Passive traders. Let me welcome you to 2021. One of the resolutions this year was that I was going to have a podcast episode every week. But this is the first episode of The New Year. And you are probably listening to this in February, which means I am behind, I apologize, I'm going to do my best to make it up and catch up and have at least one episode every week, if not more, depending on what's going on in the markets and whatever lessons I need to impart. So hopefully, we'll be able to take care of that and catch up. I wanted to say thank you for having a wonderful 2020. Corona aside, you know, that impacted everyone's lives to some degree, those of you who lost people, I'm greatly sorry, and my condolences. But when you look at the market and overall economy, not the economy, but the stock market economy and the stock market are two different things. We learned that in 2020, the returns and the investments that we made in the markets and our options trades did amazingly well. Amazingly, amazingly, well, I don't know if we're gonna have another year like that anytime soon. Passive trading, just keep but all of the strategies worked amazingly well. We have students that didn't have a losing trade all year, as hard as that to believe. You know, I know I had losing trades, but they showed me their results. And it's like, no losing trades the entire year, and they're doing fantastic. And they've continued to 2021. In this episode, I did want to talk about what we can expect in 2021, and how we can make money from it. So, you know, 2021 started relatively calm. We didn't have any issues with the inauguration, Biden took control, and Trump left peacefully, no big deals, no rights, no, cool, no, nothing big. I mean, we have a little issue at the Capitol for a day. And those guys were beaten back and they left. And now there's investigations and all that going on. But, you know, the government seems to be running smoothly. The Democrats do have control of the Senate and the House and the Senate, they have a 5050 with the tiebreaker. So they can get more stuff passed, but they don't have complete control, because a lot of issues, they do need 60 votes in the Senate. So they're gonna have to get all of their dems to vote in that favor, and then they'll have to have 10 Republicans to vote for them. So that's probably not going to be an easy thing for them, that's gonna keep a damper on things, meaning that they don't get to pass every single thing that they want to pass, which is a good thing. Right? I think when it comes to politics, the less laws they pass, the better the last day and a few of the better. And I will agree with Trump on that, that every time they pass a law, they should take out a loan. No. But it is what it is. And as soon as long as we have, you know, one, either the House or the Senate in one control, and the other party controls the other one, that's fine, that's great, it works best. And the market does the best in those and people are normally happier. When you have both of them being controlled by one party, things can get really out of control. The biggest thing for us is the Fed, the Fed continues to keep saying that they're going to keep rates at zero, they're waiting for inflation to come up. And they're expecting more and more stimulus from the government. So as long as the rates are at zero, as long as the Fed is continuing to pump money, markets are going to continue to move higher. as they've done the last several years, we've had a very fed induced bull market that has just pushed stocks higher and higher and higher. And we're probably going to continue higher. That doesn't mean that they can't go down. In the meantime, we could easily have a 10% correction, we normally get those once a year. easily. We can have overdue for one soon. Does that mean it's time to bail? No, maybe you take some profits. And then if it comes down, then maybe you get back in, you buy the dip, because as long as offense keeping rates too low, it doesn't make any sense for why the market will not go up. We also have the democrats and Biden pushing for more stimulus and more unemployment coming. So that's going to go towards people that are sitting at home and a lot of these youngsters have decided to put their unemployment checks and their stimulus checks and go gamble in the stock market. And so we have a lot of speculation, a lot of pumping of stocks, like what they used to do and the penny stocks really pump and dump that's going on right now. With GameStop and AMC and all these other stocks that are just jumping up for no reason. The beaten up names like those, they are going to continue to be volatile. You know, don't expect similar things in other companies to cruise lines, airlines, all those companies. If there is a small chance, you know that a beat company or company is about to go out of business is going to turn around or have some good news, there's going to be somebody to pilot in there, and then they're going to promote it and say, Hey, this is great good buy this, buy this, buy this, and then the stock will rally. So just keep an eye out for that doesn't mean that it's a bad thing, necessarily, it's part of the way the market works, of course, over corrections or whatnot, it's fine. As long as the hedge funds don't get killed, I'm happy. Or if they do get killed, I'm still happy. The only time I'm not happy is when they get killed, and they have to dump all their stock, which leads to a few down days in the stock market. A lot of times in the history, you know, financial news doesn't cover it. But you know, if the market goes down three or 4% 5%, in a couple of weeks, or in one week, especially, it's because there was some very large player that blew up. And they had to sell everything in order to satisfy their margin calls that might be going on right now as we speak. Market was down today. And it might be because of that. So we'll see. Now, what's going to do well in 2020. Right, let me take a look at the agenda for Mr. Biden, the environmental names should continue to do well. So who is that? Well, the electric companies, the companies, anything related to electric power, wind power, solar power, and all of the solar names. So there is a ETF called Tam ta n, which covers them, I own that. It's done amazingly well in 2020. And I expect it to continue to go up as long as Biden is pumping more federal money into alternative energy. I believe the cannabis companies are also going to be doing the marijuana companies, you know, they haven't done well, that launch for the past few years. But the democrats are more favorable towards marijuana and making it legal. Maybe there's a push to make it legal nationwide, I don't know, we'll see. I don't know if they have the votes to approve that or get it passed. But they'll probably be relaxing some laws and make it easier for these companies to do something. So that's definitely gonna, if anything changes in that regard, these companies are just gonna shoot up super high. Infrastructure companies are also going to be doing well. You know, the companies that build the roads, pipelines, all that kind of stuff. Caterpillar is one united rentals. Another one, that's a good quick way to get jobs and people back to work is to start building stuff, looking at building homebuilders and construction companies going to continue to do well, home builders, usually they stay in the suburbs. And that's where everybody's moving to, there is a shortage of homes in the suburbs. And so they are doing really, really well, lumber prices are through the roof. Right. But that's because there's so much demand. And with rates, so low, people are going to continue to be moving to the suburbs, people are leaving California, they're leaving Texas, they're leaving all these states that have very high taxes, and they're moving to places like Florida and Texas and Tennessee, which have zero state tax, and land is plentiful, and there are plenty of cheap properties here. So if you've been thinking about moving to Texas, come on down water, fine. It's hot as hell. But other than that, you know, if the mosquitoes don't get you, you'll be fine. What's gonna suffer is I believe the rates. So if you have a read, it's probably not going to do well probably going to drop and there might even cut the rates or the dividends. Office Building rates aren't going to suffer. Urban Development rates are going to suffer people, you know, reach that focus on properties inside major cities. And the malls are going to continue to do poorly. I just went to one of the biggest malls in Texas are not Texas, but in Houston. And there was nobody there. Weekends are pretty busy. Because we have a lot of people coming in from Mexico to Houston. But with Corona, they've closed the board on again. And so there's less, there's still people coming. But there's less weekday man places dead. There was nobody there. I don't know how they're paying rent. But those are going to suffer the stocks that shot up in 2020. In the work at home stocks, I believe they are going to suffer because they're they're going to be tapped out. There's not that much more demand for something like a DocuSign. And most people that were going to start a Shopify store or you know, something like that they've already done, and they're going to realize that it's harder than it looks. And they're probably going to lose customers because people are going to quit, you know, when they were all excited. And yeah, I'm going to work at home. I'm going to open my own online business and I'm going to go open a Shopify store. Okay, great. And then it takes a few months for you to realize that it's not that easy, and Shopify is expensive, so I'm gonna shut this down. So I think Shopify and DocuSign and those types of companies will do that, or do poorly, not as well, not for me, I guess, but not as well as it did and so the stocks are not going to rise. The unknown. Really healthcare, healthcare is an unknown. We don't know how they're going to react. Some of them are going to do well because of the vaccine rollouts. Others are not because there's a shortage in Drugs, there's a shortage in pills. And so if they can't sell their pills, and they're not going to make a lot of money, also oil companies, that's a strange one, right? oil companies are unknown. Yeah, because oil is trending higher, oil dropped considerably. And then since the drop, it's been going back over, it's up to 60. And at $60 a barrel, a lot of oil companies, they make money. So oil companies, I think will do well, better than they did last year. Even with the headwinds, the reopening trade itself, like I said, I think that's going to continue to suffer. And the reopening trade is basically cruise lines, airlines travel company, you know, entertainment places, all those places are going to continue to suffer, because Corona is not going away. We having the vaccine rollout, that's fine. But Corona itself is not going to go away. And the new variants and the new strains that are coming are coming fast and furious. It's not just one Corona, it's several Corona and then you're having there's one from South America, there's one from Brazil, there's one from the UK, and then who knows, we might have some of our own. So yes, the drug companies and the makers of the vaccines are gonna have to stay on top of this. And probably, they're probably going to start changing the vaccine and make us take more than one next. So that's going to be a very interesting scenario where, you know, oh, you have the vaccine from this company. Okay, great. Well, now you gotta go and get it from this company, too, because this one doesn't cover from that. And it doesn't cover that it's going to be, we're not out of the woods yet. Overall, though, it's still a stock pickers market. I've said that last year, I said it over and over again, every stock did not do good. The markets themselves overall did well, because they were carried by certain stocks, every stock not too well. It's going to be contained, some stocks are gonna be trending higher, some stocks are going to be in the toilet, some stocks are just gonna be going sideways, and some are gonna go up, and then they're gonna go down and they go up, and then most of them should rise until the Fed takes away the Punchbowl. Until the Fed starts making comments, they start changing. When they have their, you know, their meetings and their posts and their speeches, when they start changing their vocabulary. That's when things are going to go south. And if the market gets spooked, and if they think that the Fed is gonna start raising rates, as soon as that idea takes shape, we're gonna go straight down, and it might be more than 20%. So I'm gonna be very afraid, because this move higher has been really, really extended. Probably never liked this anything happened before. And everybody's talking about, oh, are we in a bubble in a bubble in a bubble? Well, if you're talking about a bubble, then you might be in a bubble, right. And it's an artificial bubble created by the Fed, and they know it, and they're looking for it, and they're waiting for inflation to increase while inflation is already here. Right? Well, prices are up food prices are up, I don't know what the hell they're looking for, or why they haven't noticed it. But they're gonna see it, they're looking at unemployment, you know, unemployment is still there, because of the virus unemployment, it's gonna stay there for a while. So I don't know where this goes, I don't know, if they're gonna be able to have a smooth landing. The first time they had QE. And after all that great depression, Great Recession stuff. Janet Yellen was in charge of the Fed, and they kind of had a smooth landing, you know, they were doing a lot of quantitative easing, but then they started taking it away taking away, she's now in charge of the Treasury, which might be a good thing, because she's had experience with this. And she might be able to help the Fed, if there are any issues. So that's positive. But if we see something like that, then definitely I believe the market is going to tank. And so until then, we're free to enjoy the spoils and have the market go up. When that happens, put some hedges on very, very quickly, get out of your, your bullish trades, lower the low, cut back on some of your positions, and then just wait and see what happens. And eventually things will recover. And we will continue to be selling options, our positions. And we will continue to do well. We just might have some hiccups this year coming up. So beware of those, you know, expect, expect the hiccup don't expect to be making money every single month. Expect hiccups to come. And that will keep you on guard and vigilant. Now, that's it for my 2021 promotion or  predictions. I do want to thank everybody that turned out and supported us for the live event that we had a couple weeks ago in January. It was amazing. We had a lot of fun. We had a lot of people show up. It went off beautifully. I was you know, nervous and scared and everything went wonderfully well. I mean, the second day in the morning, before we got started, we actually lost our internet in the office. That kind of freaked us out. We're like oh no internet. But then, you know, five minutes later it hopped back on and we were able to start off without a hitch so that was wonderful. We got overwhelmingly positive reviews and comments from everyone that attended. So thank you so much. Thank you for that. I really appreciate And people have been asking, when's the next one? When's the next one? I don't know. So far, I don't have plans for our next one for high probability trading that we did. But I do think that I would like to do one for futures options. So, you know, maybe we'll do a one day, this time, basically cover futures options, and why they're important, why you should be looking at those as a good way to diversify away from stock options, you don't have to leave completely, but I believe there's a lot of that's the new untapped market. And so, you know, a lot of speculators and stuff are really coming in to the stock market game. But in the futures market, it's wide open. And we just have to go in and take advantage of it. So I think I'm going to do a one day live event training on futures options and how to trade them and what to look for, and the differences and the pros and cons and all that stuff, how to get approved and whatnot. So if you're interested in that, please let us know. Send us an email help@optiongenius.com. We'll put you on a waiting list. We don't have one now, but we'll put you on it. And we'll let you know when that comes. In the meantime, I hope you have an amazing year. Merry, merry, happy new year to you and your family. I hope you have another great year. You know, stay vigilant in terms of trading wise it should be in good year, but it might be a little bit Rocky. Other than that, I'll be here. So if you have any questions, you can always email me and we will trade it together. All right. Take care and remember to trade with the odds in your favor. LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/  WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com  JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://optiongenius.com/alliance  Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps.

