Does your personality make a difference in your trading results? Turns out, it makes a huge difference. And so today I want to talk about two different personality types. And I want to talk about the pros and cons of each and how to tell if you're one and how to improve your trading based on which personality you are. I bet you've hardly thought of the possibility of your personality having an affect on your trading results. But scientists have. And they have that one personality is better than the other. In this episode we talk about those findings and how you can improve your trading no matter what your personality. JOIN OUR FREE PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://freeoptionsgroup.com Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps. Thank you!

Hey there, this is Allen from Option Genius. One of the most common questions that we get at Option Genius is, "Allen, I want to know more about options trading, What books should I read?". And so I made this short video for you to tell you some of the top books that I think should be in your library. There are hundreds and maybe even 1000s of books on there on options, but not all of them are worth your time. Okay, so I wanted to save you some time, tell you the ones that I think would be the best. So here we go. This is the first one. Now these books are in no particular order. But this one is "Options as a Strategic Investment".  Now this one is the heavy hitter. Okay, you can tell this is thick, it's very long, it's very detailed. This is like the Bible of options trading, okay, now, you're not going to make it through the whole book in one sitting. And you might never make it through the whole book. I've tried it a couple of times falling asleep. But this is not meant to read cover to cover. This meant this book is meant more as a reference book, at least that's how I use it, if I need something, or if I need to look up something, especially when I was starting out with options trading, this one was very helpful. You know, it was it's a good source. There's a lot of good material, a lot of good examples in here. And it covers just about every single thing about options related in here. So if you're just starting out, and you need one book as an introduction to options, this one might be a little bit too technology or jargon heavy, but it's a good one to have with you. Okay. Now, second book I have here is called passive trading, how to generate consistent monthly income from the stock market in just minutes a day. Now, this is the book that I wish I had when I started trading 15 years ago. Okay, now, to be honest, I have written this book. So I'm the author of this book. So I'm a little bit biased. But you can tell it's a decent sized book, this is not the goal for this book was not to cover every single strategy and every single way to trade options and everything about options. That's what this book does. So we don't need to recreate this book, what I put in this book is what I need, or what I think you need to make money the fastest way possible with options, okay? The the how to think about it, why you need to start trading options, and the strategies that you should use to really simplify your trading, and really get going and making money quickly as quick as possible with Options. So that's why I've written this book. That's why it's on my list, because I think everybody who trades options, at least if you're, if you're just starting out, you definitely need to read this book. Okay. And the other thing is that it talks about doing it in your spare time. So that is a whole different philosophy. We don't talk about buying options in this book, I tell you exactly why that doesn't work, I show you how to sell options in a way that doesn't take a lot of your time, so that you can actually make money from the stock market, but still have your time to do whatever you want. Because that's really the goal of making money, right? We want money for freedom, we don't want to make money just so we can work longer hours. So this is what this book shows you. The next book we have here is called "Generate Thousands in cash on your stocks before buying or selling them". Now, this book, I've used maybe the first two or three chapters, and the rest of it is about indicators, technical indicators, technical analysis, stuff that I don't use, I haven't even read. But the first two or three chapters have made me a lot of money. And so that's why they're on the list. Now, the strategies he talks about in the first couple of chapters are basically naked puts, and how to trade them and different ways you can use them. And like I said, it's made me a lot of money in the past. So that's why I put the this book on the list. Okay. Now, a lot of books out there, talk about the different strategies, but they don't tell you what to do. If your trade gets in trouble. They just broadly glance over it. So this book here is options, "The option trader handbook - strategies and trade adjustments". So this book actually goes into more detail about what to do when your trade goes into trouble, how to adjust your trade, and it covers different strategies and covers a couple of different adjustments for every single one. Now, it's not the same thing as watching a video or watching somebody actually do the strategy and think about it and tell you why they're picking one adjustment over another one. But when you have some ideas of what different adjustments you can do, then if you're trying to get into trouble, you can analyze them and see which one you like better, which one you think will work best for your bad trade. And then you can go with that and hopefully it will work out so it's a it's a good book if you don't know anything about adjustments. And it's definitely something you should have. Just in case a trade goes bad you don't know what to do. You can pick this up and look for ideas. Okay, now, for those of you who are iron condor traders, this one is is profiting with iron condor options, strategies from the front line for trading in up or down markets. Now, the reason why I chose this one, and it's not a very thick book, because it doesn't cover everything about iron condors. And if you want to know what an iron condor is, and if you're an individual investor, how to trade it, we actually have a course on iron condors that goes through all the details, adjustments, everything you need to know. But the reason why this book is on the list is because the fellow who wrote this book says he's a hedge fund manager, he runs a hedge fund, and he trades iron condor as his main strategy. So that means he's doing millions and millions of dollars worth of trades in the iron condor. So from his perspective, if you're an iron condor trader, this one was really cool to read to see how he does it a little bit differently than us individuals how much harder, he has a time to do the iron condor. But how he's still able to make very good profits, even though he's trading in the millions of dollars with iron condors. So this one was a cool fundraiser. Okay, the next one. Now, this book might be out of print, it's the complete guide to option selling, this one might be out of print. But if you didn't pick it up, us, it will be a good book, if you're interested in futures options. Now, the title is, you know, the company guide options selling but they don't talk about stock options. In this book, they only talk about futures options. Now, the reason these authors wrote this book was because they had a management fund, like a management company, so they wanted you to give them the money, your money, and then they would trade options for you. That's how they made their money. Unfortunately, they made some mistakes, and they blew up, meaning they lost all of the money for their investors, and they went out of business. So that's why I'm saying that the book might be out of print, because they don't need to use it anymore as sales piece, but it still has some good material and good information in there if you're looking to trade futures options. But keep in mind that the strategies in here work, if you have a lot a lot of money. Now I've tried trading these with a smaller amount of money, like you know what a normal person would have, they didn't really work out. So I had to test and tweak them in order to make them work. So if you aren't going to use this, the book, you need to know that they might not be ready for just, you know, follow along exactly as they say in the book, because, like I told you, this book was meant to be a sales piece. Not exactly, to give you a complete A to Z explanation of how futures options work. Okay, but it is good for futures options, it gives you some good ideas and some good things. So that's why it's on the list. And then lastly, I have a book for all you option nerds. Now, I have not read this book, I don't think it's necessary to understand everything about option volatility and pricing to make money with options. Now volatility, yes, pricing, maybe not. Because pricing is something that, you know, if you can, if you're trying to sell an option, and they're only going to pay you $1, that's all you're gonna get, you can decide yes or no. And if it makes sense for your risk reward on your trade, then maybe you'll take the trade. But, you know, if you want to really get into the weeds, and really understand volatility, and pricing of options, and how they're priced and why they're priced on certain days, so much, and how to take advantage of that, again, if you're playing with a lot of money, then that really helps if you're an individual investor, you're not going to worry about that so much. But this is a very, very jargon intense book. It's very dense. And it's good if you really want to get into the weeds. So that's why I have that one. Now, again, all these books are great. In the beginning, I think this is the only one you really need. Because that's the way I've written it. That's the way you know, this is like, okay, so we have all this information out there. You have all these different strategies out there. What do I start with? What do I do? Well just read this one. That's the way it's simple. That's why I've written it today. Hey, from A to making money as fast as possible. What do I do? That's why I've written this book. So hopefully, this helped. These are some of the books out there that I think can definitely help you. I've tried to bury them. But hopefully this helped. And if you have a book that I missed, or I left out of the list, please put it in the comments down below. Let me know what book you think should be on the list. And so when I update the video if we get enough of the same if everybody if several people say this book help them. If it's not gonna list we'll go ahead and add it. No problem there. All right now, take care and remember to always trade with the odds in your favor.

Picture this, you're a prizefighter. A boxer.  And your opponent is the reigning champion, large, strong, fast and deadly. If you win your payday could be huge. But if you lose, you might lose it all. Do you get in the ring? Well, if you're a trader, you get in the ring every single day. So let's talk about how not to get knocked out. Hey there passive trader, how do you think about your trades, and your trading can make a huge difference if you're going to be profitable or not. And I want to share about how I think about my trades. And I think that it's going to help you as well, because I've shared this with my students. And they it was really, you know, a different paradigm shift for them. So I want to say, Okay, well, you know, people don't don't see it this way. So I want to I want to talk about this. All right. Now, trading is more of a mental game than anything else, of course, you got to know what you're doing. But the mental aspect is what really separates new traders from professionals. And I've always said that trading is about 90%, mental, and 10% skills so if you have not become consistently profitable yet, it might be that there are some skills that you're missing. But there's a really good chance that there's the mental aspect is also holding you back. And it's actually something we spend a lot of time on, on our coaching calls with our programs with our students. And it's one of the reasons that we see people come into our programs that have been trading for a while, but they haven't received or achieved the level of success that they desire, until they start working with us. Because then you have a coach and the coach can look at what you're doing and how you're thinking and pointed out and be like, you know what, maybe if you change this, or you look at it a different way that he can make all the difference, right? It might be just that one thing that they're probably doing that the coach understands this is what's the problem. And once you fix that thing, boom, it automatically flips a switch, and then they become profitable really quickly. So that's why in this episode, I want to talk about the mental game, and really how we think about our trading as a whole. Because what I've seen is a lot of traders, they get bogged down in the minutia, they don't really look at their trading as the big picture. Right, they don't look at it from 10,000 feet above, and they're there in the forest, you know, they're looking at all the trees, and they can't see the clearing, they can't see the pasture, they can't see the big picture. And every single tree is a trade and all the trees and all the trades to them look the same. And they treat all the trades the same. So I want to talk a little bit about how I look at and think about my trading. Now to do so, we got to go back in time back to the future. No, back back to the past. Back to my youth when I was a little kid and I used to play this game called Mike Tyson's Punch Out. Right, it's on the Nintendo Entertainment System, which I think they make new ones now they don't make the old ones anymore, but they make the little mini versions travel versions. So this game is still around people still play it. Now I spent hours days probably the hundreds of hours if I'm truthful on that game. And if you don't know it's a boxing game, you know, like the fighting. Boxing, you know, the one guy fighting another guy. And if you remember, Mike Tyson was the heavyweight champion of the world and nobody could really touch this guy. I mean, the guy was was a monster monster like crazy crazy guy, right? So it is really a great metaphor because Mike Tyson is the market.  Okay, truth of the matter is you cannot knock out Mike Tyson and you cannot knock out the market right? The market is just too big. So the market is Mike Tyson cannot come out and you're just this little itty bitty guy right we're just we're just at home traders right? We're just a little people. We're not even like big prize provisional trade Wall Street guys that have billions of dollars like those guys, they go against the market they might win we're just we're just little guy right? Even in the game your name was Little Mac and if you look at the game you were like about this big when Mike Tyson was like about this big so he was like 10 times bigger than you the gay and your day was even Little Mac so what about positive encouragement right up late i Big Mac know this Little Mac tiller, you're never gonna be able to knock him out. But you still want to win the match. Right? You still want to win the boxing fight. And the way that you do that is not by knockout. But you do it by points. And you in order to win the fight. Basically that means that you're going to be profitable for the year and you might be beat the market averages. So that is the goal. That is the overarching big picture. That's what we're looking at. We're looking at, hey, I want to win the match, I want to be profitable. And I want to beat the averages. That's my match. So in order to win the match, you have to win enough rounds. You get, each round is a month. Okay? So each match or fight has 12 different rounds. Now, you need to win more rounds than you lose, and you need to avoid getting knocked out. Right. So January through December, every every month is around, so we got 12 rounds in our match. So 12 Round bout, okay, and we're going to win by two things, we're going to get points. And if we get enough points, we win the round. If you win enough rounds, you can win the match, but you have to avoid getting knocked out. Okay, so when you are profitable for the month, guess what, you won the round, you win enough rounds, and you got a chance at winning this fight.  And you get these points. To win the round, you don't have enough points. You get these points by making small hits, small base hits, right? We're just jabbing, jabbing, punching, jabbing, punching, blocking, jabbing, jabbing, punching, punching, maybe maybe a cross, maybe maybe an uppercut if you get lucky, right? These are all the trades that we put on. As passive traders, we're trying to hit singles and doubles. We're not looking for grand slams, we're not looking for knockout punches. Because even if you hit Mike Tyson, with what you think is a knockout punch is not going to knock him down. And he's going to knock you off bases of balance. And if he hits you with one of his big punches, you're gonna go down, you're gonna be in a hospital, it's gonna be over game set, match or whatever TKO not even TKO just want one hit, boom, you're done. Right? So that's what we're trying to avoid. Hopefully, you're not getting knocked out completely if you do get hit. And maybe you can, you know, dust yourself off and get back in the ring and be like, yeah, we're pulling me out a, pull me out, right. But a lot of traders, they don't understand this concept. And so they get knocked out. And they might not even be able to get back in, it's over. They give up trading because it's too painful. They can't handle it. They're knockout becomes permanent. And they are knocked out of trading for good. So we want to make sure that you do not get knocked out. That's the biggest thing when you're fighting Mike Tyson. Okay, and how do you not get knocked out? Well, he's going to be temperamental, he's going to be crazy. He's gonna get all excited and come at you like crazy every once in a while. You avoid that by using a trick. Now, in the game, you had to know the tricks. Okay. So the trick with Mike Tyson was that, you know, you hit him and you hit him and you hit him and you hit him. And all of a sudden, he makes a little move. It's a tell. And when you see him make that move. It basically tells you Okay, now he's coming. He's about to get ready. He's about to come at you with his big, big uppercut, to knock you out. And it comes super fast. It's like, you know, split seconds, I usually the move Oh, no, get out of the way. Because boom, if you don't, you're gone. So as soon as he starts making that move, you gotta get out of the way. You can't be in the way because, boom, you're on the floor, right? So you gotta get other way. And if you do, then you can start hitting them again, boom, boom, boom, and it is like starts over. That's kind of what the market does, right? It's kind of like the stock market does. Markets make big wish moves up higher, wish down higher, either up or down? And then it gets tired. So here's another metaphor for you. Right? We're talking about boxing and as the market but how about the market is like an elephant. So when an elephant is mad and stampedes. That's my elephant noise. It starts running around. And then you of course, you don't want to get in front of an elephant when it's damp eating and is running around. But eventually, the market, the elephant gets tired. You know, it starts panting, it gets tired. I don't want to run around anymore. And then it stops and maybe a standstill or you know the market goes starts going up and down a little bit or you just find a bottom and find the top and it just calms down a little bit right. I'm sure you've seen this with the market. We have periods with like high volatility, and then things calmed down and you think, Oh, it might be over. Sometimes it is. Sometimes the market gets jazzed up again. It comes at you again. And so that's what Mike Tyson used to do. He would try to knock you out. Right? And then he would calm down And then he would let you hit him a few more times. And then you're trying to score as many points as you can, before he dressed, it knocks you off again, and then you get out of the way again. And then if you do that enough times, you can actually win. So you got actually beat Mike Tyson. Now, truth be told, I don't know what actually happens at the end of the game, because I was never able to beat Mike Tyson. But I know that I've been through several years of trading where I have come out ahead, and I have won the match. Right. And it's, it's a phenomenal feeling, you know, to show my guns here, my little want to be guns. In me, it's such an amazing feeling to be able to know that look, I can go into the market. And I can just extract money, and I can be self confident. And I can know that I can take care of my family, you have that confidence in yourself that, hey, look, I can go into the market anytime I want, and just take money out, right? But the trick is to manage the trades properly. So you have to know when you should be punching. And when to get out of the way. We cannot control the market. But we can avoid the uppercuts. And this is how you do it. So you don't look at every single trade as an individual event. Right now, when you're taking notes, and you're looking and you do the analyzing. They're like all different things, right? It's like, well, this trade this trade this trade, but don't look at them, as all individual events, they are all part of something bigger, you won't win on every trade. So don't try. Yeah, that's right, I'm telling you did not try to make money, okay, you're not going to win on every trade, don't try. Remember, your goal is to win the round, not land, every punch, there's gonna be punches where you miss, there's going to be punches when you try to hit him, and instead he hits you instead, and you're going to have a loss. That's okay. Because if you try to make money on every single trade, well, you're gonna go crazy, right? And it's gonna be too stressful. Plus, it's not possible. So you look at every round as an event every month that you're trading is an event. And then you look at the entire match the entire year as an event. And that's how you save yourself. You look at the big picture, the eyes are always on the big picture. The eyes are always I don't, are always I want to win the match. Not I want to land this punch, right? So I look at all my trades as a group as a collective. So if I've already made money in a month on four or five trades, and then I got this one tray that might be losing money, I asked myself, What do I want to do? You know, What are my chances that I can make this trade work? Do I even want to mess around with it? There are some times when I don't? Or do I just want to get out and be done with the month and win the round. Now remember, we call this passive trading, right? So I want to do as little work as possible. So if I put on trades, and they're doing great by themselves, and I can get out perfect, but then I put on a trade and it starts not behaving, it starts making me do work, like watching it and analyzing it and trying to adjust it. I don't want to do the work. So if I've already made positive trades on one side, then I have this one one trade not acting properly, I'm going to take a look and say, Okay, how much money have I made so far? How much money am I down on this one? What happens if I try to get back? You know, what's the difference? What is a percentage? Like? How am I going to be up? And if it's not worth it, which most of the time it's not, I'm just gonna get out of that trade. I'll be done for the month, and I won the round. Geez. Right. That's the most important part, winning the round. So if you win the round, and the next and the next, eventually you can win the match. But if you start messing around and playing with every single trade that's going bad, and you try to adjust your way out of it, or you don't do anything at all, because you're like, oh, no, he's gonna turn around, you let her run all over you, you get that there's a chance you're gonna get hit by the uppercut. Not only do you lose the round, but there's a good chance you're gonna get knocked out so badly that the whole match is over. Right? Even if you don't get knocked out completely, you get knocked down three times it's TKO, right? technical knockout. You don't want that either. Not only the match, but in this case, your entire boxing career. Your trading career could be over if you take a big enough loss, and we don't want that. So we don't want you losing all your money or suffering the one large knockout loss, right? everybody complains, and when it comes to trading and selling options, they're like, Oh, I win, win win, but then I give it all back. That's what we'r talking about. How do we avoid that? So you go into every single month, and every round with the goal of just getting enough hits to be profitable. And if you don't win that month, no problem. It's a long match. You got 11 more rounds to fight, right? Big picture, big picture, think of the big picture. So let's say it's the first trade for the month, okay, and it's going bad, nothing, man, first trade, and I'm already going bad. But then you think about it, you know, like, I got several more trades I'm going to do this month, do I really need to fight this one. Or maybe I just get out and take a loss because I can make it up on the next ones. Because my goal is to win the round, right? You can do that. Or let's say you've already been successful on several trades for the month, then you definitely don't want to have one loser, take it all back, you don't want to give back all your gains all your work, right? That's the biggest gut punch you can get is if you've already made several trades, you've already put in the work, you've already made money, you're positive on it. And then you got one trade that you try to mess with, or you try to adjust or play with it. And it just causes you to have a large loss, and you give it all back that you made, and maybe even more, that feels horrible. And you don't want to do that because you want to win the match. Right? The big picture. That's the whole point. That's the goal. That is how I think about my trade. So every single trade is not a life and death situation, you're gonna have 1000s and 1000s of trades over your career, and you're not going to win on all of them, not even close to all of them. Or we don't even want to why bothered, we don't want that stress. So you don't need to worry about it. Don't let your losing trades cost you the round. And get this, you don't even have to win every round either, right? That's where it gets really, really big picture. And there's one more step that gets even bigger picture. You don't have to win every match, either. Right every year doesn't have to be super profitable, there are going to be years when you lose money, sometimes we just can't help it, there's nothing we can do. The market is a market, it's going to it's going to hit us and you're gonna take it you gotta take losses, you just have to make sure you don't get knocked out so that you can come back and fight the next fight. Right. And with passive trading, you're going to win enough rounds, sometimes it just happens automatically, because the stats statistics are in our favor, right? You're just going to win it, you're going to win loss arounds, and you will win enough matches so that overall your boxing career will be a very successful and will be a very lucrative one. Over time. I keep saying this over time the math just works out, play the trades properly, and you'll win in the long run. So there you have it folks, proof that kids do learn from video games. So if this was helpful, I would love you if you could do me a favor, please subscribe and comment so that more folks can find our content. You know, so we can spread the word about passive trading and help more people and it means a lot to me as well. So until next time, trade with the odds in your favor. And watch out for Mike Tyson's uppercuts.

