The Option Genius Podcast: Options Trading For Income and Growth

Last week I was at a conference. And they had a lot of great speakers, a lot of fun donors. And there were two people that were legit billionaires that they had invited to speak. One of them was John Pennington. The other one was Jim Rogers. Jim Rogers is definitely the most or the more famous. He is the one that he started the quantum fund with George Soros way back when, and at that time, they were, they were only like, according to him, there were only like four or five mutual funds or hedge funds in the world. At the time, nobody really knew what a hedge fund was. And so they started that they made billions of dollars. And then he decided, hey, you know what I'm done. So he took his money, and he left. And then he wanted to travel. And so he was trading his own money, he's investing his own money. And he got a couple of motorcycles for him and his wife, or his girlfriend at the time. And they took those motorcycles, and they drove around the world. And then he wrote a book about it, you know, talking about the different stuff that they learned from the travels and the currencies, and the macroeconomics and how politics works, and how the black market works, and all these different things. And I was, I was very young, when I read that book. And it opened my eyes. I was like, Man, this is the best book I've ever read. Because not only did it talk about travel, which I loved, it also talked about macroeconomics, and it exposed me to that. And I'm like, Well, this makes so much sense. This is awesome. I love how things work. I love how the world works. And then I was like, Man, this guy, so rich, how can he travel around the world? You know, what does this guy do? And I real and I found that he's a hedge fund manager. And that was the first time I've ever heard those. So I'm like, oh, I want to find out what this is. And then I realized, Oh, my God, that's what I want to do. I want to be a hedge fund manager. And since then, I've always had that in the back of my mind. Eventually, though, I gave it up. I'm like, Yeah, that's a lot of work. And I don't know if I want to treat both people and this and that, oh, yo stuff. And then this conference, when I saw it, I had a ticket from a year ago, but I wasn't gonna go. But then they announced that he was going to be the headliner. And I was like, Ah, this is it, you know, my fund is launching this is like, is like fate. It is a full circle, it's going all the way around, like, this is where I got started with the idea. Now I'm actually doing it and these guys will be speaking I can see him I can meet him maybe. So I had to go. And these are the things that I learned from these two fellows. Both of them are very smart, both of them, some of them, they said the same stuff, they overlapped. So that was like man to billionaire saying the same thing. Maybe there's some to that. But you'll see that these are their interpretations. These are their thoughts, their theories, some of this border lines on, you know, conspiracy theory, to be honest. So, you know, take it with a grain of salt, see what makes sense. And hopefully, that you guys will be able to benefit from this as well. So first guy, his name is, like I said, these are my notes, you know, all the thoughts I put here, their their thoughts. I'm not sure if I agree or not agree, I'm not talking about that. I'm just reporting on what I heard. And I give you any advice, I'm not selling anything, right? The first guy, his name is John Pennington. And he got rich by creating a real estate fund where they would buy real estate, and land on real estate and then to borrow money to lend on real estate. And the company got so big that they took it public, when they when they went public, he retired. And now he, you know, just sits around and thinks about economic theory and investing money, of course, but he doesn't really have a day job. So he can think about all this stuff. So we're gonna talk about what he said first, the biggest thing that he came up with, and, you know, his whole thing is that you look at everything that's happening in the world, you look at the different news events, and they don't make sense a lot of it. And I'm gonna go through some of them. But if you think about it, and say, hey, you know, what, how are these things all connected? Are they connected? Sometimes they start making sense, if you have to peel the onion and look under the hood a little bit, you know, and sometimes you have to guess at what's going on. Because this guy, you know, he's not, he's not in the Army Air. He's not in the politics. He's rich, but he's not that connected, where he's in the government. He knows exactly what's going on in all facets. But he can sit back and take a look and try to figure things out. So what he says is that, you know, things don't make sense by themselves unless you put them all together, and then they start forming a pattern and then people in power are not stupid. You know, it doesn't matter who

I wanted to talk about, tell you, and show you basically how we made over 180% in the first four months of 2023. You heard that right. We made conservative trades and we've made, and by the end of April we made 32 trades and the total result was over 180%. Actually, the exact number was 180.42%. Now that's pretty remarkable. And then it gets even more remarkable, because we had 32 trades, all of them were winners, none were losers, and none of them lost since the beginning of the year. Now, I don't know how long this streak is going to keep going. And I don't know what the record is for her like most winning streaks in a row. But this one is pretty remarkable. And I do think it's going to continue. Now a little bit of background. This is for our weekly actually, it's not even a weekly. It's a one-day to expiration trade that we do on the SPX, we've been doing this for a long time. We were doing this for several years. But something occurred in 2022. That allowed us to not only upgrade it but to make significant changes to the system. So that not only do we get more trades, that we also get abilities to not lose money on every trade. So I wanted to explain that a little bit and show you what we're doing. So basically, it's a one DTE or one day to-expiration credit spread on the SPX. Though what that means is we're only trading SPX, which is an index is the S&P500. And we'd put the trade on today, and it expires tomorrow. So it's one day, it's basically overnight risk. And that's it. And we are aiming for around five to 8% per trade. Now, as you can see the numbers I gave you, we did 32 of them, and we made 180%. So you can do the math and figure out how much we average per trade. And like I said, these are very conservative traits. And they make money and they've won, right? So in February, we actually released this to a small group of people. So we, we explained this concept to on a live event we had, you know, a lot of people come in and watch. And we showed them what we're doing. And we said, hey, if we want to actually teach this to people, because we want to do this same strategy in our hedge fund, and I need to create training for it, right? Because I need to train the people that are trading at the fund. And so I said, Well, I'm going to be creating the training anyway, why don't I let some of you guys in so you can do it for yourself. So we've had about 35 people into the program, it's sold out like like that. And all of them are having phenomenal success. So it's been really exciting to share this with people. And we are probably going to share it with more people because it's just been so much fun. And because of the numbers and the liquidity and the volume, we're going to be able to trade it for the fund anyway. So I don't see any reason, at least right now why we cannot let a few more people in so they can do this for themselves. Like I said, it's been phenomenal. Everybody's been winning left and right. And the numbers are just crazy. So basically in February we showed them and we were explaining like Okay, so this is a a one day to expiration trade on SPX you do a credit spread, and we have a set pattern of how we trade it. Now, the most interesting thing is that, in 2022, the CBOE which is the Chicago Board of options in the CME which controls the SPX. They got together and they released weekly options for Tuesday and Thursday. So until then, we had weekly explorations that were happening on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. But they introduced Tuesdays and Thursdays so now we have expirations on SPX that happen every single day of the week, that enabled us to do two things. Number one, it gave us more trades, right? Because if it's a one day trade, if you want to do it on Tuesday, you can't because there's no expiration or like, if you want to do it on Monday, that expires on Tuesday, you can't do it, because there's nothing expires on Tuesday, you have to go to Wednesday, that gives you a little bit more risk, right? Instead of just one day, now you're doing two days. So because of Tuesday, and Thursday expiration, now we have more trades that we can do. And we realized that because of this new thing, we can now adjust these trades, because not all trades always work out. So far, the four months of this year, it has been fantastic. But you know, we're gonna have a losing trade, right? It's just normal is trading, you're gonna lose. So we've identified several different ways of potential adjustments. You know, if a trade goes bad, how is there a way to either get our money back and not have a loss or get adjusted in a way where you can still even make money. So what we wanted to do, because these are weeklies, and there's so many of them, so many of the trades, we figured what if we can just get back to breakeven on any losing trades, because we have so few losing trades. And we actually found it, we actually tested several different adjustment strategies over and over and over and over again, un

Hey there passive trader, have you ever thought about what it would be like to be a Billionaire? Or even if you could become a billionaire? I know, I know, it's pretty far fetched. But today, I want to talk about my plan to become a Billionaire. And you'll see that it's pretty easy. And something that's pretty replicatable by just about anybody. Alright, so a few days ago, I was thinking about it, I was like, yeah, man, it'd be really cool. If you know, it wouldn't be possible if I could become a billionaire. And there's mostly, most of the billionaires out there that we know of, you know, the Forbes 500, or whatever Fortune 100, whatever the different lists that they're on, but the world's richest people are billionaires, because they have taken a company public. So if you take a look at Elon Musk, or Warren Buffett, or Mark Zuckerberg, they are not, they don't have money, they don't have the billion dollars sitting around. It's the stock that they own of the company that they started that they took public, that's worth billions of dollars. And so they're worth billions of dollars, because that stock is worth billions of dollars. Now, if their company goes out of business, they're not a billionaire anymore. So I don't know, you could argue if they're actually worth billions or not, right. And in fact, these type of people, they don't like to sell their stock. So it's very difficult for them to actually get the money out of the company out of the stock, because for example, you know, let's say Warren Buffett starts selling his shares, let's say he wants a billion dollars to, I don't know, buy the moon or something. Right, but he needs the money, and he starts selling his shares. Well, people are going to know people are going to notice he has to tell. He has to disclose it. Because he's a public company, and he's the CEO. So people are going to know and they're gonna be like, Why is Warren selling shares, oh, my god, something's going on. And everybody's gonna start selling their shares, and the stock is going to tank, right? Same thing happened with Elon Musk, this is a real life example, when he wanted to buy Twitter, he had to sell his Tesla shares, some of them, because he didn't have the money sitting around to pay for the Twitter shares. So he had to sell enough Tesla shares, to not only pay the taxes on everything that he's selling, and the gains that he's making, but then also pay for the other shares for Twitter. And so the stock price of Tesla, when he started selling was, was at around about 285, close to $300. And when it was done, he was at about $100, one on one. So if stock price dropped from 300, to 100. And that's why it's not a good idea for these guys to be selling their shares. Now, that's not the type of billionaire that I'm talking about. I don't want to be a stock market, going public-type billionaire, I want to be the guy that actually has the billion dollars in assets, something that I could sell pretty easily and have that money converted into billion dollars. Right? So how do we do that? Well, there are three things that you need to become a billionaire. Number one, you need to have an investment vehicle something to put the money in, that's going to give you a good return. Number two, you need to have time, because it's going to compound and grow. And then number three, you have to have some money to start with, the more the better, right? The more time, the better, the more money you have to start with the better. And the better the return that you get on your investment, the better. So the reason I was thinking about this is because, if you've seen my other episodes and stuff, you might know that I'm starting a hedge fund, and it's getting ready to launch pretty soon. And I am putting in about $700,000 of my own capital into this fund, at least in the beginning. And I plan on leaving it all in there. I leave it you know, I don't want it to be I don't want to take it out. I'm just gonna leave it in there and let it grow and grow and grow. And so I was like, Huh, I wonder how much it could grow to? Right? So that's my starting capital. That's the money I have. I have, of course, other funds, but we're only talking about this. And so I was thinking I'm like, Okay, how much money can I make? And really the goal for the fund is to make about 20% per year. Now, the strategies that we talked about, we can make a lot more right than 20% a year, but I want to be conservative and even 20% a year is most people will say that's not conservative, that's very aggressive. But because of the strategies we're using and the money we've made in the percentage that we've made in the past, I'm pretty confident that we can make 20% a year minimum so I don't want to shoot for the moon. I wanna say Oh, Okay, if that's what I can make reliably, predictably year after year, that's the number I'm going to go with. Let's a little be, you know, a little conservative on this. So let's say that I'm going to

So this week, we have two different high ranking Republicans who want to raise the retirement age in the United States. That's what we're talking about in today's video. If you enjoy these type of videos, if you want to learn about retirement and how to make more money so that you can retire more comfortably, please go ahead and subscribe to the channel. Appreciate that it would really help get the message across, we can get more information to you. So now let's talk about what's going on. So earlier this week, Nikki Haley who is running for president, actually, she's running for the nomination to eventually run for president. But she's a very high ranking Republican, big in the circles and she made a comment that she wants to raise the Social Security entitlement age when you can collect social security higher than 67. Now, it used to be 65. Now it's 67. She wants to raise it even more. And then on the talk shows CNN asked Nancy Mace who is a Republican Representative from South Carolina if she agreed with that. And then she was like, yeah, definitely, we definitely need to do this because Social Security is screwed up. The Republicans and the Democrats have screwed it up, and we need to fix it. Now. Nobody's going to argue that it needs to be fixed. But with Nikki Haley's version, she wants to change the retirement age, not for older folks, but for people in their 20s. Right, because people in their 20s don't vote Republican. So yeah, okay, that makes perfect sense for you. But yeah, there's a problem there. It needs to be fixed. Social Security is, I mean, we've been hearing rumors about its demise for years, is it gonna happen not happen? Eventually, somebody's gonna have to come in and fix it, because we don't have any other options for most of the people in this country. Now, unfortunately, we're not the only ones in this boat. France this week, President Macron he almost single handedly passed a bill or law, whatever, that they are going to raise the retirement age in France from 62 to 64. And that has led to massive protests, and strikes all across the country, the garbage sanitation workers they're on strike, there's garbage piling up all over the country, the bus, drivers union, they're on strike, buses aren't running all kinds of crazy stuff is happening, because people are enraged. People are scared. People are. I mean, they that's the biggest fear that people have. They're not fear of death, they're not scared of public speaking as much as they are afraid of running out of money in retirement, and becoming a burden to their family or somebody else. And it's very legitimate, you know, I'm going through a personal issue right now with my father who, for the first time in his life has become dependent, he has some back issues, he can't move. And it's driving him crazy that he has to be reliant on nurses and help and other people to even move around to even go to the bathroom. And it's mind blowingly depressing. You know, if you have read the Passive Trading Book, which you can get up passivetrading.com. If you read the book, you know that Social Security was not supposed to be gotten in the sense that when they came out with Social Security, they set the retirement age at 65. But at that time, most people didn't live to 65. And so yeah, they didn't really want you to get in Social Security, right? But it was good for votes. Now, people are living well past 65. So almost everybody gets Social Security. And it's only getting worse. I mean, I'm 46, myself, and I plan on living to 120. So I mean, let's say if I got in, and I started working at the age of 26, or 21, whatever, right? And I'm going to retire at age 65 or 67. I'll have put in a certain amount of money, but then I'm going to take money out from 67 all the way to 120. So I'll be taking a lot more money out that I put in, and so will everybody else. And so yes, somebody definitely has to be done with Social Security. But I for one, am not sure that the government officials, even though they're elected, these politicians are the ones that should be creating this stuff. Yes, they have people that are experts, supposedly they're advising them, but it comes down to the lobbyists, right? Whoever's got the biggest lobby, Wall Street, the banks, investment companies, they're the ones that are going to set the policy and it's really a shame, but that's how it works. So here's what you need to do and here's how it should be. Okay? The proper way to look at social security is that it is the cherry on top of your retirement planning sundae. So you got your ice cream, you got your hot fudge, you got your nuts, I love my nuts, and you got your whipped cream. The cherry on top is Social Security, you might get it, you might not get it, but you shouldn't need it. Too many people in this country are only living on Social Security, that's the only income they have, they have no savings, they have nothing else. They're only living on Social Security, and thei

How to be a black belt spread Master? Black Belt. Hiya! Like karate, right? Black Belt, that's the best belt you can get. So how can you be a spread Master with a black belt? Let's talk about that. First thing we got to do though, is go over the disclaimer, of course, trading involves risk. It's not suitable for everybody, you can lose money, you probably will lose money. So don't risk too much. You don't want the spouse kicking out of the house. Right? Got it. Okay. So blast from the past, right? Karate Kid, the original, with Mr. Miyagi, that one rules. I love Jackie Chan. He did great. But the original Karate Kid, the original Miyagi, it was just KickAss. And I'm gonna have to tell you a little bit story here. Karate Kid. My parents actually took me to see this in the theaters. And I loved it. Right made kind of dates can tell Joe live, but I loved it. The original one is just classic story of this guy. He's a little bit nerdy, He's skinny, he moves to this new town, he doesn't have any friends. He meets a girl. And then he gets picked on by this group of dogs, you know, and they know karate. And they're beating him up over and over and over again. And then finally there's this guy, this, this this wreck loose, right? This guy who just takes him under his wing becomes like a father figure to him because he didn't have a father and teaches him how to defend himself and teaches him karate and karate used for defense. That's a very horrible, horrible accent. But, you know, that's what Mr. Miyagi teaches them. The Karate is for defense, and it's about life. And it's about meditation and being calm and peaceful and, and all these things he gives them shows him how to do respect, right? How to Give respect. And that's what karate is about. But the thugs, all they're talking about is no mercy, no mercy, right. Karate is to win and beat and pummel and, and destroy. And so we have the rest of the movie. And eventually, hopefully, you know, hopefully, you've seen the movie. If not go watch it, but I'm going to spoil it for you here. There's a karate tournament. And, of course, the Karate Kid wins in amazing fashion. Right? And then there's Karate Kid, Part Two. And so he goes to Japan, I don't I can tell the whole story. But that one was good, too. So if you haven't watched them, the originals, you gotta go back and watch them again. And then now on Netflix, they have come out with a new series called Cobra Kai. So I guess they wanted to make more money from the Karate Kid. Right. And so they brought back all the actors. And they have a whole new series, where it continues the story. It's I think it's like 30 years in the future. 30 years have gone by since the original Karate Kid movie. And you see all the actors have grown up, and they're all there except for of course, unfortunately, Mr. Miyagi - Pat Marita because he is unfortunately he has passed away. But all the other actors are there. And that was I've been watching that. And it was it was cool. And I love the I mean, the acting is really bad. To be honest, the acting in the series is pretty bad. The story is like, you know, but I love how they showed the other side of the story. Like in the Karate Kid movie, you see everything from Daniel San's perspective. He's the kid who's just moved here how hard it is for him. You know, he's got a single mom, his mom is annoying. He's trying to make friends. But he's getting beaten up all the time. You see it from his perspective. In the Cobra Kai series. It starts you off. The main character is the main thug, the one that was torturing Danielson. And it shows you from his perspective. And he's telling the story of how this kid Daniel came to his town and messed up his life. stole his girlfriend, beat him in the tournament, made his sensei hate him, all this kind of stuff. So I loved how they showed both sides of the coin, the flip. And I mean, he was it was really well done that that part was really well done. Anyway, why am I telling you all this? Because after I saw the Karate Kid, I of course, wanted to learn karate. Just like after I saw Top Gun. I wanted to be a fighter pilot. And after I saw Jaws, I didn't go swimming for years. But when I saw karate kid, I wanted to learn karate. So I told my parents, I want to learn karate, I'll put me in a glass swimming in class. So they did, bless them. Right? And so I joined a karate class. And I'm i You see they have these belts. So you want to of course you start off as a white belt, meaning you know nothing. And then you get a different color belt as you grow and you get better and better and better. And eventually you get to a black belt and then when you get a black belt, it gets even higher. From there you can get degrees of black belts. So I started off as a white belt. No On nothing, and they started with basic stuff, right? How do you throw a punch? How do you do a kick? How do you block a punch? How do you block a kick? How do you block this and that, and so yo

