 021- The Option Continuum -- LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... 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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 the episode all credit spread traders MUST listen to. Jeremiah placed a credit spread trade with the max loss of a little less than $500. This was the 35/30 put spread on DBZT. Potential ROI was 19% in 10 days. The stock closed on expiration day at $47.80. So the trade is a wild winner, right? Then why did Jeremiah lose $1,250? That is more than the max loss! What is going on here? And this can happen on any credit spread you sell. Listen in to learn exactly what happened and how you can keep it from happening to you. www.optiongenius.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.  -- I still remember when I first learned about options, so many years ago. My father, who is an infomercial and a get-rich-quick junkie, had gone to some free, two-hour options seminar in some hotel. You might have seen these commercials on TV, where they come to your town, and they have different hotels where they have two-hour free seminars where they teach you how to get rich with options. They're supposed to teach you how to get rich with options, but instead, it's basically a sales pitch for a much high-priced seminar. He went to this two-hour thing, and he came home $5000 lighter, because he spent it on a seminar that they were doing that weekend. Lucky enough for me, he was allowed to bring someone along, and so I got drafted. It wasn't really a choice. You know, I guess that's one of the benefits of being an only child. We went to the seminar. We were excited. I was like, "Okay, this might work. We might make some money out of it. Hopefully it's good." A lot of the stuff that they talked about was really cool, first time ever hearing about puts and calls and all this different terminology, and it was exciting. I mean, they taught us what a chart was. They taught us what an indicator was, that you could make money in stocks and options by just reading and doing what the indicators told you to do. I mean, I was like, "Whoa, this is so simple. Holy cow!" When you get three green arrows, that means that three indicators are all bullish, and you buy. It was that simple. You get three green arrows on their software, you buy, and then you hold it until you get three red arrows, meaning that all three of the indicators were bearish. I mean, that's pretty easy, right? Heck, yeah, we were going to make millions. That's all we had to do, just look at the charts, and keep looking at different charts until you see three green arrows. That's the stock you buy, or options, you call options on that, and then you get out when you get the three red arrows. That's all you have to do. My father and I fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. I mean, "Great job, Dad! Awesome! Whoo-hoo! That's the best $5000 you ever spent! All right, we're going to make millions!" Now, I didn't have any money at that time, because I was still, I don't remember how old. I was pretty young, but my dad ... He's the get-rich-quick junkie, so he's been to these type of seminars before, and unfortunately, he brought all the credit cards with him that still had some balances on them. Now, I wish he had not done that, but he did. He brought them, and so he spent more money at the seminar. He bought some software. He bought some video courses that they had. They had other stuff, other seminars you could take. I don't remember exactly what package he bought, but it wasn't until the second day that the instructors really laid it on us. I mean, that was when the pitch for coaching really got started. They kept telling us over and over again that if you really wanted to be good at training, you couldn't learn it in a two-day seminar. They can give you some basics. They can give you some stuff to go home and try, but if you really, really wanted to get good at trading, then you would have to have a coach work with you, one-to-one basis, because then the coach could tell you what you did right, what you did wrong, give you some ideas, let you look over their shoulder. For that reason, you've got to have a coach, right? All the greatest athletes, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, all these guys, they have coaches, right? Yeah, so you need a coach, too, because that's where they taught the really good stuff. In the seminar they couldn't teach you everything, but all the top secret stuff ... That's what was taught in the coaching program. What was the cost of this amazing, wonderful, super, can't-live-without coaching program? Well, they were going to give us a great deal. They were, because we were they're real good customers. We had spent two days with them. They were our friends now. We were talking to them during the break and everything. We were telling stories, and laughing at their jokes, so they had to give us a great deal, right?   They were only going to charge us $30,000 for six months of coaching, but we had to act quickly, because they only had a limited number of spots, right? They couldn't take everybody, because their time was limited. There were four instructors there that weekend, and so we could pick whichever one we wanted as our coach and go in the back room, pay the $30,000, and then they would set you up with one of the coaches. I was like, wow! Whew! Can you believe that? For just the price of a car, you can get coached by a real trader, a real trader that's making money in the markets. At that point, it didn't dawn on me that this real trader, if he was doing so well, why the heck was he pitching coaching in seminars on the weekend? Why was he flying halfway around the country every weekend to do this seminar to pitch coaching. At that point it didn't dawn on me. It later did, but thank God my dad did not have the $30,000. Oh, my God, I can't imagine what would've happened if he did. I mean, after spending all his money on the seminar, which, basically, all the stuff that they taught us was basic introduction to options trading stuff. The software they gave us, the home study course. Luckily my dad didn't have any money left to trade. I mean, that's the funny part about it. We spent $5000 on the seminar. We spent several thousand more dollars on the software and the video and whatever else there was. At the end, there was no money left to trade, so we didn't get the $30,000 coaching program, thank God, but we couldn't really use the stuff that we learned anyway, to see if it was actually good or not. -- 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.