Do you have a problem with trading discipline, or not sticking to your trading plan, or not getting consistent results from your trading, or even getting stuck like a deer in the headlights when a trade goes bad. Let's go ahead and solve that right now. On the other side of the intro. All right, so what does brushing teeth have to do with trading successfully? Everything. But you didn't know that. Right? And it's the key to improving your trading, which I'm going to show you right here, right now. This is why we don't stick to our trading plan. Wait, you do have a trading plan, right? Because you don't want to be trading options without a proven trading plan. One that actually works and is proven to be profitable, not just something you saw on some random Youtube video with something that is actually tested with real money over several years in up markets down market sizes and markets everything and you know, hey, look, this works. Other people are doing it. Other people are using it, you need to do the same thing. If you don't have such a trading plan, contact us. And we can help you. Okay, go to our website, or email us or contact us here, leave a comment, do something we'll get to you, we'll get help, right, because we have these plans, we've been doing this. So if you don't have a plan, get a plan. Today, I want to talk about why we don't stick to our plans, why we don't stick to the rules. And there are many reasons. It could be lack of discipline, could be going with your gut, it could be your technical analysis telling you that the trade is going to turn around. I don't know, maybe a little birdie told you that is all going to be okay. Right? And on and on and on. There's so many different reasons why, you know, we're supposed to do something in a trade and then we do the opposite, or we don't do anything at all right? It doesn't matter the reason that's irrelevant. What matters is that this is the reason for what I call roller coaster syndrome. This is where you do well for several trades, you're going up the roller coaster of profit doing good, then all of a sudden you fall. And you give it all back and maybe even more, then you do it again. Then again, and hopefully you don't have two drops, right in a row, which could knock you out completely. And you're like, oh, man, this trading stuff doesn't work? Well, it's because you're not doing it right. So if you've been trading for a while and you're not consistent, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Now, if you're newer to trading, and you don't know what the roller coaster syndrome is, that's great. You're lucky and hopefully you never do as long as you follow what I'm about to tell you in this video. Okay, let's get back to brushing your teeth. How do you brush your teeth? How do you take a shower? How do you put your clothes on? I don't want it in my head. I'm not asking you for specifics. Okay. What I want you to do is realize that you do those activities the exact same way. Every single time. Every single day. Like clockwork, think about it. How do you brush your teeth? How do you take how do you how do you take off the toothpaste cap? How do you put it on thing what handy you use? Where do you go you go left to right right to bag you do the top top you do top first bottom first tongue first. What do you do? It's always done the exact same way. You're putting your pants on the the one leg always goes in first, whichever one you choose, but that one goes in first every single time. Why? Because you're used to doing it. Because it is a habit. Yeah. So look, our brains have tens of thousands of thoughts every single day. Right scientists have studied this and they get come up with the number, whatever, it doesn't matter what the number is. But what matters is that the majority of these thoughts, almost like 89% of them are the same every single day. And that's why we don't have brain overload. Right? That's why we can do things in a normal way over and over again, without having to think about it. Because subconsciously, the brain is working. And it's doing it is thinking, the brain is thinking, well, we don't realize, and those things happen. We make them happen with our body. So, you know, gonna get in the car, what do you do, sit in car, put coffee down, put seatbelt on, right on this way. Press, press on the brake, hit the little button that turns on the car, you do it every single time. So our brain handles all of that for you. You could probably put your car on blindfolded, because it has just become a habit, you've done it so many times. So what you need to do to improve your trading is to make your trading rules, a habit. Following the rules becomes a habit, no more thinking about it. Make it subconscious. I don't know what the subconscious is, maybe back here up here, I don't know. It's somewhere in your brain, make it go there make your rules go there. And less thinking, more trading by the rules. So to do that, right, to have it become a habit. Scientists have done lots of studies. And recently they did this really massive study. And they determined that the average person on the average task needs to perform that task 66 times in a row to make it a habit. Now I know in the past, people have said, Oh, yeah, you need 30 days in a row to make it a habit. No, it's not. This study blew that out of the water. They haven't actually, you know, it's actually scientific. Now, they did a whole study. Now, that's average 66. The more complicated the task, the more repetitions it takes. And for some people, it took over 200 times to form a habit, but it can still be done. That's the good news. Right? So then here it is, this is what you need to do in two steps. Number one, you got to make sure you have a trading plan that works. Number two, you do the 66 trade challenge. What is that? Well, I'll tell you, it's simple. The next 66 trades you do, you do them by using your plan, no deviating no using your gut, no praying. No birdie is flying around telling you what to do. Take the plan, follow the plan. No deviating doesn't matter what the market does doesn't matter what the Fed does not it doesn't matter what the company is doing. Follow the plan 66 times in a row. Why is that? To make it a habit. And what happens if you break the streak? What did you get to like number 60? And then you decide oh, no, I gotta go with my gut on this one. No, you start over. You do another 66. But, but but but but but but isn't that hard? Oh, but trading is supposed to easy? Yeah. It's hard. Making money from trading is easy, but only if you do it right. If you're not following the rules, you're not doing it right. And until now, you're probably not doing it right. Because that's why you're not consistent. So you take it from somebody who is consistent, right? This is what I do. This is what I do. Trade that follow the rules, okay? And then give you the rules. And then you tell me, I didn't follow the rules. Why not? That's why we have this, right. \ That's why I'm talking about it to figure out another way to get you to follow the rules. So I've come up with this 66 trade challenge. That's it. But wait, you went into trading? Because you wanted freedom? Right? Yeah, man, I don't want to be stuck to my job. I want freedom. I want to make my own decisions. I want to follow the markets. I want to trade, bullish bearish, all this stuff. You want to be able to make your own decisions. Fly by the seat of your pants. Well, sorry to hand it to you. But trading plans are restrictive. Okay. You're not a robot. We know that. And you should be able to change your plan when the markets change, right? Wrong. No. So here's the truth. This is a big truth. So so listen in, okay. Trading well means that you follow a process that is proven to work. There is no freedom in that. You follow the rules, and you benefit. Then, with that benefit that is where you use and you go and you used to get your freedom. But trading itself is not freedom. Trading well means being restricted. That is the truth that no other trading educator tells you. The more methodical, boring route your trading, the better you will do. So if your trading plan is good, it will change for you. It will handle the fluctuations in the market, it'll tell you what to do, it'll already be in the plan. If the market changes, something happens, the trading plan will be like, "Okay, if things go up, you do this things go down, you do this, if things go sideways, you do this. If volatility increases, you do this". That's the job of the trading plan. If you're making decisions on the fly, it means your trading plan is not complete. But you don't change the plan in the middle of a trade. Right? So that's it. Take the 66 trade challenge. And if you can make it through, your trading can be changed forever. If you don't, you just keep trying. You do it again, you do it again. And this doesn't have to be with real money. These are no I'm not talking about real money trades. I'm just talking about trading with a habit. Right? So if you want to put on paper trades, that's fine. As long as in your brain, you think this is real money? And you go through it exactly. No cutting corners, no forgetting about a trade No, none of that lack of discipline stuff, right? Follow the rules. That's it. And you don't have to do it for the rest of your life. You just have to do it for 66 trades until the habit is formed and it will be automatic, and you will automatically be doing it for the rest of you. But it will be subconscious, there won't be a problem, it won't be a pain, you just get used to it. Okay, so this is the solution to lack of discipline and the roller coaster syndrome. So now you know. Question is, what are you going to do with this knowledge?

Mark: Well, look, it's really it's a, it's a long journey. I've read your book, I've read many books, I've been in this game for a long time. It's very difficult to sum it up in literally minutes, I suppose. But after reading a book just recently, and listening to all your podcasts a lot lately, I've delved into a lot of it and taken many, many things out of each person's story, which I can resonate wholeheartedly with. But I probably got into Options back in 2006. And I've probably come and gone with it a lot. I've started and stopped, due to various reasons, obviously, life, I've got kids and family and work commitments and stuff like that. But it's always been, I suppose, a hobby. But trying to make that jump or trying to get into it. Full time is obviously difficult for lack of funds or lack of time and effort. I don't know, there's always seems to be something that comes up that stops me from progressing. Having said that, I'm a pretty committed person. I'm pretty disciplined. I've been doing it now for a long time. But like, if you look through him on the table here, I've got trading stuff sitting everywhere, notes. Mark: I've crunched the wheel so many times I've done the shiny diamond thing. I've gone from one program to another. I've spent numerous amounts of funds on various programs and different services such as yourself. I don't know this Option Genius has been around in my life, I suppose, on and off. So I don't know like I've all I'm a big advocate for what you say and what you do. I've wholeheartedly believe that I've been selling options for a long time I've done credit spreads, I've done strangles I've done butterflies, I've done covered calls, I've done a lot of those strategies, or centered around selling options. And I've been doing it for a long time. But for some reason, I just can't seem to break through the ceiling, I just cannot seem to be there to go from this hobby, like training interest that I seem to be involved with, to getting to that next level. I suppose I when I found out that we're going to do this call. Set last night I sat down I tried to write out things that would be good to discuss or to ask you. And I've got like all this paper sitting you have all these notes that I've made, as you would have seen in my email, it was quite lengthy. I think one of the assistants said all that email is probably the longest one I've ever received, that I really okay then.  Allen: Like, you know, because we get, we get lots of emails every day and some people, right? Some people write two paragraphs, but when somebody goes in deep, and they really share their, you know, their soul pretty much. It's like, Hey, I've been doing this and this and this, and this, and I don't know what's going on, then, like we you can feel it when somebody is really, really wanting to make it work. And so those most of those get passed on to me. And when I read it, I was like, alright, you know, we need to we need to talk about this. Because if you've been doing this for years, then like, I have not doing my job. I've let you down in some way that because you know, you shouldn't still be feeling that way. I know. But it's not uncommon. You know, we come across many, many people that come to us and say, hey, you know, I've been doing this for a long time. But you know, it never clicked for me. But you will.. Mark: Yeah, I can see that. So many people that you talk to, you know, have the same they're trying and trying to trying to find the right system, the right setup the right, whatever it is just can't seem like I feel to break through that ceiling. Like you're stuck underneath the water. You're swimming hard. You're learning this, you're watching that you're reading this you're researching. You're looking at the charts to pair with analysis, paralysis, all that stuff. And I've made lots of trades. I've done lots of trading. I've been I've been I won't say successful because clearly we wouldn't be on this call otherwise, but I've made money, but I've also lost money. I've got scars, I've got all that stuff I've had I've had losses, but still here I am battling looking at all that stuff that you talked about in the book in that book really resonated with me there's a lot of stuff in there that I thought I can do this. I know I can do it. Why am I doing it? Why it's just what why does it elude me so much? Is it just a pipe dream and more and more just a duck on the water swimming and just never gonna get there? I don't know. Allen: So you know, when we when we got the email, when they forwarded to me, they asked me like, hey, what do you think the problem is here? Does he not know enough? And my answer to them was No, I think he knows too much. He knows too much. That's part of the problem. I'm just guessing here and I wanted to try to get to the root of it. But you know a lot of the times when so there's there's different things that you need. Everybody needs different things to in order to succeed in anything. Obviously, you know, you need to know what to do you need to how to do it. You know, you have to practice you have to put in the time. You need somebody Do that can actually has doing it like coach that's teaching you, you need a team or a teammate or somebody to do it with. These are all different things that that can help. But a lot of times we come across people that have been, you know, bouncing around from program to program, like you said, they know all the different strategies, they know everything, they know how it works. Some people come and they know it better than I do. You know, so they're, they're telling me that, oh, the Vega this is this and the Gamma and the theta and the row and all this other, you know, they're touching on the Greeks, and they're managing by the Greeks, and they're doing all these complicated stuff. But they're like, it's still not working, why is it not working? So I think, if it can work for somebody else, it can work for you. And I firmly believe that in just about anything, except maybe sports, you know, should somebody else could dunk the ball, maybe I can't dunk the ball. But in trading, a lot of it is I think, 80 to 90% of it is menta. Mark: I've totally, totally, totally. Allen: So there might be something that is holding you back, or, you know, maybe like I don't know, so let's get into it. So now you've mentioned a couple of times that you haven't gotten to the next level. So tell me what is the next level? What is the goal that you're trying to get to? Mark: Well, I think the goal is the same for everybody's, you know, everyone's trying to make income, like, right, I have a I mean, I'm in I'm a cop. So I work in a profession that I see myself coming to a fork in the road. I've been doing this job now for over 14 years, for 10 years. And before that I was in a private industry, we had a family business. So I understand all the dynamics of running a business, how it operates. We had a family business for over 30 years. And long story short, we got out of that for various reasons. And then I got into the government sector, which is a totally different psyche altogether, which took me some time to try and come to terms with. Having said that, I've forever in my wife, and I've come from a family that has been heavily invested in property, shares, businesses, and stuff like that. So I've always had this belief that I can do something with my life that will be able to produce constant income money have investments, like I've had investment properties, and I've done the share thing now on the option things for a long time. And I'm not destitute, I'm not desperate, I have a house, I have three beautiful children and family sort of stuff. But I want to go to the next level I want to be able to provide, I want to be able to teach my kids trading, I want to be able to show them how to invest all the money stuff, like all that sort of thing. I feel as if I'm promoting this stuff, yet, I haven't really truly succeeded myself. I haven't got to the level where they can say okay, Mark, look at you've got all this great stuff, and that show me how to do it. And when they do ask me, I'm sort of thinking so I will not really, I can talk about it. I've read about it, and I'm doing it, but I really haven't got what you think I have. Having said that. Getting back to the trading side of it. I think I want to have this as a business, I can see the potential in it as you can do from home. It's all in front of you in the net. I don't have to go out I don't have to be injured tree. I understand that. I do know a lot about it. I understand all those things you just mentioned with the Greeks and what not right? And I probably do, I probably do know too much. And I do want to keep it simple. I do say to myself, when I'm doing it, just keep it simple. Why do you need to have this indicator? Why do we need to be having that? I totally agree with what you've promoted and talked about for so long. And I think I was probably watching on Option Genius probably before you even started doing podcasts. But over the years, I've come and gone. I've been involved with and I've been with other things. And I've on and off as we mentioned before, right? All right. Does that help answer the question? Allen: No. So what what what do you mean by the next level? Is it an income? Is it is it a certain amount of money in the account is a certain amount of money every month? Where it is it that you say okay, now I've arrived now I have achieved my goal? What what is that number so that you would be able to be like, Yes, I feel happy though. Mark: Okay, so I've sort of thought about that. And I've put a number down to 10k. Now that's a pie in the sky dream. That's a pie in the sky dream. I know. And that's a long way off being achieved. I would just like to be able to see some consistency, all that stuff that you promote consistent, being profitable, and I can do that. But then as you know, you get one or two trades that wipe you out, wipe it back to zero and then it got to start again. Right? So just not we're just not getting that constant. Right? What do they call it.. Allen: Okay, so 10k is the goal. Now, it's not a it's not a it's not a pipe dream. It's so 10k is the goal. If you got 10k every month, you'd be happy. You'd be like okay, I've made it you know I'm accomplishing And that this stuff is actually working. Finally, this stuff is actually working if you were making 10k a month. So tell me, what is it that you think is keeping you from doing that? Mark: Well, clearly a lack of funds at this stage. But I have had numerous accounts where they've had a substantial amount of money in there, but I've just brought it right back down to just doing one lots, until I can see the consistency and seeing that, the, that my trading works, it's consistent, well, then we can scale up. So I'd rather than that, so I'm happy to do just one month a month, which means I'm not gonna make 10 grand in the near future, right, those types of trades, but we can scale that up at a later date. Allen: But what do you so if you were to say, hey, Alan, give me this one thing, and I know I can make tons of money. What is that one thing? Mark: Well, I suppose it's like a business plan, isn't it, like a franchise to follow a step by step thing, do this, do this, do this, do that put it on, obviously, there's a little bit of, there's gonna have to be a little bit of a thought process and feel for the market. But I suppose I need a plan. Like I know how to put the trade on, I know how to do a credit spin on it, for example, but I suppose I need a set of rules or business plan or like something to follow. So that way, I can just follow the recipe for a particular day, not particular strategy, but it's very hard to identify it or pinpoint it down to one thing. Like I've written all these notes in the book and pages and pages of all these things that you're discussing the iPad and whatnot, and try to answer those questions myself. Like, what am I looking for? What's stopping me I've written here a recipe, a plan, a template to follow rules to follow or to abide by tools, treat it like a franchise, for instance. So that way, I'm not deviating to another thing. So I have it on my wall and write down Am I following those particular plans? Does that is that sort of answer the question?  