Turns out that a million dollars is not a big deal anymore. It's not enough to be a millionaire, or is it? I don't know, we'll talk about that. So, there's a new survey that just came out. CNBC reported on it, that's how I came about it to see it, it's put out by a company called Natix Is, I don't even know how you spell it. Natix Is Investment Advisors. That's their name-- financial company, they did a survey. And they asked millionaires. And they asked us a 16,017 millionaires who already have a million dollars in assets, right. And they asked them about what they think and how they feel about the economy, their future retirement in the year 2022. Unfortunately, most of them, a lot of them said that they are not very secure in their financial footing. In fact, 35% of them. 35% of these millionaires said that it will take a miracle for them to retire securely. Now, imagine that.. you're a millionaire, everybody's told you, well, hey, the goal is to get to a million dollars, you know, so that you can live in luxury for the rest of your life. You can stop working, quit the job, sell your business, whatever, and just relax and enjoy the rest of your life. But the people that have this million dollars are saying, Hey, we got here, but it's not enough. So my goodness, why, what happened? Well, turns out that million dollars is not what it used to be anymore. So anybody that goes, Hey, I'm a millionaire. You no big deal. Sorry, but big freakin deal. It's not enough. In fact, in in the world, right now, there are over 21 million millionaires. 21 million, that doubled from 2010 to 2020. And it keeps going up, right. So it's not a big deal anymore. And then 58% of these millionaires, 58% of them said that they will have to work longer than expected. So if they were planning on retiring at age 65, like most people do, it's gonna they're gonna have to work longer. Even if you have a million dollars in assets, according to this survey. Wow. That's insane. Right? And it could be any number of this, right? So there are economic threats growing, you know, inflation is there. The public debt is huge for the government, almost every government has tons and tons of debt. And that makes things harder for us. Because taxes go up and all kinds of stuff happens. Inflation is eating away at the money that you have, right? Interest rates are at super low points, even though the interest rates have risen, right, you go to the bank, in my have a very high interest rate account savings account, I'm getting 3.5%. So that's fine is decent, but it's a lot less than inflation. And so I'm losing money with my money sitting in the bank. 2022 is just a tough year for retirement right market was down over 23%. S&P, so geez, what do you do? Well, that is the normal way of thinking, right? So let's say you save up all your money, or you give it to an investment advisor, and then they grow it for you supposedly, right? And then when you retire, you're supposed to take out 4% of that and live off that now. $1 million 4% of that turns out to $40,000 a year. Now, yeah, you do get you know, some benefits in here and there and Social Security and whatnot. But still, you want to live on $40,000 a year? No, I don't know. I mean, I live in Texas, and it's pretty cheap to live in one of the lowest cost of living, but still, yeah, 40,000. You're like poverty level here. Even here, right? You live somewhere where it's a lot more expensive. I mean, forget about it, you can't do it, you're gonna keep working. So most people out there have a very hard time, even with a million dollars to be able to retire. And it's really sad. On the other hand, if you know how to do passive trading, you don't even need a million dollars. And we have other episodes and other videos that show you how to do the math and look for the one about our retirement calculator. And you can figure out that it doesn't take a million dollars to live a really, really good life. I mean, let's say you have a million dollars, and instead of the measly 4%, that, you know, you're supposed to take out what if you could actually make 10% on that? A year? If you can, if you can take your million dollars and make 10% a year, that's $100,000 plus whatever benefits you get from the government, most people will be like, hey, yeah, that's, that's really good. I can live off that. And that's 10% a year. Right? We like to look at it and say, Hey, we want to make 2% a month, 2% every single month, that's gonna be a lot more than 10% a year, right? That's 24%. So now we're not looking at 100,000, we're looking at 240,000 for the year. And that's relatively simple to do. It's not easy, but it's simple. We can explain to you within 10 minutes, and you'll get the picture with examples would be like, Hey, you do this, right, it'll make you to present and it's very conservative, it's very saf, right? And that's on the low end, that you can actually do better. You can do other strategies that generate more. And

Today we are going to be talking about and answering a question that we get asked a lot and option genius, which is what is the fastest way to get good at trading? Because, well, let's face it, everybody wants to get rich quick, right? Now, passive trading is a great way to get there consistently, and to be profitable pretty quickly. But to get really, really good at it, it does take time. So in today's video, and yes, I said video, I'm gonna explain that in a second. In today's video, we're going to be talking about four different methods that you can use to speed that up some of these would people you already know in order to use, and I'm gonna talk about a fifth method that can really turbocharge the process that most people don't. So first of all, I gotta say, Hey, why did he say video? Well, if you're listening on the podcast, I am making this also as a video, and it's going to be on the Option Genius YouTube channel. So if you like to watch videos, and you want to learn about trading options, hop on over to our YouTube channel. And please subscribe and like and post a comment or two, because it really helps and we're trying to boost up our YouTube channel. Now, if you are listening on the podcast, no worries, because I am going to be drawing on my screen on my whiteboard a little bit on the on the screen, but I will walk you through it, so don't feel like that you have to say you're missing out on anything. Okay, so let's get to work. So for this example, I want to come up with some guidelines. Because we need to codify this right? So we're going to say that our hypothetical trader, maybe it's you wants to get good at trading as fast as possible. And he's like, Oh, how do I do this? Okay, well, first of all, I tell you, step one is to pick a strategy, that's always going to be step one, right, you got to pick a strategy that works for you that you understand, and you want to get good at. Step two is find a trading plan that is really good, that actually works that's consistent that you find probably from somebody who's already doing it, and doing it well and having success with it. So you know that the plan works. And then number three, is putting in the reps is just doing the thing over and over and over again. And that's where we're gonna talk about today and how to really speed up that process. Because wanting to pretty pretty fast, right? I like this strategy. Okay. And then I got this plan. Here you go. Here's the plan. Thank you. I got it. All right, now let's implement, and let's learn how to do it. So that's the process that takes the longest. And for some people, it takes years and years and years to never master it. Some people, they get good at it really quick. I want you to be getting good at it really quick. And so we're going to be talking about how to do that today. All right. So for this example, we're going to say that a trader is looking to learn how to do credit spreads, okay? Because most people when they start, they're like, hey, you know, I like the credit spread. Makes sense. I want to do it. A lot of people tell us they want to learn credit spreads first. So let's say we're going to be talking about credit spreads in this example. Okay. And now let's say, for the credit spreads that we're going to do, we're going to be using $1,000 in each trade. Okay, so we got $1,000 per trade. And so that is the amount that it takes to do one trade, right? So then, what do we do? Well, we got to start putting in the reps. We got to start working, because they're doing the thing. Okay, so I'm going to draw some lines here. Okay. Now, we have a trader that has, let's say, $5,000. Okay. So he's got $5,000. He's got a small account, he's looking looking to do well, right. He's looking to get good at it. Now. For $5,000. If you have $1,000 per trade, how many can you do in a month? Right? How many trades can you do in a month? Well, obviously, you can only do five trades. How about in a year? Well, if you do five trades times 12, you can do 60 trades, right? And then how about in 10 years? Well, in 10 years, you got 600 trades. All right. I apologize for my writing. I'm not. I'm not used to writing with my mouth. So you have a trader with a small account, and he's doing $1,000 per trade. He's doing five trades a month, and we're only talking about monthly, okay? We're not gonna talk about weeklies here. So, in a year, he's put on 60 trades, which is a decent amount of trades, that's a lot of trades. And then in 10 years, he's got 600. So he's got 600 reps under his belt. Now, obviously, you don't want to take him 10 years to get good at something. So we're gonna have to speed that up, right? So what if you think oh, well, what if I have a lot more money? Maybe, maybe I can, I can do that. So what if trader number two has 50k in his account, you have 50,000. So yeah, 10 times as much money. Right? So now we're looking at that and we're saying, oh, okay, well, I can do 50 trades a month. No, not re

Why do real estate investors love passive trading? That's what I want to talk about today. So a couple weeks ago, I attended a friend's real estate conference in Dallas. And it's mainly for folks who like to buy large, real multifamily and commercial real estate, with a focus on how to attract investors. So they're buying these big properties or using investors to give part of the money so that they can go and do their thing. Well, while I was there, my friend, he already knows what I'm doing. I've known him for a few years, he asked me to get on the stage, and share with everybody what I do and how I trade. Because as it turns out, a lot of real estate investors love passive trading. Because I mean, it just makes sense to them. Right? Right out of the gate, like there you explain to them? Oh, yeah, that's just like real estate, right? Now, whenever you hear the word passive investing, you think real estate, passive trading is a way to trade the stock market, but in a way, that doesn't take a lot of time. So supposedly, when you're passive investing in the real estate, you put the money in, you invest, but it doesn't take a lot of time doesn't always happen. If you've ever done any kind of real estate investing, you kind of know that, right? So when it comes to real estate, there are four main benefits, right? So there's the cash flow, because hopefully, money's coming in every month from rent, right? Then there's appreciation. So hopefully, again, the property value is going up every year, little by little, sometimes it goes down. But you know, a little bit every year is normally what it technically happens. There's amortization, this is where you know, you have a loan, you have a mortgage, and every month you pay the payment, and then the amount goes down, the amount of the equity goes up, and the amount of the loan goes down. So you own a little bit more of the house every month, that happens automatically every time you send out. So there's amortization, where equity is going up. Then number four, you have depreciation. This is a temporary tax break from the government. Because normally, you sell a property, you have to pay taxes on it, but it with depreciation, you can tell the government, hey, look, the value of my property is going down. So every year you get a tax break. But then when you sell the property, then you have to pay it all back. So it does help with your taxes while you own the property. But eventually, you do have to pay it back. Now I love all of these, right? Especially since you can get all four and more from passive trading. How let's talk about it. Number one - cashflow, right, we get monthly or even weekly cash flows from weekly options from selling options. And what's better, we don't have to deal with tenants, toilets, or termites. The big three tiers of real estate, right? No tenants, no toilets, no termites, no worries about folks moving out in the middle of the night and property being vacant for months. No worries about them messing up the place and spending money to fix it. No buying insurance or property taxes, right? We don't have to pay for homeowners insurance and renter's insurance on our properties and paying property taxes every year, whether there's any making money, not all that stuff. So basically, it's a much more peaceful experience in my mind, right? Number two is appreciation. Right? Yeah, our stocks go up, right, usually a lot more than real estate. I mean, sure, they go down too. But if that happens that let us buy us cheaper, right? We get to buy the stocks cheaper when they go down. And so our cash flow continues anyway, we're still even if the stock goes down, cash flow still going, we're still selling options. But if it goes down, we can buy more. Number three amortization. Well, that was you know, equity going up, we don't recommend taking out a loan to buy our stocks. So instead, what we can do is we can start with a lot less, a lot less money, right? So you don't need 10%, 20% down actually, nowadays, if you're an investor, you need 20%, 25%, depending on your credit, and they get credit checks. So to start with passive trading, nobody checks your credit, you're gonna have bad credit doesn't matter. And you don't need 20% down, you start with a little bit, you can start with 500 bucks, 1000 bucks, 5000 10,000. Any amount, right. But if you want, you could use margin. Now margin is a loan to buy stocks. So you can borrow up to 50% of the amount you need, right? Now, if you have more money. So if you have a larger account, I think it's roughly depending on the broker, but I believe it's about 125,000 in your account. If you have that then you can apply for something called portfolio margin, which will pretty much let you buy your stock with about 20% down Just like real estate, and again, with no credit check, that's pretty cool. Then we have number four, right depreciation, well, our stocks do not depreciate. But depending on what you're trading, you c

Allen Welcome passive traders to another episode. Today, I have a big announcement. And I have a first for the podcast, which is really interesting. I'm going to tell you the first before we get into the announcement. The first is that for the first time we are having a husband and wife, team, actually, we're going to find out if they're a team or not. But they're both traders. And they're both doing well. And they've been doing it for a while. So I wanted to get their opinion on how trading works in a family how trading works in a relationship, how to not get on each other's toes. So I have today, Mr. And Mrs. Matt and Margaret Ambrosi. Welcome, guys, thank you for doing this. Matt Thanks. Thanks. Thanks for having us. Allen Now, the big announcement, we probably should have done it better and differently. But Matt is now full time as an option genius coach. So we are very happy to have Matt on board. And he's already made a big difference in several people's lives. He's getting more, more happy comments, or, you know, people coming together to have a wonderful he's doing he's getting more than I am. So I think I got the right person for the job. And if you if you see Matt, or you hear the voice, and it's kind of familiar, we did do an interview with Matt back in episode 110. So 110, and that he actually gave us a story of how he got started what he was doing. And at that point, his job, his role, or his, his goal of trading was mainly to replace his current income through trading options. So I think he's, he's come a long way since then, as a trader, and just emotionally and as a person. So, guys, welcome. And Matt, thank you again, for coming on board the team, it's been really awesome to work with you and to see you take the reins, and you know, it's only made the company stronger and better, and our customers are loving it. So they're really excited. Matt I really appreciate that Alan, you know, I couldn't be more excited. I mean, I have a real passion for this. And it's a real dream to, to do a job and and really fulfill that passion. So thank you. Allen Yep, yeah, I mean, you know, one of my mentors had told me he's like, you know, in your programs, you should have a lot more interaction with the, with the students. And I'm like, I don't have time for that. He goes, well, then you need to get a coach, we need to get some other coaches on board. And I'm like, Okay, where do I find these people? They're like, don't you have students? I'm like, yeah. You know, but they're all trying to retire. Like, they'll try to quit their jobs. He goes, No, I bet you there's some that are really good at teaching. They're really love people. And they would be happy to do this on a full time basis, or even like a part time basis, and just help other people. And I was like, huh, and I thought about that about and Matt was like almost one of the first people I thought of and I'm like, Hey, let me give him a call. And I'm sure he came out of the blue for you. And you were shocked. Matt So I mean, I really enjoy, I really enjoy helping people at the core of my being. And, you know, I just love seeing the light go off in people's minds when they see a trade and they see it work out and they see that everything's a possibility, just like it was for me. So I'm really excited to be part of it. Cool. And then Margaret a this question is for you. So he comes, he comes to you and says, Hey, you know, I've been working at Costco for I don't know, what, 1415 years or something. Yeah. And he's like, he's like, I just got this other job offer. I'm gonna What do you think? Yeah. Margaret There's a whole story. There's a whole nother story. When he got that call, because I mean, we were definitely both shocked. But I think what you just said reminded me of what a good coach Matt was before he even worked at Option Genius. Because when we we started at let's say, when we got married seven years ago, we we were both on the same page about being financially free. And what what does that look like? Matt was definitely more of a researcher in terms of he would read a book, he would, he would give it to me. And so I think we were on, we've been on board on the same page, what to do. And then when we found you, and started learning your methods, we both latched on to it. So when you caught him, I think I was just excited because I knew it was something he really wanted to do. I had already seen him in a coaching role with me and his mom and his sister of trying to like the backend stuff, right? The things that are the charts, the systems, getting your platform set up. Those are things that are challenging and takes a lot of time. And so I was like, I think I was super excited. I knew he could do it. I knew it'd be great at it. And so I just thank you for giving him the opportunity because it's really been wonderful for him to do this thing that he loves anyway. I mean, he was already before he worked for you, in the mornings before he would g

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

Hey there, this is Allen from Option Genius. One of the most common questions that we get at Option Genius is, "Allen, I want to know more about options trading, What books should I read?". And so I made this short video for you to tell you some of the top books that I think should be in your library. There are hundreds and maybe even 1000s of books on there on options, but not all of them are worth your time. Okay, so I wanted to save you some time, tell you the ones that I think would be the best. So here we go. This is the first one. Now these books are in no particular order. But this one is "Options as a Strategic Investment". Now this one is the heavy hitter. Okay, you can tell this is thick, it's very long, it's very detailed. This is like the Bible of options trading, okay, now, you're not going to make it through the whole book in one sitting. And you might never make it through the whole book. I've tried it a couple of times falling asleep. But this is not meant to read cover to cover. This meant this book is meant more as a reference book, at least that's how I use it, if I need something, or if I need to look up something, especially when I was starting out with options trading, this one was very helpful. You know, it was it's a good source. There's a lot of good material, a lot of good examples in here. And it covers just about every single thing about options related in here. So if you're just starting out, and you need one book as an introduction to options, this one might be a little bit too technology or jargon heavy, but it's a good one to have with you. Okay. Now, second book I have here is called passive trading, how to generate consistent monthly income from the stock market in just minutes a day. Now, this is the book that I wish I had when I started trading 15 years ago. Okay, now, to be honest, I have written this book. So I'm the author of this book. So I'm a little bit biased. But you can tell it's a decent sized book, this is not the goal for this book was not to cover every single strategy and every single way to trade options and everything about options. That's what this book does. So we don't need to recreate this book, what I put in this book is what I need, or what I think you need to make money the fastest way possible with options, okay? The the how to think about it, why you need to start trading options, and the strategies that you should use to really simplify your trading, and really get going and making money quickly as quick as possible with Options. So that's why I've written this book. That's why it's on my list, because I think everybody who trades options, at least if you're, if you're just starting out, you definitely need to read this book. Okay. And the other thing is that it talks about doing it in your spare time. So that is a whole different philosophy. We don't talk about buying options in this book, I tell you exactly why that doesn't work, I show you how to sell options in a way that doesn't take a lot of your time, so that you can actually make money from the stock market, but still have your time to do whatever you want. Because that's really the goal of making money, right? We want money for freedom, we don't want to make money just so we can work longer hours. So this is what this book shows you. The next book we have here is called "Generate Thousands in cash on your stocks before buying or selling them". Now, this book, I've used maybe the first two or three chapters, and the rest of it is about indicators, technical indicators, technical analysis, stuff that I don't use, I haven't even read. But the first two or three chapters have made me a lot of money. And so that's why they're on the list. Now, the strategies he talks about in the first couple of chapters are basically naked puts, and how to trade them and different ways you can use them. And like I said, it's made me a lot of money in the past. So that's why I put the this book on the list. Okay. Now, a lot of books out there, talk about the different strategies, but they don't tell you what to do. If your trade gets in trouble. They just broadly glance over it. So this book here is options, "The option trader handbook - strategies and trade adjustments". So this book actually goes into more detail about what to do when your trade goes into trouble, how to adjust your trade, and it covers different strategies and covers a couple of different adjustments for every single one. Now, it's not the same thing as watching a video or watching somebody actually do the strategy and think about it and tell you why they're picking one adjustment over another one. But when you have some ideas of what different adjustments you can do, then if you're trying to get into trouble, you can analyze them and see which one you like better, which one you think will work best for your bad trade. And then you can go with that and hopefully it will work out so it's a it's a good book if you don't know anything about a