It's time to get real. This is gonna be the last episode of 2020. We're recording this in early December of 2020, we're going to get it out to the last week. And it's been quite a year. Definitely. And who knows what's gonna happen next year, we never expected all this stuff to happen this year. Hopefully, it's been a good year for you. It's been an amazing year. For those of us who have been in the markets and long markets, and long stocks. It's been incredible. It's amazing. You can't go online and not run into somebody posting how much money they're making, just buying calls, a lot of people are gambling, a lot of people are gambling, that doesn't mean passive traders have not done really well at all, we've done amazingly well. And, you know, the numbers are just astounding to me, as I am on this journey with you, you know, I have enough that the income from my investments allows me to do whatever I want. But it's not billionaire status. And so, you know, as the accounts grow, as the numbers get bigger and bigger and bigger, I'm having a hard time mentally focusing and realizing like, oh, wow, what the heck is going on, it's just keeps increasing, increasing. So I'm facing that issue. But I know a lot of you are facing several different issues. So what I want to know and I want you to focus on is 2020 happened, things happened. Market was the way it was COVID, Corona, whatever you want to call it, market shut down a lot of job losses, there were stimulus fed everything. 2021 is gonna be a way different year. And it's nobody knows what to expect. But it's going to be different. It's gonna be different from this year, vaccines coming soon, hopefully, who knows. And things will get back to normal in terms of people going out and traveling, some of the economy will come back a lot of the economy's not going to come back. How are you going to play it? What are you going to do differently? One of the things that we are doing is in the first week of January, we're having our first ever event. So a live event, it's going to be two days, January 8, and 9th. And I want to invite you to come hang out with me. Let's talk, let's learn, let's trade let's train, please go to optiongenius.com/live to get all the details. Go ahead, check it out, see what we have, we got some guest speakers coming. Got a lot of great content of how to take you to the next level. Wherever you had now, wherever you were, how to get you to the next level. What skills do you need? What do you need to overcome? What's stopping you break through all the boundaries? Make your goals say hey, this is what I want. This is where I'm now. How do I get there? Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang? What are the steps 1234. And we're gonna just knock it out. So we're gonna be asking questions when we talking live, there's an opportunity for you to be one on one with me as well. We're gonna have some hot seats, you know, bring people on say, all right, show me Let's go. Let's diagnose it. This is some coaching right right now. So it's gonna be a lot of fun. Please, if you can't make it, there's a you can get the recordings. So optiongenius.com/live, I am very, very, very nervous. To be honest with you, and seriously, like, you know, I've told my team like, Hey, we're doing this, but in my mind, I'm like, oh, man, do I really have to do this? Or do I want to do this, but we have so many people on the announcement list. And so we're like, yep, let's do it. Let's do it. Let's plan it. You know, it's not going to be a pitch fest. We got speakers, but they're not selling anything not gonna be having, you know, “buy this product and buy” this product and buy this product. No, none of that stuff is just real live learning, trading, working in like a workshop type event. So I hope to see you there. It would be amazing to show your support. If the podcast has helped you in any way. It would be nice if you came in just gave me some moral support and be like, yeah, you're doing great, good job. We love you or whatever. You don't have to love me but you know what I mean? You know, it's the introvert in me talking. It's the the lack of confidence, I guess in front of getting up in front of people and being like okay on the spot. Let's just talk because it's This podcast is like me, I'm just sitting here. Nobody's watching me. I'm just recording this. I know what to say. And I can say it. But live is a totally different story. You know, you mess up. There's everybody watching you “Oh, no what I do now? Oh, anyway, but it's time to get real. You know, we need to get to the next level a year of our life has gone by, and we've been cooped up. So it felt a lot longer than normal. But how closer are you to your goals? How close are you to the things you want it? Only you can answer that question. And how can we get you to them faster? That's the real thing. You know, whatever it is you want out of life. We can't just sit around and wait. We can't take our time. We want to push the envelope. We want to push the gas pedal down. And we want to fly. Right. And I mean yesterday. Poof last night, I took the family out to go see some lights. And you know, the Christmas lights. And it was it was fun. It was a lot of fun. It was a great we had a great time. But on the way there. The Google Maps took me down like a shortcut or something, was up there made road to digital shortcut. And it was this little lane, not even highways, just a little road houses on both sides, no divider in the middle, nothing. And I'm going pretty quickly. It's dark, not really too many lights. And all of a sudden there's a railroad track that comes cuts across the road. Now, if you've seen railroad tracks you going over them sometimes they're flat, sometimes they're hilly, this one was hilly. And I did not slow down. I did not hit the brake. I went at it as fast as I was going and yeah, man we flew, the minivan flew. And it was fun. It wasn't fun when we hit the ground, the bumper, like scraped the grout, the kids are like they were I don't know what they were sleeping when they were quiet. And we heard them like when we went airborne. And then when the van started going down, and we hit you know, the ground again, you heard the kids in the back, *Kush* fall back down in their chairs were literally up in the air. They had their seatbelts on, thank god knew probably would got heard otherwise. But yeah, you heard that boom, Daddy, what's going on? Yeah, but he was a lot of fun, it's fun to fly. You know, sometimes it's fun. Sometimes you got to put the brakes on. And 2020 was a hard year for a lot of people. But it's time to buckle down and say, all right, we can't do that. Again, it's not time to buckle down anymore. We need to push, we need to get better, we need to do things we need to move forward. And so that's why we're doing this live event. That's why I'm breaking out of my comfort zone, trying something new is like alright, you know, everybody's still at home. Everybody knows how to use zoom, this is great. Everybody can understand what we're doing now. So you don't have to fly. You don't have to rent a hotel, you don't have to buy food, do it at home in your pajamas. That's great. I wish I could be in my pajamas. I might be, who knows? I might be in my pajamas.. but it's making everything so connected more, even though we are not connected physically, we'll be online, we're able to see each other, it's gonna be a very interesting experience. I'm definitely sure that you're going to take something out of it, you're going to learn something, and you're going to get your questions answered, or we're going to work on getting you whatever you need to go to the next level. So I hope you do Join us now. In terms of going in the future, like what do you do? If you haven't, go get the passive trading book. I would start there and say, Hey, what's the roadmap? What's the game plan? And basically, that's what we're doing on the live event. We're like, okay, where are our people now? Where do they want to go? And how do we get there? What are the steps? 1-2-3-4 however many steps are? How do we get there? And that's what we're going to go through. So once you register, email me, and let me know where you are, and let me know where you want to be. And I can use that when we're creating the content. So the steps are, you know, we understand the steps were like, okay, we need a strategy, we need to understand the market, we know how he's going to do, we need to manage our trades properly, we need to have asset allocation properly, we need to be safe, so we're not, you know, risking a lot of money and losing it for what-not. And then we need to build and we need to invest properly. And that's how we do the passive trading. So we're gonna cover those in detail in depth on the training, and I can't wait. So I guess this episode has turned into an advertisement. Live event. I didn't mean to. I'm just really excited about it. So I really appreciate you guys listening the whole year. And we've been doing this episode. I think we're doing this the second or third year of the podcast. I'm not even sure I think we got we're getting close to 100 episodes. So I think it took us three years to get there. But I appreciate everything I appreciate you appreciate our customers, you know, you guys, the fact that you are listening to this, you give me an outlet, and you give me a way to help, and a way to give back so much that I've been given. And I really would love to hold your hand and say, Hey, walk with me, let's do this together. You know, it's an amazing feeling. And one of the things like one of the mentors that I have, he says that you get so much when you are doing it yourself, but you don't really, really understand it, and really, really learn it until you help somebody else do it. And so it's a progression, you know, and that's what option genius has allowed me to do. That's what this podcast allowed me to do. The passive trading formula or oil options program all our memberships, it is just, it's, I am so grateful and amazed. And like, really, you know, we announced a live event a week ago, by now it's been three weeks or four weeks. And we put out and said, hey, you know, if you're interested, go to this website, and let us know, you know, give us your name and email address and get on the list. And we had a ton of people, that first email that I sent out, I wasn't even talking about this. It was just like two lines at the bottom of the email. And we had like, 80 people signed up right away. Like what? That many people are interested in coming to a live event listening to me talk. Wow, I mean, we do have 1000s of people listening to me talk on every episode, but it's just, you know, every step you take is like, Okay, this is a new thing to do. Do people actually listen? Are they gonna show up? That's a no, oh, my god, it's gonna be live. What if nobody shows up? What if they think I'm crazy? What do they all make fun of me? Oh, no, you know. But it's time to go to the next level, it's time to go to the next steps. And you got to get out of your comfort zone as well. So if you haven't been trading, I'm telling you, you missed out on a great, great, great year of an opportunity. Next year, my assumption is that we're going to be the markets still going to be heading higher into the first couple months, at least after that things will very calm down, the volatility will go away. And we might have a correction, we might have a bear market next year or 10% 20% down, I don't know how much. But once the Fed stops printing everything, once the economy starts going back to normal, things will flatten out, we might have an up market next year, but it's not going to be as easy it was this year to just buy stuff and watch it go up every day. You know, that's not gonna happen, I'm almost guaranteeing that that's not gonna happen, there's gonna be a lot of sideways movement, there might be some down moves. If you don't know how to trade it, it can be scary. But we can do it together, we can hold your hand and take you along the way. And it's still, with passive trading, the way we do it, it's still a way that you can still be profitable. So you know, it's amazing. And I am living proof that it works, along with the 1000s of other people that are doing it with us. So hopefully, we'll see you on the live event. I wish that 2021 is an amazing year for you. I wish the best for you and your family. If there's anything that me and my team can do, please let us know. Thank you for everything. Thank you for listening. Thank you for your time. Thank you for all the reviews and the comments and the emails that we get from you guys. It just makes it all worthwhile.  So Happy New Year! Merry Christmas if you are into that and we will see you in the new year.  LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/  WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com  JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://optiongenius.com/alliance  Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps.

What gaps in your trading are you suffering from? Yeah, I said gaps in your trading, not trading gaps. Normally, a gap is something on a chart where the stock, you know, it makes a jump in it, there's a little hole there in the chart, I'm not talking about those type of gaps. I'm talking about the gaps that occur in how well you're trading. So let me explain. Obviously, you want to be a better trader, that means you're going to make more money, that means you're going to be able to do more things in your life, you're going to have more time, you're gonna be able to buy more things that are state of mind, peace of mind, all those great things right now, you already know that hopefully, you already have an idea of what you want the money for. Of course, it's not just the money, it's, you know, break down bottom line, we want to be happier, we want to live better lives. So that's why your trading? I agree. That's great. Awesome. That's step number one, we get to know why. Right? why we're doing it. But then it comes to Okay, this is what I want, how do I get there? And it's like, we're on one side of a cliff. And then there's a chasm, right, a gap. And then there's the goal on the other side of the cliff, which is being a profitable trader. So now you have to figure out, Okay, how do I get from one side to the other. And for everybody, there's a different gap. Everybody doesn't face the same gap, but depends on many different things. So now I'm going to go through several of the gaps that are out there that trip up the most people, okay, then once you understand what your gap is, then you can go and you can fill it in. And you can take care of it. And we have resources to help you. So once you figure out what your gap is, you can email us and say, “Hey, this is my gap, how can I fill this in?” Okay, and we have programs where we look at, we've looked at all of these different gaps. And we've have, okay, in order to somebody has this gap, they get this, somebody has this gap, they get this, if somebody has this gap, they get this. So we've tried to identify every single gap that's out there, and I'm going to cover a few of them here, and how to fill them in. And that's the only way you can really get to become a successful trader is of all the gaps are filled in. Now, these are not like little potholes where you can, you know, just, oh, it's uncomfortable. But yeah, you get through it, no, these are big holes in the ground. And if you don't fill them in, if you don't take care of them properly, then they are going to stop you in your tracks and you are not going to get to your goal, even if you have all the other gaps filled in, but you have one left eating going to get there. Okay, so let me go through them. And then you can figure out which one you're suffering from, or maybe more than one. Now, the first one is the knowledge gap. So this basically means that you do not have the knowledge to go from where you are now to where you want to be. Okay. And there are different phases of the knowledge gap. Because you cannot just say, Okay, I want to be a wonderful trader, just give me all the knowledge in my head, like upload, right? Can't do that. You start slowly, slowly, slowly with the first things you don't know. And then you build on top of that. So if you are in this gap, and if you don't know what to do, if you are new to trading, if you're new to investing, or if you're new to options, whatever, you don't have the information, you start with the book “Passive Trading”, and you can get that for free at passivetrading.com/free. Just go there, get the book, start reading it, start learning it, we get other bonuses that will help you as well. And that is how you start to overcome this gap. It's not gonna happen overnight, you're gonna fill it in, fill it and fill it in enough to get by then you're going to go further and you see Oh, there's another knowledge gap. Because as you go on, as you start this road, you're going to realize what you don't know right now you don't know what you don't know. Hmm, makes sense. You do not know the things that you need to know but you still don't know. And so as you go along the road, those knowledge gaps will appear and you'll be like, Okay, I'm stuck here. I don't know how to do this. Then you find the answer. What I don't want you to do is say I have to master everything before I start. No. Let's not do that. Then you'll never start because nobody knows everything. Nobody masters everything. And especially comes to trading. Nobody masters trading ever. You do really well, but nobody masters it. Okay, nobody masters the market, you trade the market the best way you can. And you hopefully you come out successful if you trade your way, it's a proven way. So yeah, you should work, but nobody masters the market. Okay, so now you have this knowledge gap, start with that book, start with the basics. And it'll give you the information that you need to move to the next level. And then you'll get to another gap. And then you can show that in and then you can fill it in and fill it in. Okay, so that's gap number one, the knowledge gap. And this is not just one time it occurs over and over again. The second gap, very, very important. And this one most people don't have, it's the skills gap. And by they don't have meaning they suffer from this, they don't have the right skills. Okay. So what this means is that you actually know how to do the process, you actually know how to put on the trade, how to monitor it, how to manage it, how to exit it when you should, when you shouldn't, you can get a trading plan to tell you this stuff. And that will give you some knowledge. But it will not give you the skill until you do it until you do the thing over and over and over and over again, until it's in the back of your mind. It's like the back of your hand. And you could be like, yeah, I can do this in my sleep. Even then you probably gonna screw up. The other day, I put on a covered call trade, and I screwed it up. Yeah, I screwed it up. I bought 100 shares and I sold two options against it. And I later on I realized my thing, and I'm like, Oh my god, what the heck did I do, you know, the amount of money that I was supposed to make on that trade, I gave it away when I sold the second option. So now even though if the trade is going to work out, which is going to, I'm still gonna add best I'm gonna break even. So yeah, skills are very important. Okay, even after 15 years of trading, you can still mess it up. So if you mess it up, now, I don't fault you. Right, but you got to put in that effort, you got to overcome the skills gap. And the only way to do that is to just do it over and over and over and over and over again, I can't make you do it. I can't sit there and watch you do it, you have to do it. Okay, I can encourage you and on the sidelines but you got to do it. Right? If you never do it, you'll never overcome the skills gap. And we do have students, and I've seen them, I've talked to them, they want all the education, they want to buy everything. And they go through everything, and they do it multiple times. But when it comes time to actually putting on the trade, they back off, because they don't have the skill. They see that huge skill gap. And they're like, Oh, no, I don't know how to do it. Well, baby steps, baby steps, paper trade, try it, do a small little trade tiny trade, you know, so that if you lose the money, if you lose all of the money on the tiny trade, it's not going to kill you. Right, it's gonna go towards your education. It's like an investment, I'm gonna try, I'm gonna risk $100 to do this trade. And even if it blows up, that's $100, I invested into my education. And I put a trade on and I learned it. Right, I learned what not to do. In that case, if it blows up, but at least you did it you know, once you get over that hump, once you get this skills gap down. I don't know if you ever will. But just like the knowledge gap, there are different skills gap, you know, putting on the trade, that's one skill, managing the trades and finding skill, finding trades, those are all different skills, and you have to do them over and over again. Eventually, they become like second nature, and you get really, really good at it. So you know what you're doing. That's where I need you to get to, to become a really consistent successful trader, you got to overcome that gap by doing actual work. Third, the motivation gap. Now, I talked about this earlier, hopefully, you already know why you're doing this, why you want to be a trader. But if it's only to make money, that probably will not be enough. In the beginning. Let's say you have a lot of debt, you want to quit your job. See that's different. quitting your job is different from I want to make a lot of money. That's a different motivation. And I love that one I love I want to quit my job, or I need XYZ money to be able to send my kid to college, or I need this to because my car is about to die and I need to replace it. Those are better than I need more money. I want to make more money. Because more money in your bank accounts, is gonna do anything for you. You're not gonna be much happier. You're not gonna it's not gonna change the world is just numbers on a screen. So whether it's 1000 or 5000 or 10,000 on the screen, it doesn't make any difference. And eventually that wears off. First couple of times. You'll be like yeah, no a lot of money and then they'll be like, Oh, yeah, it's not that much. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah, I did it. Okay, I got a lot of money. I got 10,000 in my account. Yay. It'll go away. So You have to understand what is your motivation. So the motivational gap is really big for a lot of people, sometimes they don't feel the need to trade, or they know feel the need to overcome the skills gap. Now give the example of my father, right, he was motivated to make more money. And so if you put in front something in front of him, like a course, or a seminar or two day, like a two day workshop or something, he would buy it, because he was motivated to make more money. And you would actually go and do the thing, you would go and try to get the knowledge because he knew he had a knowledge gap. So you try to fill in the gap of knowledge. But then when it came time to actually doing the thing, he almost never did the thing. He never overcame the skills gap. Why? Because his motivation gap was not filled in. He wasn't motivated enough to make a bigger change, he was motivated a tiny, tiny bit, to invest in something and to try to overcome the knowledge gap. But he was not, his motivation gap was blocking him from overcoming the skills gap. So this kind of gets tricky, right? I told you, there's lots of motivation gaps, there's lots of skills gaps, there's lots of knowledge gaps, there's gaps all over the place. But you can do them if you go through the path, and you fill them in as they go along. So yeah, your motivation has to be really great. In the beginning. For me, my motivation, when I first started was my wife is working two jobs, and I want her to only work one job, and I want to be a provider in the household. I want to take care of my family. I want to have kids, I want to get out of this rinky dinky apartment, right. The only way I can do that is if I'm making money. So that was my motivation along with I don't want to go back to work because I had just gotten laid off. No, I don't want to go back to work. I need this to work. That was my motivation. And that was the same motivation for several years, until we got to the point where the money was there. It was coming. He was flowing. And then I kind of lost my way. And I was like, Okay, yeah, I'm making money. That's great. Okay, I'm kind of tired. I'm sick. I'm like, bored of life. I gotta find something. What am I gonna do? Okay, I went and I raised a, I learned how to race NASCAR's. I mean, it was like a $3,000 for a one day package. You know, we actually go and you you do a NASCAR 200 miles an hour per hour and do that. And I was like, Oh, yeah, that's great. You know, I got some adrenaline, but I'm still not motivated. You know, I don't feel like getting up in the morning. Why? What is that be motivation gap, really, really big motivation gap. And I learned that the key to filling the motivation gap, after you fill the little baby motivation, gaps of I need more money, more money. Once you have the money. The next motivation gap that comes is I need significance, I need something in my life that I'm doing that I gain significance from that I feel important that I feel growth that I feel loved. And the only when I started to train people and to teach people, that's when I started getting that. So this podcast is in a way, helping me overcome my motivation gap. So thank you for listening, I do appreciate it. I do appreciate all your support all the comments, all the feedback, emails, all their positive reviews. I appreciate all of that. So thank you very much for that. Thank you so much. Now, after we have the motivation gap, we have the habits gap. Now these are any, you know, daily or weekly habits that you have that are stopping you from achieving your goals. So does proper trading, have habits that you need to have in order to succeed? Yes. One thing is you got to watch your trade. Right? You can't just forget about it. It's not set it and forget it kind of things. Because the marking can go up and down. Even with the odds in your favor, you should still monitor your trades on a daily basis. Depending on the strategy. If you're doing cover calls, then Okay, maybe not every day, maybe you do it once a week, maybe once a month, that's up to you be too many on how aggressive or conservative you are. If you're doing something like our oil option strategy, I would like you to check in every day and see how oil is doing how your trades are doing. If you go 234 days too long, and you're not checking, that could be a bad thing and you might be negative, you might start losing some money. That's not a good thing. That's not going to help you on your goal. So that is a habit that needs to be instilled. And so one of the habits I instill and I tell everybody is you should have a time every day that you check on your trades. Same time every day for me, I do it at one o'clock, one o'clock Central. I have an alarm on my phone, he goes off ding ding ding ding ding, time to check my trades. Now I'll drop whatever I'm doing. And I will log in, and I will check my trades. If I need to adjust or do something, most of time, I don't need to do anything. So it didn't take very long. But that is a habit that I had to instill. I have other habits that I've also instilled, that have made me a much better trader. And we talked about them in our trade hacks program, which is very cheap. And if you want it, you can get it on our website, it's called trading hacks, I don't have the time to go into all of those, that's, you know, several hour program, and it goes through all of them. But if you have a habit program problem, then something like that, the hacks that we have come up with can definitely help you because you don't have to change yourself. Right? You don't have to have the willpower because willpower doesn't work. If you've been on a diet, or being like, yeah, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this willpower doesn't work, you have to change the environment, you have to change your behavior, you have to change your habits, you have to change something other than yourself. Because willpower by itself will not work. And so the trading hacks program that we have, it covers several different easy things that you can implement, that you don't have to change anything about yourself or your trading. But like I said, with the one o'clock check in, right, that's one hack that I've implemented, that has really, really helped my trading. So if you do something like that, that can make a big difference, doesn't have to change my trading, doesn't have to change anything about my style. But it's just a reminder, like, Hey, you need to do this, this is a skill - a habit sorry, not a skill, it's a habit that I needed to implement. And once I did, it made a big difference. The other one is your environment, the environment gap. So where you trade has a big impact on how you trade? Do you have a nice quiet spot that you can trade from? Do you have the freedom to trade, like if you're hiding from your spouse, and you're still trading, that's going to be a lot of stress, that's not a good environment? Right, you got to get your spouse to buy in, don't be trading behind her back, or his back and try to think that Yeah, you're gonna be a great trader, there might work for a little bit. But overall, that is a very negative environment, right? When you're trying to hide it, you're gonna feel guilty, you're gonna feel bad, and Heaven forbid you lose money, oh, man, that's just going to compound everything. So your environment needs to lead you to be successful. Do you have a fast enough internet connection? Now you don't need four different monitors. You don't even need two monitors, you just need one screen that you can trade from. But you need a good enough internet connection that that's there, you need maybe a phone where you can check in on your trades smartphone, you need some basic stuff. But if you don't have it, that makes it much harder for you. And if you don't have a spot where you can actually sit down and learn and go through the environment go through the education, right, if you join one of our programs, there's a lot of information that you're going to get. If you don't have a spot to properly go through it, then what's the point? So the environment is another gap, probably one of the most easier ones that you can overcome. Right. And so that's the last one. So we got knowledge gaps, that are recurring, they happen over and over again, you'll learn a little bit, you'll move forward, then you'll realize oh, I need something I need to know something else. So then you learn the next thing. Don't try to learn everything at once. Learn them in bites, right, move forward, learn some more, move forward, learn some more when you get to a gap, learn some more, fill it in, move on to the next one. Skills gap. There are also several of those because you don't know what skills you need yet. So focus on one skill, work on that move forward, then you find Okay, I need another one. So now you get the education for that one knowledge for that one. And then you do the scale. And you fill that in then you go forward and you go forward. Motivation gaps. This is when you have to figure out for yourself. What is it that's going to keep me focused, keep me motivated, so that I don't give up. That's the thing people give up. They just stop. You know what I'm talking about is passive trading. I've been doing this for a long time. And I've seen the results. And I know this works. And I know it's great in the feeling that you get when you're doing it well is amazing.   So I don't understand why people stop in the middle. Now I know it can take work. I know it can take a lot of time. But if you have the motivation, you should be able to overcome the rest of the gaps. That's probably the most important one that you need to overcome the motivational gap. Everything else I can help you with. Right, I can't help you motivate yourself. Then you got to habit gaps. Right if you know something that you keep doing over and over. And again, that's hurting you, that is a habit that you need to change. You can't break a habit, you need to replace it with something else. Right? So if you have a habit and your habit is Oh, I don't I don't I forget them on my trading plan. I don't stick to my trading plan, or I don't stick to my rules. My rules, say, of the trade is down so much money, I got to do XYZ, but I don't. Well, that's a habit that you need to change. If you already know that, you're that's half the battle, right? Like GI Joe, no knowledge is off the bottle. Yeah, I think you GI Joe. And so now you have the knowledge. Now you got to change the habit. So you overcome that gap. And then the last one is the environment, which is probably the easiest one. So I hope this helped. I hope you can overcome these gaps. If you have any issues, you can reach out to us help@optiongenius.com and trading hacks is the name of the program that can help you overcome a lot of these habit hacks. In terms of education, and skills, we can help you there as well, we have several programs that can help you depending on what you want to accomplish, what you want to be trading. So reach out to us there as well. And again, thank you so much for listening, trade with the odds in your favor, and have a great day. Thanks. LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/  WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com  JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://optiongenius.com/alliance  Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps.

Check this out: High Probability Trading LIVE Hey, passive traders, how's it going today? Listen, we're thinking about doing a two-day live event. Not sure yet if it's going to happen or not, but the information is at optiongenius.com/live. If you want to be on the announcement list, just go ahead and go to that website and put in your email and your name, and we will let you know. And if we've decided that we're going to do it, then the information to figure it out and sign up is going to be there as well. It’s going to be two days of content, hard hitting trading content. And I'm probably gonna bring in some guest speakers as well. So I'm getting excited, the more I think about it, the more excited I'm getting. But I am very nervous because I'm super introverted and for me to do something like you know, we're meeting a lot of people. So that's why it's virtual. I don't have to go in front of a large stage or anything, but it is going to be really cool. So I'm already starting to think of what topics we can talk about what is the, you know, what's the best, that will help everybody. And so if you have any ideas of what you would like us to talk about, you know, go ahead and fill out that the name and email at that page, option, genius, comm slash live. And then let me know what you think. And let me know what you want to hear about. Cool. Alright, so I got an email today from a reader of the passive trading book. And I thought that this could be a pretty good episode based on what she said. So she said that she loved the book, she went through it, it was great, she learned a lot. And she's really, really focused on doing it. And she's, uh, she's already in real estate. So she understands the whole options and how they work and how they relate to stocks. Now, the problem is that she's only got a couple $100 to work with. So what should she do? Now, this is a very common situation, it's a very common problem that a lot of people have, they want to get started, they love the idea, but they don't have money to trade. And obviously, yeah, it takes money to trade, right? This is the one thing it takes money to do everything but especially trading, it does take money to get started. So what do they do, and on this episode, I'm going to give you some idea and it's actually a controversial idea, because it's not right for everybody, it might be right for you, it might not be right for you might be the most awful advice that anybody could ever give you. So I'm not giving you advice, per se, I'm giving you an idea. You have to know yourself. And you have to know if this is the right thing for you. If it's you know, too much or too risky for you, then don't do it. If you think you can handle it, then it might be the opportunity or the idea that finds you the funds that you can go and start trading. And you've probably already thought about this, but I want to go through with you a little bit more. So my first ever trade was not stock. It was a commodity trade. And I was I don't know what I was like 12, 13 years old. And we got this pamphlet in the mail. It was a brochure, it was like a sales letter for a course on how to trade futures. And I read it, I was mesmerized. I'm like, Oh, this is awesome. This is awesome. Dad, we got to get this, we got to get this. So we paid a couple of 100 bucks, whatever got the manual in the mail, opened up a futures account. And we traded soybeans, and I still remember this. We traded soybeans, one contract, and we made $25000. And I was on top of the moon. It was awesome. And then my dad shut down the account. I'm like, What happened? He goes, No, no, no, I didn't want to keep doing this. I just wanted, to show you what it was like and the actual idea that he had was that he was going to open the account, and we were going to lose money. And then that would stop me from ever wanting to trade again. Because he thought that commodities trading commodities was very, very risky and not do it. His whole thing backfired on him because he wanted to teach me he wanted me to lose money to teach me not to do this. And in fact, the opposite happened. We made money and the bug I got the bug - it bit me and ever since then I wanted to trade, but he shut it down. I didn't have any choice, right. I was too little. Fast forward and in the future. I have just dropped out of college. I came back home to help my dad with a new business he owned he just bought and things were really money was really, really tight. I mean really, really, really tight. To the point where like we don't, we're hoping we have enough money to eat every month. Even less than hand to mouth. And so in the mail, I get another brochure about a course about trading futures. And this one was even better than the first one because this one talks about technical analysis and the guy will actually help you with recorded messages to tell you what he's trading and bla bla bla bla. And, you know, times are so tough. I'm like Dad, we need to do something, I want to do this. How do we do this? So we bought the course. And I started following it. And at that time, this was pre website, or pre, you know what, they didn't have websites. We had AOL and stuff like that. But they didn't have Google, Yahoo, any of this stuff. So the charts had to come in the mail, you had to subscribe to a service. And they would print out the charts every week, at the end of the week, and they would mail them to us, he get them by Monday. So you'd have the charts and they would be newspaper size. And then every day, whatever happened, you would have to fill in the chart, you'd have to draw your lines, your support, resistance, all that stuff. And then every week, you would get a new set of charts. So you have to draw the lines again. And that was really a good way to learn for one thing, but I did it for a while and I show my Dad, I'm like, Look, Dad, I'm doing really, really good. I want to do that. So he went ahead, and he borrowed $8,000 on a credit card. So he took a cash advance on a credit card, he gave it to me, we opened up a futures trading account. And I knew that this was all the money we had. So we didn't even have it. Right? We didn't even have it. And at this point for him, it was a like a last-ditch effort. Like hopefully this works. If it doesn't, well, we're not gonna be able to pay off these cards anyway. So credit goes to hell kind of thing. I think this was the last card he had with any remaining balance. So yeah, you know, no, no pressure, right? Anyway, so you know, I'm going through all the charts I'm looking for the perfect opportunity, the perfect trade, the perfect trade. Finally, I find one and I'm like, Oh, this is it. This is gonna work. It's an uptrend. It's going great. Following all the lines, all the sports, everything, okay, Dad, I'm doing this, I put my first trade on one contract on the Japanese yen, Japanese yen was going up, it was gonna make me and I was gonna make a fortune. So I put the trade on close to the end of the day, and put my stop loss in. And that's it, I go home. And at night, I'm thinking man, I'm under how much money I'm gonna make or how much money I'm gonna make. I'm gonna pay all the bills, life is gonna be good. All this stuff. The next day I wake up, you know, I get to get to the office, I check. Oh, Yen is up, Yen is up alright. I'm making money, how much money do I make how much money they make in my account. And there's like $23 in my account. And I'm like, wait, what happened? Where's my Japanese yen contract? And there's no contract. And only wait, I bought a contract yesterday? Well, this must be like a glitch or something. I don't know, am I right? Am I signing in to the wrong account, what the heck is going on. And then I looked further. And it said that it stopped me out of the trade earlier in the day at the open. And when wait this doesn't make any sense. And so then I went back and I looked at it again. And basically what happened was, the Yen had