Allen: So do you not have any trading plans right now? I mean, you said you were in different programs and everything so did you do you have any that you've been using as a guideline as a framework? Mark: The cover I've written things down in the past but I suppose sticking to it, or having it visible is difficult. I suppose someone to write one with me or for me to say right this is a trading plan. This is what you need to have in it to follow I suppose I haven't really been given a choice like if it says write a trading plan, write down this stuff, write it down, but I suppose I just want to try it like this is what's going on my head just put the trades on just put the trades on work with the probabilities. Yeah, it should work out. Allen: Okay, and are you conservative or aggressive? Mark: I believe I'm conservative in the sense where at the moment like with the one loss, so like, if I was aggressive, I'd be going right I'm pretty positive this trades gonna work of two or five, or 10 lot but at the moment, it's like let's just hold back and do one more being conservative. I think I can be aggressive if I need to be but on how Allen: And how much percentage return are you looking to make? Mark: I knew you're gonna ask me that question. And I don't actually have a percentage. I've just I suppose a bad way of saying it but I just keep putting the trades on and hope that the probabilities work out so I don't have a particular percentage amount that I've got Okay. When you ask that question Allen: obviously so obviously you know, just putting the trades on hoping they work out that's not working. So we're gonna have we're have to refine this What strategy do you think most appeals to you? Mark: Well, obviously I've been working on the credit spread that's probably the one thing that I've done the most of the credit spreads like I've done in many others, but that's the one that I've probably done the most so in the last few years. Allen: Okay, and are you keeping track record of all the trades that you've been doing? Mark: No, I don't. I have written them down in the past. I do try to follow that put it in a journal, but over time, it just becomes cumbersome I suppose like it's writing it all down. I don't I don't stick to it. It's probably the kind of problem there. Allen: So what you said is you want to franchise, and in the franchise are going to tell you the first thing is to document everything you're doing. Because we cannot tell what's going wrong if we don't know what you already did. So having a firm plan that says okay, I'm gonna put this trade on and writing down why, why am I putting this trade on? Because it's moving higher because it's got news coming out because it's high. It's, you know, very volatile right now or the IV is off or whatever their reasoning is, you put the rig, you put it there, you write the trade, you record what happened, why or why did not work out. And then after you do a whole bunch of these, you can go back and look at it and say, okay, every time I do a trade that's at, you know, 35 Delta, it works wonderfully. But every time I do any other Delta, it doesn't work. So I'm just going to do that 35 delta. So if you want to find your own trading plan, then this is how you do it. Now, this is a long way to do it, it's going to take a long time, because you're going to have to test different things and try different things and see what's working, what's not working. But it would be one way for you to create your own plan based on what you find you're more comfortable in, because some people they come in and they tell me, hey, you know what I want to do Credit spreads, and I want to do 2025 Delta spreads, some people don't want to do five Delta spreads, you know, so everybody's comfortable with different things. And then based on the amount of credit they get, then we can figure out okay, how do we how do we manage the trade, some people should be not managing the trade at all, they should just be getting in and getting out at a certain amount. Some people, they can go ahead and say, hey, my trade is going bad, I'm going to, you know, adjust it or do something else with it. So depending on what we're thinking, when we get in will dictate what we do when we're in the trade. Mark: So now that I know what I do for trades, there are particular entry signals that I looked for, like I don't just go and find a stock and then look up a chain and then play delta and put it on. I do have, like, for example, I think there's market volume, I use volume. So obviously, when volume is increasing, I'll have them put on a put trade, obviously, when the stocks turning or progressing. And obviously over the three averages, like you say, things like that. So there are particular indicators, and not too many I do try and keep it fairly simple, I believe, before I put anything on, so I do try and put the weight in my favor. And the advocate of that, of course, by using those some small indicators to try and get it on sideways or progressing in the in the direction that we think it's going. So I do look at that I'm not a big person, I'm gonna use a 35, Delta, or 45, or whatever. Right? Okay, I understand the Delta side of things. But it's more about volume, I suppose at this stage and what. Allen: Okay, so that that's good to know. Right? So I mean, what I would do is, I probably have a sheet, kind of like a checklist, you know, so get it out of your head, and onto an actual piece of paper, where every single trade you have to mark it off, you know, the volume is high, yes, you know, movement is this way or whatever, whatever your your things are, you check it off. One, two, three.. Mark: I actually have done that I can attest that I have done that I've written down, like when the bar gets lower than the level of bar, it's time to get in or when a turn when it points up. It's getting. So I have written most things down in the past. Yes. Allen: So that'll be your trade law right there. That's if you do if you have the discipline to do that, before you put in the trade, you'll you'll know at the end, okay. You know, just go back to that journal and be like, Okay, what worked and what didn't work? What are the patterns. And that's kind of the stuff that I was doing originally, when I was first starting to figure this stuff out, is look at every single one. And now I have my my checklist, where if there are two or three things that I cannot mark off, I don't put the trade on, because I know that hey, there's not enough, you know, these things are really important. I want them, I don't want to put a trade on without everything checked off. Allen: Now, that doesn't mean that I'm not going to lose, like you still lose on the trade with everything checked off. But like you said, you know, we're putting the odds in our favor. As many times if you have a checklist, like you said you did. That's your journal right there. And so before you put on the trade, you just mark it off, you know, check, check, check, check, oh, I can't check this one. Then later on, after the trades are done, you do 2030 trades, at least, then you can go back and look at and say okay, I lost on these three trades. What is the pattern I lost on these five trades? What is the pattern? And you might find a pattern, you don't have to but you might find something that say okay, these indicators, you know, they're not working or they are working. The other thing is, I mean, it's, it's really simple, right? You find the strategy that you want. And you said, Hey, I found the strategy. Second step is to find the trading plan, that you think you think will work and then is just test it and trade it and do it over and over over again. But the important part is that you have to stick to the plan. Do you think you stick to the plan, or is it? Is it a discipline? Mark: Tell me, tell me, what got you out? I've read your book or listen to your story. What part got you through that ceiling? Obviously, we're doing the same thing as we all do for such a long period of time. But there must have been something that clicked or something that you did or something did you get into? Was it a program for you? Was it someone that you got? Hold on What, what got you to that next level that we all tried to get to? Allen: It took time, it took discipline, there were a few things that really helped me. One was really sticking to the rules that I had set up. And really, it's about, you know, when it comes down to it, it's about putting the trades on with the odds in your favor as many ways as you can. And I learned about that later on, you know, having different different levels. But what I started to do, and the ones that I really started doing well on, and in the beginning, were iron condors. For some reason, that strategy really, really clicked with me. And I was like, Oh, my God, I gotta work. No, no, it doesn't work right now. But he's like, you know, that strategy really worked. And it was like, Oh, I can adjust it. So I might never lose money in the trades. It's just really awesome. But I still was having trouble following the rules. Because, you know, you have to work that. So there were there were a few ways. Number one is my wife got involved. Allen: So every day, she would, like I would have a list of all of my trades, and I would have all the rules, like when I needed to do what, so every day at a certain time, she would come upstairs because I was working from home and she wasn't she wasn't working. So she would come upstairs. And she would ask me, Okay, let's go through every single trade one by one by one. And so she'd be she'd have her notes. And she's, okay, this trade on Russell. Where is it now? And they go, Okay, this, it's up this much money, or it's down this much money? Okay. When are you going to adjust? Well, when this happens? And they said, where is it now? Say, Oh, it's right here. So do you have to adjust it? No, not yet. Okay, cool. Next one. All right. I did this. Okay. Why did you do this trade? And when are you going to adjust it? Should you have adjusted it? Yeah, I should have adjusted already. Why didn't you adjust it? Ah, I don't know. She's like, Oh, what the hell are you doing?  Mark: All that is basically you got your wife involved? Allen: I mean, not just involved, but she was holding me accountable. So I had to answer because she doesn't need to know anything about trading. But she just needs to look at my rules and ask me the questions like, hey, what's the trade doing? Is it up or down? Why have you not? What are you going to do about it? And if there is something to do about it, what are you going to do? So it's just asking yourself those questions every single day. And it helped. I used to do that on my own. But I would always ignore the answers. Because I didn't have anybody to answer to. It's like, oh, I'm a trader, I'm the boss, I make my I'll make the decisions. But when she came in, I knew I had to answer to her. And if I don't have a good reason, then I'm putting her money on the line as well. Right? I'm putting her future on the line as well. So we would have a discussion about that. So I knew in advance, I knew, Okay, she's coming at one o'clock, I need to make sure I got everything right. I'm doing everything right. Otherwise, we're gonna have an argument. And so I needed her. Like, in the beginning, I wasn't, I was I lost a lot of money. And so the only reason that I didn't have to go out and get a job was because she was patient with me. But it was part of it was like, she's going to be the boss, right? Until I turn it around. And until I break the ceiling, she's the boss. She's going to tell me what I can do what I cannot do based on how I'm doing. And so I call that my one o'clock, you know, fire drill. It's like every day at one o'clock, I still do it. I go through every single trade and I look at it and say okay, is this trade up or down? It's up. Okay, good. Allen: What happens if it goes down a little bit? Am I still going to be okay? Yes. Okay, move on to the next one. And so I don't have time to do that on 100 trades. So that's why I limit the number of trades I have. But every day I go in and I look at it and I monitor it I know where each trade stands. So that before it starts to get into trouble, I know and I can look at it and be like okay, this one I need to monitor this one I need to adjust early or this one I need to maybe just exit it because it's not acting right. It's not acting properly. So It kind of gives me you know, so having that while you go in every day and look at each trade, and everybody does that. But in order to you ask yourself the right questions, and then you have to do what you need to do. So just monitoring the trades, and just checking on them is not enough. You have to know, okay, this is my plan, and I have to do this, then you have to stick to it. And then if you have an accountability partner, or if you have a wife or a child, or whatever, if somebody comes in and asks you, hey, you were supposed to do this, well, why didn't you do it? And then you have to answer to them. So when you have somebody else there, that automatically, I mean, that instantly made me better, like instantly, the first day, second day she came in, you know, I just I just started following the rules, because I knew I had to, I had to give her an answer. So that was one of the things that did it. Allen: The other thing was that I realized that this is a long term game. And so you've read the passive Trading Book. So I wrote that book, because I saw that if you're only selling options, eventually, you don't like the options can go against you. So what I mean by that is, in the financial crisis, when we had the financial crisis in 2008, there was everything was just going up and down. And so if I had options on if I trades on those trades lost, and then I could never get that money back. That's when I realized that, okay, you know, if I want to play the long game, if I want to be in this forever, I cannot let something else knock me out. I cannot let a COVID 19 pandemic knock me out, I can't let the financial crisis I can't let you know, the President making some decision and sending the stocks down, knocked me out. And so I started building up the foundation of stocks, and using those to generate capital on those. And the idea is, hey, I want to own the stocks as my foundation. But I want to use options as basically like a rocket ship, you know, so I wanted to boost the returns. So I'm gonna have conservative stuff in the in the main portfolio, you know, where I have the stocks, and I'm making money. Mark: I totally agree with all right. Yeah. Allen: So, you know, that was now Mark: I totally agree with all that, definitely. Allen: So you can't start off that way. Because it takes a lot of money to own that stocks. So in the beginning, you do have to get good at picking one strategy, getting good at it, just following it and being disciplined, and saying, Hey, I'm going to do this, and I'm going to follow it along. Now, again, long term, picture wise, every month, you're not going to make money, every trade is not going to make money. So you have to have that in your in your mindset that, hey, sometimes it's gonna work, and sometimes it's not. So there's lots of lots of little little things that you can improve on it. But the biggest thing that I'm seeing is that you have to follow the plan. Mark: So Allen, do you think that I would benefit? Like I know you're selling plenty of courses, promote what you promote in the book. And I totally agree with all that, I get it on one side. But if I was to do another course, such as yours, I my fear is, and we're just going down that same rabbit holes, as I've done before, hence why I'm confused as to why I can't seem to break that ceiling. If I was to go into a course such as yours, this one that you're the passive trading and whatnot, I worry that I really fear that a year I am going into it again, I'm doing another course. But I understand the strategy. I think now I need more of a coach, maybe I need maybe that one on one, maybe maybe that's what I need. Or maybe there are things that I'm not happy to admit to that I do that I need to be changed. I need to be molded stead of going down this direction on to be heading over in this little bit direction over here with my trading. I understand the why thing. That's a great thing in my voice. She's a great supporter of me. I am trying to I'm trying to get out of work. She works. I'm trying to get her out, keep trying and trying and time is your course gonna sit me on that path to freedom. Allen: So it's like, you know, I mean, I'll give you an example. Like when people go to college, right? They everybody's told go to college, go to college, some people they go to college, and they just they just party the whole time and they don't get anything out of it. Some people go and they study, study, study, study, study, and they get a good job. Some people go and they make lots of contacts, you know, they they meet, they make lots of friends. They meet lots of teachers so that when they get out, they know a lot of people and they have a good network and then that helps them so it's really up to each person individually. Now I would love to say that yes, every single person that takes my course makes them million dollars. But that's not the reality. You know, people come in, life happens, they take it seriously, they don't take it seriously. And, you know, that's, that's one part I cannot control. So I cannot tell you that, yeah, you know what, it's going to work for you just because it's, I'm amazing. And I'm a wonderful person, and it's just gonna work. 90% of it is on you, I can give you everything I know, I can do it with you. But again, the markets have to cooperate. Number one, and then number two, it has to click for you, you have to do it, and you have to practice it. And you have to stick to the plan. A lot of times when people come into my programs, and they tell me Oh, hey, you know, I'm doing XYZ, I'm like, but that's not what I have in the plan. Allen: That's not what I have in the program. They're like, yeah, no, but I'm changing. I'm like, okay, but have you done it my way? No, not yet. But then why did you join my program, you could do your own way. Without my program, you don't need to pay for my program, right? If you're going to pay for something. And if you believe that, hey, yeah, this guy knows what he's talking about this thing works, I think it works. If you're going to pay for it, then just follow that step by step by step and don't change it. Unless it works.  Allen: When it starts working, then only then would you say, Okay, now I'm going to, you know, change it up, because I think I can, I can be a little bit more aggressive, or, hey, I want to be a little bit more conservative, or I want to change it up a little bit. But you don't do that until it's always working. So the problem is that people that have been doing this for a long time, they know all the strategies, they've listened to many other coaches, you know, they come in, and they're like, Well, you know, I don't like that one thing, I'm going to change, I don't like that thing, I'm going to change. And so they start doing it their own way and they don't listen. And so you can't take stuff from this course and this course and this course and mash it into a Frankenstein, and then tell me "Oh, it didn't work?" Well, because I don't know why that guy told you to do that. And I don't know why that other guy told you to do that. Or the only thing I know is if you do it this way, you'll get the similar results that what I'm doing. Now, if you add and change it, then I can't help. So, you know, like you're saying that we have, I think there's like four pillars that I tell people that people need. So if you want to learn how to do something, you need these four pillars. Number one is you need the right strategy, which you've already said is, hey, that's the credit spread, right? Number two, you need the trading plan that works. So number three, is you need other people to do it with because you're doing it all alone, like you said, you know, you might need a wife, if you don't have a wife or partner like that, then you can have a community or other students that are doing it the same way. Allen: And then number four, you need a coach that can actually show you what he's doing, because he's still doing it. And he's actually doing it right now, instead of somebody that said, oh, yeah, I was a market maker 30 years ago, and I don't trade anymore. So I think those are the four things and depends on which everybody needs. So the coaching part is the one that takes the most time. And that's why those coaching programs are the most expensive. Allen: In my passive trading course. You know, we give you the trading plan. It's like okay, here, this is the plan, these are the rules, you follow it and, you know, good luck. But there's no one on one coaching. There's no group, you know, where we are, where we're doing and looking at the trades. And so when we have that passive trading course, it's a cheaper course. And so people would join it, and they would go through the modules. And some people would have a lot of success, some people wouldn't. So I said, What, what's the problem? Why are they not? Why is it not working? And I realized that it would help if they could just spend a lot more time with me. And so we created that credit spread mastery course, where every week, we get on the call, and we're just looking for trades, we're managing trades, we're adjusting trades, doing it together. So the point of that is, here's the rules. Here's the trading plan. Now let's do it together, over and over and over and over and over and over. And so once you have that habit of doing it the same way over and over and over the other, the other ideas, the other habits kind of die off. So I've seen that that program does deliver results. So we back it up and we say hey, look, if you're in our program, and the program doesn't work, like you don't if you're not profitable in our program, then we keep you in the program. We keep working with you. We keep you in the class until you become profitable. And so even if the markets not cooperating That's fine, we'll learn how to manage it together. And then we'll stay longer in the program, if you'd have to be.. Mark:  So with your target trading alum, obviously, it does take a type of market. And obviously, that's why through the last six months with Covid whatnot, it would be easy Earth to do that type of training, because obviously, it just went straight up didn't keep they're still on put, credit spreads the load of was money for Jim, in a market such as what we're in now, which is up and down, up and down. It's far more difficult, isn't it? Allen: Currently it is more difficult, doesn't mean it's impossible. So we do have to dial back our, we have to dial back our expectations. So last year, the year before, you know, making 10% a month, 7-8% a month, not a big deal, it was pretty simple. You know, put the trades on most of them work out in anybody, and everybody was making money. Like any you know, you could buy anything, and it was going up any everyone is making money. This is a market where you have to be really good at selection, trade selection, and management. So you have to know when things are turning around, and when to get out before they get really bad. Allen: So the trade management, sticking to your stop loss is very important right now. And those are things that most people get afraid of, you know, so it's like, okay, I put the trade on, it should work. And then oh, no, the stocks turning around, what do I do what I do, and they don't do anything. So if your thing is part of, if you're doing as part of a group or in a program, then be like, hey, we need to get out, we need to get out, get out, get out. Some people let people know, Mark: There's that mental component, that's the biggest part. And as I've gone along this journey, if all these years, I've realized more so in the latest year, it's not about the strategy. It's not about all that stuff. That mental side of it, it's 80-20, Mark Douglas, the book, the trading zone, I listened to that over and over and over again, and various other podcasts and whatever other things, but trying to pull the trigger when you're in a loss is it wasn't so hard, we put this trade on, it was gonna work a met the probabilities, it was all looking good, it was under the over the top of the averages. I had volume, blah, blah. But all of a sudden, now I'm underwater again. And here we go again, and then I've got to pull a trigger to get out to take that loss. Mark: And I have taken some big losses in the past, I've had to pull the trigger, just recently with the weekly trading system. And when that I mean, there's Solomon says, I've been there for a couple of weeks, again, I've been on and off over the over many years. And all of a sudden, now I'm having to pull the trigger again to get out because we lose money. Like it's hard. It's another scar, isn't it another scar, not a scar, it's another get back down there. You know, I don't want to see you do any good. It's difficult, you know, and that's that mental side of it is arguments or trading? Allen: Yep. The emotions, you know, the emotions have to be kept in check. So there's different ways that you could do that, you know, one, one of the ways is people say that you divorce or divorce yourself from the outcome. So whether you win or lose, doesn't matter make a Mark: ..difference? Exactly what I totally agree with that. And that skill is very difficult. Allen: Yeah, your job is to just follow the plan and stick to the plan. And if you can do that, eventually, over the long run, it'll work out, you know, maybe you have losing trades, that's fine. But over the long run, it should work out. So too much of it, like you said, you know, like, oh my god, I'm, I'm going to be negative again, oh, my God, I'm gonna have to pull the trigger. And oh, my God, you know, when you have that kind of reaction, that compounds and it just makes it all, it makes it much harder to get out of the trade when there is a loss. The other there's one lady, she told me something that really worked for her. She goes, You know what, this is not my money. This is God's money. And what what are you talking about as God's money? She goes, Well, I use this money. And I use the gains from the money to do good. Because they use it for charity work. So she's like, I don't need the money to live. Because I have enough income I have enough. You know, I have I have money coming in that I live off of. But