Picture this, you're a prizefighter. A boxer. And your opponent is the reigning champion, large, strong, fast and deadly. If you win your payday could be huge. But if you lose, you might lose it all. Do you get in the ring? Well, if you're a trader, you get in the ring every single day. So let's talk about how not to get knocked out. Hey there passive trader, how do you think about your trades, and your trading can make a huge difference if you're going to be profitable or not. And I want to share about how I think about my trades. And I think that it's going to help you as well, because I've shared this with my students. And they it was really, you know, a different paradigm shift for them. So I want to say, Okay, well, you know, people don't don't see it this way. So I want to I want to talk about this. All right. Now, trading is more of a mental game than anything else, of course, you got to know what you're doing. But the mental aspect is what really separates new traders from professionals. And I've always said that trading is about 90%, mental, and 10% skills so if you have not become consistently profitable yet, it might be that there are some skills that you're missing. But there's a really good chance that there's the mental aspect is also holding you back. And it's actually something we spend a lot of time on, on our coaching calls with our programs with our students. And it's one of the reasons that we see people come into our programs that have been trading for a while, but they haven't received or achieved the level of success that they desire, until they start working with us. Because then you have a coach and the coach can look at what you're doing and how you're thinking and pointed out and be like, you know what, maybe if you change this, or you look at it a different way that he can make all the difference, right? It might be just that one thing that they're probably doing that the coach understands this is what's the problem. And once you fix that thing, boom, it automatically flips a switch, and then they become profitable really quickly. So that's why in this episode, I want to talk about the mental game, and really how we think about our trading as a whole. Because what I've seen is a lot of traders, they get bogged down in the minutia, they don't really look at their trading as the big picture. Right, they don't look at it from 10,000 feet above, and they're there in the forest, you know, they're looking at all the trees, and they can't see the clearing, they can't see the pasture, they can't see the big picture. And every single tree is a trade and all the trees and all the trades to them look the same. And they treat all the trades the same. So I want to talk a little bit about how I look at and think about my trading. Now to do so, we got to go back in time back to the future. No, back back to the past. Back to my youth when I was a little kid and I used to play this game called Mike Tyson's Punch Out. Right, it's on the Nintendo Entertainment System, which I think they make new ones now they don't make the old ones anymore, but they make the little mini versions travel versions. So this game is still around people still play it. Now I spent hours days probably the hundreds of hours if I'm truthful on that game. And if you don't know it's a boxing game, you know, like the fighting. Boxing, you know, the one guy fighting another guy. And if you remember, Mike Tyson was the heavyweight champion of the world and nobody could really touch this guy. I mean, the guy was was a monster monster like crazy crazy guy, right? So it is really a great metaphor because Mike Tyson is the market. Okay, truth of the matter is you cannot knock out Mike Tyson and you cannot knock out the market right? The market is just too big. So the market is Mike Tyson cannot come out and you're just this little itty bitty guy right we're just we're just at home traders right? We're just a little people. We're not even like big prize provisional trade Wall Street guys that have billions of dollars like those guys, they go against the market they might win we're just we're just little guy right? Even in the game your name was Little Mac and if you look at the game you were like about this big when Mike Tyson was like about this big so he was like 10 times bigger than you the gay and your day was even Little Mac so what about positive encouragement right up late i Big Mac know this Little Mac tiller, you're never gonna be able to knock him out. But you still want to win the match. Right? You still want to win the boxing fight. And the way that you do that is not by knockout. But you do it by points. And you in order to win the fight. Basically that means that you're going to be profitable for the year and you might be beat the market averages. So that is the goal. That is the overarching big picture. That's what we're looking at. We're looking at, hey, I want to win the match, I want to be profitable. And I want to

Do you have a problem with trading discipline, or not sticking to your trading plan, or not getting consistent results from your trading, or even getting stuck like a deer in the headlights when a trade goes bad. Let's go ahead and solve that right now. On the other side of the intro. All right, so what does brushing teeth have to do with trading successfully? Everything. But you didn't know that. Right? And it's the key to improving your trading, which I'm going to show you right here, right now. This is why we don't stick to our trading plan. Wait, you do have a trading plan, right? Because you don't want to be trading options without a proven trading plan. One that actually works and is proven to be profitable, not just something you saw on some random Youtube video with something that is actually tested with real money over several years in up markets down market sizes and markets everything and you know, hey, look, this works. Other people are doing it. Other people are using it, you need to do the same thing. If you don't have such a trading plan, contact us. And we can help you. Okay, go to our website, or email us or contact us here, leave a comment, do something we'll get to you, we'll get help, right, because we have these plans, we've been doing this. So if you don't have a plan, get a plan. Today, I want to talk about why we don't stick to our plans, why we don't stick to the rules. And there are many reasons. It could be lack of discipline, could be going with your gut, it could be your technical analysis telling you that the trade is going to turn around. I don't know, maybe a little birdie told you that is all going to be okay. Right? And on and on and on. There's so many different reasons why, you know, we're supposed to do something in a trade and then we do the opposite, or we don't do anything at all right? It doesn't matter the reason that's irrelevant. What matters is that this is the reason for what I call roller coaster syndrome. This is where you do well for several trades, you're going up the roller coaster of profit doing good, then all of a sudden you fall. And you give it all back and maybe even more, then you do it again. Then again, and hopefully you don't have two drops, right in a row, which could knock you out completely. And you're like, oh, man, this trading stuff doesn't work? Well, it's because you're not doing it right. So if you've been trading for a while and you're not consistent, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Now, if you're newer to trading, and you don't know what the roller coaster syndrome is, that's great. You're lucky and hopefully you never do as long as you follow what I'm about to tell you in this video. Okay, let's get back to brushing your teeth. How do you brush your teeth? How do you take a shower? How do you put your clothes on? I don't want it in my head. I'm not asking you for specifics. Okay. What I want you to do is realize that you do those activities the exact same way. Every single time. Every single day. Like clockwork, think about it. How do you brush your teeth? How do you take how do you how do you take off the toothpaste cap? How do you put it on thing what handy you use? Where do you go you go left to right right to bag you do the top top you do top first bottom first tongue first. What do you do? It's always done the exact same way. You're putting your pants on the the one leg always goes in first, whichever one you choose, but that one goes in first every single time. Why? Because you're used to doing it. Because it is a habit. Yeah. So look, our brains have tens of thousands of thoughts every single day. Right scientists have studied this and they get come up with the number, whatever, it doesn't matter what the number is. But what matters is that the majority of these thoughts, almost like 89% of them are the same every single day. And that's why we don't have brain overload. Right? That's why we can do things in a normal way over and over again, without having to think about it. Because subconsciously, the brain is working. And it's doing it is thinking, the brain is thinking, well, we don't realize, and those things happen. We make them happen with our body. So, you know, gonna get in the car, what do you do, sit in car, put coffee down, put seatbelt on, right on this way. Press, press on the brake, hit the little button that turns on the car, you do it every single time. So our brain handles all of that for you. You could probably put your car on blindfolded, because it has just become a habit, you've done it so many times. So what you need to do to improve your trading is to make your trading rules, a habit. Following the rules becomes a habit, no more thinking about it. Make it subconscious. I don't know what the subconscious is, maybe back here up here, I don't know. It's somewhere in your brain, make it go there make your rules go there. And less thinking, more trading by the rules. So to do that, right, to have it bec

Mark: Well, look, it's really it's a, it's a long journey. I've read your book, I've read many books, I've been in this game for a long time. It's very difficult to sum it up in literally minutes, I suppose. But after reading a book just recently, and listening to all your podcasts a lot lately, I've delved into a lot of it and taken many, many things out of each person's story, which I can resonate wholeheartedly with. But I probably got into Options back in 2006. And I've probably come and gone with it a lot. I've started and stopped, due to various reasons, obviously, life, I've got kids and family and work commitments and stuff like that. But it's always been, I suppose, a hobby. But trying to make that jump or trying to get into it. Full time is obviously difficult for lack of funds or lack of time and effort. I don't know, there's always seems to be something that comes up that stops me from progressing. Having said that, I'm a pretty committed person. I'm pretty disciplined. I've been doing it now for a long time. But like, if you look through him on the table here, I've got trading stuff sitting everywhere, notes. Mark: I've crunched the wheel so many times I've done the shiny diamond thing. I've gone from one program to another. I've spent numerous amounts of funds on various programs and different services such as yourself. I don't know this Option Genius has been around in my life, I suppose, on and off. So I don't know like I've all I'm a big advocate for what you say and what you do. I've wholeheartedly believe that I've been selling options for a long time I've done credit spreads, I've done strangles I've done butterflies, I've done covered calls, I've done a lot of those strategies, or centered around selling options. And I've been doing it for a long time. But for some reason, I just can't seem to break through the ceiling, I just cannot seem to be there to go from this hobby, like training interest that I seem to be involved with, to getting to that next level. I suppose I when I found out that we're going to do this call. Set last night I sat down I tried to write out things that would be good to discuss or to ask you. And I've got like all this paper sitting you have all these notes that I've made, as you would have seen in my email, it was quite lengthy. I think one of the assistants said all that email is probably the longest one I've ever received, that I really okay then. Allen: Like, you know, because we get, we get lots of emails every day and some people, right? Some people write two paragraphs, but when somebody goes in deep, and they really share their, you know, their soul pretty much. It's like, Hey, I've been doing this and this and this, and this, and I don't know what's going on, then, like we you can feel it when somebody is really, really wanting to make it work. And so those most of those get passed on to me. And when I read it, I was like, alright, you know, we need to we need to talk about this. Because if you've been doing this for years, then like, I have not doing my job. I've let you down in some way that because you know, you shouldn't still be feeling that way. I know. But it's not uncommon. You know, we come across many, many people that come to us and say, hey, you know, I've been doing this for a long time. But you know, it never clicked for me. But you will.. Mark: Yeah, I can see that. So many people that you talk to, you know, have the same they're trying and trying to trying to find the right system, the right setup the right, whatever it is just can't seem like I feel to break through that ceiling. Like you're stuck underneath the water. You're swimming hard. You're learning this, you're watching that you're reading this you're researching. You're looking at the charts to pair with analysis, paralysis, all that stuff. And I've made lots of trades. I've done lots of trading. I've been I've been I won't say successful because clearly we wouldn't be on this call otherwise, but I've made money, but I've also lost money. I've got scars, I've got all that stuff I've had I've had losses, but still here I am battling looking at all that stuff that you talked about in the book in that book really resonated with me there's a lot of stuff in there that I thought I can do this. I know I can do it. Why am I doing it? Why it's just what why does it elude me so much? Is it just a pipe dream and more and more just a duck on the water swimming and just never gonna get there? I don't know. Allen: So you know, when we when we got the email, when they forwarded to me, they asked me like, hey, what do you think the problem is here? Does he not know enough? And my answer to them was No, I think he knows too much. He knows too much. That's part of the problem. I'm just guessing here and I wanted to try to get to the root of it. But you know a lot of the times when so there's there's different things that you need. Everybody needs different things to in order to succeed in anyth

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

Do you have questions about trading? And about Options? Or maybe investing? Well, if you do, ask, and we'll get you an answer. So in our Facebook group, which is a public group, anybody can join, you can go there by going to freeoptionsgroup.com, FREE-OPTIONS with "s" group.com. You can go there. And there's a post called the post of 1000 questions. And really, the idea there is for you to ask your question and get them answered by somebody who actually trades. Because when you go online, you never know who's going to respond to you. Case in point, we got a question from Mark Baumgarten. And thank you, Mark, for your question. I'm gonna go and read that in a second. But, you know, Mark asked this question, and somebody responded to him and gave him the wrong answer, even in our group. So, yeah, you never know what answer you're gonna get. And you know, if he's gonna be accurate or not, so, you know, this post, I think it's a good way for you to get an answer. And like I said, you know, I'm making this to answer the question. So we're gonna get, do our darndest to get you an answer. One way or the other. You know, if we'll make a video about it, maybe we'll just shoot you a couple line email or message you on Facebook and say, here's the answer. But if you have any questions about trading, I'll again, can give you personalized investment advice. That's not our job, right? You have financial advisors and planners and Wealth Advisors for that. But if you have a trading question, then go ahead and post it in the program, or sorry, in the group there, and we will get you an answer. So here's my question. It says: "I have bought a leap call expiring about 24 months out and have been selling weekly calls on the leaps for the last six months. Has anyone had problems with this strategy? What are the pitfalls to watch out for? So great question. Basically, what Mark is describing is a, you can call it, it's called a couple of different names. "Poor Man's covered call", is one name, "Synthetic Covered Call" is another one. Basically, what he's doing is he's doing a covered call on a cover call is where you own 100 shares of stock, and you sell call options against it for the income, this is the same thing. But instead of having the 100 shares of stock, he's using a long dated meaning far from expiration call option. Now the one thing I don't know, Mark, is what strike your call option is at normally, with a poor man's covered call, you want to sell a covered call that is deep in the money, because you want it to not fluctuate in price as much because of the option, right? So options are not stocks, they do evaluate, they do go up and down due to volatility, the stock price will not do that as much. So there, it's definitely different. In some ways, the theory is the same, you know, you have an asset and you're selling options against that asset. In this case, it's a long call. So 24 months out, that's plenty of time, and you're doing weekly, so that's good. So you have, you know, four expirations every month, the idea here, and the goal is to get your money back on the long call. And if the stock goes up in value, hopefully that long call makes money. So you can sell that at a higher point as well as get your money back. And then I've seen people make 20, 30, 40% in a year on this type of strategy, compared to a covered call, which might make you know, 15, 20% in the same timeframe if the stock rises, so you can make more the benefit. And the thing that appeals to people is that you don't have to buy those 100 shares. So you have a greater percentage return because you have less money invested. And so this also helps people with smaller accounts. Now, you can also use margin and buy 50 shares, and then use margin to buy the other 50 shares to do it. But this works out too. I don't particularly I'm not a big fan of the synthetic covered call, because we never know what the stock is going to do. And especially in a market, you know, the cover call and the synthetic cover call are good strategies and bull markets, you know, when the stock is going higher. We are not in a bull market right now I don't know if the stock is gonna go sideways, it's gonna go up, we're gonna go down most likely, it's gonna go with whatever the market does. And my opinion is the markets probably gonna head sideways to lower from here, but it goes up and down and up and down and rallies and decline, so.. the thing is, you don't want to be called away. So you don't want your short call to get in the money, which is a problem. You don't want too much time decay to affect your long call. That could be a problem. As you know, the months go by and it gets closer and closer. Now you went out 24 months. So I mean, you paid a hefty premium for that. You paid a lot of money premium. I would look at that versus okay, depending on what the stock is, I would look at that because if there was a lot of volatility you might have overpaid, but I'm gonna assume

Allen: All right, everybody, welcome passive traders. I have one of my good friends with me today, Denny is going to be here. He's going to be talking about trading life in general, and everything that he's learned along the way. Denny, you know, we've, you've been in our programs for a little bit now we've seen your success. And I'm, we're friends on Facebook. So I see you with your posts from Hawaii, sitting on a beach house and all that and we're on the coaching calls, you're always you know, you're always making me jealous. You're always like, "well, I'm going to Hawaii next week, or I'm going on vacation. I'm going golfing". I'm like, Come on, man. So I'm glad that we finally got to talk, you know, thank you for thank you for taking the time to be out here and talk with us. And I can't wait to learn from you. Denny: Okay. Well, the way I you know, the way I originally got hooked up with you is I saw one of your marketing deals on the internet. And I thought, you know, well, you know, let's give this a look. And so I talked with Cory and and I said to her, hey, look, you know, I've got I said, I'd like an honest answer that if I come in and buy the program and everything, and I've got $10,000. Is it possible for me to make $2,000 a month on the $10,000? And she said, Well, we've got people doing it. She was very honest. You know, and then so so I got in on the oil deal. One. I think it's blank check trading is that was the oil is. And boy, I learned a whole lot. The first year, I was just sailing along making money hand over fist. And that was when oil was not very volatile. And it was just making, you know, moving sideways, which is perfect for if you want to trade oil futures, you know, it's perfect. Allen: Yeah. Yeah. All markets are our friend. Denny: And, and then all of a sudden, oil shot up. And I think it was November two years ago might have been three. Now I know I've been doing it quite a while. All of a sudden, I went in. And I looked and the market had dropped. And I and I was in a position where I was going to end up getting a margin call. So I liquidated my position was $4,700 that day, and I'll be damned the next day, boom, it pops right back up. And that was the day after Thanksgiving. And then on the next call, you talked about the Friday after Thanksgiving is not a very high volume deal. And so one big guy in there can make the market he can make it drop, you can make it rise, and I fell prey to that because I didn't know but you know, you can learn from your mistakes. And I made made plenty of them. But now I make money every month. Allen: That 4700, did that wipe you out? Denny: Out? No, no, I had 10 Okay. Okay, so I started all back over. And it took me it took me damn near a year to get it to get it back. And in the meantime, you had your program on stocks. Okay, so I signed up for that. And I fooled around with the stocks for a while and I went back to oil because to me, it's a little more passive where I can put a trade on and I will look at it once a week you know, and I feel comfortable with it. But then what happened is we got get them the next chapter Benny Alan COVID here. And my advertising agency that I own I do direct mail advertising for automotive industry. And I don't know if you've been reading but the car dealers don't have any new cars. Allen: Yeah, they don't need advertising. Denny: So, I my business the first year of COVID was down 2,000,400 and some $1,000 Right now, the second year is about 2.8 million and now we're into the third year of the car shortage and so far this year I'm down $1,976,000 From where my normal years would be so I went from a mid six figure income guaranteed down I collected my Social Security check with my wife, okay. And so I go okay, let's start fooling around with your knowledge with oil and with stock options and get yourself a little income so I took $25,000 out of our savings account and put it into my tasty works account and I make on an average trading two ETFs and oil and I just started doing spreads on weekly options in oil and that I've been doing okay on it but you got to watch that a little quicker because you'll, you can get caught up in a margin call on everything pretty quick on that. But since I have no other job, okay, I can watch it. You know, I just make sure that that when I go to the golf course on my daily trip I've got my phone with me. And I can hop in on the tasty works phone app and protect myself if I need to. But what I learned most from you was paid.. Allen: So how are you doing there? So you're like, Okay, so you Alright, so I'm following the story. Right? So you were you were learning like, you've been in our program, I think two years. So three, three, okay, three. So you learn how to do the oil you were doing great. And then you had one bad day where it crashed and you basically went back to zero and you had to start over? Right so that at least you didn't lose it you had you know you get back your gains