gapped lower at the open. And then when it finally did open, it went up all day. But it opened lower, much lower than my stop loss. And so as soon as it opened, very, very low - hat's when my order was executed. And I was kicked out of my trade. And then that basically took away everything in the account. All eight grand was gone. overnight. One trade. And the sad part was the really frustrating part was that that trade would have made 1000s and 1000s of dollars because the Japanese yen continued to rise. Now, what's the moral of the story? What's the lesson to be learned here? I don't know, if you're gonna trade Yen, you got to have a lot more liquid because it moves up and down. I guess. That's one Moral of the story. But the reason I'm bringing this story up is that the idea is to do what we did. There's a potential to borrow money to trade with. And so I was talking to a fellow. And what he does is he works with companies like mine, where we're selling programs, right coaching programs that are not super expensive, but they're not dirt cheap either. So people might like to finance it. And so this guy, he works with several banks, and basically, he wanted to offer financing to my customers. Now, I don't know how I feel about that. He knows like if you can't afford the program, should you borrow money for the program? I think I'm okay with that. But if you don't have the money for the program, then how are you going to trade? Right, I don't want to take I don't want you to borrow money to buy a program and then not have anything left over to trade unless you know that that's the plan unless you say, yeah, you know what, I'm going to be paper-trading for a while until I learn, and then I'm going to invest the money, and then I'm going to do it. So when I was talking to him, what he was saying is that the way their program works is you, let's say, you come to me and you say, hey, I want to join your program, I want to finance it. So the Okay, so I turn it over to him. And they have a form that you fill out, it's a personal loan, and they they work with the world's largest banks, right. So it's not like some, some little corner shop, these are real big banks, and they look at your information. And then they put give you an offer, they say, all right, we will offer you $10,000, we will offer you 20,000 will offer you 30,000 as a loan, and these are the terms this is the interest that you could pay every month, etc. And then if you like it, then you say yes, or no. Or if you don't want the whole amount, if you don't need the 30,000, you take, you know, I'll say I need 10,000, I need 5000 or 2000, or whatever you want to take, you can you can take that amount. Once you have that money, then my company charges you for our program, whatever the cost is that you agree to. And that's how it works. And then you make the payments directly to the bank. So I was thinking about I think, wait a minute. So you're telling me that the people, the customers, my customers can borrow more than the program is cost? And he said, Yeah, they can. So I thought that was very interesting, I think, well, if somebody wants to, so they have good credit, they can borrow enough to pay for the program, and they can borrow the money to trade with. So that way they take the money that they're trading with, they earn a profit on that, and they use that profit to make the payments. So in essence, they're getting it for free. They're just working for it, but they're using their profits to pay off the loan. And that would be an amazing way to get started very quickly. And he said, Yeah, technically, they could do that if they wanted to. So that's interesting, you know, so I'm still thinking about whether we should do that or not. If you're interested in something like that, let me know the good and the bad, you know, because I'm thinking about it, I'm still debating it, I don't know if it's a good thing. For some people, it can definitely work. I've seen people that it has worked for where they've borrowed money to trade with, and they've done really, really well. And I've seen other people blow up, there was a guy on Facebook. And he he posted that he borrowed $200 on a credit card where he was going to have a 0% interest rate for one year. And he borrowed $200 on his credit card, he's going to use that $200 to trade with. And I'm scratching my head, I'm like, Dude, what are you gonna do with 200 bucks, you're gonna buy some calls, hopefully, you'll make some money, hopefully, you'll be able to pay it off. But you got to make 100% in a year, you're it's a crapshoot, right 50% chance you're gonna make 50 million, you're gonna lose it all. But I don't know, maybe he's gonna make it. But if he's only using $200, I have a feeling he doesn't know what the heck he's doing, he's probably gonna lose it $200. And, well, it's not a big deal, he's gonna have to pay back the credit card, I don't know why you would only borrow 200 though. Geez, if you if your bank is only going to give you a line of credit on a credit card of $200, you got bigger problems, you don't need to be trading, go get a job. But the thing here is, this might be a way for you to get started. So either you borrow money from a friend, you borrow money from the bank, you borrow money from somewhere else, I wouldn't advise you to borrow money from your credit card like my dad did on this, you probably knew that, hey, you know, this is a sinking ship, we might not be able to pay it, that's a bad thing. You shouldn't borrow money that you can afford to pay back. Right? So hopefully, you're not in a situation where you do have to borrow money. But if you are, please think about it before you do. Most of the time, when you borrow money, people are under a lot of pressure. And they feel that they have to pay it off right away. And so they take risks that they shouldn't necessarily take and they blow up, they lose all the money that they borrowed. And then not only do they feel really horrible about losing money, but then they still have to pay back the bank. And that can mess up their credit, they can mess up their relationship with their spouse. So you really really have to think this through before you do it. I'm just putting it out there. It's something you've probably already thought about it.  If you've ever wanted to get into trading and you don't have any money, like, we're gonna get the money, we're gonna get the money, I still think the best way is to paper trade to learn without having the risk. And to build up a track record and the look, you know, I've been paper trading for six months. And I've done all these trades. I've done several trades every month, and I'm consistently profitable even a couple of months where, you know, I could have lost money, I could have lost a lot of money, but I didn't manage it properly. And here's my record. And then you can find somebody that can either borrow, you can borrow the money from or we'll put up the money and you trade their account and you get paid a fee for it. You know you get a piece of the profits. I would rather have you do that than borrow the money. But even if you are about to borrow the money, please paper trade it first. Whatever you're thinking of trading paper traded first, so that you don't end up and do what I did. That's why I told you that story in the beginning because it's a warning, right? I didn't know what I was doing. I had a course. But I didn't have like a live mentor. I didn't have a group, I didn't have any community. It was just me by myself with my little charts that come every, every Monday in the mail, and I'm drawing my lines. And even though I had it, right, even though I had the trade, right, I had nailed it, I knew the direction I knew was going up, I placed the stop loss in the wrong spot. And I was trading the yen when I shouldn't have been, because my account size wasn't large enough to be able to trade the yen properly. Does that make sense? I was trading the wrong instrument. And I didn't have anybody to tell me that.  That's why we have coaching programs. That's why we do coaching calls with students. So they can tell me what they're trading and I can coach them and walk them through and say, you know what, if your account is that big, maybe you're overreaching here, maybe you need to trade more, use your feet, something else. And so we walk you through it so that you don't make that same mistake because I know how painful it can be. I know how you can do every single thing, right and still have it blow up in your face. And so if that's happened to you reach out to us get on the phone with us book a call, we can talk about it, we can tell you what we have to help you. And I think, you know, if we need to, we can even help you figure out how to finance the program. But we'll have to make sure that it's gonna work for you first. And so that's why we get on the phone. And we have to talk to you see what your background is, if you're the right fit for the program, then we will give you an invitation to join. And then if it if need be, we can tell you how to finance it if you have to. But again, that's something that we really don't really push. And we don't encourage you to very much. Just because you're going into debt for something I don't want you to go into debt for. Right, I don't want you to start behind, I want to put the odds in your favor as much as possible. And so when you're dealing with that, you have that extra added pressure. I know what it's like to have a lot of debt. You know, at the worst, I think I had myself I had over $100,000 worth of debt. That's not even including car and mortgage and all that stuff. This was just like credit cards and stuff that I had borrowed from. And it's not easy dealing with debt. It's something it sits on your shoulder every day. And it's a pressure that you feel, you know, you're feeling like Atlas, he was the in the Greek mythology, he was the guy that had to hold up the earth on the back on his back. And that's what it feels like, you know, there's something there on your back all the time, and you feel it. And I don't want you to go through that if you don't have to. So my point here is that I never thought I never talked about this before, I've never really mentioned it pushed it, because it is very risky. But if you need to, if you're the right person, if you feel that you're mature enough, you can handle it, you have a trading plan already that's working, that's consistent. Maybe this is the way to go. And if you need to give us a call, reach out to us help@optiongenius.com is our email. If you want to get on the phone with us, we can explain how we can help you just reach out to us via email and we'll tell you what we can do help@optiongenius.com. Oh, and if you do want to find out about that live event that we might be having, it’s optiongenius.com/live. Alright folks, thank you and trade with the odds in your favor. LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/  WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com  JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://optiongenius.com/alliance  Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps.

I'm thinking about doing a two day live virtual event, we can get together right now because of the current situation. So I was thinking we could do it online and open it up to everybody. The idea is to have two days of content, and collaboration and trading and just talking and sharing a lot of ideas, information and having dialogue back and forth. If you're interested, I haven't firmly decided if I want to do it or not. But we're thinking about doing it in January the 8th and the 9th, it's Friday and a Saturday, it's probably going to be all day for both days. And if you're interested, please go to Option Genius slash live. And you can join the announcement list. Of course right now, I haven't decided to do it yet. So we don't have any of the details. Exactly what we're going to talk about. I've thought of some ideas, but exactly what we're gonna talk about not sure yet. I am planning on inviting a couple speakers. So if you want to be on the announcement list, then go to optiongenius.com/live , just put your name and email address and you'll be on your list there. And then if we do decide to do it, we'll let you know. And we might even let you know on the list. And as for suggestions, like Hey, would you like to learn about this topic or this topic? Would you like to hear from this person or this person, but I do not want this to be a pitch fest. We do have that a lot in the financial industry where they pretend that they're going to give you a lot of information, but all they do is pitch you products over and over and over again. And that's not what this is going to be definitely not at all. So if you're open to that, go check it out. Optiongenius.com/live, put your name and email sign up for the announcement list. You know, you don't lose anything if you do that. Cool. Now, are you sedated? Do you even know what that means? I didn't know Sedated is a medical term. At first I didn't know my wife had explained to me why my wife is a registered nurse. And she likes to watch these medical shows. So you know I'm sitting there watching her with her. And there was this one show where this guy comes into the emergency room and he can't communicate. And he's wildly gesturing and room making noises and all these weird stuff. And the doctors jump on him and say oh is it items an item and they they hit him up with an injection and then eventually, he comes down, he stopped shaking and he's like, are half asleep or something like that, I guess that's what they call sedation, right? Where they give you some type of medicine so that you calm down and you I guess come back to your senses or whatnot. But the thing is that I was thinking about that. And I'm like, you know what, that's the way most people live. If you really think about it, you know, about 80% of people who work for companies are unengaged at work, meaning they're sedated at work. They're not giving 100%. Most small business owners are overwhelmed - either they're doing too much or they don't have enough staff, they don't have enough income to hire the right people, or they can't find the right people or right now, you know, their businesses are so uncertain. They don't know what to do. They're going to open, they're going to close they're going to how are they going to serve their customers so they can have any more customers. And it's very rare to find someone who is actually living life, on their own terms, in a way where they actually enjoy themselves. I mean, I think all through life since when we're born to, you know, when we're adults, we are told to behave in a certain way. We're told to believe a certain thing. We're told to live in a certain way and act a certain way - and I don't think that is helping us. And I think that's why maybe we see record numbers of people going into depression and having mental health issues, record numbers of people not getting along. It seems worse now than I've ever remembered it. And you know, we've had some crazy times I lived through the Cold War. Well, not the Cold War with JFK, but the cold war with Russia and Ronald Reagan - Gorbachev. I lived through that I remember that it was kind of scary. And this seems worse because it's in our own country. People, you know, ready to rip each other apart and why I don't want to get into the politics of it and all that. But the thing is that like when we're born, we're full of energy, and we're happy and we accept everything. And we think everybody loves us because they give us so much attention and encouragement and they're always there for us and they're helping us if we fall down they pick us back up, right? And then as we get older, something starts to happen. And we start hearing the word No, no, no. So many times we start hearing negative things. People are putting us down, people are telling us we're not right. And we're stupid or whatnot. And, oh, you don't look good today, or you don't acting like a right mean, the way you're supposed to act. And it's start sending conflicting signals, like, hey, maybe there's something wrong with me, or maybe I need to conform, then we go to school, it's the same thing. You know, we're told me you gotta properly behave, sit in your desk, do this, do that. Follow the rules. My son, he's 10 years old, and he's learning at home he's doing at home school, he's having trouble with his homework, because he gets a lot of homework, and he has to do it on his own. So up till now, he's done amazing in school, because he knew exactly what to expect. And he knew the rules. He knew how it worked. But now, he's on his own. And there's nobody to watch over him all day long while he's doing. I mean, obviously, my wife is at home or somebody is at home. But nobody's on top of him making sure all of his assignments are getting done on time to time basis. And so he's falling behind. He's not doing assignments, he's, he's goofing off, he'd rather watch TV starting to even lie to us and say, "Yeah, I did my homework" , and then we find out no, it wasn't done at all. That's, I think, what's wrong in today's society, that we are all in a sense, sedated. And we're told what to do, what to behave, what to think, or how to act. And it's really, really insane. One of the things that we are sedated about or is the whole aspect of retirement, right? retirement means that you save up money for the whole life, and then eventually, when you are have enough money, then you can stop working and you can officially retire. And I don't think that's the way it should be at all. It's nothing has nothing to do with how much money you have. It's how much money do you get every month without having to work at it. If you have $10,000 a month coming in, that you don't have to work for, then you don't have to work. Unless your expenses are more than $10,000. You could retire tomorrow, you read a hit song, and you get people paying you license fees for that using that song, then you're done. That's it. It's over. But why do people think that they have to have 1,000,002 million $5 million saved up somewhere invested somewhere so that they can withdraw like 4% a year and live off of that? And that's a requirement? Because that's what we're told to believe? That's the myth that's given to us by wall street? Why do they want that? Why do they want us to believe that? Well, because they get to control the money. The more money they control, the more they charging fees. If you give them 100,000 to invest, that's great. They make a little bit if you give them a million dollars to invest, they make a lot more for doing the same amount of work. Very little work, actually. Right. So it's all about the game. And it's all about the way it is. So if you feel yourself being stated, if you feel that you're not living life to your expectation, if you feel that you're not living up to your purpose, it's up to you to change. A friend of mine was telling me a story. He's like, yeah, you know, I was talking to this guy, and he got a new job. And I'm like, Oh, cool. You know, why do you get a job? He goes, Well, I called him and asked him, Hey, when would you get a new job? because well, you know, I was working at this place didn't really like it. And I'm not a tree. So I left. It makes plenty of sense to me. I've not a tree. So I left. Exactly. I didn't have my you know, I'm not a tree. I don't have roots in the ground. I can make my own decisions as an adult. And I can change. I can change my environment, I can change my situation, I can change what's going on in my life. So what's the point? The point is, you're listening to this podcast, because you want to change, you want things to get better. Your finances can change when you trade options. That's fine. But is that going to change your life to the point where you are no longer sedated, and you're completely happy? That's what you need to work on. So really, the question is, who are you? And if you've never been asked that question, if you never thought about that question, I urge you to take a few minutes. You got the holidays coming up. You have some time off, hopefully. Think about it. Half an hour, hour, whatever it takes. Who are you? Really? No, no, I'm a doctor. I'm a lawyer. I'm this I'm that I'm a father. No. Who are you? If you're who is in your name, you know if your name is John, who is John? Deep down? What does he want? What makes him happy? And then you can start to design the life that you deserve. Cool. That's it for this episode, folks. And remember, if you are interested in being on a list for the live event, please check out: optiongenius.com/live. Take care, trade with the odds in your favor.   LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/  WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com  JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://optiongenius.com/alliance  Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps.

