The Option Genius Podcast: Options Trading For Income and Growth

I have the pleasure of introducing you to Nelson Wennerlund. I call him Wonder Man. And you'll see why his results and his accomplishments have been amazing. So, without any further ado, let's just get into it. Nelson, how you doing? Nelson: I'm doing great today. Allen, how are you? Allen: I'm wonderful. I'm happy to talk to you. You're one of my one of my favorite people to talk to you. Nelson: Oh, good. Yeah. Allen: So I know a little bit about you know, you share a little bit about you know, who you are and what you do. But for our audience, once you once you tell us, you know, give us some background into who is Nelson, and how'd you get to where you are today. Nelson: Well live outside of Nashville, Tennessee, newly retired officially about five years ago. But I've been keeping busy with doing this, that and the other and volunteering. And in some of the stuff that I've wanted to do that I hadn't had time to do spent 25 years in the restaurant business, I spent 15 or 20 years, almost 20 years in the financial services business. And when I was 60, I decided that I'd had enough. And I retired with my wife's blessings. And so I've been kind of just volunteering and doing stuff since then. So trading, what I've been doing as far as trading back in the 90s. I started, I got a thing in the mail from a guy won't mention his name that was gonna teach me how to make tons of money. Trading commodity futures. Allen: Mr. Roberts. Yes. Mr. Roberts? Nelson: Yes Allen: Yeah, I got a quote. I had it. I don't know where it is now. Nelson: Yep. And so actually, I won and lost a few small fortunes for me at that time doing that for about I mean, I dabbled in anatomy for about 15 years. Wow. So, you know, I would I would lose, and then I would, you know, get all excited, you know, I'm gonna do this again. And, you know, I had a few small wins than that, you know, get over excited and make a dumb move and all that. Yeah, you know, same story, you know, so, and so I, but I did, you know, I, I did enjoy doing it, actually. And so, and then, but in 2010, I stopped and focused on the business I was part of and, and then I got something else in the mail about selling naked puts options. And I had been on the periphery of options, but it was just, you know, I didn't understand them. And it was confusing, seems like a sucker's bet to me, and all this kind of stuff. But I didn't do any research in it, that did research for this kind of bought this course and started doing just some naked puts, and actually did really well at it, you know, identifying stocks and this kind of thing, following this certain method and this than the other and so, I thought this option thing one so bad, after all, I can make some money at it. And I wanted to be able to do something in my retirement years that would bring extra income. Nelson: We had enough to live on wasn't really done it to, you know, have to put food on the table, but wanted to, you know, help grandkids with college and, you know, that type of thing and give to causes that we like and, and help people out and that type of thing. So we wanted to so that's really what I've got into it for. Discovered Option Genius, actually, by just wanting to get into option trading, and just went on the internet and started, you know, looking at, you know, I just counted all the guys who were getting on big airplanes, and, you know, like, they owned them, you know, and stuff like that. And so, you know, I figured that that was, I didn't want something that was get rich quick, I knew that that I'm smart enough to know, that didn't work, that doesn't work. You know, um, you know, the turtle won the race. And so I wanted something that was understandable, was consistent, was slow, was high probability, all that that's fits my personality. And when I ran into you Allen and just listen to some of your stuff, and all that, and, you know, that fit with my personality, I'm sure there's some other one good ones out there. But there was a lot of adjusting and doing this and doing that and day trading and, you know, all this kind of stuff. I don't want I didn't want to do that. I don't have time to do that. I have other stuff going on. So that's how I kind of, you know, options fits with my personality and doing the passive trading the are already owned about some pretty good positions about 10 stops. And so I just started doing covered calls. Allen: And this was in your retirement account? Nelson: Yeah, yeah. It's all in my retirement account. I don't have a separate account. Allen: Okay. So everything stays in there? Nelson: It stays in my retirement account. I've dabbled with another account. But, you know, most of my money's in my IRA. Plus, I don't have to pay any capital gains tax on anything in retirement funds. So that helps to, you know keep a little bit more. So that's, you know, with naked puts with an IRA, you know, it's there harder to do so, and yet about the full amount. So I don't, you know, don't do as many of those unless a stock is getting close that I own that I want to buy more of, and that really hadn't happened much lately. So.. Allen: Now, you said you were in the financial services? Or what do you do this? Nelson: I was a, I started out as a loan mortgage originator like you used to do. And then I was offered a partnership in a mortgage company. And I took that and then we got gobbled up by big fish and I retire. Allen: Oh, very nice. So is that how you were able to retire? I mean, cuz you did it at 60. So that's a little bit earlier than most people? Nelson: Yes. So I was able to.. my partnership was, I was rewarded handsomely. And, and we were a successful mortgage firm, local mortgage firm. And we did well. And so I was rewarded. And I'm very grateful for that. Allen: That's awesome. Cool. Yeah. So in your spare time right now. So you've been retired? For what? like five years? Six years? Nelson: Hmm hm Allen: Yeah. Okay. So basically, you're, we're looking for something to do. Yeah. And that's, that's how you stumbled upon and say, Oh, let me let me see what this is all about kind of thing. Nelson: Yeah I wanted to build residual income, not to actually, you know, to live on day to day, but to just supplement some traveling and stuff. Without I mean, you don't know what the future holds. We don't know if, you know, I don't want to be I mean, obviously, my wife and I don't want to be a burden to our children when we get older. And so we want some of that stuff built in, you know, that we would have enough money in our retirement funds that if we had, you know, to go into assisted living or something like that, and there would be money for it. And so, and that's really what we wanted to that, that that was my main aim just to build grow over time. So if that happened, we would be covered. And if it didn't happen, we would have something to leave our children. Allen: Sweet, nice. I mean, it's, it's rare to see people in that position. Most people are the other way around, you know, they're becoming part of the sandwich problem, I guess they call it you know, where the, the kids are taking care of their own kids and then taking care of their grandparents or their parents. And it's the they're getting squeezed on both ends. Nelson: Well, when I was in the mortgage business, just quickly, when I was doing loans for people, and I did over over 2000 loans at a 10 year period. It was shocking how many people had little or no, nothing in the retirement funds at even 40+, and they had a company that would match. And they just said I can't afford it. I couldn't afford it. But yet they had $800 truck payment. Allen: And they're buying a brand new house. Nelson: So I mean, it was like I you know, right there I'm thinking that's not gonna be me. Yeah, so, yeah, this is another thing that motivated me to, you know, find something that would build on my retirement cuz you don't know what's going to happen. And you know, that retirement fund can go quick. A six figure retirement fund can go quick. You may not think so. But it can. Allen: Yeah, no, I mean, one heart attack. So that's right there. Nelson: Right. Allen: So now you're, help me out here. You're you're over 65? You are 65? Nelson: I'm 65. Allen: You're 65. So technically, you can take out money from the IRA? Nelson: Yes. After 59 and a half, I could. Allen: Oh Okay. Okay. So basically all the money in the IRA that you're trading is growing, no income tax, no, nothing. And then you can take it out for like you said, your travel and your charity and all that stuff. Awesome. So you like the best of both worlds? Nelson: Yeah, well, that's my plan. Yeah. Allen: Cool. So did you try anything else before that you haven't mentioned yet before Option Genius? Nelson: I've dealt with in a couple other folks. I don't remember their names now. But they were they were very educational and everything. But you know, the more I got into it, the more confused I got quite honestly. And they started talking about like, and I'm sure if I studied it, it would be fine. But like butterflies and doing this and taking this off and this and that and the other, like I don't kind of want to do all that. Okay, I'm not a day trader and I don't want to, I don't want to be that involved. I want to be a passive trader. I want to get on my computer 15 minutes every day. Unless it's you know, trying to do a, you know, doing some research on a trade, I wanted to check my trade, take 10 minutes and go do what I want to do. And you're the one that offered that. Like, I mean, I could have done it with the others, but I would have probably lost all my money. Because, you know, again, they're, you know, listen, if you want to do all the adjusting and all that stuff, that's fine. But if I've got a great trade, I don't want to have to adjust. You know, I know you have to sometimes, obviously, but yeah, you know, and I had to last month, but still, you know, yeah, I don't, I wanted something simple, strategic, easy, high probability, you know, just prod along, if I can be, if I can, if I can go in the right direction, you know, which is up, just incrementally 3 to 5% a month? I'll make, I'm gonna make millions. You know, 5 percent a month. Allen: Right. A per month. Yeah, yes. Yeah. Nelson: And that's, you know, quite honestly, your course. That's easy. I mean, to me, it is so.. Allen: I mean, you've proven it, right. Yeah. I mean when I first got started, when I, you know, options and stuff, I really was like, "Oh, yeah, you know, the adjustments" because you do a trade. And then you can, if it goes bad, you can adjust it, oh, man, I'll never lose on any trade, I'll just be able to adjust my way out of it. And you learn really quickly that the adjustments, they you know, they add more risk to it, because you're adding more money most of the time. And then if it keeps going against you, then the loss just ends up really much bigger than you anticipated in the beginning. And then, you know, I guess the older I get, and really the the more assets I have, the less I want to be sitting in front of the computer, and the less I want to be worried about adjustments, and hey, what am I going to do tomorrow? Is everything okay? And being stressed out about all that time, so I totally hear where you're coming from. So I'm sure everybody's wondering. So what have your results been? Nelson: Well, in 2020, despite I will mention this number, despite losing $92,000 in about 45 minutes on that Tuesday after the COVID Allen: On the COVID crash? Yeah, the COVID bear market? Nelson: Yeah you know, they've taken that hit, I still was up 24% for the year. And so, and this year, so far, I'm up about 56% through the first six months. Allen: So 56% in six months, right? Nelson: So I'm sure I'm gonna break the 100%. thing, and I'm gonna get my award from you. Allen: I'm still working on that. We haven't come up with it yet. But yeah, definitely want to, I definitely want to get you one. So what strategies are you doing? How do you get the 56%? Nelson: Well, I just I do just almost exclusively, I do make some money on covered calls. I'm very conservative, because I like my stock. And I don't want to be I don't want to call the way unless I want it called away. And so that's only happened once this year. And so that's really, you know, otherwise, I'm just, you know, between that I'm just trying to lower my cost basis on my stocks, covered calls and in reinvesting the dividends. And so but I do just vertical spreads almost. And, you know, this summer, I'm doing iron condors because that's what your training told me to do. So I like to do, I'm learning more about them. And so mostly I just do vertical spreads. I'm also, I also do weekly and daily spreads on SPY. Allen: Okay Nelson: I use a high probability 90% Delta, or 10% Delta, I should say, I'm an optimist so I always say the 90%. 10% Delta and, you know, I've had an occasional loss, but that's really helped also with my return, but my bread and butter is still the monthly vertical bull that really a bull put spreads is what I've been doing this year. So far. I haven't seen a whole lot of really great call spreads, but mostly put spreads from a $5 put spreads with, you know, 82%, 83%, 84%. Making 10% just doing it over and over and over, you know, on the monthly and I haven't had a loss yet this year on that. Have on the daily and weekly. Allen: But okay, say that again, you've been doing these like these, we call them layups, right? So the layups, you've been.. Nelson: Yeah, yeah. Allen: Since January. Is that when you started with the layup? Nelson: No. Well, I've been doing. I mean, I had been in the course. Allen: Okay. January 2020. Allen: Okay, so you've been doing them. If you were in the past year in the passive trading formula program in the course. And so you were that in January 2020. And then from April 2021 that's when you join the layup mastery program to.. Nelson: Yeah the credit spread Allen: Right, the credit spread mastery and then since then you have not had a losing trade at all? Nelson: Not on my vertical spreads. I have on my daily head a couple of my daily and one of my week Allen: Right, I mean the but those are obviously those are riskier. Yeah. But that's amazing. How many of the monthly trades have you done? Nelson: Oh, gosh you asked me that. I'm probably I averaged about five a month, five to six months. I would say 50 to 55 spreads, I'm guessing. Um, That's not right. You know, 30? Probably around 30. Yeah. But in June, I only did one because I was doing those iron condors so. Allen: Okay, so you're not counting that. Okay. All right, but that that's phenomenal. That's amazing that you've had so much success with that one. Simple trade. Right? Yeah. That's cool. Kudos to you, man. That's amazing. so on. So you said in 2021, first six months, you're up about 53%? Or 56? I don't remember.. Nelson: 55% Allen: 55% Okay. And then in 2020, even after the big market crash, the bear market and you lost a ton there. You still were up? 24% for the year. Yeah. So before you got or you found option genius, what were your returns then that you remember? Nelson: Oh, gosh, they were really super hit or miss, I was basically breaking even. But I was only trying, I didn't have scaled up trading. You know, I mean, like I do, you know, I was really basically trading two or three contracts when, instead of, you know, 40 and 50, like I do now. So.. Allen: I mean, I wouldn't blame me if you if you don't have confidence in the system, right now, if it's hit or miss, or it's when a couple of times, and I lose, and then I win, and I lose, it's there's nothing there to give you the ability to say, you know what this works, I'm gonna start putting more money at risk. Nelson: Right. And that, this, that this strategy, I mean, it was a good knowledge base. But I didn't care for the I just didn't care for the strategy. It didn't fit my personality. So it was a little half flying, you know, doing set, you know, doing 30 deltas. And that's just too risky for me, and then adjusting out of that in, in the couple times, I paper traded all that and adjusted, I still lost money. Plus, I'm not a guy that wants to keep a losing trade a loser and try to eke out a few dollars. That's just my personality. I rather let it go and move on to another trade. So yeah, but yeah, that's just me. That's just my personality. Allen: Right yeah. Because if you come in, you know, 30, delta, even sometimes 25, you're gonna end up adjusting a lot more than if you come in much lower. It's rare that you won't have to adjust if you come in at that high. So, yeah, okay so.. Nelson: I don't need to actually, I don't need that action to make me feel like I'm a big time trader or anything. That makes sense. Allen: Yeah, I mean, some people they have that mean, and some people they actually get addicted to the, to the, you know, all the madness and watching the talking heads on TV all everyday looking for ideas and being in the chat rooms. And, oh, what do I do now? What about this? Oh, that's the craziest thing I see. You know, people, they put trades on. And then they go to like a Facebook group or something online forum, they're like this My trade, I'm in trouble. What do I do now? And then they just get advice from who knows who on the other end? You know, people that maybe have never put a trade on before they're giving them advice. Oh, you should do this. And you should do that. It's like, Ah, no, that's not how you do it. Nelson: That's what I think it's great that you Allen, one of the things is that if I have a question, I can shoot you an email and you'll answer back. So and and that's one thing that you don't get with other folks. I mean, you might get somebody answering you back, but you don't know who got out. Allen: Yeah, I mean, that's why we you know, we try to keep our system smaller so that we can actually give that one on one attention and so I can like right now I'm handling all the trade questions, you know, so anything that comes in. Now we do have somebody that we're training to help take off some of the load but for any member, any student they get a direct answer for me so that's something that I want to keep doing. Okay, so what was it that really turned the corner for you? Was it just that you found a strategy that work that fit your your your style or your your personality or was it something else that helped you go from hit or miss to wildly consistently profitable? Nelson: Well, I really, the way he does class, Utah in the in the course materials and stuff, were super understandable to me, and, and so you know, I'm a guy that, like I made some rules not and so when this happens do this I'm that's sort of how I'm wired. And you know, I don't I'm not a guy that's gonna look at a chart and sit there with angles and all this kind of stuff, I can get a lot of support and resistance and, you know, the simple stuff like that and moving averages, and, you know, but it's really, you gave me a sense, and a confidence that if we do this, most of times, you're going to come out as a winner, or you're going to be profitable, and you're not looking. You know, if you're looking for 10%, monthly, month after month after month, and you know, and even if you make less than that, that's okay, you know, and so I mean, you don't go into it, like, Oh, you know, you're gonna make 80%, you know, and, you know, some unrealistic expectation where people do they just end up quitting, that's not the goal, the goal is to, you know, figure out a strategy. Nelson: And one thing that you taught me is that, you know, you can look at a chart and stuff, and it's really incomplete. You know, it's incomplete, because you don't know what's gonna happen tomorrow, perfect example, is this past Monday. I mean, you went from Friday to Monday, that just crashed red, now it's up, you know, you know, a whole, you know, for its back even so, you know, you just don't know. And if your eye tells you, they know, they're lying. So you know, so you don't know. So you have to take that information, and make in take what it says to you. Make an informed decision, and then you just have to put the trade on, I learned that from you. And that revolutionized how I did things because to me, I always was thinking, "Okay, is there something else I need to know?" "Is there another indicator that's gonna make me feel all warm and fuzzy?" and you know what, there's not one. And so I take a few things that I look at that I think it's going to continue in that direction, it may not. And then I'll make a high probability bet that it's going to, instead of a low probability bet that it's going to end so. And that's an edge and a strategy that totally fits me, I can do a trade that's got a 85% probability of winning, I mean, if you can go into a casino, you'll own the casino in about 4 hours. Allen: Yeah, they won't let you get away with that. They're either beat you up, or they put you in jail or something. Nelson: You go into the back room. Right, so that, like, you know, that I was I monitored in statistics in college. So that made a big sense to me, like, you know, I know that, that I'm going to lose some time, it's inevitable, but the probability that I have a greater probability of winning than losing, and so that's a strategy that's an edge that I think works for me, you know, once it's passive, it's passive. And so, you know, I think that that right, there is what made me turn the corner, and in your credit spread mastery course, showing that over a period of time, how well you did with your count, through ups and downs was a real inspiration for me also not tucked up for real inspiration for me to think, you know, a regular person could do this. You know, you don't have to have an MBA from Harvard, or some somewhere else to, or something to do all this. So a regular person who is serious and, and can do the same strategy that works over and over, can really build upon it, and, you know, reach their financial goals. Allen: Yep. And I mean, I'll tell you the truth, like, you know, you took the rules, you took the system, and you've done better than I have at it this past year. Seriously, you know, you're from what you said, you have a losing trade, I haven't had losing trades. So, you know, it's like, maybe I need just need to give you my money be like, Hey, can you manage this stuff for me? But um, so now that you have a decent size portfolio, so you have a bunch of stock that you've had for a long time, and you do and the spreads, and then you're also doing some dailies and weeklies, so how would you break it down in terms of percentage? How much do you do in each? Nelson: So I would say 50% of my IRA is in 10 Stocks. Allen: Okay Nelson: Maybe a little bit higher that but less than 60%. And then the rest, I just keep keeping, you know, I keep it in cash, but it's cash that I use to trade spreads and then I have backup, you know, reserves that I have for emergencies and stuff like that you know, reserve fun or rainy day fund or emergency fund whatever you want to call that so I have a really even have a savings account so I can because I can get this money out in a day, right? If I had to so I have a non that something I'm not going to touch that you know and then I have the rest of it. I really considered cash that I will invest in my spread trading. Allen: Okay, and how much do you do monthly versus weeklies or dailies? Nelson: Most of my I would say 60% of my that I do and or maybe 70% I do in monthlies Allen: Okay. Nelson: Okay, and then the rest I will do in three day-a-week, I guess the dailies, and then the rest of would be on the weeklies Allen: And do those take a lot of time, the weeklies and the dailies. Nelson: No I have a system that I sort of go by, but I, I use the same system for the monthlies as I do for the weeklies and the dailies. Really, it works. I mean, I use a higher Delta, Delta. And so and I don't make you know, 10% obviously, I make three to 4%. But, you know, that compounds over, you know, every week, so.. Allen: Definitely, yeah, yeah. So now, like once you turn that corner, right? And once you started doing well, once you started getting confidence and scaling, what was something that surprised you about the whole process? Nelson: The process and how we do it is scalable. That's what I was sort of surprised, like, you know, I never, I didn't think that, you know, I figured out what I had to, you know, maybe have a new strategy by now that maybe this didn't work over a longer period of time. And it's a surprise me that it actually, I mean, I know, yeah, and I know, you've said this, but, you know, nothing lasts forever. And I figured I'd have to be switching strategies or something. And I will, if there's, you know, a long program, or you know, long bear market, you know, I'll have to be doing more calls and puts, obviously, and all that type of thing. But the rules still apply, I would think it's pretty much it's the same strategies, just the other side is the opposite. So I'm thinking, you know, I'm always tweaking I'm, I mean, I'm always evaluating, I should say, you know, the strategy, you know, I mean, I'm always paper trading lower deltas to see, you know, how I would have done at the same trade, you know, and I mean, in this market, even at an 80 or 20, delta, you know, I'd probably still doing really well, but you know, I don't want to own up I would say on the weeklies, but and then on the monthlies I always paper trade them as if they were 30 Delta, just to see how would go and they haven't been that great on a 30 Delta. But they've been, so I'm thinking, why would I do that, like, I'm not going to put my account at risk over a few more $100 or so you know. So again, I'm I want something that's consistent, sustainable over the long haul. And I'm not looking to get rich quick. I'm not trying to, I mean, I'm doubling my account, I'm going to double my account, if you're just by doing regular stuff, not by going, I'm gonna double my account. And so I'm going to take, you know, unnecessary risk. And so I'm just not going to do that. I don't want to have to tell my wife like you had to tell your wife that "Oh, I'm sorry, honey, but our IRA is gone". Yeah. Like, I kind of want to have that conversation. Allen: So okay, so on that on that note, like, what are you doing in terms of like a hedge? Do you do anything to see like, okay, hey, if stuff goes bad, do you have I don't know, like a process or something that you Hey, this is what I'm gonna do? Or do you do you know, buy long puts or something to hedge you? Or? Nelson: No, I don't I haven't gotten into that. I'd love to learn more about that. I do, I plan every one of my trades completely before I get in it. Okay, I'm going to exit this no matter what, you know, for in the course and I do this at 25%. I'm getting out. You know, but I haven't explored the, I've heard you talk about it. I don't I haven't done the time, or taking the time to try to understand, you know what that's about? And I mean, I do understand it, but I just haven't done it. So but I'd love to learn more about that. But I haven't had the need to really learn a lot of it. Does that make sense? Allen: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, from what I know, you have already stuff built in, you know, with the stocks you like you said he even if they go down 20 25% you're still gonna hold them? Yeah, you still want them, you still want to get their cost basis down to zero. So you're gonna keep doing that no matter what happens with those, you're still gonna be cash flowing them, you know? Nelson: Exactly, exactly. Allen: With the spreads, you have a certain number, a certain percentage of your portfolio, it's not the whole thing. And you have your you know, when you're getting out, right? Nelson: It's non negotiable to, you know, I'd get out at that time. You know, I've gotten out before and had it turned around on me, but you know what, but I don't you know, I don't worry about that, almost. If I do everything I know I can do, and do it by the rules. And, you know, I know that I'm going to win more than I lose. And I'm, you know, preservation of capital is the rule for me. You know, I don't, I don't need to prove myself right or wrong. You know, when it's out. It's out. Yeah, get out. Allen: So it seems like you do have a plan in place. You know, it's not like you're just doing whatever And not even thinking about it. If stuff happens, if things go bad against you, then you you already know what you're going to do. I mean, that's pretty good enough, I don't, you can go further with it. And you can say, yeah, I'm gonna hedge it this way, or I'm gonna start doing pairs trading. And, you know, there's so many different ways that you could hedge yourself. You know.. Nelson: Maybe that's extra work I don't think I need to do right now. Allen: Yeah. And there's always a cost involved, right? So either time and money, or one of the other or so cool. I mean, as long as you're, as long as you're able to sleep at night, then and you know what to do, and you're safe, then that's cool. So, when you when you first got started, what was one of the biggest challenges that you had getting started? Nelson: Pulling the trigger to do a trade, I didn't have the confidence. I mean, listen, I know I did, I've done a lot of paper trading, and it's not the same. And so that $100,000 in that paper trading account is not real money, and, but my $100,000 in my account is in so and so I, you know, pulling the trigger really was, you know, was the hardest thing to do. But once I did it, and once I knew that I didn't have to know everything, before it started, and that there was a possibility to lose, and I was able to accept that loss, because I still believed in the strategy. You know, for an occasional loss, then that helped me move on in because, you know, and, and not be worried, you know, if I've done something dumb, in lost, that would have been bad, but if I follow the rules, and still lost, you know, and then that's just going to happen, and that's just life, and that happens in business. And that happens, you know, in life. And so, you know, in trading is no different, you know, my egos not tied to my trading. And so.. Allen: That's a big deal. That's a big, that's a big distinction. Nelson: I don't have to be right, you know, and, you know, because sometimes I'm not right, and that's just life. And so I don't, I had that problem, at first when I was trading commodities. And I just had to be right, you know, and, and I wasn't some of the time. So.. Allen: Well, that's the thing with the way I mean, if you're buying commodities, or buying stocks or buying options, you have to be right. Otherwise, you lose money, you don't have a choice, you know, but with our way, it's like, yeah, you know, I could be wrong on this direction, and I can still make it, you know, it'll still might work out, it doesn't have to be like you said, if you take incomplete information, make your best educated guess on it. And then you put the probabilities in your favor, and then most of the time is going to work out, even if you try to screw it up. Nelson: Well, that's a great edge that you taught me, not only myself, but you know, the other students that that that gave me some coffee, that gave me a lot of confidence to go forward and pull off trades. And that gives me confidence in scaling up my trading also, you