What is an accredited investor? How do I become one? And why do I want to become one? It's a great question. So let's talk about the why before we get into what it is and how you become one. So as you know, you know, we talk a lot about trading, we talk a lot about passive trading, investing in the stock market selling options. But the goal, the long term goal is to not be a trader. It doesn't make sense, right? Like, what are you talking about, the goal is not for you to be a trader for the rest of your life, unless you want to, right? Now, if you look at the passive trading manifesto, and the goals of passive trading, there are three freedoms that we're trying to accomplish. Financial freedom, time, freedom, and choice, freedom. And choice freedom gives you the choice of doing what you want, when you want. And if that means that you don't want to trade, then you don't have to trade. Right? Now, if you do decide to continue to trade because you want to, then that is perfectly fine. That's your choice and more power to you. But if you don't want to, then you shouldn't have to. So that's where this accredited investor comes in. Because the point is, for us to increase not only our monthly income, basically, you know, the more income you have coming in, when you have money coming in, that pays for all your bills, you can essentially retire and you have financial freedom. But we need to also increase our net worth, so that we can have other opportunities to investing, where we don't have to be active or you don't have to be trading, even though it's called passive trading, you're still doing it. Right? Now, it's a lot less active than day trading, or stock trading or any of that stuff. But you still have to still do something. There's nothing totally, totally passive, even, you know, regular passive investing is still takes time and energy and learning and all that other stuff, stress, a lot of it. But that comes with the territory. So the goal as the way I see it, and the way I'm trying to live it and I try to teach it to my students, is that we want to use trading as a very safe, but very quick way to get us to first financial independence, where we have enough money coming in from our assets that pay for all of our expenses. Once you get there, then you are not beholden to a job, then you're not both beholden to the economy, your recession doesn't matter, right? Because you have enough money coming in, you have a skill, you can go into the market, and you can extract money, at will. And that's what we teach. That's what passive trading is all about. But once you get to that point, you want to keep going further, and you want to become what's called accredited investor. So what is that? Well, an accredited investor, according the SEC, is someone who has either $1 million in net worth, not including their house. So if you're a millionaire, and you don't count your house, you're an accredited investor officially. Or the other thing is, the other criteria is that you've made if you're by yourself, you've made $200,000 In the last two years, and you're going to keep doing that. So your income is over $200,000 a year by yourself, or if you're married, it has to be 300,000 for the both of you over the last two years, and going into the future. Now, look at the numbers. If you're making $300,000 a year, and you're not worth a million dollars, that's a problem, you should probably work on that first before talking about whatever we're doing here, right, your your expenses are way too high, you need to worry about that, first get your debt down or get your build on or whatever it is. And then you know, get to that million dollar net worth requirement. Now again, we're not counting our primary residence. So if you have a business, if you have other properties, if you have cars, you've shoved jewelry, if you have notes or anything that you have anything valuable antiques, all that stuff counts in this million dollar net worth criteria, and it's basically up to you, you know, so if you think something is worth $100,000, even if you can't sell it, but it's still worth 100,000 You can't be crazy about it. You can't say well, you know this pen, I want a million dollars for this pen. No, that's not real, right. Not realistic. But if you have something that's illiquid, something that is valuable but illiquid, maybe it's like a baseball card collection or antiques or something like that, that you know, is worth money but only to the right buyer. You can still qualify that as an asset. Now why do we want to do this because there are certain investments that are only open to you if you are an accredited or above investor. So there's that accredited investor list and I are the criteria that I told you about. And then there's also a couple other criteria above that one is called qualified. The both of them are called qualified. They're called different things. But the step above accredited is 2.1 million in net worth. And then af

Hey there, passive traders How you doing? I got something really, really exciting for you today, if you'd like to have really, extra money, free money without having to do anything, that's what we're all about, right? Passive income, passive trading. This is really something I just came across this, I don't understand why I didn't know about this sooner. I just can't imagine all the money that I've left on the table over the years. I mean, I knew that this was happening. And I knew this was done. I just didn't know that us, individual investors at home guys, I didn't know that we could do this. And so I had to make this deal right away. And I had to get this information out there. So you could basically turn this setting on in your account and start making money today. Okay, that's how that's how cool it is. There's nothing to buy. There's nothing to do there. I mean, basically, it's, you have stock in your account, your broker will pay you extra money for having that stock in your account. That's simply what it is. So, I mean, let me just get into it. Okay? I'm flabbergasted. I'm speechless. No, I'm not, I'm talking. So I'm not speechless. But still, I'm really like, shocked. I call it the sticky to Wall Street stock Income program, because that's what we're doing. We're sticking it to Wall Street, we're sticking into the man. Now, look, this is our works. Normally, when we buy a stock, right? It goes up, we make money, that's what we want, you buy it, and then it goes up and you sell it or, you know, your passive trading. So you don't want to sell it, you do want to get dividends from it, you still want to sell options on it, and you want to make money off of it. You don't want to sell it ever, really, because it's just it's a it's an asset, they just want to cashflow. But this is another way to do that. So you buy the stock, it goes up, you make money. But if you think the stock is gonna go down, well, obviously, you can short the stock, right? And that's what hedge fund guys do. That's what Wall Street guys do. The big banks, the institutional traders, that's what they do all the time. They are shorting stock. Well, in order to short the stock, they don't own it, you can't short something you own right, because they would lose value and you own it. So that's bad. They instead they turn around and they borrow the stock from other brokers on Wall Street. So if they want to short a stock, they got to go to a different broker and say, Hey, I need this many shares this, I need this many shares this. And in order to do so they have to pay money, they actually pay interest to the broker that they're borrowing from. Now, if you go to your I know this, this works on Thinkorswim. If you go to the main page, where you type in the symbol, and you see the all the information, it'll tell you if the stock is easy to borrow, or hard to borrow. And that's what tells you how much volume there is and how much ability the hedges have to borrow this stock. Right? If it's easy to borrow, then they can go to any borrow and they can get it and they'll pay a lower interest rate. If it's hard to borrow, they have to pay a lot higher interest rate. Okay, so that's the really cool part. Because if we have that stock, we could lend it and collect that interest. That's right. So the hedge is they have to learn, they have to pay whoever they're borrowing their stock from the payment, it depends on the stock and how much they need to stop, right. If it's hard to borrow, they're gonna pay more. But any borrowing that they do, for us is really extra money. So yes, if you have stock in your account, it's just sitting there, you turn this feature on in your account, click, or I mean, there's no application, but you fill it out, and you get approved for this, your broker will take that stock from you whenever somebody wants to borrow it, and they will pay you interest. Now, the cool part is nothing changes in your account, nothing changes, you can still sell it whenever you want, you're not locked in. If there's a dividend, that money will still be given to you. You can sell options against it. The only requirement is that you own the stock 100% no margin. So if you own the stock 100% no margin. You can do this. Okay now, against the details a little bit, but here's what it's called. If you want to research it, you want to look it up, you want to call your own broker and find out more I think you should because it's like free money right? At Interactive Brokers. It's called the stock yield Enhancement Program, stock yield enhancement program, because that's basically what it does. They're giving you more money for owning it at other brokers like AmeriTrade, Fidelity Schwab e trade, it's called the fully paid lending Income program called the fully paid lending Income program. So you can either research it online or go into your account and search it or you just call up your broker and ask him make sure you get the pros and cons haven't wal

Allen: All right, passive traders, we have a treat in store for you today. Many of you know about the option continuum, which is basically, you know, our levels of breakdown of where you are as an options trader, you start with level one, you don't know anything. And then you get to level 10, maybe if you want to, which is option professional. And basically a professional means that you are so good at trading options, that you are now trading and managing other people's money and you're getting paid for it. Many of you have reached out to us in the past and said, Hey, I want more information on that. And we haven't really put it out there because I am not doing it myself. Right now, as a professional, I don't I'm not measuring anybody else's money. And so, you know, I'm not the best person to talk to about that. But we keep getting people and be like, hey, you know, I want to learn, I want to learn. So one of our members, Paul Ashcraft, has volunteered to join us today. And I want to thank you, Paul, for coming and helping out. A few a couple of months ago, I think in one of our groups, I think it was a passive group, where I had put in there like, Hey, I'm thinking about starting a hedge fund. So I'm thinking about going professional, right? And he reached out and said, hey, you know, I'm already doing it if you want to, if you want to talk and I can answer your question. So we had an amazing conversation, I learned a lot. And I was like, You know what, this would be really helpful for everybody else. So I asked Paul, hey, could you do it again? And we can record it this time? It was like, Yeah, sure, no foul. And so he's here, Paul, thank you. Thank you for being on thank you for taking the time to do this. Paul: Thank you very much. Pleasure. Allen: And you're Paul is a member of our of a lot of our programs. So passive trading formula, the blank check, and now the credit spread mastery as well. So you know, it's good to see that, hey, if you're a money manager, then you're continuously getting learning and learning new things to help out your students, or your clients, I guess. So. Well, tell me, why did you get into management? What was it that drawed you through that? Paul: Well, I sort of got tricked into it. I had a, I'm a CPA by trade, and I had a client who was becoming an NFL player agent. And he trusted me and wanted me to help him manage his people's NFL players money. So I started the licensing process at that time. And so that sort of tricked me into it. So that sort of fell apart. And then he wasn't getting more leads for what he was doing. So I basically continued since then, so Allen: Okay, so were you already trading on your own? Or before that? Or did you learn as you want to? Paul: Yeah, I've been trading, you know, for quite a while. Off and on. So yeah, I've had some experience of trading. Allen: Okay. So you are comfortable, you could do it? Paul: I knew I needed to learn, I do need to learn some more. But yeah, I feel like I could I knew enough about the world to do that. Allen: Okay. And so you are known as what is a RIA, a registered independent advisor? Paul: Right. That's correct. Allen: So that's one of the ways of managing money. What exactly is an RIA? Paul: It's basically a firm that is licensed by the FINRA basically, and you are licensed to where you can manage other people's money. Allen: And all RIAs, are fiduciaries, right? Paul: That's correct. Yeah. Allen: Right. Because a lot of people don't know the difference between a fiduciary and a non fiduciary. And so a fiduciary, if you don't know you are legally bound to do what's in the best interest of the client. A lot of these other companies that people think about when they're talking about money management, or Wealth Advisors, retirement advisors, all these words that they use, they have no license, or maybe they do have a license, but they're not a fiduciary. So they're not required to do what's best for the client. And so they can sell you a product that they get the highest commission on, even if it's not really a good thing, a good fit for you. So that's why.. Paul: Yeah one of the ways I deal with that fiduciary criteria is basically whatever I do for other people, I do for myself. Allen: Okay. Okay, interesting. So, what does it take to open an RIA? Paul: Well, if you want to legal structure and need, like, I have an LLC got a creative for that. And I have had to pass a serious 65 test, which you'd like an SEC test, and get to come up some kind of agreement you have with your clients that's approved by FINRA to sign them on as clients. Those are the basics you have to do. Allen: Okay, and like how long did it take you to go through all that? Remember? Paul: I'm gonna say, basically of six to nine months. Allen: Okay, and how long have you been? How long have you been an RIA? Paul: Since 2014, so roughly eight years. Allen: Awesome. Yep. Cool. And for those of you, you know, I'm going to repeat it later on, but P

One of my 12 month books is called the 80-20 principle by Richard Koch. Now, a 12-month book is one of the 12 books that I read every year. So every month, I'll have one of these books, read it, and then I'll implement. And these are books that have special lessons for me, stuff that I need to implement. Stuff that I want to work on, for the whole year. And what I used to do is, I used to read a lot of books I still do. I'm a Book Reader, I love reading books, I love reading, learning, but I don't implement as much as I should. So even though there's so many things in here, so many ideas, so many stories, so many, so many examples, I don't implement them in a way that it actually helps me. So I'm reading, re-reading, and I'm getting pleasure out of reading, but I'm not implementing, so it's not really making my life much better. And so I implemented this process where I would read one book, and then implement it for a month, and then read another one implement it at the end of the year, I go back to the first book, because there's probably more stuff in there that I can use. So if I finally finished one, I got everything out of it, then I'll replace it. But I've been on the same 12 books for a while now. Now I said one of those 12 books is the 8020 principle. And so the 8020 principle is something that I need to work on. And in fact, you probably all work on it. That's why I keep going through it over and over again. Now, this weekend, I was at the library with my kids getting them some books, and I came across this book, the 8020 manager by Richard Koch now, this guy's really milking this 8020 thing. I mean, he's he's gotten, I don't know, like eight or nine books on it, probably, I have I owe like three of them. And then he's got this way. And who knows how many more? So yeah, he's really honing in niching, down, right 80% of his income come from the 8020. So the 8020 principle is also known as The Pareto principle. And you've probably heard of that one before you, you kind of have an idea what I'm talking about. William Pareto was an Italian economist, who lived way back then, I don't know when he lived. I'm not a historian. So you can Google it if you want to end he discovered while doing some research that 80% of the wealth in Italy at the time was controlled by just 20% of the people. 20% of the families owned 80% of everything. That's pretty astonishing. And over time, other researchers, other scientists, whatever have discovered similar phenomena in just about all aspects of nature, and life. So for example, if you are a business owner, right, 80% of your profits will come from 20% of your products. Also, 80% of your sales will come from 20% of your customers. And on the flip side of that, 80% of your problems will also come from 20% of your customers, but usually not the thing 20% of customers are giving you revenue. If you have employees, 20% of your employees will be giving you 80% of your problems, right? And you know this to be true. So no matter what work you do, 80% of your results come from 20% of the tasks. Now, this is really counterintuitive, because we're told since we were born, that you got to diversify, you know, don't put all your eggs in one basket, you got to protect those eggs. Well, what if all the eggs are not worth protecting? What if there's a better way? Right? So like I said, Koch has written about this book, many books on this topic, and he has tons and tons of examples. But the best examples are ones to look at your own life, and see for yourself how the ratio works for you. So 80% of your good times - 80% of the fun is going to happen with just 20% of your friends. 20% of the people, you know. And in good times 20% People. Also, 80% of your fights are going to happen with 20% of the people you know, so good times, few people, bad times, different few people. So you make the call who you want to hang out with, right? It's up to you, and on and on and on. There's so many different examples in life that we can look at this. But then it gets even trickier if you go deeper. It's not just 80-20 Okay? But it can be 90-10 it can be 95-5, it can be even 99-1, just like the 1%, who now control 99% of the wealth in the world, my goal is to be one of them. So I'm not knocking this, but it's there. It's something we cannot hide from. So it starts with 80-20. And then it gets more and more and more condensed. As time goes by. And it has been this way, for generations, it's just an undeniable fact of life. Everything is not equal. And it never will be. I bet you didn't know that the supply to the markets as well. So in the 20 years, from 1990 to 2010. Got 20 years of data there, the S&P 500 index, grew an average of about 8%. A little bit a little bit down, but average 8% a year. Not Bad, right? But if you take out the gains of just the top 10 stocks, which is 5% of the market, 5% of the index, you take those out, the index was actually negative, on average of 3.3% every year. So you ta

I don't know if you're doing day trading, but over 74% of day traders lose money. Interesting stat actually thought would be a lot higher, probably is. Let me give the details. So the other day, I was talking on my phone to a friend and the word migraine came out. We were talking about her child that does he have migraines. It was just one or two times that the word migraine was used. The next day on my phone, I start seeing ads for migraines, migraine relief, migraine therapy. I'm like, What the heck is going on? You know, I haven't been to any migraine sites. I haven't searched for mi-- oh yeah, I mentioned migraines on the phone. So my phone is listening to me. And you've probably seen it. And it's just happened too many times to be a coincidence. The phones are listening to you. Mine is listening to me right now, you know, Alexa, Siri, all these guys. They're all listening. And then they're showing us ads based on the stuff we're talking about. Now, that is the future, that's how things are gonna happen in the future, right, we're gonna be thinking something, and there's gonna be some software, some program that's gonna be able to read our thoughts. And it's gonna show us a billboard with a thing that we're thinking about. So every car that goes by on the highway, will see a different sign on the Billboard, because of what they're thinking about. I don't know, it's gonna be crazy. But so I bring this up, because now I don't do day trading, I'm not interested in day trading, I lost money doing it, I don't want to do it, I found my niche. But as a trader, you know, we talk about trading all the time. And so I see ads for all different types of companies, option buyers, forex guys, day trading companies, all this stuff. And I keep seeing, I kept seeing this ad from a company called Warrior Trading, They're day traders and the main guy, he looked like a really nice guy. Tall, skinny, long ponytail glasses, could be like, your average community college or university professor. Nice guy, you know, a little hippie looking guy. But he looked like, he was trustworthy. And he was talking about how he made millions of dollars doing day trading, and it doesn't take a lot of time. And it's super easy. And he'll teach you everything on his webinar and stuff like that. Now, I never looked at it. But by the the numbers that he was throwing up, and the amount of ads that he was running, obviously, he's got a pretty big company, and they're got a lot of students and people are going to it. So it turns out last month, in 2022, or earlier this year, the FTC went after this company for several issues. The company has since settled. And they have agreed to pay a $3 million fine to the government, to the FTC, because of a few different things. Number one, they were teaching people how to avoid the $25,000 rule. So there's a day trading rule that if you have less than 25,000 in your account, then you can only do two or three trades a day. And then once you get classified as a day trader and you have to have more money in your account, because it's more risky, right day trading is actually riskier than regular investing. And so if you become a day trader, then you have to have a lot more money. Well, they were teaching people how to avoid that rule. So that was strike one. Strike two is the claims that they were making, you know, basically, he had a claim that "Oh, how I turned $500 into a million dollars, I'll teach you how to do this with very little time and you don't need a good education. You don't need this and that. And the claims, according to the government were very exaggerated, and they weren't for average people. So it's not true that you can learn to day trade if you're an idiot. It's not possible for you to day trade if you only have 15 minutes a day, it's not possible to profitably day trade by following your rules if you haven't been doing this for 50 years or some stuff like that, right? Now our company we make claims as well. And then we make similar claims. Now, the FTC sometimes they go after certain companies, the bigger companies and they try to make an example out of them so other people like us get the hint and stop making exaggerated claims. So hopefully our claims are not exactly that, we try to make them not exaggerated. But like I said, you know you guys see the ads you guys see that you guys get the emails, most likely you get emails from lots of different option guys. And there are crazy crazy crazy claims that are being made. You know, oh how you can make 100% in your underwear in two minutes every day. You know in the morning when the open is crazy, crazy stuff. Hopefully ours are not that crazy. Yes. You know, we tell you that we can make 10% in a month and we tried to. Every month every month, and that's 120% a year, which is a lot, crazy a lot. So people won't believe that. But if we can show that we can do it, then we can say that. And so you know, that's why we have to do it. But all of our