this is my trading money. And so I take the money that I make, and I give it away to charity, and I do good things with it. So it's really God's money, and I cannot lose God's money. There's no way I can lose money. And so if I'm if I'm going negative, that the trade is losing, I get out right away because I don't want God mad at me because it's not my money. So that's another way you could look at it. That you know, again, it's it's taking yourself out of the outcome, you know, and it's not like okay, it's not under my control. So you've got the wife coming in and asking you what you're doing and why it's working or why it's not working and being accountable. You have you know, not looking at the outcome just getting better as a trader, just hey, I need to do my skills, whether it wins or not, that's not up to me. That's up to the market, I can't control that. But I can follow my plan. That's up to me. The other thing is, you know, not looking at it in emotional point of view, like, Hey, this is not my, maybe this is my kid's mind. Maybe this is, you know, God's money, however you want to look at it, but it's not yours. So if you lose it, it's bad. Like, that's the worst thing to happen. You know. So there's, there's three different ways that you can mentally overcome the different obstacles. But again, I think one thing that we haven't talked about yet is to simplify, right? So you've done all the different strategies, and I'm sure, you know, some of it is creeping in. And, you know, it's like, oh, you know, I got to do this, or I'm going to, I'm going to wait for this indicator, or I'm going to wait for these Bollinger Bands, or the Fibonacci, or the technicals, or any of that stuff, the more you simplify it, the easier it becomes to actually follow through with it. And so I think, you know, just one strategy, not chasing after the shiny object, you know, it's like, Hey, make a decision. If it's spread, spreads, and that's the only thing you focus on, and you get rid of everything else, you stopped listening to everything else, you unsubscribe from all the emails, you know, whatever, whatever service that you choose, like, Hey, I'm going to, I'm going to follow this plan, I'm going to, you know, if you've taken a course, maybe you've already taken a course, you have a course that you've tak`en and be like, Okay, I like this course, I'm going to follow this course, we'll get rid of everything else. Just go through it. Master that and don't do anything else until you know what that is, until you get the results that you're supposed to get it. In the beginning, when I started screwing up, like I would learn something, and then I would do good for a little bit and then I would mess up. And then I would do good, then I would mess up. So I was like, What the hell do I do? Well, I would always go back to the basics. I would imagine that I don't know anything. And I would go back to step one. Okay. What is a call? What is the put? What am I doing here? What is the strategy? How am I supposed to put it on? What are the rules and I gotta follow them step by step by step, not like, oh, you know, I'm gonna, I think this stock is gonna go down or or, you know, there's a Fibonacci retracement level, and there's some support here. So I don't have to adjust. No, forget all that stuff. I don't know any of that stuff. All I know, is the strategy and my trading plan. And that's it. And so that was, you know, you go back to the basics. And that will change your mentality of it, like, Okay, how do I manage the trade? How do I deal with this? Allen: Again, if there's other things involved, like stress, you know, if you're under a lot of stress, you're going to make the wrong decisions. If it has to work. If I have to make money this month, from my trades, you're going to make the wrong decisions. It's not going to work out in the long term. So there was a there was something another trick that one of our one of our students taught me. And now everybody can't do this. Most people can't do this. But what he does, is that he takes whatever money he makes trading this year. He will live off that next year. So when he's trading next year, he doesn't have to live off that money. Because he already has the money set aside from the last year. If that makes sense. Mark: You need a big bankroll sounds like a real estate agent. Allen: Yeah, you need Yeah, he was. Yeah, he was. He was a politician. But, um, he has obviously, other people's money then. So I mean, he did have, you know, he had, he had a large account to do that. But eventually, that would be the best thing to do. You know, you have you already know your expenses are covered. Right? Now, you're only focusing on the plan and focusing on on just winning and just trading properly. It's not it takes the emotion out of so whatever you can do, whatever trick you can use to get that emotion out of it, that will make you a better trader. One, one more thing that that that that I've seen is happening to me is, the more you do it, the more of a habit it becomes. So if you do, you know, 50 trades, that's a lot better than five trades, but 500 trades is a lot better than 50 trips, if you do them properly with the right practice. So eventually, you get to the point where Oh, it's just another trade. It's not a big deal. It's just another trade. There's another one coming. So if I get if I hit my stop loss, yeah, it hurts. I hate it. But it's Just another trait, you know, I'm going to move on, move on to the next one, move on to the next one, because every month is a different ballgame. So you start over, you get to start over again and again and again. And so that is another trick that you would help in the long run. But again, you know, you have to, in before all of that happens, you have to have the confidence that this actually works. Mark: So what do I truly do believe in? Allen: Yes, you say that you say that. But then you also say that, you know, I can't do it. It's not working. It's not working. But you, you you've heard it that it works, you want to believe that it works. But I don't think you have that conviction yet that it works. And so the only way to get that conviction is to get it done for yourself. Right? And so it might be that you take a maybe you take a step back, and you go even simpler. And you say you don't want not the credit spreads, how about I do something like maybe a naked put, right, in a naked put, I'm going to make money if the stock doesn't go down. And it'll expire. And then I'll sell another one. And I'll sell another one. And I'm going to sell it far out of the money. So that I just when I just make that 20 bucks, or that $30 or whatever it is that small amount I'm just going to make month after month after month trade after trade I'm going to make and if the stock drops, okay, no fine, I can buy the stock, no big deal, I'll buy the stock. And then I'll sell covered calls on that stock. And so the covered call will expire, and I'll make something the covered call was expired, the next month will expire, and I'll make something so you build up that confidence that you know what, there is a way to do this. That's another option, you know, if you want to go that route, so you really got to figure out like, okay, you know, it's a, it's a personal thing, I wish I could just tell you that, hey, this is the one thing you need to do. But for everybody, it's different. And unless I spent a lot more time with you, unless I see all of your trades, unless I see you know, your emotion, how you handle the emotions, I won't be able to tell you. So that's kind of like in our in our program, what we do is we tell we give everybody a spreadsheet, and we say, hey, look, you have to fill out the spreadsheet, you have to put every single trade on the spreadsheet. And then they shared with me so that I can go in and I can look at them. You know, I could look at the tray. And I'll go in I'll see like, why did he do this trade? This doesn't make any sense to me. And I'm calling this Hey, John, why did you do this tray? Allen: And he goes, well, no, that's not gonna work. And he goes, okay, okay, fine, I'll do it. All right, done. You know, and if they're doing all the trades, right, then it's probably working. And most of the time, it's not working, like if they're not making money, then we can identify, Okay, what are what is not going right? You know, there was one of our current students, he was doing several trades, and he was still negative. So I looked at his spreadsheet, and I'm like, Okay, what's going on? What do I see, and his trade entries were great. You know, he was picking the right stocks, he was doing it properly. But whenever he lost, he would lose a lot more than he should have. He just wasn't getting out early on time. And so that was the biggest thing is like, you're not getting out. This is it, you know, your losses are too big. Doesn't matter how many trades, you win, your losses are still too big, you're still going to be negative. And so we worked on that. And then over time, he got better at getting out earlier and earlier and earlier. But he had, you know, he had somebody to look at that and to point it out, and to hold him to it. So that eventually he did it over and over and over again. And then by the end of the class, he was positive. He was like, Yeah, I fixed it. Again, that's all you need to do. That was he needed that one thing, everything else is simple. The training plan I could give you, you know, you could go do it on your own. But the discipline part of it, that's sometimes where we need help from somebody else. And so whether you know, it might be a wife might be somebody else, it might be a trading partner, somebody you work with, it might be a coach. So I think that might be one thing that you could implement. Mark: So just quickly, what what's the key points in a trading plan make like entry criteria, stop losses or that sort of stuff. Is there anything else that I can many points or rules should be in a trading plan? Like what I try and put a trading plan together, that is doable and simple to follow. To look at rather a complicated bloody list of all this crap, what would be a good trading plan? Allen: So, you want it to be simple and easy to implement. But you don't want it to be too simple, where it's just broad, like anything can happen. So, you know, I've seen people that have a trading plan that says, I'm going to do an iron condor on this stock 45 days to expiration, I'm going to sell a 10 Delta calls and sending out the puts. And that's it. That's my whole plan, and I'm just gonna sit and let it expire. That's a trading plan. It's very simple, right? You know, what you're going to do you know, what you're going to how you're going to do it, you know, what you're going to trade it on. And you know, when. And so now that pretty good plan doesn't work. So whoever's listening don't don't do that one. We've back tested that, and it didn't work. But there are, there are times there are several months where it does work, just because it has, you know, 80% probability, but over time, it doesn't. So that's the basics, you got to know what you want to trade, you need to know the strategy, you got to know what you want to trade. And then you have to know what constitutes a good setup. So when it comes to credit spreads, you mentioned credit spreads. So I like to do that, depending on the size of the of the trade, if it's a you know, maybe a $5000 $10,000 trade, then I'll go into I can go into a stock, or I'll go into an index ETFs are good, too. But they're their strikes are a little bit smaller. So you got to do a lot more contracts. But if I can go into a stock that has, you know, five point spreads, and I do 10 of them. That's a $5,000 trade. That'll work. Allen: So you can, what do you want to trade? And then what's the proper setup? So for me, again, I like to keep it simple. So if I see a stock that's trending, as moving up, or moving down, then I'm happy to trade it. Because I'm, I'm more of a trend follower, you know, so there's people that think, okay, if the stock is gonna go up, it's going up, it's going to keep going up until something big changes, there are other people that think the opposite. They're like, Oh, if it's going up, they just kind of come back down, because it's gonna do reversion to the mean. And sometimes that works. And sometimes it doesn't. So I don't really buy that I just like, hey, if it's going up, then it's telling me that it wants to go higher. So that's basically what I'm looking for. In a setup, I'm looking for the stock to tell me what it wants to do. So if I see a stock that's jumping up and down, no, I don't know what it's doing. I don't know what it's telling me, I can't understand the language, I'm not going to trade it. If it's going up, then I'm going to play it bullish. If it's going down, I'm going to play bearish. And sometimes, you know, it turns around and you get banked, but most of the time it's going to work out. So that's the kind of setup I'm looking for. And then over the years, you know, we've added other things to look at, you know, how do you make sure that all of your trades are not in the same sector? Right now, you know, right now, oil has been doing well. So all of the oil companies were doing great. But then they all turned around and went down all together. So if you have 10 trades on in different oil companies, that's not that's not diversification. That's the same trade. And so if they turn around, I'm going to turn on together. So that would be one way of putting the odds in your favor by having you know, only a small portion of your account in one sector. So you have to separate that. How do you diversify by time? You know, so not putting all your trades on on the same day. That's another way to do it. So you diversify by time. So there's so many different ways that you can do it, some of them might make sense to you some might not. And then, you know, we have other students that come in and say, Well, I do it, you know, I look for this also in my trade, like, Okay, if that's what you want to add to it, then add it. Don't subtract things that I've given you. But if you want to add to it, one student said that he likes to look at the weekly chart, I usually look at the daily chart, see how the stock is doing. He likes to look at the weekly chart as well. Allen: So I'm like, Okay, fine, you can add to it, you know, if it doesn't hit your criteria on the weekly chart, then just means you'll have less trades that qualify, but it's not gonna it's not going to put you into a trade that's going to hurt. So when you're basically you just have to figure out what you think is going to work. And then you have to test it. So back testing, and paper trading are really really, really helpful. Especially back tests, Mark: I find paper trading useless. To be honest. You lose interest very quickly. It's very easy to lose in that type of trading. Yeah, go ahead. I've done a little bit of paper trading and I've just found that I find okay, it's gone the wrong way. But I got it wrong. You just let it go. Because it doesn't mean anything. It has no significance, does it? Start with money trading? Yeah. You've got a connection heavenly with the with the live trading, because actually, it's not your money tied to it. Allen: It's not your money. It doesn't matter what the style of the trade does, you're only focusing on becoming a better trader, the goal is not to make more money, the goal is to become a better trader. Right? It's kind of like playing poker. It's like when you when people go to play poker, right? They'll professionals, they'll tell you that if they play their hand perfectly, and they lose, they're okay with it. Right? If they play, if they mess up, and they still win, they're still mad at themselves. Because I didn't play it right. I didn't play my cards, right? Even though I won, I don't care, because long run, it's going to hurt them. If they keep playing incorrectly in the long term, it's going to hurt them. So that's the goal to become the better trader. And the end results, the profits will take care of themselves. So paper trading is practice. That's all it is. Right? If you didn't need to take that on board. It's slow practice. Back testing, I prefer back testing way better than paper trading. Because you can go really quick. You know, if you if you come up with a plan, like okay, these are my criteria, I got these seven criteria on my trading plan. I'm going to enter when I see this, this and this. I'm going to exit when this happens. I'm going to adjust it this way If this happens, okay, I got that right and down, and that you can even just come up with your you can just guess No, I think this one's good. This one's good. That's my plan. Okay. You pick. You pick a stock, spy. Great, perfect. You go back to yours in time. January 1, put the trade on. How does it do? Oh, it made money. Awesome. Cool. February, how do you do made money? Great. March. Oh, we lost a lot of money. Doing it, huh? Okay. APR, how do you do? And then just do it month by month, I want back testing one month or one trade, you know, might take you five or 10 minutes. And so you can get years worth of practice in just a few days by back testing. And you'll find that Mark: It's something that I've never done is back testing. Is there a particular software that's adequate for that sort of stuff? I've never really looked down that line. I've heard about it. I've listened to it, but I've never actually really done it myself. Is there anyone ticular that would be worthy. Allen: The one that I use, the one that I use is called the option net explore. option that explore? Yeah, and I think I think they're based out of Great Britain. And so basically, it's, it's an options selling platform, you know, so it looks like your broker's platform, you put the trade on, and you go through it day by day by day. And it doesn't do it all for you, you actually have to look at it every single day. And if you want to make changes, you can make changes to it. That's what I like about it. There are other software's that you just put in the strategy, you press a button and it'll tell you "Oh, you made money or you lost money". That's not the point. We want to get better as a trader. Right. And so this one is like, Okay, I put the trade on, click a button. Oh, stock is down today. Do I need to do anything? No. Okay, next stage. Oh, stock is back up again. I don't have to do anything. Next stage. Oh, stock is down again. Oh, no, I'm at an adjustment point. Okay, what adjustment am I going to make? I'm going to do this adjust. Okay, cool. Let's see, did it work out? Go there forward today forward a day forward a day. Oh, expiration day stop. It worked. So it's, it's just, you know, there's no money, right? It's just about becoming a better trader. It's just about getting the practice doing it over and over and over again. So that I think would definitely help you as well. Mark: Okay, so one of the things obviously, we talked about discipline and the mental game, what's probably the best thing to follow, or to train your mental strength, like, as you said, like a paper trade or a live trade, you should be able to make that same decision, then in there without any emotional war. What's the best way to get to that level of trading where you whether you win or lose, it's just business as usual? Allen: Yeah, I've done to you have to divorce yourself from the outcome, whatever, whatever that takes for you. For me, in the beginning, it was getting my wife because I knew how I would have to answer to her. Mark: And scary Allen: I didn't have it. Exactly. It has to be scary. Because if you do it properly, she cannot get managed. Right? It's like, Hey, I followed the rules, babe. I did everything I was supposed to do. It still didn't work out and she'll be like, Okay, fine. That's no problem. But if you do not follow the rules, that's when she gets manage. And that's when it gets scary. So yes, you have to make it scary for you not to follow your rules, because a lot of us a lot of US traders, like, if we lose money, yeah, we don't we get mad about it, we're like, oh, man, I lost money, we feel bad about ourselves. But it doesn't hurt enough. You know, it's kind of like these people that say, Hey, I want to lose some weight. You know, so they make a goal, I'm gonna lose some weight, I'm gonna lose some weight, they tell everybody, and they do it for a few days, and then they give up. But then there's this website, that what, what this website, basically what it does is, you have to pick a, maybe a political party, or a person or some organization that you hate, you actually hate them. And you have to put up a lot of money and say, Okay, if I don't stick to my goal, this organization is going to get $5,000 or $10,000. So that makes you because it's now becomes a different level. It's not about just the money, or about doing the thing. It's like, okay, you know, let's say, for example, I don't want to give my money to anybody like the Save the whale Foundation, right? I don't want to, I don't want to give my money to the whales, I hate whales, I want them all to die. I don't want anybody to save the whales. So if I don't lose 10 pounds, they're gonna charge my credit card $5,000 and give it to the whales, and I hate whales. So I want to do whatever I have to do to lose that money to lose that weight. You know, because I don't want that well to be saved. You have to want something more than what you have. So there's, that's another psychological trick. No, in trading? We sometimes we get used to it, you know, it's like, oh, last? Oh, well, you know, we get used to it. And it just, we gotta it's just the mental part of it. Mark: Definitely, definitely, it's a huge part of it. Something I didn't I didn't realize, until much later down the track of trading, how big a part of mental side of it really is. Allen: I mean, if you find trying to avoid is difficult. Yeah. So if you find yourself having a problem with discipline, make it simpler, cut it down, make it as simple as possible. Find the trade that you know will like you know, the naked call or the naked put the covered call, these are very simple trades, they're really hard to mess it up. Right? On the naked put, if you get assigned the stock, hey, that's great. I just bought the stock much cheaper than it was before. And I'm going to own it. So you want to you want to do it on companies that you're going to own you want to own for a long period of time. That's the only way it really works. You can't you can't be selling naked puts on stocks that are just, you know, going crazy. That's the wrong way to do it. So you know, if you can simplify it, if you can find some way to have somebody else monitor you, and hold you to your fire, you know, hold your feet to the fire like, hey, you need to follow this, why aren't you doing this? Or, hey, it's not my money. Right? I'm doing it for somebody else. This is my kids inheritance, right? I cannot mess it up. So I have to follow the rules. One guy, when I was in, just after high school, I became an agent, a real estate agent. And as an agent, as a brand new agent, they tell you that you have to do a lot of things that you don't want to do. You have to talk to hundreds of people all the time, you have to cold call, people say Oh, Hi, are you doing? Do you want to sell your house? Oh, hi, do you wanna say, Well, you know, they have to keep doing things that you don't want to do. So it was like, okay, in the guy, the guy is like, hey, most of you guys are not going to do it. But if you want to be really, really, really motivated, what you need to do is go out and buy a fancy sports car. Sounds like what you're talking about, what do you do a fancy sports car? Because yeah, you need to go out and buy an expensive sports car so that you have that payment that you have to make at the end of the month. And so that is going to make you work your butt off because you have to make the payment. And as I go I mean, I understand what he was saying. I was like, No, I'm not doing that. But then eventually I didn't make it as a realtor. Maybe if I did do that, maybe I just didn't do the work that he told you to do. I just didn't do it. It wasn't the reward wasn't worth it for me. Mark: It was up to risk, I suppose. Yeah, Allen: I mean, you know, so with your training, you got to figure it out. Is it really worth it? Is the goal that hey, I want to quit my job. Is it I want my wife to quit her job. I want the kids to have this vacation or whatever it is. You have to burning. Yes, just eat you up every single day. You have to really really, really want it Mark: Explain to me how and it's burning me. Allen: Then the discipline has to stick. Because if you want it, but you're not disciplined, and your losses are too big, then it's it's not there yet. So I think, you know, if you don't have a trading plan, I'll just give you the training. You know, I mean, it's not that hard. It's not it's, it's the training plan helps. But it's up here. And it's the practice just doing it over and over and over again and having confidence in the plan. Because then if you have confidence, you'll stick to it. If you don't have confidence, you're going to change it, you're going to you're going to add things to it, you're not going to follow it, you're going to forget about it. Like with the paper trading, that's exactly what that is, you know, so it's not real. So, oh, well, I'm gonna ignore it. I'm gonna forget about I'm gonna do that.  