In this episode, Kori takes over the podcast to share the results of her first ever trade and the results. Hi, traders. It's Cory today, for those of you who don't know me, I'm the customer satisfaction manager here at option genius. I handle everything related to well, you guys from customer service, incoming coaching students. I'm talking to you guys today because something really cool happens like really, really, really cool. And I'm super excited. a month or two ago, I started going through the passive trading formula. It took me a while because halfway through the course portion, I decided I wanted to make a workbook for all of you guys to make learning easier. So all your incoming students, you're welcome. But that's beside the point. Let's get to the exciting stuff. My whole life. I've been worried about finances, my parents' finances, my siblings, and especially mine. I don't know why. But I've always been fixated on them. Because of that, it's always been very important to me, that I'm smart with my finances. I don't want to be you know, I can't be in debt, I need to make sure that I have more than enough to cover my expenses. And saving is a huge deal for me, I always want to be sure that I'm making the right decisions financially. So when I first started working at option genius, which was around nine or 10 months ago, I believe I was super excited. Because that way I had the option and the ability to learn firsthand how to trade options. But despite that, I was really scared. So I kept pushing it off farther and farther. Because I didn't want to lose money. I was terrified of losing money, because when it's in my savings, it's safe. Even though I you know, I'd seen Allen trade and I'd watched his account grow as well as our students accounts, I was still super scared. But I knew logically that if I just did it the way I was taught in the end, I would make money. But again, I was scared. But one day I was watching Allen put on a trade and I decided that if I was ever going to learn how to trade it had to be now otherwise I would just keep pushing it off and pushing it off and pushing it off. So when I got home that day, I decided that I was going to go ahead and go through the course right then in there. While I was going through the program, I decided to put on my first options trade using the passive trading formula. I was super nervous. But I followed Allen's formula to a tee, which was obviously the right call, as you'll see later. My favorite part. So I picked one of my watchlist stocks, Disney, I saw that it was going up on the chart and looked like he was going to continue that trend. So I decided to put on a call credit spread. I'm pretty conservative when it comes to risk. So I made sure to choose one with an 85% probability of profit, I had a lot of confidence in the trade. So I went ahead and put on 10 contracts, which made the margin requirement around $5,000. For that spread, I felt so accomplished after that the initial rush of having put on my own trade was amazing. I don't think I've ever felt something like that in my life. I think it was because it was my first real step in my trading journey and something I'd worried I'd mess up for a long time. You know, because I've been thinking about doing this for a while. And that was it was a big leap for me. The first week I was in the trade was pretty nerve racking. I'm just kidding. I was actually really calm through the whole process. Having worked with Allen really helped me see how well the formula works. And it gave me that confidence that I needed to not worry. Am I checked in on the trade around every four days I believe in the beginning it was showing I was down a couple of dollars here and there. And but as the trade kept going, I saw that it kept going up. Like one day was at $10 the next day was up $45. And then last Friday, it was up $585 that's crazy, right? Once I saw how much it was up, it was around 12% I think I decided it was time to exit the trade. Unfortunately, it was after the market closed. So I went ahead and put in the the closing order so that when the market opened on Monday, I would be out I was a little scared doing that. Because what if the market went down over the weekend and my trade ended up not working out. That was a big concern for me. It didn't really matter in the end, because today when I checked my account, I was out of the trade with a 12% profit. I ended up making $600 on that trade, my first ever all by myself no help from out on trade. I was so excited. I just had to share with you guys. Having a winning trade is always great. But having a winning trade. The first time you put one on is amazing. I'm literally jumping up and down right now in my chair. I feel like my confidence in myself has shot through the roof, not just with trading but everything in general, because now I know that I have the skills to be able to trade profitably for the rest of my life. Thank you guys so much for listening. And as Allen always says, trade with the odds in your favor. LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/  WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com  JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://optiongenius.com/alliance  Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps.

Hello. Hello. Hello. I want to do a little bit different today and I am going to be answering a question that I got from a podcast listener. This is a question that we get frequently, and I do encourage you to send us questions. If you have anything regarding trading or investing that we can help with, I'm more than willing for you to reach out to us. Email us, it's help@optiongenius.com. Hopefully we can help you. If there is something we can do and point you in the right direction, we will, if not, we'll tell you straight out, hey, we are not experts in that. We don't know. Maybe we'll try to find a resource for you or something, but we do our best to help everybody out as much as possible because in the end, we're all in this together, right? Nobody's getting out of this alive. Might as well help each other and make the world a better place. Right? This is the question I get often and got this question recently from a listener. The question says, the one thing I struggle with is constantly being scared out of the market. I have a trading plan with iron condors and credit spreads and failed to follow it by not trading frequently enough or with enough size. How is the best way to scale up your trading to make a bigger income out of it? Basically, the fellow is saying that he does trades, mostly spreads, but he's hesitant and scared to not do it enough and not do it with enough money when he does do it. He's thinking about how can he scale up his trading to be better at it or make more money from it? The first thing you need to realize is that fear is not always a bad thing. I mean, it's there to alert you to danger, right? That's why we get scared, something dangerous happening, but it's also there to alert you to opportunity as well. We look at fear as a negative thing, but fear is just a common response, right? It doesn't have to be something that is bad for us that we are afraid of. Anything outside of our comfort zone can be scary, but that doesn't mean that it's bad for us. A lot of people are scared of placing their first trade. They're scared of investing money in the stock market because they're afraid to lose it, which is one possible outcome. Yes, but you can mitigate that and you can protect against that. When you look at it and you say, look, there are trillions of kazillions of dollars, whatever invested in stocks around the world, what do those people know that I don't, that I'm afraid to put my money in the stock market? What are the people that are trading profitably and consistently? What do they know that I don't know that I'm not consistent? That's why I'm afraid of making trades or making bigger trades. Is there a secret out there that they know that I don't? Well, most likely not. There are certain ways to do things and once you learn those things, you can follow them methodically, but the problem is fear and emotions. I'll get to that. The second thing you need to realize is that being out of the market is not a bad thing either, right? We don't have to be trading every single expiration cycle. You don't have to be exposed all the time. You get to pick and choose. If the markets get scary and volatile, there's nothing wrong with taking a step back, catching your breath and reassessing to decide if you want to get back in, or if you want to wait until things calm down. Now this fellow thinks that it's a problem that he's not trading enough. He wants to trade more and he's not trading with enough size. It would be a bigger problem if he was trading and he was losing money, but that's not what he said. He said that he has a plan, but he's just not doing it enough. If his plan is profitable, then it doesn't matter if he's trading every month because he's making something. As long as you're making something and you're compounding it, eventually it's going to grow and just let it grow and grow and grow. If you're not comfortable in the market all the time, and if you're not comfortable making your trade size bigger doing more contracts, there's nothing wrong with that. You're okay. There's nothing wrong with you. You're not broken. Don't think that. Don't think negative. That's a negative. No. As long as you're profitable, you decide how much you want to trade. The gains will be smaller, right? If you have a goal, I need to be a millionaire or have 10 million dollars or whatever, yeah, it'll take you a little bit longer. But you can still compound it, and that compounding is exponential. You might not get there tomorrow, but you will get there. The third thing is called market risk. This is something that nobody ever talks about, which is being at risk because you're in the market. It's hard to take this into account, but when selling options, you have the ability to look at each and every exploration cycle as a separate time period. If you miss one, no big deal. We had one of our students, he was going in for surgery. He's like, yeah, how do I protect my trades? How do you protect your trades is you get out, right? There's no telling what's going to happen in your surgery. Now, heaven forbid something really bad happens to you, but he was expected to come home in a couple days, but yeah, sure. Hey, why are we taking that risk at all? Get out of your trades. Take the time off, recuperate, go through your surgery, get better, rehabilitate. Then when you are back to normal, then you can go back in again, right? We as option traders have that ability. Now fear and scaling are a different thing. For me, it's been a process of focusing on managing your risk and protecting capital. As you slowly gain more and more confidence in your ability to become consistent, you will become more comfortable taking on more risk, which leads to generating more income and obviously growing the account. Does that make sense? Before you scale, or at least when it comes to a point that it is consequential to you, you have to take control of your emotions before you can start doing that. Now, that point is different for everybody. For some people, they can handle losing a hundred dollars. For some people, they can handle losing a hundred thousand dollars. It's different for everybody. I have seen traders freak out. Putting on a trade, they get out when they're down $200. I mean, what happened? Why did you get out? I couldn't handle it. I was losing money. I'm like, yeah, you were technically down on paper for one day, but the thing rallied and you would have been up today. The trade would have worked. Why did you get out? I couldn't take it. I couldn't take it. Okay. Well, then you know yourself, and if you can't handle a $200 loss then maybe trading is not right for you, or maybe you need to get a handle on your emotions. Right? I've seen other traders on the flip side, they risk a million dollars with no trading plan or any understanding of what to do if the trade goes South. I've seen everything in between. I mean, when I started the Option Genius Service, right, one of the first people I talked to, this was like, way, way, this was years ago. One of the first people I ever talked to, the guy said, hey, I just joined your service and you just put out a iron condor. I just put a hundred thousand dollars in that trade. I was like, what? How much is in your account? He goes, a hundred thousand. I mean, you put the whole thing in one trade? He goes, yep. I said, how do you know it's going to work? He goes, well, your site looked good. My site looked good, that was the reasoning that you put a hundred thousand dollars in one trade? Are you out of your mind? I mean, you don't know who I am. Right. Because at the time, I didn't have a podcast. I didn't have my picture anywhere. I told him, I remember I told him like, dude, you don't know who I am. I could be some kid, some teenager sitting in China putting up a website trying to scam people. He was quiet. He's like, oh yeah, I never thought of that. I mean, luckily that trade worked out great. After that, I helped him to not put all of his money in one trade, which would be a good thing for anybody. But I digress. There are people on both sides. There are the ones that can't take any risk and there are the ones that are super risk-takers. The thing is that it's all pretty much mental, it's in your head. It is fear, plain and simple, right? Trading one contract is technically the same as trading 10 or a hundred or a thousand. It's the same trade, just different numbers. The numbers are a little bit bigger, but yeah, it can be a huge block, a mental block. Part of it comes down to knowing your dollar goal. How much do you actually want to make? If you're trading too small to hit your goal, right? If your goal is a thousand dollars a month, but you're only doing one trade that can only make a hundred dollars a month, you're never going to hit your goal. Then the goal will help you scale because that's just mad. You're like, oh man, I can't get my goal. Okay. I need to do more because I need to get to my goal. The other side is to have confidence. That comes with doing the trades over and over and over and over. If you use real money, it can take years as you go through the different markets, right? You go through a bear market. You go through a bull market. You go through a sideways market. You go through a correction. You go through a dip. You go through all these different things. It takes years to understand how to trade through all those different environments. Now, as passive traders, we have the odds on our side and the trades are built in to withstand these shocks, but it can still impact us. The biggest impact is on us mentally. I've done podcasts in the past where you've got trading scars. That was the name of the podcast, trading scars. When you're trading and you take hits, it causes a scar mentally, not on your body but in your brain. Well, not physically but is a memory, and so when you're in that same situation again, you have to learn how to react properly so that you don't get another scar. You don't get hurt again. Now that's with trading with real money. Now, if you're paper trading or you're backtesting, you can get that experience much, much sooner. Even if you're doing one, I would suggest you do the other two. If you're just doing paper, I would expect you to do some backtesting and eventually get to real money so that you can know what that feels like. If you're only doing real money with a smaller account, then do backtesting and do paper trades and get as many trades on as you can handle. Get as many trades on as you can do as soon as fast as you can, that will help you get the experience. Only through that experience will you feel calmness, will you feel confident and be like, yeah, you know what? I can handle this. I traded through the Lehman Brothers collapse in the great depression or great recession or whatever they called it. Right. When the Corona thing came, I was like, oh man, I've been through this. It wasn't that bad. Oh yeah, because I've been through it. I've been through worse. Right. Been through bull markets, been through bear markets, been through corrections. After a while it becomes like a sixth sense. You're like, oh yeah, I know what the market is going to do. If it does this, I'll do this. If it does this, I'll do that. But I feel confident that I can make adjustments and I'm going to get through it. But if you've never been through that environment before, it's like, oh my God, the end of the world, the market dropping every day. Oh my God. Oh my God. I'm going to lose all my money. Get out, get out. The worst possible time. That's what most people do because they don't have the experience. Do the paper trading, do the backtesting. The third aspect of having confidence in your system or your strategy. The thing has to work too, right? The way you're trading has to work as well. You got desire, you got experience, you got confidence. Three legs of the stool and you got to have all three. You could also look at this in a different way. If you tell yourself that you have, let's say $3,000 and that you have to make it work. Man, this is it. That's all the money I have in the world. I got to work. It's got to work. It's got to work. I got to make money. I can't lose this money. Under no circumstances can I lose this money. My wife is going to chop my head off or something else. Right? Then it is just too much pressure and you will either lose it or you will not trade it properly, which will end up making you lose it. So yeah, if you have that much stress on you to not take a loss, then you're going to lose it. You can't do that either. That's why we always say, trade with money you can afford to lose. If you can afford to lose it, that takes away a whole negative aspect of it that will destroy you. In order to scale, step one is to be able to control yourself. That includes being okay with losing money. It includes understanding and being okay that you can lose all the money in your account. It includes not freaking out when things get volatile. You do this in a number of ways. Number one, like I said is you have confidence in your trading plan. If you've put on a whole bunch of trades and you've seen them work, you're going to have more confidence. If you are trading with a group or other people are doing it, or if you have a mentor that's been doing it and he's telling you, hey, look, this is the way we trade. This is how it's going to work. If you've seen it work, then you have confidence. Number two, if you have experience doing the same strategy hundreds or thousands of times, that's basically how you get the confidence in the trading plan. Then step two of scaling is to increase your