Let's talk about the Fed and more inmportantly how to make money from the Fed. How do we as passive traders, make money when the Fed is going to make an announcement? So a little bit of history, a little bit of background and when you're watching this, but today, while I'm recording, this is May the Fourth 2022. And today, we just had a Fed announcement, the Fed just came out made an announcement, they raised rates, they raised rates last month, they raised them again, and I want to talk to you about how the markets performing and how we could have made money off it. So now you got to understand in the past-- last several years, markets have been doing great. The Fed was not important, right? The Fed had their meetings, they did their announcements, they raised rates, a load rate, whatever they mostly are just lowering rate didn't raise that much over the last like, say 10 years. But the Fed was really important. We wouldn't even notice as traders, when there was a Fed meeting today. Oh, okay. What happened? Oh, yeah, cuz nothing in the market habit, nothing changed didn't make, you know, Marty was paying attention to what the Fed was doing. So we as traders didn't have to pay that much attention. That changed in 2022, when the Fed said, Hey, we are going to raise rates, and we're going to do it aggressively. That changed the whole ballgame. Everything is different. Now. 2022 marks the time when the stock market returns back to normal. This is gonna be a normal stock market year normal trading year, where we go up and down and up and down. And it's not just straight up anymore, because rates are zero, or very, very low or the keep going low. Okay. So in the past, since the last meeting, when they raised rates a quarter point, the Fed has been talking how the Chairman has been talking, the other governors have been going out and been talking, they put out articles, they put out interviews, they've gone in speeches, and they said, Hey, we're gonna raise rates 50 points. In this next meeting, which was today, right, I'm gonna raise, we're gonna raise 50 points. And they actually said it. And they've been telegraphing everything that they're going to do up till now. And up till now, I think the Fed myself, I think the Fed is doing a great job. We do have inflation, I get that. But those were things that were not in their control, right? You cannot control the COVID day, they cannot control the not having enough cars on the road. They cannot control the supply chain and the lack of truckers in California to unload all the chips and they can't control that. So obviously, yes, there's going to be some kind of invasion, some prices are gonna go up, and then they'll even out and maybe they'll come down or whatever. But they figured out hey, we need to raise rates. Cool. Awesome. Got it. So the raising rates couldn't be zero forever, right? So now they're raising rates, they told everybody, Hey, we're gonna go 50 cents, at half a percent point 50 basis points, or half a percent, we're gonna go up. And eventually, we want to get to two, two and a half. And so today, they made an announcement that said, Hey, we're raising 50 cents, then Powell came out, he answers the questions. And he said, Yeah, hey, you know, inflation is there. But it might be peaking, you know, it might be stopping, or we might not, we're gonna raise 30 points this meeting, and we're gonna raise 50 points next meeting. And then we're going to try to get to that to two and a half point, range. And we'll see how it goes. Because more than a month out more than 60 days, we really can't predict what's going to happen. So we have to go month by month and and see what happens. Because that makes total sense, right? Sounds like a smart answer. Right? He's not he's telling you what they did and why. And he's telling what they could do next. But later on, after that, he's not saying anything, say, Oh, well, that's a check to see, we'll have to see. So kind of leaving the market on edge a little bit. But still, you know what's going to happen? You know, what he's going to do, and you know what the target is? So he's telegraphing, he's basically giving you the roadmap and saying here, this is what we're going to do, there should not be any surprises, right? So you think, okay, he already told us what he's going to do. And then he did what he's going to do. Oh, that concept, right? Somebody actually lives up to his word. He did what he's going to do. And so the stock market should not have really done anything. It should not have been a non event, because everybody knew is already baked into the price. But what happened to the stock market today? Well, it's up over 120 points. The s&p 500 was almost 3%, almost 3%. It's about to close right now, in a couple of minutes. 3% On a day when you already knew what was going to happen, because he had already told you now if you don't believe him, and a lot of Wall Street obviously didn't believe him. Maybe they were e

Hey, it's Allen again, from Option Genius. And today I learned something that I want to share with you. Over this weekend, this past weekend, I attended virtually a conference. And it was an investment conference on basically it was on funds. So how to, it was for people who want to have a fund like hedge fund or a real estate fund or crypto fund at all, there's so many different types of funds. And so they put all the people together in a room and they had speakers come and talk about the different things that they're doing and how you can do it, and how you can get investors to give you money and how you can build your track record and all this kind of stuff. So currently, I am thinking about doing that. And so I went there, and one of the speakers was a guy by the name of John Pennington, you can look him up John Pennington, he's probably a billionaire, or if not, he's worth several 100 million dollars. About a year ago, he took his company public, they were a fund, they were a real estate fund. So they were using investors to give them money. And then he would go out and buy real estate and do loans and stuff like that. And they made it to build it up pretty good—several billions of dollars of assets. And then they took the company public. And he was the I believe he was the president or the co-founder, one of them and then he retired. So now he has a lot of time on his hands. But he's still a very smart guy, because you don't build up a company and go public, you know, and make millions or millions of dollars if you're not a smart guy. So he took the stage. And he talked about a couple of different things. One of the things he talked about was he what he calls the Bitcoin cage. Now, I want to give him complete credit for this because I hadn't thought about this. This is his thing. I don't know if he got it from somewhere else. But he brought this in spoken to everybody. And it was very interesting. So I'm telling you this not because we're going to be making money, I will not be selling options on Bitcoin or anything like that. But I want to also show you how other people think and how when you're investing, you need to be looking two or three steps down the road, to really understand what is going on in the markets. It's not just hey, I want to buy this stock is gonna go up and sell puts because it's going up. Yes, that's just kind of what we do. Right, simplicity wise, but long term, we have to also know what's going on. So Ray Dalio, the guy who has the biggest hedge fund in the world is another guy, he has written several books. And he's been talking a lot about the reserve currency, as the dollar is currently the reserve currency of the world, meaning that most of the trade around the world is done in dollars. So that's very, very, very, very, very important for the United States. And if they stopped being the reserve currency, the dollar stops being the reserve currency, it's going to be very negative for our economy, our country, our debts, borrowing money, all that stuff, taxes are gonna go up all kinds of crazy stuff is gonna happen. And at this point, China really wants their currency to be the reserve currency. They don't want the dollar, they don't like the dollar anymore, and Russia is trying to get everybody off the dollar, as well. So it's gonna be interesting, the next 1520 years, see what happens with that, but call him John, John Pennington, the guy who's talking. According to him, the Fed-its main mandate there number one mandate is to keep the dollar the reserve currency. That's what he says is that their most important goal, their most important objective is to do that. Now a few years ago, nobody ever heard of Bitcoin, right? But bitcoin is billed as a currency is that's where it's supposed to be used to buy stuff with itself stuff with it, right now, because of the US tax laws, it's not really a currency, right? Because you pay taxes on it, every time you sell it, every time you buy something, you paying taxes, you got to record all that stuff, that's crazy. So until they get rid of that, it's never really going to be a true currency. But still people are using it to buy stuff with. And so it's gaining more and more traction. And it's unregulated by any government. So that's the appeal to it, right? And there's no one government that can take away your Bitcoin or and they actually found ways they can, but technically, you're not supposed to do that. And so the federal government, obviously, you know, there'll be the they got smart people that work in there, they'd be like, well, you know, this Bitcoin thing, it might take over as the reserve currency of the world, and they're going to replace the dollar, that's not gonna be a good thing. And so the Fed is thinking, okay, so how do we stop that? How do we not allow that? So before I tell you how they did that, let me give you a little bit more background. In the 2000s JP Morgan was manipulating the price of gold. Yes. JP Morgan, t

Today I wanted to talk to you about the trader's journey. At least he that's what I call it. I like to learn about marketing. I don't know, it's just one of my things. I just I enjoy marketing. And I think it's because it's a lot about psychology. And so even in trading, you have to understand Psychology because, you know, people are what make markets and so when people are reacting or behaving a certain way, if you understand it, then you can profit from it. Right? So in marketing, one of the things that I've been learning about recently is something called the hero's journey. Now, the hero's journey is a common.. now it's common way to tell stories. So whether it's a movie or a book, most likely the most, you know, the most famous movies, the most famous books, the ones that you really enjoy, they follow this trajectory, this story arc, which is called the hero's journey. Now, basically, what it means is that there's obviously a hero, right, and there has to be a hero in every story, cannot be vague, it has to be very clear who the hero of the story is. Secondly, the hero has to want something, right, it just can't be about a guy just going about his daily life, because that would be boring. And we can all do that ourselves. So the hero has to want something. And then the problem occurs that there is a problem or a blockage, that is stopping the hero from getting that thing, right? So there is something that he needs to go or do or overcome, or there's people in the way, and then there is usually a guide. So a person or a tool or something that helps the hero. Now this is kind of like the Obi wan to Luke, or the Dumbledore to Harry Potter, right? There's, there's somebody that's guiding them along the way. And then at the end, the climax happens when the hero achieves his goal, or sometimes doesn't, right. And a lot of times in the more deeper stories, the thing that the hero has to overcome is external, which means that he has to actually do accomplish something or beat somebody or win something. And then there's also an internal problem that he has to overcome. So from the beginning of the story, to the end of the story, the hero has changed has grown as a person, because he had to overcome something internally, in order for him to get to the end and achieve his external goal. Okay, so now in the traders journey, obviously, we have you, you are the hero, you are the star of the show, not me, it's you. I know we do the podcast, and I talk about my own exploits or whatever. But in reality, it's all about you, the trader, the hero of our story, and there has to be something you want. Right? So what is it that you want? Now in order for us to have a successful hero's journey for you, you have to know very clearly and specifically what it is you want? Is it that, hey, I would like to make X dollars per month, for whatever reason, or I want to make enough money from trading that I can quit my job and retire early. Or is it hey, I want to buy a new Lamborghini. And I need, I don't know how much they are. But you know, maybe like $2000 or $3,000 a month to pay for this Lamborghini, or I want to pay it in cash, or I want to be a billionaire. Or a multimillionaire, I don't know, I want to start my own foundation, my own charity, and I want to be worth millions of dollars so that it lasts for hundreds of years, whatever that is, whatever that thing that you want. If you don't know it, and you're not clear about it, then we're gonna have a lot of trouble on our journey. Okay, so step number one for you to have a very successful hero's journey is to know what you want specifically Okay, so now, after that comes the guide, like, "Hey, Hi, I'm Allen, I'll be your guide on this traders journey. I'm not the hero you are, I'm just going to help you guide you along the way". Because normally times the "guide" has some special information, some special skills, maybe he's done the journey before, right? He knows the pitfalls. He knows the traps. He knows where to write the right turn left, turn all that stuff. So in case I'm going to be your guide, and I appreciate you listening to this podcast and letting me help you along on your journey, then what is it that's stopping you from your destination? That's what we have to figure out as well. And it's not as simple as oh, Allen I need more money. No. I mean, I could give you a million dollars tomorrow, but you wouldn't know what to do with it. Right? So the issue is that we need to figure out a path or a way to get to your goal that is systematic, and can be replicated, right? So that it can be done over and over and over again, it's not just a one time fluke, we don't want to just give you a lottery ticket. No, here's $10 million. And it's going to be gone in winter, right? It's something that we build over time. And we get because the internal issue also comes out, right? If you're just given money, you don't change, it's too easy. But if you grow the money, if you learn a

Vince couldn't trade like he wanted to because he was a commercial pilot and it is hard to put on a position and not be able to monitor, adjust, or exit when you are flying across the world. So we started with our Blank Check Oil Options program....and for 2 years...Vince has not has a losing month! Listen in to hear his amazing story and how we accomplished this. JOIN OUR FREE PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://optiongenius.com/alliance Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps. Thank you!

Episode 4 of 4. In this last episode of the series, Allen helps you understand what level your trading is at on the Option Continuum and exactly how to move up to the next level. Make sure to listen to the episodes before this one to catch up. JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://optiongenius.com/alliance Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps. Thank you!

Episode 3 of 4. In this series Allen help you understand what level your trading is at on the Option Continuum and exactly how to move up to the next level. 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. Thank you!

Episode 2 of 4. In this series Allen helps you understand what level your trading is at on the Option Continuum and exactly how to move up to the next level. Make sure to listen to the episode before this one to catch up. So now that you know where you are, right? And you have an idea of how many levels there are ahead of you, I have some steps I can take you from one level to the next. And then I have some more steps that can take you from any level to move you along. So let's go through those. I mean, if you want, you can take screenshots of these. Level one, if you're at level one, if your Option Clueless, you know, very simple, read the passive Trading Book that we gave you, that's going to help you a lot. Get familiar with stocks and options, you know, start watching the financial media starter, covering what the words are, and try to make sense of it. And then we do have a reading list at the website OptionGenius.com/readinglist. So that's a reading list for selling options specifically. So if you want to get into options, those are some of the books that I recommend, they'll get you started, and basically just get more information, just gathering information. Okay, that's the one thing, the first thing. Option level two - options scared, here, what I want you to do is go ahead and open an account, you don't have to fund it, just open the account, go through the process, start creating what I call the watchlist. Now, the watch list is a list of stocks and ETFs that you particularly would like to watch, in particular like to trade. So if there are some companies out there that you're really interested in, add them to your watchlist, you know, and start watching them, start seeing how did their stock behave? You know, if you're working for a company, then that definitely should be on your watch list. Pay attention to the stock, how does that stock behave? You know, if you eat out like I do at fast food, I know everything about fast food, I know almost all the restaurants, I know how they're doing, I know what items are selling or not. It's just something with me. So a lot of the fast food companies, they're on my watch list, then you want to learn the basics. And you'll find the basics in the reading list. You know, you'll learn the jargon, you'll learn what is a put, what is a call, how does it work? Why do we sell the why do we buy stuff like that? And then number four, really, you got to know why that thing that we did in the last session, really, really ask yourself dig deep, you know, the deeper you go the more times you you ask yourself that why question - it gets really emotional. And I've seen people do it. And they've just been crying because they finally understood something about themselves that they didn't know before. Because we think oh yeah, I just wanna make more money. No, it's not the money. It's never about the money, there's always something more deep, more mental, more emotional. That's why we're doing this. And if we don't understand that, then we don't we don't follow through. Level three is option confused. So this is where you have an account, I want you to start trying to put on some trades. And these are virtual trades, paper trading. So you're putting on trades you're putting on, you know, maybe you buy some stock, or you sell an option, you buy an option, just seeing how it works. And then you need to list out all the questions that you have, right? Everything that doesn't make sense to write it down on paper, don't just think, oh, yeah, I got to figure it out, write it down on paper, look for the answers. And then either ask us if you can't find them. Okay, that's how it's gonna get you to the next level. The next level is option curious. Which, right here, you're going to be trading smaller trades, on stocks that you already own, or that you would like to own. So here is where I want you to actually put money to work. And maybe you put $500 in a trade, maybe put $1,000 into trade or even less 250. Sometimes, you know, and you're doing small trades, to get your feet wet, to go through the process to understand, hey, this is not as scary as I thought it was going to be. You know, if you just do it over and over and over again, it breaks down those barriers. And you'll be like, Oh, okay, I got this, this is simple, I can understand this. And then you want to keep a trade log. And this is just for everybody. Keep a trade log of all of your trades. Now I do it on paper, I have a folder here with me. And I have my trades going back for a decade. And I write them all down on paper. And I have some of them on spreadsheets, but really I like to have them on paper. And then at the end of the year, I haven't done it this year and I am to. But at the end of the year, I go back and I look at each trade. And I look at the ones that I didn't do well on the ones that I screwed up on. And that's how I learn. Because you don't learn when you do a positive trade. You're like, oh, yeah, I did

Episode 1 of 4. In this series Allen help you understand what level your trading is at on the Option Continuum and exactly how to move up to the next level. 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. Thank you!