Allen: That really resonated with me Allen's that that point, like, go back to the paper trading, treat it like it's somebody else's money, and then make it work. Don't look at it as just as being as a fake account, that doesn't matter. Allen: I mean, I wouldn't Yeah, I would prefer you do back testing, it'll be much faster. Mark: To look at that I'll get, I'll get onto that particular site that you've made. Yeah, Allen: That'll give you years of experience in just a few days. And so, to me, that's like the best way you can do it. But if you know, if somebody is listening to this, and they can't afford that software, paper trading is free. And you can do it. Just Just treat it seriously. Treat it like real, and just follow the plan. And you'll see, because if other people can do it, you can do it. I'm talking to you. You're a very smart man. You know, if you understand what a strangle is, and and all the other things you taught me, you know that you told me, Oh, you're doing this. And we're doing that. And if you understand that part, you can get this. It's nice. Not that much. Mark: I know I can do it. I know I can I honestly believe in my heart, that of all the work and the discipline. Part, probably not so much the discipline, I suppose. But the tenacity that I have. I know I can get there. My wife, she just can't understand why I'm not there yet. She says you've worked so hard at this for so long, why aren't we living a better life than what we are now? Not that we're destitute and desperate, we're not we're doing we're doing fine. We both work with secure all that stuff. But I want to take it to here. I don't want to be just going through life normal and just crunching the wheel everyday living in a rat race. I've done that I want to I can succeed. I know I can do it. I've just got to find a way through. It's why we're here, I suppose. Allen: Yeah, I hear you. I feel it. You know, I was I was in your shoes for a long, long time. But, you know, part of it is sometimes, and I don't like talking about this too much. But the whole nature of options trading it, there's a lot of money to be made by teaching people how to trade options. There's a lot of people out there that don't trade options that teach people how to trade options. And they have no clue what they're doing. They're putting out information. You know, we've had people that joined our program, and then took our stuff and start selling it. And they don't know they never used it. You know, they're just oh, I learned this. And I learned this and I'm going to start become a coach. But you don't do it yourself. Right. But somebody else listening to that guy doesn't know that he doesn't know how to do. And so it calls into question like, okay, all the stuff that you have been learning. I hope that it's been correct. But we don't know. So that's another thing. Like, if you feeling overwhelmed, if you are feeling like Man, I've learned so much. And I'm studying this guy, and I'm studying this podcast, and I'm listening to this, I'm listening to that. Sometimes what you need is just a vacation from all of it. Mark: I have done that over time. Now I had stopped that period of time where I felt like it's too much or I've had a few losses. And in some of this during that time it says walk away for a while, take a break. And and at periods I've gone No, no, I've got to keep that I've got to keep at it. I've got to keep moving forward. But then I've probably learned as time has progressed, that it maybe just walk away for a few weeks, even maybe a couple of months. Just go and do something else for a while. But I always gravitate back to it. I always keep coming back.  Allen: You can come back, you can come back. But what I'm saying is that don't make it too complicated. If you're listening to too many people, if you're listening to too many voices, then it just becomes too overwhelming. And even listening to so many like success stories, you know, everybody has success stories. If you just listen to that and say oh my god, this guy's making this much money. This guy's making this much money. He's good. Why can't I do it? What the hell is wrong with me? Why am I you know, am I stupid? Or am I First or what? It's, you know, everybody has a different path. And so, you know, sometimes you just gotta stop listening. You know, no more marketing gimmicks, no more marketing emails, no more webinars, no more, none of that. Focus on that one thing that you decided to do, you know, pick that one strategy, it's like, I'm going to focus on this strategy, this the only thing I'm going to learn about this, the only thing I want to listen to, and you go back to the basics, you start from scratch, you keep a record of all of your trades, you figure out the pattern, what's going on, you learn it, and then you just go from there and build on that. And I think.. Mark: So what did that, that comes back to that trading plan doesn't have a number of headings in there? Why did you went up? What day did you enter? Where was your stop loss? Why did you not take it out? I suppose there is a number of things that can be headlined in your journal, then you would have to account for as the trade progresses through to the end. Allen: Yeah, I mean, we have a we have a presentation, a video that we show people. And basically, what I did was I took nine years of credit spread trades. And I put them, you know, like, these are all my real money trades, if I started with $100,000, and I put 20% into each one. So you know, 20,000 20,000 to five trades, right? Of all the trades that I did, I looked at I went back nine years, I looked at all the spreads that I did, if I had done that and put 20% into each trade. Now, every month, I didn't have five trades. So I didn't have all the money invested. If I started with 100,000, at the end of nine years, I had 1.1 million. So that tells me that, okay, you know what my trading plan kind of worked. Right? The trading plan worked, the strategy works, you gotta give it long enough. Some years were really good. Some years, we lost money. But over the long term, with real trades, I was able to make the work. And so you know, in terms, a lot of people say, oh, I need to learn adjustments. Okay, that's one way you can increase your odds. If you learn adjustments --true. But if you want to just go back to simplicity, just make it as simple as possible. Put the trade on, if you make 10%, you get out, you lose 25%, you get out. Now, you know, I mean, I could teach you a hundred other things to add on to that. But if you want the simple, the simplest way to do it, find a credit spread that works that looks good to you. Try to make 10% temporary, you make 10%, you get out, you don't get greedy and try for 15 or 20, or whatever, you make the 10 you get out you make 25 or you lose the 25% you get out you don't you never lose more than two and a half times what you could make. And that was that's your plan right there. That would work. That's what I was doing before. So you know, I got a history Hey, yo, a real money. This is not back testing. Just this is real trades. It works. So, you know, the problem is, we don't always stop when it's down 25% We don't always stop when it's up 10%. You know, there's been many times when I started when I was when I was getting started. I was up 10% on a trade. And I'd be like, you know what, no, I'm going to make 14%. Allen: If I go to 40, if I let it go to expiration, I'm going to make 14%, I want the 14% I don't want to. I don't want to get out of the trade now. It's only got a week left. You know what's going to happen in a week, a lot could happen in a week. And then that thing would turn around, it would take back all the money that I made, and it would give me a big loss. And those are like oh my god, my stomach. Somebody just punched me in the stomach. Oh my god, I've got to die. Because not only did you give back all that money, but now you have this huge loss you're sitting on and you feel like you're the stupid schmuck in the world. So, you know, just stick to the rules. You'll feel better about yourself.  Mark: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Definitely. That's what I made on a set of rules. Just follow. Allen: Had this helped? Mark: Yeah, I think so. Yeah, it's been good is there's been a few aha moments. And yeah, I just got to stick at it and take into paper trading thing. I think I'd definitely take that on. Have another look at that and try and treat it differently as opposed to just artists fake money. So to practice again, doesn't matter. The wife thing I might have to get her involved and as much as she doesn't really want to be involved in training. She's not interested in one or the other. But I'll have to probably get her into look over my shoulder and as you say, Make me accountable, more accountable. I suppose. I've got no trouble Follow the strategy. I've got no trouble following above averages and looking at the deltas and stuff like that. I think it's more the discipline thing is probably.. probably the key thing and taking that 25% loss rather than thinking like that, we'll come back, we'll come back, like now at the moment, look at the market, we're in the moment. It's not easy, peasy, no, it's gonna bounce, we're gonna bounce, we're going to bounce, but it's just keeps going down doesn't, we're in a bear market. Allen: You have to trade the market that you have, not the one that you want. So that's where that's where your your setup will keep you out of trouble. You know, so you want to like I said, you want to have the odds in your favor, as many as possible. So if you have all the indicators, or whatever your whatever your checklist is, you know, you got to make sure that they you check them all off. Otherwise don't do the trade. Mark: Yes, just want to get back to the COVID times when the market is frustrated off again. Allen: I don't think those days are coming back for a long time. This is the new normal, you know, where the Fed is the most important part, the Fed is.. Mark: I know inflation over there is raising interest rates is obviously a big thing in the States at the moment. But over here, we're having similar things happen as well. inflation's like interest rates, rock bottom for a long time. But now we're starting to move back up again. And it's really shaking things up. And people, I think, probably a lot of overextended over a period of time, because everything was so cheap. And now everything's starting to go back up again. everyone's freaking out. And it's obviously shaking the markets up this bear market downturn? Allen: Yep. Yep. I mean, it was, you know, we could see it coming. You know, we could, you could predict it be like, hey, when they start raising rates, stocks are gonna stop going up. They have to go down. So like, I've been predicting it, like, Yeah, we're gonna have a bear market, when they announced, hey, we're thinking of raising rates in the US, you know, when the US Fed announces that, we're thinking of raising rates, that's going to be the top, that day is going to be the top and then it's just gonna go down. And that's exactly what we've seen. So, you know, there are still there are some things that we're looking at, like, Okay, if we see this, and if we see this, we might be putting in a bottom, but I don't think we're there yet. And this volatility is something that we're gonna have to get used to the ups and downs. So, you know, that means when you have a trading plan, and it's been working, but then it stops working, because the market changes, then you as a trader, you have to trade with, you have to change with it. So you have to either trade a different plan, or get a different strategy. So, you know, like, like I said, in the financial crisis, I knew a lot of guys, and I was one of them, that was just doing iron condors all the time, every month, iron condor, easy, easy, 10% every month, but then the market changed, and the condors didn't work anymore. And there were people that didn't adjust, and they didn't change themselves. And they lost whatever money they had, they had to go back to work. You know, they just couldn't make that change and shift. So now we're in a more volatile market. So having resources on your side, you know, having a community having a coach or other people that are trading working with you, it's more important now than ever before. You know, Mark: Now, I think it's been very worthwhile today is reading that was fantastic. It's sort of revisit, there's so many things that have resonated in there with that. It's listen to podcasts, and people's success stories has been fantastic. And what you said today, certainly put a lot of thought in my head, where I definitely need to revisit a lot of those points that you've made today. I know I can do it. I know I can do it. I just just got to break through that ceiling. And I suppose I'm still going to do that. Allen: Yeah, I mean, by talking to you, I know I can tell you know, you have the desire you have everything you need, is there just there's just something there's just one or two little tweaks that we got to make up here. Once that clicks, then then it's gonna start working. That's all that's all it is. And.. Mark: I suppose to claim is definitely one of those things, the wife and the perpetrator. There are three things I've probably taken out of today's discussion. Allen: Yeah, and if you do the right thing, you know, she doesn't know she doesn't have to know how to trade. She just has to be able to ask you the questions. Like, Hey, let's go through every single trade. What's going on in the trade? And what are you going to do if it goes bad? You know, and when. And if you haven't done it, why, why didn't you change it? Mark: Follow the 25% loss   Allen: Yeah, if that's if that's the thing, then die she comes in, and she's like, Okay, what's the trade? Apple? Okay? When are you gonna get out? When I'm down 25% Okay, where are you right now? I'm down. 27% Why are you still in the trade? Okay, I'm getting out right now. And then that's it, that will keep you at your losses to around 25%. And so if your gains are 10, and your losses are 25, you should you shouldn't be profitable. You know, the numbers just worked out. Allen: Again, markets a little bit crazy right now. But once things, once thing settled down. It's gonna, you know, everything's gonna clip again. So even now, like we had, in you mentioned, the passive trading formula course, you know, we had a, we had one of our students on this week on the last call, and he said, Yeah, you know, I did nine credit spreads this month. And they all won. You know, even in this craziness, he had nine trades, they all won. So, you know, there's still people doing it, it's still working. So give me give me give me give me like to take like two things, you're going to do two steps, like two activities or two takeaways that you get that you're going to implement? Mark: I think I'm gonna revisit the pilot training, I'm definitely gonna look at that and try and utilize that more. Okay, sure. And I keep thinking the wife, I've got to bring the wife in, but I don't want to do that. That's, that's gonna be hard.  Allen: Why is it gonna be hard? Mark: Well, anyway, she's not interested for a start. But if she.. Allen: Is she interested in the money? Yes? That's it. She doesn't have to care what you're doing. You just have to ask you questions. You know, and it's just, you know, like, for as a man, as a husband, you want her to be happy and you don't want her mad at you. And that's the that's the emotion. Right? So if it's if it's the wow factor. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. It's the will factor. Oh, damn well. Okay. All right. So I hope this has helped you. I want you to stay in touch. Keep me apprised of what's going on? And if there's anything we can do, please let me know. Mark: I'm definitely going to be in a much better place. Next time we talk. JOIN OUR FREE PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://optiongenius.com/alliance  Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps. Thank you!

So a common question that we get is, when you sell a credit spread, can you get assigned? And so the idea is that, you know, if I'm in the middle of a trade, what happens? Or at the end of the trade? What happens? So there are different connotations here. So the answer really is yes and no, because in trading, nothing is black and white, right? Nothing is just on the line. So let's go through this a little bit longer. So you would think it's a very easy answer, but it's going to take a little bit of explanation. So number one, there are two types of options, right? There's the European style option. And then there's the American style option, the European style option cannot be assigned early. So you stay in a trade, nothing happens. And then at the end of the trade, you'll see what happens, right? So early assignment does not happen. These are index options, SPX rut and a lot of futures options. So you'll have to check which future option you're trading to find out if it's early assigned, or European, or American style, American style options can get assigned early. So there's a risk of that happening whenever you're trading an American style option, which are options on most stocks, just about every stock, and just about every ETF. So again, first thing you know of, is there going to be early assignment. And that is going to be determined on if it's American style or European style. Secondly, what causes early assignment? Well, if you're in the money, there's a good chance of getting assigned. And if there is very little time left. So if there's only a few days left in the trade, or until expiration, there's a good chance that you can get assigned, of course, it's not guaranteed. But if there's a lot of time, chances are very little that you will get assigned. And if you're out of the money, most likely you will never get assigned. But again, there's no guarantees. Okay? Now, a lot of people wonder is like, Okay, if I let my option, my credit spread, go into expiration, and the short strike is in the money, but the long strike is not what happens, then? Well, again, we'll say that it's a American style option. Let's say you did it on a stock or an ETF, right? So can you get assigned? And the answer is yes. If it's in the money, you will probably get assigned. Okay, now, that's not a big a fear, or a big thing happening, as you might be afraid it is. A lot of newbie traders are totally scared about assignment. And they're like, oh, no, I don't want to get that high. Sorry, I don't know what's gonna happen to my account, I might not have enough money, blah, blah, blah, yeah, don't worry about it, it's not a big deal. Even if you don't have enough money, there'll be a negative sign in your account, you'll get a margin call. And all you have to do is just get out of that stock position. So if you're assigned stock, you just sell it there. If you're short stock, then you just buy it back, and you do an exit order. And it's all taken care of the day after. So usually, if it's assigned on a Friday, let's say expiration is on a Friday, then on Monday, when the market opens up again, all you got to do is just exit. If you don't exit it, your broker will do it for you. So yeah, I mean, it won't be as good a price and you don't want that. But if that happens, then the broker will will get you out. So it's not as big a deal as people think it out to be. So again, can you get assigned with a credit spread? If it's American style, you can get assigned early, before expiration, if you go into expiration, and your short strike is in the money, most likely, you will be assigned almost all the time. Doesn't happen every single time. But usually, if it's in the money, there's a trigger at your broker, and it's it's gonna go into assignment. Now, how does that work on the money center? You know, the money side of it? Well, it depends on how much it's in the money. So let's say you sell a $5, wide spread, okay, you sell the 100. And you sell the 105. Okay, let's say it's a call spread. So you sell the 100, you buy the 105, the stock ends at 101. So it's $1 in the money. So that is how much you would lose, you would lose that $1 In the money. But you got a credit. Let's say you got a let's say you got $1 credit. So now you're still at breakeven, but you get assigned the stock. Right now you sold a call. So you have to give up the stock. Right? You have to get rid of you have to sell the stock because you sold a call and your call got assigned. You don't have the stock because it was a spread. So now you would be short 100 shares for every contract. Okay? So when the market opens, it'll show that you are short 100 shares and then you just have to buy that stock back and you'll be out. Really, you need to find out what the PNL is after you get out of that stock position. Now, sometimes what people do is they say, Hey, you know what, I don't mind buying the stock, I'll sell a put spread. And if it goes in the money, I'll buy the stock. You can do that. A lot of times you can, you can do that. And that will be fine. So depending on what you want to do, depending on how your process is, but yes, you can get assigned early in a spread. Again, if it's in the money, and there's very little time left expiration. So those are the two things to look for. Or at expiration. If it goes into the money, can you get assigned? Yes. All right. So again, it's not a big deal. It's not the craziest thing in the world, it happens sometimes, if you don't want it to happen, all you got to do is exit the trade early. And that's it, that's probably the best way to do it. You don't want.. if you're if your short strike is going to be in the money on a call, unless you want to be assigned. Just don't do it just get out early, and you'll be fine. So again, you know, I always say that, whatever you're afraid of sometimes you got to experience it once, right? So if this is something that is really causing you a hang up really doing like really scared, well, then I would say you probably do like a one point widespread. If you could find something that's a one point widespread or something, do a really small trade or short, like not very expensive stock or something and let it get assigned. Just do it. Just let it let the fear out. Let it happen, whatever you're afraid of let that happen. And you'll see what happens. You see Oh, wow. Okay, no big deal. Click, click, click out, done. You know, yes, you might lose a little bit money because you let it go too far and you're on the wrong side of the trade. But the world didn't end your style, your account didn't blow up, you know, the brokers not sending the police to knock your door down and take your house or anything like that. So no big deal. Just let the worst thing happen sometimes and you know, in a small way, not in a big way and small way. Try it out and see what happens and you'll learn something again. Thanks for Thanks for visiting and showing and watching. (He) didn't show me anything but yeah, thanks for visiting. I'll see you again in the next episode.