know, we're, um, you know, you know, I'm up to you know, trading 50 contracts on each spread. So, and that's, you know, that's, that's a lot of money. There. But, you know, it's, it's just is what it is, you know, I mean, I've got the confidence that it that, you know, you put up high probability trading in your favor, you're gonna win most of the time. Yep, if you have to get out and it should, whatever it is. Otherwise, it probably turns into a low probability trade. Allen: Yep. And so, as you've been through the process, as you, you know, you started out learning and you implemented now you've, you've been doing well at it, what are some of the takeaways that you would want to share with our listeners? Nelson: Well, I tell you, my biggest takeaway would be that follow the rules. That's my biggest takeaway. I mean, you're the person that's done it. And so just bumping this takeaway is just follow the rules. If you just follow the rules, and do things that like you've taught us, then you're going to have a high probability trade, it's not coming, you're always going to win, but you're going to have a high probability trade, people get in trouble, and they do things that go against what we teach, passive trading, you know, betting on the next high flying stock, and, you know, and it goes up, and then goes down, and, you know, you're out of money, you know, that type of thing. And so, you know, that that would be one one of my takeaways. And, you know, the other thing is that this course is easily explained. And it's, it's easily understood. And, you know, for someone who's not even brilliant, you know, I was able to take it and fit it within my personality. And I guess the last thing that my biggest takeaway, too, is that, you know, you, Allen and your team, you care about your students, you know, and I've told you that before, that's no new news. But, you know, like, I know that if I send you if I have a question for you, you're gonna answer Or some, somebody on your team is going to answer me. And so to me, that's, you're committed, and your team's committed to my success. And as I said, it's not a tag word. I mean, that's, that's, I've felt that from day one. And so that inspires a lot of confidence in me, that I know that you care about not only my success, but you care about me and how well I'm doing too. And, and that's, that goes for all the students that I've seen you interact with. Allen: Yeah, I mean, we we try our best, right? I mean, we make mistakes, but we do try our best and we do care, everybody that comes in, it's like we want to do whatever we have to do to help you succeed. You know, one of the things we're looking at is we're having more customer service issues, you know, like, "Oh, I need my password", or what program should I get? or stuff like that little questions here and there. And we're thinking about bringing on somebody to take over that position. And we looked at different things to think, well, we could go, you know, overseas, we could hire somebody in the Philippines or something like that, and they get, you know, three $4 an hour and full time they're happy, you know, that's the going rate over there. They'd be more than happy at a job like that. But then there's still that disconnect, you know, and so we decided, no, you know, we're gonna keep it in house, we're gonna hire somebody here locally, that is working with us in the office. And I think I've made it a rule that everybody that works for us has to trade, like, they have to go through our programs, and they have to understand the trades, and they have to know what they are. And whether they do it for themselves or not, that's up to them. Right now. Everybody's doing it, and they're loving it. But if somebody says, Hey, you know, this is not my thing, but that's fine, but they're gonna have to know how to do it. Right? If they don't do it for themselves, that's different, which I don't know why they wouldn't, when they see, you know, they're all the results. But that's one of the things that we want to because even for employees, it's like, you know, I don't want you just working, I want you to better your life as well. So, if we're doing it for customers, and clients and students, then you should also be benefiting from that as well. So that's something we've implemented that I'm proud of. So Nelson: That's great. Allen: Yeah. Cool, cool. Cool. So what do you think the future holds for you now? Nelson: Well, I'm, I'm going to keep slowly, and hopefully, I'm going to still be successful, I'm going to keep, you know, scaling up my trading slowly, you know, I mean, I have a certain I have a certain amount that I want to have in my account, by the time I'm 75. And so I need to, you know, keep compounding it and, you know, keep trading and, you know, keep just scaling up, I guess, you know, I still believe in the, you know, I can't see the strategy changing unless some fundamental part of the market changes where you can't do options anymore, or something, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna keep adding on, I'm going to keep it, just add on some more, you know, the stocks that I own, I'm gonna keep adding shares, as they, you know, as they become, you know, available at a good price. And so, you know, that's my long term goals. The other is to really feed that, you know, that type of thing is to buy more stock, and, you know, and that type of thing, so that that's really what's, you know, I'm on a, hopefully, I'm still going to be involved with passive trading and doing that in the community. That's another great thing. I mean, we have an awesome community. And that's, you know, duty. I mean, yeah, but an easy Allen, for you to say, other courses over, I'll see you later. Good luck, you know, send me an email if you need help. But, you know, the zoom calls, and we've been continuing and have been great. And it's great to be in a community of people who are like minded, who want to progress and are serious about trading and who, you know, it's, it's good to bounce off ideas. I think we've got a pretty decent group. You know, and so, it's been great to meet, you know, get to know those guys over the last few months, guys and girls. Allen: Now, I want to thank you, too. I mean, you're, you know, you're a very beneficial source in that group. You know, I mean, especially like, you took Roberta under your wing, kind of, and you kind of coached her through it. And she, you know, she put on her I've been after her for months to put on a trade. And you just, you know, you kind of gave her a little pep talk. It didn't even take that long. Hey, she Next one. She came back and she's like, yep, I did it. I did it. You know, I made money. That was like you we have no clue how big an impact that can have on somebody. You know, we've been emailing back and forth so.. Nelson: Okay, all right. I'm trying to get her here. Second one now. Allen: Cool. So I mean, I'm so I'm a bit a little bit confused, though. But do you like your living expenses, how do you that comes from another source or you take it out of your trading account? Nelson: Well I'm on Social Security, I took it, okay, now I said, I'm waiting, I get a really decent amount of Social Security, my wife still working, but we don't have any debt. So and, and all my kids are out of the house and, you know, rolling on with their own lives. And so we don't, we don't have a ton of expenses, the only, like we're going to we're planning some trips next year that we're going to, you know, use some of this money for but nothing extravagant or anything, but, you know, it's taken some trips, some places, so that's what you know, stuff like that. And then we help in help our, I don't, this, I know this is gonna be popular, but instead of giving our grandkids gifts for Christmas, and all that stuff, we just put some money in there for 429 Program, which makes their parents happy. They're not super excited about but you know, what's one less present when you're getting 20? Anyway, so you know that that's one thing that the.. Allen: Oh, the 529? Nelson: Yeah 529, the college savings program. So we just put Birthday, Christmas and everything all in there once, of course, and then take a tax deduction for that. That's how you make your grandkids birthday party. So I've been saying, Yeah, I stay busy. So, you know, I do some consulting restaurant wise and stuff like that, that keeps me busy. But, you know, so I, that's kind of in the future, maybe that, you know, I look forward to, you know, doing more trading and, like, I love doing it, like, it's fun, you know, doing it. But I think if I was like doing a day trading thing that would just wear on me, you know, and, you know, I'm kind of like, you know, I check in at about 10:30 in the morning, and about 10 minutes, and I look at the PNL just like he taught me. And if it's doing well, I just click off of it. I don't watch any of the you know, news programs or any of that noise. Yeah, I used to get up in the morning and check the futures you know, and we all weird about it and everything like that. And, but I don't you know, anymore, so. So you are like the poster child for passive trading. I took you seriously, Allen. Allen: Yeah. And so far, it's been working, right? Nelson: Yeah. Well, that's how, you know, I know, guys that are my age and have portfolios, like mine have stocks, and they're checking them every hour. Like, that's gonna make a difference. Like, they're not gonna sell them anyway. So, you know, they're checking them all time and always talking about them all that stuff. And, you know, that just bores me. Allen: Yeah, yeah. But I think part of it is also fear, because they're not in control of it. Right? Exactly. They don't know how to like, once they retire, they don't know how to generate more. Nelson: That's right. Allen: Because they've been just okay, if I go to work, I'll make money. And so I'm safe. But when I stopped working, and that paycheck doesn't come in, now, it's all this money that's, you know, in this mystery place that somebody else is running, and they have no control over it. So they lose a big part of that certainty in their emotional makeup. And it can be very, very scary. Nelson: Well, I had my money when we had our IRA course, to somebody and, you know, in 2018, I got my statement, you know, when was a great year for the S&P and all that I got my statement in my account had gained 1.18%. Allen: Okay Nelson: I said, All right. You know what, I can do better than that. I'll be a blind squirrel finds a nut every once a while, I can invest it in myself, and make 2%. I know it. So that's what I rolled it all over to self-directed, I rate myself, and I'm glad you had to, but, you know, I got that that got killed me on fees and stuff. Allen: Yes Nelson: And wiped me out. Couldn't believe it? Yeah. Allen: Every time they do something, there's a fee for something. But so Okay, so would you would you recommend Option Genius to other people? Nelson: Absolutely. Of course, it was, you know, it's been worth every, I mean, it's been the return on investment. It's almost incalculable, you know, on what I've paid for, what I paid, and just the time that you've invested back into me, it's been unbelievable to me, you know, so, I mean, I really can't even put you know, a figure on it, because what it's meant to me, be part of community to be coached, you know, to be almost mental word in some ways, you know, because if I hadn't gotten involved in Option Genius, you know, I'm sure no one myself I'd be at some other deal doing something and pulling my hair out, you know, with gains, losses, gains losses, and never had the confidence So I would recommend it to anybody from the beginner to the seasoned veteran who's just so stressed out because of their strategy just stresses them out, you know, and I don't want to live stressed out, I, you know, I spent 25 years in the restaurant business, that was nothing but daily stress, you know, so I don't I don't want to do like, I don't want to live like that. And so it's great that I've been able to be profitable, but I wouldn't learn this system if it weren't for y'all, because no one else is teaches this system. I mean, I've looked, and, you know, it's, most of them are, like, get rich quick schemes from from what I see, you know, in in, and the ones that aren't, aren't teaching, high probability method and even a passive method. So I would say, for, you know, a low stress trading system, that over time bills and bills and bills, you know, through incremental gains, you're the best. Allen: I mean, I gotta tell you 50% a year, that's not that's not incremental. There, there are people on Wall Street, they'll give their right arm for one year of 50% gains, and we're just halfway through. So we, you know, Nelson: I don't know what the second half of the year is going to hold Allen but.. Allen: Well I mean, even if you take the second year off, it's 50. For a pretty good year, you got bragging rights, Nelson: I will have to correct myself, I think that I did have a small loss on a put no, a call spread. Because you told me I need to be more diversified. Yes. Allen: So that was my fault. Nelson: So I tried to be, but I did take like a $200 loss, I think on that trade. But I'm not blaming you really. Allen: You just did. Now, okay, so now you did tell me that you did want to you had a message you wanted to share. Nelson: I did want to share for any of y'all out there that or maybe you're, you know, retiring, or you have to retire, you know, you don't want to work till you're 70 or 75, or whatever, you really can start with this method. And build your nice retirement fund or nest egg or inheritance that you want to leave your children or grandchildren. Because this system, even we even with a small account with incremental growth over the years, will get up pretty quickly. Compound Interest is the eighth wonder of the world. And compounding time after time, after time doing safe trades. So if you have a small amount, and you are 60 Plus or even 55 Plus, and you haven't done a good job of funding your 401k or IRA, for whatever reason. Doing this will get you back in the game. You know, if you follow the rules, and you think clear headed and you invest clear headed, you don't try to all make it in one swoop. This right there, this right here will be the key to doing that. And with Allen and his team that's committed to your success, you know, you almost have to try to go wrong. Allen: Well said Yeah. And then you know, the other thing I was looking at it and you said compound interest. And you can go to any calculator on the on the web, and you can say, Okay, if I put this much money, and I make this return, and if it sits there for 20 years, you know, you compound it, it turns into like a huge number. But most of those calculators, they compounded on a yearly basis, right? You know, so it's at the end of the year, in a year. So 20 times, you know, 20 years later, you'll have a big number, but that's 20 periods of compounding. But like, you know, you told me, you're doing this, the monthly trades, right. And so every month, your account is now bigger. And so you have more money to compound it. So you're compounding it on a monthly basis. So that number is just totally off the wall exponential. So it's it's x, you know, like, whatever, whatever your return is gonna be like, you know, cubed or quadrupled or whatever. I don't know how to explain it, but it's a can be so huge. So definitely, I totally agree with you, you know, you got to you got to start, right, even if you can't just give up and part of the thing is the more I study this I've been looking into longevity studies, and the science and the advancements in technology and health. And they're some crazy, crazy stuff coming down the pipeline that is almost ready to be unleashed on the world, where it's not going to be unusual for somebody to say yeah, you know, I'm 140 years old and they'll still be in control of their faculties you know, I myself, I think my one of my goals is, Hey, I'm going to live to 120 you know, and from what I'm reading and seeing in the, in the research in the companies that are coming out and, and COVID really, really really, you know, supercharged this movement, because before I was reading somewhere where you know, you go to the hospital, and about 5% of the visits were virtual, then you got COVID. And it went, it jumped up to like 80 90% visits were virtual. And so now everybody's, you know, more familiar with the technology. And the government was the bureaucracy of getting new stuff approved for experiments and trials. That was one of the biggest holdups. So what used to take 10 years during COVID, took two months, because everybody saw that there's a real need for this stuff. So we're gonna see in the next handful, maybe five years, we're gonna see some really radical new treatments and technologies coming out that are really going to push longevity to the future. So even if you're behind now, in your retirement funds, you know, you get started and you're going to have time to catch up. Nelson: Well, if you have $100,000 account, and you average 5%, which is totally doable in this system, in 10 years, you'll have $50 million. Allen: But that's per month. Nelson: That's per month, per month, you gave me the confidence that I could do that. With this system. Allen: Where'd you get that number? Five? 100,000? How would you say 50 million? Nelson: $100,000 and 5% compounded monthly will be 50 million in 10 years. Allen: Really? Nelson: Yes. Allen: Wow Nelson: I put it on a compound calculator Allen: And you're doing that right now you're doing that? Well, you're you got a head start. Nelson: That's assuming a 5% every month, you just don't know. Allen: But yeah, no, I mean, you can't, you're gonna have losing months but still. Nelson: Just have a little bit of that. Allen: Yeah, you don't need to I don't think anybody needs.. Nelson: So it is possible. And again, II think if you break it down 3% either. So you start with a 10,000 and a 5% and you're gonna have $5 million. So you know, it's, that's that's a lot of I mean, I can live on that. Allen: And that's 10 years. Nelson: Yeah, that's 10 years. Allen: That passes by like this. I mean.. Nelson: Yeah so 2% would be compounded is a little bit over, it's almost 3 million. So you, you know, 2% you can do 2%. If you had some stocks you could do you know, you could almost get 2% on covered calls a month, you know, and just keep on every month. Keep on and keep on keep on. And then you're right. It's at a certain point, it just starts going crazy. Allen: Snowball. It just goes faster and faster. And then you have to do anything. It just doesn't by itself. Nelson: That's right. And even if you subtract nearly 3% inflation out of it, still a ton of money. Allen: Yep. Big time. Big time. Nelson: But but so you don't have to put on 20 spreads every month, you know, to do that you really can, you know, you really can do a lot less than that. And, you know, and if you make 10% you really can do that, like you teach. Allen: Well, thank you so much, Nelson. I really appreciate your time. I know this is gonna be very beneficial for a lot of people. And you know, it's wonderful having people like you in the community. You know, you're so selfless and you help other people and you're an inspiration. I really can't thank you enough. Nelson: Oh, no problem. I'm happy to help any way I can. Allen: Alrighty. Take care. Take care. Bye. 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I'm going to call this episode, a thing about scaling. And when I'm talking about scaling, I'm talking about scaling up your trading in terms of trading larger amounts and larger quantities of contracts. So this comes into play, because we have several students who are going through one of our, I guess, our credit spread mastery program. And we teach them the fundamentals, we teach them how to do the trades, we work with them, we show them how to do it. And then at the end, after they've had really great success, and they're ready for it, we talk about scaling, how to go from, you know, one to two to three contracts to 510 50 100 or more, depending on the size of the account. And so, we've been having these discussions, and that's why it's in the top of my head, and I noticed something recently, that I wanted to share with you. Now, I tell everybody, and I've said this many times on that podcast as well. trading is 80% Mental 20% Physical, right? So whatever you do, the thing, the analyzing, the research, the clicking, the monitoring, the trading itself, the stuff that you do with your hands on their broker, and moving money around all that stuff, that's 20% of trading. 80% is what goes on in your mind, and how you process how you handle things, your emotions. And when it gets to, when it comes to scaling, that really, really starts to play a bigger role, the emotions, how to handle those things, that is really important to have a handle on before you start scaling. Because otherwise, you're going to have issues. And those issues are going to be very expensive. So one of the things that I noticed recently, is I was doing a I had a $15,000 trade on. And it was a normal spread that I had put on, and it had hit my goal, which was 10% for the month. So it's like a great, you know, $1500.. not bad for a trade. I'll take it very nice. And so according to my plan, I'm supposed to take the trade off, I'm supposed to finish it exited, take my money and relax, right? Or move it to another trader or do whatever. But as I'm looking at this trade, it was not in my regular brokerage account, it was in a different brokerage account. And so the way that trade looks is different. Maybe that's why I felt or felt differently. But normally, you know, most of my trading is done in thinkorswim. This one was done in a different account. And so it looked like I said it looked different. It felt different. And so maybe that's what what threw me. But when I looked at the trade, it showed me that oh, I had made 15 $100, which was great. But there was plenty of time left. There was still another maybe another week, week and a half left in the trade. And I could have made another I think $600. I said "huh this is interesting. I made 1500, I got my goal, but I can make another 600. Now 600. That's a lot of money, right? I mean, I just have to sit in it for maybe like another 10 days, the stock is really far away from from my short strike. What are the chances of this trade going bad, pretty little probabilities on my side time is on my side, you know, data is gonna pick up and every day I stay in the trade, I could probably make another 100 bucks. Do I want to do that? Or do I want to stick to the rules? Now normally, I've gotten to the point where it's not even a question. I just take the trade off. But something caused me to pause. Something caused me to think about it like $600 that's a lot of money that give me for some people that's maybe not a house payment, but that's definitely a car payment. Right. Hmm, interesting. So I paused and I thought about it. I'm like maybe I can stay in it. Maybe I can stay in it. Now here I am. violating my rules. My rules is you get your gain, you get your 100% your your 10% profit and you get out. That's it. There's no ifs, ands or buts. You get your money get up. But here I am thinking about it. Eventually, I did get up. I took my money and I got out. But it really bothered me that I was sitting there thinking about it and trying to try to reason with myself. Oh, maybe I can stay in one more day. Maybe I could stay until the weekend. Maybe you can stand on Monday. You know get the whole weekend time decay. Yeah, maybe you could do that. How much can I make? Oh, and I kept like I kept going back and forth and thinking about and checking the trade over and over again when I didn't have to. And it just was not normal. And so that's what I wanted to share with you. It's like, Yeah, when you scale, you do the same things, you know, you press the same buttons, you do the same analysis, the same stock, same trade, same strategy, everything is the same. But emotionally, it's very different. Because the numbers get bigger. The numbers get bigger, you just add more zeros to it. Now, yes, technically, depending on how much you're trading, I have to tell you that you should probably do more in hedging, and you should probably change it up a little bit your trading. So that the trade is a little bit different, maybe you're hedging a different way, maybe using different strikes or different underlyings to make sure there's plenty of volatility and liquidity and all that stuff. So yeah, it varies a little bit depending on how much you scale and what strategy you use, and all that stuff. That's way beyond this episode. But my point here, is that while you're scaling, you got to have a handle on your emotions. And it's really important that you stick to your game plan. Now what happened with that trade? It expired, I could have made the extra money. But I'm happy that I stuck with my plan. I didn't let my brain in my emotions and all that get a better of me my greed, basically, right? the greed of wanting to Oh, that extra $600 could go far, you know? Nope, I had my gain, I heard everything. Now, normally, if this was a small trade, you know, maybe you would be like, Oh, I can make an extra 60 bucks, that wouldn't be a big deal. Okay, I can get out of my trade, no problem, I'm gonna, you know, I'm a good boy, I'm a good trader, I'm sticking to my plan, I'm following the plan getting out. But when you get to taking it off, and there's still $600 left on the table. $600 leaving on the table, that feels different, feels really different. And when you get into those extra contracts, you know, that that commission adds up to then, you know, what about if it's not 600? What if it's 6000? Right? bigger numbers. So that's why you have to have a check on your emotions. And when you scaling, you know, we don't want to go from five contracts to 50 contracts, we want to go from five contracts to maybe eight, I don't even I wouldn't even want to go double, I'm gonna go step by step slowly, slowly, slowly, until you get the hang of it. One month, you maybe go to five, then 10, 15, 20, 25. As long as you're staying consistent, as long as you're staying true to your trading plan and trading by the rules that you've already set out. Right? Eventually, you'll get to the point where hey, I'm increasing this, maybe I need to tweak my rules a little bit, maybe I need to hedge myself a little bit more, maybe I need to change what my goal is, instead of making 10%, I'm going to try to make 8% and use 2% for insurance. Or maybe I'm going to change the underlyings that I'm trading in in my larger, larger trades, I'm going to go into some underlyings that are very liquid. So you change things up. Right. Now that comes with experience. And if you're one one of our programs, we can talk about that when you get to that level. In the beginning. Of course, you don't need to worry about that man as much. In the beginning, you stick to the plan, that's the biggest thing, focus on the plan, understand the plan, understand how the trade works, put it on, take it off, put it on, take it off over and over again, make it methodical, make it consistent, so that you're doing the same thing over and over again, so that you get consistent results. And then once you're consistent once the money is coming in, we can tweak it, we can improve it, and then eventually get to the point where Okay, now it's time to scale. And at that point, it gets emotional. So be careful for that when you're scaling. Be careful. And big plan here. No matter how big you get, no matter how much you're trading, you got to stick to the rules, no matter how much money is being left on the table, because you got to remember, hey, look, I got my goal. I got what I wanted. I'm playing it safe. And the more money you trade with, the more you have to keep it safe. Because I heard somebody going again on another call. And you know, this guy was talking on the podcast, he was talking to a billionaire. And a billionaire had a different mindset about investing. That billionaire was saying that, hey, when I invest in something, and they're talking about real estate, when I invest in a real estate property, I don't care as much about how much money I can make. I am more concerned with getting my capital back. I'm more concerned with return of capital, then return on capital. And so when you get to that level, when you get rich, right, when you get to multimillion dollar status, then your mind shift changes, your goals change, everything changes. So as you're scaling, when you get to that point, it becomes really I got to make sure that my money comes back. And then if my goal changes, maybe I don't need to make 10% on every trade. Maybe you make 3% maybe you make 2% even 1% on a lot of money is a big deal. Because eventually we know we've talked about this in the past that after you get to a certain level of net worth, you know, adding more money doesn't make you happier. It allows you to do more things, you know, your, your nest egg gets bigger, and you're, you know, you can buy more toys if you want to, but eventually, that stuff doesn't really make a difference in your life. At this point, we're talking, you know, maybe $30 million or higher in terms of net worth, you know, very few of us are at that level, eventually, I want to get there, you know, hopefully you get there too, and we can get there together. But for now, you know, we focused on scaling, focus on trading on a plan and getting our goal and getting out. Because the less time we're in the market, the less bad things can happen. Yes, we're leaving money on the table. But that's okay. Because I got the lion's share. You know, I got what I wanted, I'd be happy before I got into when I got into the trade was like, Okay, what would you want this trade to do? Well, I wanted to get my next goal, which is 10% for the trade. If I get that I'm happy. Good. So when you get that you should be happy and get up. Forget about whatever's left on the table. Let somebody else have the scraps, we got the lion's share. So when scaling, remember, you got to stick to your plan, keep your emotions in check. If you have any issues, you can reach out to us, we'll help you out. But I wanted to give you this quick lesson. This is something I noticed doing myself. And you know, I think mainly it was because that I was trading in a different environment. I was trading in a different software. And so what I was accustomed to seeing was different. You know, normally if I'm on my thinkorswim, I look at you know, what's my margin? And then what's my profit and loss on the trade. And if it's 10% of that I just get out. I don't even look at how much is left. But on this particular software, I couldn't see that. And so I had to figure it out by myself and like "Okay, did I get my 10%?" Yes, I did. Okay. Oh, wait, there's a lot of premium left. Oh, okay. Yeah. And so it gave me pause. But eventually I'm going to get used to it. And so hopefully, it doesn't bother me and I can stick to my emotions and stick to my plan. So I hope that helps. I hope that's something that you can keep in mind as you scale up. Again, trade with the odds in your favor, and we'll talk to you next time. 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.