position sizing, obviously, right? Yeah. I want to scale. Okay. Step two. Step one that we talked about was, what did we talked about? Step one, being able to control yourself. Step one to scaling is being able to control yourself. Step two is to go ahead and then do it to increase your position sizing. Now remember, remember how you thought about going to school or training for whatever you do now for a living, for your job, right? Do you remember getting trained for that? If you had to go to college or get a certificate or go to a seminar or whatever, you did all that, you put up with all that because you were training. You were learning and it took time. It's the same thing here. Trading takes time to learn, but this puts you in a real life seminar and you are paying your dues every day. The time that you put in, you're paying your dues. You put your trades on, you monitor them, you debrief them at the end, right? What happened? What went wrong? What went right? What did I do right? How can I change it? How can I make my results better? You rinse and you repeat. You got a good plan, keep doing it over and over and over again. As your account size gets larger, you can go from one contract to maybe two, then maybe to three, then to five, then to seven. You go at your own pace. There is no race. There is no time limit. As long as you're doing constantly better, you're being consistent like I said earlier, the account will grow in size and you'll get more confident and you can trade more. It's up to you. You want to go from one to five? If you got the money and you've had the experience, okay, fine. I wouldn't advise it. I'd go from one to two, two to four, four to six, six to 10. Take it small jumps. It doesn't need to be overnight because there's no rush. It's not like, oh, my next door neighbor just bought a Mercedes. I got to buy one too so I need to do a hundred trades this month. No, forget him and his Mercedes. Who cares? Right? Be confident with who you are and what you have. Don't rock the boat. We don't want to take unnecessary risks we don't have to. For most people, it's better to move from say three contracts to four contracts, to six to 10 small increments because there's no such thing as missing out on the trade of the century. There is no trade of the century. It's like, oh my God, if I don't invest now, I'm going to lose. I'm never going to get this opportunity again. No, it doesn't happen. There's no such thing. They said that before years ago, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, six months ago, they've been saying that forever. As long as you get in and you can consistently make money, you're fine. It's just going to grow. Everything is the same. You don't need to put all your money in one trade when you're not ready to do so. Okay. Now, step three to scaling. Once you have increased contract size, you need to increase the account size, or maybe you need to do this in the account size before you do the contract size. Either way, but one usually comes after the other. You do this obviously by adding more money to the pot, put more money in your account. Right? Now, you can do it the other way and you'd be like, you know what? I'm just going to grow the account, and whatever I make, I'm going to keep it and just scale that way. Or you can say, hey, look, I've got the confidence. I've got my emotions under control. I got a good strategy. I got a good mentor. I feel confident to be able to go to the next level so I need to add a few thousand dollars more into my account so I can go from say, two contracts to four or four to eight, right? I'm going to go incrementally higher. I'm not going to go from two to 10. Don't do that. Two to four, two to five, slowly, slowly, build it up. Go to the next level, trade there for a little while, get comfortable. Then you can go again to the next level. It's like going up steps, right? Once you're adding more money to the pot, you can do something or you can add something to your account that's called portfolio margin. What portfolio margin means is that you get additional leverage and you get the ability to make money quicker where less money tied up actually. For most brokers that I've seen, portfolio margin starts at $125,000. If you have that in your account, you get portfolio margin. Normally, when you open an account and you apply for margin, they give you two-to-one margin. If you put in $10,000, they'll let you buy $20,000 worth of stock, but they charge you interest on the money that they lent you. We don't really advise that. Right now, when you're passive trading, you need to have a margin account. If it's a non-retirement account, if it's not an IRA, then you got to have margin enabled so that you can do spreads. You can do naked puts. But we don't borrow the money. Portfolio margin is a little mix of both. Portfolio margin, I believe it's like four to one or five to one in terms of margin. If you have a hundred thousand dollars, you can actually trade with $400,000. Big difference. You could buy a lot more, but I'm not telling you to buy a lot more. I'm telling you to do it because on your trades, they can charge you less in margin. What I mean by that is if you do a naked put that is very, very, very, very far away from the money. If you have a regular margin account, they might charge you, I don't know, they say $3,000 in margin to do that trade for example. I'm just making it up. Okay. If you have a portfolio margin account, they look at it, they calculate that margin differently. They look at the actual risk of the trade. Because they can tell that you're so far away from the money and that the odds are so far in your favor, there's not a big risk of you losing money and so the amount of margin that they're going to charge you or hold for doing that trade is going to be a lot less. It might be, say $500 compared to 2,000 or $3,000. With a regular account, they'll charge you $500 a margin for a portfolio margin account. What happens there? Well, I can make a much greater return percentage-wise on my money. Right? Dollar-wise, they'll be the same thing, but then I can decide, hey, what? Do I want to do two of these or three of these instead of one? Because I can, right? Because I have more leverage. I can do that. If the trade goes against me, of course, I'm still going to end up losing money and I'll lose more because now I have three contracts versus one. I need to be able to know and be good with that. That's why they only give it to you if you have over a hundred or $125,000. But that's what I did. Right? For myself, when I started scaling, I went horizontally. I'm going to lay it out, two different types of scaling. What I did, I went horizontally, meaning I put small amounts into many different accounts. I had a Roth account. I had a regular IRA account. I had one each for my wife. I had a SEP account. I had a corporate account for the company. I had a couple of personal accounts. Then I would do different trades in all the different accounts, so I got a little bit, a little bit, a little bit in all of them, right? Yes. I have a lot of money in the market but they're spread out in all of these different accounts. That's what I call horizontally. In hindsight, the process worked and now all of the accounts are fairly large, but it took a lot longer than necessary because each account did not have enough money in the beginning to do everything I wanted. I was limited in the trades I could do. I was limited in the strategies I could do in the beginning because each account did not have that much money. If you have, let's say a hundred thousand dollars, right? You put it in one account, you can do certain things with it that you can't do if you open 10 different accounts with $10,000 each. That makes sense? What I've done now is I still have those accounts, but I went vertically right now. That's how I'm scaling right now. I'm going vertically. I'm working on growing just one account to a certain level. I have a goal for this one account, whatever money I'm putting in is going into this one account. I'm not spreading it out into all of them. I'm putting it all in one and I want to get this one to a certain level that I can use to generate monthly gains that I can either withdraw if I need to, or I can just let it stay in the account and grow. That's my plan now. Get this account to a certain level that I want to, and then when it gets there, then I don't need to put any more money into my accounts. Then I can take that money that I'm earning and make an investment somewhere else. The money that I make in that account, I can take it out if I want to, if I want to invest in somewhere else, or I can just leave it there, I'll let the account grow. I'm at the point now where it's like, you know what? I don't know if I want to have more money exposed in the stock market. Let's diversify. Let's put some over here. Let's put some over here. Let's invest in different things. Now I'm doing vertically. Initially I started out horizontally. It was great, but I probably could have gotten my goals faster if I went vertically from the beginning. Doing it vertically, you're focusing on just growing one account and that were actually shown to get faster results, but it's all based on your own financial situation. I did it the other way because I had different IRA accounts, a Roth, my wife, and there's limits on how much you can put in each every year. Okay, I can only put this much in there. Your Roth, IRA, you only put like 5,000 or $5,500, something like that. I don't qualify for anymore. But when I did, I was putting I think about 5,000 a year and that's the max you can put. If you have $30,000 you want to put in the market, then you have to put five here, five here, 10 here, 10 here, et cetera, et cetera. That's why I ended up with those horizontal accounts instead of putting them all into one main vertical, large trading account. That make sense. The important thing is to get started. The more you trade, the more confident you will get, the more profits you will generate, and the more you will be inclined to add funds to your account. It's just that simple. For some of you, I know that you have a spouse or a partner that's involved in your decisions and it can be challenging when you want to scale and you want to trade larger, you want to put more money in the account. I know that. They may not be on board with it, right? But if you follow this path, you have concrete results to show your spouse. You can show, look, look at the history. Look at my trades, look at this. I'm doing good. That will ease their mind and then it will make them not only okay with the idea, but it will get them supporting your trading a lot more. Right? The main thing they're worried about now is that it's going to not work. But if you have proof, if you can go to your spouse and say, look, I just did 600 trades. Look at this, trade after trade after trade and I made this much money. Then I think they're going to support you. Don't you think? Don't you agree? Like, yeah, but if you show them three trades. Look, I did three trades. Okay. Let's put a million dollars. Let's mortgage the house. No. Right? Cool. So 90% of trading is mental. You master that, and scaling is a piece of cake. All right, folks, make sure you trade with the odds in your favor. Don't ever forget that part of it. Take care and be safe LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/  WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com  JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://optiongenius.com/alliance  Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps.

Passive traders, how you doing? What's going on? Hopefully, you are safe and sound wherever you are listening to this and I hope the markets are treating you fairly. Or, better than fairly, because we want what's fair, right? We want, in our favor. So we had a question from someone coming in and the question was, is it still, or is it a safe time to get back into the oil markets? And if you are following us, you might know that I do have a coaching program where we teach people how to trade oil options and these are futures oil options. And I have been doing so for, it's been over five years now, I believe, quite well, actually. And so that's why a while back I started teaching people how to do it. And now we have, I think we have close to over 400 people that have gone through the program and lots and lots of success stories. Lots of people are very happy that they've joined and we do have a few openings and people are still coming in. So really, I wanted to talk about oil and what has happened in oil this year in 2020 and what I think will happen in the future. So the biggest thing that happened in 2020 in terms of investing so far, was definitely the coronavirus, right? Coronavirus hit the US really bad in March, actually hit the markets in March. And we went into a bear market in the stock market and then pretty much a V-shape bounce back. It took about, I don't know, a month and a half or so, or two months, and then after that, we were off to the races, going much higher. Overall for the year, markets didn't do that much, but it dropped 20% and then came back. So that's a big deal. In addition to the stock market, oil also took a tumble from where it was trading. And then there were a lot of headlines in April, lots of headlines, all the news going crazy, oil went negative, oil went negative, oil prices are actually below zero. You can get paid to get oil. And of course, that's a bunch of BS. So let me put some, let me talk about it. Let me explain it. The spot price of oil, which is the actual real price of oil if you were to go buy a barrel of oil, it's the spot price, that's how much you can buy it for. That never went below zero. Never, ever and it hasn't happened, will never happen, because oil is a commodity. It is a physical substance that has cost, right? It is worth something and it has a cost to locate it, to drill it, to get it out of the ground, to transport it, insure it, store it, all that stuff. It costs money to do all that right now in the US, in the shale, it takes about, I don't know, $40, $45, $40 to $45, depending on the company, somewhere in that range, to get the oil out of the ground. If you go over to Saudi Arabia, they're drilling it. Their oil is a little bit easier to extract and so their costs are cheaper, probably somewhere at $12 to $15 per barrel, somewhere around that range, but still it costs money. And so no, there was never a time where anybody could go into the market and get paid to buy oil. So let's put that to rest. And if you look at a chart of oil right now, you will see it never went oil. And when I talk about oil, there are different types of oil. The one that went negative supposedly was called WTI and that is the one that we trade in our program. The other type of oil, which is traded in the United States, is Brent. And Brent oil itself never went, even trading wise, never went below $26 or so a barrel. That is the oil that is used, the crude oil that you get from overseas, the Middle East and such. But in reality, there are dozens and dozens of types of different crude oil. So the ones we trade mostly are WTI, and you can also do Brent in our program. We trade WTI. WTI is the one that is pumped in the United States or drilled in the United States and in Canada. And all of that oil makes its way normally through pipelines and gets to a place or city called Cushing, Oklahoma. That is where they are stored. That's where all the oil is stored. That's WTI, that's the one we trade. So a lot of times, if there is some unease in the Middle East or something like that, it impacts Brent a lot more. It does impact WTI a little bit, but it's not to the same degree. So WTI is a little bit more stable in that sense. There's less risk of an attack or something like that really making WTI go nuts. But if something happens to Brent, WTI does move in tandem, so that's a whole different story. But what happened was, the trading in WTI for one day did go negative. It did. And that was what the headlines were talking about. It's not that the spot price was negative. It never was. It was for one day. Basically what happened is that we have this very large oil ETF, ticker symbol, USO. If you want to trade oil, but you cannot trade futures, like if you're a mutual fund or a hedge fund or whatever index fund type thing, if you cannot trade futures, they created this ETF, which tracks oil prices and it's called USO. Now in order... The way they do that is they buy front month oil futures contracts. Now oil is traded as a future, which means it's a contract and it has an expiration date, just like the options. So you can have a option on a future. So you have an option, which is a derivative and then oil contract futures contract, which is also a derivative. So you have a derivative on top of a derivative on top of oil. Seriously, I'm not trying to lose you. I know it's getting a little complicated here, but really I'm not trying to. I'm trying to make it as simple as possible. So anyway, you have USO. They buy front month futures contracts, and you can, futures contracts go for several months. So you can buy one for now or in the future. That's why they're called futures and the prices are different for all of them. They're all individual, different securities. So they only buy the front month. What happens is every month when they get to expiration day, the USO has to sell all of its futures contracts, and then they have to buy the contracts for the next month. So basically, they just roll it forward. They do not own any oil, right? So there's another ETF GLD, which tracks gold. Now GLD actually owns gold. So they have gold stored. They don't have to play this game. Maybe they do a little bit, but not as much. USO doesn't own any oil. They don't store any oil, so they have to play this game with trading. Now, what was going on is, that oil was decreasing in price because there is a lot of supply. There is a ton of supply right now, and there's a lack of demand, because of the Corona. It was totally unpredicted, markets shut down, country shut down, business shut down, everything shut down. Nobody needs as much oil. And so what happened was, that the drillers are still drilling oil, but now nobody's using the oil and nobody's buying the oil. So the oil was being stored in Cushing, Oklahoma and the storage facilities were getting fuller and fuller and fuller. They were roughly at about 80 or 85% capacity. Okay. Now, if you want to store oil in Cushing, Oklahoma, you have to have a contract, you have to have a deal with them. You can't just walk in and say, I need a billion barrels of storage or whatnot. You can't just do that. You have to have an agreement with them in place. So you have an entity and you have a trader, USO, which has thousands and thousands and