Do you have questions about trading? And about Options? Or maybe investing? Well, if you do, ask, and we'll get you an answer. So in our Facebook group, which is a public group, anybody can join, you can go there by going to freeoptionsgroup.com, FREE-OPTIONS with "s" group.com. You can go there. And there's a post called the post of 1000 questions. And really, the idea there is for you to ask your question and get them answered by somebody who actually trades. Because when you go online, you never know who's going to respond to you. Case in point, we got a question from Mark Baumgarten. And thank you, Mark, for your question. I'm gonna go and read that in a second. But, you know, Mark asked this question, and somebody responded to him and gave him the wrong answer, even in our group. So, yeah, you never know what answer you're gonna get. And you know, if he's gonna be accurate or not, so, you know, this post, I think it's a good way for you to get an answer. And like I said, you know, I'm making this to answer the question. So we're gonna get, do our darndest to get you an answer. One way or the other. You know, if we'll make a video about it, maybe we'll just shoot you a couple line email or message you on Facebook and say, here's the answer. But if you have any questions about trading, I'll again, can give you personalized investment advice. That's not our job, right? You have financial advisors and planners and Wealth Advisors for that. But if you have a trading question, then go ahead and post it in the program, or sorry, in the group there, and we will get you an answer. So here's my question. It says: "I have bought a leap call expiring about 24 months out and have been selling weekly calls on the leaps for the last six months. Has anyone had problems with this strategy? What are the pitfalls to watch out for? So great question. Basically, what Mark is describing is a, you can call it, it's called a couple of different names. "Poor Man's covered call", is one name, "Synthetic Covered Call" is another one. Basically, what he's doing is he's doing a covered call on a cover call is where you own 100 shares of stock, and you sell call options against it for the income, this is the same thing. But instead of having the 100 shares of stock, he's using a long dated meaning far from expiration call option. Now the one thing I don't know, Mark, is what strike your call option is at normally, with a poor man's covered call, you want to sell a covered call that is deep in the money, because you want it to not fluctuate in price as much because of the option, right? So options are not stocks, they do evaluate, they do go up and down due to volatility, the stock price will not do that as much. So there, it's definitely different. In some ways, the theory is the same, you know, you have an asset and you're selling options against that asset. In this case, it's a long call. So 24 months out, that's plenty of time, and you're doing weekly, so that's good. So you have, you know, four expirations every month, the idea here, and the goal is to get your money back on the long call. And if the stock goes up in value, hopefully that long call makes money. So you can sell that at a higher point as well as get your money back. And then I've seen people make 20, 30, 40% in a year on this type of strategy, compared to a covered call, which might make you know, 15, 20% in the same timeframe if the stock rises, so you can make more the benefit. And the thing that appeals to people is that you don't have to buy those 100 shares. So you have a greater percentage return because you have less money invested. And so this also helps people with smaller accounts. Now, you can also use margin and buy 50 shares, and then use margin to buy the other 50 shares to do it. But this works out too. I don't particularly I'm not a big fan of the synthetic covered call, because we never know what the stock is going to do. And especially in a market, you know, the cover call and the synthetic cover call are good strategies and bull markets, you know, when the stock is going higher. We are not in a bull market right now I don't know if the stock is gonna go sideways, it's gonna go up, we're gonna go down most likely, it's gonna go with whatever the market does. And my opinion is the markets probably gonna head sideways to lower from here, but it goes up and down and up and down and rallies and decline, so.. the thing is, you don't want to be called away. So you don't want your short call to get in the money, which is a problem. You don't want too much time decay to affect your long call. That could be a problem. As you know, the months go by and it gets closer and closer. Now you went out 24 months. So I mean, you paid a hefty premium for that. You paid a lot of money premium. I would look at that versus okay, depending on what the stock is, I would look at that because if there was a lot of volatility you might have overpaid, but I'm gonna assume that you didn't. Now, the pitfall is if the stock goes down, if the stock itself, the value goes down, your long call will also lose value. Now, if you own the stock, you don't have any problem, because even if the stock drops to very low, you can still hold on to it, yes, you have a paper loss, but you still hold on to it, you can still sell covered calls against it, you can still do covered calls against it. And it might take a year, two years, three years, four years, five years. But eventually, it might recover. And until then you still have that asset that you can still cash flow by selling the covered call, with the you know, the long call, you have a deadline, right? Every day that goes by the value of that asset is going down, you're losing value, so you have to recoup that. So a lot of people say, hey, you know what, I think 24 months might be a little bit too long to go out. But you know, if you're talking about, hey, I don't want the theta decay that might be working, I would definitely back test it. You know, I haven't, like I said, I'm not a big fan of these. I've tried them in the past, I haven't gone out 24 months. So I have the most I gone out was about 12 months. And so they did work if the stock was generally in an upward slope, in stocks where we were going sideways, I was losing value on the on the call option every month. And so it was it got harder and harder at the end to recover from selling call options, what money I could make what I was losing on that long call. And if the stock drops, then you're actually collecting less premium, right? Because let's say the stock drops from 100 to 50. Now each option that you're selling is also worth less, so you're getting less and less, and it doesn't recover the loss-- it doesn't recover the loss on the call. So that can be a big detriment in your pattern. So if you if you suffer a large loss, we had, you know, Facebook meta has been down 60-70%. So on a stock like that you would be down big time, you'd still be down if you own the stock, but again, you still own the stock, and there's a chance, you know, eventually it might recover and go up, and you can wait for it. With the long call, you cannot wait. So that is the biggest problem. Some of the other people were saying, hey, you know, you got to watch out for the stock to drop to zero. Well, that's, of course, you know, anything. Yeah, there was that. Steve was replying that, you know, his experience with the LEAP call moves around enough to negate the income from the weekly call. So yeah, you know, it just it fluctuates enough that the volume or the premium that you're getting from the sold calls, doesn't equal to the negative Theta decay. And there were a couple other replies here. So I think you know, that would be the biggest fallback, you know, it's a, it's a good strategy, if you don't have money in the beginning, if you're if you're just getting started, it's a good strategy to go from there. But if you do want to get into covered calls, I would probably recommend instead going to something a stock that's even cheaper. And then starting with something like the wheel, you know, where your selling points. And then if you get assigned, then you sell the covered call right at the money and use leverage and margin to do that. Other than that, I haven't seen too many professional traders or even long term traders that are not professionals rely on this strategy for a long period of time. It's more of a beginner strategy. You know, when you get started, you don't have enough capital. After that, like, I've done covered calls on stocks that I've owned for eight years, 10 years now. And part of what we say at passive trading is that you want to build a foundation, right? You want to own high quality, good stock names that pay you dividend with the synthetic covered call, you don't get the dividend. And every time there's a dividend paid out, the company loses value. And so the stock on your option will drop. It's actually supposed to drop every time you take money out right as paying a dividend. As a shareholder, you collect that dividend as an option holder, you pay that dividend. So you don't necessarily pay out of your pocket, but the value of the company drops and so your call option will drop in value. That's another one. But if there is a large downturn, you know, you're going to take a big hit, your value will go down very quickly and you will not be able to recover. If you do own the stock, then you have plenty of time to wait and let it come back up. One of the most infamous for me anyway, covered calls I did was on Las Vegas Sands. And I think I bought the stock around 17 and the stock ended Going all the way down to like $1.75 or something, you know, but I held on, I sold some of it. But the rest of it I held on and it recovered. The business was rumored to go out a bit. He was rumored to go out of business, but they they were able to save themselves. And then eventually, I sold the share somewhere like 40-$50. So yeah, I made money off of it. But yeah, it took like six years, right? With a synthetic covered call strategy, you don't have that option. So it's in terms of a bull market, great time to use it. In terms of a bear market, not so good. There are other strategies out there that you can make way better returns on, you know, I would probably look at the covered call. Now the cover call, the credit spread, would be a choice that most people would probably go to over this better returns, you're in and out, you're not stuck in the same trade for 24 months. And you're not stuck in the same stock. Right? So unless I own the stock, and I can wait it out. I don't want to be in an option trade for more than a month at a time. You know, there's just too many variables and too many things that can happen. I don't want to be long options, or even short options more than a month at a time. So that's my two cents on that. Hopefully this will help you mark, you know, it's not that it's a bad strategy, it works, it's just that there are other ones that are probably better off to accomplish what you want to accomplish. Because it's not a covered call for me. It's "Hey, I own this stock, I bought this asset that I'm going to own for a long period of time, I'm going to sell covered calls because I want to reduce my cost basis, or I just want the income", right? "I want the income coming in every month". With a synthetic covered call. It's not about income, it's about the return, you're trying to make a larger return. There are better ways with other options, strategies that you can make a better return and take maybe less risk. So that's my two cents there. Again, if you guys have questions, you know, go to free optionsgroup.com, find that post. It's called 1000 questions, and go ahead and put your question in there and we'll be happy to get your answer. Thanks, guys. Trade with the odds in your favor. Take care.

Allen: All right, everybody, welcome passive traders. I have one of my good friends with me today, Denny is going to be here. He's going to be talking about trading life in general, and everything that he's learned along the way. Denny, you know, we've, you've been in our programs for a little bit now we've seen your success. And I'm, we're friends on Facebook. So I see you with your posts from Hawaii, sitting on a beach house and all that and we're on the coaching calls, you're always you know, you're always making me jealous. You're always like, "well, I'm going to Hawaii next week, or I'm going on vacation. I'm going golfing". I'm like, Come on, man. So I'm glad that we finally got to talk, you know, thank you for thank you for taking the time to be out here and talk with us. And I can't wait to learn from you. Denny: Okay. Well, the way I you know, the way I originally got hooked up with you is I saw one of your marketing deals on the internet. And I thought, you know, well, you know, let's give this a look. And so I talked with Cory and and I said to her, hey, look, you know, I've got I said, I'd like an honest answer that if I come in and buy the program and everything, and I've got $10,000. Is it possible for me to make $2,000 a month on the $10,000? And she said, Well, we've got people doing it. She was very honest. You know, and then so so I got in on the oil deal. One. I think it's blank check trading is that was the oil is. And boy, I learned a whole lot. The first year, I was just sailing along making money hand over fist. And that was when oil was not very volatile. And it was just making, you know, moving sideways, which is perfect for if you want to trade oil futures, you know, it's perfect. Allen: Yeah. Yeah. All markets are our friend.  Denny: And, and then all of a sudden, oil shot up. And I think it was November two years ago might have been three. Now I know I've been doing it quite a while. All of a sudden, I went in. And I looked and the market had dropped. And I and I was in a position where I was going to end up getting a margin call. So I liquidated my position was $4,700 that day, and I'll be damned the next day, boom, it pops right back up. And that was the day after Thanksgiving. And then on the next call, you talked about the Friday after Thanksgiving is not a very high volume deal. And so one big guy in there can make the market he can make it drop, you can make it rise, and I fell prey to that because I didn't know but you know, you can learn from your mistakes. And I made made plenty of them. But now I make money every month. Allen: That 4700, did that wipe you out? Denny: Out? No, no, I had 10 Okay. Okay, so I started all back over. And it took me it took me damn near a year to get it to get it back. And in the meantime, you had your program on stocks. Okay, so I signed up for that. And I fooled around with the stocks for a while and I went back to oil because to me, it's a little more passive where I can put a trade on and I will look at it once a week you know, and I feel comfortable with it. But then what happened is we got get them the next chapter Benny Alan COVID here. And my advertising agency that I own I do direct mail advertising for automotive industry. And I don't know if you've been reading but the car dealers don't have any new cars. Allen: Yeah, they don't need advertising. Denny: So, I my business the first year of COVID was down 2,000,400 and some $1,000 Right now, the second year is about 2.8 million and now we're into the third year of the car shortage and so far this year I'm down $1,976,000 From where my normal years would be so I went from a mid six figure income guaranteed down I collected my Social Security check with my wife, okay. And so I go okay, let's start fooling around with your knowledge with oil and with stock options and get yourself a little income so I took $25,000 out of our savings account and put it into my tasty works account and I make on an average trading two ETFs and oil and I just started doing spreads on weekly options in oil and that I've been doing okay on it but you got to watch that a little quicker because you'll, you can get caught up in a margin call on everything pretty quick on that. But since I have no other job, okay, I can watch it. You know, I just make sure that that when I go to the golf course on my daily trip I've got my phone with me. And I can hop in on the tasty works phone app and protect myself if I need to. But what I learned most from you was paid.. Allen: So how are you doing there? So you're like, Okay, so you Alright, so I'm following the story. Right? So you were you were learning like, you've been in our program, I think two years. So three, three, okay, three. So you learn how to do the oil you were doing great. And then you had one bad day where it crashed and you basically went back to zero and you had to start over? Right so that at least you didn't lose it you had you know you get back your gains then you know COVID hit so you had to basically all hands on deck for the business trying to figure that out. Now you're at the point where like, okay, you know what, I got this stuff that I know how to do let me see if I can make some money on the side. So you've been trading oil you've been doing you said you doing 2 ETFs. So what are you doing on? Yeah, what type I do? I do SPX and (inaudible). So what strategy are you doing on those? Okay, well, Denny: Let's go back to my educational background. Okay. Okay. I have a master's degree in Environmental Engineering. My master's thesis was the statistical modeling of dam failures due to excess runoff. Okay, so I'm a numbers guy, a numbers game, I understand standard deviations, regression lines, Bayesian coordinates, you know, all of this fancy mathematics that all of these indicators that when they write them, you know, I know how they get there. So I started looking at the stuff and I started looking for patterns, because standard deviation and stuff like that is nothing other than patterns, okay, that create a probability statement of the same thing occurring, okay. So, I started looking and I found the correlation between the VIX that, you know, on the CMOE, right, the VIX, right? And what happens with it? And so, I take the VIX and say it was it traded at 2588 and open this morning at 2588. I can't I can't remember exactly what it is. I go in, and I divide the VIX by 16. Now, why do I divide by 16? Allen: I have no idea. Denny: There are 256 trading days in the market. Right? The square root of 256 is 16. Okay. So I take the 68 divided by 16. And that gives me a percentage that's 87% accurate as to the upward or downward movement of SPX or rut on a daily basis. From what it opens that not what it closed that yesterday. But when the opening bell dings like, this morning, yesterday, right? Close to 1806. Okay. But this morning, when the bell rang, it was 1843 just for a short period of time until the CPI stuff caught up in the rear end dropped out of it. Okay, right. But so what I do is I go in and take what it opens at, and take the percentage and what it opens at, say it's one point it was 1.61 today, so you take 1.61% of the opening bell, and you subtract that from what it opened that and you add it to what it opened that and you gives you a high and a low rate. Okay? Allen: Say that again, do make doing so. Okay. The VIX divided by 16. Okay, then what do you do that? Denny: Okay, you multiply that the 1.61% Okay? Times when it opened that, okay, and that comes out to roughly what, close to 30 bucks. I don't have my calculator here. Okay. So you would take, you would take it and if it opened at 1843, you take the 30 off of that, that would be 1813. And then you take the 1843 and add the 32, which would be 1873. So that means that you've got an 87 point something percent chance that the right is going to close somewhere between the 1813 and 1873. Okay, okay, so now, we wait until the Between 1030 and 11 o'clock central time, okay. And the reason that I wait until then, is if you look, the market goes in and opens it bounces up and down. And if it's on the way up between 1030 and 11 o'clock you have what what usually happens and happens most days is a mid morning reversal of some sort where people are in taking profits or, or getting rid of losses. So okay. And at that point, it gives you a direction of the momentum of the market for the rest of the day. And the rest of the day barring no news or anything, it pretty much goes sideways or slightly up or slightly down. And I go in and sell a put put spread or a call spread at the bottom or the top that was ranges away from the way the momentum of the markets going. And I do that on a daily basis. Allen: So if you think is going down you sell calls if you think it's going up you sell puts at the end of that range. So is that like you said 87% So what is that like as like one and a half standard deviation?  Denny: One and a half standard deviations?  Allen: Okay. All right. But but why do you do the VIX because what does the VIX have to do with the rut? The VIX is based on the VIX, SPX the VIX Denny: Gives you the volatility, the market as a whole. Allen: Right. But it has to do with the volatility of the SPX, the RUT has its own.. Denny: Okay, okay. But the RUT is based on 2000 stocks, okay. And vix takes into account the volatility of what's happening in the 2000 stocks, the Dow Jones and the standards and poors. The way they calculate the bets, Allen: Okay, because I thought the VIX was just only on the SPX the 500. The large ones. Denny: Yeah, yeah. Well, but it is, but they just weren't right. There's yeah, there's a there's a correlation between what's happening in SPX and what happens in RUT. Okay. Allen: Yeah, they're, yeah, okay. Right. They are correlated. So it just it just happened correlated workout, right?  