Allen: Passive Traders, welcome to another edition of the Option Genius Podcast. In this episode I have the pleasure of introducing you to a fellow passive trader, Mr. Charles Betz. He is a passive trader and he is gonna talk about how he got started with a small dollar account and how he is using the Wheel Options Strategy to generate some very significant returns. I think you're gonna enjoy this one. Stay tuned. Allen: Cool. So tell me, tell me about Chuck, tell me about Mr. Betts, you know, what do you do? Who are you? How'd you get into trading? Chuck: I'm a high school teacher, I teach math and physics. It's a second career. My first career was in the restaurant industry. And you know, things just didn't really work out for me there. So then a teacher for then going into my 10th year of teaching. And the whole reason I got into trading was when I looked at the retirement system, the pension, everything that teachers can earn, it's like one of the few professions that still has a pension, I looked at how old I was going to be when I was going to be able to collect a decent income. And I thought, wow, I'm not sure I want to work to be that old one. I'm still working and retire at that age, like, how much am I going to have left? Who knows? So I started looking into other things that could maybe do to dial that number back. And I met with a buddy of mine, I have a real estate license, that's one of the things I got into while I was transitioning careers. He's he owned a, he ran his own little brokerage for a little while, and I was thinking about maybe, you know, selling some homes or listing some homes in the summer or on the side while I was teaching to make extra money. And he told me about options. He's like, you got to check this out. This crazy thing, like, and I'd heard of them, I'd looked into different types of trading, trading currencies and, and trading stocks. You know, that's one of the things I teach in one of my math classes was investing, you know, stocks and what are they and all that stuff. Just the basics, though. And I had never heard of options. So that's how I found out about options was through my buddy knows about two years ago. Allen: So okay, only about two years. All right. Chuck: Yeah. Allen: Cool. So instead of telling you to "Yeah, come on board and you know, love you sell houses for me", he just, he put you in a whole different direction? Allen: Well, he did offer to, you know, give you some leads, I could follow up on his real estate leads. But having done real estate full time in the past, I know how much time and effort and energy it takes to be successful in that industry. Yeah. And as a teacher, you know, I already had a few years under my belt, and I, I love this job. I love what I do. But I just don't want to do it forever. I couldn't see doing real estate and then teaching. At the same time, it just I don't know where I would find the time to do both. So I thought I'd look into options or something to do with the financial markets, because that's something that can be done without as much time to invest into it, you know? Allen: Yeah. What state are you in? Chuck: I'm in California, in Southern California. I live in the city of La Mesa is just outside of San Diego. Allen: Okay. And so they're unionized teachers there? Chuck: I was teaching at a school that had a union I was part of the Union have since left that school for.. Now, I teach from home. I was another thing I reason is because I had more time, I didn't have to go drive and be in a school building all day. I work with homeschool kids Allen: Oh, interesting. Chuck: It's homeschool them. And, you know, they get to that point in their schooling where they're like, I can't help you with that math, or I don't know how to teach you Physics. So that's where I come in. But we aren't part of a union. But we do still pay into the State Retirement where we get our funds from public schools. And from you know, the same way public schools do we are a public charter school. We're just not part of a union. So, that's the only difference. Allen: Okay, so I think you might have touched on this, but besides the money aspect, what drew you to trading? Chuck: I just wanted to not have to work until I'm in my late 60s. And I knew that if I could somehow increase our income, and put that into retirement savings. You know, we're we're starting to fund our Roth IRAs, and we're starting to give money to our 403B's. And we're, we also, you know, my wife's a teacher, too. So, you know, we're starting to we pay into the 403B is like a 401k. But.. Allen: ..for teachers Chuck: For teachers, right. And I was thinking, well, gosh, you know, it'd be really cool if we could just build up our investments faster. That way, we wouldn't have to rely on you know, that number they're gonna give you when you reach that age, it's all this calculator and this crazy math, and they tell you, well, if you teach this many years, and you're this age, we'll give you this much money. And I was like, that's all great, but I don't want to be 68 when I retire, how can I dial that back? So yes, it was about the money, but it was more about how can I start coming back from 68 and make it more like 65 or maybe 62? Or maybe even younger than that, you know, so yeah, that was really the goal was to not have to work until the 68 and how does your wife feel about that? She is on board like this whole thing is just been a huge eye opener. You know, I've kind of been a sucker in my life for all of these crazy money making schemes and it's something I learned from my mom growing up she got into all these crazy money making schemes and and you know, I've met a lot of really bad decisions and so it took a while for me to realize that no, this is legit like this is real. This works this this is not a scam it's not an overnight get rich quick scheme but but it's a legitimate way to increase your income and to reach that goal of financial security a lot faster than you normally would. So she's totally on board. Allen: That's awesome. That's really, I mean, I would say it's becoming more common. But in the.. Originally when a lot of people come to us, you know, they're like, yeah, you know, I want to do this, but my wife, she's totally against it. And she just thinks, like you said, you know, she just thinks it's another one of those things that I'm getting into, that I'm all excited about, I'm gonna spend money on course, or whatever. And then, either it's not gonna work, or I'm not gonna do it. So we have that pushback a lot from a lot of people, and I get where you're coming from. Because I mean, when I was little, you know, I've done it all to you know, network marketing, you know, real estate, sales, all that stuff, everything that I could think of, I even did those chain letters. I don't know if you ever did that, where no, you get a letter.. Chuck: I know what you're talking about. Allen: You get a letter, and it has like, 10 names. And you're like, Okay, you got to send $1 to each people on the name. And then and then you change the last and you put your name there, and then you send out 1000 letters, and then all those 1000 people are supposed to send you $1, and on and on and on. And yeah.. Chuck: Oh my gosh I totally remember those. Allen: That was cool. I think I got like, $1 back. Chuck: Yeah well growing up, you know, my mom bought into, I don't know, if you remember Carlton sheets, you know.. Allen: Yup, we got his programs Chuck: She was into Amway and selling Avon, and, you know, she was always trying to find that, you know, that next thing and, and so that's kind of the mindset I had growing up. But, you know, I just didn't really learn any financial literacy from her, you know, it was, it was kind of a struggle, really. So when I, when it found this, I've always, you know, when I got older, a little bit older in life, I started to realize, like, I don't have a whole lot of good financial knowledge from growing up. So I need to be a little bit more cautious about things. So I kind of made sure that this worked before I introduced it to my wife. And once she saw that it was working, she's like, Let's go, this is great. Are you kidding? Wow. Allen: Okay, so how did you so you said, you made sure that it work? How did you do that? Chuck: So we had a brokerage account that I had just bought some stocks in, we opened it up when our daughter was born, we had a few thousand dollars in there. And you know, just it was just sitting there not really doing anything and never really appreciated and value never went up. It was you know, over the years, when I was in real estate, some of the guys in the office, we're doing penny stocks, and maybe have a couple $100 of that. And, and so over the years, there was a total of a couple grand in there, I read that a little over 3000. And so when I first found out about Options, I used that because she really didn't even know about that. It was like this account that she barely knew.. Allen: She forgot about it.. Chuck: Whatever, it's no big deal. And so I used that to figure out, is this legitimate? Is this going to work? Or is this another one of those things where I'm just going to be like, oh, there I go again, making poor decisions about things don't really work. And at first, it didn't, you know, one of the the the program and the education program that my buddy introduced me to, the thing they used to get me into it was buying options, which totally went against everything that I heard from you, and from another podcast person that I listened to where all you guys talked about as being a seller of options. But the way they presented the course and all the information, it made so much sense. There was logic and you know, a program and a trading plan. And so I put that in, in motion with my little small account and lost a third of it over the course of about four or five months. So that's my start into option. Yeah.. Allen: Yeah that's pretty common. A lot of people go that route because it I mean, it's more appealing because oh, if you buy an option, you can double your money, triple your money 10 times your money overnight, you know. And it's great, because they have plenty of examples, you know, they can show you Oh, we did this trade. And we had this trade we did this trip, they don't show you the other 99 trades that didn't do well. But they show you the few that did. So great. So how did you find out about option genius? How did you get started with us? Chuck: I was looking for more education, more information. You know, I watched tons of YouTube videos about what options are. All the Greeks and all the details and all that stuff. And I go out, mental part of my daily routine is to go out for an hour long walk, walk about three miles every morning, I'll put my earbuds in and I started listening to podcasts about investing and and then eventually trading and now options. And yours was one of the few out there that I could find there aren't that many people doing consistent podcasts about options trading. So between you and this other one that I was listening to. Again, both of you were primarily talking about selling options, and here I was over buying options and like something is.. I'm not doing something right. I'm losing money, and these guys are talking about doing something different. I gotta get this figured out. So that's how I found you guys was through podcasts. So thank you for putting out the podcast. Allen: Okay, no, you're welcome. It's been a it's been an interesting journey for the podcast. So what was the the first product that you tried with us? or what have you had? Chuck: So I went to your website, I signed up for your emails, just your basic emails, here's what we do that kind of stuff. And you sent out a scholarship request, you were offering a scholarship for your passive trading program. And, you know, like I said, I didn't have a whole lot of extra money on the side, I was using a really small account, you know, to buy a program is like, Oh, I'm still not sure about this stuff. But you offered a scholarship and your your introductory video for what you want. And you're like, you know, I've offered this before, like, nobody's ever really done anything with it. I was really kind of disappointed by all the people who, you know, I've given the scholarship to I haven't really had any success stories. So maybe you can be a success story. And I'm like, Yes, that is me. I want to be that guy. So I put together my video and I sent it in and you emailed me, congratulations. You know, we're awarding the scholarship, and I just about my head exploded, it was fantastic. So I watched all the courses. I take notes on all the courses that you teach. I have my little options notebook here that I write everything down, like, word and awesome. And just right when it all was over started, started working the plan. So that's how I found you guys. Allen: And how how's it been? so far? That was about two years ago. You said? Chuck: A year and a half ago.. Allen: Year and a half. Okay. Chuck: It was actually February of 2020. Good Time to get started, right? Yeah, I started placing my first trades, and my first few trades were profitable. I hit my profit margins, just like the plan says everything was going great. Oh, my gosh, let's keep going. Let's do the next month beginning of March, you know, open up my trades, and then Coronavirus, right. And so everything went south, but I could see like this is working. I totally get that this works. We just had this huge adjustment in our market based on what was going on. So I just kept going and going after that. And it's been going great. Allen: But you had the hope, right? Chuck: Oh, yeah, no, I can see that it worked. That was the thing I saw the results, I saw that this new strategy I'd never used before. It works. What all of these guys talk about books that I've read, talk about selling options is the way to make money. It works. It was the first time I had ever sold an option. I was like, Oh my gosh, this stuff works. Kind of like how you talked about in your story where you're like, man, I was losing money. And I looked at the this one option. And it was the one I sold. And I was like what it was like a light bulb moment. Right? Allen: Yep. Yeah. So So how did you handle the the Corona bear market? Chuck: You know, I lost some money, but I just got right back in. Like, I think it turned around within a few weeks. Like actually, as it started going down, I start I just flipped to the other side of the options chain, you know, and started taking advantage of it on that side. And okay, because I could see, okay, we're gonna go down for a few days, or maybe a week or who knows how long but that's the beauty of options is, you know, if there's a clear trend and what's going on, you can jump to the other side. Allen: Awesome, cool. Cool. So how have your trading results been so far? Chuck: Um, I'm keeping track. So that account was so small, and I really wasn't doing what I wanted to do based on what the passive trading formula, you know, they're the three main types of trades and you break it all down by account size and my accounts, I was so small, and I wasn't having as much luck with what the one strategy to build it up. So I rolled over my 403 beat from my previous employer to my current brokerage as a rollover IRA and got it approved for options and started trading there. That was October of last year. Allen: Okay. Chuck: And since October, it's up 26%. Allen: Okay, so what does that like nine months or so? Chuck: Yeah, yeah. And also, if I, if I look at the graph, because most math people would like to graph things. As I look at the graph, I should be right around 30 to 35% on a year over year basis. So using using that strategy. Allen: Sweet, very nice. So what strategies are you using? Chuck: Right now and selling puts to get into positions.. Allen: Okay. Chuck: And once I'm in that position, I do covered calls, and I'm doing them a little closer to the money because I don't really care if it gets called away. As long as I'm, you know, not negative in that particular option, like position, I should say, I look at each position like a little business, right? If I'm going to put this money out there, I want to make me money. And as long as I'm profitable in that position, if it gets called away as long as I've made money on it, you know, when it's all said and done, perfect. So that's what I've been doing. It's just kind of been bouncing back and forth right now. I don't I'm not holding anything right now. I might get assigned this Friday. We'll see depending on where that put closes. So yeah, that's what I've been doing. Allen: Then what type of stocks? Are you doing this on? Chuck: Actually, I've only been using ETFs. Allen: Okay Chuck: So I found that stocks dip, you know, they move a lot I've been I've been looking at, I've been doing credit spreads a little bit like, you know, you're taught to do credit spreads. So, I've been doing a couple of those here and there, I'm starting to get back into trying those out and making sure I can figure out I know what I'm doing. But I like doing it on ETFs. Because I feel like you know, an ETF isn't going to go bankrupt, an ETF isn't going to go down to zero. So I've been using, you know, smaller ETFs, some of the different ETFs that have smaller, you know, price per share points. So that, because my IRA account isn't that big. So, you know, but and I don't want to put all my eggs in one basket, I don't want to do all of it one trade, so I want to spread it around. So I've been using just this list of ETFs that I found that, you know, fit all the criteria you mentioned in the course and just keep selling puts on them until I get assigned and then doing covered calls. And if it gets called away, then I just go back to selling puts again, and it just keeps going around around around. Allen: Awesome. So that puts your selling in the covered calls, they are what weekly every two weeks, three weeks a month? Chuck: They're on mostly I'm doing monthly, most of the time, I'm looking for like a 30 to 35 days till expiration, put to sell all of the ETFs do offer weekly options, you know, I want to make sure that fit that criteria of having weekly options. And there's lots of liquidity, you know, not that you necessarily need it if you're okay with being assigned. But still, you know, if there for some reason you wanted to get out of a trade, you got to be able to get out of the trade. But there is one where I've been doing it a little bit more like just testing out this idea of trying it every like two to three weeks. So I've been doing puts where they'll expire anywhere between 18 and 24 days instead of 30 to 35 just to see what the results aren't, you know, playing around with things and right, keeping tracking data and keeping track of everything to see if it offers any edge whatsoever. Allen: Right. And you're not and you're not keeping the stocks too long. So you're not really worried about the dividend? Chuck: No, not at all. I mean, I'm hoping to build, you know, to get to that point. And like you say in your program where it's like, Okay, you got this host of really good stocks, you get your dividends that are coming in, and then you're just doing calls on top of that to help juice those returns. So but my accounts not quite there yet. Allen: Okay, no worries. Chuck: Or size goes. Allen: Yeah, no, that's awesome. So okay, so you're doing like basic butter, I mean, bread and butter covered or naked puts, get some premium, maybe they expire, maybe they get assigned. And then you turn around right around and you do what like at the money covered calls are a little bit out of the money or.. Chuck: Depending on how if I do get assigned, you know, it depends on where I got assigned at. So if it did go through a couple of dollar drops, let's say it was trading at $40 a share and I sold that put and and then it drops to 38. You know, I'll make sure that I sell the call. So that I'm above my cost basis. I want to make sure I'm not losing money on the position. So sometimes it's a little further out of the money. But most of the time, I'm trying to sell it pretty much right at where I got it sound. Okay, awesome. and collect the premiums to build my account faster. Allen: That's cool. Yeah, I mean, congratulations. I mean, you're doing better than most people out there and a lot of Professionals. Chuck: Yeah it's amazing. I'm floored I really am when I started plotting everything and looking at the returns. I was like, Are you kidding me? This is crazy. Unbelievable. Allen: How long does it take you in the day to do this? Chuck: Oh, not long at all. I do in the morning. You know, before my workday starts or some sometimes before I go out for my morning walk. You know if it I'll look Monday or Tuesday. Okay, let's sell another put in, I just got my list of ETFs that I look at and I say okay, how much did that one expire? Cool, I've got some more money in my account. Let's sell another one. Did I get assigned? Okay, let's look at the chain where where do I need to do my covered call at. Okay, let's do it there. And then I go on with my day. That's it. It's I love it because it's so low maintenance during the school year, my days are unswamped. Like I don't have a whole lot of time to sit here and stare at a screen of the markets and go through and look at charts and all that. So this plan really just fits what I'm looking for. Allen: Okay, so okay, now, I don't know if you've done this. But if you extrapolate and say, okay, you know, I'm doing about 25-30% a year, if I can do that every year, which you know, with the style that you're doing, you should be able to do somewhere close to that, right? Does that help you or does that? Have you done the numbers and be like, Well, you know, I could probably retire five years earlier, four years early or something like that. Chuck: That's been a moving target. And it's really been hard to nail down because all of this is just so recent. It's also very recent, and you sent out that email. I don't remember like a month or two ago. What's your number and you linked it to that article. where, you know, that guy offered to give you as much money as you want you write a number down? How much money would you need to never work again for the rest of your life. And I'm going to ask for other people. And whoever gives me the lowest number wins. I thought that was amazing. Because then I got me to think, what is my number? I never, I mean, I know that this whole thing was designed to dial back my my want to work till 68. Right. But what would this get me if I were to project this out? Could I stop teaching at 62? Could I stop teaching at 59, I really need to look at all of the pieces of the puzzle, to get a clear picture of what that's going to look like and when. But it's very exciting. This is exciting stuff to get to do, you know? Allen: Yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, if you, if you're still looking at that way, that's great. But I would like you to look at it from a different point of view as well, now that you've already seen, you know, that it works is power behind it. Now, let's figure out okay, how much do you need every month to pay the bills, so that we don't need to worry about what your big number is in the, you know, in the big number in the sky? Think we need X dollars every month to pay the bills? How much do I need in my account? To cover that amount? Right? So if you want to, you know, like, let's say your monthly expenses are five, six grand, and you know, as an example, well, hey, if I can make that much five, six grand from my trading account every month doing these simple trades, boom! I can retire today, you know, and then it's up to you. It's I could do I want to keep teaching? Yeah, that's great. Or do I want to go volunteer? Or do I want to teach for free? Or, you know, it, the sky's the limit at that point? So, you know, definitely, I don't want people to think that they have to wait till 6568, they could do it a lot sooner. And when you look at it, from that point of view, that's another like, aha moment like what really that possible? Yeah, it is. And it doesn't take as much as you would think, especially when you're, you know, bringing in like, one 2% a month. If you can build it up, then. And once you take a look at it, your expenses. I mean, you're in California, so maybe a little bit higher with the taxes and whatnot. But if you structure it in a different way, it might be a lot less than you realize. Chuck: I think I'm going to do that. Just knowing that, you know, I haven't done a full year, I think once I hit that October deadline, where I've been doing this a year, and I see that number, and I know that it works, that's a really good opportunity to say, hey, how much would I need in my account? In order to do this and live off of it, like pay my bills, pay my expenses, and not have to worry about going to a classroom every day during the school year, or teaching zoom classes or planning lessons or grading papers? Or you know, any of that just, you know, then what would I do with my time? No, I could, like you said, volunteer or tutor for free or do something else. Just Yeah, that's a that's a really interesting thought. Allen: I mean, I wouldn't want you to leave teaching because I know we need our teachers. But you know, just the fact of not having to worry. Like we've had multiple, multiple people that come into our system, where they get to that point, you know, where hey, yeah, I'm making as much as from my job as I am from my trading. But I love my job so much. I want to keep doing it. Yeah. So it feels really good. your self esteem goes up the way you think about yourself, the way you carry yourself all that changes, because now you're like, wow, you know, I'm in control of my own destiny. Chuck: Yeah I can see that I just just from the success I've had, I can kind of see that mindset shift for me, you know, what my thoughts are about the future and, and what's possible. Allen: Like, I know, like, you know, recently after Corona, we've had this really great bull market, you know, things have been going up things have been doubled, tripled since when they from the hit the bottom and they went up. So a lot of people have made a lot of money, especially the buying option, guys, right now they're walking on water, because they're like, oh, everything that every option I buy, it goes up, every call option goes up. So they're making money, but the thing that you're doing, it works in a bull market when things are going up, but it always works when things are going sideways. And it works really good even when things are going down. You know, so if you came to me and said, Oh, yeah, you know, I've been buying options, and I made 40% or 30% this year, really Congratulations, but you're not gonna be able to do that year after year after year. You know, but what you're doing, yeah, it can be done year after year after year. And then you start compounding that eventually, very quickly, within three, four or five years, you know, that number every month of what you're bringing in just exponentially grows and grows and grows and it gets huge. So I'm really excited for you. So it's like the, you know, future looks really really bright for you. Chuck: It really does. It's it's just an having come to you know, financial stability, I will say at a later age in life and thinking about okay, when I got into teaching at least I will be able to retire at some point, you know, even though that was 68 and then stumbling into this It just blows my mind. Because, you know, I wish I had found it sooner just like teaching. I love teaching. I wish I had started doing this earlier in my life. But yeah, the opportunities that trading opens up are limitless. This has just been amazing. And I can't thank you enough because you guys offered me the scholarship. And here I am. I'm loving it. Allen: Yep. Okay, so now we've talked a lot about the good stuff, right. But what now what was maybe the most challenging thing to get you started to doing this or achieve some success with this? Chuck: I think well, two things. One was the account size, small account to start with. But the second was more of a mental thing. And again, I don't know if it had to do with all of those horrible schemes, those money making schemes that I've come to in the past to really just trust and believe in this and know that it works and trust in the process and click Submit on that order and just watch it work. But I think the mental part of it was probably the hardest thing to get over. And I hear so many people that I listened to and read about talk about that aspect of what it is we're doing, where the mental part of trading is probably one of the most important things, because anybody can do a strategy. And anybody can come up with a trading plan. But if you don't have the right mindset about that plan, it's not going to work for you. It's just not. And I think that was the hardest thing that when it clicked for me, it was like, Oh, my gosh, why did it take so long? But I think getting the right mindset was probably the hardest thing for me. Allen: Okay, and how did you go ahead and get that mindset? Chuck: Knowing that there's limited risk, like what we do you limit your risk? You know, the, when there are certain things that you know, people talk about options, I have a friend who used to work in the financial markets. And I was asking him if he knew anything about options, because oh, man, I don't know, the only thing I know is those are really risky. But what we do you define your risk, right? You You have a, here's your maximum loss, you are willing to lose, you're not going to lose your house and your life savings and be destitute living on the street. There's a and you can make that as small as you want. And I think that helped comfort me a little bit and just saying, Well, look, if it doesn't work, this is what I'm going to lose. Am I okay with that? Yeah, that's not going to make a big deal in the long run. So let's give it a try. So that part of it really helped me get over the mindset of losing, or the fear of losing being greater than the fear of opportunity, or the the actual idea of opportunity. So yeah, just the mindset thing that really took a while for me to wrap my head around, and just do it. But I again, reading so many people talk about it, and great examples of how to get over it. Just, it's I'm so glad I did. Allen: Awesome. Awesome. Cool. So let's say if we have a listener who's in your shoes, where you were about year and a half, two years ago, what would you tell that person? How would you tell? How would you advise them to get started? Or what should they do first, second, third? Chuck: Educate yourself. Definitely, you know, I spent several months just educating myself as much as possible with from reputable people. Like I said, I listen to your podcast, I listen to podcasts of other people, I read books, watch the YouTube videos from reputable sources, you can kind of tell the snake oil salesmen out there, so I would always just kind of tell them, you know, ignore those. But, you know, there are plenty of valid sources of free material to educate you about what options are and how they can work for you. So first, make sure you know what you're doing. But then second, get yourself a somebody who knows what they're doing to help you out. This has been such a helpful community that you've introduced me to everybody in our Facebook group, you offer all of the support, you know, it's just been so helpful to know that there are people out there doing it with me, even though I'm here alone in my office, you know, watching the screen or doing what I'm doing, but definitely somebody who's new - educate yourself, find somebody who's going to help you, and then just do it. You just be okay, with losing a couple 100 bucks. Trust me, I think most people have probably spent a couple 100 bucks on something useless Anyway, you know, and so, I think it's worth it to see that this works. And that'll just be a complete different, a complete mind change for you. Allen: Cool. Okay, so now thinking back to the program that you were in the passive trading formula, give me like maybe two or three takeaways that you know, when you went through it, it really hits you and you're like, Okay, this you know, this makes a lot of sense. This is good. I need to start using this stuff. Chuck: There are rules for everything. You have everything there is a template, it's a pre determined, this is how you do it. This is what you look for this is when you see this go. And as a math teacher math is just rules, right? And what you do when you know there are rules for every type. Math. So if you follow these rules, you'll get the right answer. So if you follow that trading rule, you will get the desired outcome. You know that I think that was one of the biggest takeaways from your entire program was that there's a template, it's laid out for you, you know, here, here's what to look for, here's what to do when things go wrong. Here's what to do when things go right. Here's how to be successful at this and then just do it. That's it. That was the beauty of it is how simple it is. And the fact that I don't have to be glued to my computer screen all day. It's perfect. Allen: Mm hmm. Cool. Okay. Chuck: I hope that answer your question, I hope. Allen: Yeah, I did. Yeah, it's up to you is whatever I mean, you know, everybody looks at it from a different point of view. You know, when some people start asking the same question, it's like, some people they talk about, oh, yeah, you know, I'm gonna be able to do this. With like, some people have certain disabilities, and they can't, they can't work or they can't focus, or they can't do some some other things. And they get drawn to this. Other people look at it. And their takeaway is like, Oh, you know, I'm coming at this from like, let's say, a real estate background, we have a lot of real estate investors, they get involved in options, because it makes sense. You know, you're you're buying a house, you're renting it out, you're cash flowing it, well, you could do that same thing with stocks, you know, your covered call is cash flowing your stocks. So it's kind of the same thing. And so different, like I love your answer is great. Everybody looks at it from a different point of view. So I just like hearing what attracted and what people took away the template thing, you know, that that's something, I've heard it but not not too much? And I think it is, it's one of the things we like to do is just keep it simple, you know, you can, like you said, there are other people out there, they're teaching this stuff. But what I find is that they make it so complicated, that it stops people in their tracks from like, oh, man, I'm never gonna understand this stuff. What is he talking about? i? Geez. So that's what we kind of, you know, especially this program is like, yeah, this is really simple. You know, like, just get started, start with one foot, start with another foot, you don't have to go running, you just start walking a little bit, and crawling a little bit, and eventually you'll, you'll get the hang of it. So.. Chuck: Yeah, it's been great. I think the other thing that hooked me the most was you use the analogy of insurance a lot. And that really was like another lightbulb moment. For me. There was a book I was reading, where they talked about it from being an insurance company perspective. You've talked