Hey there, it's Allen from Option Genius and I wanted to share a thought with you that has really made a huge difference in my life. I can't take credit from this, I learned this from the guy who, well, he didn't even create it, but he's making it famous. And he wrote a book on it called the gap and the gain. So if you want to, if you want to learn more about this concept, that's the name of the book, the gap and the gaing and basically what it is, it's a simple way to change how you think about yourself, and your accomplishments and your future. And so, you know, for me, and I'm getting little personal here, I always thought growing up that I was a big deal, you know, little bit arrogant. And I always thought, hey, I'm special, I'm above average, I'm really smart, I can do things, I have huge potential, I have an amazing potential, I can be whatever I want, I can accomplish anything I want. And it was true. And I think it's true for a lot of people now, you know, I mean, especially if you have all the advantages of growing up in the West, and, you know, there's unlimited opportunity. So if you're watching this, and if you're a trader, then you know, my God, you know we don't have too many things to complain about. Right? We could, but we shouldn't be because there's people way worse than us. So anyway, the my thinking was that, you know, I made all these huge goals for myself first, it was, you know, by the time I graduate high school, I'm going to be a millionaire. That didn't happen. So then I was like, alright, well, I'm gonna graduate college, I would have been a millionaire. That didn't happen. Oh, by the time I turn 30, I would have been a millionaire - that didn't have any there. Okay, and then later on, you know, things out better and things have settled, but then I realized that, okay, you know, it's like, Man, I don't want to make these such big goals anymore. You know, because I started, I started getting beaten up a little bit, you know, it's taking so long my goals aren't, I'm not achieving my goals. And so I started lowering my expectations. And I remember one time I was in a mastermind group, and the idea was, you know, what's, what's your number? How much? How much do your net worth you want to be. And my goal was 2 million. I was like, you know, if I can have a $2 million net worth, and I know that I can easily make 10% on that every year, and I can live off $200,000. So that was it. That was my goal at the time. And then when I got there, the goal changed. And it got bigger, right? So then it was, you know, like 5 million. Then when I got there, I was like, Okay, now my net worth goal is even bigger, and even bigger, keeps growing. It's like a never ending thing where you get your goal. But then you always want more, because well, we're human. And that's normal. Right? I remember when, when I was first starting out trading, my goal was I want to have $100,000 trading account. When I got that, then it was oh, now I need a $250,000 trading account. Then it was like, oh my god, wouldn't it be awesome if I had a $500,000 trading account, and then a million dollar trading accoun? And I think it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. As soon as you hit your goal, you're now your your thinking is expanded, and you're like, oh, man, I want more, I want more. And the thing is that, that goal keeps moving. Right? That end desire, that end thing that we want, it just keeps moving, moving, moving, like kinda like the horizon, like when you're walking, you know, you see, oh, I want to go there to the horizon. But then you keep walking, walking, walking in that goal, the horizon just keeps moving further and further, it is a the more you go, the further further it goes. So you never get to the horizon. And for a lot of people, especially like me and others, it can cause a lot of disappointment, and self doubt and pain, being "Oh, man, I never get my goal", you know, and then you start comparing yourself to other people. It's like, "Oh, man, he got to the goal so much faster than me. And he's stupid. And I'm smart, and how come he got it? And I didn't?", you know, all kinds of self doubt self talk about, you know, what was wrong with me and why I can't do it and all this kind of stuff. And so, you know, I've suffered from this for a long time, cause depression cause serious doubt. And it really hurt my trading. It hurt my business, it hurt. My relationships hurt a lot of different things in life. And we don't we don't even realize how much our thoughts of ourselves are limiting us. Right? And so I read this book, and in the book he talks about, well, you know, this is very common. It's very common for people who are aggressive and highly motivated, and they want to achieve things they want to grow, they want to accomplish things, for them to make these big goals and then keep looking at themselves, comparing themselves to the end result from where they are now. Right? So if I look at myself where I'm at

Allen: All right, welcome, everybody. Today I have a very special friend with me, I want to let you know that she is a..I mean, she's been doing amazing, since she got started with trading with us. And the thing that stood out for me was that when she, she was going through our credit spread Mastery program, she did not attend any of the coaching calls, which most of the students think that's like the the highlight of it, because it's one on one coaching, but she did not attend any of them. And it was because that she works a full time job. And you know, at a very stressful I guess, manner of stressful, but it's a very important job for the government. And so she was working full time, she takes care of her family. So she does not like she had a lot of free time to do this stuff. And she's also in a different time zone in Hawaii. So take all those three things together. And it's like, wow, if she can do it, you know, I think everyone that has excuses, it just goes out the window. And I think it goes to show that when you want to do something when you really have a desire that you can figure it out, and then she's gonna tell you how well she did. But you know, I'm very proud of her. She did amazing. And so with that, you know, Lori, aloha. Lori: Thank you for inviting me here. Allen: No, it's wonderful. I'm glad to get you on here. You know, for whatever reason, trading is more male-dominated. And so whenever we see a female in it, it's like, wow, this is awesome. You know, and I think we need more females in the in the trading space. And we do, I do find it that females do trade better than men for whatever reason. You know, like, like, I remember when I was learning how to trade originally, and I got some back testing software. And then my wife would come and ask me, Hey, what are you doing? And I'm like, Oh, look, I'm doing this strategy now. And she, she'd be like, oh, you should do this. And this, and I'd look at her. I'm like, "you know, I just spent like the whole, you know, six weeks learning this thing, and you just come and you just go Blah Blah Blah and tell me what to do. No, it doesn't work that way". And she goes, 'Oh, yeah, let's try it". And I'm like, What do you mean? She goes, Well, you have a testing software, right? I'm like, yeah, she goes, all right. You test it your way, all test it my way. And because I had explained it to her, and I was like, you know, this is a like, I don't know what I think was a credit spread. I was like, you know, this is the trade and we want to just pick where the stock is not gonna go. You know, we don't have to pick where it's going. We have to pick where it's not going, and then make a decent profit. So I think that was the basic intro I gave her. And we tested it for like six months or so. And she beat the pants off of me. And she's like, Oh, this is easy. I don't understand why you hate it. Why can't you make more money doing it? Oh, my God, I was about to cry. But no, but still. So Lori, is your, are you married? I've never asked you before. Lori: Yes, I am. We kind of celebrated our 19th anniversary. Allen: Oh, awesome. Congratulations. Yeah, you don't look that old. Does your husband trade? Lori: Oh, he is actually a financial advisor. But oh, yeah. But his is mostly, you know, mutual funds. You know, trying to preserve capital for his clients and everything. And I wanted to do something that, you know, generated, you know, consistent cash flow, something that eventually would replace my, you know, salary that I get from my 9-5 job. Allen: Right. So what does he think about options in the way you're trading? Lori: He doesn't want to touch options. You know, didn't want to, you know, hey, don't go Forex, don't do options. Don't do crypto, you know, he's, he's pretty much the traditional, hey, let's do mutual funds. He doesn't even do individual stocks, either. It's more of a whole portfolio type of approach that he takes. Allen: Oh, wow. So yes, I can imagine the discussions you guys have had in the past. It's interesting, because when we do have a lot of clients, and they come in, and they're like, Yeah, you know, my wife really, really, she hates this stuff. Like, she won't let me do it. Or she, she doesn't she lets me do it. But you know, like, it wasn't an easy conversation. Oh, wow. Okay. So let's just start off, you know, how have you been trading? How's it going? How your results? Lori: Actually, it was because of your program. It's the first time I've been consistently making money. And I think a lot of it is because you provide the structure. And you know, when you were talking about, hey, there's not many women, and a lot of times they're better traders. I kind of equated my husband when he coaches basketball with the kids and stuff. He said, he always found that the girls did better than the boys because the girls would focus and master the fundamentals more than the boys would. The boys always want to do the trick shots and you know, be all

Hey, this is Allen from option genius. And I am coming to you today from Galveston, which is a beach. So I drove down here today took day off, you know, just hanging out, get some time to think, enjoy the weather. It's not that hot, it's not that cold. But then take a look at this when I get here. This is what it looks like. All foggy, everything was fine. The whole day, everything - the whole road here was fine. It took us about an hour and a half to get here. Everything was fine, good here, and it's all foggy, you can barely see too far in the distance. But that's okay, because that gives me time to shoot you a quick video. And today what I wanted to ask you was are you treating your trading as a business? Or are you treating it as something else? Now, a lot of folks when they talk about their trading, you know, they compare it to their job. It's like, oh, how much do you want to make? Well, I want to make as much as I'm making my job. So they compare trading to their job. Now in the job, you have a performance review, right? So the company manager, whatever the boss tells you how you're doing you personally. And if you're doing well, if you're doing badly, it's all on you. And so if you compare your trading to your job, and you say, Oh yeah, this is my job, this is my second job, then it reflects on you, your results reflect on you. So what I want you to do instead is I want you to think about your trading as a business. Now a business in corporate speak, right? If you incorporate, you are not your business, you might own the business, but the business is a separate entity. Right now, I'm not telling you to go out and form a corporation for your trading - that's a separate topic. But I want you to think of your trading as a business. Now, you might have heard the statistics right from the SBA, most companies go out of business within the first few years, almost 95% of them go out of business in the first 10 years. Now option genius has been around for 10 years, or more than 10 years, I think 1314 years now. So we must be doing something right. So that's good. I'm happy about that, that we survived. But when you think of your trading as a business, you understand that not everything goes smoothly, not everything goes perfectly. Right. Now, for example, at Option Genius, we might have a new marketing campaign. And we might launch it and I cost a bunch of money. And I have really high hopes and be really excited about it and it falls flat and it doesn't do anything. Every people hate it doesn't work. We lose money. Ah, man, it's disappointing. But it's not a personal failure. Right? It's something that we tried, that did not work. So big difference mentally, versus "Oh, my God", attaching it the results to yourself personally, versus "Oh, it was something else that we tried, and it did not work. Now everybody knows that a business. There are ups and downs, right? There's yours are you make profit, and there's years that you don't make profit. And in trading, we seem to forget that. We seem to think that we should always be making money, we seem to think that we should always every year should be profitable making money. But in the long run, it's not like that. And so if you think of it as a business, if you have a losing year, that's okay. Right? Because that happens. Maybe something happened differently this year in the economy or whatever that caused your business to lose money. That's okay. Business is still found sound, the the foundation of the business, it's still sound, we're not going to just throw the business away because it lost money. Especially if you'd lost money for a whole year. Right? We'll make it back. We have that confidence. Now, most entrepreneurs and then I think of us small time traders as entrepreneurs, because, you know, unless you're a professional managing other people's money, then you might be like, you know, a big CEO of a Fortune 500 company or whatever, you know, bear yourself to that. Well, most of us, I can compare us to entrepreneurs, you know, scrappy, hardworking grinders, right? We really we enjoy the grind and entrepreneurs really enjoy the grind, they enjoy startup phase, they start, you know, bootstrapping, where you learn, and you try new things, and you see what works and what doesn't work and you adapt, and you overcome. And you really learn from every single mistake. Now, for a lot of entrepreneurs, the confidence that comes from success. So for example, if you're talking to a rich person or a rich business person, they are not confident because they have a lot of money. And this might be counterintuitive, having a lot of money does not give you confidence actually brings you depending on how you got the money, it can actually cause you a lot of anxiety, because you're worried about not losing the money, if you don't know how to make it, right. If it was just given to you, then your whole thought process is I can't lose it, I can't lose it, I can't lose it. Beca

Ex-Financial Planner and 20+Year Trader, Kevin, talks about how to manage your trading and lessons he has learned along the way. Allen: Today I'm going to be talking with Kevin, who is now a good friend. I've known him for a few months now. And me came into the option genius world a little while back. And he has been a trader for a while. He's done lots of different things worked in the public sector worked in the private sector, very smart man, very intelligent. He keeps me on my toes with the questions that he has. So it's always wonderful. It's always helpful to the, to the other students, because, you know, they get the high level thinking of the questions that he asked, they get the answers to, as well. So thank you for that, Kevin, and welcome to the show. Allen: It's been a pleasure to have you yeah, like I said, you know, you keep me all you kept me on my toes the whole time. So it's like, this is really good, you know, because.. Kevin: You're actually not the first person who has told me that. So that's part of what I do. Allen: Yeah, I think every class needs one person like that. Do you know, and then as a teacher, it kind of, it makes you feel like, hey, you know, somebody is listening. And, you know, you keep pushing the envelope. So it's like, okay, if I don't know something, I gotta go figure it out. Like, yeah, I know, I do that one thing. But why do I do that? I don't know. Let me go and see if you're gonna make it. Because sometimes we've been doing it for so long. It's like, you know, it's just second nature. I just do it and do and do it. And then you're, you know, you and a couple others are like, Hey, Allen go back, "why did you do that?" I'm like, I don't know. I just does the way I've always done it. Let me figure out why we did it that. Kevin: It becomes instinctive and second nature. And sometimes, we forget why we do some of the things that we do. So it's always good to have somebody you know, especially when you're teaching to ask those types of questions, so that you can help other people understand because you've been added, obviously, a very, a lot longer than I have, and other students. Allen: Mm hmm. But you've been trading for a while. So tell me, how did you get started in trading, investing all that stuff? Kevin: Well, I've owned businesses pretty much my whole entire life. And I started, I actually got into investing when I was very, very young. And so it all started with putting out a financial plan that I wanted to be financially independent. And this was right when I got out of college, I want to be financially independent within 20 years. And so I hired a financial advisor to help put together a financial plan and help put together a life plan for me. And so that's really where the journey of investing began. I've always been a saver, so I've always saved money. So that wasn't that difficult for me. And I've always lived within my means and, and so I was able to put away money the old fashioned way, invest it right and had a lot of great people along the way. And, and that's how I kind of got started. And when it came to options, I actually first got exposed through options at a Tony Robbins seminar that I went to event, I'm a big Tony Robbins fan and have gone to nearly all of his seminars and got introduced to options. And so that was back in 1998. And so I was on the buyer side and bought options and had some success. I also, that year lost millions of dollars as well to trading options. It wasn't through anything that I did in the trading process of it is what I, the decision that I made when I held that to call options. So I held 10 contracts for AOL and 10 contracts for Amazon at $15 each. But both were in the money. And both were getting ready to expire. And I wanted to invest in one of them. And I thought AOL had the best opportunity of being in the internet world and creating the internet. And I thought that's the direction we were going and I didn't think that a bookseller, an online bookseller was going to be as successful. Well, not having cashed in and acquired 1000 shares of Amazon, which would have been worth the millions of dollars today, I missed out on that opportunity. And so that was the only the only thing trade that I've ever made that I regret, but I did make some money on it. I think I ended up making like four grand on it. So it was trading near $20. And I had a $15 option, and overall ended up making like 20,000 Plus on AOL. But of course, that pales in comparison when I could have made it Amazon. So anyways, that was my first experience of buying options. So I had some minor success. And when I became a certified financial planner, which I've been for over the last 22 years has been my main business. Then we used options to help hedge my clients' portfolios when they had very large positions. So nearly all my time in the trading business I've always been on the buying side of it and not the selling side. Allen: Interesting, interesting. I h

Today I have the privilege of sharing with you, Mary Powell. The reason I'm bringing Mary on is because she's having some wonderful success in her trading, and we want to share that and she has a lot of lessons. And also she wants to share. But Mary, you might not know this, you are, you have the privilege of being the first female trader that we're interviewing on the podcast. So I haven't interviewed too many people on the podcast, most of the episodes have just been me. But we have been starting to interview, you know, people that are going through our programs and having success and different different traders, and our listeners seem to like it. So I said, Alright, let's bring some more on. But I did want to get it from a female perspective, because I do know that and studies have shown this that females are better at trading than men. Mary: There is that? And let's hope I'm not the last. Allen: No, no, you won't be. Mary: Start a new trend. Allen: Yeah. Yep. So I'm trying to line up a couple more. So hopefully, we'll have a lot more. Okay. And I am seeing that we are seeing more females in the program. So before, when we started, it was almost 100% All men, now it's become maybe 80-20. I think that with people like you coming on and sharing and saying, Hey, look, you know, women can do this as well, it's, there's nothing, there's no magic or anything to it. I think you'll be a role model for others who are trying it, but they haven't maybe stepped forward or they haven't put their hands up and said, hey, you know, I'm interested or something. So I think definitely, that will help. Because a lot of times, you know, when we're doing some type of like a case study with someone, it might be like, Oh, maybe it's a grandfather that lives or they used to work as a firefighter, you know, and he's talking about his story and this and that, then we'll notice that all of a sudden, we get a big influx of people who are grandfathers who used to be firefighters, or other firefighters. So whoever the case study is we seem to attract people like that. So I'm hoping that we can attract more women into the group. So I think that you're a trailblazer for that. So thank you Mary: Hoping for that as well. We can all support each other. Allen: Cool. So Mary, how long have you been trading options? Mary: I have been trading options for more than 20 years, I will date myself and tell you that I did participate back in the late 90s when the option Industry Council to still a marvelous group of free education on options. But at that time, they were trying to solicit more business in the options. And they would go to various big metropolitan cities, rent hotel banquet rooms, and give two or three day training sessions for free about options. And so that's how long I've known about options. I would say I was probably a dabbler for a long time trying to master the various concepts about the Greeks and different option strategies. And my career probably took the front seat at that time, and I just didn't dedicate the time needed to really focus on it. Until probably in the last five years, many people in my family or friends have retired. And when I went to the financial planner and start working the numbers, and I didn't like those numbers. Wanna see, you got to work for 10 or 15 more years, I'm very fortunate that I do enjoy my job. But I don't want to have to have that pain over me that I'm a slave to it. So that's when I really got serious and started really honing my attention and my education efforts on options. Allen: So about five years ago, you got serious? Mary: Yeah. Allen: And I want to ask you like back in the day when you first when you when you first start, would you remember how much the commission's were back then? Mary: They were probably in the range of 14 to $16 and each, each side, so you know, $30 a round trip and that was back in the day when the naming nomenclature was alphabetical. They didn't go by month in week. They didn't even have weeklies back then. Yeah. So you had to learn all of that. Yeah, it's been fun to watch the evolution and with electronic trade. Allen: Yeah I mean it's so so much simpler now and easier. And I remember, like, I didn't get started. I don't know. It's been a while. I think it's like maybe 15-16 coming close to 20 years for me, but when I started Thinkorswim was already there. And, you know, everybody was blown away. They're like, Oh my god. This is so amazing. So I'm like, okay, but this is cool. It's good. I mean, it's good to have these nice features and stuff, but I don't get but they're like, now you don't understand. You don't understand what we've been through. You know, to get a quote, you have to call your broker on the phone. And then he has to go look it up for you. And it takes like, 10 minutes to get a quote. Oh, wow. Okay, yeah, this is all real time. This is cool. This is better. So yeah, people starting now. I mean, the tools available education is available. It

Welcome Passive Traders to another special edition of the Option Genius Podcast. Today I have something a little bit different for you. I was interviewed on another show called "2 Bulls in A China Shop" by a company called Financial Ineptitude. That's actually their name,Financial Ineptitud. Basically, it's two guys. You know, there are really cool guys named Kyle and Dan, and they've been talking about trading for a little bit. They've been trying to learn how to trade and so they made this podcast to basically help them get their thoughts out, and to record all of their lessons. Their website is really cool. Their podcast is two bulls in a china shop and I'm going to include the interview that they had here as an episode because I thought it was really good. It was a lot of fun. And hopefully you guys will get something out of it and learn from it as well. So again, that's "2 Bulls in A China Shop" by Kyle and Dan. Enjoy the episode. We're so glad you've joined us today, folks, today is a very special day, we've got a fantastic guest with us. We're gonna be joined here by Allen Sama, Head Trader and owner of Option Genius. He is an Amazon bestseller author of the book Passive Trading: How to Generate Consistent Monthly Income from the Stock Market in Just Minutes a Day. And we're going to let you know more about that. But first, Allen, how are you doing today? Allen: I'm doing very well. Thank you very much. Kyle: Thanks for coming on. I know we had to work a little bit to get this. This recordin going. Allen: Yeah, better make it good. Allen: I'll do my best. Kyle: The more you work for it the sweeter to be right? Yeah, Dan: Yeah. No pain, no gain, Allen: The more you value it, right. Dan: Oh, right. So so tell us a little bit about your journey to becoming the Option Genius. Allen: So I was born as a trust fund baby and I started with $20 million. Kyle: End of story. Allen: Exactly, then I made a course. And then I made a course and I started selling it. Dan: Make more money selling. Allen: Yeah. So I have a similar story to you guys. You know, I got laid off from basically the only job I ever had. And it was really about, hey, do I go back to finding another job than job market? Or do I try my hand at trading, which I had been starting to learn while I was working because I was working remotely. So it was a great job learned a lot. But it just came to an end. The business went under in the financial crisis. And so, you know, we were actually teaching mortgage brokers how to be mortgage brokers, mortgage brokers, they owe it away. So it's like they didn't need me anymore. And so I said, Alright, cool. Let me you know, try my hand at trading. And I took some of my wife's money, and I lost most of it roughly, for like 40- 43,000. Plus, very quickly. Dan: Oh you're kidding. Allen: And, you know, like you guys said, you know, you learn very quickly, what doesn't work and most of it doesn't work. Yeah, at least for me. Dan: I get to strangled to work one day. Allen: Yeah. And so really, the, the best thing for me was that, you know, she had, she had faith in me, and she, she's like, you know, you need to make this work. And so I went back, and that kind of really put a fire under my ass. And then I looked at all my records, because I keep paper records of all my trades, write down everything. And so I found that, you know, I was doing day trading, and I was doing this and I was doing that buying and selling and value and I was trying everything, you know, there was one time where I was long, the inverse ETFs you know, SDS and SSO. So SSO is the two 2X S&P Going up, and SDS is 2X going down. So I was long on both of them. I was like, I can't lose. Right? Yeah, it's like the only trade that I can't lose on but guess what I did, I ended up losing money on that trade. Dan: You're telling my story, Allen. You're telling my story. Kyle: This all sounds so familiar. But there is a light at the end of the tunnel that it sounds like you.. Allen: Because the only thing that worked for me was selling options. And I had done at least one trade where, you know, I put it on, didn't really know what I was doing. But I followed it. And I put it on and I forgot about it. And then it it was in my paper records, but it wasn't in my account. And I'm like, where to go. My broker scamming me, you know, that should be here, you know, I put the trade on, where's my trick, and I kept researching, and then I realized that that trade had expired, worthless, and it just had gone away. So it doesn't show up on the screen anymore. And there's no exit record. And so I was like, Well, this is cool. You know, this is something that I didn't pay any attention to. And I made, you know, a good decent amount on it. And I didn't like it was easy. So I'm like, What is this thing? So I learned more and I dug deep into it. And we went into covered calls and naked puts and spreads and iron condors and, and all these different ones. And eventually I

What is the fastest way to learn Options? I want to learn to trade Allen. What should I do? How do I get there as fast as possible? Nobody wants to take the long way, right? Everybody wants to take the shortcut. Nobody wants to be like, alright, Allen, I want to take 20 years to learn how to trade and make money No, everybody wants it today, they want instantaneous results. Right now right now. So let's go over some of the things that I think can definitely help you, in your Options Trading journey, that can definitely speed up your path, right? Get you to your goal, the fastest. And that is actually number one. That'll be number one on the list is you have to know your why you have to know why you're doing this, you have to know why you're trading, you have to have a deep inner reason. And you know, if I asked you "Hey, why are you trading?" It's gonna be the first and everybody says, "Oh Allen, I want to make more money. Allen, make more money". Yeah. Okay, great. I know, I know that, right? That's a superficial answer. Everybody wants more money, of course. But why? What is it? And we've talked about this before, we've talked about this in our live events, we've talked about this on the podcast, you got to know why. And you got to dig deeper and deeper until you figure out like, hey, you know what, I want more money because I want more security, because I want my kids to have things I didn't have when I was growing up. Because I want to make the world a better place. I want to start a foundation and give back have a legacy. You know, donate money, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is. That's your thing. Doesn't matter what it is. Right? But that's going to keep you going. And that's going to help you remember why you're doing this because it's a path. It takes a while it's not overnight that you're going to turn into an Option Millionaire, right? So you need something to keep you going when the times get tough. And they do get tough. markets don't cooperate all the time. You know, we think they're going to do this and they do the opposite. And then we have to adjust, we have to run and sometimes we have losses. So at those times, you might be like, I want to quit. This is not too hard. I can't get this. I don't know, man. I don't know what this what's going on. I think I did everything perfectly. But in the workout, let those times that's when your why kicks in. That's when you realize "No, you know what, I'm going to keep going. Because Allen said I could do this". Yes, Allen said that you can learn to trade options. Okay? So, stick with me. Know your why, number one, number two, the method beats the hours. So when it comes to learning something like trading, right, your method will always beat the number of hours you put into something. So it's not about you know, I gotta trade 10,000 hours like Malcolm Gladwell said in his book. If you do that, that's great. You'll turn into, you know, a world class expert in whatever thing you're practicing, if the practice is perfect, right? It's got to be perfect practice. But we're not even trying to be world class. Right? We're not trying to be one of the top 10 best Option Traders in the world. We're just trying to be profitable. It doesn't take that many hours to do that. But the method the way you do it does make a big difference. Okay, so for example, let's say there's two people driving from Boston to New York City. Right? It doesn't matter how skilled or how committed or smart the first driver is, if he's driving a pickup truck, like a beat up old pickup truck, and the second guy is driving a Ferrari Well, driving number one is going to lose, right? Your method is the vehicle that will get you and become the engine to where you want to go. So with Ooptions, there are dozens of available methods to follow, right? There's lots of experts, so called "experts", quote, unquote, to learn from, this means that you want to spend a lot of time understanding who you're learning from, what credibility they have, and how it fits with your learning and your trading style. Okay, not all trading is suited for all traders. Now, for me, you know, day trading, not for me learn that the hard way, you know, and passive trading, passive trading is not for everybody. If you don't have patience, you're going to get bored, and you're going to wonder. So the process or the strategy that you trade has to mesh with you and your temperament. You got to know yourself, and what trading style or method fits you best. Okay, that's number two. Number three, we want to apply the 8020 rule, because we want to get success faster, right, we want to get the results faster, we don't want it to take forever. So you apply the 80/20 rule. And really, you should be applying the 8020 rule in just about everything, because 20% of the people in your life will lead to 80% of your happiness. If you have a business 20% of your customers will bring you 20% of your sales. And 20% of what you're learning will gi

Allen: Welcome passive traders. Welcome to another edition of the podcast today I have with me my good friend Alex. Alex is one of our graduates of our credit spread Mastery program and I brought him on to talk about what it was like in the program, what his results have been, and what he sees for the future. Alex, how're you doing today? Alex: I'm doing great. Allen: Awesome. Awesome, cool. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, you know, how you got into options, what you do full time, all that kind of good stuff? Alex: Sure, I worked in the corporate world for about 15 years and always invest in real estate. And in 2015, I left the corporate world to focus 100% on real estate. But as far as option trading, you know, in real estate, there are lulls in activity, you know, whether you're caught up in in building and planning, or, as we were discussing earlier, there's a global pandemic. So the Option Trading provided the prospect of additional streams of income. So I had a good friend that actually a family member has been trading options for decades. And he kind of figured out all the stuff you figured out, and they told me about it. And they basically said, Hey, there's this guy, the Option Genius. Of all the crazy programs and snake oil salesmen out there, you know, they said, This guy's he knows what he's doing. His strategies are legitimate. So that's how I kind of got turned on to your stuff. Allen: Awesome. Sounds good. So basically, it was I mean, you're in California, you know, I know you're doing well for yourself. It was basically I need, I'm gonna diversify income, and I'm gonna just try to learn this new skill, or was it more to it? Alex: No, that's exactly it. I mean, we have multiple streams of income. And we're always looking for additional streams. And this, again, based on the family friend that introduced us to you and your program, and this style of trading, we just seem like a very viable additional stream of income. Allen: So you're not looking to quit what you're doing and just go full time trading. This is something in addition to what you're already doing? Alex: Yes. Yeah. But not not yet. You know, I started out I did your program. I started out slowly, I started with the paper trades. And then.. Allen: Well, that's because you had never traded options before. That was your first time doing anything. Right? Alex: Exactly, exactly. I never traded options. I mocked around in the past with securities, but you know, probably lost a bunch of money doing it. So you know, this is really my first introduction to Option Trading. Allen: And how did it go? Alex: I think it's gone great. I've learned a ton. So like I said, I started out with paper trading. And then probably the end of March, I started with my real trades, I can tell you I did since the end of March, I've placed 46 trades, I currently have three active trades for those three trades. So far, so good. They're set to expire at the end of next week, of the trades I've placed, I had 37 out of 43 were successful. So that's like an 86% success rate, the longest run I had was about 14 successful trades. And you know, so interestingly enough, I started out at the end of March, and then by the beginning of June, I was up by 1100 bucks. So again, these are small trades, like 50 bucks or so and potential earnings and, and so on for potential profit. And then all of a sudden, by the end of June, I was actually at $35. So, so what happened was I placed a few trades, and you know, a bunch of them were the potential profit was somewhere around $50. And then there are other trades that maybe are based on the spread or the actual stock or the option. You know, they were worth 100 bucks, potential profit, or max profit. And some of those just didn't go my way. So that I don't know, if the term the trades weren't exactly balanced. So those six trades took me you know, that didn't go well took me from 1100 bucks down to $35. A couple I made mistakes that, you know, like, one was Amazon, I lost about 250 bucks on that. And that was because I placed a trade too soon after earnings, which and I can hear you in my heads. Oh, the credit spread mastery sessions and we're, you know, we're too close to earnings or not before earnings, but after earnings, you know, and the stock got a little bit of a bump, yeah, after earnings and started heading south. But you know, and then a few others like United rentals or Norfolk Southern, they're just larger trades, and they just didn't go well, or they didn't go my way. So.. Allen: So that was basically you were trying to scale it up a little bit or it was just it just happened that they were.. Alex: It's just at that time. I wasn't aware of it. You know, it's interesting, looking back how much I've learned and how much more aware I am of what's happening in the trades, and I have a better sense of what's a good trade, I have a better sense of what's actually trending well. And since I started I got back on th

Did you know that passive traders are some of the happiest traders out there? That's true. I'll tell you why in this episode. So the longer I trade, and I've been doing this, geez, it's been it's been a while. Okay. But it's been a while. And the longer I do it, the more I realize that the only thing that is holding me back, is myself. It's not the economy. It's not the stock market. It's not the Fed, it's not the government, it's not lack of money, or too much money or any of those issues. There's nothing - it's not an external issue. Because all of that stuff can be addressed. And it can be overcomed. It's not that hard. But internally, that's the stuff that takes the most work. Because most of the time, you don't even know what the issue is internally. And so the thing that separates winning traders from losing traders, is mentality - their mentality, specifically, I mean, you can give the same trade to two different traders, and one will win and the other one will lose. I've said this over and over again. Why? Well, mentality, it's their mental state. It's the stuff that they're thinking about. That's what's holding us back. Fear, stress, doubt, lack of confidence. All of these can limit your success in trading and in life. You see it all the time, you see people walking by like, "Oh, my God, this guy should have been so successful, but he's not, why he's not taking the right actions". Why? Because of fear, or stress, or doubt, or lack of confidence. So if you are not as successful as you want to be, the fastest way to fix it, is to work on yourself. Now, I didn't say it was easy, but it's the fastest. So how do you overcome the self-imposed limitations? How do you how do you fix this? Well, sometimes the answer that we're looking for, will not come from the stuff that we already know,right? Einstein said this, I think what they say - it's attributed, the quote is attributed to him, but nobody knows if he actually invented it or not. But the quote was that when you have a problem, you cannot use the same type of thinking, to find a solution for that problem. You have to change your thinking, you have to grow, you have to expand your mentality and look at it from a different way look at the problem in a different light, in order to see the answer, because otherwise the answer would be easier, and you just do it, you wouldn't have the problem in the first place. So in this case, I found an answer. From studies on relationships. Totally different, right? Have nothing to do with trading. What is what is having a good relationship have to do with trading? I'll tell you. One of the most respected experts in marital stability, his name is John Gottman. Okay. Now this guy has shown repeatedly that he can predict with 90% accuracy, which couples will stay together, and which will get divorced. So he can watch you and your spouse for a few minutes. And he'll tell you if you're going to last or not. So not only am I going to tell you why passive traders are happier, and how to be happier. But I'm also going to share with you how to improve your marriage. Looks pretty good, right? Not bad. 2 for 1 in this podcast. All right, you're welcome! All right, the difference between happy and unhappy couples is the balance between positive and negative interactions during conflict. So basically what this means is for every negative interaction you have with your spouse, you gotta have five or more positive interactions. Okay? So let's say your wife comes home, and she says something, maybe she asks you a question that you've already answered 100 times, and you look at her and you roll your eyes, that would be a negative interaction. But if she's sitting down, or you're walking, you know, you go for a walk, or you're in the mall or whatever, and you reach over and you grab her hand, and you hold her hand for a few seconds, that will be a positive interaction. All right? So you have the negative and the positive, couples that stay together, give each other five positive interactions for every one negative. These are just simple things, right? raising your voice, negative interaction. Giving a hug, positive interaction. So if you want to stay happy, make sure your ratio is five or more to one. There you go. Marriage, problem solved. Now, if you want to be a happier trader, you can use the same ratio, five winning trades to one losing trade. Maybe that's why I've never really met a happy day trader. Think about it. If you know people who trade - day traders are not the happiest bunch, they're not usually the most miserable bunch, right? Because they lose on most of their trades. They lose after lose after lose now, now yeah, the losses are smaller, and they try to make it up on one or two big ones. But most of the time, they're losing money. And that affects you mentally. Okay? But as passive traders, we win on most of our trades. So we get positive reinforcement, over and over and over. And that results in what? Well, less str

Back on Episode 96 of this podcast, I was talking about how to get started trading for a living. And that came about because I got an email from one of our students saying that he had just been laid off. And he needed some help, and some sounding board about what he should do. Should he go back to work? Should he new start trading full time? And he gave a little bit of the background? And you know, I read his email on that episode. And then I gave, I had written him an answer, but then I went into a little bit more detail in that episode. But right now I'm happy to say that I have Todd with me on the line here. And he is going to be giving us an update of what he decided to do, the situation, what happened and how he did it. So Todd, welcome to the show. Todd: Yeah, I am. Yeah, thanks for having me on. Allen: Yeah, I really appreciate you coming on. You know, it can be a little bit vulnerable, embarrassing a little bit, you know, when somebody gets laid off, it's, you know, not always under our control, especially when you're working. So I appreciate you taking the time to help us out here. Todd: Right, no problem. Allen: Cool. So can you go back a little bit and tell us so what exactly was the situation when you had sent that first email in? Todd: Yeah, so the situation was I ended up losing my job. It was due to budgets that were constrained because of the Coronavirus in response to that. And so some of the projects that I was working on, the funding got pushed out another year. And so they couldn't, you know, they couldn't compensate me anymore. So they laid me off. And at that point, I had already signed up for to have your blank check program, I was kind of starting to get, do the homework, but I really didn't have a lot of time to do it, when I was working full time and balancing family and, and then when I got laid off, it was more imminent. Todd: And so I thought, well, this might be an option that I I'll have more time to dive into it. And so that's what I did and I sent you an email and said, "Hey, Allen, is it really feasible that I could, you know, do this full time and at least cover my my hard cost- my expenses?" And that was my initial goal. I wanted to, you know, cover my mortgage bills, you know, monthly expenses. And, you know, your advice at that time was, yes, it is possible, it may take you a few months to get up to speed. So, and I think at that time, you said maybe you should look at getting a part time job, something like that. And, I ended up not doing that. I just kinda, I just kind of dove into it. And I think in the third month of trading, I was able to meet my goal. So that's amazing, right? So I met my initial goal of just covering my expenses. And, and then the next couple months, I increased my goal. And I think I was running about an average of 10% rate of return on my trades. So month to month, it was real positive. And I kept scaling up. So it's continued to be a positive experience. As you know, last month, it was a little bit volatile, a little bit of a roller coaster. I ended up getting out of that month, I think I met I was at 8% of my rate of return. So.. Allen: That's still really amazing. 8% a month is a good month. Todd: Right, right. So it's good for that. Now, what's changed recently is now that I've learned this, and I've gotten a little more in tune to the oil market, I'm actually out again, looking for a job and what I think I one of my plan is continue trading at this level, and then find a job. So I think I have more time during the days that I could I can do that. And and so hopefully I could go back make my original salary, and I can still, you know, profit from the trading. Allen: Oh, that's really interesting. Wow. I mean, yeah, I didn't see that coming. Todd: Right. Right. Allen: So okay, so you are in our oil options program. And you're also in another You said you were in another program which one the passive the passive trading. Todd: The passive trading program. Allen: So when you started trading full time, right after after the layoff? What did you focus on? What did you trade? Todd: I jumped, well, I went through about half the courses of the passive trading program and got a you know, learn what options are how they were, but I ended up migrating towards the blank check program with oil. I'm okay. With my job. I'm more in tune with the energy markets. It's more interesting to me. I can understand I can understand that supply and demand a little bit better. And so that just appealed to me. So I, I really dove into that. And that's what I'm doing 100% right now, in the future, you know, in the next couple months, I plan to go backwards more into the strategies that you teach in the passive trading and use probably use, you know, covered calls on, you know, on some other other trades, just to supplement. Allen: Right. Okay. Yeah, because in the passive program we do, you know, cover calls, naked puts, covered credit spreads and whatnot. And just to