Denny: And it's just and it's just like if you want to see what's going on with gonna happen for disaster time, with the SPX. Go in and look at what's going on with QQQ. If QQQ is dropping, you better watch yourself on the SPX, with about, I forget what percentage of the SPX is Fang stocks now? Right? Yeah. Okay. Allen: So how long? How long have you been doing this? Denny: I've been doing for about four months. Allen: Four months. Okay. And you back tested it? Denny: Yeah. Oh, yeah. I spent a couple, couple $100 and got some good back testing software and back tested it. And if you go through the thing and wins about 80 some percent of the time, okay. Allen: And how much are you trying to make on each trade? Denny: Okay, I'm trying to make 4% Three and a half to 4% on a trade, okay. Allen: And these are weekly trades or daily trades daily. So you want the SPX, Denny: The SPX, the SPX has a closing every day. Okay, Allen: So these are at the close. Yes. Okay. Denny: And the rut has Monday, Wednesday and Friday. So I only trade the rut on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Allen: Cool. So now your results been so far? Denny: That I'm doubling my money every month. Allen: Wow. 100% every month? Denny:  When Putin cut the pipeline off, okay. And the market and the rear end fell out of the market that day. I was at my computer when it started happening. And I closed everything out. If if I hadn't closed it out, I probably would have lost about three or 4000 that day, but I don't you know, what I do, Allen is I take a future value calculator, okay. And if this month, I want to make $10,000. I plug in $10,000. And I put three and a half percent of $10,000 times 21 or 22 trading days. And I print it out. And it tells me how much I need to make each day in order for that to occur. And then I keep a spreadsheet that I'm plus or minus off of the predicted number that I was supposed to be asked. And I adjust my trading from there now like right now for this month. So far. I'm up 900 bucks as a closing day. So I'm actually today is the 13th. Yeah, and I'm actually to where the tweet where I should be on the 20th of them. month. Okay, so if I think the markets going to be a little volatile or, or there might be some bad news coming, I can lay off, okay, and skip a day and see what's happening. Okay. That's where what you taught me is the patience. Is that it? You don't have to do it every day. Allen: Right? Right. So okay, so you're saying that you're doubling to 25? Every every month or no, Denny: Not doubling how much I want to make God, I got 25 in there, but you're trying to make you want to make if I want to make 10 This month, I put 10 up. And with the whole idea that I'm could lose all 10,000 of it. Allen: Okay so you're only using 10. Denny: Yeah, but I'm only using 10. If I lose, I lose the 10 then, you know, I'm a big boy. You know, we try again next month. Allen: So like, today's the 13th, you're only up 900. So you still got a ways to go before you get to the goal. Denny: No, no, I'm up 900 over how much I should be up. Allen: So you've already made the 10. And you made another 900? Denny: No, no, no, no. Oh, hold on a second. Okay. Okay, I started out, okay, with 10,000 in the account, okay. And I go to a future value calculator and I plug in, say three and a half percent. Okay. And I plug in 21 days, okay. Yeah. Well, that'll, at the end of the month, if I do that I shouldn't have around $21,000. Okay. And what the future value calculator says is that on day two, I should have 10,300 and some dollars on it. Okay, and then day three, I should have close to 10 Seven. Okay. So I go down what the day is what it says where I should be to achieve the deal. And I'm up 900 Okay, over that. Allen: I say okay, okay. Okay, so you're on pace. You're better you're better than doing on pace to double Denny: Yeah, right. I'm, yeah, I do what's called a phase and betting deal. Okay. Yeah. And so.. Allen: So that's what you're doing on the SPX on the RUT, and you're also doing oil. So how do you put in oil? Denny: I don't know oil, I buy maybe two to three contracts okay of the weeklies now, okay, and do a credit spread on them and try to make, you know, 4 or 500 bucks on the credit spreads and let them expire worthless. Okay. And, and then and the only and I'm only trying that because I know how to make money doing the monthlies and, and getting in at 45 days and, and monitoring it. So I'm a natural born tanker. Okay. Right. And, and, and it can cost me money at times. Okay. But, you know, I guess I'm fortunate that I'm not looking where my next meal is coming from. Allen: Right. Cool. So like today, you know, we have SPX is down 4.3% Today, big moves, they move down. So I'm assuming based on what you said, when you got in on SPX had already started moving down, so you sold calls today? Denny: Yeah, I sold calls I sold about 4090 and 4095. Allen: Okay, and then basically, you didn't have any trouble today? Denny: No and yesterday, yesterday went up. Okay. But when I went when I entered it, it was going sideways. And it was more advantageous on the calls yesterday. So I sold 4185 and 4190 yesterday, okay. And, you know, they they expired worthless okay. Allen: And is there any time you do both puts and calls? Denny: Yes. Yep. It looks like it's going absolutely sideways. Like I say, enter my trade between 1030 and 11. And I usually go to the golf course about one o'clock. But before I go to the golf course, I pull my account up and I look at it and the pit looks like it's going sideways. Then I create an iron condor and I go in and sell puts. Allen: And then what about a stoploss you have any? Denny: Yeah, I put stop losses in on everything. Allen: What percent? Like how do you know when to get out? Denny: I put 40% Okay. Allen: So 40% loss. Denny: Yeah. Allen: Okay. Cool. And so you're pretty happy with that? Denny: Yeah, you know, until it burns me I guess I will you know, I'm waiting. I'm waiting for it. I'm you know, I've done this long enough now that I know that nothing is failsafe. Allen: No, but you're doing this in a time that it is pretty volatile. You know? I mean vix today was at 27. But yeah, even so the VIX is kind of low for what's going on and all the stuff that's happening with the Fed. And, you know, we're still in a bear market. So we're still getting these wild bull market, not not a bull market rally, but a, like a whipsaw rally to go up, and then we, we hit back down on a dime. And so it still it has been very up in Downy and so well, having a you know, the strategy that you're just like, hey, I'm not gonna, I'm just gonna play day by day and not worry about at night. I think that makes a lot of sense. Denny: Yeah. You know, and, you know, I am a very, very avid reader. Okay, so I read Barron's, I read the bestsellers, Business Daily, and stuff like that, not because I think that they are going to enlighten me on anything. But what I have read is, there's a lot of guys in there that tell us about the history of the market. Okay. And for every bear market, you know, usually lasts nine to 18 months. And there's usually four to five mini rallies in there that everyone is calling the bottom of the bear market, and then it drops again, you know, and so, if we understand that, you don't get too overly enthused with the rising SPX or a Dow. Allen: Yeah, yeah. It's, I mean, that comes with experience or like you said, you know, learning and education. Cool. So what do you see going forward? Like, what's, what's next for you? Denny: Man? You know, I just enjoy doing this stuff. You know, I mean, you know, I'm in the twilight twilight of my life. You know, I'm 76 years old. Man. I'm a real young 76. I mean, I'm very mobile. I play, play golf every day. Right now, while we're speaking. I'm in Duncanville, Texas at my grandson's tennis match. He just, he just won his doubles match. And so about a half hour he'll start playing singles. So we'll watch that but.. Allen: Yeah it's a little how, I tell you that. Denny: Yeah, 95 right now here but you know, my normal week is yesterday was Monday I was in junior high volleyball and Flower Mound, which is 30 miles away from where we live. But today I'm at varsity tennis in Duncanville. That's not bad. That's close to where I live. Tomorrow. I got off then Thursday. I got junior varsity tennis. That's a home meet. And then Friday night, I've got got varsity football and Flower Mound. Okay. That's almost every day of the week. I'm doing something with the grandkids. Allen: You're going golfing every day and you're still trading every day? Denny: Yeah, and I'm trading every day. No, and you know, thanks to you. You've shown me ways that I don't have to sit there and stare at a computer. To make money. Allen: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, that's not the I really like what you're doing. I like your style. You know, it's like, okay, you know, put a trade on, let it work, and then go enjoy my life. Denny: Yeah. Doesn't work. So what, you know, there's another day. Allen: Yeah, but the return is good enough that, you know, you get compensated, even if there are losses, the you're, you're playing with bigger numbers. So it's like, hey, if I can make 100%, then yeah, I can lose 20, 30, 40%. That's okay. Yes. Because I can still make much more than that, you know, in the stock market. They're like, Oh, wait, you know, you shouldn't lose more than five or 10% of your account? Well, you're only making 10% a year. So obviously, you don't want to lose more than that. But if the numbers are bigger than you can take bigger, bigger, bigger bumps, so.. Denny: And I'll tell you, I'll tell you what I use I still I still use your option trading Google Spreadsheet. Allen: For the credit spreads, yeah. Denny: Yeah, I use it every day. Allen: Yep, makes it simple, right? Just calculate Yeah. Denny: The only thing is I went in and change changed the 25% to 40%. Allen: But I like it because it's like simple, you know, and I'm sure people listening to this. They're gonna be like, Okay, what do I do again? So it's like, just gonna recap. You know, you wake up in the morning, you see where the SPX and the RUT are opening, right? Yeah, take a look at the VIX. You divided by 16 and then you add that.. Denny: That's your that's your percentage movement in the ETL. Okay, that's Allen: A percentage move of the SPS. Okay. So you multiply that percentage by the open. By the Open, and then that you find your range. Denny: That will give you the that'll give you the movement, which, so say it's 1843 and say, say your your divide by say, say it's say VIX is 32. Okay, okay. Okay, you divide by 16. That's two to 2%. Okay, so say.. Allen: Okay that's percentage. Okay, yeah. Denny: 2%. So say right, opened at 1800. Today, you take 2%, that's $36. So then you take 36 off of 1800. Okay. And, you know, that puts you down to 1764. And then you add 36 to the 1800. And that gives you 1836 yeah. Allen: We have a 87% probability of this range working out for the day, it's not for the month, whatever it is for the day. And that works out to be about 1.5 standard deviations. So we've got the range, that's about one and a half standard deviations, that's 87% probability about that. And for you, it's been working pretty good. And you set it at a 40% stop loss. Oh, and then the other thing is that you get into the trade about an hour and a half an hour, hour and a half after the market opens. And so.. Denny: And the reason of the hour, hour and a half is it took me a while to realize this, the market tends to at times gap up or gap down. Okay. And then about an hour to an hour and a half later, it kind of self corrects itself. Allen: Sometimes that Yeah, yeah. But they say, you know, the opening bell is usually amateur hour. And so yeah, I mean, I could have told you that I don't trade the first hour of the day, you know, markets open markets open about 8:30 here Central time, so I don't trade before 10 o'clock, which is exactly an hour and a half. So I do that.. Denny: Yeah, that's when I'm looking at the momentum indicators and everything.  Allen: And then you let your trades expire? Denny: Yes. Allen: Okay. So you got that going on. And then.. Denny: Well the good thing about it is trades good, you can't get out of it anyway, because you've made all your money by about two o'clock and go in and try to close the trades. It says that say you get the message just some of the bid ask or zero. Allen: So, okay, so you got that going on. And you got the oil, weeklies gone. So that keeps you busy. That keeps you diversified. You're making decent amount. You're happy. That's awesome. I love it. That's that's what this is all about, you know, Denny: Keeps going to Hawaii. Yeah. You know, Allen: Yeah life is good, right? You're hanging out with grandkids you got you still have the house in Hawaii, you go on vacations, everyone, wherever you feel like it. So I like it.. Denny: In two weeks. I'll be in New York City. Allen: That's great. Cool.  Denny: Going to see Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden. Allen: Very nice. So did you do any kind of trading before you came across us? Denny: Yes. And I lost my rear end. Allen: Oh, no, that's not good. Yeah. Denny: I was way too aggressive. Okay, and not patient. And that's when I was gonna get out of the equity market completely. When I saw your oil deal, okay. And, you know, and I figured I had a better chance at oil, because it's something that we all need. And it's something that's not going out of style. Even if we go to all electric cars. What people don't understand is that two thirds of the pharmaceuticals and all of the plastic comes tomorrow. And that's none that's going away. Nope. There's going to be a demand. Allen: Yeah. In fact, you know, even with everything with the more solar and the more wind power they bring on, the world is still using more oil now than we have, like 10 years ago, the demand continues to increase, just goes up and up and up every year. So yeah, it's not going anywhere, anytime soon. So we're going to continue to trade even if demand starts going down. It's such a big market that we'll be trading oil for, you know, for the next 20-30 years.  Denny: Yeah Allen: That's, I mean, it's a different so basically, the you are trading equities but then when you found out and you learn about how we sell options, that kind of really flipped the switch?  Denny: Yeah that intrigued me. Okay. First of all well, my background before I got into the advertising thing was I owned a car dealership. Okay, I owned a Ford dealership. If you know anything about car, guys, we're super aggressive and we love leverage. And when I saw options, and I saw the leverage available, I said, this is my ticket. Allen: So then, why are we still at 25,000? Why don't we go more? Denny: You know, I've got a, I've got a wife. Okay, that funny story, okay? All donations came in and bought me out. I guess it's 28 years ago now. And I got a very sizable check. And the day I got that check, my wife reached over and she grabbed that check. And she said, seed money only comes once in a lifetime. And this is going for our old age and for fun. I go, Okay. Well, one of the ways that I've stayed married 52 years, is that I always get the last word. "Yes, dear". So, she, in the money, she basically watches it, okay. And, and she thinks that, you know, a lot of what I'm doing, although I'm making money and stuff like that, on on a basis is a little bit too risky for her, her deal. And so that, you know, that's what she has given me to play with. Okay. Consequently, I have pointed out to her recently, that because of that money, she's not had to buy any groceries out of her retirement account. For her Social Security check. I played for all the plane tickets wherever we go. This trip to New York. I've got $1,000 in Hamilton tickets invested. And she didn't have to pay for any of that. So don't you think it's about time that we started looking at adding more to that, you know, so that I think by the end of the year, she might, you know, lead me forward a little bit more. Allen: Do you have other investments and stuff elsewhere? Yeah, yeah, money's coming in. So it's not like you need this to live off of   Denny: No, no, no, no. Man, like, it's like I said that when my COVID that stopped an annual mid six figure income. I mean, on a normal week, before COVID. I was, well, on a normal month, I was doing 800,000 to 1 million pieces of direct mail a month. But that so you know, it's a good sized business, okay. With annual revenues, anywhere from two and a half to three $3 million. And, and I'm a one man show. I have no employees in that business. You know.   Allen: So it's still running, you still run that business? Yeah.   Denny: Yeah. In fact, I just got a job today. I mean, you know, they're, they're doing  infrequent, you know, I mean, you know, I might have made 30,000 bucks for the whole year doing that, you know, which, you know, that used to be a week sometimes, you know,   Allen: You know, so let me ask you this. Are we going to see below MSRP prices anytime soon?   Denny: No, no, no.   Allen: How about MSRC? Like, I'm seeing prices that are like way above like, double MSRP. Yeah, I'm not paying.   Denny: As soon as the chip shortage is alleviated, and they start to get inventory sometime in the next 18 to 24 months. They'll have inventory again. Oh, wow. But I don't know if you've seen what's happened to the used car market?   Allen: No, it's taken off like crazy.    Denny: Yeah, I mean, you know, my wife has macular degeneration now. And so, leasing a car is unless you have a business purpose. leasing a car is a bad investment. Okay. My wife had macular degeneration, we didn't know if she was going to, they were going to be able to get it stopped and whether she was going to be able to continue to drive. So the car that I'm sitting in right now is her car. Okay. And we leased it, and it had a $21,000 residual on it at the end of the lease period. And we were, you know, we were gonna turn it in. And then I pulled up what the value on it was, the retail value on this car was 31,000. So I went down to the Ford dealership, and broken but check for the car. And they can't want me to lease another one. I know. Thank you, you know, and so and that's happened all throughout the industry. And it's consequently forced the US car prices way up. And so what's going to happen two fold things going to happen. Matt, real quick, I know that you know, either way saw your day on this, but this is interesting. Once the inventory, get levels get up, all these car dealers that have these massive use car inventories are going to have so much water in their inventory. And water is excess pricing to what the current market book value on the vehicles is. In other words, if you can't sell it for what you own it for, you're gonna lose money. Right? And, and a lot of these big-- you live in Houston, I live in Dallas, a lot of these big dealerships that have two and 300 guards in the ground, are going to have a million and a half to $2 million in water in their inventory. And they're going to have to get rid of them. Okay. And so the rear end will fall out of the used car market. And you know, so right now consumers are getting screwed on automobiles. But the dealer has his day of reckoning coming due.   Allen: Yeah, but if you need a car now, you're screwed.   Denny: You need a car now you're in trouble. A buddy of mine went looked at a Subaru Outback with 19,000 miles on it, that it was a year and a half old. And they wanted $35,000 for it.  Allen: Yeah, yeah, don't get in a wreck. I mean, my car I've been thinking about my wife is like, can you just get a new car, please? I'm like, No, I like it. You know, I'm trying to get it up to 200,000. You know, miles on it. Yeah, trying to get there. I mean, it's fine. It works. You know? It's comfortable. It looks fine. From the outside. Everything is comfortable. It works. You know, it's nice Toyota keeps running. But she's like, can you get some bigger? I'm like, Alright, so we looked around, and I'm like, Man, I don't want to pay this stuff. You know, it's not even. It's not like we can't afford the payment or anything. It's just from where it used to be to where it is. Now. There's no difference. The car is the same. You just charged me a whole lot more for no reason. Just because yeah, there's a you can. So yeah, yeah, no, I don't want to play that. Denny: Yeah, their day of reckoning is coming.  Allen: We'll be alright. Well, do you have any advice for our listeners, people that are learning and trying to figure out like you found your way, right, you found your niche in trading, and it took you I don't know how many years you were trading for two years. But how many years? Were you looking before? Before that? Denny: Oh five years, I probably probably five years before I found you. Okay. And two years, two years of.. Allen: Learning and testing Denny: Not doing what you told me to do. And getting and getting burned, to realize, to realize that the things that you teach patients, you know, just the little thing and Think or Swim your standard deviation deal, you know, saying, Oh, you've got a red line there. That's not good. You know, just those little things, you know. So the biggest advice, the best advice I could give to an individual, be patient. Don't try to hit homeruns. You know, the age old adage, pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered, is so true. It's like one of my rules on the SPX. You know, a $5 spread. Okay, a $5 spreads on the SPX is 500 bucks. Okay. So if I'm trying to make 4% to 5% a day, that means I'm looking to get 20 cents. On my credit spread. That's it 20 cents. Okay. And if you look at what the delta is on that, it's usually 12 to 13, which puts me in a real advantageous position. You know, so don't get greedy. Just let time be. let time be your friend. Allen: Right? Yep. And that actually might be a shortcut for you. So you don't even have to worry about the VIX. You just go in to get the 12 Delta.  Denny: I'm in the process of doing about a year study on this, okay. Because I back tested it using the Delta. Okay. And some wild market swings, it comes out that it doesn't work out. Right. Okay. Yeah. Allen: But the thing is, it's hard to back test it because you're saying that you go in after looking at it visually and being like, Okay, I want to be on this side or I want to be on that side. You can't do that. Unless you do it manually yourself with a like a software that I like the one I use where you got to go in day by day by day. If you're one of those programs where you just put in the numbers and you Just let it run, it doesn't work. Denny: You've got to plug them in yourself. Yeah. And it's time consuming. Especially if you're doing dailies. Yeah. Because you got you got 256 for every year. Allen: Yeah. And I mean, like, you know, when we when we back test a new strategy, it's like I want to I want you know, a good 10 years of data, you know, I want to see the the ups and the downs and the flats and the recessions and the bulls market and everything. I want to know that it's going to work long term, not just for a couple because I've been burned on that too. You know, I, I back tested different strategies like the butterfly on McDonald's and a butterfly on a Walmart and they worked great for five years. For five years, they made money. I went in there with guns blazing. You know, I took like every money out of money I had at the time at $25,000 on one trade, just want Dre put it all and boom, blew up. And I'm like, what happened? Oh, my God, man. It was a fluke. I'm gonna do it again. Next month, next month, boom, blew up again. You know.. Denny: Those butterflies and iron condors look great. You sit there and you look at the leverage you've got on that you go, Whoa, you know, but you know, you got to think, why isn't everyone doing it? There's a reason. Allen: So, there's lots of little tweaks behind it. Yeah, yeah. This has been fun. Denny, I'm gonna let you go. I appreciate you. And if there's anything you need, please reach out to us. We're always here for you. And thank you for sharing your wisdom. Denny: Okay, well, you know, I mean, I just want to tell you and your listeners that your program has definitely taught me a lot and made me a lot successful. Faster than I ever would have been. Allen: That's awesome. That's good to hear. Make my day. I love it. I love it. JOIN OUR FREE PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://optiongenius.com/alliance  Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps. Thank you!