about it from that perspective, I used to work for AIG selling life insurance back before they had to get bailed out. That was an interesting time. But insurance for that perspective, and selling options totally makes sense to me. And being able to define your risk, you know, what insurance market Do you want to go into? Do you want to be a reinsurance company where you're going to handle all the crazy insurance that nobody else will touch? Or do you want to be a super conservative insurance company, that's really what trading options is, you're, you're out there taking on a little bit of risk and collecting some money and just do it month after month. And it's amazing. It's just amazing. And that so that whole insurance analogy just really clicked with me. So between that and and the step by step, here's the template, follow this process, and let it fly. That those two were the huge takeaways for me. Allen: Okay, cool. Awesome. So based on your experience, would you recommend Option Genius to others? Chuck: Oh, yeah, I already have! A buddy that I mentioned, options to he used to work for the wealthiest guy here in San Diego County was the guy manages several billion dollars worth of investments. But you know, his portfolio kind of shrank over the past several years, and he's just looking to hang it up. So he got laid off. And he was the one I asked if he knew anything about options, and he could get all freaked out, oh, they're risky. And I said, Well, you should look into this guy, you should, you know, go listen to some of his podcasts. That's how I was introduced. And if what he's saying makes any sense, you know, I'm happy to turn you on to what they're doing over there. It's It's amazing. It really is. And so, I don't know if he's, I haven't talked to him. I don't know if he's listened to the podcast and ran with it or done anything with it. But I'll probably check in with him here before I go back to school next month. Allen: I appreciate that. Yeah. I mean, you know, everything that we can do to get the word out there, because the situation for.. I mean, you're you're lucky that you're a teacher, and you have that built in pension, you know, it's kind of I've learned a little bit about it, but it's like your teachers are kind of in that situation, or better often. Most companies are most people that don't have that fallback plan. A lot of people are really, really and you have the other thing, I don't know if you, you're in high school teacher, right. So I mean, if you were unionized, I've seen these, it's harder to lay off a teacher. Chuck: Oh, yeah. Allen: But we have so many, so many people that come to us and say, you know, I was a high level executive. I was making a couple 100 grand a year, but then they decided to lay me off and they brought in somebody that's, you know, doing the work cheaper. And now I can't find a job that will pay me the same amount I was making so my family's used to a certain lifestyle. I can't provide it anymore. Yeah, I wish I had found this stuff so much sooner. And so that's why it's like I'm out there like man, you know, we really need to get this stuff out there. People need to hear about it. Chuck: I agree! Allen: Even if they're doing just the basics, you know, just, you know you already have, most people already have a stock portfolio, they already have their indexes, just, you know, just sell a few options every few years, every month, you know, not even every month, they can do it every few months, they can still make a little bit more than they're making now. And in the long run, it'll add up and workout. So Alright, last question for you. What do you think the future holds for you now? Chuck: That is completely up to me. You know, I've always been a believer in that, that I kind of control my destiny and my circumstances, don't necessarily, I'm here because of who I am. So, but I feel like my future has just, it's wide open. It really is I daydream a lot more. I think about the opportunities and the possibilities a lot more. You know, it's like you said, What if 5, 6, 7 years from now, this could replace your teaching income? Would you continue to teach, you know, or would you do something else? And those are the thoughts that I have. And I just, like I said, haven't really committed it to paper and, and, and talked it over with my wife to figure out okay, if I could, you know, would I? Or could I? Or should I, and what would I do? You know, what would I deal with all that time? But those are the, that's that's what I see for me and a future is just so many possibilities. You know, there's so many things that I thought I would have to wait to do until I'm much much older than I am now. And, and the thought of being able to get to do those sooner rather than later. It's really exciting. Allen: Yeah. Is there anything that one thing that you've always wanted to do that you're like, yeah, I'm gonna give it a shot? Chuck: So interesting story. My last job in the restaurant business, I was a brew master. And I worked for a company called rock bottom breweries. There used to be one I know you're in. In Texas, there was one in Houston for a long time. I don't know if it's still there or not. But I was a Brewmaster for the rock bottom breweries, and I absolutely loved it. It was a fun company. It was a fun job, that beer community, the craft brewing community, and this was back in the late 90s. No, this was before everything blew up like it is now. So and I had to get out because of a workplace injury. Well, you know, so many of these little tiny neighborhood breweries are opening up where it would be super easy to manage on my own and just do it part time, B 4 days a week, I've seen people do that business model. I think that would be a fantastic thing to do with my time. Just make some beer for the local community sponsor, some little league teams and some softball teams and just just, you know, work part time and have a great time. Allen: That sounds awesome. Yeah, yeah. So what are you gonna do it? I know, I'm pushing you here. Chuck: I know, I think I should I really do. I think if that's the one thing I could do, if I got out of this, what would I do with my time? I think that's what I would do. I really do. Allen: Sweet , cool. I like it. I like it. It's a good plan. I mean, I wouldn't want you to stop teaching but you could do this in your afternoons. Chuck: Tutoring is an option. And with tutoring, you can set your own hours tutors get paid fairly well, you don't have to, you know, be locked in a classroom for six and a half hours or glued to a computer screen teaching three or four hours a day. Tutoring can just be Hey, an hour here an hour there. And you know, you're still helping students out you're still passing down that knowledge that you know, and, and being a part of the education journey, you know, somebody who's who's never been, you know, to college, or whatever it may be. But at the same time, having all my other time to do other things that I want to pursue, like, like running my own brewery. Allen: That sounds interesting. That sounds like a lot of fun. Yeah, I mean, I'm in Houston. Well outside of Houston. So I don't remember that one. But there are several here. And like, I've been to a couple of them. There's one called St. Arnold. I think they they sponsor, you know, the MS. Ms. 150, which is like a bike race. They're big sponsors of different charities and stuff around. I don't drink, but it's just the vibe when you go there. And it's just a whole it's, it's just different atmosphere. So yeah. Chuck: Oh, yeah. And that's what drew me to it was the community, you know, as a job. It's just a job here. You know, it's pretty physical manual labor to run one of those breweries. Yeah. But it is more of the community, you know, sponsoring local events and just reaching out, you know, giving giving money away cuz brewing beer is like printing money. The cost of the materials to make that stuff is next to nothing. And they're selling it for four or five, six bucks a glass that's, it's like printing money. It's crazy. So you know, I would just love to be a part of my community here and give back. Allen: Yeah, I've always thought to get into something like snow cones or something like that. You know, you're just selling. Chuck: Yeah. Oh, my gosh, those used to come to my daughter's Elementary School. Same thing. Yeah. You know, just putting a little flavored syrup on a cup of ice and you're charging four bucks for that. Oh, my gosh, yeah. Allen: Fun thing. Cool. All right. So thank you so much for doing this. Thank you for your time. I'm so happy and proud of your success. Had you really, you know, you took that scholarship, you ran with it, it was all on you, you know, I mean, we we did what we could we supported you however we could, but it takes, like I said, you know, when you saw the video, there are several people that have been through that program, and they start everybody starts out fresh and excited. And you know, but then life happens and they kind of fall off. But not you. I mean, you took it, you ran with it, you're actually doing it. And I think that's the biggest thing, you know, you want to change your life, you have to set your goal, you have to set it and this is something that I'm going to do. And then you just do it month after month you keep at it and you work on it, like you said you had, you know, you lost a little money in the beginning with the different program, and then you found something that made sense. And that's like, the biggest thing is, oh, this makes sense to me, okay, I press this, I do this, I do this. And that happens. Okay, let me try, you tried it, it worked. Allen: And you're like, Okay, I could do this. And then you just kept building on it and building on it. And like you said, Now you're getting you know, you're trying to do the credit spreads, you're learning a different strategy, you're getting a little bit more creative and more advanced. You don't really have to, you know, you've had great success, you know, if the S&P was doing 30% every year, like, we'd all be billionaires, we wouldn't have to do any of this. But it does it. But if you could do that year after year, I mean, you'd be you know, you could be starting your own school and your own Brewmaster school or whatever you want to do. You'd be starting up pretty soon. So I'm really excited for you. I appreciate you. Thank you for taking the time to apply for that scholarship, and then just taking and run with it and doing it and it just makes me so, it makes me so happy. You know, it's like, yeah, you know something, I'm actually doing something that's making a difference for somebody. Chuck: I can't thank you enough, Allen, for extending that, for offering this all the support, you know, for the past year and a half that I've been part of the program, you know, the the coaching and the support community on Facebook, and just, you know, just putting that information out there and sharing your knowledge and your belief in other people. So I just want to extend that thank you to you personally, because I will be forever grateful. Allen: You're welcome. You're welcome. And I mean, you've made me come to the decision, that yeah we want to offer this scholarship again this year, you know, in the past? I don't know, man, is it helping anybody? We just wasting our time? But no, I, you know, I think we need to even if it helps out one person like it's, I think it'd be worth it. So normally, we do it around Thanksgiving. So those of you who are listening, if you're interested in the program, you want to wait till Thanksgiving, I wouldn't advise it. But hey if money's tight, then maybe that's what you got to do. Right. So we're on Thanksgiving, we'll probably come out with a scholarship again, for a limited number of people. But yeah, thank you so much again, Chuck. This has been awesome. Appreciate it. And we'll talk to you soon. Chuck: All right, thanks, again, take care. Allen: Uh huh. Buh-bye LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/ WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://optiongenius.com/alliance Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps.

Before we get into this episode, I did want to remind you that we have Futures Options Live coming up July 30, it's going to be an all day seminar, virtual Zoom event where we're going to be teaching and talking and answering questions all day long. It's gonna, if you haven't been if you don't anything about futures options, and this episode will be great to listen to, to get some understanding a little bit, but we're gonna go deep, deep, deep on Friday, and tickets are going really fast. Hopefully, there are still tickets by the time you hear this. But if you go to FuturesOptionsLive.com that's where you get more information, FuturesOptionsLive.com, and the link will be in the show notes. Now, let's hit the music and on the other side, we're going to be listening to the difference between futures options, and stock options. So what are the difference between futures options and stock options? We get this question a lot, because I do have a Oil Trading Program and oil is a futures. And I talk about it a lot, because it's one of the favorite ways to trade. But really quickly, I wanted to go over and there are several reasons I'm going to give you the top three, you know what now I'm going to give you the top four, let's give you a bonus, right, the top four differences between futures options and stock options. Now, I do still trade stock options. And I probably always will. But by adding futures options to it to my investments, and to my portfolio, to my strategies, it's really been amazing. It's given me really, really great diversification, it's given me a lot more fun in my trading. And it really adds another element and another way to generate income and passive income really, that, well, let's get into the differences and you can see for yourself. So number one, the numbers are bigger when you're trading futures options. And there's a couple of different reasons for this. And the numbers being bigger. I mean, they're all all the numbers are bigger. Number one, there's more leverage. Okay, so now, when you're talking about stock options, you're talking about a regular trading account, they have something called portfolio margin. So this is for those traders who have over 100, 130, 150, I don't know how much the limit is. It varies by broker, but you need somewhere over $100,000 in your regular trading account. And you have to have a lot of experience in order to qualify for something called portfolio margin. Regular margin accounts, you know, when you buy stock they give you, if you buy, you know, you have the money for one stock, they'll let you buy two shares, that's 50% margin, that's what normal accounts are. Portfolio margin - they'll give you five times. So if you have you for buying one stock, they'll give you the the let you borrow the money to buy five shares. So it's like five times bigger. Now, that in stock world that only happens if you have portfolio margin. In the futures world, they have something called span leverage, which is very similar to portfolio margin. And everybody gets that right off the bat. So you have more leverage, right when you start. What does that mean? Well, it means that the premium for every option is higher. So you can make a lot more money per contract, than you can in the stock market world for the same amount of risk. And secondly, you can spend less time in each trade, because you can hit your goals much faster. So if you have a profit goal, hey, I'm gonna make 10% when make 15% whatever it is, you can hit that way, way, way in advance. Okay, so in my Oil Options account, my goal is to make 10% on the account every single month, and whatever trades I put on, I'm usually in and out of them in two weeks. So compare that to my iron condors. Right? I'm also trying to make 10% on my iron condor, but I'm usually in there for 30, 35 days, sometimes 45 days. So it's much sooner, much quicker, because the numbers are bigger. The other difference where the numbers are bigger is that the amount controlled by each option is just one futures contract. Okay, so it's not 100 shares to one option, like the stock it's one futures contract is controlled by one options contract. And then that how much control that futures contract has depends on what commodity or what future you're trading. So if you're talking about oil, it's barrels, you know, you might be doing 10,000 barrels per futures contract. That's a lot of money, right? 10,000 barrels, you're controlling a lot of oil with just one options contract. With soybeans, it's the number of bushels. Corn is, you know, bushels. Wheat - same thing. With gold, it's ounces. So the numbers are bigger because you're controlling thousands and thousands of dollars worth of the commodity with each contract. So that's the first thing, numbers are bigger. And that really is awesome. Because you can make a lot more money, you can lose money, too. So it goes back and forth. Right? But if you have the proper strategy, and you have the proper risk management in place, you can take advantage. Secondly, trading on futures options is almost 24 hours a day. So this is great for people who maybe they work a full time job, and they can't trade during market hours. So they come home, and they can still trade the same markets. Yes, it is less liquid. But it's still tradable. And when we teach you the way we do it, you know, it's pretty simple, you could put some trades on and it works great. This also is great for our overseas friends. You know, if you're in a different country, besides the United States or Canada, you can be trading the same markets when you're awake, you don't have to wake up super early to to get the opening bell in the United States. Third, the futures markets, they protect their traders in a way that the stock market does not. So if there are really big moves, there are two different things that the futures market does, that changes what you're allowed to do as a trader, to help you protect, right to hedge yourself to be where you have less money at risk when the markets are crazy, volatile and wild. Now, I don't have time to go into all that because I don't want to make this a three hour episode. But we will be covering those at the at the futures options live. We do cover it in there. And so we'll be talking about those different protections. But just know this, that the futures options markets protect traders better than the stock market. And then lastly, our bonus one - commodities and futures are actually easier to trade. Because they're easier to predict. Right? Somebody comes to me and says, Hey, what's the stock market going to do next month, next year? Nobody knows. Nobody can tell you with any certainty, or any even close to being correct. Unless they're just very lucky. In futures, it's a little bit different. And there's several reasons why. So number one, technical analysis, if you're good at that, if you understand Fibonacci, or if you understand support resistance, if you understand basic moving averages, you'll do better trading futures, than in stocks, the technical analysis just works better. Because most futures options traders, and most futures traders, they use technical analysis a lot more. There's not as much fundamental analysis used, there's not as much valuation and all this other stuff that people use to trade stocks. So that the technical analysis, all those signals and indicators, they are more effective, and they work better. Number two, the trends stay longer intact. So if there's a bullish trend, you know, in a stock market, it might last maybe a month. In a commodity is gonna last a lot longer. So for me, I love trend following, I love trading trends, you know, that takes away a lot of risk for me in my book. So when when there's a trend, I wanted to stay consistent, I wanted to stay long, I want to I want this trend, just keep going and going and going so that I can extract as much money as I can from it. Three, demand and supply is a lot more important and prevalent. Okay, so in the stock market, you know, demand supply, it's not really that relevant, because companies can increase the supply or decrease the supply of the stock whenever they want. They could do a stock split, there's more supply all of a sudden, right? They can issue more shares, oh, all of a sudden, more supplies. The owners could sell their stock if they want to up more supply if the stock on the stock market. So they can dilute or liquidate or play games with their stocks. And how many shares are outstanding, and that affects the price. With a commodity like, you know, wheat, you really can't do that. You can't just snap your fingers and make more wheat. So how much wheat there is in supply and how much is there in demand that makes a big difference in the price. And there are ways to know what is the supply going to be? What is the demand right now, there it's much easier to understand and so supply and demand is a huge part of understanding futures and how they work. So if you are, you know, if you have a good head on your shoulders, you understand basic economics, it really helps you a lot in the in stock, you really can't tell, you know, but you have to try to guess, if a stock is gonna go up or down, but you never know, right? stock has wonderful earnings, they have earnings report, they really knock it out of the park, they're making a lot more money than they expected, and the stock goes down. That's totally counterintuitive of what common sense would be okay, if the company is making more money stock should go up. But no stock went down. Or sometimes stock is the company's doing horrible, and they're like, Oh, no, we're losing so much money. Oh, we're hemorrhaging money, but the stock goes up after earnings. So it's really a crapshoot a lot of times. Futures, they don't have that, and they don't have earnings, right? So that's another thing they don't have. They don't have a quarterly report that can mix up your whole trade. There's also no insider information. And any commodity, everybody knows what's going on. There's no insiders that are selling their shares, right? There's no lockup periods. There's no way for the company to dilute shares. There's no way for the company to cut the dividend, because there are no dividends. And there are no earnings surprises. So I just, you know, went through basically four differences between futures options and stock options. Now, futures options is not for everybody. Right? Can you trade them in your IRA? Yes, you can - we'll talk about that on the event. So whatever's stopping you from trading futures options, if you are doing halfway decent at stock options, you should look into futures options. It's not for everybody, I'll get that, you know, but looking into it, it's not gonna hurt you. You might find that you love it, like I did. Alright, so that's the end for this episode. Again, if you have any comments, you have any questions, you can always get me Help@OptionGenius.com. We'd love to answer them. And if you're more interested, check out our website. Thank you for listening. 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.

If I were to ask you, what your largest expense is? What would you say? You know, what is the thing? The one thing that costs you the most money? Is it your mortgage? student loan payments, car payments, credit card? health insurance? What is it? Well, if you saw the title of this episode, you probably guessed that I'm talking about taxes. And, I mean, you can name them right with all the different types of taxes that we pay. It adds up, we got income taxes for federal and for state, we got payroll taxes, we got property taxes, we got estate taxes, we've got gift taxes, we've got sales taxes, on and on, there's a lot more that I can't even think of. I mean, it is estimated that most Americans pay somewhere close to 50% of their earnings on taxes. Now, I'm guessing that if you're the one that pays the bills, that's not shocking to you. I mean, maybe the 50% is kind of like eye opening, like really? Is it that much? Yeah, unfortunately, it really is. But in this episode, I wanted to talk about taxes and options, and one simple change that you can make to lower the taxes on your trading games. Now, let me start off with a disclaimer, I am not an accountant, I'm not a CPA, not a professional on taxes, nor do I want to be. So make sure that you talk to your tax person about anything that you hear. Right. Now, when it comes to federal income taxes, there are two types that deal with options trading. Now, here we're talking about, you know, your gains on your trading. So if you're making gains, there's two types of taxes that you could pay. The first is regular income taxes. And the second is capital gains taxes. So capital gains is normally the tax that you pay, when you have held an asset for a year or more. And then you sell it for a profit, you would pay capital gains tax on any profit. So if you have a stock, and you own it for over a year, when you sell it, that's the tax that you would pay capital gains. Compare that to if you held the asset for less than one year, then you would be taxed at your regular income tax rate, whatever that is. Now, capital gains is usually much lower as a percentage. Okay, I don't want to go into the actual percentages here, because they keep changing depending on who's in the White House and all that other politics. But for our purposes, capital gains is lower, and is preferred, because of course, it's less. So, of course, the best way to deal with taxes is to not have them at all, to not have to pay them at all. And those of you who are trading in your Roth accounts, will never have to pay taxes on the gains. So if you can, that would be preferable to trade your options in your IRA so that any taxes that you have will not be taxed, you don't ever have to pay taxes on those. So that's really cool deal. Now, if you have a regular IRA, you will have to pay taxes when you eventually withdraw the money, but you don't have to pay it now. And if you're trading in a in a regular trading account, then yes, you will have to pay the taxes depending on your tax situation, quarterly or year. Okay. Now, there is a piece of the tax code that most traders don't know about. That actually helps options traders pay less taxes. It's called section 1256 of the IRS code. Now securities regarded as 1256 investments include non equity options, foreign currency contracts, regulated futures contracts, dealer equity options, and dealer securities futures contracts. Okay, so now what's the difference between section 1256 and non section prophetesses? Well, every section 1256 security, if you have a gain or loss, it is treated as being 60% long term, and 40% short term, no matter how long you own it. Now long term means that your cap is your capital gains tax rate. Okay. And the 40% short term means your personal income tax rate. So, for example, if we have a Joe Schmo trader, he makes $1,000 on an options trade, okay, and if this was a section 1256 security option, then his capital gains tax is 15%, let's just guess. And his personal tax rate is 22%. Okay, for this example, now, he made $1,000 on his trade, right, so 60% of that would be long term 40% of that will be short term. So long term, he would be paying $90 for taxes, and short term, you would be paying $88 for taxes. So for a total gain, or total tax of $178, on his $1,000 game, okay, so he's paying about 17.8% total, on $1,000. But if this was a non 1256 Options trade, and he still made the same $1,000, he would be paying 22% in taxes, which is his personal return rate, and he would be paying $220. So he would have saved $42, which doesn't sound like a lot, but that's just one trade, you got to add it up. But if you look at it percentage, it's 4.2%. So he actually kept 4.2% more money in his pocket, because he's trading 1256 options, instead of not 1256 options. So just by simply switching, you can save or you can keep about 4%, more than you already do. This is money that you've already made. But you didn't have to pay the government. Right. So if you trade for a whole year, let's say, and you make 10% for the year, well, a big chunk of that goes to taxes. This way, you're actually saving 4% of that of the total that you would pay. So instead of paying maybe, you know, 22%, you're paying 17%, or it could be less depending on your personal situation. Or it could be more, though most of the larger traders that we have in our in our movement, in our coaching programs and whatnot, they're usually trading with a lot more money. And so the percentage might be the same. Or it might be more because their income tax rates are different, are probably higher, right? So their tax rates will vary, that amount will be more, but the dollar amount increases significantly when it's non 1256. So now that you know what that is, now that you know what the benefit is, how do you make the switch? Right? How do you go from non 1256 to 1256? And how do you know which options are which? Well, most stock options are non 1256. And by most I mean the options in any company that you trade, or any ETF that you trade. So if you're trading Apple options, IBM options, Microsoft, whoever whatever company option that you're trading is going to be non 1256. ETFs are also non 1256. So if you go into the GLD, the USO, the IBB, any of those ETFs are non 56. And you'll know by looking at the name of it when you're going to try and trade it if it says ETF, it's non 1256. Okay, the main ones that get the 1256 treatment are indexes, and futures options. This is one of the reasons that I have moved a large portion of my trading funds over to my futures options trading account. Because when you trade in size, you know the savings are enormous. So I've been moving more and more money over to my futures options trading account so that I can pay less on taxes even if I'm making the same amount of money. So I do have a special announcement on that. If you are interested futures options and the way I trade them and what I do, we're having a one day live event called futures options live this month, on July 30. So one day events going to be live, it's going to be a lot of fun. You can get your tickets today at www.futuresoptionslive.com. And if you're listening to this episode close to when we publish it, there should still be tickets left. If not, maybe you can, if you're new, we're still interested, maybe you can email us. And if we have the recordings, for sale, or available, we'll let you know. At the live event, I'm going to be going over exactly how futures options work, how they're different from stock options, you know, taxes are just one of the many benefits that they have, and how you can get started with them. Okay, so hopefully, I'll see you there. Now, the other kinds of 1256 options that I mentioned, the ones that I trade are also they're called Index Options. So these are cash settled options on the actual indexes, like the S&P 500, the Russell 2000, the NASDAQ 100, and others. These also get the 60-40 tax treatment. Okay, so if you're a member of our Options Genius advisory, you'll notice that we trade SPX, and we trade rut every month, those are indexes. Those are SPX is for the S&P 500. And the RUT, the rut is for the Russell 2000. You can trade those with ETFs. But the indexes have much greater benefits, taxes being one of them. And so you'll notice that any hedge fund that is doing say iron condors on the s&p 500, or they're probably trading the Russell or the NASDAQ or whatever, if they're trading options, if they're a large trader, you know, they're a hedge fund. If they're a money management fund, if they're Warren Buffett, they all trade the indexes. tax treatment is one of the benefits. Okay, the other benefit I mentioned, there's that they're cash settled, meaning there's no early assignment, that can be a big one, depending on how much you're trading or what you want with your strategy. There are also many other benefits that we are going to cover in a future episode. So stay tuned for that. So let's say right now, if you are trading SPY, if you're trading IWM, for trading QQQ, if you're already trading these, these are ETFs, they don't give you the 1256 tax treatment. So you can do the same trade in an index. And immediately start saving on your taxes. Okay, now, the index options, the S&P or the SPX, the RUT, those are obviously much larger than the ETFs. And so it helps if you have a little bit larger account. But most traders can make the switch today, you do have to get approved by your broker. So you do have to have a higher level, the highest level that they allow. But if you have a track record, that shouldn't be a big problem, you know, you can let them know that, hey, I'm becoming more sophisticated, I want to try these indexes, I want to get the tax treatment, I look at my trading history, I know I can do this. And they'll they should allow you to trade indexes just not much of a big difference. Okay, now again, there are many other benefits to indexes or ETFs. We'll cover those in a future episode. But as you saw in our simple example, with Joe Schmo trader right trader example, just by switching to 1256 options instantly helped the guy make 4% greater returns. And I said, like I said, the larger you trade, the more you're going to save. And this is like free money. I mean, it's just it's, if you don't know about it, you're gonna pay it. Right. If you don't know about 1256, you're just gonna be paying the money in taxes, and you're never even gonna think about it never even notice that oh, my God, I'm paying too much. Unfortunately, most CPAs don't know about this, they have no clue what 1256 is, because most of their clients are not options traders. So you might have to go to your accountant, your CPA, and educate them. And you might have to tell them, hey, these options are 1256 options, and they're not regular options. So they need to be taxed differently. Now, it does mean more work for your accountant, so they're not going to be very happy about that. Truth be told, they might try to take some shortcuts and group them all together. So you have to be very on top of it. And that's why I'm doing this episode so you can realize that there is a difference. And, you know, if you're trading futures options, then it's a little bit easier because you will get a separate tax paper for any futures that you trade and futures contracts themselves or 1256, as well as futures options. Okay, now, mostly all the time, I'm only trading the futures options, not the futures themselves, because there's, there's differences. But if you trade futures or futures options, you will get a separate tax paper at the end of the year, that pretty much lets you know it says it out. These are futures, these are 1256. So that's easier for your broker. But if you are mixing SPX and SPY trades in your regular trading account, you're going to have to separate those and make sure you tell your broker or your CPA, what the differences and how it's going, Okay, because they might not always catch it, they might not know about it. So you have to let them know. I hope that it saves you some money. And I hope to see you at futures options live, the live event that we're having on the 30th. All right, have a great day trade with the odds in your favor. And I'll see you next time! 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.

Hey Passive Traders. Welcome back to another episode of the Option Genius Podcast. I'm gonna switch things up a little bit today, we get a lot of questions via email or on Facebook from our people reaching out to us. And I wanted to take this episode and to take one of those questions and to answer it. So the question that I am answering on this episode, and I want to do this for future episodes, so if you do have a question, something about related to options, or trading, or anything really, in that realm that you think I can help you with, go ahead and email us at Help@OptionGenius.com, send us an email, ask your question and you never know if we get enough people to ask it, we might get it on on an episode. Now, you know, we'll definitely do our best to answer your question via email when you send it in. But if we get the same question over and over again, for multiple people, then we'll try to answer it here so that it helps more people. Because if you're thinking of something and you have a question, there's probably like five or six other people out there, or probably more depending on the question that had the same question, can't find the answer and your question might help them as well. So go ahead and reach out to us, let us know. And I'd like to be doing more of these episodes where there'll be a little bit shorter, not too much in in length as a regular episode. But we'll get the questions answered in a brief period of time that would help you out. So this question is, the question is basically, what is the difference between a layup spread, and a credit spread? We get this answered a lot. I mean, we get we get it a lot. Because there is a difference. Even though the layup is built on the credit spread, the layup is different, it's a different way of doing it. And so that's what I'm going to be answering on this episode. The reason I am doing this is because lately, we've had a lot of interest in a program that we called credit spread mastery, where we teach the layup spread, as well as other methods of trading, credit spreads. And so because we've had so much interest, we get this question over and over and over again. Now, that particular program, we've had amazing, amazing results since we started it in January of 2021. Incredible results, really, we're with the second batch of students right now. And what we've been doing is for three months, we have one batch and then to the break, and then three months for the second batch. And you're not allowed, nobody's allowed to come in during the class during the batch, right? So we are thinking of opening up a few more spots. Because I do know and I do think that the market is going to get a little bit more volatile, coming up this year. And so it's going to help a lot of people to have someone to bounce ideas off of to get coaching from to see how they are trading through the volatility. So I definitely think that this year, it's gonna be a little bit different from last year, it's not gonna be so easy to make some money. And so that's why we're opening up some more spots in the credit spread mastery program. If you're interested, all you got to do is reach out to us, we'll get you some more information about that, and how you can join up if you're interested. And if you qualify, because everybody doesn't qualify, you have to be able to take advantage of it. So with that in mind, let's cue up the music. And then on the other side, I'm going to answer the question, what is the difference between a layup spread and a credit spread? Take care. So what's the difference? between a credit spread and a layup up spread? They seem very similar Allen. What's going on? What's the difference? Let's go and talk about it. But before we do, I gotta show you our trusty disclaimer. Remember, don't trade with money you cannot afford to lose. You don't want your spouse kicking you out of the house. I love that. I think I'm gonna say that every time from now on. Sorry. It's like so unprofessional for me. Alright, but hey, you signed up for this it you gotta you got to put up with my corny jokes. Alright, to put it simply, the layup is a type of credit spread. Okay, the layup takes the best features of the credit spread and then improves on them by stacking the deck in your favor more and more and more. Okay, so if the credit spread is your strategy. The layup is the trading plan is going to tell you exactly the best way to find the trade, the best way to enter the best way to manage your trade. And obviously, the best way to exit is part of the management process. But remember, the credit spread is the strategy. The layup is the details. You know, how do you find the stock? How do you find the Options that you're going to trade? How do you know if it's a good trade or not? How do you know when to get out? How do you know what to do? All that stuff is the details of the layup. And that's what the layup gives you. So the layup is time tested through bull and bear markets with real trading results. So we've been doing it this way, for years and years and years. And so we know that over time, this process works, right. And if you follow the layup rules, then you're going to be on your way to being a consistently profitable options trader. Because we've already done it, we've done it for you, right, we've done it in the past, hopefully now again, obviously, the disclaimer is there. And past results do not equal future performance. We get that, right? So I can't guarantee that it's going to continue to work. But until now it has been working. And if it stops working, I'll let you know, right? But as of this recording, the layup does work. And it's a way not only to help you be more consistent, but it's a way that doesn't take a lot of time. And that's what I really enjoy. That's what I really like the fact that hey, this is part of passive trading, because it's very simple to do. I can put my trades on, boom, boom, boom, I know exactly when to get out. And I don't have to mess with it. And the fact that we stack the odds in our favor in so many different ways. It's not just probability of profit. You know, anybody can do that. Anyway. Oh, yeah. Find a find a 20 Delta, find a 15 Delta, find a 10 Delta. Okay, I gotta probably profit. No, it's not that simple. Right? That's one way. That's one thing. But that's not enough. You got to look for other things. And we go with me. And we do that in a different video where we tell okay, exactly how are we going to stack the deck and also in different different different different ways? The more ways you can stack the deck in your favor, the more the odds are 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.

Allen: All right, Passive Traders. Welcome to another edition of the Option Genius Podcast, we got a real treat for you today. I have one of my long, long time friends with me today and we're actually doing something special, we're going to do a video as well as audio on the Podcast, we will be having some slides, but when we show the slides will describe to you what's going on in the slide so those of you who are listening will not be missing out. And the video will also be on our media channels and YouTube channel. So you can catch it there if you need. I want to introduce my guest today He is Mr. Doug Smith of Hawthorne Funds. Doug and I go back, man, we go back, like over what over a decade or so. But yeah. Doug: 15 years. Allen: So Doug is Mr. Moneybags himself, Mr. Real Estate, you know, he's been doing real estate for years and years, he launched a very successful company called MyHouseDeals.com where if you are a real estate investor, you can go and find all the deals that are not on the MLS. So it's pretty cool. And that site has made a lot of people a lot of money. But today, we're gonna be talking about Doug's newest venture, this is something that he's been doing for a few years now. And you know, whenever you get together with friends, you talk and "Hey, what's up?" "What are you doing?" And we would share stories of what we were doing and, and Doug A few years ago, came up to me, and he's like, yeah, you know, I'm doing all this stuff with land and doing this and doing that. And I was like, Wow, man, you're making a killing. And he made such a big killing that he just like, he just has to get out. And he's like, Alright, we need to do this on a bigger scale. And so Doug went and figured out how to do a investment fund. And so that's what we're going to be talking about today. I know back in Episode 94, it's called "How I Invest". I shared that one of my investments is in a real estate fund. And that is Doug's fund. And so I asked Doug, to come on and answer some questions and give us some highlights about what investment funds are, how they work, what to look for, when you're choosing one, making sure that your investment is safe, and all that stuff. So Doug, hopefully, I covered everything. If you anything you want to add, please go ahead. Doug: More or less, you covered all the stuff that makes me look good. So we'll just skip all the other stuff. Allen: Yeah, I didn't want to tell all your dirty secrets. Doug: It's good to see you again, Allen. And thank you so much for having me here on the call. I'm really looking forward to sharing everything I can to educate people help you out. Allen: Yeah, I appreciate it. Appreciate it. Thank you for having us. So tell us what are you doing at Hawthorne? Doug: Oh, my gosh, well, I work all the time, which was so funny, because when you and I met, I was like a lifestyle guy. But yeah, for those considering starting up a private equity firm, just know that it will consume you. We buy and sell land outside of Houston, Texas. And so we're buying about a million dollars a month worth of land, sometimes more. And we're selling maybe $2 million a month worth of land, it really just depends on the month. But that requires a lot of people and a lot of emails, a lot of phone calls, a lot of Excel spreadsheets, there's just a lot going on, there's 20 or 30 of us that make all of this happen. So there's always something kind of vying for my attention as it pertains to mining selling land and raising people's money and investing that money properly. Allen: Yep. And so one of the things I do want to point out that Doug, you are doing this for yourself before you started the fund? Doug: Yes, that's right. So not only that, I have my house deals calm going on, I was buying and selling houses, I was selling those on owner financing. And then my business partner and I switched over to land in 2016 started buying that and selling on owner financing. And it was just, it was very profitable, requiring a lot of my capital. And sometimes that capital would take a year and a half or two years to come back. And I was wanting to do more deals as opposed to just sit on sidelines, right and wait for money to come back. So that's when I started the fund around 2018 or so started taking other people's money on as well. Allen: Okay, so you had one iteration, and then now you're in the second iteration, right? Or the second fund? Doug: Yes, there's the first time that was an equity fund. And then we formed a debt fund, I guess a few weeks ago at this point, maybe a month or two ago and took on 5 or $6 million into that second fund. We've taken out about the same amount into the first one, but there's, they're structured differently, but they The end result is pretty similar for the investors and for us. Allen: So can you give us a difference between debt versus private equity? Doug: Yeah, sure so that's one thing you said we're gonna talk about on the call is like, what would you want to look for if you're looking at investing in a private equity fund, and the majority of those funds out there are equity funds, and so that means that they're probably buying one or more assets like multi multifamily apartment complex. For example, and they are going to leverage up with maybe 75 or 80% bank money. So that's debt. And then you as an investor, you're a limited partner in these deals. So you're now you're the equity portion, the 25% equity, and whatever it appreciates, you know, force appreciation or just natural appreciation over time, you benefit from that. But that can be a little bit risky. If there's a downturn in the market, or the property's not managed properly, because equity holders can get wiped out, or at least have a lot of their money, kind of like, you know, wiped away. So a debt fund is when you invest in a fund, and that fund becomes the lender against something. So they are now in the bank's position in that first example. So let's say you, Allen, or your friend is wanting to buy a house for $100,000. And you lend him $50,000. Well, he totally mismanaged the project, and you have to foreclose on him, he's not paying you, well, you're gonna become the owner, you're foreclosing become the owner of that house and be able to resell it on the open market, and, and almost certainly recuperate your $50,000, because the house would sell is worth more than that. So that's kind of like a simple way to explain the difference between an equity and a debt fund. Allen: Okay, so now on the first one, the equity fund, you said that they go out and they borrow 75% of it. And they in the investment funds are 25%? Doug: I think there's a fairly typical kind of split, right, equity funds. There are some equity funds that don't take on debt, but the majority do, and that's why they're able to pay out at, well, sometimes the ends up being maybe 15%, internal rate of return over time. But there's, you know, there's some risks, there's some negatives, those are projections, you never quite know how it's going to shake out. Yeah. And your money would be locked up for usually about three, five or seven years, depending on the fund. Okay. And what if you wanted to get out sooner than that? What would you Is there any recourse? For most funds, you can't. Allen: No, just you can't give it to somebody else, or they won't help you facilitate it change or.. Doug: It might help you, but they're not obligated to do so. The latest fund that we set up, there was finalized one or two months ago, you can get it out. It's an evergreen fund, it is a lot more liquid. So that's one of the advantages of it. Allen: Okay, so now you said yours is a debt fund, right, then and so you are using the funds money to go out and buy the land? Doug: Yeah, so let's say like, let's say we're about to buy some land, and it's gonna cost a million dollars, we're able to borrow from the fund and the fund be a lender on that deal. So my entity that I own - Hawthorne land LLC will borrow. And it's all at the courthouse. It's documented from Hawthorne Income Fund, LLC, which is where all the investors are as members. Allen: Okay, so, okay, so basically, you created your own bank? Doug: Yeah. Here's the deal. Most banks, they do not like to lend on anything that is slightly outside of this cookie cutter box. And what we're doing buying raw land outside of the city, subdividing it and proving it and selling on honor on owner financing there, they've never heard of that most of them. And they're like, we don't know which box to check here on this form. So maybe you can go talk to this or that banker, but we did find bankers, and we saw bankers that will mind on it, but they're a huge pain to deal with. They take weeks to process alone. And there's all these requirements. It's just very, very bureaucratic, so much red tape. So yes, we created our own bank. Allen: Okay so basically, you borrow the money from the fund, and then the fund gets a set percentage. Doug: Yes, it doesn't get any of the profits or anything. No, it's just the lender. It's very clean. So it's kind of like, it's kind of like a lot of people all they know is about investing in some sort of index fund. And then maybe they'll put some of their money in bonds. And so this is like a lot of people that invest with us there. They're familiar with other strategies, like they might invest in other private equity funds that are a little riskier and maybe they're an equity fund, and they will treat us as if we're like, the bonds. So we're the lower stable like steady investment that they feel like if all the crap hits the fan that we're standing Allen: And so say you're paying 10% and that's paid out every month Doug: It's every month or people can check a box and have it automatically reinvested in compound. Allen: Awesome, sweet. Okay, yeah, cuz I know the first time we had it, we had a, that wasn't a possibility. So actually into our investors who wanted that. Yeah. So you're actually growing and learning at the same time. So that's awesome. Doug: Yes. Allen: Awesome. So who is able to invest in your fund anybody or accredited or how's that work? Doug: Accredited investors, and the minimum is 100,000. So who knows? Maybe 95% or more of American population can invest unfortunately. But those who can enjoy it. Allen: So now accredited, that means what 200, I think it's 200. Doug: If you're an individual, you need to be making 200,000 a year or more if it's a married couple 300 or you need to have a net worth of a million dollars, not counting the equity in your house that you're living in, Allen: Okay. And the minimum to put in is 100. And there's like you said, there's no tie up phase. So somebody come in, and then if they need it six months down the road, they'd be like, hey, I need to get out. Doug: That's correct. So we have provisions that if anybody's trying to get their money back at the same time, there's a slow process of giving it to everybody. But in general, people get their money back fairly quickly, if they need it. We've not even had our first requests yet, everybody, they're putting their money with us, because they want it to be with us not because they want to pull it, pull it out. But it would take a few days to, who knows a week or two to get someone's money back to them on a typical scenario. Allen: Right. And I mean, this is real estate. So people understand that this is not liquid, you know, most times you go buy a house, it's going to take you two months to sell it anyway. This is putting it in a fund that's invested in real estate. So that when if they need to, it takes time. So.. Doug: Yes, but with a structure, it is pretty liquid. Allen: Okay. Okay. Doug: Like it could be the next day, we get their money back to them, but I cannot go. Allen: So, I mean, I wanted to go over some of the reasons for our listeners, why, you know, why I invested in Doug in the first place. And, you know, this was one of the first investments that I actually made in a fund. And, you know, he came to me and said, hey, look, I've been doing this, and I'm starting a fund. And if you'd like to invest, you know, go ahead, these are the parameters, and this is how much we're gonna pay out. And there's risk involved. Of course, there's risk involved all assets, and all investing and trading and whatnot. Doug: My attorney made me say that. Allen: Oh, yeah, there is. So you know, you don't want to have somebody come in and be like, Oh, man, I'm gonna get rich. And then, you know, it doesn't happen. Doug: We do sell for about double what we buy for. So it's just like, with the margins like that, it's kind of hard to mess up. Allen: So I came up with some criteria, I was like, Alright, so number one, you know, who is actually doing or leading this fund, righ? And in this case, it was Doug. And I've known Doug for 10 years, and those of you guys know him, you don't know this, and you can't tell because he, you know, he looks like a really nice guy and everything on the in the video. That guy is I mean, he's a stickler, he, I mean, I only know this because I've known him for so long. But he tracks his net worth on a regular basis, he accounts for every single penny, in his business man, every single point 001% he knows what's happening and where it's going. And this guy is meticulous on his numbers. And he was not somebody that plays loose and fast, you know, he's got every dotted eye, every T is crossed. And so that was really something that gave me a lot of confidence. Like, you know, this guy, he knows what he's talking about. And he's been doing it on his own for a while. And the numbers just make sense. And so, you know, a lot of times people get attracted to these investments, the only thing they know about is Oh, I can make 10%, I can make 50%, I can make 25% in maybe some cases where, you know, it's, it's, it's more of a scam than anything else. There was like a lot of people investing in this crypto stuff. You know, there are crypto funds that I've seen that are like, oh, we'll pay you 30% a month, a month. Wow. And so you get money for a month or two, and then it folds and it goes out of business because it was a big Ponzi scheme. But in this case, you know, I knew Doug, and I trusted him. And that's what one of the things that led me to it. The other thing was, you know, his experience was there. And then the second part was, does the investment makes sense, is like, What is he doing? Or what is the investment. And in this case, it was something I had never heard about, it was pretty unique, where he's buying hundreds of acres of land, and then he's subdividing them into smaller pieces. And then when you subdivide it, and you smell a smaller piece, you get to sell it for a lot more money. So I think some of the numbers were you were buying it for four or $5 a square foot, selling it for $10-$12 a square foot originally. And like you said, it's pretty hard to go wrong with those kind of numbers. This was not like a apartment complex in some other country that we're going to Airbnb it and hopefully people want to go there and stay there. And maybe maybe it's run properly. This is something that he was already doing. The third thing was, what is my risk? You know, I'm going to put my money into this thing. I want to own that land. As an investor, what's my risk? And I was looking at, I think, well, this is raw land. It's been there for hundreds of years, it's not going to go anywhere. If it's not going to burn down, it's not going to go out of business. You know, he can't take it and run away with it. The only thing that might happen is it doesn't sell, you know, he'll buy it, it doesn't sell it'll sit there and maybe 5-10 years from now we'll sell it. To me that was like the only risk is like if the lead doesn't fill. It's just gonna sit there. No, I don't get my return but leaves my money is still safe. And so all those aspects, I was like alright, let's go. Let's do it, you know, and so that's why I feel comfortable. And those are the three aspects, I would look for investing in any other fund. Is there anything, Doug that you want to add? Like, you know, what are the things people should look for when there's questions I should ask? Doug: I can go into that a little bit. So one of the main problems with a lot of private equity funds that they have this projected internal rate of return. And the majority of funds do not meet their projection, really don't say like 15 to 20%, or whatever, but you can, but here's, here's what you do. So that'll be based on a certain amount of appreciation of whatever asset they're holding, you like reduce that appreciation by just .5% per year or something, and that projection all goes to crap. And the reason that it's so effective is that there is some debt ahead of you. And so you're just dealing with that little thin equity margin. So you play with that a little bit and that's a high percentage of your potential return that can be taken away from you. So that's kind of like the main problem. But yes, I do invest in other funds. And you know, private equity funds can be a good way to invest your money, right? Probably just a mix of right, different things like that. You could be doing Options Trading, like maybe you've got some like long term, like buying hopes, maybe you've got one or 2% of your money in crypto, whatever. But it can certainly be part of your strategy. So that's like the main problem I see with certain private equity funds, the less common one is that they're a scam. You'll see that maybe more like if there's like a crypto fund, okay, maybe like that could kind of like maybe be a scam. Oil and gas is kind of notorious for some guys that come and go with a little scam. They're gonna go drill some wells here and there on the wells and of dry or maybe they run off with your money, but pretty notorious. But for the most part, people running private equity funds do not want to go to prison. Like they're not super incentivized to run a scam. But I'm more than happy to tell you about a story where I was scammed recently in a private equity fund. Allen: No way. Doug: Yeah, I mean, if you want me to go into it. Allen: Yeah, yeah let's go. I'm sure people will be excited to hear about that. How the Mr. Smart Guy got scammed. Doug: Yeah, that's crazy. Well, looking back, I can see like, now I can see how the scam and where I went wrong. So like I said, I like to kind of diversify a little bit of my money away from these land deals, not because I'm worried about the land deals, but it is nice to dabble in other stuff. I think we're a bunch of like business people, entrepreneurs on this call, right? So like, when somebody comes to us with something, it seems like "Oh, just plop 100 grand, or whatever it is, and your fund, and you're gonna pay me. Sounds great". So there was this guy, I was at this competition where veterans were pitching their business ideas, and we're all investing in some of their businesses. And there was a guy in the audience, and he actually ran a private equity firm himself, which he was on his maybe 6th fund, and each fund was like only a year. So that's kind of a shorter duration than his normal. So that was a little bit atypical from the beginning. And then his first fund got a return of 63% in a year. And so it's like, of course, like, my eyes lit up. "Oh, my God. Wow, that's awesome". Like, well, what about your second one? Oh, that was 45%. What about these other ones? And and it was I talked to one of the person who had invested with him, and they were, like, fairly happy at the time. And so I went out and I.. Allen: What was he doing? Doug: Yeah, that's a good question. Well, I'll tell you what he said he was doing. He said that he and his team are going out there and buying mineral rights from individuals and then aggregating those, and selling them to companies that were looking to buy larger chunks of minerals into like, they like direct mail and stuff. So that like, you know, old Sue, she's like eight years old, and heritage minerals, she didn't even know about it. And she gets a little direct mail piece from his company saying that they'll buy her minerals, I'm sure at a discount. doing that for a lot of people aggregating them and then selling them in a package. So it kind of made sense, you know, aggregate and sell for a higher price. And so but here's the deal, I'm not an oil and gas guy. And so I was not able to properly vet the investment. I was just sort of going off these other investors seeing kind of happy to seems legit. I went out to his office, and I met with him and his staff out there. He's got like, all these people with firm handshakes and strong like backslaps, you know, like, and I'm just like, maybe a team of 15 or 20 people there are a lot of them were rice, MBA, Rice University MBA graduates, and it just seemed, it seemed kind of legit, you know, the, and here's the deal. They're all almost all veterans. It was a veteran owned and operated business. So like, wow, you go in there. And there's like all these like, swords on the walls and stuff like, you know, and flags. And just like, this guy seemed like Miss Captain America. Like, I was like, you know, 15 years ago, I was running an internet business and this guy was out there like killing terrorists or something. It's like, okay, I was like really looking up to this guy and a lot of other people were too and so over time, he took on maybe 60 million from people over the course of five years or something like that. And ultimately, we found out through an email from him like two months ago that he had squandered almost all of our money and that he was basically using fun money to pay a staff which you cannot you cannot do that the fund money has this very designated purpose, which is to invest in whatever asset you're investing in and had just basically raped and pillaged the the bank account for the fund. And it's very hard for like 30 or $60 million, because I think ultimately the losses were 30 million. But for me, it was like, almost all of my money. The early like first two funds, they mostly got their money back. But beyond that it was it was scam time. Allen: Oh, wow Doug: And so yeah, so like he was holding this managing the funds. And we still don't know if he ran off with some of them on his own. Or if he was just trying to pay his employees and save his company and make desperate business moves to sort of save things or salvage things. And the oil and gas has been going downhill. It's been in a, I guess, a trough over the last year or two. Maybe it's doing better lately? I think it is. But that really hit him. Just, I guess maybe when the pandemic was starting and maybe.. Allen: Yeah it was, you know, oil went in the toilet pretty much. Doug: Yeah. So I kind of like, we're like, he'll go to prison, which I don't know why in the heck, you'd want to do something that would lead him to prison. That's crazy. Like any sane private equity fund manager, their main goal is not to go to prison. So then what do you? How do you not go to prison? You don't do anything illegal? Yeah. Tell that to made off? Yeah, it's crazy. So anyway, so but looking back, I've got some insights as to why I kind of got scammed there. I understand it more now. Allen: Okay, tell us tell us. Doug: Basically, if anybody's really like his disguise themselves, it's like a Veteran Business or Christian business or something like that. That's usually a little bit of a red flag, because they're trying to make themselves seem like a very reputable, or moral and principled, and all that, it's like an overreach. Allen: And they're taking credibility from another organization kind of thing. You know, they're tying themselves to something else. Doug: Yeah. So that's one. I mean, there's many things that came together, when you go on his website, which are websites probably even not even there anymore. A lot of his team members, they had various positions, but their background on LinkedIn, and all ends up being sales. Like they were all in sales before, like the Geologists was in sales. So that was kind of a red flag. He had a huge overhead, like, he's, obviously all these MBAs, I was like, maybe this is a red flag, but I wasn't so sure. And here's what I messed up doing too, is like, I know, his professor at Rice, or that was his professor. He is one of our fellow members. And I could have asked that guy because I asked him later and he said, "You didn't know that was a scam? It was pretty obvious". He came in here. And every time they were raising money for something, he was dropping $20-$30,000 at a time, everybody else was dropping, maybe 1000s. So I thought, well, he's probably just dropping all the investors money. You see what I'm saying? I was like "Oh I got it". And he was, uh, yeah, he seems like he's maybe trying to compensate for something, make himself look a little bit better than he is. And then I got to know another investor in the oil and gas business later. He's like, "Oh, we've known that was a scam for the last 12 months", just the types of returns he's been paying out are not feasible in this industry. It doesn't make any sense. Allen: Oh wow. Doug: And so basically, I mess up by not asking those two guys before I invested, I just asked that the the satisfied investor that I knew. And actually when I asked him right before I invested, he said he was less satisfied with the fund, and that he would not recommend it. But I went against his advice, because he could not give me a firm reason as to why I should not invest. It was more like a gut feel that he had. My own brother who ended up investing had a negative gut feel about it, too. So basically, in the future, if I get some of these red or yellow flags, I'm just gonna sit on the sidelines, and I'm gonna sit out of that deal. Another problem is like he was, I'm 40 now and he was my same age. And so like, I'm thinking, Okay, this is a guy, like, I've had, like, 20 years of business experience at and so but I'm not sitting across from another guy with that amount of experience, even though it's just it kind of felt like it because he was in the military 13 or 15 years. And so that's life experience, for sure. But like, as far as like business, this guy was green. I'm throwing a bunch of money at this guy that's green and so as everybody else so that's a red flag especially in oil and gas. I think they need to be in the industry for like decades because that's that can it's very tricky, complicated industry and, and very volatile. And a lot of fortunes have been made and loss. I don't want the guy that's like new to the industry. Right? Yeah. So yeah. And also I messed up. I should not necessarily be investing in stuff that I don't understand very well like oil and gas. Unless I'm willing to put the time into that. So the outrageous returns were red flag. Anybody saying we're gonna get you 60 something or he didn't guarantee that but right. I don't know. It's just like, that's not super realistic. I mean, it can be done, I guess. But red flag. Allen: Yeah, I mean, our traders they can get it but We don't run a fun doing that, you know, they can do it on their own. They hear the trades, he learned how to do it and go for it and do it. And some markets, you do it in some markets, you don't in some markets you lose. But when you have a fund, you obviously have all these expenses, like you said, you know, the staff and the work involved and all that information, all the lawyers that you paid, I remember you telling me, you know how much you paid to the lawyers to make all the documents and the accounting and the photos and all the auditing. And that's done on a regular basis and all that stuff. Yeah. So it takes a lot of money to put this stuff together and actually run it. Doug: Yeah, totally. Oh, here's the company. Here's a couple more things about him. Like, he didn't let his investors mix and mingle. So I never really met any other investors besides that one guy like, there's other guys that run funds, they'll like even sometimes do lunches and dinners or like a group events for the investors because they have nothing to hide, let the investors check. Allen: This, I mean, if you're legit, if you're legit, you want that, you know, you want the happy people to mix with the new people. So the new people are like, Oh, yeah, are you doing it? They're like, Yeah, I do. It is great. You want that to happen if you're legit. Doug: Yes, totally. And we never got any documentation like showing which minerals we owned and what was sold. Like, I want to see like legitimate notarized documents, stuff that was filed somewhere like, so that's the problem with some funds, too, is like they're not obligated to show you all that stuff. Like, who regulates all this stuff? sec. sec. That's not I was thinking that may see that maybe needs to be something that maybe at some point becomes regulated. I hate to like, I don't I'm not like a fan of more regulation. That might be actually kind of handy. You know, like, it's crazy like the if you want to be a scammer with a private equity fund, you can. It does not end well, though. So you're not incentivized in that. That's when I shocking to some people would want to do it. You go to freakin jail. Allen: Yeah, Oh, I mean, you take the money and run to another country and live in it. Doug: There's like international police now. They'll get you anywhere. Allen: You can't go to like some island that doesn't have extradition or something? Doug: You'll be like the only white guy or whatever. Yeah. Allen: Head on down to Cuba and you'll be the king. Doug: It baffles me that anybody would want to do what he did. But I again, I don't think that's the norm. I asked a couple of attorneys. I said, How often do you see this? And they said not very often? Allen: No, because I mean, I know with your stuff ever since we'd invested with you. It's like, we get regular emails, we get regular update, since like hey this, look, we bought this land and hey, we bought this property. And here's the address. And here's the photo. And and before we before we even invested, I mean, you took us on a tour, like, you know, Doug: Yeah, we were actually on the land. Allen: Yeah, we saw the land we saw where it was subdivided. We saw, you know, people that were there, you know, that purchased other plots already. And they were building stuff. So I mean, it was everything was on the up and up, and it's still on the open up still, you know, if you want access, you call Doug up, and he'll explain everything. And if you want to go see it, he'll give you all the details and you go take a look and check the deeds are whatever you want to do. Doug: Yeah we'll send our statements or deeds, whatever. Also, some people if they are hesitant about investing in a fund, like for us, we're willing to sell people the notes that we generate. So like, they can get about a 10% return if they just own the notes, but it's a little bit more volatile. Because every now and then you might have a borrower that defaults, and you have to foreclose and then resell, so like investing the fun is just simpler. But if you're one of those people that just like I don't trust like somebody else having control over my money, there's other ways to get the same return with what we've got going on. That's why we changed our name from Hawthorne funds, the Hawthorne capital, because we sell notes, and you can lend against notes or you can invest in the fund, the fund is just the easiest. Awesome, cool, cool. How do people find out about you or talk to you about this? shoot me an email at Doug@HawthorneCapital.com That's D-O-U-G Doug@HawthorneCapital.com Allen: Alright, I'll put that in the show notes as well. And you know, one of the questions that I got after I did that episode 94 was like, you know, if you're making so much money in the stock market in an options, why are you investing in real estate or something else. And right now, at least in this market in this economy that we've had, you know, the stock market is doing amazing, it's doing great. I mean, this year, not so much. It's kind of, you know, going up a little bit last year was really good. But still as Options Traders, were making a killing. And I see my investments in my accounts in there, you know, just increasing and getting bigger and bigger and bigger. We're at the point now where I mean, it's got to end sometime, you know, and it's time for if you have a bunch of gains in your accounts, it's time to be diversified, especially with you know what they're saying with inflation coming down the road that's gonna be coming pretty hard. Land is a good thing to invest in when you have inflation because you can automatically just raise the price. Things lost more when you have inflation so. Doug: Well for us you know what the way that's affected is land has gone up in value. Big time over the last year, which a lot of us didn't see coming. We thought just you know, in a recession with our heading into a big recession, that would just decrease the value of a lot of stuff. We used to, we used to buy land for about four, or $5,000 per acre. And now we're buying it for eight to $10,000 per acre. Wow, no, we sell it for a lot more to so we're kind of in the flipping game we buy. And then a few months later, or sometimes it's maybe a year, we sell the little pieces because we buy a bunch and we chop it up a little pieces. So we'll sell those, but then we sell them on owner financing. So we collect on my income income stream over about 15 years. But we've seen that the market moving inland for sure. Allen: So who's buying these little pieces from you? Doug: Blue collar individuals who live in the city and want to be able to go out to the country on the weekends and enjoy time with their family and their dogs. And maybe they want some get some animals out there and maybe have a little swimming pool or something like that. They want to be on the country and there was already such a demand for that pre-pandemic, but it just exploded here with the pandemic. But our model works like pre pandemic during pandemic post. It doesn't really matter for us. It just, it changes some of the numbers a little bit like if we have to buy for more than we sell for more. Right, the demand is there. And we just we do a lot of advertising on Facebook to sell our ranchettes. And we also are on MLS and all these other places. But with Facebook ads, we're able to we spend about $2 per lead, and we're able to ramp that budget up or down and get as many ranchette buyers as we want. So it's just a matter of the sales team handling all those leads. Allen: Really? Doug: That was that was true before the pandemic, we didn't need the pandemic to make our business work. Allen: And what about the land, finding the land? Doug: We look on the MLS, there's a website called lands of Texas, there's one of those for just about every state. So we look at a bunch of land, and we try to get a deal on when we can but usually maybe the best we can do is about a 10% discount. No, we're looking for land that has access to roads on a couple of sides that we can chop it up into where each little ranchette it will have access to a road. So normally we'll buy one or 200 acres at a time, for example. And these are all over different parts. It's not like one all together, it's the subdivision. And yeah, so then we'll chop it up. And we need to give each of those little pieces access to road because it costs a lot of money to build roads. And that would make our deals a lot less profitable. If we had to do that. Allen: Ah, I see. So you buy the properties that already have roads, and you add the utilities or? Doug: Yes, we bring in we'll put in a water well, that costs about $6,000, maybe seven, and they will put in fencing usually cost about 5000 put in a gate for maybe another 1000 culvert driveway. Every now and then a pond that we bring we bring in power can cost one or 2000 per ranchette. So like the typical like 10 acre ranchette, we will have bought for about $80,000. And we will put about 20,000 and improvements into it. So now we're in it for 100. And they will sell it for maybe 180. Allen: Hmm, okay. Doug: And the fund lens as we do these things, it lands on the land, and then it lands on the note that we generate. So that's kind of the margins we're dealing with lately actually are probably selling for more than 180. Actually on that scenario. Allen: And how long do you think this will last? This will run? Doug: I don't see how it would end. Allen:There's plenty of land out there? Doug: Yeah, there's plenty land, plenty of buyers. I've got a lot of investors investing with us. And once a.. Allen: So you're not closed or you're not you're not full, you're still taking investors.. Doug: Okay yeah, that's good question. Fund to opens and closes as needed as so we took on about five or 6 million last month. And we close it because we have to deploy capital for new purchases, because as soon as we take it on, we have to start paying our investors. So we're not going to take on like 10 million when we can only deploy five. So as we're about to buy more land, so we'll open it up, temporarily take all that money and then close it. And we'll just accept a certain amount of money, whatever we need at that time, whether that's 2 million, 5 million, whatever it is, then we'll close it. Allen: So you have basically like a waiting list. Doug: Yes. Allen: Awesome. Cool. Cool. Cool. All right. Okay, I think we've covered everything I had all my questions. Is there anything else that you wanted to share anything else our listeners and our watchers need to know before they go out and invest funds? Because there's a lot of funds on now that you know, with the crowdfunding and all that stuff? What do you think about that? Doug: I think some of the inferior funds are going that route because if you've got a solid fund, you really pull a lot from your own network. And so you don't have to go like I don't have to go like list my fund on some sort of like fundrise or realty mogul or whatever. Because I get all my money just from my like word of mouth. Everyone just talks right. And that's how most like well operated funds are because they will take a cut of whatever you raise and so you get sometimes like slightly newer operators or they don't have. They don't have a network, or maybe there's not as good of word of mouth or something. So I'm not like a fan necessarily of investing in that kind of stuff. There is a cool website that came out called Vera Vest. It's fairly new, and they research, they do this sort of a background check on certain private equity funds. And so you can kind of go and make sure that they're, you can ever be fully sure, right, but make sure they're probably not a scam. But those operators are paying very best a fee. I don't know if it's like a monthly fee or what, for them to be like gold verified, or whatever it is on that website. And then so if they are, they're showing up high on that website, and they get a lot of new business from investors, or even a new investor capital. I say it's kind of like the BBB, you know, the Better Business Bureau where you have to pay them for drinking. To get the young people, people still believe in it. They're like, Oh, well, I mean, not too much anymore. I don't hear about it anymore. But people before were like, Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm gonna go check the BBB. I'm like, okay, but, you know, if we pay them, they'll say good stuff about us. That's kind of on my other business My House Deals with, we had had 42,000 something paying subscribers at the time, and we had five complaints in the BBB, that's five out of like, 42,000 something. And these are people that had never even raised the issue with us. First, they just went straight to BBB, because they wanted to refund or whatever. And the BBB gave us a D or F rating. And yeah, we went in there. And they basically said that we were like, poorly operating our company, I said, five, I'd like for you to say here's our list, I printed out like this huge stack, here's all of our customers, by people complained. And they said that basically, we need to pay them some more money. And then we would be like A-Rated. That's like, this is a racket. It is a racket! Allen: It is, it is. Doug: So luckily, nowadays, people can just look at Google Reviews. And those can be manipulated a little bit too. Like if the company is like sending all their customers to leave reviews or.. Allen: For something free. Like they're giving away a free service or something. Doug: Yes, they do that on Amazon too. Like.. Allen: Oh, Amazon full of fake reviews. I mean, they buy the reviews, they don't even give you know, it's like they'll there are companies out there you can hire and they'll just go out and give you like, Yo you want 20 fake reviews, okay, pay us. And we'll go and our people will go and, you know, they have all these fake accounts and everything. And they just yeah, Amazon. I don't I don't trust anything on Amazon like I have. It's super hard to know if the reviews are good. Doug: Yeah, they need to do some coding to kind of look for that. But there are certain plugins you can install. Like if you use Chrome as your browser, like a fake spotter review, and they'll analyze, see whether that they think that Amazon review is legit or fake, and I'll give it they'll give it a rating. That's pretty cool. Allen: Interesting. Doug: Yeah, at least we have that we don't have to depend on the BBB anymore. Allen: Yeah.Yep. Cool. All right, Doug, I appreciate everything you've shared with us. Again, Doug's email is Doug@HawthorneCapital.com Doug: ..or email my assistant Ellen@HawthorneCapital.com. Allen: Okay. Doug: We'll put you on the email list. So like maybe every, every four, six weeks or so you'll get an update that shows what we're doing. So if you even if you're not looking to invest now, it's fine. Like maybe three years from now, you've been getting our updates, and you've been getting educated and seeing what we do. Then if you felt like investing you could. Allen: Yup and full disclosure, I am an investor. I was in the first fund and we were over the money into the second fund. But yeah, so you know if you're, if you're interested in getting into a fund, do your due diligence, please, you know, this is you turning over your money to someone else, hopefully, they have experienced hopefully, they have a track record and they know what they're doing. And they'd like, you know, most of them most of these funds are not scams, because they do take a bunch of money to put together and investment to start up and they have something to show for it. I think the bigger fear is, you know, if the investment goes south, you know, how much of your investment Can you lose? Can you lose all of it, etc? Doug: Yeah, that's gonna be case by case each fund is going to have a different risk reward profile. So you really got to look at that. Allen: Yeah, yeah. How would you know? Doug: Well, ideally, either you're in that industry kind of like sort of like or you have a friend who is okay, you people that you want to run it by people and really get to know the operator, maybe talk to a couple different people who run you know, similar types of funds if it's more it's pretty common as multifamily apartments. Of course there's some commercials there's some office buildings and stuff that has been beat the heck yeah, I was talking to somebody at the gym that he put a put a bunch of money in a fund that invested in hotels. He put in his money and right before the recession. He got hammered. Allen: Oh, boy. Yeah. So do they like do those funds, then they go out of business and then they everything gets foreclosed? Hmm. Doug: The lender forecloses on the fund because the fund has borrowed money. Allen: Okay, so what can the individual investors do and when that happens? Doug: They get whatever's left over after the bank gets paid. Allen: So they can't sue,they can't do anything? Doug: Well, if there was like fraud committed, yes, but a lot. Some of that there was no fraud. It was just gonna be a poor investment. Allen: Oh okay, yeah if you guys do your due diligence. Make sure you know. Alright, Doug I appreciate your time. Thank you so much. We're gonna put this up to everybody and you know, at least my recommendation is that Doug is a stand-up on his guy, most of the time and again, I've known him for years so yeah. Thanks Doug again and talk to you soon! Doug: Thanks Allen! Allen: Alrighty, bye bye Doug: Alright, bye

Passive traders, welcome to a very special episode of the Option Genius Podcast. This is episode number 100 hundred. No, it's not a hundred hundred. It's just 100, but yeah, it's one zero, zero. We made it to triple digits, which is a pretty good feat. They say most podcasts don't even make it for the first 15 episodes. So to get to a hundred episodes, I think it's been like two years and to have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of downloads and people listening to every episode? Wow. I am so humbled. I continue to be so humbled. I've said it before, but it's like, I can't believe it. You know, I never thought that anybody would want to listen to me that much, um, much less, several hundred thousand people. It's insane. I did want to do something special for this episode. We did go ahead and let's go be kind of like, uh, the best of, you know, so I looked at all the different episodes, see which one got the most downloads, which ones are the ones that most people email us about and ask questions about. And I went through and I said, you know, which ones do I want to highlight? Meaning that they're so good that I want to, you know, make you listen to them again, take the best things and be like, okay, we don't need the whole episode. Just need little snippets, right? Little pieces of it. So that it reinforces something that maybe you've forgotten, or maybe you didn't know, or you missed it the first time. So things that I thought were really important to get through, things that will definitely help you. And so that's what we did in this episode. So I went through identified eight episodes that I thought were really, really good to re go back and rehashing and go back into them. And then we cut and pasted the most important parts. So each episode might've been my 28 minutes or 30 minutes or 20 minutes or whatever, but there was, but three minutes worth of four minutes worth that really just summed it all up and, you know, hit the spot kind of thing, no stories. Cause I know sometimes I can go on and on with the stories, but I think these stories are important that people say they enjoy that. So there you go. But I also want to take this time to appreciate everybody for sticking with me and for all the wonderful comments and for all of the wonderful reviews that you guys have posted over the years, the last two years or however long we've been doing this, I read every single one. I really appreciated all those reviews. They do help other people find the podcast. They do help tell the different podcast services that, hey look, people like this and it should be shown to more people. And if you have not left a review, please, please go do that right away. It really, really helps. And I appreciate it from the bottom of my heart and it really helps other people because deep down it's about helping to me, you know, I could go out and trade for my own and I don't need to do the podcast. You know, we don't make money from a podcast. We don't have sponsors. We don't, it's just something that we do to spread the word, spread the message and say, hey, if you're stuck in life, if you need to make more money, if you want to have more free time, if you want to have less stress, if you're looking for something and you know that you can do better, then this might be something that would work for you. So come check it out. And if you like it, then we can tell you more. If you don't like it, that's fine too. But even if you just listen to the podcasts, like many people have, they just listen to the podcast, it gives them a little boost and then they go out and they keep doing it. So that's the whole point, you know, it's a motivational home and some people complain. Oh, why don't you tell us all the different strategies and how do you adjust, uh, Forty-five day Iron condor trade that's in the money and all this stuff. And it's like, that's really, really specific. And I think maybe in the future we'll get into those. But I think that that information is already out there in many different sources, right? Many different places. And if you want, and you have to get visual and you have to do a video where you can actually see the trade and all the different details and whatnot. So I try not to get into the more complicated issues on the podcast. The podcast is really about mindset. It's really about getting you to see what's possible, giving you that extra boost of momentum, letting you hear from other people who are doing it, who have done it, we're doing it. And me sharing the things that I wish that people had shared with me when I got started. And that's the really, the big thing about it. You know, we were doing the high probability trading live event this weekend, and there was something that we went through. We went through all of this different content with, through two days of content. And when I was going through my slides and my notes beforehand, I realized that my god, there is really, really good stuff in here, you know, but the person that he's new or the person that is not ready to hear will not notice all the depths that is in the session. And we had several sessions, some of them were pretty basic. Some of them had a lot of content in them. So it was me talking with slides and I just get going on and on and on the surface of it, if you weren't really paying attention, it's like, oh, this is basic. But every single line in there was put there for a purpose. So if you were coming at it from somebody who was on the low end of the option continuum where you're just brand new to options,I put it in a way where it wouldn't confuse you and you could get understand what I'm talking about. If you were in the middle of the continuum, I put it in a way where he could tell you, okay, this is the next step that you need to take. You know, you need to do this and you need to do this. And these are the things that you need to focus on. And then if you're on the upper end of the continuum, you could have really gone really, really deep because I shared stuff in there that I've learned, and he took me 20 years to learn. And I've never seen it anywhere shared anywhere before. I've never seen videos on it. I've never seen any other gurus talk about this stuff because most Gurus don't last for 20 years, to be honest, unfortunately, they're good marketers; they're not really good at trading. So most people don't last 20 years, I've been able to luckily and Option Genius has been around for, I think, 11 years now. So we've been doing this a while. We know the same thing over and over and over again, and it just works. And so I appreciate you guys. It's been a long journey. But we are making a difference now. And I see it every day. I see it from the people that came to the live event. They were the comments that they made, the emails that we got afterwards, the way that they're excited about learning to trade options. And they're excited about what their lives can be like, because they have hope, it really makes life worth living when you can go out and help other people. And I think that is the whole basic of it. So really, if you are listening to this podcast, I want you to understand, listen to it, learn and go take action and go do the things and go do the trades and go make the money and then go help the other people. Cause that's when you'll feel really, really good about yourself, you'll feel good when you eliminate the stress and the, and the bills and all that. And you're doing well and you're feeling successful about that, but you take it to the next level when you're starting to help other people in different ways. So thank you for listening to my little lecture there, but now let's get into the episode. So for the very first episode, I have a clip from Episode 74, which is the Passive Trading Manifesto. And I came up with this, I said, what is a passive trader, you know, define passive trader. Describe what I passive trader is thinking is doing, is feeling, and that is what I came up with for the manifesto. And it's just very, it's very short, but it's something that I think you will see yourself in at least part of it. And you'll be like, yeah, that's me. I fit here. This is the group that I belong to. This is what I want to be doing. That describes me. And I can't wait to get more. So let's listen. A passive trader is a new breed of investor. Smarter, confident, relaxed, and free. Passive traders are winners. They keep the odds on their side, take calculated risks, and make consistent profits over and over. Passive traders are flexible. They know how to adjust when the market does and still be profitable. They play their own game and use wall street's secrets to their benefit. Passive traders are independent and can think for themselves. They know that no one cares about their money more than they do, so they manage it themselves, and better than the experts. They do not rely on financial planners, mutual funds, or robots to charge insane amounts of fess while providing below-average yields. Passive traders are patient. They sit back and let the gains come to them by keeping things simple. Passive traders are determined. They know their "why" and it pushes them to stay focused and never give up. If you asked a money manager they'd tell you that passive trading is impossible – the little guy is not supposed to beat wall street. Yet it is happening every day. Passive traders know that life is a gift and should be lived to the fullest. Money is not the end goal. So passive traders make their money work for them, generating an income 24 hours a day, 365 days a year so that they can spend their time doing whatever makes them happy. Passive traders are in control of their destiny, their finances, their emotions, and in turn, their lives. Passive traders… Define their own destiny March to their own beat Make the world better Live their ideal life Passive traders are motivated knowing that the odds are in their favor. I AM A PASSIVE TRADER! Okay. So for our second clip, we have one of the most popular episodes that I've ever done. It is episode number 26, which is called the Ultimate Options Trading Strategy. Now, there are lots and lots of strategies to trade options. Many of them work. I can't say all of them because I have tried all of them, but I know the ones that we teach, they do work. And if you only do each one individually, if you only do covered put, covered calls or they get books or credit spreads or condos or butterflies or calendars, or if you gonna do any of those or any variations you can do very well. If you're good at, and you practice, you only need to do one, but if you do more than one, that's fine too, depending on what you need. So in this episode, I break down. What is the ultimate, the ultimate options trading strategy? With our account balance what do we want? Do we want up and down roller coasters? No, we want slow and steady increase. In order to have that you have to be trading in a way that is actually boring because you know what you're doing, that's why it's boring. You've mastered it, because you've excelled at it. The alternative is to do what you're doing right now jumping around from strategy to strategy. I know what you thinking. Say, "Hey Allen, what about diversification, don't I need to diversify? If I have maybe some earnings trades over here or maybe I have some naked calls over here or maybe I have some box spreads over here." Yeah, you should diversify if you have an account that is well over six figures and you are already consistent and profitable. That's it right there. If you are over six figures, and I'm talking about mid-six figures; $400,000, $500,000, more than that, and you are already consistent and profitable then you can diversify as much as you want. If you're on the top end of the continuum, level's nine, level 10, then you are making money so you are going to stick with what you know automatically. You're going to go to the bread and butter and you're going to do those every month or every week or whatever your timeframe is. Then with a little bit of extra cash you're going to try other stuff. That's the smart way to do it. If you don't have over six figures, if you're not consistent, if you're not profitable already, then forget about diversification. Until you can make money with one strategy month after month, trade after trade. You have to be consistently profitable before you add another strategy to your arsenal, are you getting this? Is this sinking in? Yes? Hope so. Anybody that tells you otherwise is full of it and probably just wants to sell you something, that's the truth. Stop all the noise, stop listening, stop jumping around, because the noise is there, the offers will always be there. If it's not options, it'll be Bitcoin. If it's not Bitcoin it's going to be marijuana stocks. If it's not marijuana stocks it's going to be sports betting, that's the newest thing that's going to come on, right? The Supreme Court just announced on Monday that states can now make it legal to bet on sports. Well, guess what? There's going to be stocks on sports betting and they might even have options on sports and betting and all this stuff. Who knows what they're going to come out with in future? That's going to be the new hottest thing. If you keep jumping from one to another, to the nother, to the nother, you're never going to get good at anything, you're never going to be profitable, you're never going to be consistent. Go back to the basics, back to the fundamentals. Choose one strategy and work on it until you know it inside out and you are profitable because that is the name of the game, that is the goal. That is the only thing that matters. I don't care what strategy you use, I don't care how you do it, I don't care when you do it. If you are profitable you are winning. That's the only way to know if you are winning, I don't care how much you know. I don't care if you know more than me, I don't know if you know more history than me, I don't care if you know more math than me, more about statistics, more about options, more about everything. If you are not profitable it doesn't matter so go back to the fundamentals, go back to the basics, one strategy. You focus on it, you work on it, you back test it, you paper trade it, you real money trade it until you are profitable. That's it, that's the answer. Now, if you can't figure it out, if you already tried, you tried your best and you can't do it, then reach out to me, maybe I can point you in the right direction. Maybe I can work with you like I did with Simon and we can identify what it was that works best for you or that makes the most sense for you, and then how to actually implement it. In the beginning you don't need complicated stuff, you don't need complicated indicators. You don't need complicated chart patterns, you need a strategy that you understand, that makes sense to you and you need toThen if you can do that then you tweak it. Then you work on it. Then you look at, like Simon did, you look at the entrance of the trade, you look at the management of the trade, you look at the exit of the trade, and then you improve your percentages. That's how it works. Right now, Simon, like I said, he's only doing one strategy and, yes, he is well over six figures in his trading account. That's okay, it doesn't matter. He doesn't need to be doing anything else. I know people who only do one iron condor every single month. They do it on the same underlying, they do it on an index, and they trade literally over $100,000 worth of one iron condor every month. That's the entire trade, that's the whole strategy, one iron condor, six figures in that condor, every month. I hope this makes sense, I hope this is sinking in. I hope you got to this. Then finally, no matter which strategy you choose, whether it's the condor, the credit spread, the ratio, the butterfly, I don't care what it is, whatever it is, no matter which one you choose, make sure that the odds are in your favor. Peace. Okay now let's get into some serious topics. Okay. This is episode number 96. It's called how fast can you start trading for a living? And really the basic here is that I got an email from one of our students. He got laid off and he needed to know what to do to get up to speed as fast as possible. And this was the advice that I gave him. Just an update for him - he did take the advice he is doing it. He did happen to go back and get a job. But his trading is on par to be doing very, very well. So there's always hope, right? Like it says this too shall pass. So whenever you're in a bad situation, whenever you think everything is falling apart, just remember that everything works in seasons. You know, winter comes and it's hard and it's tough, but then there eventually is a spring. There is a summer and things get great again. So just all you gotta do is get to it, get through it, use the people that want to help you, take advantage of their help and do the best you can to get through it. I got an email from one of our members and I wanted to read it to you because he just got laid off and he wants to know how he can replace his income with trading. It's crazy that we get so many people in this same situation. It's great that when you have a job, right, you have an income source. You want to get into trading. You don't really like the job or you don't really like your business or whatever. You're like, oh man, I wish this trading thing could work out. I could get it. And you know, you, you invest in one of our programs and then you don't really follow through because life gets in the way. And I know how that goes. You know, it's, it's really the why. Right? Your why about trading? Wasn't strung out until something happens. Any jars you can. It's like, you know, it's like you, you might be driving along the street and you're not really paying attention to the road. And then all of a sudden the car comes out of nowhere, almost hits you. So here's, Todd's email. It says CLO Allen, I'm going through a life change. I want to get your opinion. I'm currently a member of your programs. I joined almost a year ago, have not been able to devote enough time due to work and family obligations. Totally understandable. I'm an engineer and work in the construction industry for a healthcare organization or read your book, listen, all your podcast sessions, at least once while going to work. Thank you for that last week. I was laid off from my job. And now I'm trying to decide my next moves. My wife works full-time and we have funds to carry us along for a couple months, but I will need to replace my income fairly soon and relieve the stress on my wife as an aside. Yes, that's very, very, very important because you are not, you know, when you get laid off, you're not the only one that suffered the whole family suffered, especially the other spouse, because that person has to carry the load, right? They're not used to carrying the full load. Now they have to carry the full load, and then they also have to worry about you and your mental status and the pressure on them. You also have to work off, so you don't want to add divorce to your problems. So be very, very careful about how your spouse is handling the situation. Make sure you give them enough time and enough attention to leave their pressure, take some of their work, you know, their homework or whatever other work is off their plate while you can. And if you're looking to go into trading. Discuss it with your spouse, explain what you're doing with them. So they don't think that you're just sitting at home, doing nothing all day playing with computers, watching TV. Okay. So that's a really important point. So let me continue. He says, I'm trying to decide if I should jump back into the construction rat race again, so I can draw a salary and benefits. Assuming I can find a job fairly quickly. Otherwise I would really like to immerse my time into your programs and start trading. I realized I have to get up to speed and take some time to learn your methods and develop my own trading plan. My main concerns are being able to learn your program soon enough and be able to replace my income. I was making 120,000 a year, but need to replace approximately 5,000 a month. Take home. I plan to start paper trading this week and scale up as I learn more, eventually I will have $250,000 in capital that I could scale up into an account. How realistic is it for me to replace my income with this size of an account? I would appreciate your opinion and any comments. Thank you. So that's the email I want to read to you what I wrote to him. And then I want to give you my thoughts on this and a little bit going a little bit more detail. So I told him, you know, Hey, I'm sorry that this happened to you. Very, very, sorry. My first thought was, Hey, you know, you need to get out of where you are. I know where he is. He's in a different state where things might be slowing down. So I'm like, Hey, you know, get out of there and get your butt here to Texas, because we can't find enough people to do construction, but that might not be possible. Um, so I don't think the issue here is if you can generate 5,000 from 250,000, the issue is how long it will take you to get there. And from what you wrote, this is me talking to you from what you wrote, you would be in your best interest, I believe for you to get out of the job for now as a fail safe. Okay. Maybe not a full-time thing, just something to bring in some guaranteed capital and keep the health insurance, if possible. Cause that's a big. Concern for a lot of people trading when you are super stressed out and you have to win is super hard. Trading already is very hard, but doing it with one hand timing on your back, it's much harder while you are looking for the second job, or even after you get the part-time job, spend three to five hours a day on your trading. Do that with the courses and programs you already have. You should be able to have the skills to do it full time in a few months, but having the skills is different from being emotionally ready. So you're going to have to overcome that aspect as well. So if you can start with a smaller goal, say 1000 a month on a a hundred thousand dollar account, that would be a great place to start. And then you can scale it up from there. And then I told him, because he's in the programs, I want to see you on the coaching call on Thursday. I want to see you and your paper trades, you know, groups. I want you to posting that. I want you to get a critique. So I want you to get my opinion, my advice. And I want you to send me a man told him, Hey, I want you to send me your training plan and a concrete plan of how you expect to get to 5,000 a month, including your asset allocation. And this is covered in one of the programs that he's already fired. You can do it, but having a job would relieve a lot of the pressure, but even with a job three to five hours a day, learning and trading, because enough is enough. Screw these jobs. It's time to learn how to make it from trading. Okay. Here's clip number four. This comes from episode 87 - How to Scale Up Your Trading. So now let's say you've already been doing trading for a little bit. You've been pretty safe. You're being conservative and now it's time to get big, right? You're you're feeling good. You're feeling confident. How do you go from where you are now to the next level? And it's, and it's not what you think. It's not about more strategy. It's not about more complicated stuff, more trading or more analysis or more software. It's all mental, it's all mental scaling, all mental 90%. There might be some things you need to do a little bit different because you're playing with bigger numbers and then there's less there's limitations to what you can do at bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger numbers. You know, we're talking about in the millions, but when your individual and you're scaling up 99%, I would say is mental. So take a listen. 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. 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. 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. Okay. Episode number 64 is next. This is our 5th episode. Title is called Selling Puts Versus Owning Stock. Now I brought this one up because when I first started in options, selling puts wasn't very enticing to me. I really didn't understand it. It wasn't something that I practiced. It wasn't something that I did. It wasn't only until years later when I actually understood the power and the reasoning behind it. I mean, I always understood the theory behind it and why you should do it and why people do it, but it wasn't until I actually started doing it where it came and fell in place. When I came up with the whole passive trading situation and the whole brand and the whole formula and you know, the fact that, yeah, I don't want to be trading all the time. I want to be just relaxed, less stress free and not having to be stuck in front of the screen all day. And for that, the naked put works really good. So in this episode, I compared selling naked puts to versus owning stock and see how we did. So I am finishing up the book called Passive Trading. Has been taken me I think over two years, but I'm finally getting close to completion. My editor told me that it's probably better to add a few examples of trades that I've done in the past and some examples of the different strategies that we're talking about. So I was like, "Yeah, that makes sense." So what I did was I decided to go into the past and pick a stock and say, "Okay, this is a stock. What if I did what I'm telling everybody to do? How would it work out without knowing anything about the future or anything like that?" The example was for naked puts, selling naked puts. That's one of the strategies I cover in the book. I talk about it, say how to do it, this and that. And I said, "Well, what would happen if I take my strategy, how to do it, and go and apply it in real life?" So I picked Walmart because Walmart is not a stock that I own. I don't follow it on a regular basis. It is on my watch list because it's a good company and it pays dividend. It might be one that I want to get into, but up till now I don't own it and haven't traded it very much. So I said, "You know what? Let me go into Walmart. Let me try it and see." So 2018, January 2018, Walmart was trading at $98.59. That was really good because in 2017 the stock was up 42%, so had a great year in 2017. What's it going to do in 2018? I don't know. I don't remember. And I haven't traded, so I don't know. So what I decided was I am not going to own the stock. I am only going to sell naked puts on it. If I get assigned on those puts, then I will see what I have to do there. Maybe I will sell the stock and keep selling more puts or maybe I will keep the stock and start selling covered calls. Either way, I'm going to have to do something, but I'm not going to roll. That was the decision. I wasn't going to roll my putts. I was just going to take the stock. So I started on the 2nd of January, okay? First trade I did sold some puts, made 3.6% because the puts expired. Nice. Did another trade in February after that one expired. After the first expired, I did it in February. That one also expired. 3.2% gain. Then I did do one in March. 3.54% gain. Did one in April. 5.54% gain. Geez. This is easy, right? All I'm doing is selling naked puts on Walmart away from the money and I'm getting really nice monthly gains, and I'm not having to watch it. I'm not following. I'm not adjusting. I'm not doing anything. I'm selling the put, waiting till it expires, and then selling another one. That's all I'm doing. Then, May came. Those puts expired. 2.83% gain. June, 1.85% gain. July, 3.9% gain. August, 2.53% gain. September, 2.75% gain. October, 4.89% gain. And November. Oh, November I finally get assigned. So on December 21st, Walmart closed at $87.13, which was 37 cents lower than my sold strike, so I had to buy the stock at $87.50. Now, you might be thinking, "Oh wow, Allen, yeah, anybody can make money selling naked puts in a bear market." Walmart went up 42% the year before. It probably went up close to that in 2018 when you were doing it, right? Well, yes and no. 2018 was a year when Walmart traded from $98.59 at the beginning of the year. That's when I started trading. It went up to $109.55, so it did go up. But then once it got there, it turned around and went down all the way to $82.40, and then it ended the year at $93.15, which means that the stock was actually negative 5.6% for the year. So if you had owned this stock, if you had bought it on January 2nd, first day of trading in 2018, and you held it to the end of the year, you would've lost 5.6%. Now, you would've gotten the dividends, so maybe it's an even, but still that's dead money. You're not making any money on this stock if you are only buying it and holding it for the whole year. But if you had done what I did and you had sold naked puts the whole way, you would've made 34.65%. Let that sink in here. I was selling naked puts on a stock that went up and down and up again and closed down. So this was not a stock that just went up in a straight line. This stock lost money on the year. But because of the naked put strategy, I made 34%, okay? This is without owning any stock. I didn't own the stock until very end of the year, until December 21 when I actually had to buy the shares. Until then, I didn't own any stock, and I didn't really spend much time on it. I just put the trade on, let it expire, and then put on another one every month. Takes literally five minutes or less. Didn't watch the news on Walmart. Didn't care about earnings, or announcements, or what they were doing, or how the stock was doing. Doesn't matter. Didn't care. All I did was sell a naked put every month. Let the one expire, sell more, let it expire, sell more, let it expire, sell more, let it expire, some more on a stock that went up or down. Now, I understand if this was a stock that had just gone straight up, then yeah, you could say, "Oh, yeah. It just went straight up. Of course you've made money." True, but this was not that. This was a stock that went up and down, right? The next one's gonna be a little bit weird. This was episode number 54. Learning to trade is learning is like learning how to snorkel. It's like, what snorkel did he say snorkel? Yeah. I said snorkel like snorkling, you know, you put the little two with your mouth, you put the goggles on and you go put your hand in the water and bring it through the tube and you look at all the grass or fish or whatever you could see down there right? So this was a video actually that I shot in Cancun when I had gone with my family and my boys and I, we were, it was an all-inclusive place. So they give you circling equipment if you need it and whatnot. So we took it and were snorkeling, and really, they were learning. I had done it once before, but I had forgotten about it. So I was trying to get used to it again. And then I was showing them how to do it. And they both loved it and it was awesome. It was a great experience. But while I was watching them learn, I kept thinking to myself, oh my God, the stuff that they're saying, there's stuff that the behaving new traders do the same things. And so I saw the parallels and I said, okay, how do I get them to up on how to get them to be successful at it? And at the same steps that you need to take also work when you're learning how to trade. So take a listen and maybe you'll learn how to snorkel, enter it at the same time. I just wanted to shoot this quick video podcast to let you know that I learned something yesterday that I wanted to share with you guys and it's really … Right behind me in the water, we took our kids snorkeling for the first time, the seven year old and eight year old boys. Sorry about the squinting it's really sunny today, but we took them snorkeling for the first time and I don't know if you've ever been snorkeling, but you get a little mask you put on and you get a little snorkel and you breathe through the snorkel and you look down in the water and you see whatever's in there. Now, there wasn't much to see out here. There was some fish. You go a little bit further over there, there's some seaweed and stuff. There were some pretty cool fish, a couple of big fish actually. They were really excited about that, but when they first started, I had prepped them ahead of time before we came on the trip. I told them, "Hey, we're going to do snorkeling. It's really cool. It's really cool. You put this thing and you can see all the water and all this different world, all that stuff." They were all excited. They were wanting to go. When we got here, it's kind of like trading, right? You hear about it, you picture it in your mind. It's like, "Oh my God, this is so cool. I want to do this. I want to do this. Yeah, I'm going to be awesome at it." Then you get your equipment, you get your mask, your snorkel, you get some instruction. "Yeah, this is what I'm going to do." Then you go do it for the first time and you totally freak out because it's not easy and it's not normal. You're not used to it because you're not breathing with your mouth anymore. I mean, you've got breathing with your nose, you have to breathe with your mouth. Then if you get a little water in the top of your snorkel, then drinking water and then the water is coming in your mask and your eyes are burning from the saltwater. Believe me, we had that same experience. Basically, we walked them through it. It's the same thing with trading. The first thing you have to do is you have to put your mask on, cover your nose, get used to breathing with your mouth. Open mouth breathing, breathe with your mouth. Once you got that done, you put the snorkel on. You got to make sure it's all tight and snug and then you have to breathe with the snorkel. You're just breathing with the snorkel. Once that's done, then you stand in the shallow water, you put your head down and you just look around, focus on your breathing, don't even worry about what you're looking at, just focus on your breathing, making sure all your technical aspects are right, making sure you're following all the rules, making sure step-by-step you're not making any mistakes. Then once you have all that done, then that's when you get into the water and you go deep and you start floating and then you can go a little bit farther. First time is going to freak out. You're going to … It's going to be like, "Oh, it's not happening. It's not happening the way exactly that I planned in my mind." There's a fish and you'll freak out or there's a piece of thing, something touching my foot. All that stuff happens, especially in trading. It doesn't go exactly as you want, but if you go back and you stick to it, eventually you end up like my boys. I mean, they loved it. They loved it so much, they want to go again today and they want to go … There's some shipwreck off the coast of the Island. They want to go over there. It blew me away how I couldn't get them out of the water. I couldn't get the snorkel off their faces because they were like, "No, no. More, more, more." There's nothing to see here, but they were so excited and that is how I want trading to be for you. Whatever your issues are right now, if it's not going well, if you don't know what steps to take, if you don't know exactly what instruction you need, it's there where it's available. You just got to take the simple, simple, slow, slow steps, right? Get your stuff, get all your equipment, practice the easy things. Practice putting on paper trades. Getting on the trade, putting it on, getting out, putting it on, getting out. Practice finding trades. How do I find a trade? What do I go through? How do I make it streamlined as possible? Right? Because I don't want you to just put on your stuff and just jump in the deep water right away. That's what most people do. That's why they get burned. I have a lot of people, a lot of students that told me, "Oh no, I don't want to do paper trading. I'm going to put … I got $20,000 I'm just going to let it ride on one trade." You're freaking crazy because you're going to lose a lot of money that way and they do. Then they come back and they're like, "Yeah, I should've listened to you." Well, that's too late now. You just learned a very, very expensive lesson. Let's not do that. Let's do it snorkel time, right? One at a time, because in snorkeling, you mess it up, what happens? You just stand up. You drink some salt water, no big deal, but what could have happened and what almost happened with my second son is that he almost gave up. He tried it the first time. "Oh man, daddy, I don't like it. This is horrible. I don't want to do this anymore." He threw the mask down and he threw the snorkel down and he just stormed away. That's what we cannot have happened to you because if it does, then you lose out on a passive income stream that has the power to change your life. I mean, take a look around. I'm here on a weekday in Cancun, enjoying with my family and my trades are still working, right? I mean, you can see … There are not there many people here, right, because this is a private beach for a private resort. There's not going to be a lot of people here. This is not like the cheapest resort on the place as you can imagine. That's what comes with from trading properly and passive trading and the ability for you to be able to take vacations, not have to worry about your trades as much. I mean, I checked on my trades this morning. It's actually the same time frame here in Mexico as it is back home for me. I checked on my trades this morning and they're fine. They're doing great. I'm making money, my options are … They got [inaudible 00:06:13] going on everyday so I'm not worried. I checked it. It's all done, but I got to take the chance and the day, or at least a few hours, to teach my kids a skill or have an adventure with them that they are probably going to remember for the rest of your lives because I remember the first time I went snorkeling and it was with a school trip. It wasn't with my parents, but they were here with their parents and I think they're going to remember that for the rest of their life, which is pretty cool. All right, for our next clip, I am going to say something maybe a little controversial, maybe, maybe not. It depends on your perspective. Now there's a lot of people out there talking about FIRE, which is financially independent and retiring early. This one is coming from episode 47, where I talk about the same thing, but I talk about it with options. And I talk about why the fire thing sucks the way normally it's taught to do and why using options makes it so much better. You get the same result, but you have a lot more fun and you live a lot better until you get to the results. So if you're interested in retiring early, this one is a really good one for you to listen to. The title of this episode is "FIRE", which is Financially Independent Retire Early. That is a new movement. It's not really new, but it's a movement that has become popular lately, and you can read articles about it, and people are writing books about it, and blogs and there are even podcasts about it and everything. It's basically retire early, become financially independent. They call it FIRE. Cool. Okay. This is especially big amongst millennials, because I guess they don't want to work for the man, and they don't want to work till they're 65 years old. But it's really cute, though, how millennials think that they create things that have been around for generations. It's like the desire to retire early. It's like, "Yeah, this FIRE thing. It's cute that you gave a name to it, but you guys didn't create this. People have been wanting to do this since the start of time, really." Anyway, according to the tenants of FIRE, you have to do three things. You have to earn as much money as you can at work. You do have to work. You have to earn as much money as you can. And, you have to get a side hustle. A side hustle, just another name that they gave to a second job. Whether you're working online, for yourself, as a freelancer or you actually have a second job, or you do something else like trading options, you have to have a side hustle to make as much money as you can. The second thing you have to do is you have to save as much money as you can. And they do this by basically living as paupers. That's what they tell you to do. Live like a poor person, like a homeless person. You don't need a car. You can ride the bus to work and take a bike, because that's healthy for you. Eat less food. Don't eat so much. Don't go out to the movies. Watch Netflix at home, all these kinds of things, where you're trying to save as much money as you can. And then, with that money that you save, you invest it in something like index funds. You put it away, let other people manage it, and that's the cycle. Earn as much as you can, save as much as you can, invest it. Now, if you follow that formula, it works. There are people in their 30s that have enough money saved that they can live off the interest off of their investments. Their investments or whatever they invested in is making money, and they can live off of that interest, which is awesome. They don't have to work. Most of them don't have kids. Even if they did, they still have to live frugally, of course. Because even in your 30s, even if you're making $100000 a year as a job, you're still not going to be able to save that much that you're going to be earning a lot of income, or a lot of interest from your savings, from your investments, to live middle to upper class. These folks, they have retired. They're not working, but they are living low to middle class, somewhere around there. That's cool if you like that sort of thing. I don't. I think you can have your cake and eat it, too. I want you to retire early and still be rich. That is doable, if you take control of your money. Now, I agree with the "make as much money as you can" part. I agree with that part. I agree with the "save as much as you can" part. Now, I don't think you should live like a pauper. I think you should enjoy your life, even now, while you're working, and you're saving. I love driving. I love my car. I'm never going to give that up to save a couple hundred bucks in gas and insurance a month. But if that's something that you want to do and that will get you to your goal faster, then do it. But your side hustle should be to learn to grow the savings you have as much as possible, instead of losing control of your money inside of a mutual fund. Does that make sense? Your side hustle, you have to make as much money as you can. You go to your job, you get your income, you save your money. What do you do with that money? Well, you can give it to somebody, index fund, mutual fund, and let them do it for you, and hopefully the market goes up or maybe it will go down and then pay fees for all that information and whatever. Or, you spend your time, and you learn how to do it for yourself, because there are people out there that will charge you to manage your money that are not going to do anything that you cannot do for yourself. You can actually do it much, much better. That's what we're all about. That's what we're trying to teach you. That's the point of this podcast, to help you to learn how to do that. Take advantage of your own future, instead of giving it to somebody else, and then you can fire yourself much faster, years and years sooner. I did some calculations to prove my point, here. Over time, the stock market has averaged about eight percent a year, eight percent yearly return. That's pretty good. But when you sell options like we do, we have the ability to make 10% a month. A month, not a year. Stock market, 8% a year, options 10% a month. Hmm. Which one is bigger? I don't know. You could sell options one month out of the year, make 10%, and then take the rest of the year off if you wanted to. But these trades and these option selling I'm talking about is very high probability trades that can make you at least 10% a month. Ten percent, that's my goal. That's what I try to make every month. But I know traders that do a lot better than that every month. It's definitely possible. Now, look. I know right now that might seem like a bit of a stretch to you, maybe if you're not making 10%, or you don't understand the strategies. Ten percent is a lot. That's 120% a year. That is fabulous. If you asked me, "Oh, nobody every does that, Alan." Uh, yeah. I do. I've done it before. It's not impossible. But let's be a lot more conservative. Even though 10% is possible, let's just aim for 5% a month. That's 60% a year. Still, very, very impressive. There are guys on Wall Street that will chop off their right arm if they could make 60% in a year. That's really good. If you start with a $10000 account … Let's say you start off with $10000 in your trading account and you're making 5% a month, in 5 years, you would have over $186000. Five years from now, $10000 to 186000. That's really, really good. What could that kind of money do for you? What would your life look like? Would you have a new car? Or maybe a new bike for you FIRE people? A new house? a new plane? I know, okay, okay. Maybe 5% seems a little high right now for you, maybe because you're new to options and maybe you've tried to make it work before, and it didn't work for some reason. All right. Let's say you screw it up, and you don't make 5%. You only make 3% a month. Let's cut down our expectations. Do you think you could do that? If 5% is possible, and the odds are in your favor, do you think you could make 36% a year? That's in addition to whatever you're making on your stocks right now. You take that, and you add it to the 36%. That would be really good, right? Would you be happy with just 36% a year? That's really good. I'd be happy with that, because in 5 years, if you have a $10000 account, your account goes from $10000 to $59000 in 5 years. That's almost six times what you started with. We're still talking about life changing money. It would be awesome, right? But I get it. Okay. Maybe 3% is a little high. How about if you totally, totally screw it up and you don't even get 3% a month. What if you only get 2% a month? That is 60% less than our goal amount. But that's still 24% a year. How would your account do, then? Making 2% a month? That would triple your account in five years. Your $10000 account in 5 years goes to $30000. And then, in another 5 years, from $30000, it goes to $98000, because it compounds. Every year, it's just going to compound and compound and compound. Remember, we're only starting with a $10000 account, here. $98000 in 10 years, that's fire your boss money, right there. That is actually 2% a month is more than what Warren Buffet has made. He's averaged 22% over his life. If you can do 24%, it's possible you can do better than Warren Buffet. Now, he started with millions of dollars that other people gave him. I'm not going to compare that and say you can be the second richest man in the world, or whatever. I'm not going to say that. But you can do better, have better returns, than he does. These are all hypotheticals. Now, let's look at a real example. Let's figure this out. For most people, a really good average income would be about $100000 a year. Is that fair to say, you think? Would you be okay with that, if we used $100000 as an example? Let's say we want to make that. We want to make $100000 a year income. That is $8334 a month, $100000 divided by 12 months. I'm going to leave taxes out of this, otherwise it's just going to get too complicated. But first, what we need to do is we need to figure out how much money our account would have to be worth, because we're trying to make $8334 a month. How much money would we need if we were making 2% a month, to be able to make that? That number is $416700. If you have an account that size, $416700, and you make 2% a month, you would be making $8334 a month. You would be making $100000 a year. We need an account of that size, $416000. But we don't have that right now. Most of us don't. You don't have it. Okay. I get it. No problem. Right now, let's say we only have $50000 in our account. I think that's more normal. I think most of us have at least that, or maybe more, maybe a little bit less. It's okay. But let's just say we have $50000, and you can make 2% a month. If you have $50000, and you make 2% a month, question. How long do you think it will take you to get your account to be able to give us an income of $100000 a year? You start with $50000, you make 2% a month. How long will it take to get to $416000? You think it will take 20 years? You think it will take 30 years, 40 years, maybe? Well, I did the math on investor.gov. It's a website. They got all these nice financial calculators that you can play with. It would take just nine years. Imagine that. If you're 50 years old right now, you could be making $100000 a year in income before you hit 60. When you actually do retire, you'll still be getting your Social Security, your pension and whatever else that you have in your investments. Sounds like a really sweet retirement to me. Am I right? If you have $50000 right now, and you only make 2% a month without any stock appreciation, in 9 years you would have a 6 figure income from just the income from your option trades. Oh, and on top of that, you'd be working about a couple hours a week. I think that's the kicker. Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. We're going to be working hard? Uh, no. Now, for some of you, you might not have the $50000 right now, and that's okay. This is an example. You could start with a lot less. We have traders in our community that are starting with less than $5000. When you have a smaller account, it just takes longer, but you can still do it. Trades are the same, strategies are the same. Everything is the same. But the important thing is that you need to start now. Can you imagine it? No more credit card debt. No more worries about college costs. No more worries about not having enough money for emergencies. That's pretty cool, right? I think so. It is. It's an amazing way to live. You could lose $80000 a year and not even be mad about it. My wife got mad, to be honest. She did. I told her it was going to be a slam dunk. I was like, "Yeah, yeah. It's going to work. It's going to work," and then we lost the money and she got mad. I didn't get mad, but she did. All right. But what if you are super, super new to investing, and you're just awful at trading. You're the worst. And you don't even get 2% a month. What if you only get 1% a month? That's 12% a year. How many of you guys would be happy with 12% a year. I would. I think so. That would mean that your $10000 account, in 5 years, increases to $18000, and that's without any stock appreciation. That's just the income from your option trades. Even if you're only making 12% a year, 1% a month, it's still significant money. It's still better than what you can do in the stock market, because you put your money in the stock market … Stock market is getting 8% average, sometimes 7. Some people say seven, some people say eight. I just went eight. But if you calculate all the fees, all the commissions you pay, you're going to be looking somewhere around 4%, 4 and a half percent is what most people get out of the stock market. If you can make 12% on your own, and you compound that money month, after month, after month, after month, because when you look at the stock market and when you put your money in an index fund or a mutual fund or whatever, that money doesn't compound every month. It compounds every year. When we're doing our option trades, these are monthly trades, sometimes less than a month. If you have $1000 in your account, or let's say $10000, to keep it simple. Let's say $10000, and you make 10% in a month, well now you have $11000. The next month, you're not playing with $10000 anymore. You're now playing with $11000. It compounds every single month, and that's why it can grow so fast, much faster than in the stock market if you put it in an index fund. Does that make sense? Good. Because that's what I want for you. If you want to retire early, if you want to be financially independent, you don't want to live like a pauper, like a poor person, like a homeless person, then the best thing for you to do is follow the plan that I just laid out. Number one, try to make as much money from your job as you can. Number two, you've got to have options as your side hustle. You've got to be selling options. You've got to be trading options, selling them, not buying them. Number three, save as much money as you can. If you don't need to go to that five star restaurant, don't. If you don't need to go to the movies, get Netflix. It's fine. You'll watch the same movies later on. Once in a while, you want to splurge, do it. Enjoy your life. Don't live like a pauper, but don't live above your means, either. Save as much money as you can. Spend your time that you have, your free time, your side hustle time, learning how to trade, selling options, practicing, practicing, practicing, getting better, asking questions, getting education. Find other traders that you can talk to and ask questions from, learn from, model what works, because I've done it. Others have done it. We have hundreds of people in our community that have done it and are doing it right now. We've interviewed people on the podcast that are doing it right now. Okay. And lastly, we have episode 30. What should my first trade be? So this is for you folks who haven't tried options yet. Usually thinking, Hey, what do I do? What do I do? I'm afraid to get in. I don't want to lose money. I don't understand all this stuff yet. What should your first trade be? And that is the answer that I expose. In this next clip. So take a listen. Really, what I would say is, okay, if you have an account already and you own maybe 100 shares of stock, okay? Hopefully it's maybe an ETF, maybe it's a big company like Coca Cola or Disney or something like that. I would go ahead and just place a covered call. That would be my first trade. That would be my advice to go in, take a look at it and say, you know what, let's say Disney is trading at $100. In the next 30 days, I don't think it's gonna get to 110. That would be a 10% gain, it's not gonna get to 110. I want to go and sell the 110 call. And maybe I only get $20 for it. That's okay. This is not about how much money you can make, it's about just getting your toe wet, just doing it, popping your cherry so to speak. And so, that's what my advice would be to be for that. Your first trade, if you have some stock, never done this before, covered call, it's easy to get approved for. Almost nobody gets rejected when you apply to add options trading to your account if you just say, "Hey, I just want to do covered calls." Because that's the one that the brokers for some reason, they really think that's the safest one even though it has as much risk as a naked put on the risk graph. That's another story, we can get into that later so, if you have some shares and you want to just do it and you just want to get a taste of it, what option selling is all about, go ahead and sell one call above where your stock is trading at right now. We don't want to lose your stock, we don't want anything to happen with your stock, we want this option to expire and we want to take that money that we get, right? So, let's say we sell 10% above the price. So, if your stock is trading at 100, we sell 10% above that so at 110, we sell that 110 call option, do it for about a month, maybe a month to 45 days away and whatever you get. Maybe you get $15, maybe you get 30, $40, whatever you get, that money goes into your account. That's yours. No matter what happens, that money is yours, you never have to give it back. And then for the rest of the time, until that option expires, I just want you to watch it. I just want you to look at it and be like, "Okay, I sold it and I got $30 for it," let's say for example. Let's say you got 30 cents for it, which is $30 credit to you so, you got $30 and every day, that option goes down in value. Little bit, by little bit, by little bit, by little bit, it's gonna go down, down, down in value until hopefully, it will expire worthless and you'll still have your stock, you'll still have any dividends that you've gotten from the stock but you've also gotten the $30 that you got from the call option. So, that will give you a nice taste of what option selling is all about. It's very basic, it's the simplest trade you can do and if you hone the stock, you can do that. Now, if you do not own stock you can do that. Now, if you do not own stock already or if you have a small account then covered calls might not be the best for you. There is something that I'll call the, "Poor man's covered call," but that's a little bit more complicated. We're not gonna get into that right now. What I would say if you don't have any stock and you still want to do your first option trade. I would say probably you do something that at our company, we call, "The layup spread." Now, the layup spread is a credit spread with some twists to it. The criteria for getting in and if you want to learn how we do layup spreads, then you can go to simonsaysoptions.com/layup and get the guide. It's really cheap and it walks you through exactly how do you pick a trade, how does a trade work and what are you looking for, okay? So if you need, if you've never done it then pickup the guide, it's really cheap and it will go step by step tell you how to do everything. Now, the reason that we call it, "The layup spread," is because in basketball, the easiest trade you can make for most people is the layup, right? You're standing really close to the basket, you just jump up, bank the ball and just throw it into the net and percentage wise, that's the most made shot. So, the other shot … we were thinking about calling it, "The dunk spread," because if you go for a slam dunk, that's kind of easy, right? That's probably the easiest … that might be easier than the layup but for myself and for Simon, Simon is the one who wrote the guide and who does these, we really have never dunked in our life and so for us, a dunk is not the easiest trade or not the easiest shot in basketball because we have never done one, we couldn't do one if our lives depended on it and so for us, it wasn't the dunk that was the easiest, it's the layup that's the easiest and so, we called it, "The layup spread," because it's probably the easiest trade you can make and so, that's why we call it that. It's a spread, meaning it has two options, you sell one and then you buy another one but really it's something simple and basically what you do is you find a stock that you like, you want it to be … for your first trade, you want to find something that's really big. Like an ETF, you can take a look at SPY, that's the S&P 500 ETF, that's a good one. Or find a large company, maybe Apple, Facebook, Google, any one of these large tech companies or just … those would be good to work with and you see the chart. Now, you don't want to find a chart that's just moving up and down, up and down all over the place, you want to find a stock that's moving in one direction, smoothly. So, relatively if it's going up, you want it to go on your screen, if you look at the chart, you want it to go from the lower left to the top right and you want it to go up slowly, slowly, slowly, not have really, really big moves but small moves and just generally going up, up, up. Or if you want one going down, you do the other way but you don't want it to have big jumps and big movements. You want it to be [inaudible 00:11:48] have a decent slope going up but smooth. We don't want it to look like big hills and have gaps in the middle and what not. So, you go through some charts, find one that you like and then what you do is you want to sell away from the direction. So, if it's going up then we want to sell some puts. So you take a look at the chart and say, "Okay, in the next month of so, I don't think it's gonna drop more than 15% in price," and I can't go through all the mechanics here. If you want to know in detail, then you have to get the guide but the answer to the question is what I'm trying to get to here. So basically, how it works is if the stock is going up, we think it's gonna keep going up, we don't think it's gonna drop but if it drops a little bit, it's okay. We're gonna pick a point where we do not think the stock is gonna go so, if it's training at $100 and it's just been going up, up, up, up, we don't think it's gonna go all the way down to 90 or 04 or 85 or even 80 so, we pick a number or we pick a price where we do not think the stock is gonna go in our timeframe. Maybe 30 days or 60 days, however long we want to sell the option for and then, that's the option that we sell. That is the put option that we sell and then we buy another put option right below it, the next put option there. And you can get into this trade for as little as $100. The average trade is probably gonna be around $500, sometimes … you do that, that's the spread you have. The probability's in your favor, probably 80 to 90% probability of that working out and you can make 5%, 8%, 10, 12% in that short timeframe of a month or so. So, I think it's a very good strategy because it's less risk, it's very calm. Basically, you're just selling some options, have the odds in your favor, the trend is also in your favor, which is a good thing and then you just sit back and you just watch it and you just let it expire. In this particular strategy though, you have to know when you're gonna get out. So, you can say, "I'm not gonna do anything. I'm not gonna adjust it, I'm not gonna change it. And so, if I'm risking $100, I have an opportunity to make $10 but I'm gonna risk $100 so if I lose it, I lose it." So, in this case if you're putting up $100 as your margin, you're gonna lose $100 if you don't do anything and the trade totally goes against you, 100% against you if it goes. If it doesn't, the other option you have is that you can get out if you're down a little bit or if you can learn to adjust, you can do that. There are different ways to play the trade in the beginning. If this is your first ever trade, I would probably put up 100 bucks and just not do anything, I would just watch it. That's it. See how it goes, see how it feels. If you lose the 100 bucks, see how that feels. That's a learning experience right then and there. You know? It's like, "Oh man, I just sat here, I didn't do anything. I lost 100 bucks, this is horrible, I don't like this. I'm not gonna do this anymore." But if you understand how it works, most of the time it's gonna be profitable so, if it's something that you enjoy doing, then you can look into it further. Because for some people, selling options might just be too boring. Putting on a trade and just waiting for it for a month, man, that sucks. I don't want to do that. I want to be a gunslinger and I'm gonna be a better, I'm a poker player. I want to just, bet, bet, bet and hopefully I'll hit the lottery. If that's you, then option selling is not for you and this is not the Podcast for you anyway. But if this is your first trade, like I said, if you have 100 shares, covered call would be good. If you don't have 100 shares, the layup spread is something that is right up your alley. Now, of course, you could do other things. You could be selling naked puts, you could be doing condors, butterflies, straddles or something. That is pretty popular, strangles and straddles are good for people but I think if this is your first ever trade, you're just looking to get in, you're just looking to get your toe wet, get an experience of what it's really like, covered calls or layup spreads. And again, covered calls are really simple. You can get more information on our website and credit spreads are … the layup spread is a credit spread with a little bit of the twist and the twist is how Simon actually chooses the trades that he does because you can go into any stock and say, "Okay, I'm gonna do a credit right on this trade, on this stock." But to really get maximum gain out of it, to make sure you win on most of your trades, you're gonna have to do a little bit of digging, you're gonna have to look at the chart, you're gonna have to look at what stocks should you be trading and what stocks you should not be trading and so, Simon actually goes through that in the guide, in the layup guide and you can pick that up if you want to. It just puts more odds in your favor, so to speak, those are the two things I would recommend. Again, if you wanted to learn about covered calls, you can go optiongenius.com/covered calls, we'll put the link in the show notes and then, if you want to learn about the layup guides, you can pick it up at at simonsaysoptions.com/layup guide. Alright? If you have any questions, please let me know and remember, trade with the odds in your favor.

80 miles. If you go on a car trip or road trip somewhere and drive for 80 miles, it takes a little bit over an hour. But on a bike 80 miles, whoo it can take all day long. Yep. So last week, I actually biked for 80 miles. Now I didn't do it on one day, I did it over three different days. But with the wind in my face, going up hills, down hills going out about 10 to 13 miles an hour, it took a long, long time. So this week, I didn't do 80 miles. I did 60 miles so far. And I am hoping to do another 35 miles on Sunday. Why you ask why am I putting myself through this? Well, there is a charity ride ride coming up in a week and a half that I have registered for and it's called the MS 150. Normally, it's 150 miles to over two days. But in 2021, because COVID they've changed it. So they made it a one day ride. And you can either do 70 miles, 80 miles, or 100 miles. I opted for the 70 mile one because well, I'm not exactly ready. Last time I did 35 miles in one day, my thighs were screaming in pain. But, I am going to do this ride, no matter what even if I'm not ready. Even if I'm the last one to cross the finish line. They close up the whole race everything. Everybody goes home. I'm the only one there on the road pedaling. I'm going to do that until I finish and I'm going to do it. Why? Because I put my mind to it. It's something I decided I'm going to do. First I thought you know, I want a hobby -join a bike team, sign up for an event, lose some weight, get something exercise, but now it's not about any of that. It's about crossing the finish line and pedaling that whole 70 miles. Is it going to take me eight hours, nine hours. I don't know, takes some breaks, maybe a lunch break and you know, a little time to calm down your muscles that are probably going to be cramping and spasming. Hopefully it doesn't take more than nine hours. But yes, it will take a long time. And it's going to be very difficult. And it's going to be something probably the hardest thing physically I've done ever. But I'm going to do it. It's really mind over body, mind over matter, right? Because I set my mind to it. And I made a decision. And I said, that's it. No, there's no backing out. There's no stopping. There's no quitting, no matter what happens, I'm going to finish this race, because I want to. So what is it that you want? And how bad do you want it? I want this thing. And so when you're out bike riding, you're out there by yourself in the heat for hours and hours at a time sitting on this small little seat that's very hard and your butt is hurting. Your butt goes numb if you're a guy, you know other areas in the groin, they go numb, your arm start hurting, your legs are hurting. It's not fun, especially when you do it that long. But I want it. It's mind over matter. I want it bad. I want to be able to say yes, I finished this ride. I did it. I set my mind to it. I finished. How bad do you want it? There are lots of people that email us, come to us buy some of our products and say yeah, "I wanna learn how to trade, I have to I have to" that's the words they use. And then a very small, tiny percentage of them actually follow through and actually do it. I hope that's not you. What is it that you want? And how badly do you want it? If you don't want it bad enough, it's not gonna happen. It doesn't matter. It's not about trading or exercise or losing weight. This is everything. How badly do you want it? Here's a question only you can answer. But the thing is, it is something that you can answer. And you can change your mind and you can change your desire into making something so badly wanting that you'll do whatever it takes. You'll sit for hours and hours on this hard little bike, pedaling in the heat, sweat stinging your eyes, wind blowing in your face, trying to push you down. legs, cramping, feet hurting, just going going going. I mean, I'm going to do it because I want to. What do you want to do? What do you want in your life and how badly do you want it? That's it. That's all it comes down to that is the secret to success. How badly do you want it? If you want it bad enough, you're going to find a way. If you don't want it bad enough, you're going to find an excuse. Even if you have the most perfect opportunity in front of you. Market has been going up. Markets are up 60% ss I say this, from the time we had the COVID, bear market, it's up 60%. Even if you didn't trade a single option, all you do is throw money in the market, you would have made money. And yet people are still on the sidelines. People are still Oh, I'm, I'm trying to open my account. I'm changing. I'm trying to find a better broker. Oh, wow. Stop making excuses, get it done. Mind over matter, put some urgency behind it. This market is not going to last forever, it's going to change, it's going to start getting more volatile, it's going to go down and up. And who knows what is going to do. Mind over matter? How badly do you want? And that's it. If you want it bad enough, you will figure out a way. And that's my message to you. How badly do you want it? And yes I keep asking because you need to give me an answer. You need to say this is what I want. And this is what I'm willing to do to get it. This is why and I want I want it. I want it. I want you to come up with your own answer. You don't need to tell me. You can tell me if you want. I'll be your accountability partner. You can email me help@optiongenius.com - you let me know, hey, this is why I wanted this, this is what I want. And this is what I'm going to do it. And if you do that, then we will email you back on your deadline and say hey what happened, did you do it? hope you did. Because everything you want can be yours. Everything is achievable. But you got to want it. How badly do you want it? Figure that out, change your life. That's it for this episode. To be honest, I am completely still exhausted. And I still have more training to go. But wish me luck. I'm going to do it. And maybe on the next episode I'll be telling you about all the stuff I learned on my ride. But until then trade with the odds in your favor and answer the question "How badly do you want it?" 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.

No sex for you. That's right, I said it, no sex for you. Well, not for me anyway. Like that was ever gonna happen. But still, hey, passive traders, I've been reading a book called Your Next Five Moves. And it's a book about business strategy. So the author of the book is saying that a Grandmaster of chess, when they play chess, they can think 12-14 moves in advance. So if I do this, he's gonna do this, if I do this, he'll do this, if I do, this opponent will do this. For 14 moves, right? In business, the author says, you should be thinking at least five books ahead. I'm reading this book trying to apply it to Okay, you know, that's for a business, how do we apply this to trading? You know, how many steps ahead should a trader think? And how do we apply these strategies to trading? So I'm reading through the book. And obviously, in chess, you kind of have a finite area, right? So the chess pieces can only do certain things, you can only move in certain directions, whatnot. And so when you're a grandmaster, and you do a move, you can sometimes kind of force the opponent to make a conflicting move. So if I do this, he has to do this kind of thing, right? Because if I put him in check, then he has to get out of check by moving this or this or something. So you kind of you can kind of structure that out many, many moves in events, even in business, you know, the guy says, Well, you know, you gotta have, you gotta be in charge of yourself. And you have to know that, hey, if I'm going to ask for a job, or a raise, and my job, then I need to know what could happen. So first of all, I need to be prepared, I need to show my value, I need to ask properly, I need to know what's in the best interest of the company and present it that way. So you have to have your presentation plan, that's like one move. The second move is what's gonna happen if they say, yes. The third move is what's gonna happen if they say no, and then can I back that up? Am I going to give them an ultimatum? I'm gonna do this. And if I do quit, then what am I gonna do that? what's what's my mood that so basically just thinking about, so if this happens, I'll do this. And this, and this giving ourselves options right? Now in trading, we are trying to be in control, and we try to stay steps ahead, but the market does whatever the market wants. So we're more in a reactive mode than in a active mode. That's why it's passive trading, not active trading. If you're a day trader, good luck. You know, I don't have the stomach for that all the time. So, how does a trader think many steps ahead? Well, number one, when you put on the trade, you have to have a trading plan. So that's obviously a step number two, the trade can go in your favor, or the trade can go against you. So you got to know what to do in either situation. Number three, the trade if it goes against you can go against you very wide, violently, and suddenly, or if you go very slowly against and you have to have moves for both of those aspects involved, you have to go thinking ahead for what are the small moves? What are the small things that could upset my trade? And then what are the big things that could upset my dream? Real micro and the macro? And then what are you going to do when the micro ones What are you gonna do on the macro lens? Right? And then you have to worry about not just the trading aspect, but you got to worry about your personal aspect. So what happens if I cannot get to the trade? What happens if something happens to the trader, right? Maybe he has a headache that day, maybe he is sick, and he has to go to the hospital for several days, then what happens to the trades? You have to have all of these things thought out in advance to be the best trader that you can. So yeah, there are several trades that we can do, as are several moves that we can do as a trader, and just really thinking about what is the risk? And what am I going to do to counter that? So I'll do this. This could happen. What do I do with this, this could happen? What do I do? The longer you get into trading, the longer you do it, the more trades you put on, the more you'll see what could happen, what could go wrong? And then you'll have experience and you'll be like, Oh, yeah, I remember that happened one time before. This is what I did. And it worked out. Well. That's why we also do backtesting, the more experience you can get under your belt. The more situations that you see, the more it'll be muscle memory, and then you'll be like, Oh, if this happens, I can do this. If this happens, I can do this. Because when you're first starting out, you don't know what you don't know. And that's why it's so important to have a mentor to have a coach, have somebody guiding you along and be like, hey, relax, calm down. This is what's going on. How are you going to deal with it? You can do a you can do B, to C to D which one? What are the pros and cons of each? What do you think is the best one proceed that way and let's see how it goes. Now mentor coach is not going to guarantee that he can help you be profitable, or get you the right answer every single time. Sometimes it's just not possible, right, they're gonna be lost, it's, of course, that's part of the game. Otherwise, it wouldn't make any money for us. If it was so easy, you just win every single time, there would be nothing you make, right? That'd be like buying a CD, you get like 1.1% on a CD. So the reason that we make money trading is because there is risk and there are losses. So you have to also have a move for how do you handle the loss? emotionally, and financially? You have to be aware of both situations. So now, coming back to no sex for you. All right. You're probably wondering, okay, how'd you get to this from that? Oh, well, in the book, the author Patrick Bet-David. He was a young kid, and he's telling his own story. And His goal was to become, have his company do a million dollars in sales? And so he was doing well or something. And then he was, I guess he was outside of a nightclub something happened? I don't know. I don't remember the exact story. But somebody asked him, hey, how are you going to know? What's your goal? Are you know that you're successful? Or what are you going to do to make yourself successful? I think that was the question, what are you going to do to make sure that you are successful, and he said that he was not going to have sex until he got a million dollars in sales in his company. And he took him something like 18 months or something like that, that was really cool. You know, because that was for him that was a big deal. Because he was like, in his 20s, or 30s. And he was very sexed-up. Supposedly, that's that's what he says in the book, he liked to party you'd like to hang with women, you'd like to drink. That was his thing when he was younger. And so for him, that was a big, big, big sacrifice. What is the equivalent to you? Right? How are you going to know when your moves are lined up? And how are you gonna know when you hit your goal? And what are you going to do to motivate you to hit your goal? So, you know, part of this podcast is, I'm trying to attack you in different ways to try to get you to take action, try to get you to think about different things that maybe you haven't thought about yet. Or maybe if you have thought about them, but you didn't get my second thought, or you didn't think about them enough. So I'm trying to re-hit you be like, Oh, hey, think about this. Oh, hey, what do you do about this? Oh, eight? What do I do? I can't give everybody the answers, because the answers are different for everybody. So the question is, if you haven't gotten started yet, or if you hadn't hit your goals yet? The reason is probably not because you are lacking all the tools. The reason is something internal. And you can make whatever excuses you want. I don't have the money. I don't have the time. I don't know, the proper education. Those are great. You have the same amount of time everybody else has. You have access to all the education you need through Option Genius. And in terms of money. Well, you know, what are you gonna do? How badly do you want it? What is the goal? Number one, do you know your "why" is it really, really important to you? And what are you going to do to get it? So in the beginning, it doesn't even take money to start, you need to back testing, you need to do paper trading, that doesn't take a lot of money. It's free. For the back testing, you can buy software, it's like 500 buck, a year, for some back testing software, build up track record. And then you can find the money. There are lots of investors out there that will fund somebody take a chance on you, if you've been shown that, look, I know how to make money. I mean, I've done it, I know other people that have done it. And even if you give them 100% of the gains, you look to somebody, you say, Look, I know how to make money, funded open account, I'll trade it for you, you keep all of the money. I'll do it for you for free. That's kind of weird, right? You get to work for free, make all the money that guy gets all the money or the other investor gets all the money, you get nothing. Yeah, if that's what it takes. That's you're getting your practice with no money at risk in the money with real with real money in the markets. Right? I mean, you can't get like any better, no risk situation and obviously, we lose money, the guy's gonna hate you. That's the way it goes. If you are motivated enough, you will find a way. Now, for those of you who are not motivated enough, that's where it comes to. Right. That's where that's where this question no sex for you or this idea comes from. So if you don't have that motivation to just go nuts and do whatever it takes, then maybe you need to sacrifice something, maybe you need to take something out of your Life until you hit your goal. So you got to carry and you got to stick. So what is it? No fast food? No beer, no TV? I don't know, what is that thing that you spend time on or money on? That is pleasure for you but it's taking away time that you could be spending on learning how to trade and getting better at your trading? Figure it out, and then set your goal and say, Hey, you know what, I'm gonna make XYZ dozen dollars in the next month, or I'm going to make 50 trades and the next two months, or I'm going to make, you know, I'm going to learn this strategy. And I'm going to put on my first trade. And I'm going to make 10% on one trade, whatever, whatever your short term goal is, or maybe your long term goal, you know, the author, Patrick's goal was $1 million in sales. And obviously, it takes a whole while to get to that number, right. So maybe for you, it's a "I want to make $50,000 from my training". Great. I love it. That's an awesome goal. What are you going to give up? Or what are you going to stop doing? To keep you motivated, keep you hungry until you get to that goal. That's what sex is for you. So maybe it is sex. I'm sure your spouse might not agree or your boyfriend and girlfriend, whatever. But if that's what he thinks that's what it takes, and then maybe you'll get some help from them, right? You'll get some extra motivation from them be like "Hello, hurry up here, please and get your gold" and it would be hilarious. But still, what is it figured out? What is the goal? Figure out what you're willing to sacrifice? Until you get triple? All right. So if you do if you do this, I would love for you to email me and let me know what you have decided to do. That would be cool. Just let me know. Email me help at option genius, calm and let me know what you're deciding to do what you're going to what you're going to sacrifice and give up until you hit your goal. So let me know, give me an email with your goal and what you're giving up. I would love to get these emails from you guys. I answer every one of them personally. So just let me know and keep the odds in your favor. Talk soon.