thousands of contracts that they have to get out of. They have to sell, right? And it's expiration date, so they got to sell them today. They got to sell them on that day. They don't have a choice. Otherwise, they go bankrupt. They go caput. They cannot take delivery of that oil. They can't. So they have to get rid of the contracts. Who do they sell the contracts to? They can only sell them to people who have capacity to store it, right? You, me, any individual trader, we cannot take delivery of oil. So we do not trade on expiration day. We do not take contracts, our brokers will not let us. It's just not done because you cannot take delivery. Only people who taking delivery are trading on expiration day. And those were the only people who could buy these contracts from USO. Now, normally in a common market, normal market, everything happening, people take those contracts and it's a done deal. It's normal. But, this was not normal. Nobody knew what was going to happen with Corona. Nobody knew when demand was going to pick up again. And so what happened was, all of the buyers that USO normally deals with, they know these guys, they're friends, they work together. They reach out to them and say, "Hey, we need you to take over these contracts from us." The buyer said, "No, can't do it. Not going to do it this month. I still got plenty of oil stored up that I haven't gotten rid of. My capacity is low. I don't have that much allotment. I can't do it." And USO freaked out. So they said, "All right, fine, I know the price is whatever, 30 bucks a barrel, $25 a barrel, $25 a barrel," whatever it was, said, "I'll give it you for $20. Just take it for $20." And the buyer said, "Nope." "All right, I'll give it to you for $15." "Nope." "I'll give it to you for $10." "Nope." "I'll give to you for zero. Come on. Just take it, just take it. Just please just take my oil. Just pay me and just take it from me. Just take these contracts." "Nope. I can't take it because I got nowhere to put it." "So even if you give me the oil at zero, what you're doing, Mr. USO, I cannot take delivery. It's going to cost me to take delivery of this oil. I have to pay for storage." "How much is it going to cost you?" "Well, I don't know. It's going to cost me some money." So USO kept dropping the price. They went to zero and then they went negative. They said, "Here, we'll pay you to take the oil." "Nope." "We'll pay you more. We'll pay you more. We'll pay you more." I think it got down to, at one point, it was like negative $35 or $37 a barrel at one point. That is what they were paying these people to take contracts from them and then take delivery and store it. So we as individual investors, or most people on Wall Street, could not take advantage of this. There were only a few select firms that could have taken advantage of this. So for them, yeah, it was a windfall, right? For us, you and me, it didn't make any difference. For oil traders or option traders, it didn't make any difference. Why? Because number one, oil options had already expired. The options that we were trading had already expired. And because of the rules that we use in my system, we were already out of the oil markets. We were not trading at this time. So that saved us. The rules and my system, it worked, this is proof. It worked and it saved us and we were not trading at this time. Number two, the day after this happened, oil prices went back up, because this was a anomaly. It was a technical glitch in the system. It was just supply and demand. No demand, prices go down. Hey, I need you to get rid of this, here, please take it. So they got paid. Everybody could not take advantage of this. This is not a normal thing that happened. If you look at the price of a price chart, you won't see it on the price chart. And that was gone. That only happened that one day for that one futures contract. Not all of futures contracts, not olive oil. It was that one futures contract on one day and it expired and it went away and the problem was gone. Now I hope USO has learned its lesson. And they did say that they do not, where they were spreading their risk into not trading only the front month option. So now they trade whatever the current month is, they buy some of the next month, they buy some of the next month. That's going to lower their profits and that's going to lower how much USO actually tracks the regular price of oil. So if oil is going up a dollar, USO's not going to go up the same amount because it's not going to track as much, because they're in different contracts. So getting technical here. So just USO is not going to be as efficient tracking the price of oil because now they have to hedge themselves. They have to protect themselves so this does not happen again. Okay? But, so if you're going to ask me, "Hey, did oil prices go negative?" I'd be like, "Not really." Oil never went negative. Technically there was a glitch. If you could have taken advantage of it, you did well. Most of us couldn't. Next thing you know, oil was up the next day, right? And it started going up since then. So what happened? Well, this was a pretty big anomaly, a pretty big glitch. And even before this happened, liquidity, or not liquidity, volatility in oil had increased. And so if you look at OVX, which is the oil volatility index, it's like VIX, you know the VIX for stocks, the SS&P, OVX is the same thing for oil. If you look at that, volatility had increased before this happened, before April 2nd, I believe. And so the, the brokers themselves, the futures brokers, when volatility increases, they start to increase the amount of margin that you need per each contract. So basically what that means is, that things are getting crazy. Things are getting volatile. The market is waking up, it's jumping around, you need to have more money for each contract, which means that you are being protected, right? You're having less money at risk. If you only have $5,000 in the account, you can't be trading two, three, four different contracts. It lowers how many contracts you can trade. So you have to get out of some contracts, which is good because things are acting crazy. That's one of the ways the futures markets protect their traders, us little guys. After this happened, several brokers decided to stop letting individual investors trade oil. That was oil, as well as the options. Was this fair? I don't know. I'm not a broker. I really can't decide. I can't say. But I do know that if you were at a broker that did not, and all the brokers did not. There were several brokers, interactive brokers, trade station, DeCarley trading, which is somebody that we recommend. They are a futures only broker and all the other futures only brokers did not stop trading. If you could have traded, and I could not. I was at Ameritrade, Ameritrade stock trading. A lot of the other big firms stopped trading, E-Trade, Schwab, they all, they stopped it. So I could not take advantage. But you have a security that has just gone down in price significantly. It's lower than the cost, right? Oil is trading at a price that's lower than it costs to create. What is going to go happen to that price? It's going to shoot up. It has no choice. It has to go up. That was the easiest money you could have made ever in the history of the world, maybe. You have things selling and I think if you look at our oil chart now, the lowest they got to was like $6 on the oil chart, right? But let's say it went to $7 or $8. Let's say you could have bought it at $8. If you could buy oil at $8 and it cost $40 to get out of the ground, yeah, that sucker's going to go up. That's easy money. So yeah, we did have people in our program that were trading and they made the easiest money in their lives because you know it's going up, right? You just sit back and buy as much as you can and you hold on for dear life. And since then, that happened in April, right, and oil has rallied. It's been trading for the last several months around $40 a barrel. And it's in a very tight range. It just goes up and down a little bit, little up and down, up and down, up and down. I have been gritting my teeth waiting for Ameritrade to let us back in. They still haven't done it. I'm recording this, it's November, they still have not let us back in as individual investors. Other brokers have and so I had to switch an account to another broker and now I'm trading it over there. I waited and waited and waited, and finally said, I can't take it anymore. I mean, this is the perfect opportunity to be trading oil. It's calm, it's moving sideways. Oh my God, it's easy. Money is just sitting there. Please, let me trade. Please, let me trade. Nope. They're not letting me. Okay, let's go to a different broker. So I took out a large account over to another broker and I've started over there. Two months ago, I started, made 7% in the first month. This month I made like two point something. I got out early because of the election. The US presidential election's coming up in a few days and I have really limited all my positions. I don't want to be in any oil positions. I don't think anything's going to happen to oil because of that, but I'm not taking the risk. Okay? So yes we are back. Oil is back. It is a great way to trade. It is doing really, really well. I mean, it's going sideways. I don't know what else you could want is to be an option seller, right? Very little risk, sell as far away from the money as you can. It's great if you do it properly. And the way we do it is, we do it properly, right? Because we have, back-tested, not back-tested, but actually tested with real money. I have for several years. Different strategies, I found the one that works the best and not only does it work the best, but I came up with the different rules to protect myself and to hedge myself and to make sure that, okay, in this situation, we need to do this, in this situation, we need to do that and that's why we were protected. That's why we were out of the market even before oil went, quote unquote, negative for the day, right? We were already out. And that was because of our rules. So we were protected. So I'm happy, I'm ecstatic. I'm like, Hey, this is it. It worked. This is why we have the freaking rules to protect ourselves. This is why I can say, yes, this program works. And this is why I say you should join the program, right? You should join if you want to trade oil profitably. Yeah, join the program. If not, you can try to figure it out on your own. Good luck, it took me several years to do it. Have at it, be fun, hopefully you don't lose all your money in the process. But yeah, so that's where oil is right now. It's moving sideways. It's doing good. We're going to be making money. I'm waiting until after the election is over and then we're going to go full fledge back into it. Been already doing it for two months now and we did great, very simple, very easy trades. After the election settles, everything goes back, we're going to go 100% back into it and it's going to be a lot of fun. I do expect oil to be very calm for the next year. We'll see how it happens. We'll see if there's anything with the Corona vaccine and all that stuff. We can't predict the future, but from what we are seeing, we're going to make a lot of money. https://optiongenius.com/oiloptions So if you've been thinking about our program, it's time to get in now so that you can start paper trading, so that you can start practicing and so you stop wasting time, right? Because every day that goes by is a day that you're missing out on theta, missing out on this money for selling time. Every day that goes by is a day you cannot sell time. So stop sitting on the sidelines, get involved, start paper trading, doing something, and trade with the odds in your favor. Thank you and good luck. https://optiongenius.com/oiloptions LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/  WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com  JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://optiongenius.com/alliance  Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps.

People literally ask me this one question ALL THE TIME… “Allen, how did come up with such a lucrative, safe, and easy way to trade?” I explain it all in my new book Passive Trading, get your free book here! https://www.passivetrading.com/free-book Podcast Transcript: I hope that wasn't too loud. That's my new toy, and I am super excited about it. I'm stoked about it actually. But first some background, making money could get boring. Now I say that because passive trading can be monotonous. When just about every trade you make makes money, you take it for granted. It kind of loses its charm and the dollars, they just become numbers on a screen. So it can get really out of hand. Like you, just, there's no more fun anymore. And that's good in a way, so that you don't get emotional about it in case you lose money, just, oh, the numbers went down. That's okay, it's not an indictment on me that I'm a bad person or I'm stupid, or anything like that. The numbers went down and then, they'll go back up. And that's how it becomes for a lot of traders, but that's bad because you lose interest. It's not exciting anymore. It's not fun anymore. It doesn't have that same oomph that it had when you first started, you know? And that's when you start to screw up, that's when you start making mistakes, that's when you start falling down and not paying attention. So a few years ago, I added a bonus for myself. Every time I would have a positive month, where I would make money for the entire month, I would have what I called the celebratory lunch, with my wife. And this would be special, maybe once a month, no kids, no distractions, nothing else. It would just be me and her setting time apart, scheduling it and saying, we're going to lunch and we're going to some nice place. And, it was because I had a positive month and I would be super happy. I would love it, I would look forward to it. And it made a huge difference. I actually started trading better, just because I knew I wanted that day off. And yeah, I did take the whole day off. So it wasn't just a celebratory lunch, it was like a celebratory day off. But the big thing was the lunch. I wanted that time with my wife. Now we normally do date nights. You go out at night and you get a babysitter or somebody to watch the kids, but this was different, this was during the day. I mean, we would make the time and we would splurge and we would celebrate. And the cool thing is that we would go to these restaurants where, everybody else there was rushed. People coming in, workers, or they're coming in their suits and ties, and they're in their whatever outfits, or their office outfits. And they would come in and they'd have, maybe like 30 minutes to eat and they'd be rushed. And the waiters would be rushing around and we'd be sitting there for like two hours, just enjoying ourselves, talking and catching up, and relaxing. And the waiter would be like, oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't bring your food out fast enough. We're like, ah, don't worry about it, we're going to be here for a while. You take care of your other tables. Don't worry about us. And that was another way, where I would be so grateful and thankful. It was a monthly reminder of what I have that other people didn't, because they had to rush back to work. They're on the clock, it's a daily grind, the nine to five rat race, and they couldn't get out of it. Whereas me, I was lucky to be celebrating with my wife, something simple, hey, we made a positive month this month. And it wasn't just that we made money that month, 'cause the worker people, they're making money too, right? But it was the fact that I was able to have the time, to spend the way I wanted to, and so it made it a much bigger deal. So it wasn't just a fact that yes, I made money that month. It wasn't just the fact that I was spending time with my wife. It was a celebration, and it was a reminder of what a wonderful life it is. And it would bring me joy and it would bring me some humility, try not to get over, you don't want to get over-pompous. You want to stay humble, right? You don't want to get a big head. You don't want to be like, oh yeah, I'm perfect, I'm a great trader, I'm a God of wall street, master of the universe type thing. No, that's not me, I don't think I'm ever going to be like that. But that's another thing why I needed to do it. I needed to have that celebration because as an introvert, that's one thing I don't do enough, is to celebrate the wins and to have fun. Or maybe it has nothing to do with me being an introvert, I don't know. But I do know that that is something I need to work on. That is something that I need to change in my life as well. Because now when we have the little ones, the little kids, it's important to celebrate everything, even all the little things. Not every little thing they do, we don't encourage them, but when they do something important, we really make a big deal out of it. Because I know my parents didn't do that for me, everything was expected. I didn't have a high school graduation party, didn't have a college, well college graduation wasn't a big deal, but dropped out of three different schools before I finally graduated. So that wasn't a thing. But, everything was expected, you were expected to get good grades. You're expected to do good. You're expected to not get any speeding tickets. You're expected to behave properly, and all that kind of stuff. So there wasn't a lot of celebration. And so, I think that's carried off into my behavior and I'm a lot more serious than I want to be, and one of the things I want to change about myself is just be more joyful, and be more happy and kind, and all that comes from being happy. And so, if you celebrate more and you get to be happier, in a sense, and so the lunch, it worked great. I got all these reminders. I felt good about myself. My wife was smiling and she was proud of me, and it was a reminder that she was proud of me, and it worked awesome for a while. Problem is, the lunch was only once a month. And so yeah, once a month I would get that. But you want that constant dopamine hit, you want these constant reminders to feel good about yourself and to be happy. And so it's kind of like, all these video games and the social apps, like Facebook and Instagram, and Twitter and all these things. And even slot machines, they are addictive because you get the constant dopamine hit. Every time you make an action, you get a little bell or you get a little emoji, or you get a little like, and those become addictive, because we really crave that. And in our mind, every time you get one of those little messages, there's a little chemical that's released in the brain. And that chemical is even more powerful than heroin and crack. And so, you do become addicted to it. And studies have shown that