Eddie shares his trading journey and how to transitioned from a Startup CEO to full time trader. Allen: Hey passive traders, how you doing? This is Allen back with another episode today I have one of my good friends with me, Mr. Eddie So. He is an amazing Options Trader and he is 100% bought in, he loves what he's doing. And he's going to share with us some of what he is doing some of his results and his lessons that he's learned along the way. How are you doing any? Eddie: Doing pretty good. How are you, Allen? Allen: Good, good. Welcome to the show. Thank you for doing this. Eddie: Sure. Happy to. Allen: So Eddie, tell me tell me what do you do? Eddie, what do you do? Who is Eddie? Eddie: Yeah, so I started my career. pretty young. I think I've held a job since I was 15. And then I got into, I guess, my career job, if you call it when I was about 19, I was actually in financial services, I worked for Citi group for almost 10 years, I started as a bank teller and worked my way up. And you know, it was at one point a manager managing branches. And then just before I left, I actually I was on my way to becoming a stock broker, basically, I was getting my licenses, and actually had my series 663, I was going through and getting my series 7. And I live in the San Francisco Bay area, right in the heart of the Silicon Valley. And at that time, was right before the dotcom boom, and or bust, I should say, booming. And, and I was, you know, I noticed all these young guys around me, you know, making really good money in tech. So I decided at that point to make a career change after 10 years, and I got into tech. And so for the last 20 some odd you over 20 years, I've been in the tech industry here in the valley, I you know, always in some sort of sales capacity, whether it's business development, or partnership sales. And when I sort of got out of the working world, yeah, I had worked up to the executive ranks. And I was running in sales teams and partnership sales teams, for various tech companies. So I've worked for companies, small and large, you know, small startups all the way up to really large, you know, 100 billion dollar companies. Allen: Awesome Eddie: And then I left tech and I started my own startup that has been something I had wanted to do. And unfortunately, I started right at in 2020; and right before COVID hit. So we took a little bit of a hit, I knew we wouldn't be able to weather the storm. But I knew I had to wait, right? And so we're still in stealth mode. But one of the things that I realized is going through options, and this whole Option Genius thing. And trading just sort of came back around. Because I was actually a little bored during the pandemic and I was looking at, you know, what else can I do? And you know, maybe I could get some income I used to trade and and that's how I stumbled across Option Genius. And then I came to the realization of, well, why am I putting all this money into my startup, I could be putting all this money into investing. And so I made the decision earlier this year, having gone through your program for probably like six to nine months, I had seen enough and done enough and experienced enough to make a decision that you know what, as of January 1, 2022, so next year, I am going to basically live off of trading, meaning I won't be doing my startup anymore, because I think a lot of money into a timing wasn't the greatest and I'm thinking my returns are a lot better with trading. And I don't work, you know, even you know, it's a fraction of what I've done in terms of work versus a startup. So.. Allen: That's a pretty big move right there..you know? Eddie: Yeah, you know, I've been pretty fortunate in my career. I've worked hard, I've been pretty fortunate as well I've been part of some IPOs in Valley here and so it's you know, it helped me be able to sort of save up the startup right to fund the startup because in you know we were all have few partners and we're self funded where we were not at the stage where we're you know, looking for funding so it's actually early enough for me to get out still, and still have a decent amount to invest to make a living off of Allen: So are you going to get that money back that you put in or is that lost? Eddie: Yeah, so I'm you know, I'm going to continue as an investor but more on the silent sort of investor side versus you know, being an operations so I'll get that money back eventually. I may even invest more into it but I just will be sort of a silent investor non operational versus what I am today which I pretty much general you know, GM right now. Allen: So Okay, so let me see if I can recap that. So you were doing you've been doing well. Obviously, you're in you know, San Francisco, very expensive to live there probably one of the most expensive cities in the world to live. So obviously, your expenses are pretty high and your income has to be pretty high to match. You decide, hey, you know what, I'm going to start my own

Opportunities don't last. Now as I record this episode, Bitcoin is trading somewhere around $50,000 a coin. And no, this is not going to be an episode about Bitcoin. So just hang with me, okay? Some people are saying though, that Bitcoin is going to go all the way to $100,000. Some people are saying it's going to go up to $500,000. Now that'd be great, right? For people who own Bitcoin, I mean, I have some, so that would be great. If it goes up, that'd be really nice. I mean, a 10x return from 50 to 500,000. But how long is that really going to take? I mean, might take years, might take decades? I mean, the more expensive something gets, the more money it's going to take. buying it to move it higher, right? What if you had bought it when it was like $10 a coin? Back in 2013? It was bad. He was at price to 10 bucks a coin somewhere around there. And then it jumped up to $220. That's a 20x return. Wow, how long do you think that took, right? To go from 10? To 220? How long do you think it take really long? How long do you think it took? It took four bucks. That's it just four months, 20x return. So I think that it's safe to say that the easy money in Bitcoin has already been made. I mean, sure, you can hang on to it, you know, you could buy some at 50,000 a coin, and it might go to 70,000; 100,000; 200,000, that would be a really nice return. But I don't know how long it's going to take. The easy money has already been made. My point is that in life, we are presented with many different opportunities. Almost every day, there's a new opportunity presented to us. Some of them suck, most of them. Right? Your brother-in-law comes with a can't miss, you know, get rich quick scheme is probably gonna suck. Right? Some are okay, some are good. And then there are a few that are amazing - life changing. And realistically, you only need one or two of those life changing ones to change your life to be amazing. But they don't last. That's what I came to realize that they don't last. Now, in my last job, only real job I really had. We taught people how to get into and train for the mortgage business. We trained mortgage brokers. This was way back in 2001. And business was booming. And so my boss was taking things slowly. I mean, for him, it was just a cash cow. Money just kept coming and kept coming in. I mean, we were dominating that market. But we knew that we were leaving millions on the table by moving slowly. But that was okay with my boss. Oh, right, who's gonna go against the bus? We thought that we would be doing that for years. Because I mean, mortgages are not going anywhere, right? Who can afford a 200; 300; 400; $500,000 house, you got to have a mortgage, if not a mortgage is going to be some other kind of loan event or something like that mortgages are not going anywhere. So we're in the right industry. Or so we thought. But then in the financial crisis, everything stopped. They stopped doing mortgages. And so people didn't need our training and our marketing training to do nothing because they couldn't get their loans approved. And the legislature, right? They wanted to find a scapegoat. They wanted to find "hey who causes financial crisis"? And so who do they listen to? They listen to the lobbyist, and who had the best lobbyist. The people with the most money, the banks, the people that were actually approving the loads, right? And so they listened to the lobbyists and they blamed everything on the mortgage brokers. So industry changed. Mortgage brokers, the rules change for them, and most of them were put out of business and out of work overnight. The opportunity ended. Now it's been several years since then. There are, there has been an uptick now in mortgage brokers. So that kind of industry is kind of coming back now. But that was a long time ago that opportunity ended and it's not going to be like that again, right? When we are in the middle of an opportunity, we feel that we have time that it will last for long, long periods of time, that there we will be able to get to it eventually, even if we're not doing it now it's like, oh, yeah, I know about that. I'm going to get to it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to take advantage of it. It's gonna be great when that happens. And many times we do get in. Sometimes we don't, but sometimes we do. But usually, after the easy money has already been made, and now we curse our luck. "Oh, man. Sure got in earlier. Oh, man, this doesn't work, man". Now, look, we all know that self-driving cars are coming. Right? We see the headlines that had self driving cars, coolest new thing, eventually, technology is going to be there. I test drove a Tesla just to check it out. And it was awesome. Really, really, really cool that it can drive by itself, parked by itself, drive by yourself changed lanes in traffic. I mean, it was scary. But it was really cool. I mean, you can see the future right there. Now I love driving but I still I want to self driving. You know, I love to dr

Allen: All right, everybody. Welcome to another edition of the Option Genius Podcast today I have with me, Matthew D'Ambrosi .He's one of our passive traders. And he's gonna be telling us how he got started and how he's doing pretty well right now. How are you doing, Matthew? Matt: I'm doing well. Thanks for having me on. Allen: Cool. Cool. So how'd you get started with Option Genius? Matt: Well, I have to actually go back, it's been quite a journey, I have to say, you know, it's more like a 15 year journey for me. Allen: Wow. You know, I was given a book by my sister at age 30. And I was a young guy, and I was just more not interested in reading books just kind of floating through life, didn't really have much direction. And the book was called "Automatic Millionaire" by David Bach. Allen: Okay. Matt: In that book, I wasn't really interested in reading it, but she handed it to me. So I said, at least go through it. And I started thumbing through and I came upon a compound interest chart. And it showed, you know, you're 19 years old, and you put $2,000 into an IRA, or Roth IRA, and you did that, and you continue to do that, it would be well over a million by the time you're 65. So I was caught immediately by that. And that's kind of where my journey began. So I took that information, and started reading more books. And I came across Dave Ramsey. He's kind of like a financial soldier, if you will, you know, to get out of debt. Yeah, kind of get your stuff together. And I started, I always thought about making money and you know, retiring early, it was always a thought of mine, it was a gold mine, it was definitely what I wanted to do. And I always felt like 65 is when I would do it just like everybody else. And I continue to read more, I read numerous articles and books. And about two years ago, I went to a workshop, and I was learning how to invest. And they introduced me to options and selling options. And I was told that everyone else was told, you know, it was risky. Don't touch it. There's a whole another world to me. Allen: Have you done any stocks or options before that? Matt: No, absolutely not. Allen: No stocks either? Matt: Not really, you know, I was more into mutual funds, I had gave my money to an advisor, I just believe that people had your best interest. And they're great advisors out there. I'm not saying they're not. But it really started me to take a hard look about how money is handled. And you're much better off if you take the plunge and believe in yourself and start looking into deeper and see that they can really work out for you if you're willing to take or have the interest really to go and look at that. So I started paper trading. And then I was wondering who else does this so I started searching. And then I came across your name, and I have to hand it to your master marketer. I've never had anyone hit my inbox like you. So I started listening to all your podcast, taking little by little, you know, all the information that you give out there and started little by little paper trading. And then I started making money slowly, you know, doing one contract, then adding two. And then now I'm pretty much on my goal to replace my income. And that's my ultimate goal so... Allen: Awesome. Matt: Just a regular guy, you know, I just kind of happy to be here. I'm really happy to be here today. Because I want to get the message out that you know, you're teaching just normal people like me, who have no experience at this. And it's really a wonderful thing if you're willing to get a hold of your fears and take a stab at it. Allen: Right. So you started about two years ago, you said? Matt: Yeah, about two years ago yeah. Allen: Oh two years ago. Okay. And you're still working? Matt: I am, yep. Allen: Okay, what do you do during the day? Matt: So I'm a forklift driver and it's tough work. It's very laborsome. And trading has allowed me to look at money in a different way. I just don't look at money as scarce as it was. So it's a whole different mindset. Allen: Yeah. So how do you find time during the day to trade? Matt: Generally I don't go until about 2:30 in the afternoon, and I go on to 2:30 at work so I spend the mornings pretty much studying and paper trading and learning and then even after work at 11 o'clock, sometimes I'll be up till 1am or so learning as well and paper trading and trying to think about things and whatnot so.. Allen: So you're all in? Matt: All in, absolutely. They say burn the ships and I burnt them. Allen: So what was your first trade? Matt: First trade I did was credit spread. I did far away from the money for about just one contract and I made like 18 bucks. It wasn't much but you know, you're, you talked about the options continuum. That was in that stage where I was very nervous and you know, you have these feelings and you feel like you're gonna lose all your money. And that's not true, if you study and really take what you have to teach, and I took it very slow and g

When was the last time you let yourself dream really big? I mean, really, really, really big. Most of us, I think, you know, "we live lives of quiet desperation". That quote, I don't remember who said it, but I believe that quote is so true. Most people are just going through the motions. So what would you do if gave you a billion dollars? A billion with a B? Right? If I just gave it to you, or whatever, you woke up one day, and boom, there's 1 billion in your bank account. You can do anything you want with it. What would you do? I mean, obviously, a lot of us, we probably start spending it, right. I mean, there's no strings attached. It's not stolen or anything, it's your money, do whatever you want no taxes, debate and anything like that? Start spending, what are you gonna do? Right? You gotta buy maybe the nicest house in the state. Maybe you buy eight or nine, fancy sports cars or luxury cars, whatever you can think of - Bentley's, Maseratis, whatever you can think of. Maybe you buy a jet or two. Maybe you get your own private island. That's pretty big. Maybe you get all the clothes you can ever think of, eat out every night, you know, some jewelry for the spouse or something, gifts for the kids, maybe a pony? I don't know. But a billion dollars is a huge amount. And for most people, they probably still have a lot left. I don't think any normal rational person can spend a billion dollars in their lifetime. It's pretty hard. So what would you do with it? And then the real question is, what would you do with the rest of it? Right? Eventually, you're going to realize that the money is not going to bring you happiness, all the stuff. Stuff is not important. When you die, it don't come with you. Right? The houses you can buy them, but they're not really yours. You know, stop paying property taxes and see who really owns all the houses. The cars are gonna eventually fall apart, like clothes are gonna get eaten by moths and go out of fashion. Ponies probably gonna die eventually anyway. So that stuff doesn't bring you happiness. Significance! That's what it's all about, right? Having some significance in your life, having a sense of purpose, being able to do something that makes you feel alive. What is that for you? Do you even know? How do you generate significance? How can you generate more significance? I mean, dream big, think big. Is there an injustice that you've experienced that needs to be solved? What did you want to do as a kid when you were little think back? Think back to when you were little? What did you want to do? Be? Accomplish? Before the world said no, that's unrealistic. Can't do that. What gives you the greatest excitement and wonder? There are some deep questions. For Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, you know two of the richest guys in the world. For both of them it's the same thing. They want to get humanity, mankind into space. I mean, think about it. These two guys, billionaires, top two richest people in the world. They're both, both of their passions, both of their purposes, is to get humanity into space. And so that's why they both have companies where they give billions of dollars to that have pushed the frontiers much farther than NASA has gone, faster, cheaper, more sustainable. So what's your purpose? Do you know what it is? Or are you like most people just going through the motions every day? living day to day. You know you get up you go to work, get stuff done, accomplish, some things here and there. Then you're "Oh, I'm tired" "Oh, it's five and six o'clock, all right" Time to head home. You get home you take care of the kids. You hang out with the spouse, you cook you clean, you do some stuff and then maybe you relax a little bit and hit the hay. There's all time to do it all again tomorrow. Is that what life looks like? Are you in a rut? For most people, they say that they cannot live their purpose because they don't have enough money. Or they don't have enough time. Or there's something stopping them. "Yeah, I can't do this because I have kids right now". "I can't travel the world because I have kids". "I can't go and become a teacher because I have all these bills to pay". "I can't do this, because of that" or "this person won't let me" or my spouse this, or my mother this or my mother in law that. Right? I think it's just sad. And I mean, I don't blame you, if that's you, because I'm in the same boat. You know, I have always wanted to travel. And I wanted to see the world but we have three little kids. So can't do it. Right? Because they have to go to school, they have to learn stuff, we can't just, it's dangerous out there in the world. And we could be traveling in some third world country and get taken hostage or get sick or get hurt. And then you know, all the medical stuff and it wouldn't work and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I was at a seminar where I was talking to this guy. The the head of the seminar, he was like this personal trainer, not treating you physically, but lik

The question asked was: "Allen, what has been your greatest investment?" I was asked this by a coaching student recently. And I told him, I have to think about it and get back to him. Right? Well, I have thought about it, and I want to share the answer with you as well. So when it comes to success, at anything, really, there are three major components. Okay, number one is the skills, you got to know what to do. And then you got to get good at it. And that's doing the thing. Now, whether this is trading, whether this is parenting, weightlifting, anything, there are certain skills that you have to be able to perform. And the best way to learn those skills is by investing in education, something like a book or a course or something like that. Right? Now, these are basic skills. So when it comes to trading, you have to know some stuff, you have to know what is a stock? How do they go up? What do they go down? What is an option? What does it call? What does it put? How do they work that you go, and you get from a book you get from a course or a video right? Now, most of the questions out there that you want to know, you can get the answers for free. From about skills, you can get the answers for free at the library, in a book, and now maybe even on YouTube. Now YouTube's a little sketchy, because you don't know exactly who's making these videos and how good it is. And if the answer is actually going to legitimate how old this stuff is, I mean, I've I've tried some things on YouTube that were so old, they didn't work anymore, and you can't tell. But at the bookstore library, you know, the skills, the basic skills, hey, I want to learn fundamental analysis, I want to learn technical analysis. 90% of what you need to know, you can learn by a book or a course, that stuff is out there, there aren't that many things that are secret out there. And that's like a myth, right? Everything you hear about is like, oh, the secret method to do this the secret to do this, oh, they that person got so rich, because they have a secret. No, the skills are the same trading, the skills are the same, you got to know how to chart you got to know how to look at a stock, you got to know how to read the direction, you got to know how to put the trade on, you have to understand how the trade works. Right, you have to know probability of profit, you got to know when to get in when to get out, follow a trading plan, you got to have a trading plan. These are all skill-based things. Because the skills are just the basic level. That's like the entry level. Right? That's the first things you got to learn the skills. And some people they spend their whole life working on the skills. But that's why they never become successful because they don't do the other two components. Getting good at the skill does not guarantee success. There is a lot more to uncover. Just because you know, this skills or your book smart doesn't mean you're going to be successful. Knowledge is not power. I don't know why people say that. So I've heard that before. Knowledge is power. Knowledge is power. No, it's potential power, if you use the knowledge, right. But if you only have the knowledge, that's not good enough. If you know some of the skills, you could do some of the things that will get you some success, but will not get you the ultimate success that you're after. Okay. So I know a lot of people that are very smart. You know, they went to Harvard, MIT brainiacs, you know, everything. They're like a walking encyclopedia, but they struggling to pay the bills every month, because they are missing the other two components. So now, component number two is the habits, the discipline, the work ethic, these are all based on character, right, you have to have the right character. In order to succeed, you have to have discipline, you have to have work ethic, you have to be able to get up when you get knocked down. You can only get that one way. By doing the thing over and over and over. Like they say, practice makes perfect. But then again, there's no such thing as perfection. Because there is always another level, there's always a way to get better, there's always a way to achieve more to improve more. So you never get to the end goal. So there's no such thing as perfection. But you still got to practice and you have to have it internally. It has to come from inside. That's the only way to have the discipline and the work ethic you have to work on that everybody's not born that way. You know, you look at take a look at Arnold Schwarzenegger or the rock, Dwayne Johnson. They got bodies like crazy, I'm never gonna have a body like that, because I don't have the discipline to be in the gym for six hours a day. That's not me. That's not my thing. I don't have that discipline. Right. And so I might have the skills, I might know how to lift weights, I might know how to be a personal trainer or whatever, but I'm never going to look like them because I don't have that work ethic o

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

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,

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'

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

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. S