What is an accredited investor? How do I become one? And why do I want to become one? It's a great question. So let's talk about the why before we get into what it is and how you become one. So as you know, you know, we talk a lot about trading, we talk a lot about passive trading, investing in the stock market selling options. But the goal, the long term goal is to not be a trader. It doesn't make sense, right? Like, what are you talking about, the goal is not for you to be a trader for the rest of your life, unless you want to, right? Now, if you look at the passive trading manifesto, and the goals of passive trading, there are three freedoms that we're trying to accomplish. Financial freedom, time, freedom, and choice, freedom. And choice freedom gives you the choice of doing what you want, when you want. And if that means that you don't want to trade, then you don't have to trade. Right? Now, if you do decide to continue to trade because you want to, then that is perfectly fine. That's your choice and more power to you. But if you don't want to, then you shouldn't have to. So that's where this accredited investor comes in. Because the point is, for us to increase not only our monthly income, basically, you know, the more income you have coming in, when you have money coming in, that pays for all your bills, you can essentially retire and you have financial freedom. But we need to also increase our net worth, so that we can have other opportunities to investing, where we don't have to be active or you don't have to be trading, even though it's called passive trading, you're still doing it. Right?  Now, it's a lot less active than day trading, or stock trading or any of that stuff. But you still have to still do something. There's nothing totally, totally passive, even, you know, regular passive investing is still takes time and energy and learning and all that other stuff, stress, a lot of it. But that comes with the territory. So the goal as the way I see it, and the way I'm trying to live it and I try to teach it to my students, is that we want to use trading as a very safe, but very quick way to get us to first financial independence, where we have enough money coming in from our assets that pay for all of our expenses. Once you get there, then you are not beholden to a job, then you're not both beholden to the economy, your recession doesn't matter, right? Because you have enough money coming in, you have a skill, you can go into the market, and you can extract money, at will. And that's what we teach. That's what passive trading is all about. But once you get to that point, you want to keep going further, and you want to become what's called accredited investor. So what is that? Well, an accredited investor, according the SEC, is someone who has either $1 million in net worth, not including their house. So if you're a millionaire, and you don't count your house, you're an accredited investor officially. Or the other thing is, the other criteria is that you've made if you're by yourself, you've made $200,000 In the last two years, and you're going to keep doing that. So your income is over $200,000 a year by yourself, or if you're married, it has to be 300,000 for the both of you over the last two years, and going into the future. Now, look at the numbers. If you're making $300,000 a year, and you're not worth a million dollars, that's a problem, you should probably work on that first before talking about whatever we're doing here, right, your your expenses are way too high, you need to worry about that, first get your debt down or get your build on or whatever it is. And then you know, get to that million dollar net worth requirement. Now again, we're not counting our primary residence. So if you have a business, if you have other properties, if you have cars, you've shoved jewelry, if you have notes or anything that you have anything valuable antiques, all that stuff counts in this million dollar net worth criteria, and it's basically up to you, you know, so if you think something is worth $100,000, even if you can't sell it, but it's still worth 100,000 You can't be crazy about it. You can't say well, you know this pen, I want a million dollars for this pen. No, that's not real, right. Not realistic. But if you have something that's illiquid, something that is valuable but illiquid, maybe it's like a baseball card collection or antiques or something like that, that you know, is worth money but only to the right buyer. You can still qualify that as an asset. Now why do we want to do this because there are certain investments that are only open to you if you are an accredited or above investor. So there's that accredited investor list and I are the criteria that I told you about. And then there's also a couple other criteria above that one is called qualified. The both of them are called qualified. They're called different things. But the step above accredited is 2.1 million in net worth. And then after that, it's 5 million in net worth. So first, go for the accredited, that's the goal, then 2.1, and then 5. Okay, once you get there, a lot more things open up to you. So if you want to invest in private placements, or in real estate deals, or in syndications, you have to be, in most cases, at least an accredited investor. Now, the reason you want to do that is because these investments, while they don't make as much money as we can, trading passively, it still is a passive investment. So you're not having to do any work. Right? So, for example, I was looking at a investment recently, that is a real estate development, basically, this guy wants to create or build 200 apartments, and he needs the money for the down payment, the rest he is going to get from the loan. But he's got a construction company that plans to get the land, he's got everything ready to go. But he needs investors to come in and bring in a certain amount of money for those investors, he's going to pay them a piece of the whole deal based on his projections of what it's going to cost. And by the time it's built, what's his going to be able to sell for what is going to be worth then if they refinance, it should be about a 20 - 25% yearly return on the money. So you'll make sure if it's like a three year deal, you make 25% 25% 25%. If it's a four year deal, you'll make your money back. So whatever your money you put in, you get it back now, if you're not accredited, you can't get in the deal. Right? So that's why we want to get to be accredited. And for me, yes, I could put more money into my trading more money into the stock market. But at a certain point, when you already have seven figure plus accounts, you kind of feel like you know what, maybe I don't want to put more money in the stock market right now. Right? If all if the market is going crazy, and everything's going up, then yeah, you can go put it all in there. But in a time, like we have going on right now, you know, in mid 2022, markets are down, Fed is raising rates recession here, not here coming, who knows. But things are more up to down Z for the stock market. So yeah, I'd like to be in diversify into something else where I don't have to worry about it, it's not up to me, and I have to do any work, that money should be coming in. And of course, I have to stay on top of it, do my research, and all that stuff. So it's not completely passive. But it's more passive than me trading. So that's why I encourage all of you to become accredited investors. Now, in order to do that, sometimes, depending on the fund or the investment that you're going into, you know, there's no one place where you go and they give you a certificate or anything, it's not like that. But depending on the investment, you might have to bring a letter from your CPA, or your financial advisor or whatever, yeah, this guy's got over a million in assets. In some cases, you might be able to sell, verify. So they just ask you a question like, Hey, are you accredited? Yes or no, you click the box, and you're good. And they don't ask any more questions. So depending on type of fund regulations, and all that, we'll be able to tell if you need to self verify, or if you need an outside person to do it, because it's more painful. A lot of CPAs don't want to do it. Financial Planners don't want to do it. So more and more people are going to the self verification route, or, you know, if you have just one large account or whatever that has the money in it, you show the money, like there's my statement, boom, done. So that is what an accredited investor is. That is why you want to be one. Now, how do you become one? Well, if you're not one already, you know, it's very simple. Cut down on your debt and make as much as you can. And if you're having, like, if you can invest in yourself, you can get into you know, get a better certificate or something of learning some some specific skill that you can specialize in, you'll make more money at your job. If you can't do that, then passive trading will get you there eventually, depending on how much you have to start with and what strategies you use. So that's you know, the passive trading is the vehicle to get you to financial independence that's the first stop and then after that, it's like "Okay, now let's keep building a nest egg let's keep making more and more Grow, grow grow the pie", so that we can get to accredited investor, which is 1 million in net worth. And then that's when you can think about okay, let me diversify. Let me put some money in a crypto fund if you want to, even though you can't do it without being accredited, even though you because it's me more risky, right? So that's why they have these restrictions, these things are for sophisticated investors, and you could lose all your money. But you could do that even in the stock market, but whatever the government does, and so, you know, maybe you want to be in a fund that, like I said, builds apartments, or owns a commercial shopping center, or owns a mobile home park, or anything like that, where you know, you have other incomes coming in. So remember back to, I think it's like episode number two of the podcast, which is the five finger income theory where you got to have five sources of income. So this could be, you know, once you get to that accredited status, you could set up your investments in different funds in different parts of the country where that money is coming in. So it's a little bit spread out a little bit diversified. So I don't think you need to do it right away. Because most of these funds, they do require, you know, maybe 50,000 100,000 is average, but 100,000 requirement, you know, to invest in the Fund, some are more I've seen, some that are like 250,000, for an investment. So depending on the fund, depending on the risk, all that has worked to play, but you got to put in a substantial amount in to invest in it, sometimes you start getting money back, within six months, sometimes like the development deal. If I invest in it, I won't see any money until the thing is built three years later, or they'll probably build it out slowly and start renting them out as fast as they can. But we're still looking at about a year and a half, without any return any money coming back. Right. So you have to be in it for a little bit longer term. So that's it, that's an accredited investor, again, just to be sure, you got to have a net worth of a million dollars, not counting your house, that's for married people, as well as individual people. And then if you are going for the income route, you gotta be making separately individually at least 200,000 For the last two years, and got to be able to know that you're going to do it forward. Or if it's with a spouse, it's 300,000 for the last two years income and the same this year and going forward. So that is an accredited investor qualified, you know, it's 2.1. Basically, that's it, you just have to have a net worth of 2.1, not counting your house, that would be the next step. And then that will allow you to even more broader categories, certain funds that you can't get into as accredited, you have to be qualified. So that's a higher bar. And then there's another one after that, which is even higher bar 5 million. At that point, you can basically invest in anything you want. But that's what that is. And hopefully we can help you get there. If you have any questions, please always email us help@optiongenius.com. And whatever we can do to help you get to that accredited investor status, some of you are already there, if you are there, and you are looking to diversify, and if you do want to say, hey, what other things can I invest in, I am always looking at stuff. And so I've put together a list of people that are also interested, and we'll share the deals with them. So when I find something that I like, you know, like, Hey, this is a really good deal. This is a good return, the fee structure is great. And there's not a lot of risk here. The operator is good, you know, is vetted. I do all that research for myself anyway. So I can just share that information with you. If you're interested, you know, email us help@optionsgenius.com and and we will get you some information. Just tell us what you want to invest in and then we'll we'll be able to separate it out and let you know or you can go to I believe it's optiongenius.com/passiveincome. And there's a form there, you can just fill it out, tell us what you want to invest in, and we can send you the right information. So again, that's optiongenius.com/passiveincome or just email us or just reach out to us and we'll get you on the list. But we need to find out a little bit more of what you want to invest in. Okay, so there we go. That is accredited investor and we will see you later. Take care and trade with the odds in your favor. JOIN OUR FREE PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://optiongenius.com/alliance  Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps. Thank you!

Hey there, passive traders How you doing? I got something really, really exciting for you today, if you'd like to have really, extra money, free money without having to do anything, that's what we're all about, right? Passive income, passive trading. This is really something I just came across this, I don't understand why I didn't know about this sooner. I just can't imagine all the money that I've left on the table over the years. I mean, I knew that this was happening. And I knew this was done. I just didn't know that us, individual investors at home guys, I didn't know that we could do this. And so I had to make this deal right away. And I had to get this information out there. So you could basically turn this setting on in your account and start making money today. Okay, that's how that's how cool it is. There's nothing to buy. There's nothing to do there. I mean, basically, it's, you have stock in your account, your broker will pay you extra money for having that stock in your account. That's simply what it is. So, I mean, let me just get into it. Okay? I'm flabbergasted. I'm speechless. No, I'm not, I'm talking. So I'm not speechless. But still, I'm really like, shocked. I call it the sticky to Wall Street stock Income program, because that's what we're doing. We're sticking it to Wall Street, we're sticking into the man. Now, look, this is our works. Normally, when we buy a stock, right? It goes up, we make money, that's what we want, you buy it, and then it goes up and you sell it or, you know, your passive trading. So you don't want to sell it, you do want to get dividends from it, you still want to sell options on it, and you want to make money off of it. You don't want to sell it ever, really, because it's just it's a it's an asset, they just want to cashflow. But this is another way to do that. So you buy the stock, it goes up, you make money. But if you think the stock is gonna go down, well, obviously, you can short the stock, right? And that's what hedge fund guys do. That's what Wall Street guys do. The big banks, the institutional traders, that's what they do all the time. They are shorting stock. Well, in order to short the stock, they don't own it, you can't short something you own right, because they would lose value and you own it. So that's bad. They instead they turn around and they borrow the stock from other brokers on Wall Street. So if they want to short a stock, they got to go to a different broker and say, Hey, I need this many shares this, I need this many shares this. And in order to do so they have to pay money, they actually pay interest to the broker that they're borrowing from. Now, if you go to your I know this, this works on Thinkorswim. If you go to the main page, where you type in the symbol, and you see the all the information, it'll tell you if the stock is easy to borrow, or hard to borrow. And that's what tells you how much volume there is and how much ability the hedges have to borrow this stock. Right? If it's easy to borrow, then they can go to any borrow and they can get it and they'll pay a lower interest rate. If it's hard to borrow, they have to pay a lot higher interest rate. Okay, so that's the really cool part. Because if we have that stock, we could lend it and collect that interest. That's right. So the hedge is they have to learn, they have to pay whoever they're borrowing their stock from the payment, it depends on the stock and how much they need to stop, right. If it's hard to borrow, they're gonna pay more. But any borrowing that they do, for us is really extra money. So yes, if you have stock in your account, it's just sitting there, you turn this feature on in your account, click, or I mean, there's no application, but you fill it out, and you get approved for this, your broker will take that stock from you whenever somebody wants to borrow it, and they will pay you interest. Now, the cool part is nothing changes in your account, nothing changes, you can still sell it whenever you want, you're not locked in. If there's a dividend, that money will still be given to you. You can sell options against it. The only requirement is that you own the stock 100% no margin. So if you own the stock 100% no margin. You can do this. Okay now, against the details a little bit, but here's what it's called. If you want to research it, you want to look it up, you want to call your own broker and find out more I think you should because it's like free money right? At Interactive Brokers. It's called the stock yield Enhancement Program, stock yield enhancement program, because that's basically what it does. They're giving you more money for owning it at other brokers like AmeriTrade, Fidelity Schwab e trade, it's called the fully paid lending Income program called the fully paid lending Income program. So you can either research it online or go into your account and search it or you just call up your broker and ask him make sure you get the pros and cons haven't walked you through it. Right do your own due diligence before you do you do it. But it sounds really awesome. And I'm applying myself to get this set up today. I was planning on setting it up first making some money off of it and then being able to come back and report it. I was like No one, we're gonna wait, I just need to tell you guys right now. And because I've seen other people do it and they were boarded that it works, it's easy, it's doable. And so I'm gonna go ahead and tell you now, and then I'll go do it, and then I'll make another, you know, we'll talk about it later, and see how it does and all that stuff, basically, you get daily income, yes, they put the money in your account every day. Because let's say, let's say there's a stock and, you know, they're gonna pay you 12% a year. That's a lot, right? 12%. Now, they're probably not going to take the stock from you, borrow it for the whole year. But for whatever period of time, they'll take that 12% divided by blah, blah, blah, how many days and then you get paid that dividend or you get that dividend, but you get paid that income that yield every every day in your account, and it'll show up as an account as a payment to you. Okay? Now, again, like I said, there's no restrictions on the on the trading, you can sell it whenever you want to, you can trade options on it, if you want to, make sure your broker allows it. Every brokers are different. They all have different criteria. So make sure your broker allows it. But yes, you can trade it you there's no locking period, you can get out whenever you want. Now, you might be thinking, But wait a minute, you know, if I'm giving this stock, and I'm letting somebody borrow it, who wants to short it, that's going to make the stock go down, and I own it. So that's going to hurt me Why would I do that? Well, you would do that because they're going to short the stock anyway, whether they borrow it from you, or they borrow from somebody else, they're going to borrow it, they're still going to do it. So you might as well make money off of it. Right. And we are in it for the long term. We're not in it for like five points. We are in it for five years. So if you do your stock selection properly, you're going to want to stay in the stock. And if it if it goes down, that's great. Well buy more. That's perfect. And we're getting paid while we're waiting. And we're selling options against it while we're waiting. And we're still getting dividend payments while we're ready. So yes, it's a good idea. The yield of what they do depends on the stock. If it's harder to borrow, you get less if it's easier to borrow. No, it's harder bar you get more, it's easier to borrow you get less, it depends on the broker as well. And the broker will then determine how much of that money they give you. So yes, I know it's yours. Right, but they're doing the transaction. So they keep part of it. Now at AmeriTrade they say they keep 50% Interactive Brokers is also 50%. So they keep 50% of that interest that gets paid. All right. Now, what's the risk? Well, the risk is that this is the once you hand over the stock, it's not government protected. So basically, what happens is if you have stock at Fidelity or AmeriTrade or whatever, your broker, if your broker goes out of business, you are protected up to a certain dollar amount by the US government. So the government will go into okay broker you failed, give us all your accounts, you know, let us know how much did Joe have in his account? Oh, this much. Okay, Joe, well, here you go, Here's your money. Or here's the stock that you own. You know, if you got 100 shares, here's your 100 shares, or they'll give you the money for it. So the government protects you in a normal environment. In this situation, the government will not protect you because you're lending them away. You're giving them up temporarily. Right, so you're not holding on to them. In order to offset that. What the brokers have done is each broker has a bank. Right? So for AmeriTrade, the bank is Wells Fargo right now. So the broker or in this case, AmeriTrade takes 102% of the value of the stock that they're borrowing and they go and they put that money or those that that amount of asset into the bank at Wells Fargo. So in case AmeriTrade goes out of business, Wells Fargo will make you whole okay. So again, if let's say you had $100,000 of a stock, AmeriTrade takes it from you, you let them borrow it, you let them give it to somebody else, then they AmeriTrade will take $102,000 worth of assets T bills or something else and they'll put it into Wells Fargo just in case. If they got a business well, Fargo will give you your money back. Okay, so you are protected, but it's not government protected. That's why they call it fully paid lending that it's, you know, fully paid. What else? Okay? So dividends, dividends are different dividends are paid, but they're not paid as a dividend. So let's say you have $1,000 dividend coming up. If you have lent the stock, the broker will still pay you that $1,000 But it won't be classified as a dividend. So depending on your tax situation, you know, that might upset you a little bit. But it's still better than not getting the money, right? It's still better than not getting interest. So I don't know if that would make sense to offset it unless you know your tax bracket and talk to your accountant about it. Make sure it works and makes sense. But if you're doing this Send an IRA account, well, then there's no taxes, so you don't have to worry about it at all. That's the last thing according to AmeriTrade, now again, I, I've only contacted AmeriTrade so far, I do think that this can be done at other brokers in a regular account. But at AmeriTrade, they want you to do this in a non-margin account. So if you have a regular account that does not have margin, they will let you do it in there, or they will let you do it in a margin enable IRA. So what that means for us, as passive traders, is if you're selling options, you know, if you're selling credit spreads, iron condors or naked puts in a regular trading account, that account will not be eligible. But if you're selling those same options in an IRA account, that account is eligible. So this works for those of us who are trading or who have IRAs, and have margin enabled. So you can do that in there, because you probably have most of your stocks in there anyway, the long term holdings, so this will be another added boost to that income and that yield. So that's really cool. That's the basics of it. Okay. Again, it's either called the stock yield Enhancement Program, or it's called the fully paid lending Income program. Again, this is money that it's free to you. There's no restrictions. And I'm looking at the website right now for AmeriTrade on that page. And it's, basically it says earn extra income on stocks and ETFs, you hold in your account by lending them out for a fee, we facilitate the loans. I mean, AmeriTrade charge borrowers and share 50% of the income with you, the securities must be fully paid for not borrowed on margin. Okay, so it says here, you know, you can buy and sell your shares. As usual, you can review the loan details on your daily statements. So you'll get daily income statements, and you can opt out at any time. So you're not logged in. There's no fee for this, you're not paying anything to do this is basically something you click on your account, you make an apply application. And then if that's turned on, then there you go, we're off to the races. How much money can you make? Well, they got some hypothetical lending rates here, you can get 10.5% 5% 1% 15% on different stocks, depending again on how hard it is to borrow. I mean, that's basically all it is, right? It's pretty crazy. If you have a it's and they based it on 360 days of lending. So I guess five days the markets are closed. All right, I guess I don't know how they calculate the 360. But that's what it is they pay you for 360 days out of the year. So even on weekends, you're still getting paid interest. And that's really cool. So again, the considerations and the you know, the risks if you want to say shares, loans are not protected by the SIPC however, the shares are fully secured by collateral held at a third party custodian like explained to you well, when the bank holds the money, you do forfeit your right to participate in any corporate actions, such as proxy votes, tender offers, and voluntary actions. So there's a vote coming on or something you don't get to vote. Okay, I don't vote anyway. So for me, it doesn't really matter. Rather than dividends, you receive substitute payments in the same amount, which are taxed differently from dividends. So again, talk to your CPA about that. Typically, typically, positions must be more than $10,000 to be considered for lending. So you want to have at least $10,000 in that stock doesn't say you got to have 100 shares. So that's cool, you know, you might have less than 100 shares. But if you have $10,000, they'll still borrow it. And then securities lending may not be suitable for all investors, and is only provided to clients after a review and approval process. So yeah, that's, you know, that's them covering their own butts, They have some FAQs here, there's an application, you gotta meet some criteria, and it doesn't say that, you know, all the money or the all this, all the shares will be loaned out, but they will all be eligible. So it depends on what the market wants, right? And yes, you can buy and sell the security, as usual. If it's lent out and you sell the stock, then you just stopped getting any interest. So that's it. And that's it and you do your own research. I just want to get this out to you. This is really cool way of just being extra free money. There's nothing to buy nothing to do. If you have an account at a broker that does this. Just ask them how do you set it up? What are the pros and cons try it out. If you don't like it, stop it, you know, but this is just another way to generate some extra passive income from stocks that you already own. And I'm just happy to bring this information to you that you could do this. Go ahead go get it started today while you're doing this, you know, watch his video again if you have to get the details but yeah, it's pretty simple. Go set it up. All right. Trade with the odds in your favor guys. Wish you all the success in the world. Peace out. JOIN OUR FREE PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://optiongenius.com/alliance  Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps. Thank you!