Facebook and all these things, are addictive. And so I guess to me, this was my "like", that I went to lunch and I got a like, but it was only once a month. So it did what I wanted it to do, but it wasn't often enough. So about a month ago, one of our passive trading formula students, posted in the private Facebook group that we have, that he made eight profitable trades that month. And we encourage our students, post your trades and push your trades before you do them even, so that you can get them critiqued. Other people can give you ideas, to see if you make sure you're doing it right. And we do want to celebrate everybody's trades and everybody's success, right? So he posted, he had eight profitable trades that month, which was awesome. It was great, and everybody's congratulating him and giving him likes. And then the next day, another student posted that she was profitable on 10 trades in a row. And she had done, I think, three trades for three months, and then three trades another month, and then four trades the last month. And so for three months she was profitable on every single trade, and that was wonderful. And that pumped me up even more, right? I got really excited. I'm like, oh, this is awesome, this is awesome. And these, they're having success, they're having great results. That pumps me up more than my own trades. Doing well on my own trades, that's great, that's ho-hum now. But when our students are doing well, that really, really gets me juiced. And so I wanted to figure out a way to congratulate them. You know, I mean, I can't take them out to lunch, but how can I congratulate them in a way where they get a little bit of that dopamine hit, and they feel good about themselves? And so, I saw that in the groups, when you're typing in a reply, you can add these emojis. And one of the emojis is a bell. A service bell, that's what it's called. And so, I gave them one bell for every positive trade. So the first gentleman, he got eight bells. The second lady, she got 10 bells, and then other students got bells as well. So I was looking through, okay who else posted positive trades? Gave them bell, bell, bell, and I got to tell you, it was super fun giving out bells. It was a lot of fun. And they liked getting the bells too. It's like a public acknowledgement that you're doing well and you get one bell for every positive trade. So, it's like a cash register going ch-ching, ch-ching. If you're a retail store owner, every time that cash register rings, hey, you made money. So this is great. The bell goes off, boom, hey, you made money. Ding, there's a bell, you made money, congratulations. And so bells are also a big part of wall street, right? Now that you think about it, right? Every day, the stock market, the New York stock exchange and the NASDAQ, they're opened by ringing the bell, ding-ding-ding, and then they're closed by ringing the bell, ding-ding-ding. Now, right now it's totally, they don't need the bells, especially on NASDAQ. Everything is computerized, automated, nobody's even there, but on the New York stock exchange, they have a floor and they actually have traders. And so the bell tells you, ding-ding-ding-ding, markets open, markets closed. And so it's really cool, the bell is a big part of trading. And so now, I am making the bell a thing at Option Genius, and we are going to give students bells for every positive trade, right? So every time they post a positive trade, they're going to get a bell. And I thought, hmm, what if we rang a real bell? Would that make any difference? I don't know if you ever remember this or if you've been to this restaurant, but it's a fast food place called Long John Silver's and its sea food, and I used to go there when I was little. I don't see anymore around here, where I live right now, in the suburbs of Houston. But when I lived in Miami, there was one near our house and they had amazing hush-puppies, I love their hush puppies. I would just go in there and order like two dozen hush-puppies. Just fried corn bread, but they were super good. But if you've ever eaten there, you go inside and it's like a seafood theme, because it was seafood. And they would have this bell by the door, by the main door, the entrance and exit door. And it had a little plaque and said, hey, if you got good service or if you were happy, ring the bell and it would have a bell that you would see on the ship or on a dock, or something like that. And it was a pretty big bell with a rope tied to the little thingy inside the bell that rings it. And so you're supposed to ring the bell every time you got good service and that'd be cool, because that's positive reinforcement for all the people that work there. That, hey look, somebody enjoyed their visit. Somebody enjoyed their food. Somebody liked the staff. And it also tells all of the other people eating at the restaurant, right? That whole, hey, it's social proof, right? Somebody likes this place, somebody else besides us likes this place. And so as a kid, I would just ring the bell all the time, it didn't matter. I just loved ringing that bell, it was crazy. It was just fun ringing a bell. And so now I've taken it a bit further. So I ordered my own bell from Amazon. And every time I have a profitable trade, I ring the bell and I love it. I mean, it's a constant reminder that I did a good thing, right? I was successful, I made it, I did what I was supposed to do and a trade worked. And it works in two ways. Number one, I need to move. Like I need to actually physically move to go to the bell and press a button, right? And number two, it's auditory. So it impacts two senses. And of course, I mean, on the screen, on the monitor, I see the dollar amounts that I made. So I guess that incorporates sight too, so three senses. So every time I have a positive trade, there are three senses that are involved. One, I see the result on the screen. Two, I actually have to move towards the bell and hit the bell with my finger. And then three, I get to hear it as well, and it's loud, and it's like, there you go. It's loud and people can hear it. In the office building that we're in, next door to me, there is a lawyer and I have been driving him crazy with all the bell rings lately. He's been getting mad. He doesn't say anything, but whenever I see him in the hallway, he's like, hey man, what's with the bell? It's hilarious. But the important thing here is, the only time you can ring the bell, is after a positive trade. And I've been ringing it on the podcast because I just want you to hear it. But it's important that you don't use it unless it's a positive trade. So after you're out, trade is over, you are done. You exited the trade, everything, don't do it before that. Don't say, oh yeah, I made most of the money, I'm getting out, now I'm going to get out. No, no, no. You only get to ring the bell, you only get to take credit, after the trade is over, okay? You can't just ring it whenever you want. Because ringing the bell is special and it's a celebration. If you don't do that, then it's going to lose meaning and it's just going to gather dust. So make sure it's important, it's special, and that it is a celebration. Now it's kind of like, if it's on your birthday and you're blowing out the candles on your birthday cake, that's special. It's once a year, if you do that every day, it wouldn't have any meaning. It would be like, whatever more candles, foof. But the fact that it's a big deal, you got candles, you got a cake, you got people singing, and then you blow it out and everybody claps. It's a big deal. Maybe not for adults as much, but it should be. If you don't enjoy your own birthday, then that kind of takes a little bit of life away. So celebrate, enjoy the little things. Enjoy the big things especially, if you're not enjoying the big things, start with the big things and then start enjoying all the little things as well. So if you want to get your own bell, you can just search for service bell on the internet. I got mine from Amazon. It's like five bucks or something. That's what they're called, they're called a service bell. And they look like, well, it's the bells that you used to see at motels and hotels, even some doctor's offices. So you would ring it in case there was nobody at the counter. So you probably remember them, they are silver and they have a little button on top. They're black on the bottom and you just press a button on top, and it goes ding, like this, ding. So I would urge you to go and get yourself a bell and celebrate every positive trade, okay? If you don't want to do a bell, don't do a bell, do something else, but make something that interacts with your senses. Something that you have to move physically, do it, makes a noise or makes a smell, something that gives you some sensation. And then every time you do that, you get that little bit of dopamine and it becomes addictive, and then you want to get that trade. So sometimes if you're in a trade and you're like, you know what? I can take my money now, or I can get a little bit more. And you're like, no, you know what? I'm going to get out of the trade now because I'm going to ring that bell. So you take the profits and you don't risk it. So, it can work out in your favor as well. So remember trade with your odds in your favor so that you can ring the bell more often. Take care. LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/  WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com  JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://optiongenius.com/alliance  Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps.

People literally ask me this one question ALL THE TIME… “Allen, how did come up with such a lucrative, safe, and easy way to trade?” I explain it all in my new book Passive Trading, get your free book here! https://www.passivetrading.com/free-book Podcast Transcript: Hello. Hello. Hello. I had a interesting phone call yesterday. And so I thought I'd share with you, it's an interesting story. A guy calls the office and I just happened to pick it up and he's wanting to know about passive trading, what it is, how it works. And so I asked him, I said, "We have some questions that we normally ask people." And I say, "So are you doing any trading right now? You know anything about options?" And he says, bravely, or very proudly that, "Yeah, I do. I just turned 10,000 into 25,000 trading options." And I said, "Whoa, that's awesome. That's great. Congratulations. Well done, good job. How much do you have in your account right now?" And he says, "Well, I have 25,000." I said, "Oh, okay. So you had 10 before and you turned it into 25?" "Yes." "Oh, awesome. Great, great. What are you going to do with it now?" And he says, "Well, I'm going to take the 25, break it out into five and put 5,000 in each different trade." So I'm like, "Oh, okay, cool. You're going to be smart. You're going to diversify." He goes, "Yeah, exactly. I'm going to be diversifying." So I was like, "Okay, so the first time you did it, you put the whole 10 in one. Right? How many different stocks did you do?" He goes, "Yeah, just one." I go, "Okay, so you put one trade in one stock, the whole 10 and it turned into 25. Now you're going to break it down and diversify." And he goes, "Yeah, that's exactly what I'm doing." And I was like, "Okay, cool. So, let me see," this is me talking. I was like, "Let me see if I can try to explain to you what you did. Now, what you did was basically you went to the casino, Wall Street's a casino. So, you go to the casino and you end up at the roulette table. Now the roulette table has all these different kinds of bets that you can make. You can bet red. You can bet black. You can red odd, even. What you decided was you going to take all your money and you picked one number and you put it all on that one number and you let it ride. And you hit, which is awesome. I mean, the odds of that are really low, but you hit and it paid off. It paid off big, that's awesome. That's great. So, now what you're doing is you're taking your winnings. You split it up into five little pots and you're going to put them on five different numbers." And he's like, "Okay." I'm like, "Yeah. So, now this is around two. The first spin you hit. The second spin and you put it on five different numbers. What do you think is going to happen?" He goes, "If it's a roulette, I'm probably going to lose." I'm like, "Yeah. Yep, exactly. That's what's going to happen if you do the same thing." And he's like, "Well, well, why is passive trading so different? Why is that so much better? I knew what I was doing. I made a smart choice. I made a smart bet." I'm like, "Yeah, maybe you did. But the chances of you duplicating it, not very big. The odds are against you. Now with passive trading I'm with you in the casino. I came with you, the same car. But I didn't go to the roulette table. I went to the blackjack table and I sat down." And he goes, "Well, blackjack it doesn't have good odds either." And I'm like, "Yeah, that's true. If you play the regular way, black Jack doesn't really have that good odds either. But see, I don't play it the regular way." "What do you do?" I said, "Well, when I play blackjack, or basically passive trading, but when I'm doing blackjack in this scenario, I start with my two cards and I start with either an 18, 19 or 20." He's like, "What?" I'm like, "Yeah. I start with either, an 18 and 19 or 20 on every hand. Now, sometimes it gets really, really close to 21. Some trades are really close to 21, but nothing is guaranteed, so I can't say 21. So, we'll just say I start with 18, 19 or 20. Now, how many hands do you think I'm going to win, if I start with 18, 19 or 20?" He goes, "All of them." I'm like, "Well, yeah. You do lose on occasion, but yeah, I win on the majority of them. I win on most of them. So, both of us went to the casino. You went to roulette, you did one swing or one round or whatever it's called and you won big. Then you do the second one and then you lost it all. Now you're busted. You're broke. You're got no money left. So now you have to wait for me to either run out of money or get bored, because we came in the same car. So, you're going to be waiting a long time because I'm doing well at the blackjack table. Now, you know how at the blackjack table they have space for six or seven people or eight people? I don't know how many people can sit there, but they have space for multiple people there." "Yeah." "Well, I'm playing the whole table. I'm playing every single seat. I'm doing multiple hands and I'm starting every hand with 18, 19 or 20. And so the thing is that, I'm going to lose eventually. Occasionally I'm going to lose. But when I do lose, I lose small. I don't lose it. So that gives me staying power. That lets me sit there at the table all night long, just playing, playing, playing, playing, playing until I get bored because most likely I ain't going to run out of money. And that's the difference between buying options and selling options. Now passive trading takes it a little step further. If you're only selling options, you still have some risks you have to worry about. Passive trading takes it even further to the next level. That's why I'm really a big proponent of passive trading." So he goes, "Oh, okay. Where can I find out more?" I go, "Well, just go get my free book. And you can do the same thing. The book is at passivetrading.com/free book. Just go there and pick up the book, learn all about it, see what you think. Learn how to play blackjack with 18, 19 or 20. Depending on whatever strategy you use, that's what number you get." And so, right now I understand what this guy is coming from. There are a lot of people like him in the market. The market is very volatile right now. Stocks are going up, stocks are going down depending on what stock you're playing. And it's a little crazy, but it's a gambler's market. And so if you are a gambler and if you're not in this for the long run, and if you're just in it to make some quick money and hopefully you place a bet and it pays off. This is a great market for you. It's very volatile. That means there's a lot of premium and the stocks are moving up and down really crazy. And then now we have the election coming up. So there's going to be a lot more volatility, a lot more volatility. And so if you're a gambler, then this is great. You can turn your 10 into 25 and then you probably turn your 25 and zero. And then maybe you get some more and come back in and try it again. But if you do hit the 10 to 25, I hope you take some money off the table. Don't risk at all. Just whatever money you came with. Take that 10 off the table, go put it in a savings account and then play with whatever money you made. Because eventually you're going to blow it, if you're a gambler. If you're not a gambler, if you're in this for the long haul, if you're looking for a real passive income, if you're looking for real something stable to do, then selling options is the way to go. Add passive trading onto that, take it to the next level. And you could be there playing all night and it doesn't matter what happens. It doesn't matter how volatile it gets. It doesn't matter who wins the election. It doesn't matter if there's stimulus or no stimulus. Doesn't matter if this company is doing well or that company is doing well. We play the odds and we just keep rolling. We just keep playing with the money and that's it. That's how it goes. And so, I've been doing this for a long, long time. And in the beginning, when I first started, lost a bunch of money, did all kinds of crazy things. Made money too, along the way. I had some big winners just like this guy did, but you learn that those are few and far between. And so eventually, over time, I realized that. Hey, you know what, I need something sustainable, something long-term, something that's not going to take all my time either. And that's another major factor of passive trading, it doesn't take a lot of time. And so right now, it's a great time to start. Things are going to get more volatile, I believe. We don't know when this Coronavirus is going to be going away, or if it's going to go away, or what the world is going to look like when we returned back to normal. It's going to be maybe a new normal, who knows. But I think eventually things will go back to the way they are now, or they were before. So we'll have pre-COVID and then during COVID, then after COVID. And after COVID eventually things that go back to pre-COVID, and life will go on. And passive traders will still be trading and the gamblers will be gone. So, don't be a gambler. Trade with the odds in your favor, my friend. Take care. LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/  WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com  JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://optiongenius.com/alliance  Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps.