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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People literally ask me this one question ALL THE TIME… “Allen, how did come up with such a lucrative, safe, and easy way to trade?” I explain it all in my new book Passive Trading, get your free book here! https://www.passivetrading.com/free-book Option Genius was built with you...the individual trader, the breadwinner, the dreamer, the rock your family depends on ...in mind. Because we know what it takes to become a successful and profitable trader. And that’s exactly what we help you do best. Get your $1 trial of Simon Says Options, our most conservative and profitable trading service here: https://simonsaysoptions.com/stockslist-ss-trial-offer  Podcast Transcript: Allen Sama: All right there, passive traders, welcome to another edition of the Option Genius Podcast. Today I'm here with my good friend, Justin Boyum, who is a US Army veteran. He's also a very successful businessman, speaker and a professional and executive coach. Being a veteran himself, he does look out for the other veterans and their families, and tries to help them find fulfilling careers, create strong relationships, and live joyful lives. How are you doing, Justin? Justin Boyum: Doing great, man. Allen Sama: What you've been up to lately? Justin Boyum: Lately, I have been doing some events, going around talking with other veterans and professionals out there just trying to learn more about how people are dealing with our new COVID era that we're in and dealing with lockdowns and the different strategies that are available to them to accelerate their careers or their business. Allen Sama: Awesome, sweet. So, the reason I wanted to bring Justin on is because as a veteran, he goes through and he's been trained in making quick decisions. As we are traders, we need to have the ability to take limited information and act on that. Some people I've talked to in the past are like, "Well, I want to know that everything is going to be perfectly exactly the way I needed to before I make a trade." That's just not how it works. We need to take imperfect information, we have to be okay with not knowing everything, and that knowing that we might be wrong on our assessment and still be able to adapt. Allen Sama: So, when I was talking to Justin, he was saying the same things. I was like, "Man, this is some really good stuff." So when he talks to his students and his clients, he talks about how to be high performance and how to make those quick decisions and how to make the decisions that will put you in the position that you can excel. So, Justin, tell me something about the stuff that you learn in the military, because you were active, right? You were in a war zone. Justin Boyum: Right, I did a tour in Iraq during Iraqi Freedom in Basra. Yeah, absolutely. So, realistically to talk about exactly what you mentioned, right, being able to make quick decisions. I mean, one of the first things that they teach their leaders and their officers, and the sergeants is the worst decision that you can make is no decision, right? So, they teach you to be able to really make decisions. You got to use the information that you have in front of you. That doesn't mean that every decision you make is always going to work out perfectly, but the worst thing to do is to be inaction. Justin Boyum: I think one of the more beautiful illustrations of this is in the HBO series that they did for Band of Brothers. They showed the Battle of Bastogne, which is very key battle in World War II. They had a new lieutenant that was less decisive, that was going to lead this effort initially. One, the soldiers already knew that too. So, there was a lot of concern about like, "Are we going to be able to handle this?" But sure enough, they go into action. That's when the combat starts, and he completely freezes. It's causing them to take on casualties and have all these issues. So, they send in another captain from another unit just to run in there and take over operations. He quickly figures out, "Where's everybody at? I've got to make a decision, we get going." Justin Boyum: And then they go in, they actually complete this mission, which was effectively you can really pinpoint that that's where the Allied forces really won the war was winning this particular battle. It was because somebody came in, and he just made decisions, right? It wasn't always perfect. He did some crazy things in that. Go watch the series, if you want to see it, or read the book. It's a fantastic book. But I mean, realistically, the difference was that he went and made decisions. He got into action. Yeah, there's going to be risk that you have to take. You have to just do whatever... You have to calculate that in your head quick enough. What's an acceptable amount of risk? You got to go. Justin Boyum: But obviously, in a war effort, you've got to make that decision or you're going to lose a [inaudible 00:04:21], right? So, there's a little bit of a raised stakes there. But I think in general, when I talk with my students, whether they're building a business, following their careers, making more sales for their book of business, wherever it is, they've got to be able to raise that necessity to that warlike effort. If I don't go do this, these are the potential results or lack of results I'm going to see. There are a number of ways to attach meaning to that. But absolutely, you got to be able to make decisions and go. The worst thing you can do is do nothing. Allen Sama: Yeah. So, I mean, there's two things that you mentioned there. One of the things is that we find that people, they want to be successful. They want to make more money trading. They want to live a better life and have a better lifestyle, but they are afraid to get started. They're afraid to make that first step and get in, because it's like, "Oh, I don't know this, and I don't know how to do this. This is confusing to me." Allen Sama: And then there's that other person who's a little bit further down the line. He has put on a trade, and he has followed the rules. He's doing everything properly, but then the market, like the market does or the stock, it doesn't cooperate. So, now, the person doesn't know what to do and they're flustered. They're taking losses. It's not the same as in a war zone. We're not dying here, we're not getting hurt. But when you lose money, it feels the same way. Justin Boyum: Well, you got to think about the ripple effects of that, of course, too, right? What does that mean for your family? What does that meant to the new people you're connected to? Right? What does that keep you from being able to invest in, right? Maybe this person that likes to invest in charities, that like sports things, like my community, like the veteran community or what have you, right? You not being able to perform at a high level, which is why I love to talk about high performance, because in order to be successful at anything, especially when you're dealing with something that can be volatile like a market, you've got to really be very highly clear and be able to take that bolt action, because there's real meaning behind, "What if I don't do it?" Justin Boyum: I looked at this as, say I was somebody who was in cold call sales.  I don't know if you've been in cold calling before, but you got to go and make 100 calls a day and maybe 5 of them will pick up, right, depending on what persons you're calling or how good you are with your outreach. But in general, when people are first starting out, at least you're looking at like a 2 to 5% success rate of even getting to talk to a human being that doesn't hang up on you. That can be difficult, but we'll break that down to say 20 calls. If you stopped at 19, that 20th call might be the person that said yes. Whatever solution is, you're selling product solution, right? Justin Boyum: By not making that next call, you've sacrificed that other person's joy or their ability to get what they want. Who does that effect, right? The people that are not near them, right? So, it's important that you'd be able to do those things and be able to overcome that fear of rejection or failure. You might get in them or "Oh, yeah, I had this happen one time, and it didn't go well," right? Well, what if I stopped cold calling after the first person that called me an idiot on the phone and hung up on me, because I didn't like the way that made me feel? Well, that kept me from making the next call, where I could have served somebody at a very high level and gotten them what they need to do, which not only helps them, but helps my business, helps my family, and all the different ripple effects that go from there. Allen Sama: Okay, so how would you walk somebody through that situation? So, I'll try to put it back in the trading scenario. So, there's a guy who is in a new environment, doing something new, not too experience, hasn't been through the ups and downs before, but he has made the jump. He's very scared, but he made the jump. He's done some trades. But now all of a sudden, because like right now what's going on in the stock market, the stock market has been going up. For the last several years, it's just been going almost straight up. Allen Sama: Now after COVID, we have some turbulence, we have a big market drop. A lot of people got scared. But then even after that, the market rallied back higher. Now everybody and their brother is wanting to trade and buying stocks and telling, "Oh, I'm making so much money." Well, that's great, but I mean, you're not doing it properly. You're just jumping in and you're getting some quick gains, because that's just what the market is doing, just going straight up. It's easy to do right now. But when it turns and I do believe it's going to turn pretty soon, there's a lot of uncertain activities and events coming up, the election and all that. Allen Sama: So, let's say somebody has done that. They don't have that much experience. They got in, they played some trades. They've made some money. They're a little bit maybe overconfident, but now the trade turns around. They're at a point where, "Okay, I need to make a decision. Either I need to get out of my trade, or I need to buckle down and stay in or I need to change my trade or adjust it somehow." Can you walk them through, or do you have some steps that they could take or some questions they could ask themselves? Justin Boyum: Right. So, I think that keys in. So, most people, it's what we've been talking about as we've been going through this. There are three major areas that cause most people to fail or quit at their goals. The very first one I think that we've been talking around now is fear. Fear is something that really drives a lot of decision makings. Sometimes when we're in a place where we're operating with fear, we tend to make bad decisions. We're going to make decisions that don't really serve us definitely. Allen Sama: That's cool. Justin Boyum: Or you might just go quit, right? Hey, I got into this trading, because I wanted to make 10K a month. I don't know what the average person if they really commit to this tends to make, but let's say they want to make 10K a month, allows me to quit my job, allows me to really freelance my time better or manage my time to be able to spend more time with my family or retire, whatever I'm going to do. So, I would come back to what was that original goal that you had? Because fear, sometimes it could be like, "Hey, I'm concerned about what the outcome may be." Maybe it's not what I'm going to be wanting, right? Maybe I go invest this money in trading, and I actually end up losing money. Maybe it's going to be harder than I expect. Justin Boyum: Maybe they're a little bit afraid of the process that's going to be a little hard or maybe they've got some stories in their background films like, "Well, I've always failed at some of these things or I have a bad experience before. So, I'm not going to go and do this again." Even if they've learned a strategy from someone like you that says, "Yeah, this can be successful if you do it right." So how do you overcome that fear? I think that you'd have to really go back and attach that, have the clarity around why you're doing what you're doing. Now, certainly, you want to follow a great strategy and you want to have a really good, effective plan. But just like in the military, right? Justin Boyum: I mean, sometimes we can have excellent plans. We've got the greatest military in the world, because they've done a lot of research. They make sure that they look at what's acceptable risk to them and what we need to do to be okay with something. But even with that, if you read any military book, stuff hits the fan, right? You got to be able to deal with that and be able to make decisions and move forward. Sometimes you're going to take some losses along the way. Sometimes they can really work out great for you. Justin Boyum: So, I would go back and look at somebody... So, in this case of if I was going to work with somebody who's a trader and going, "Hey, I really wanted to make this 10K a month, but I'm really afraid of making this decision because the market is volatile." I'm like, "I don't know if I want to get out of this." I said, "Okay, well, why don't you write me a check for $10,000?" Because by not making the decisions and staying with your commitment, that's what you're doing. You just go ahead, write me that check for this month. You'll tell your family that you wrote a check for $10,000 a year or do you want to play, right? Allen Sama: Right. Yeah, because you're losing, you're leaving it on the table. It's the same as not having it. Justin Boyum: I wasn't working with the trader, but I had that with somebody who was a sales representative. He was a real estate guy. He's like, "Hey, I wanted to be able to sell this much real estate so I could make this amount of income." He was thinking like, "Man, this is really hard. It's very competitive. I live in a major metro, so I can throw a rock and hit another real estate agent right now." He's like, "Man, I think maybe I need to go another direction." But the problem is that that fear was going to follow him to whatever other opportunity he was going to go to. So, it's about whether or not did he really want to commit to this, he got into real estate because he like to be able to help people, find that solution that dream home and that lifestyle. Obviously, allows him to do his lifestyle, manage the time that he wants to. Justin Boyum: But by saying, "I'm not sure about this," or "I'm not going to make that decision, or "I might just get out of this altogether," I was like, "Well, you said you want to make 10K a month, just go ahead and write me that check. Go home and tell your wife that's what you did today." Because that's what you're doing. I've been there too. I've been in a place where I was in a sales role or I was trying to start my business. That's my goals. Justin Boyum: By not taking action, I might as well just say, "That's what I need to just give up today." That keeps me from being able to go to donate to the charities that I think are important, being able to take my kids on the vacations that they deserve, send them to private school if I so choose or whatever, right? That's the ripple effect of not making decisions, right? Sometimes you might step on it, it might not work out what you want. But all you're going to end up happening by getting out is that you have regrets. Oh, that could have worked out. Allen Sama: Right. Yeah, yeah. Justin Boyum: Well, you want to be smart about it, right? Hey, look at the market and look at the information that you have available to you and try to make the best decisions. Yeah, but there's no guarantees, certainly not in trading, just as much as there's no guarantees that my business is going to just do anything, right? I got to go perform at a level and do the things that are important, but actually go out there and do it. Allen Sama: Yeah, right. Yeah, man. That's the hardest part. And then the thing is that we teach all our people to do it in a way where you're putting the odds in your favor. So, you're lining it up. So, you have as much success built in before you get started, but there's always that fear there. There's always that thing. So, I guess what that means is like you bring it back to what the goal is, what the why is, right? So, that overcomes that initial fear. Justin Boyum: I would agree with you about give yourself the best odds. They do that in the military. In basic training, they talk about squad tactics, right? They don't let you go and set schedule like an operation unless we have three to one odds and personnel, right? If you've got a 10-person unit and there's another 10-person unit that you're going to go and ambush, that's not good odds. Then you're like, "We're not taking that risk." Right? You can establish your boundaries of what's good for you- Allen Sama: Right, what's acceptable. Justin Boyum: ... and operate within that system. Okay, but if you said, "Hey, I set this goal." Okay, well, then you need to adjust. Okay, well, what kinds of trades am I going to make? Right? So, when I talked to a real estate agent, I go, "Okay, well, you got to sell this much inventory. Well, what if you just instead worked in a higher level of real estate and you don't have to make as many sales?" Right? Or "Hey, that's a complicated market." Okay, well, maybe you can go into one that sell more inventory, right? But you have to sell more to reach that same goal. Justin Boyum: There's different ways to do whichever one, but you've got to figure out what's your framework that you're going to work within. These are my boundaries. I think, in the military, we called that the left and right limits, right? Okay, anything in this field division is what I'm responsible for. Anything outside of that, I don't go past that. Allen Sama: Interesting. Okay, that's cool. I like that, the left and right limits. So, I'm going to focus on whatever is in front of me. So, one of the things we have people do is we do a personality test and a risk assessment. So, it's like how much risk am I good with? Am I a risk taker, like a real gambler? Or am I just like, "Hey, I'm super conservative. If I lose $1, I'm going to have a heart attack thing"? So, based on that, then they decide what strategies we want to work with them. So, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Okay. But now, let's say we're in the midst of the battle. Things are not going exactly as we planned. Like you said, the stuff is hitting the fan. Now, what do I do to make the proper decision to help myself? Justin Boyum: Well, I think ultimately, again, you're going to have to look at the parameters of what's your framework, right? So, I love to use this analogy all the time. Have you ever seen the movie Moneyball? Allen Sama: Yeah. Justin Boyum: It's a baseball movie, right? We talked about basically, the order to win a baseball game is I don't need to go get all this flashy stuff, I just need to make sure that I score more than the other team. The best way to do that is to make sure that my guys are getting on base, right? So, basically, what you're looking at is just more turns on base or more at bats or however you want to look at that. So, I always just talk to my people of like if they're looking to build a business, right? So, MLM, trading, whatever you have to have, you have to get on base, right? Give yourself the ultimate opportunity to do that and when. Look, there's military operations where they have withdrawn, okay? Justin Boyum: There's been major motion pictures about it, like We Were Soldiers, right? That was a battle that did not go well, right? They had to figure out how they're going to get out of that and move on or go do the next thing. Sometimes you have to make that assessment, where this particular opportunity isn't working out. We need to cut losses, and you need to be comfortable with that. What that means, "Hey, okay, I might be taking a loss here," but what you don't do is you let that stop you from getting back in the game. Hey, I got to go to this next at bat. Justin Boyum: I'm sure anybody who's in... I keep going back to real estate, because it's an easy analogy, because it's about investing and stuff. But hey, I'm sure not every investment work out, right? So, sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't go. You can do the best you can to give yourself the best opportunity to make money. But at the end of the day, when you're making the straight, again, more at bats. The more you do within your framework, whatever kinds of stocks that you use, you can do the backwards math on that and what's it going to take the win, right? The Oakland A's in the baseball didn't win every game. They just give themselves the best chance to win every time. Allen Sama: For those you guys who are listening and have read the book, I did not talk to Justin beforehand, because Justin, I talk about that as one of the pillars, the Moneyball, getting on base? Justin Boyum: [crosstalk 00:18:21]. Yeah. Allen Sama: Because a lot of times... Yeah. Well, what we teach is making very small conservative bets, but just winning over and over again. So, our straitening strategy wins about 80%, 90% of the time. So, we're not hitting homeruns. We're not trying to double, triple our money every time, but we're putting on small, small bets. So, we're making 10%, 10%, 10% in an easy way, in a way that doesn't take up a lot of stress, a lot of time. We're just sitting back and making 10%. That really adds up to a lot of money. Justin Boyum: I mean, that's a fantastic strategy, right? I agree. Using the Moneyball analogy, I'm glad that we see eye to eye there. I love that, right? It's just a matter of you just put yourself in the position to win. That's what the military does. They put themselves in the best possible chance to succeed at admission, right? Back in the World War II times, right, there was a lot different scenario. But nowadays, even more, we go to a military operation, we expect to win, right? It's because they've put in those parameters and that framework to make sure that they'll win. Same thing, it sounds like what you're teaching your students is, "Hey, give yourself the best chance to win. Justin Boyum: And then hey, if something doesn't go well, that's okay. You got to figure out how to cut your losses. You can stick it out. You can determine that, but just be at peace with your decision. Don't let that be the thing that holds you back." Right? Hey, I got rejected at the bar by the pretty girl, it doesn't mean I'm not going to ask another girl, right? Allen Sama: Right, right. Okay, so what it seems like I'm hearing you saying is that in order to get in, to get to bat, you got to overcome that initial inertia. You got to have a deeper meaning. I tell a lot of people this. We ask them, "Why do you want to learn how to trade?" They're like, "Oh, I want to make more money." It's never about the money. There's always something deeper there. It's I want to be more successful, I want to be respected. I want to take my family on vacations or whatnot. So, that's the first step. The second step, once you're in the game, once you're in the field and things are happening, you have your... What was it, the Y and the Z or the X and Y? Justin Boyum: You can say left and right limits. Allen Sama: Left and right limits. Okay, so you have your limits, you focus on what's in front of you. You don't worry about all the noise, because in trading, there's noise every single day. There's, "Oh, Trump sent out a tweet," and this person is doing this and this stock over here. This guy said this is going to happen." That guy said that's going to happen. So, there's tons of noise. So, I like that, the left and the right limits. You focus only on what's in your field of vision. You don't worry about anything else. You have your set trading plan or in your terminology, I believe you called it... What was it when you mentioned that before they go into battle, they have their... Justin Boyum: Well, they just have their acceptable risk, right? Allen Sama: Acceptable risk. Justin Boyum: Or their framework for what is... So, like I said, in that scenario I used, you might be on a small squad and you're going through a reconnaissance, right? You're going through this area? Oh, I see this is an area that we might do an ambush. And then they go, and they see that the enemy element that they're looking at is twice the size of what they have. That's not an acceptable risk. You let them go by. Right? Same thing with you're talking about. Hey, I'm not taking huge risks. I'm taking more at bats at smaller risks. So, I can protect myself long term, right? Which is a great framework to use. It's the same thing, right? Hey, left and right limits. Justin Boyum: Okay, so then I see the shiny object. Oh, this big stock might be something big, but it's in a different market. Well, you better determine, "Is that the thing that's going to be useful to you? Is that helpful?" Is taking that risk moving you toward your goal or using the same strategy to build over time so that you have that protection that you're looking for, right? I would suggest depending on what you're teaching your students or what their goals are, hey, don't go off of that big, shiny object, right? Unless you've done the research and you know that you're going to give yourself the best chance to win, stick to what you've got there. Stay at what's your acceptable amount of risk, right? Allen Sama: Right. So, it's not like- Justin Boyum: When one of my clients come to me and they said, they want to do something crazy or they might think it's crazy to them. I'm like, "Hey, that's not crazy. Let's talk else." Figure how we can make it happen. We're going to figure out what's acceptable. Is this serving your purpose? In the military writing concept, it always starts with mission, right? Hey, this is the mission that we have. Here's our situation that we're in. Here's how we're going to execute that. Here's what we're going to do if something goes wrong, right? It's all planned out, it's all structured in that way again to give them the best chance to win. Or if they're going to lose, they do it without losing a lot. Allen Sama: And then they have the right tools, [crosstalk 00:23:06]. Justin Boyum: Of course, you got to have the right tools and resources and the training in order to go do those things. [crosstalk 00:23:11]- Allen Sama: So, what was- Justin Boyum: ... what's the situation and information? Let's do that. Allen Sama: What was your position in the army? Justin Boyum: So, I had various positions, so I was an officer. So, at the end of the day, most officers are leaders, right? They're more management style, more strategic thinking. So, technically, I was trained as a logistics officer. So, it was really about moving equipment, making sure people have what they needed, how do we move X equipment to Y location. But I also held roles such as company command, where I was dealing with over 200 people with various types of departments and equipment and moving them to missions and goals here and there. When I was deployed, I was an executive officer for an intel in sustainment company. Justin Boyum: So, basically, dealing with all of the super secret squirrel intelligence equipment, making sure it was functioning, and that they had what they need to be able to support the mission in Iraq and do their job. So, it was very unique. It was nothing I expected. When you go in the military, you think you're trained for one thing, and then you deal with something a little bit different. So, you always got to be in that place of dealing with ambiguity. I think the same thing applies outside of the military, we you've got to be able to deal with things. Justin Boyum: Maybe you don't have a huge clear picture of it, but you operate within your framework and the way that you like to structure yourself. You're going to do better than you otherwise would have, which is why I love to teach with my students that idea of high performance. How do we structure you so that you can make sound, clear decisions? You know exactly where you're headed, you know how you're going to get there. Allen Sama: Okay, so let's go to there now, but how do you that? How do you become high performance? How do you have huge success without all the information? Justin Boyum: Sure. So, we can go back to the Moneyball thing. I think this really works best and tied in with the military. So, the military is really the best one in the world because there is almost nothing that's a surprise. Our military doesn't do a lot of things that are shocking, right? Sometimes maybe on a particular mission, something could go a little bit different than we planned, but everything has a structure. There's a standard operating procedure document for everything within every unit all the way down to the individual level. Here's how you're going to operate down to what you wear every day, right? Justin Boyum: I wear this every day. I've got my canteen on one side. I've got my ammunition on the other. So, everybody knows where everything is. You've got a question how something works, there's a book or a regulation to tell them how to do it, right? It's all very systematized, right? They send you to boot camp first, right? The reason they send you to boot camp first, we're going to send you through the wringer of here's what it's like to be in the military, make sure your mind is right. Allen Sama: Because you have to build that discipline, you got to be able to- Justin Boyum: You have to have the discipline. You've got to be able to be comfortable around firearms and dealing with... We always called it embrace the suck. Sometimes you might be sleep deprived, you might have to go through this. You've got to low crawl and get in the dirt. You got to do all those things, you've got to have your mind and your foundations right for that. Well, the same thing applies out of the military, you've got to be highly structured. The world highest performers in the world measured by study, anybody you think of, they all demonstrate certain characteristics and habits that allow them to succeed. It's not a super huge secret about... Justin Boyum: Sometimes you might be lucky. You've invented the super widget that nobody ever thought of. You might get the next iPhone that changes everything. For most people, that's not going to potentially happen. You might be creative and that's awesome if you are. But the end of the day, you also still have to be able to perform at a level that allows you to build a business around that and build that influence. We start on a personal level. Justin Boyum: Again, we go back to clarity. High performers have demonstrated the ability to seek tremendous amounts of clarity. They know specifically what they want, why they want it and how they're going to go get it. They're really connected to it. You go back to the Simon Sinek stuff, Start With Why, right? You've got to be connected to that, right? Justin Boyum: Second thing that high performing individuals are able to do, they're able to generate energy. It takes a lot of energy to be a successful person. Most people won't go do the things that they need to do in order to perform at that consistency type of level, right? If you're able to build your business, it might take you for a little while to go 80 hours a week to go develop all the marketing and everything and put everything in place. Can you maintain the energy on that? Justin Boyum: Again, we get back to the three things that stop you. First one is fear. Second one is fatigue. People will just stop because it's hard either physically or mentally or emotionally. They'll fall back to what's comfortable. While high performers are able to generate energy over that. You imagine what you would be able to do, Allen, if you had like five times the energy you do now, right? Allen Sama: Yeah. So, by energy, you mean the food we eat, the way we sleep, all that? Justin Boyum: Well, yeah, it's not just physical. It's mental, right? It's emotional. Yeah. I mean, how much sleep are you getting? Well, first things I usually talk about when someone's coming to me that they can't reach their goals, I'm like, "How much sleep are you getting?" Right? What are you eating? How much are you exercising? Do you meditate? How do you renew? How do you maintain that level of momentum? So, that you can overcome those times when it feels like you don't want to do it, right? We've got like a multi-billion-dollar industry for teaching people how to lose weight. Secrets, do you know how to lose weight? Allen Sama: Yeah, everybody knows how to lose weight. Justin Boyum: Everybody knows how to lose weight, but you've got all these personal trainers and coaches teaching people how to do it and helping them do it because they can't generate that energy and that mental focus themselves. That's what high performers can do, right? And then the next part that we can use to overcome those challenges is you got to be able to be productive. You've got to be able to increase your productivity. Allen Sama: Okay, what do you mean by that? Justin Boyum: So, when we talk about being productive, sometimes it's like, "Oh, I got to do all these things. I got to work harder." Well, not necessarily. It's more or less, "Am I working on the things that are moving me forward? Am I being productive on things that are actually useful," right? Limit those distractions, stay in that left and right limits? I talk to people and I'm like, "Okay, if you got one project to do, let's figure out what the priorities are. If there's anything on your list that doesn't actually move that project forward, then it's not that important." Allen Sama: Right. So, this is working on the 80/20 or the one thing that- Justin Boyum: Yeah, 80/20 rule, however you want to say it. Yeah. Allen Sama: Okay, all right. So, we got three, right? We got know your why. We got increase your energy, and then we got increase your productivity by knowing what to focus on and ignoring everything else and all the noise. Justin Boyum: Right. And then the next part and here's the thing is... I love this for the military style of analogy here. High performers are able to raise necessity. What do I mean by that? We could go back to the war effort, right? It was highly necessary that they completed that mission because people would die, right? We all might be speaking German. That level of necessity. High performers are able to go, "Hey, I need to complete this mission," "I need to go build this business," "I need to go make those trades," "I need to be highly focused in the way that I operate myself. Because if I don't, my family is going to have to move out." or "I'm not going to be able to go and serve the people that need my help." Lift that up. It's connecting to the why still, but it's really attaching that, this has to happen. There's no turning back. Allen Sama: So, this is like focusing on maybe the negative and burning all the boats, saying, "I don't have a choice. My back is to the wall." It's either do or die time. Justin Boyum: Yeah, and high performers are able to do that, forward their projects, right? Because it might seem like, "Hey, if I don't make this trade, that's not going to be the end of the world." Well, you need to be able to show up like it would be. Allen Sama: Interesting. Cool. So, how long does it take to get all these steps in place? Justin Boyum: Well, certainly depends what you want to focus on. You've got to decide like, "What is it that's really holding me back?" We can always do more of a lot of these things, but it's really about putting together systems. Like military style, let me put structure in place that allows me to put these things in as a habit that I can repeat on process. I can be very deliberate with them. It's not something that I just inherently have. Some people are a little bit more risk averse than others, right? Justin Boyum: Some people are really able to go out there and be courageous and go take bold action, just because that's in their nature. Some people maybe aren't, but we can always be doing more. You can do it as a habit, you can actually make it happen. It's not something that you just inherently have all this, right? I will never be 6'10 and in the NBA. I can't control that. I can't control how old I am. I can't control gender. I can control a lot of things, but I can control how productive I am. I can control my sleep schedule, if my kids allow it, right? But I can do a whole lot of things that I do have control over, that's going to give me a way better chance of getting on base than somebody else. Allen Sama: Makes sense. Makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Justin Boyum: Right. So, I mean, in general, I work with my clients, I have a number of ways. I generally start new clients off on a 12-week program where we implement all of these strategies and habits over time and apply it towards what that goal is. Hey, I'm going to go be a day trader and retire. I'm going to make this much money because it's going to allow me to do X, Y, and Z. Great. I really want to go and meet the love of my life and be the best husband and father I could ever be. Great. Or achieve any goal, you've got to be at a level where you're performing as a habit. Can you get lucky and buy a lotto ticket? Sure, you can. Is that repeatable? Probably not. Allen Sama: Which one would you say is the most important out of the four? Justin Boyum: Well, the four that we've mentioned so far- Allen Sama: Are there more? Do you have a lot more? Justin Boyum: I do, I have two more. Allen Sama: Okay. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Justin Boyum: I alluded to it, right? So, high performers also demonstrated a lot of courage. They're able to step outside their comfort zone, right? It's not comfortable to go do something brand new to you or be able to continue to move forward when maybe it's not going so well. So, you've got to figure out, "How can I attach again, go back to that meeting? How can I show up as a more courageous self?" Right? And then the last step, most high performers.... Again, this is something that's obvious when you think about it, I think anyway, but high performers are able to develop influence, right? Justin Boyum: How can I go get the people that are going to help me get where I want to go, and I can bring them along with me? How can I pour into the other people and continue to build my sphere of influence? Think about anybody successful you've ever met, they didn't get there by themselves? I don't care who they are. Even if they're one of those people that seems more independent and reclusive, they got somebody helping them to get to where they wanted to go. Allen Sama: Of course. Yeah. Nobody's an island. Justin Boyum: But I would say the number one reason and most people even if they think that they're mostly clear, and I would be in this boat too, is clarity. It starts there. That's why it's the first step on the journey when I work with somebody and we refer back to it throughout the entire program is that we've got to be able to seek clarity and use it as a habit and continue to develop clarity. Allen Sama: Does that change over time, do you see from people? Justin Boyum: Well, some people start with different goals, of course. So, some people might think that they want to operate in their space in a certain way. And then over time, they mature, and they take advantage, right? The clarity is what they make of it. There's no like set answer, right? So, for instance, so if you told me that you wanted to be a business owner, I wanted to be somebody who really brings enthusiasm, I want to be seen as a leader, great, that's awesome. Well, maybe over time, you realize that you're really much more comfortable being somebody that works more alongside people, right? More of a mentorship capacity rather than that outward leader? Justin Boyum: Well, that's your goals, that's your way that you want to interact in the space. That's not worse than being a leader, right? It's just a different role. It's got to be what you're comfortable with, right? So, a lot of people can have certain personality tests, right? I don't know how I feel about personality test, because you can change that picture. The picture is up to you, and it's what you're comfortable with. So, you asked, "Can it change over time?" Sure. But as long as we're highly clear and we're in it to serve others, we're not trying to cut other people down for us to get ahead, you're going to be okay. You're going to be great. I think most people don't want to disparage other people on the road. Allen Sama: No, no, yeah. Justin Boyum: It's pretty rare that that's the person you're working with. It's probably not going to be in my program. Allen Sama: Can you give me a couple of tips or some questions on how to find that clarity? Justin Boyum: Sure. So, here's what I would suggest to anybody in your following. You can do this, if you're listening to this later. Think about and give yourself a space of a minute or two just to really get centered. Close your eyes and think. I want you to start thinking about three words that describe the best of who you are. These are words that they may be the best of who you are now or who you would like to be. Justin Boyum: If I'm going to ask Allen, I said, "Hey, Allen, tell me about Justin in three words," these are the three words they say and you'd be proud to have someone say that, right? If I go, "Oh, man, I really love to be joyful. I really love to be a leader. I really love to be honest." That's just for an example, right? And then let those three words really drive you and all of your interactions and what you do. So, if what you're doing is not congruent with the three words that you picked, then maybe you shouldn't be doing that. Allen Sama: Okay, interesting. Three words. So, what are your three words? Justin Boyum: Well, mine always tend to change. So, my three words, I don't like sharing them as much, because I don't want people to think [crosstalk 00:37:48]. Allen Sama: Okay, give me one of your clients. You don't have to say the name or anything. Justin Boyum: No, no, I'll share mine. But again, I would love it if you definitely go do this exercise for you, because there's great words. One of mine is bold. I love using bold. And true and leader. They're meaningful to me, because I fancy myself a little bit more of an introvert- Allen Sama: Okay, me too, yeah. Justin Boyum: ... originally. I don't know if that comes across to people or not, but I struggled, like a lot of people, with getting up and speaking in front of people and directing and being seen as that person that people who go to, but that's what I wanted to be and I knew that could be that. So, by embodying that I'm going to be bold here. It gives me that that boost of confidence and being able to be... Again, it gives you that clarity just knowing who you want to be. Justin Boyum: When I first started one of my first businesses, I used networking, like face-to-face networking as one of the ways that I built that business, or going to a room of strangers to go ask them to support my business or whatever would have been something crazy to me when I was younger, right? It's not something I would use to. But before I go in, I go, "Bold, right? I'm bold. I'm a leader. I'm true." Then conversations are just easier, right? Because I'm going to go be who I meant to be. This is the best version of me. Allen Sama: Okay, cool. And then do repeat it to yourself, you put it on the wall? Justin Boyum: So, I would recommend to anybody that I talk, I'll do strategy sessions with someone, gets on the phone, we might do this exercise. I always say, "Hey, look, we've all got a smartphone, we're all using them for our alarms. Go set yourself an alarm for 10:00 AM with those three words." Hey, you look at it and says, "Oh, yeah, I'm going to be bold today." I pick 10:00 AM. It's arbitrary. Some people have different battle rhythms, but 10:00 AM is right for lunchtime. You might be starting to past your peak productivity for the day. Maybe there's another time for you, whatever time you know you normally run out of that energy. Hey, set yourself an alarm that reminds you, put it on the wall, put it somewhere, right? Justin Boyum: Share it with your family. Tell them, "This is who I want to be," right? Even if it's something crazy like, "Hey, before I've never really been enthusiastic," right? That's one of your words, right? "Well, I'm going to start being that way," right? Tell people, "This is who I am." You don't have to, right? It's your words, whatever you're comfortable with. Especially if have a spouse, go tell them, right? Tell them the same exercise. Hey, what do you want to be, right? You get a lot of energy and clarity out of that. Allen Sama: Okay, yeah. I mean, if you tell other people, then if you're not behaving that way, they can actually help you. Or if they tease you about it, then that'll help you as well either. Either way, you get the motivation. Justin Boyum: Not everybody's comfortable sharing with that. I've had people on the phone who were they're a little bit more close to the chest. It takes them some time. Now, they're your words. I mean, ultimately, you get to say, "Hey, this is who I want to be." You chose that. I never judge anybody for the words that they chose, especially if most people are choosing very inspirational words for them. They can change over time, right? Maybe next week, you call me in with a different word, because I've had to tweak in the way that I want to operate. You can change it week to week, year to year, however, you want to do it, or you can stay with them. It depends on what you want it to be for you, right? Because like I said, we can change that picture. Allen Sama: Yeah, I mean, you asked that question. I'm thinking to myself, "I have no clue what my words were." I don't know. Justin Boyum: Maybe we should offline, we can sit there, and we can do that exercise. We can come up with it. It's not as hard as you think. I think most people once they have that space, you give yourself a few minutes to think and then they just rolls off. Just go what's the first thing that comes to mind? That's it. You don't have to overthink it, right? I had one person who had one... I can't remember the three words, but they were all relatively around integrity. So, he was a little bit like, " This seems like the same word. They were not different." I was like, "Hey, these were the ones that are meaningful to you," right? There's a little bit of an angle that you can certainly attach meaning. At the same time, I said, "Hey, these are your words, right? If you want to change, when you can." Allen Sama: Yeah. I know for me, it's not going to be that hard to come up with the words, but it is going to be to keep coming back to them and keep remembering them. Because whenever I have a setback, all of the self-help stuff and all the motivational stuff, all that stuff, I just chuck it out the window. I'm going to go into my little hole. I'm going to feel bad for my job for three days, just leave me alone. Justin Boyum: [crosstalk 00:42:13] personal example, right? That can be easy, right? I go into an event and I'm a coach, right? I want to help people. I want to be able to bring someone into my practice that I can really serve. I go through the process of meeting them at the event. Hey, this is my business card, this is cool. We schedule a call. I go, "Hey, let's book a call, let's talk after this." They go, "No." Well, I could let that affect me or I could go, "Bold, true, leader." Move on to the next person, right? Or address that maybe there's something I've done wrong or whatever. But if I allow myself to be disconnected from that clarity, then what am I doing? I'm not making the next call. I'm not serving the next person I can serve, right? Allen Sama: Oh, I should do that. Justin Boyum: I'm not selling the next house. I'm not making the next trade that's going to allow me to take care of my family. Allen Sama: Right, exactly. Justin Boyum: Or somebody to take care of their family, right? So, yeah, I could be disconnected that way, I can allow those things to help me. But if I'm going to go back to my words and do this, again, as a habit, as a system, as a structure. Put it on the wall if that's where you need it. Have an alarm on your phone, make it the background. Allen Sama: Right. Because not only does it help you get started, but then like you said when there is a setback, when there is a rejection of [inaudible 00:43:26], anything that is a pebble in the way and you trip over it, you can decide to go the negative route or you can decide, "Hey, let me focus on what I want, one of my words." And it brings you almost instantaneously back to what's important. Justin Boyum: All the habits, of course, are important. They're almost required for anybody who's going to be successful. But for me, what was the game changer for me when I started focusing on it was clarity. You can always fall back on clarity, right? Some people need the energy, right? The energy is what drives them. Some people need the productivity. They know that they're making the progress. Some people need to be able to raise that necessity or be more courageous, right? But for me, clarity is one of my favorite topics, because I can fall back on that. Maybe I'm not being productive today, but I can go, "I said I'm going to be a leader today." Allen Sama: Right. You have that cognitive dissidence there as well, because you're telling yourself something and then you don't act like that. Your brain is naturally being like, "Hey, there's something wrong here." You don't feel easy until you fixed it, until you act the way that you said you're going to act. Justin Boyum: Yeah, that's what it's all about. Again, that's the part. Again, that's why I make it basically as the first step into the program. When I'm working with somebody, I'm going to make sure that you're highly clear. So, you're going to come out of my practice depending on what programs you go through, I'm going to make sure you clear. So, we're going to have that after talking to me. Allen Sama: Sweet, sweet, sweet. So, what type of people do you help? Justin Boyum: So, in general, I work with military veterans who are getting out of active duty. That's a really scary time. I was that way back in 2012, 2013. I don't know what I'm going to go do. I only had military experience, right? I was in college. So, I had some college type jobs, but nothing serious. So, I'm coming out with military experience. I don't know how to translate. I know what I'm going to do. I don't know how to interview, right? In the military, especially as an officer, they try to train you not to talk about yourself, right? It's really more mission and people focused. All of a sudden, you're going to go into an interview and talk about how great you are, just a little bit odd. Justin Boyum: That's not knocking the interview process, you had to do it for a reason. But it takes that like, "How can I be very clear?" Right? You could be like me and you think you're clear on something, because maybe you've done some research. Oh, this translates from my experience really well. But you're not clear about what maybe your values are or what that job is going to allow you to go do or what's going to be important to you when you're there. You're like me, and even though I got a great opportunity, I wasn't happy there, right? There was a different set of values and the way they managed people. It just wasn't the right fit. I was miserable. Even though I had a great job for a great company with great people working there, it was just a different mindset. Justin Boyum: So, I love to help people that are going through that phase of transitions. Military, maybe you think about changing jobs. Maybe you think about getting into the trading, right? But you got to be highly clear on what you want to go do. You got to have the system that's going to allow you to be successful, right? That's what I love about my program is because we can talk about a very specific strategy for you to go get what you want, maybe your day-to-day trading, but you're going to have to use the habits that I'm talking about if you actually want to get there. Justin Boyum: I can have map up for you right now on this board how we're going to make a million dollars in the next 12 months. Most people won't have the habits and structure in place to actually go do the things that allow them to do it. So, that's what the power of my program is, it starts with clarity. Allen Sama: Sweet, sweet, sweet. Justin Boyum: So, I work again in veteran space. I mean, truthfully, professionals, business owners, entrepreneurs, anybody that's going to need that level of structure and they're going to support, they're going to need someone there with them that they can share things with. Because sometimes I might want to go do this goal, but my friends... They might think that's weird, right? Justin Boyum: You might be like me, where I was running a trade business. I said, "Hey, I want to go be a coach." That might be seemed weird to some people, right? Because they're comfortable with where you are, but when you're working with a coach, I said like, "Hey, whatever you want to do..." Like I said earlier, "... let's go see if how we can make that happen. Is that realistic? Is that something you want? Is that connected with your mission? What is your mission? Do we need to define that? Great, let's do it." Justin Boyum: That's the power of working with the high performance, because you're going to have that clarity. You're going to have that camaraderie of having somebody that you can be open and honest with that's not going to tell you you're dumb, right? There's nothing as too great. Hey, I've been making $50,000 a year working the line for last 10 years. I want to make a million dollars next year. Okay, great, how we're going to do that? Let's work through it. Allen Sama: Right. Okay. How do people find out about you? Justin Boyum: Well, they can certainly follow me on Facebook or Instagram. Charge Forward is the handle. So, C-H-A-R-G-E Forward. Or you can go to my website, www.thechargeforward.com. So, that's T-H-E chargeforward.com. You're able to follow me there. I have a blog. I put out content. It connects to all my other social media pages. So, you can find all my content there. Certainly, if it's something that I can help you with, I'd be happy to hop on a quick high-performance attraction call. If you've got something that you're struggling with on a goal and you just need some help and support, I'll put you in a totally sales free zone where if I can get you moving in the right direction, I'm happy to do that. You can schedule that call there at the website. Allen Sama: Awesome. Great. All right. Well, Justin, I appreciate your time. I appreciate your service. Thank you so much for all you do. Thanks for helping out our military folks, because yeah, what you're saying is that they go through boot camp. They're normal people first, I guess. They go through boot camp. They get trained in a certain way to think and behave. And then they're dropped back into the real world. It's like a whole different set of rules, and then they almost have to have boot camp to reassimilate into the normal world. Justin Boyum: It'd be like somebody who was raised in Texas, and they dropped them into Paris, France tomorrow. Some people speak English, but it's different, right? Maybe the UK is a better example, because they speak English, but it's different, right? The cues are different. It's not that you can't perform well. It's going to be weird and difficult. It can be hard. Allen Sama: Yeah, exactly. Justin Boyum: Yeah, absolutely. Allen Sama: Appreciate it. Justin Boyum: Thanks for letting me on, by the way. Thank you, Allen, as well for what you do, serving your audience and helping people get and achieve their goals by using your practice and strategies through trading, which is awesome. I love Moneyball. If anybody is using Moneyball as an example, I think that's great. I love that. I'm a numbers guy myself. Allen Sama: Awesome. Cool. All right, Justin. Thank you so much for stopping by. Justin Boyum: All right. Thanks.   LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/  WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com  JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://optiongenius.com/alliance  Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps.

People literally ask me this one question ALL THE TIME… “Allen, how did come up with such a lucrative, safe, and easy way to trade?” I explain it all in my new book Passive Trading, get your free book here  https://www.passivetrading.com/free-book! Option Genius was built with you...the individual trader, the breadwinner, the dreamer, the rock your family depends on ...in mind. Because we know what it takes to become a successful and profitable trader. And that’s exactly what we help you do best. Get your $1 trial of Simon Says Options, our most conservative and profitable trading service here https://simonsaysoptions.com/stockslist-ss-trial-offer.  -- I am joined by my good friend, Angela Aja, who is the founder and the CEO of Angela Aja Coaching. She's also a best-selling author of the book Summoned to Fear. She is a certified life coach with well over 30 years of mentoring and coaching experience, training heart-centered leaders to shape impactful lives for themselves and their communities. Now, Angela has been from the pinnacle of success to the depths of despair. After a devastating family setback, Angela has overcome her own adversity, taking advantage of opportunities before her and turned tragedy into triumph, growth, and expansion. Angela's message is clear, that every human being has an opportunity to turn their setbacks into comebacks and soar to new heights. So that is one of the reasons that I wanted to have Angela on, because a lot of our traders, a lot of our community can deal with that same situation, where they were riding high and then there was a setback, maybe they went down to the pits of despair and then now they're crawling back, or maybe they're just getting started and these despair pits are coming into the future. So Angela, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Allen. I'm really excited to be here and speak to your listeners and just really encourage them and inspire them to just live their fullest life. Thank you. Thank you so much. Well, thank you for coming and sharing your message with us. Now, we mentioned that you had overcome a lot of adversity. One of the reasons I wanted to have you on is because fear is a very overwhelming emotion. I believe that trading has different parts of it. As a mentor or an educator I can give my traders the how to do it, the step by steps, like hey, do this, do this, do this. What I can't do is actually make them do it, you know? Yeah. Sometimes I'd be great if I could just reach over through the screen and just press the button for them and say, "Here, just do the trade." Right, right. There is something holding them back. So why do you think fear stops so many people on their tracks? Well, that's a great question, and I really love to talk about fear, which sounds kind of crazy. Where we are today is a result of what we've been thinking. So if you want to go somewhere or do something new, or have something new, you have to think something different. As a transformational life coach, for me it's all about mindset. So I believe in all of my experience of dealing with people, fear is one of those things that holds people back. I have found that we actually fear fear. Tony Robbins, I think it was Tony Robbins, he said this one statement that really helped me create a lot of major shifts in my own life, and that is he said that fear is nothing more than the thought that you can't handle whatever comes your way. When you boil it down, that's all fear is. Many times fear is just we're presuming our past upon our future. So when you boil it down, fear really is nothing more than one thought, and that is that I can't handle it. Or maybe it's the unknown, that they don't know what is about to come. Yeah, exactly. And that if the unknown happens I won't be able to handle whatever it is that happens. If you think back over your life, think about all the things that you've handled like a boss. Think about all the things. For those that are listening, I want you to think about for a minute all of the things that you have overcome. So you are capable, you can handle. If you just look at your past track record, you can handle whatever comes your way. So really if you begin to come from the new mindset that it doesn't matter what happens to me, I can handle whatever comes my way, then it takes the sting of fear away. I find that a lot of people have a real fear of failure, right? Definitely. I mean, really that's the big thing. When you talk about fear, like what if it fails and I can't handle it? What if it fails and I don't know what to do? What if it fails and I end up in the pit of despair? But I think when we're afraid of that failure what we're really afraid of is success. The reason I say that is because I believe that in most cases we are equating success with a lack of failure, but if you study anyone that has accomplished anything from a baby learning how to walk to the geniuses of history, their journey to success is paved with a road of failures. Here's what I mean by that, is that when I suffered a devastating divorce, and of course one of those things that I did not think I could handle. I was married to a pastor. So I was a pastor's wife and I would speak from the pulpit. I went from speaking from the pulpit to selling windows door-to-door. Here I was, shy, an introvert, I was just ... I didn't have a lot of formal training in terms of education. I had gone to Bible college, so I wasn't super hireable after my divorce. I can imagine. Yeah. Nobody really wanted a job description with three years of children's education. So I had to get creative and I found a job selling windows door-to-door. I was petrified, but this old school salesman took me under his wing and trained me. So he would pull up to a door and he would say, "Now, walk up to the door and go say this." And I would, and sometimes I would come back to the car crying. He would say, "What did you say?" And he'd say, "Now go do it again." What he taught me was that for every, I don't remember what the number was, but let's say for every nine nos there is a yes. So he taught me get out there and go after your nos, don't go after your yeses. Get out there, if you go get your nos your yeses will be there. What that taught me was that somebody saying no to me, something not turning out the way that I expected it to, something that I had maybe in the past deemed as a failure no longer had the sting that it once had, because I realized this is part of the process. Right, you're paying your dues. That's right, that's right. Now, I get that, and I know that in the beginning we tell just about all of our people that when they're starting, they're going to lose money, right? Because they don't know what buttons to push and they don't know exactly what's going to happen and how to react to it and whatnot. So most likely they're going to lose money in the beginning, so they should start small, start with smaller trades, a little bit of money, not too much at risk. In a sales point of view you can get up and say, "Okay, I'm going to knock on 100 doors and even if everybody says no then that's okay because I didn't really lose anything except maybe a day or two of my time." But I know what some of our traders are thinking is I only have X dollars that I can learn with. So if I do this trade and I lose, then my number, it goes down, so I'm losing and I'm having less, and less, and less until eventually everything goes away. So how do you overcome that type of mentality? Because I know that in the beginning it takes a while to learn and you pay your dues, but how do we overcome that feeling or that fear? The fear I know you said it's a thought, and I agree with that, but for some people they internalize that thought so much that it becomes like a feeling. They actually feel inside their stomach or inside their gut or something like they're about to put a trade on and they start shaking because that feeling that they're going to lose, maybe they're already convinced themselves that they're going to lose. I don't know, how would you handle that? Well, I think that we are used to, again, like fearing fear. We think that if we fear that that should stop us or that that holds us back. You know the old saying of feel the fear and do it anyway. Fear does not ... When you change your mindset about what fear really is, then it no longer has to stop you. It can literally be the thing that catapults you into ... Because it's not fear or lack of fear that actually makes you the money, it's the action, it's pressing that button. Right. The other thing is is that what I teach people that I work with is that loss [inaudible 00:10:50] does not have to equal lack. Okay, could you repeat that? Because you cut out a little bit. Yeah. Loss does not have to equal lack. Okay. Loss could equal investment, that you're investing into your future. You're investing into your knowledge, you're investing into your wisdom. You're getting experience. You're getting experience. By learning what not to do. That's it. That's it. So I think that, again, looking at it from a mindset point that we move in the direction of what we focus on. So really it has to do what we're focusing on. So I still fear. I still feel afraid all the time, but it's what I focus on, and what I focus it on is the end result that I'm looking for and that it's the experience that I want to gain from my actions. So then that gives me the courage to take action because I'm not identifying the ... I'm not letting identifying that fear and loss as failure, but I'm identifying it as hey, this is a part of my process. So it's just steps on the path. That's it. So what I'm hearing is that you're saying that it's more of a mindset than anything else and that we should be instead of looking and saying, "Okay, what's the worst that's going to happen?" We should be looking at it hey, why don't we focus on what's good that's going to happen or what is the best that could happen? Focus on that and not worry about the bad stuff. That's it. That's it right there. A lot of times when people come to me they want to have coaching, want to work with me. They're thinking about all the things that are going wrong in their life, and they're thinking about all their problems, and they're thinking about all the things that are stopping them. I like to ask this one question, because one question can change the whole world. One question can change everything. So this one question really changed the game for me. I was thinking about my setback and all of the wrong that had been done to me. I was thinking about all the bad in my situation, and someone said to me, they said, "What's great about that?" and I was like, "What? What are you talking about?" Yeah. What's great about the fact? Okay, I'm divorced, I'm living on the floor. I went from wearing a Rolex with diamonds to selling windows door-to-door, to standing in the food stamp line. What's great about that? Yeah, I don't know. But it caused me to dig deep and it caused me to really think about okay, how can this serve me? How can this become a stepping stone for me? So when it comes to pushing the button and learning trading, I think if you just realize that if you're feeling afraid it's just the mindset that oh my gosh, if I push the button I might lose this. Well, you can handle it. Loss does not equal lack. That loss means you're investing in yourself. So you start thinking about even if you've had a loss, hey, what is great about this? What are the lessons that you learned that you will apply next time that will lead to your actual success? Exactly. Yeah. I mean, there are so many stories that we get. One of the things that I really enjoy is when somebody emails us or calls us and we're talking to somebody about their first trade, the very, very first they put on. They said, "Oh, I did this and it worked exactly like you said it was going to be." And it's like okay, that's great that you made money. I don't really care about that part, but the fact that you took action and that you actually did it, to me that's like breaking the barrier. That's like okay, if you can do that first step, you can break the ice, then yeah, you can just do it over, and over, and over, and over again. I totally hear what you're saying, because even now. I mean, I've been trading for, I don't know, maybe 15 years now full-time. I'll have to check the exact numbers, but it's somewhere around there, and I have a lot of money invested in the stock market, and people ask me, it's like, "What if it goes down tomorrow?" It could go down, that could happen. So we put things in place to protect ourselves, but I know that I can't really control it, but I know that it's a long game. Like you said, it's not just knocking on one door and if you don't make the sale you get shot in the head. It's not like that. Exactly. You get to do it again and again. So I want to play the game where I'm going to be doing this for the next 15, 20, 30 years. So if I'm playing that game, the long game, then I'm not taking as big risks as other people are that get blown up and lose everything. Yeah. If we set it up in that way where we know the risk and we know what the gain is but we focus on the gain more, then even if we do lose once in a while it's not going to totally destroy us. Yeah. Another question that my coach, years ago my very first coach that I had asked me was again, one of those questions that kind of made my mind go like, "What?" Here I was, I had been, again, divorced, and living on the floor with my kids. I had been ... He had made some decisions that didn't include his family and that kind of thing. I was stuck as the victim. Even though I had been victimized, I stayed the victim in my mindset and I wasn't moving forward, because that felt easier for me just to stay the victim. Exactly. She asked me, my coach asked me this one question, and she said, "What was your contribution?" I mean, that question, it made me really mad. What was your contribution? Yes. I'm going to write that down too. So here I was the one that had been victimized in a sense, that I had been done wrong. She asked me, "What was your contribution?" And it made me so angry, but I decided to sit with that question. I realized that my contribution was that I didn't know who I was. I lived my life trying to make everyone else happy and I had completely lost my joy. Because I was brave enough to sit with that question it really opened the door for what I do now and helping people really discover their purpose, why they're here, really shift their mindsets. The reason I bring that question up is because I think that's a great question for your listeners, that if they have lost in the market it would be real easy for them to say, "Well, it was the market's fault." Yeah, exactly. And feel like they're the victim to the market, but if they asked themselves that question, well, what was your contribution? Well, if you've set yourself up, like you said, with protection, layers of protection, then again, that loss does not take you out. So really sitting with that question. If you've lost, what was your contribution? Again, what it does is it pulls those lessons out so that the sting of fear, so that the sting of loss it becomes a gift to you. Yeah. That's big, that's huge right there, how to get over that, because we have so many people who want to, I mean, they sincerely they want to achieve, they want to learn, they want to take the next step, but there's something blocking them. A lot of times it's like well, what's the problem? We've shown you examples that it works, we've shown you other people that it's worked for them, it's been working for me. What is it that's holding you back? And they're always like, "Well, I tried something else in the past and it didn't work." Or, "I tried to learn it and I lost because of the market." Or because of something else, or because of this other course that I took, or the economy was bad, or my spouse wasn't helpful. It's always, like you said, it's always something else. Very few times do I hear that oh, you know what? I just didn't pay attention and that's why I lost money, you know? Right, right. There's very little self-responsibility. It's always something else, something else. So is it that simple, just ask yourself that question and sit with it until you come up with the answer? Well, I mean, yes, it is that simple. I know we make it a lot harder. It comes down to what do you want? As human beings we only have two motivations. We're either going after what we want or we're avoiding what we don't want. Exactly. So if you decide, get really clear about what you want and then go after that, then fear is nothing more, you can recognize fear is nothing more than just an excuse. Because if we make something hard ... Like how many times, I'm sure you hear this a lot, people say, "Well, this is hard." Mm-hmm (affirmative). If you make something hard, then it becomes unobtainable, right? In our minds we say it's hard and that lets us off the hook. So if it's unobtainable then it becomes our excuse. Well, we don't have to do it, we don't have to figure it out, we don't have to go make another trade and try it again because it's hard. Exactly. Either that they say something like, "Oh, I can't predict what the market is going to do or what the stock is going to do." Or, "I don't know how to do X." Whether it's I don't know how to look at the trade, or analyze it, or look at the little lines on the charts that people draw all over the place. It's always I don't know how to do this, so I'm not going to do anything at all. Right, right. Yeah, it is that easy. Focus on what you want. If that's what you want and you want to go for it, then invest in yourself and consider those loses your investment, and feel the fear and do it anyway. Just learn and grow. Like you said earlier, when I was out there knocking on doors I literally came back to the car crying every day my first week. I could have just given up, but because I did not give up I just kept doing it anyway and I would keep making those small little tweaks. I'd come back to the car and he'd say, "What did you say." And he'd say, "Now go back out and say it but don't say that, say this." And I would go do that. I trusted the process and I trusted my coach, and I ended up becoming number one in five states. Wow. Here I was this shy introverted mother of four that had just been divorce. Those thing, fear, and loss, and lack of knowledge, we're used to letting those stop us, but they can also at the same time that they can stop you they can be the thing that fuels you. Yeah, I totally agree with you. So I think in this situation would you say that you succeeded, because anybody else could've done the same thing, right? I mean, if you'll agree with me that- Yes. ... there wasn't anything magical about what you did or what he told you. Right. There are some tricks, but yeah, everybody could learn from him, everybody could go do the same thing. So would you say, and I'm sure this is true in most sales organizations, most of the people don't survive, they fall out, they give up, they quit, they fail at selling. So for you to be number one in five states, would you say it was because of your overwhelming drive of what you wanted or were you afraid of what was going to happen if you did not succeed? I think it started out at first, this was before I understood coaching, so I think at first when I was doing that I think there was a fear of okay, I have four kids to take care of, I have four kids to put through college. What the heck am I going to do? I don't have a good résumé. So I think there was some fear, but I think it did switch, because I remember a point where something rose up inside of me and I decided that I was no longer going to be the victim and I decided that I was going to be a success and that a little failure here and there did not detract from who I was as a person. I decided I am a successful person, so because I'm a successful person I'm going to get out there and take the actions that a successful person would take. So I ended up successful. So I think it did start out that way, but I do remember that moment where there was a shift inside of me and I was like, "You know what? I don't care how many doors I have to knock on. I'm going to go connect with people." I believed in the product, I really did, I loved ... I mean, as funny as it sounds, I loved the windows that we sold and they really did help people. They were triple pane and they cut people's energy bills, and I knew ... What I did is I learned the art of walking up to a house, I learned the art of [inaudible 00:27:08] to the houses that I knew had all the buying signs and they really needed the windows. So I learned my art, and I think that applies to your listeners, is that you do have to learn the art and learn the skill. One of the things that I teach is confidence for women, but confidence, the confidence that I teach is not just walking into a room and feeling good about yourself. My definition of confidence is the way that Amelia Earhart defined it. She defined confidence as the willingness to go after her impossible and the belief in herself that she could make it happen. She was the first woman to cross the transatlantic flying solo, and it had never been done, especially not even by a woman. So she was stepping out and stepping into an arena, there was no path for her. She had to go out and create the path. So it took this bravery, but she decided this is the impossible that I want to create, and I'm just going to go after it and believe in myself that I can do it. That is what she attributes her ability to accomplish such a great feat to, was that right there. So with your listeners, just decide hey, I want to be successful at this, this is what I want and I'm going to put the time in, put the effort in. I'm going to learn the skill, I'm going to learn the art, but I'm also going to believe in myself and I'm going to take the necessary steps to protect myself financially. Obviously I'm thinking, I'm guessing that you're not encouraging people that if this is their last dollar put your last dollar in. No, no. So they have to be smart about it and listen to their coach, but just that belief. A loss is not going to define me and take away who I define myself as successful. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. So I do have a followup question on that one, was when you had that epiphany, when you had that switch, that mental switch that you went from victim to I guess victor. Yeah. How did you make that switch? Was it something that just occurred to you, or something happened, or was it something that did you have a coach that was helping you? What was that process like? I think that probably was about the time when I did have a coach, because she really helped me, what she really helped me do was step out of that victimhood and living that victimhood every day. I think before everything happened, before my setback had occurred, I did a lot of reading. I was always studying success and the mindsets of a successful person. So I think there were seeds inside of me that were there. When a seed goes into the ground it's covered up by dirt and sometimes it's covered up by manure, but that manure, the stuff we go through in life is what feeds us and expedites our growth. So I think there were seeds inside of me of success. I grew up in a Christian home, I grew up ... We had success in the ministry right away, so I kind of was in that ... I had the perfect life, so I thought. Really it was that setback, without that setback that became the fertilizer for all of the success, principles that I had put inside of me in my younger years. I think the setback it really did become that fertilizer, and then just sitting in that place of really thinking about what do I want. Here I have basically lost everything. What do I want to do with this? I can even just stay here and kind of stew in this negative spot or I can make something of this. I think that's what I was thinking. Okay, what am I going to do this with? I have an opportunity to reinvent myself. So I decided that's what I wanted, and I started going after that. Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, I mean, I had a similar story. I don't know, for me when I started investing and trading I lost a lot of money right off the bat. It was at the point where I had lost so much and financially we were kind of desperate. So it was okay, either I need to turn it around right away or I need to go out and get a job. Yeah, yeah. So I had that my back to the wall feeling I had, like you have to succeed no matter what because the alternative was too painful. So since then we've had success and things have been built, but it's interesting, and I ask that question because I don't know if I've actually made that switch yet in my mind. I don't know if I've ... I still, I have confidence in my trade, I know what I'm doing, but if somebody were to say, if someone was introduce me as, "Oh my god, look, here's a super successful trader." I'd be like, "oh, knock it off. That's not me." So I still have issues with that part of it, of seeing myself as the new me that I've wanted to be or that maybe even I am based on the numbers, other people say that all the time, but to me it's like nah, that's not ... Anybody could do that. Yeah. It's interesting. Well, I have to bring it back here. I know this might sound a little funny for your readers, but I have a butterfly necklace on here because I'm known as the butterfly lady, and I did not intend on becoming the butterfly lady, but what happened is is that I realized that I started looking at the journey of my life, and I started realizing that my life, my journey, it mimicked that of a caterpillar going to a butterfly. So I wrote a book called Summoned to Soar: Five Stages of the Rise of a Woman. So in that book I show how every woman, actually every human being has an opportunity to go through five stages to make their greatest comeback. There's something so interesting about the butterfly, and I know most of your listeners are probably guys and they're probably thinking, "What in the world am I going to learn from a butterfly?" But this is really incredible. When the caterpillar goes into the cocoon, most of the times the cocoon hangs upside down. So there's times in our lives when life gets turned upside down, but when life gets turned upside down that means you're properly positioned for a transformation. I don't know if you know this, Allen, but did you know that the caterpillar does not turn into the butterfly? No. That's not what my four-year-old told me. She told me just the other day. She was like, "This happens, and this happens, and this happens, and this happens." Well, listen, let me explain myself. Okay, so the DNA of the butterfly is inside of the caterpillar. When the caterpillar goes into the cocoon, enzymes are released that literally melt her into liquid form, and they actually call it pupa soup. So the encasement, the old encasement has to be melted away so that the DNA of that butterfly can be revealed, reshaped, and reformed. So I believe it's the same with us as human beings, that the DNA of our purpose, the DNA of our greatness is inside of us, but we have to be willing to let go of the man or the woman that was created by fears, failures and disappointments. So this is so incredible, but when the whole time that the caterpillar is in the cocoon she can't excrete, so she can't go to the bathroom. So here she is, she's face-to-face, excuse my language, but she's face-to-face with her own crap. So it's when we take time to sit with ourselves, and look at the old fears, failures, and imperfections that we have allowed to define us as a caterpillar, that's when the transformation can take place. If she goes through the full process, she's this little caterpillar, she's in the cocoon, she becomes liquid form, the DNA of the butterfly starts to go through this transformation and she becomes this beautiful butterfly, and all of a sudden she's like, "Okay, I know it's time to break out." And the only way for her to break out is to kick her way out. Sometimes breakthrough is hard work. So even with your listeners, when they're trying to break through to their next level financially and they're going to use trading as that avenue, this is not supposed to be an easy road. Breakthrough, breaking through your mindsets that have held you captive where you're at, breaking through your ideas of what success is, breaking through all that is hard work, but if you're willing to go through the process then you break free. What happens is is that once that little butterfly, she breaks out of the cocoon, she falls to the ground in exhaustion and she's laying there. As she's laying there then she's got these new things, and she's like, "Hmm, I just feel like I'm supposed to flap them." So she starts flapping, and as she starts to flap her wings all of the excrement that was in the cocoon with her literally gets shot back up into her body and into her wings and hardens. Really. So all of the crap that you've been through is what gives you the strength to fly. So whether it's your traders, whether it's a man or a woman that has gone through a divorce, whether it's ... No matter what it is. What happens is we get used to seeing ourselves as merely a caterpillar, but the DNA of your butterfly is inside of you, the DNA of your purpose is inside of you, and being willing to let go of that old mindset of I'm just a caterpillar, I'm just this, I'm just that. The reason it is imperative for every man and every woman to become a butterfly to soar is because of this one thing, and this is why I wrote the book, Summoned to Soar, is because when the caterpillar, sorry, when the butterfly begins to flap her wings, she can fly, she can go places that she's never gone before, she can do things that she's never done before. Exactly. But something incredible happens. As she is faithful to flap her wings and do what she was created to do, she can catch the tailwind and the tailwind can carry her to places that she can never go on her own. So something magical does happen, something ... That success, when you're ... Think about somebody who they're putting step, it's like going viral. It's like something magical happens where you go from- There's an outside influence that comes in and just takes you. Yes. Yes. So even for your listeners, I just want to encourage them and inspire them. Get in touch with the DNA of your purpose, of that call. Go after what you want. Decide, I am successful, and so I'm just going to do the actions that a successful person would do, and I'm not going to let a loss define me. I'm not going to let fear define me. And stop me, yeah. And stop me. That's it. That's one thing about the butterfly and the cocoon. I know one of our friends had got us one, I guess you can buy them or maybe she got it off the ground, I don't know, but there was a caterpillar and there were some little sticks or leaves in a cup, and she had covered the cup. She gave it to us, and she said, "Look. Here, hold this, keep it, and it's going to turn into a butterfly." Yeah. So we were watching it day after day and the caterpillar is walking around, I guess eating the leaves, and then finally it turned into a cocoon. We're waiting, and we're waiting, and we're waiting, and we're waiting and nothing happened. My wife got a little, like maybe it died. What happened? Maybe we should help it. So she took a little, like a pin, and she poked a little hole in the bottom of the butterfly, the cocoon, and it died. The poor thing died, and then we told our friend and she's like, "No, you have to let it kick its way out by itself because otherwise it won't be strong enough to survive outside of the cocoon if it gets the help. It has to do it by itself." Yeah, so Allen, your listeners, they have to push the button. Yeah. They have to do it. You know what I mean? Exactly. You can't push the button for them. Right. So yeah, it's exactly. It's the kicking that strengthens the butterfly for flight. So pushing that button, it's preparing them for the next level of success. Yep. So okay, one final question for you before I know you got to go. So then how do we get clear about what we want? How do I know okay, I'm caterpillar now, I want to be the butterfly, how do I know what the butterfly looks like? Well, that's a really great question. I think that you can do that a couple different ways. I think you can do it just by ... I think there's a lot of breakthroughs that you can get on your own if you listen to yourself think and you listen to yourself talk. Okay. Then I'm a big proponent of journaling, of really just dream building. You have to have that quiet time where you can really sit and think, what do I really want? Because we're not conditioned to sit and ask ourself, what do we want? We're mostly just conditioned to kind of get on the hamster wheel and stay on the hamster wheel. Go through life, do this [crosstalk 00:43:30]. This is what I'm supposed to do, you know? Yeah. My parents expect this, my kids want this, I got to do this. Yes, but I believe that your dreams and your desires, all of that supports what your purpose is, the message that you're here to speak, the hurt that you're here to heal, all of those things. So really just taking the time to sit, and journal, and ask yourself the right questions. You can hire a life coach, which makes it go faster. I help people really identify who they are, why they're here and what they want to do in 12 weeks. So I help them do that quickly because I have a process so that you don't have to ask yourself, well what questions do I need to ask myself? What do I need to be journaling? So I kind of take you on that journey. Can you give us a couple of those questions now? Yeah. So one of the questions that, again, they're several questions that really changed my life. This one blew the doors off of everything for me. This is a big question, okay? Mm-hmm (affirmative). I got my pen. My life coach asked me, she said, "What do you really, really, really, really, really want?" Six reallies, okay. Because what happens is is that we settle for kind of the first really. The superficial stuff kind of. Yeah. When you start digging down, well, why do I want that? A great exercise that I like to take people through is called the five whys. Yeah. Again, it kind of helps you get to the answer to that question that I just asked. Well, what do you want? Well, why do you want that? But why do you want that? What's important about that and why. Yeah, exactly. What's important. That's it, yeah. So it helps you just to drill down, because I think that a lot of times for most of us we just settle and we don't take the time to really get in touch with what is our heart really longing for. When you know that, then you get tunnel vision. Yeah. It's like a horse with blinders. You're no longer distracted by other people's dramas, you don't have to be a people pleaser, you're no longer a perfectionist, you're no longer a procrastinator, you're focused. You work on your own self and you don't worry about anybody else or what they think about you, or what their expectations are. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you just go. Awesome. So Angela, how do our listeners find out more about you? You have a website or ... I do. I know your book is called Summoned to Soar. Yeah, yeah. So my book is on Amazon, but really everything is at angelaaja.com, www.angelaaja, A-N-G-E-L-A-A-J-A.com. Okay, cool. A link to my book in on there, coaching, everything. Awesome, awesome. You said you had a 12 week program where they can figure out what they want and who they are and all that. Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah. So, I mean, if anybody is interested in that there's a place where they can book a call and- And talk to you to see if it would be a good fit. Yep. You do one-on-one as well if they need that? Uh-huh (affirmative), yes. I sure do. Awesome, awesome. Yes. Thank you so much. Great. This was really fun. No, this was wonderful. Thank you. Yeah, I took a whole bunch of notes. All your questions, I got them. Good, good. That was awesome. Great. Thank you so much, Angela. Awesome. Thank you. -- LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... 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People literally ask me this one question ALL THE TIME… “Allen, how did come up with such a lucrative, safe, and easy way to trade?” I explain it all in my new book Passive Trading, get your free book here  https://www.passivetrading.com/free-book! Option Genius was built with you...the individual trader, the breadwinner, the dreamer, the rock your family depends on ...in mind. Because we know what it takes to become a successful and profitable trader. And that’s exactly what we help you do best. Get your $1 trial of Simon Says Options, our most conservative and profitable trading service here https://simonsaysoptions.com/stockslist-ss-trial-offer.  --- Passive traders, guess what? My mind has been blown again.  Maybe doesn't take that much to blow my mind. But I just finished re-reading a book called The Future Is Faster Than You Think. I might have even talked about it before. But this book is written by a guy named Peter Diamandis and I guess you could call him a futurist, but he stays on top of and in contact with all the different technologies, the scientists that are coming up with all... Doing all the research about what's going to happen in the future, how everything is going to be disruptive in different industries. So, what companies are doing what, what scientists are doing what, what new advancements are... He stays on top of all of that, and so in this book, he actually compiles and summarizes all the stuff that's going on in all these different industries, like transportation, health, finances, advertising, retail, all these different aspects of life that are going to change in the next few years. And that is the really crazy part, that in the past, it took years and years and years for things to change. But as we've seen lately, things are changing much, much faster and we really have to adapt to these changes. For example, when I was in high school... What was this? 1994 is when I graduated high school. There were no cell phones. I didn't have a cell phone. I had a beeper, if you guys remember beepers. But I had a beeper. And then came the cell phone and then came the smartphone and now people have smartphones even in the poorest of countries. And with a smartphone, you now have more information in your hands than Bill Clinton did when he was president of the United States. That's amazing. That's the power that we have nowadays. And so, one of the things that he was talking about in this book... And I believe if you're interested in the future, like I am... I think cool stuff. You really should pick up the book. And the thing that I wanted to talk about on this episode is the aspects of health and all of the new technologies that are coming out. For example, there is a company called Gelesis. This is a pharmaceutical company, I guess you'd call them, but they're a new startup health company and they have already gotten FDA approval, which means they can sell this new product to anybody they want, for weight loss. It's a weight loss pill and in their trials, right? They did FDA approved trials with thousands of people. They give you this pill. On average, in six months, the people lost 22 pounds. And this is not a drug. It's an all-natural pill. Actually, it's three pills. You take it with water 30 minutes before you eat lunch and then another three pills before you eat dinner every day. You do that. That's all you have to do. You don't have to change your diet. You don't have to exercise. You don't have to do anything else. Nothing. You do nothing except take these three pills 30 minutes before lunch with water, 30 minutes before dinner with water. That's it, and you will lose 20 pounds in six months. So, 20 divided by six, you're losing about three and a half pounds a month without doing anything. This pill has already been proven to work. It's already FDA approved. It's going to be on the market for sale by the end of the year of 2020. That's their plan. And there are no side effects. Well, there might be a few side effects, but there's nothing artificial in this pill. There's no chemicals, there's no drugs, there's no nothing. Everything in it is natural. The side effects... You might be bloated or you might get diarrhea depending on how it interacts with your stomach, all right? Because that's what it is. It goes into your stomach and this is how it works. You ingest the pills, you drink the water. Whatever the stuff is inside of the pill expands in your stomach and it makes you feel full. And because you are full when it's lunch time or dinner time, you don't eat as much. I mean, it's brilliant, it's simple. It's very easy to come up with this idea, but this company finally found a way to make it happen. Now, there might be others that are following them or even ahead of them. I don't know. I only know about this company and FDA approval is a big deal, right? And it's coming out at the end of this year. What else is happening? Wow. Well, we've already heard about people getting face transplants. We've already heard about people or scientists that are able to grow organs. So, if you need a new kidney, you need a new liver, they can grow the organ. Not only that, but there are other scientists who are doing 3D printing of organs. I don't even know how you 3D print organic material, but they have a way. They are printing organic material, printing organs. This is life-changing, crazy, crazy stuff. These things are going to be hitting the market. Right now they're all in testing. They're going to be hitting the market within the next 10 years, okay? There's a book that just came out from a Harvard MD. It's called Lifespan. Now, I haven't read the book, but basically the gist of the book is that with all the current technological advances that we have, man should easily be able to live to 120 years old. Right now, average life span is, what? In our eighties? Right? Depending man, woman, how old you are, whatnot. But... So, we can expect to live in our eighties. Okay. Great. Now they're saying 120 without much new advancements. But all these advancements are coming, right? Another aspect is a friend of mine who sells insurance, she told me that for cash value life insurance policies or at least for whole value or whole life insurance with cash value... Not term insurance, but with whole life insurance, what they used to do is you... And they still do this, but the thing changed. You put money in, right? Every month you pay the premium and the cash value grows supposedly. When you hit 100, they are like, "Oh, wow. You hit 100. Congratulations. You beat the game. Here's your death benefit." So, if it's a million dollar policy, they're going to give you the whole million dollars and they give you whatever cash value you had. So, they give you the entire policy amount. They give you everything and they cancel the policy when you get to 100 years old. Now, that's pretty cool. That's a really good encouragement to live to 100, right? Here's all this money. Go enjoy it. Go live your life. Awesome. Thank you. Woo-hoo. Right? Well, guess what? That number is no longer 100. The insurance companies have now changed that number to 120 because they are seeing what's happening. They're seeing what's going on. More and more people are hitting 100. They moved that number up to 120 and I believe they're going to have to move it again within the next 10 years or so because people are going to start hitting, getting close to that 120. All right? There is another fellow who was talking, and he is a scientist, he has a company. They are dealing with a certain type of stem cells, right? So, the actual cell name is called the precursor cell and it's a one type of stem cells. It helps develop bones in babies and all that stuff before we're actually physically material as people or... I don't know how you say it, but when the embryo is growing, these precursor cells go and develop stuff and then they turn off or they go away. I'm not sure exactly what happens to them, but they're not there anymore. They're not active anymore. So, this person, this scientist and his team have gone in and found a way to make these cells active again. And so, now they're doing tests on dogs and they are taking a 10-year-old dog, giving it these cells. They're re-activating these cells and the dog body changes to become a young pup. Everything. I mean, the body... It doesn't get... It doesn't shrink in size or anything, but the brain function, the activity levels, the metabolism, the cell structure, everything. How the body of the dog works is as if the dog was only one or two years old. Now, this is a 10-year-old dog. They have started trials on people and they have one video that they show in their talks where there's a woman who's suffering from very late stage Alzheimer's and she's at the point where she's almost catatonic, where she can barely move, so if you... She has... Her eyes are open and she's there, but if you move your hand in front of her face, she won't respond or anything like that. They gave her this therapy and she's up and about, walking, talking, totally changed. Alzheimer's. I mean, this could be a cure for Alzheimer's. When? Next five to 10 years. And when he was doing the talk, the guy was doing the lecture and showing the video. He could tell that the people in the audience were not really... They didn't care too much about Alzheimer's. They weren't like, "Oh my God. That's amazing. It's the best thing in the whole world. And he was obviously looking for investors. So, the people in the group, people in the audience, were mostly men, older. And so, he said, "Well, you know, you guys might not be interested in Alzheimer's or curing Alzheimer's as much, but I can tell you that within the next five years, we will be able to regrow hair in your original hair color." And everybody went crazy. They're like, "What? Oh, my God. You can regrow hair?." So, yeah. You can tell some people, where their values lie. Forget about Alzheimer's patients. But if you can put my hair on my head, all right. I'm going to heavily going to invest in this. But, seriously. If you're interested, look this guy up, Peter Diamandis. Pick up this book, The Future Is Faster Than You Think, and you can read about all these new technologies, all these new companies that are coming out. They're changing the way we use energy. He starts off the book talking about self-driving cars and flying cars and hyper loops and rocket cars, rocket ships that fly around the earth, and take you from point A to point B. Then he goes into artificial intelligence and he goes into virtual reality and how things are changing in that realm and it's just mind-blowing stuff. And, I mean, I got myself a pair of virtual reality goggles just to check it out and they were the gimmicky ones. You know, the $30 ones. But it's really cool stuff. Now for my birthday, I told my wife, "Hey, I want the $500 brand." You know? I want the $500 virtual reality goggles because that is a whole new level. And if you've seen... There's a movie called Ready Player One. It's also a book turned into a movie. Basically, it is set in the future and everyone there... People don't like their life, so everybody goes, puts on these virtual reality goggles and they're always in a game and everybody plays the same game and you play the game, you fight, you do racing. You do all kinds of different things in the game and the way that they show the people reacting in the game... So, you put your goggles on. You are now a character in this whole new world. It's not Earth. It's somewhere else. You can do anything. You can jump, you can kill, you can do all kinds of crazy stuff. But if somebody touches you, you have to have special equipment in the real world. You have to have gloves. So, if you have gloves... You have virtual reality goggles. You can actually buy virtual reality gloves in real life today. You can buy a virtual reality suit and you put that on today. And so, when you're in the virtual reality world and you touch something with your hand in the game or in virtual reality, you will feel it on your fingers. I'm not sure... I'm not explaining this correctly. But there is a group of scientists. What they did was they went into one of the pyramids in Egypt. I think it was Cleopatra's tomb or Tut's tomb or... I don't know where they went. They went to one of the tombs and they went in and they took all the images and they took all this... They video-recorded everything and they turned it into a virtual reality-type experience, and now in schools, the kids can put on the goggles and they can go, transported into the pyramid, walk around the halls of the pyramid, actually touch the walls and feel how it feels inside, feel the slime or feel the rock, and if there's something carved in it, they can trace their fingers on the carving and feel. I mean, it's phenomenal, amazing, crazy stuff that's going on right now. Why am I saying this? Well, I'm excited. I just wanted to share it with you. But, the reality is the future, is coming. It's coming fast and we are all going to live a lot longer than we are thinking. We are going to be healthier. We are going to live longer. Those two things, I'm going to pretty much... We can guarantee it. Life span is going to increase with all this stuff coming okay? And with the new technologies and new scientists and new ways of healing, we're going to be able to live healthy lives until that time. But like in anything else, who gets the best results? The rich. Okay? The rich are going to be the first ones that can afford the treatments. The rich are going to be the first ones that can afford the flying car. The rich are the first ones that are going to take advantage of all these new activities and advancements. That's why you need to do better financially. That's one reason, if nothing else, okay? The other reason that you need to be trading options? Retirement is not coming at 65 anymore. Maybe it still does, technically, legally, whatever, retirement at 65. But you're not going to live only 20 years after that. You're going to live another 40 years after that and the money has to last, and if we are living healthily and our minds are still engaged and our minds are still active or maybe even our minds are getting younger than they are at 80, you need to have a way to constantly make money for the rest of your life. That's trading. There's nothing else that can help you, right? Everything else is going to be changing. They're talking about changes to real estate where real estate values are going to completely change. I had a friend of mine, she used to work at Toyota and she was working on a project where they have this box which is a vehicle. But it's a box and it drives by itself and they are working with companies like Nike, Amazon, Visa, MasterCard. All these big companies are working on customizing this box. So, for example, let's say you want to buy some workout clothes. You call Nike or you go to their website, whatever. You press a button on your phone. This box shows up to your house. You walk inside and all the clothes are already there or you can pick what clothes you want on a screen and it will make the clothes for you in the box. It'll print the clothes for you in your size in that box. You no longer will have to go to the store and try things on. Custom-made clothes brought to you, to your house or wherever you want it to come. You step in the box. You do your shopping. You don't even have to check out. You basically just take the items, walk out the door of the box, and then the box goes to somebody else. And when you walk out, it scans the items you have, charges your credit card, charges your bank, whatever, and done deal. Now, imagine people start doing that. What do you think is going to happen to the retail industry? Who's going to open a retail store? Very few. What's going to happen to shopping centers? What's going to happen to strip malls? They're all going to go away. The other thing he was talking about is transportation, changes in transportation. So, we already have electric cars that are gaining momentum, and almost every major brand is now coming out with electric versions of their cars and they're going almost all electric soon. Maybe in the next five, 10 years. But the self-driving car is where everybody wants to get to and so far, Tesla is the fastest... It's the one that's the most there and that's why they're selling so many, because of the self-driving feature, I think. That's the only reason I want one. But the thing is that the self-driving part is not the only thing that's going to come in the next 10 years. Flying cars are coming in the next 10 years. Not only that, but they have rocket ships that they can fine-tune so that they can travel in the Earth's atmosphere and they can take you from... Let's say you get out of your car. You're living somewhere in the middle of the country. Let's say you're living in Iowa, okay? You're living in Boise. No, not Boise. Boise is in Idaho. Wherever. Fine. You're living in Boise, Idaho. Okay? You get out of your house, you need to get to London for a meeting. Okay. You take your self-driving car to the local air park. You go there, you go up to the top, get into a flying car that goes two, three hundred miles an hour. That thing takes you to the shuttle launch bay, which is in the next, probably in the biggest city nearby. That thing puts you on a rocket ship that takes you all the way to London. You get there within 45 minutes. So, from house to London, 45 minutes travel time. What is that going to open up? People are going to be able to live anywhere they want, right? People are not going to want to live in the big cities anymore with all the congestion and traffic and all that stuff, especially now with COVID and everything. People are leaving the big cities because they need... They want freedom. They want more land. They want to get away from people. So, we've already seen that exodus of people leaving the cities. When transportation speeds up and gets to this level, real estate prices are going to go in the toilet. So, if people are thinking, "Well, yeah. I'm just going to buy a whole bunch of rental houses." It'll work for a while. I can't tell you exactly it's not going to work, but there's a good chance that disruption is coming in real estate. There's a good chance that it's coming. Will it come in trading? It probably will. Something will change. But for now, that's the best option that I think we have. I think you should also diversify. Have some real estate houses, have some other things, other investments. That's great. Do it all. But be able to adapt, be able to change and know that you're going to be living longer, you're going to be healthier. There's no, "Oh, I want to do this tomorrow." No. Do it now and it'll pay off for decades, and then hopefully it'll pay off for generations. Okay? Because you can teach your children, you can generate the wealth for them, you can teach them how to generate wealth, you can build up an empire, you can build up a legacy. Whatever you want to do, because you're going to have plenty of time, okay? Even if... We have a friend, he's unfortunately in kidney failure right now. They've taken him off dialysis. He only... I don't know... We don't know how long he has to live, but if he can last another few years, he can be saved. And this is for people that are suffering with MS, people that are suffering from Alzheimer's, people that are suffering from all these diseases that basically rob you and eventually kill you. If they can survive a few more years, another decade, they will be able to be saved or their lives will be extended enough that eventually there might be a cure in another 20 years or 25 years or 30 years. Whenever the cure comes out. But they will be able to be kept alive and their life will be able to be extended. It's not a death sentence in the same way that we understand it now. And so, yes. The world is changing. Science is going nuts. It's going crazy. I was listening to another podcast about a guy who does, works with health start-ups, a lot of companies that are health start-ups. And what he was saying is that in the past, they had a saying for R&D, for research and development, about health. It takes decades to move seconds. So, what that means is basically that it would take decades to get anything new approved, to get anything new adopted by the health and the medical community because you're dealing with lives and they don't want to get sued and they don't want to take chances. So, when you're dealing with a hospital, when you're dealing with the government to get a new process approved, there's a lot of bureaucracy. There's a lot of red tape. There's a lot of things. You got hoops you got to go through. And so, it would take forever, forever, forever to get one small little thing changed. Now that we have COVID, everything is topsy-turvy. And so, now they are moving decades in seconds. And what I mean by that is they are getting things approved in days that would have taken years. They're trying new things. They're using... They're adapting technology that they wouldn't have even bothered to look at before. And so, in the past... There was a hospital chain that he was talking about. This hospital chain was seeing patients. Seven percent of their visits were virtual. Seven percent were virtual visits to the doctor or the followups or whatever. After COVID, 99 percent of their visits were virtual. It takes a big shift in thinking and process and procedures in order to do that, and these hospitals and these medical communities, they're doing that because in essence, they do want to help people and save lives, right? That's their goal. That's the whole purpose of the medical community, and so they're going to do whatever they have to do to get it done and if that means they're going to accept all these new changes because of the way everything is restricted now, then they're going to make that happen. But the point of this podcast... The guy I was listening to was saying that because of this coronavirus and the changes that all these new companies are putting out and all of the medical community is actually accepting, it's going to really move health care light years in the future. We're really leap-frogging in terms of what is possible, what is doable. And so, all of this stuff is all coming together. They've already making all these advancements, but now you have receptivity by the medical community and they're listening and they're looking and they're saying, "Hey, what else can we do? What else is cool? What else can we implement?" We are in a very, very exciting time, very exciting. Pick up that book. It'll blow your mind. It blew mine. This is the second time I read it. And this is another thing. This book is about a year old, I think. It came out a year ago and it takes about a year or two to actually write a book and publish it and get it out in the market, right? So, this information in this book is two, three years old. It's not even up to date. It's two or three years old. That means we're two or three years closer to the end result. And when I'm talking about flying cars and whatnot, I'm not talking about some small, unnamed company. We have companies like Uber that are putting billions of dollars into this. This is not small time stuff. All of these technologies, all of these advancements, billions of dollars are flowing into these areas and that's why all these technologies are coming faster than you think. So, remember, you are going to be living longer than you think. You are going to be healthier than you think. And so, you need to be richer than you think you need to be. And the thing is, you don't even have to have the money in the bank. You don't need to have $10 million. You need a way to be generating income, and income is more important than what you have in the bank, right? Your net worth or your nest egg? Not as important as how much money you can be generating on a month to month basis. So, let this be a wakeup call. If you have not started saving, if you have not started trading, it's not too late, even if you're in your fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties. We still have people in their eighties emailing us, saying, "Hey. I want to get started." Awesome. That is great. Start small. Buy a couple shares. Do a couple options. That's just... You're going to have to do it because you're going to be living a lot longer. And so, that is exciting, but in financial terms, it can be scary because if you're not in a good finacnial place now, you have the time to fix it, but you got to take action. You got to start. So, start today. Start moving. If you want to, if you don't know where to start, get my free book, Passive Trading. It's still free. Go to passivetrading.com/freebook and just get the book. Start reading. Look what's possible. Start implementing, start playing with it, learn more about it and make a plan and start getting to what you need to be. All right? So, again, the name of the book was The Future Is Faster Than You Think. Pick it up, read it, learn, have your mind blown. My book, Passive Trading... Again, that's passivetrading.com/freebook or if you want you can go to Amazon, get it from there, the e-book... Or, not the e-book. The... Well, the e-book is also on Amazon. You can get it from there, the Kindle version. The audiobook is also about to hit shelves. We just uploaded it or got everything done yesterday, and so it will take two weeks, I believe, to get them approved and on all the bookstores. So, it's going to be in Amazon, Audible. It's going to be on iTunes. It's going to be on Barnes and Noble, whatever. The audiobook is coming. Give it a couple of weeks if you're a listener. Obviously, you're listening to the podcast, so you're a listener. If you want to get that, you can that as well. But still, start doing it. Get better, right? And if you want to get better, reach out to us. We'll show you how we will help you, how we can, what we can do for you. And just be excited. Things are going to shift really, really, really fast. So, remember, take care and trade with the odds in your favor. -- LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/ WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://optiongenius.com/alliance Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps.

People literally ask me this one question ALL THE TIME… “Allen, how did come up with such a lucrative, safe, and easy way to trade?” I explain it all in my new book Passive Trading, get your free book here  https://www.passivetrading.com/free-book! Option Genius was built with you...the individual trader, the breadwinner, the dreamer, the rock your family depends on ...in mind. Because we know what it takes to become a successful and profitable trader. And that’s exactly what we help you do best. Get your $1 trial of Simon Says Options, our most conservative and profitable trading service here https://simonsaysoptions.com/stockslist-ss-trial-offer.  -- How often do you stop and think about how lucky you are? If you're like me, probably not enough. I mean, this thought came to me the other day. I'm going to the office, it's around 11:00 AM. And when you're trading passively, it means that you don't have to wake up early, early in the morning. You can wake up whenever you want and check your trades and move on. So it doesn't take a lot of time trading. So, I'm going to the office at 11:00 AM and it is sweltering. I mean Houston, its crazy heat, just like the desert, it's summertime, it's close to a hundred degrees outside and I see this 11 year old boy, 10, 10 or 11 years old. And he's in his truck. There's a pickup truck standing by one of the houses, one of my neighbor's houses. And he's sitting inside the truck and playing on his little video games. And I see a man and a woman and they're sitting on the grass and they're eating lunch. So I assume they're his parents. And I also assume that they're day laborers, maybe they're cutting the trees or doing some rehab inside or installations or something like that. And you normally see that type of thing, especially in the suburbs. You see people who come out and they do the work. The thing that struck me was that this boy, 10, 11 years old, his parents are going to be out here for several hours. And he's with them in the heat. Why? Well, I mean, the mom was there, so probably nobody else is there at home to take care of him. They can't afford daycare or it's too expensive or it's better that he just stays with them. But what does he do all day? He's a little bit too young to help out really, he might be able to do a little things, but not really much. And he's just wasting his time and sweating and getting heatstroke, but the parents are doing the best they can. I'm sure the parents love the child, that's why they're keeping him with them. I'm sure they're trying to teach him. I'm sure they want the best for this child. But I compare that to my nine year old. And at the same day, while this child is spending all day out in the heat sweltering, my nine year old in the morning, he went to a tutoring class and he just finished third grade. And in tutoring class, he's doing fifth grade work. Math, science, reading, all that kind of stuff, because to get ahead. And then in the afternoon, he's going to go to an art class. And then in the evening, he wanted to take a coding class. So they have this online game called Roblox, if you've ever heard of it. And he wanted to learn how to code and make the games, program the games in that particular game. So what's the difference? Why is one child out in the heat suffering while the other child is in different classes, learning different things, getting new experiences? Yeah, I guess you could say the first thing that pops in your mind would be money. One child comes from a poor family, one child comes from a well-to-do family. But I think it's more than that. It's not just the money. And if you take a look at it, I mean, which child has a better future? I hate to say it, but which child has more choices in life and in everything? Now, of course my child could and mess it up and the other child could do great, that's definitely true. But which one will have an easier time of it, and the likelihood of achieving and having a better quality of life? I think it comes down to not money. Of course money is there, but why? Why, what, how did the money come into place? What's the difference between this kid's father and me, even if you take the money out. Let's say you take both of us and you take all the money away or you give us an even amount of money. I am pretty sure that within a short period of time, I'm going to be able to recapture what I could. I'm going to be able to go up the ladder while the other fellow, what he knows is day labor. He's got his work, he's got his hands and that's how he makes a living. He probably works harder every single day of his life than I have ever worked in my life. I am not a day laborer. I'm not good with my hands. I don't know anything. I barely hammer a nail because I've never done, I never had to. I've always used my mind. But why was I able to use my mind while he had to use his hands, and he couldn't use his mind? Because of education. Knowing the rules of the game and by game, I mean life, helps you play the game better, helps you succeed at the game, helps you play it smarter. And I think that's the main difference. It wasn't the other fellow might have some lucky break or unlucky breaks, I might've had some lucky breaks, get it, cool. But the focus on education that my parents had, the focus on making sure that I get into good schools, that I read, that I excel, I do the best I can. That other fellow didn't have that, right? Knowing the rules of the game allows you to save time, to access different resources, to be able to use the resources that you have access to. If you're in a new country and you don't know the language, you can have a lottery ticket, but you won't know how to read it. It also allows you to speak up and have confidence and say something when the rules of the game are not adhered to. So if someone's taking advantage of you, you know how to fight back, right? And people who are uneducated get taken advantage of all the time. Instead of living in fear and accepting that, "Oh, things are just the way they are. That's the way it is. I can't do anything about it." You can actually do things about it. You can make things happen. Now, just take credit, the whole credit score and your whole credit report, for an example. Somebody who knows how credit works can improve their score. They can use credit cards responsibly. They can get cheaper rates on a mortgage and their insurance. They can manipulate airline miles and card points to get free travel and free trips like I do. Compare that to somebody who doesn't understand how credit works and they mess it up because they don't understand the value, and then they have trouble all along their life, even renting an apartment, they have trouble. So they can't rent one of the better apartments, even if they can afford it. They just won't give it to you because you have bad credit, so what do you have to do? You have to go to a worse part of town to get a crummy apartment. And if you rented there, well, guess what, your child goes to a school district that's not as good as the one in the good part of town. And so the cycle continues because your child doesn't get the same education that he should get. Now I don't want to get into what's right, and what's wrong, and all that stuff. This is the way life is. That's the way the world works, right? That's why I continue to be shocked when people who have a chance to get education, say no. People who want to trade, people who want to learn how to increase their finances, refuse to pay for the training, for the education, to learn how to do that, for the shortcut. They think that maybe they can just get it by on YouTube videos. "Yeah, I'm going to learn everything on YouTube." "Okay." The problem with that is, they don't know what they don't know. You could watch YouTube all day till you're blue in the face, till your eyes pop out. But it doesn't mean you're going to be a great trader because you don't know what you don't know. And even the person on the other end of the YouTube video whose making the YouTube video might not know what they don't know. The real gems, the truths, the gold, is not shared on YouTube videos or any other free information. It's not. Something that is so valuable to me, I'm not going to just give it out because people don't value it. And if there is truly a secret, if there is a secret system or a secret plan, if I go and share with the world, tell everybody about it, "Here, do this, do this." Eventually it's going to stop working. So why would I do that? I know I can share it with a few people. I can't share with the whole world, right? We had one fellow call in the other day. He applied to be part of our oil options program. And he went on and on about how desperate he is for a system that works and how he's been trying for so long and all the things he wants to do and do good stuff with making the money and help the world, all that stuff. He's confident that our system works and he's going to do everything in his power to execute and to do whatever we tell him, how we teach it. But then we told him the investment in the program and his response was like, "Oh, I would never pay that amount." We actually have it on recording. He was funny. We record all the calls. "Oh, I would never pay that on my own." Now keep in mind that it's not like we were asking for a super, super high amount, okay? With a decent sized account, you can make back in a month or two, what we're asking, and then trade that way for the rest of your life. So it's not like we're asking for a million dollars. But the whole idea of paying for coaching repelled this guy. It was like a block in his brain. It's like, "No, no, no, I can't do that. That's not possible." Some people have that for murdering. "I could never murder anybody." Same thing, "Oh, I could never pay for a coaching." It's against my morals. It's against my values. It's against the way I live." Okay. That's why trading, most of it is mindset. If you're not willing to invest in yourself, your investments will suffer. The easiest and fastest way to success in trading, and just about anything, is to find somebody who's already doing well, learn from them, go to the source, see who's doing it right now, that thing that you want to do and learn from that person. Copying them is not enough. If you can't get to the person, you can try copying them, but you're not going to learn everything. It's not going to be the same thing, because you don't know the nuances. You don't know what they've tested and what has worked and what didn't work. You can try to copy them, but trust me, it's not the same thing. You don't know what you don't know, unless you get the education. So if you've been blessed with a college education, I mean, thank your parents or whoever paid for it and be grateful that you had the chance to go and that it allowed you to have a better quality of life. And maybe you didn't go to college, but you still struggled hard. And you made a success out of yourself, but you did get educated some way somehow, maybe you read on your own. Maybe you did it, but you took the time to put in the effort and you learned. But most likely, if you want the shortcut, you go to the teacher, you learn from them, right? That's the way it works. Because who knows where you would be without it. If you weren't educated, where would you be right now? I hate to think about it because I couldn't even make as much money as that day laborer guy because I don't know how to do anything with my hands, seriously. And that is the difference between the trader who is struggling, trying to figure out their way in the trading world and the day laborer. And the trader who understands that he needs to get educated properly so that his trading can improve to get him to the level where he can have everything he wants in his life. There's a big difference, it's a total mental shift. If you show me a successful trader, I will show you a person who either paid their dues and traded for years without real success, or they had a mentor and they took the shortcut, and usually, it's both. You need the mentor and you still need to put in the work, okay? Because when you do, it's worth it because the world is at your feet. Anything you want is yours if you do this right. If you educate yourself, put in the work, there's nothing you can't do. And what is the alternative? You already know the answer to that question. The alternative is whatever you have now. If you don't succeed at trading, okay. For some of you that's okay. For that guy who called on the phone, maybe his current life is okay. And I could go on and on about the many benefits of paying for the shortcut, right? Paying for the education. But it comes down to this. How badly do you really want it? If you don't want it bad enough, take your time, dilly dally, watch YouTube videos. No problem. You might learn something once a week or something, eventually you might learn something. Hopefully the video you're watching is actually the truth and it's up to date and it's not outdated. And that methods, whatever they're teaching or showing you still works. And they show you everything, because that's what they do on these videos, they don't show you everything. They want you to pay. They want you to pay up for the real stuff. But if your desire keeps you up at night, if you know that you were born to live a life of plenty, do the smart thing and get educated, find a mentor, pay for access to him and soak it all up. That is truly the best shortcut you can take in trading. And it's not cheating. Some people say, "Oh, that's cheating." No, it's not cheating. Paying to get ahead of the line is not cheating. When I go to Disney world, I don't want to wait in line, I'm going to pay for that fast pass. I don't want to wait two hours for every single ride. I want to enjoy myself. I want to have as much fun. I want to get what I want as soon as possible. And I'm willing to pay to do that. It's learning the rules of the game so you can apply them to your benefit and that you do by paying for the education. So that's it for this episode. Remember to trade with the odds in your favor. Until next time. -- LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/ WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://optiongenius.com/alliance Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps.

People literally ask me this one question ALL THE TIME… “Allen, how did come up with such a lucrative, safe, and easy way to trade?” I explain it all in my new book Passive Trading, get your free book here  https://www.passivetrading.com/free-book! Option Genius was built with you...the individual trader, the breadwinner, the dreamer, the rock your family depends on ...in mind. Because we know what it takes to become a successful and profitable trader. And that’s exactly what we help you do best. Get your $1 trial of Simon Says Options, our most conservative and profitable trading service here https://simonsaysoptions.com/stockslist-ss-trial-offer.  --- Wouldn't you want to be successful, right? Of course, right? Who wants to be a loser trader? Everybody wants to be a successful trader. But the thing is you might already be successful or do you even know what success means? Now to me, when somebody asks me, "Hey, Allen, are you a successful trader?" And I would say, "Yes and no." I mean, I'm doing okay, but I'm not where I want to be yet, right? And then that yet part is the problem. That is what's keeping me from saying, "Yes, I am successful. I am happy as a trader." Because I'm not at the level or I have not hit the goals that I've wanted to do or hit or set for myself. And actually, this revelation came to me as part of a coaching program. It came from my mentor. So, I have different people that I learned different things from, and I currently am in a coaching program. It's a very expensive coaching program where the person in charge of it, she teaches us about business and sales and how to do better with Option Genius and how we can improve the sales and make an impact for more people. And she learned this from her mentor, so I'm learning from her. She's learning from someone else. That person is learning from even another person up the food chain. So, it's amazing how even people that we look at and say, "Hey, yeah, this person is successful. I want to learn from them," but they are constantly learning too. The most successful people I know are always investing in themselves, just like we are investing in the stock market. We're investing in options, but we need to also be investing in ourselves by learning more, by being in a community with other people that have the same goals or similar activities and similar visions that we do. So, I'm in this coaching program, and she's already taught us a lot. It's group coaching, so we get together once every so often on Zoom, a couple times a year in person, well, whenever we can, whenever she arranges it. And she talks about different things. One of the calls, the last... It wasn't the last call. It was the call before that. She was talking about mindset. And she was talking about how she learned lesson from her mentor, who learned it from a book. The book is, I believe it's not available anymore, but you can get the audio book. It's by a guy named Dan Sullivan. Pure Genius is the name of the program. You might be able to get the audio book from Nightingale Conant if you want to pick it up. But the idea there was that when people set goals or when people think about productivity or when they think about themselves and how successful they are and how they're doing, they always look to the future. They always look to the horizon. That's the example he gives. And so, if you're walking along or driving along on the road, it's a straight road. You're driving, driving, driving. You see the horizon. And no matter how far you go, no matter how long you go, you never reach the horizon. So if the horizon is your goal, you're never going to get there. Does that make sense? I mean, yeah, the Earth is round, and so it's constantly turning, but the same thing happens to us. When we set goals, when we set activities for ourselves, the goal or the result, the future final result always seems to end up changing. And this is human nature. So for example, a few years ago, I was in a business owners mastermind group. And there were about 12 of us, I believe, in the group. And in the meeting, in one of the meetings, we did an activity. And we went around, and everybody had to say what their number was. Basically, a number is how much money do you need to have in order to maybe sell your business and retire, right? So, how much money do you want to have to be able to say, "Yeah, you know what? I'm financially secure. I'm safe. I'm happy. I'm going to retire. I'm going to go do whatever the heck I want now. And I don't have to run my business anymore"? So, what is the end goal? And there were different numbers thrown around, 10 million, 12 million, 15, 5, whatever. The number wasn't important. But I did happen to write some of them down. And we were in this group. I was in this group for eight years, and there were several others that were with me when we were there. Some people would come and go, but most of the group was intact. And so the next year, we did the same activity where you had to say your number. Now, a lot of them had done really well that year, right? And so, their perspective had changed. And so when we went around and everybody was writing their numbers or saying their numbers, I was writing them down again. And I happened to go back and find the page when I wrote the ones from the year before. So, I see what they had said before, and then I'm writing down what they said this year. And everyone's number had gone up. Some of them, there was one particular person, he said, "I want to get to 5 million. That's when I'm going to sell my business. My business is doing 5 million a year. I'm going to sell it. I'm going to cash out. I'm going to take the money. And I'm going to retire." That was what he said. And he had already told us that his business is already doing $5 million, so then he changed it. He goes, "No, no, now I want to do 10 million. So if my business is doing 10 million a year, then that's when I'm going to sell it. And that's what I'm going to retire." So, he changed it. He changed the goal. He changed the vision. He is now moving towards the horizon, which he's never going to get to because if he gets to 10 million, then he might go to 15. He might go to 20. He's going to keep increasing it. And that's what we do. I mean, when you first started trading, maybe your goal was hey, I want to make a thousand dollars a month. That's a great goal, very attainable. You could probably do that within the first couple of months, right? I want to make a thousand dollars a month. That's a great goal. After you do that, then what happens? Oh, the goal changes. Okay, now I need to make $3,000 a month. Okay. Then I need to make five. Then I need to make 10. Then I need to make a hundred thousand dollars. Then I need to make a million dollars. Then I need to make a million every year, every year for the rest of my life. You see, the goal just keeps going further and further and further. That's not a bad thing. You got to improve. You got to strive. If you're not growing, if you're not motivating yourself, then you're going to die and wither away and lose interest. And it's going to all go to pot anyway. But my point is, a lot of people look at their success based on if they've hit their long-term goals. And so if you say, "Hey, I'm not going to be successful as a trader unless I make a million dollars a year," well, then you will never be successful because you just have to do it again and again and again and again and again until you die, right, because you never put an end date. There are other people who say, "You know what? I want to make this much. And that's it. That's my goal. I'm going to make that much." Well, if they get there, that's great. They celebrate. And then they're like, "Okay, now what?" Then they have to form a new goal, so they keep striving, and they keep doing that. So according to this guy Dan Sullivan in the Pure Genius program, what he's saying is that what people do is they never hit their goal or they do hit the goal and then they make it larger. But they never hit the horizon, right? So, what you want to do instead to be successful is you want to compare, what he calls, your actual two to your actual one. So, actual one is where you were, before when you started. Actual two is where you are now, right? So, what we're doing is we're not comparing ourselves now to our goal, which is in the future or the horizon. We're comparing where we are now to where we were before. So if your goal right now, or if you just hit your goal of making a thousand dollars a month, you're not going to feel bad and say, "You know what? I got to make 3,000. Oh, my God, I only made a thousand this month. I need to make three." No, you're going to say, "Wait a minute, two months ago, I wasn't making this thousand dollars a month. I hadn't heard about passive trading yet." Maybe, you're brand new. Maybe, you're brand new to the podcast. So, you're just listening, and you're like, "Oh, I started, and in a couple months, I'm making a thousand bucks. Great." You compare where you are now to where you were before. And if you do that, you're going to be ecstatic. You'll be like, "Yeah, really, I am making a thousand dollars a month. That's amazing. That's awesome, right?" You're going to be happy. You're going to be excited. You're going to be wanting celebrate. But if you compare today to the future, "Oh, man, I still got to make that 3,000. Man, I'm only making a thousand a month. I got to make 3,000. Jeez," you're going to be full of stress, anxiety, and unhappiness. So if you want to be successful, what you got to do is change your perspective, as long as you're being profitable, okay? That goes without saying. If you're passive trading, you're probably going to be profitable, okay? If you're not, then reach out to me. We'll figure out why. But if you're doing passive trading, you're probably profitable. The only matter is, the only question is, how profitable are you and how consistently you are profitable, okay? So, that's your goal. Now, what people say is the secret to be successful is to feel amazing all the time. The way to feel amazing all the time is to compare yourself now from where you were before. And to me, that was like, "Whoa, that is so true." Because in Option Genius, I keep saying, "Okay, I want to help more people. I want to help more people. I want to help more people." And we get success stories coming in, but it's like, man, we need to do more. We need to do more. You read the newspapers. It's like, oh, so many baby boomers are having to work until they're seventy years old, and they don't have any money for savings. And all these people are in trouble right now during the coronavirus. They might not get their unemployment checks anymore, and they're going to be kicked out of their houses, and all this stuff is going on. It's like, oh, my God, I can help these people. They just have to know about passive trading. Why can't we help more people? Why can't we do it fast enough? And so with that stress, it drives me nuts. I can't sleep. I'm grinding my teeth at night, and that's what's keeping me up. Not the stock market, stock market's doing great. I've done better this year than so many years before, even in the midst of this coronavirus. But the thing that's keeping me up is that the horizon is so far away that I don't know if I'll ever get there because I don't even have a number in mind, how many people I want to help. I want to help 10,000 people. Okay, that's a big number. How many have you helped so far? Not even close. We helped a lot of people, but I don't know for sure, right? I know a few people that have told me their story, so we have all those people that, yes. Okay, I took this guy. I helped this guy go from where he was before to now financial independence. Okay, so that's one. And we've got a whole bunch of people like him, but we don't have 10,000. We've helped a lot more than that, but they haven't actually written in or called in and said, "Hey, you know what? Now, I'm financially independent." Okay, great. Because I know a whole bunch are, but they haven't told us. But when I look at where we are now compared to where we were before, compared to a year ago, two years ago, or 10 years ago when I started Option Genius, I think it started 11 years ago, but if I started from the beginning, looking at what was happening in the beginning, I feel great. Because when I started Option Genius, it was really as a way to keep myself busy. It was going to be one membership site where I was just going to be sharing trades with a few people. I didn't expect it to blow up. I just wanted to keep busy. So, I was doing some marketing, Google ads, and putting up a website, doing some trades, iron condors, this, that, the other thing, teaching. People were asking questions, so I'd make a few videos answering their questions and help them along. I never expected it to grow to what it is now. This podcast is over 250,000 downloads. Thank you for listening. That's amazing. I still can't believe it. That many people, you're listening to me that much. It's like, holy cow, right? Yeah. It's amazing. We just launched a passive trading book, and we're already sold over a thousand copies. We haven't even done any advertising, and we've already sold over a thousand copies. I can't wait what's going to happen once we start advertising. So, the mission is going to continue, and so I need to look at where I've been compared to now. When I started, even when I started trading, the anxiety, the stress, the depression of not making money trading compared to now where I have too much money in a sense. My wife was telling me, "Hey, you know what? The money's piling up in the bank account. What are we going to do with it?" And she's like, "Why don't you trade it?" And I'm like, "Yeah, we kind of have a lot of money in the stock market already." And that's not something you would actually expect to hear from a trader, right? We already got a lot of money in the stock market. So I mean, that's a mental limit that I need to work on myself, but I never even thought I would get to this point. So, what I'm saying here is in terms of to be a successful trader, chances are, if you're doing passive trading, you already are successful to some degree, meaning that you're already putting on trades. You know some strategies. They're working. Now, you just need to fine tune it, right? But to be successful in your head is a whole different story. To be happy with your success is a mental game. And so to win at the mental game, in anything, in trading or in parenting or in a relationship or whatever it is, look at where you are now, actual two, compare it to actual one. Maybe, compare it to a month ago, a year ago, two years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago. Compare it to where you were, see the growth, see the progress, the momentum that you've made. See the things, the challenges you have overcome, and you will be happy. You'll be successful in your own mind, and that will take you to the future. One of the things that we started doing this year for my kids is every year on their birthdays, my wife and I, we make them a video. And so, we just started this one. So, we did it with the eight-year-old, and we did it with the four-year-old. And we made him a video and it's basically just me and my wife talking and saying, "Happy birthday. We're so proud of you. We love you," all this stuff. And then we list off the things that the kid did that year. So for our eight-year-old, I don't remember exactly, but some of the things were he learned how to snorkel. He went parasailing for the first time. He learned to ride his bike. What else did he do? He finished, what was it, second grade, right? So, we listed off his accomplishments and then we gave him the video. And right now, he's eight years old. Video wasn't a big deal. But as he grows older, we're going to keep those videos. And then when he's maybe 18, 20, 30, 40 years old, he can actually, maybe if he wants to, he can watch those videos and see his own progression to go from year to year to year to year all the accomplishments that he's made in his whole lifetime. And I think that might be a really, really cool gift worth more than any toy or video game that we could buy for him. And so that's something that we're starting. I just want to share that. Might be cool to do. If not, it's okay. But I know that if my parents had documented what things I had done when I was little or growing up or what they were proud of me about, and maybe even documented their life lessons, things that they learned in their own lifetime, and if I had that as a library or as a book or a set of videos, I would cherish it like no other thing. It'd be more valuable to me than anything else. So, that's the kind of things that we're trying to do for our kids. That's a whole nother topic. We can get into that later. But right now, if you want to be successful, don't think about the horizon. Don't think about the future. Work towards it. You always have to keep striving, try to keep improving. Otherwise, you're going to get bored and wither away. So, we want to keep getting better, but in order to be happy, we need to celebrate. And we just celebrate the milestones and the wins that we've already accomplished. So, look at where you are now, compare it to wherever you've been, and see the difference, and feel happy, and celebrate because we're only here for a short amount of time. And when it comes to trading, it's only money, right? So, enjoy yourself. Enjoy your life. Be happy. Be proud of yourself. Be happy with who you are. And always trade with the odds in your favor. -- LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/ WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://optiongenius.com/alliance Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps.

People literally ask me this one question ALL THE TIME… “Allen, how did come up with such a lucrative, safe, and easy way to trade?” I explain it all in my new book Passive Trading, get your free book here  https://www.passivetrading.com/free-book! Option Genius was built with you...the individual trader, the breadwinner, the dreamer, the rock your family depends on ...in mind. Because we know what it takes to become a successful and profitable trader. And that’s exactly what we help you do best. Get your $1 trial of Simon Says Options, our most conservative and profitable trading service here https://simonsaysoptions.com/stockslist-ss-trial-offer.  --- Greetings Passive Ttraders. Welcome to another edition of The Option Genius podcast. In today's edition or episode, I wanted to talk to you about watch lists and the importance of having a watch list. Now, the importance, even though I do preach about having a watch list and sticking to your watch list and trading the items on your watch list. There are times when I invariably will not listen to my own advice and then go ahead and start trading companies and instruments that I have no idea about, never heard of before. And so I was reminded of this recently, when I was doing a bonus for the Passive Trader book. For those of you who don't know, the Passive Trading book is out and it is available, you can get on Amazon for, I think it's like $20 or $25, or you can go to our website, which is passivetrading.com/freebook. And you can get the printed version actually for free. We've already paid for it. We have a limited supply of copies. All we ask is that you pay for the shipping and handling. If you do that, we'll send you out a book for free. But when we were coming out with the book and this whole little offer, we wanted to go a little bit further and created several products, or I guess they're called products. But they are things that can help you get faster results in your passive trading. So if you don't know anything about passive trading, if you've never traded before or if you want just more information, get the book. If you want to go faster, maybe you already know a little bit about it. Maybe you already know about how to trade, but you want better results. That's where these other extras come into play. And so one of the things that we created is a crash course. And so once you buy the book, the next page that it takes you to is an offer. It's an offer page and it's a video of me and it tells you about the crash course. And basically the crash course is after I already written the book we went through and I took notes on the entire book and I turned it into a video format where I went deeper into the elements that I thought were the most important. So now everything in the book is important and we've already taken out... It was a lot longer before. It was maybe double or triple the size before. And we had to cut it down to make it manageable because I didn't want to have like a 500 page book. But there were some aspects that I wanted to go in deeper and I could do it better in a visual format. So that's why we made a video course. It's a crash course. The average person to read a book of this size of passive trading would take about 10 hours. That's the average person to read it. And now this is a more detailed book. So there are numbers and there's things that you have to understand. You might have to read it back a couple of times to really get the gist of it. And so it probably take even longer than 10 hours. So what I wanted to do is a crash course just focused on the most important things. Boom, get it done with in like an hour or so, a couple of hours. I'm not sure how long the video is. I don't know. I think we broke it down into several. So I don't know exactly what the length of the video is, but it's really, really good. And I'm really happy. I'm really proud of it. So that is something you might want to pick up. But in addition to the crash course, what we offer as part of that package is videos of actual trades. So now in the book, I do cover several trades that I've made in the past. So you can see how each trade goes, by strategy, by strategy and see how they actually work out. But that's on paper, right? Visually you can do a lot better. So what I did was I picked, two trades that I've done in the past for each of the three strategies. So six trades total. And I went into backtesting software and visually I did a screen capture of my screen. And I went through how I put the trade on, what it looks like on the screen. What does the graph look like, how it works. And day by day recorded what happened. Now this was with the backtesting software, you can go back in time. So let's say there was a trade that I did three months ago. I can go back three months ago, show you the graph of the stock, the chart of the stock and say, look, this is what the stock was doing. This is what I saw the day that I put the trade on. And then this is what happened the next day. And this is what happened the next day. And then the next day this happened, so I did this. So day by day, you can actually go back and see and say, hey what is Allen looking at? How is he placing this trade? How is he managing this trade? And so I did it for all the three strategies that we talk about in the book. There are six trades in total, and I thought that... If you've never traded before, if you don't understand or if you want to get some behind the scenes kind of information and knowledge, you got to watch those videos. Because you can see me day by day going through the trades. So if you don't understand how these trades work, you want a better idea, watch the trades. And it's a visual interpretation. It's visually, day by day. Even when you're doing live trading, you can't get that because nobody has the time to sit there and go day by day by day. Even for people of our option genius membership, right? They get the trades and that's about it. We don't show them day by day how it's going through. So this is really, really important in that sense. So if that's important to you pick that up, it's on the page right after the book. So you buy the book and then the next page, you get this offer. Now, why am I telling you all this? Is it because I just want to sell it to? Well I want you to get it because I think it's going to help you. But while I was doing those trades, while I was looking for several of these trades, I came across one and I didn't want to find like the easiest trades. I wanted to find where there were some issues sometimes, like okay the trade went against me, how did I fix it? What did I do? And so I wanted to give a real sense of what these trades are actually like. And so I found one trade that I started about a year ago. It was in August of 2019. And I just exited this trade about a week ago or two weeks ago, whenever expiration was. This trade was on a stock that was not on my watch list. The company was Royal Gold, R G L D. Never heard of this company before, don't even know what they do. I still don't know what they do. I was in the trade. I own the stock for this company for close to a year. And I still don't know what they do. They might be a miner. They might be a jewelry wholesaler or they might be a retailer. I have no clue. I don't know what they do, but it has something to do with gold. Now how did I get into this stock? And why am I being so clueless about it? Well, like I said, it's not on my watch list. And so that is part of the problem. About a year ago, a friend of mine told me that there's a pattern in gold. And depending on when you're listening to this, the pattern just might help you to make some money. The pattern is that gold rallies into the end of the year. And so the idea was that it's about August, 2019. This is when he told me and he's like, "hey you know, I'm doing this trade. It's a covered call in the mining on this company, Royal Gold." And he told me what it was. I looked at it, I analyzed it. And I said, "Hey, this is good. I like this." The chart looks good. The stock is going up. And if gold rallies to the end of the year, then there's a very good chance that this trade is going to make some money. But I don't know this company. And I don't think they pay a dividend. So I want to put on the trade, but I don't want to be in the trade for a long time. I don't want to own the stock for a long time. So that's why it was set up as a in the money covered call. And in the money covered call is where the stock is trading at a certain price. Like I was saying, it's a hundred, you buy the shares at a hundred, and then you sell lower than the price. So you sell your call option lower than the price, which was I think it was selling at like a 4 or 5% below where the stock was. So that is the trade that I did. And I don't have in front of me. But the trade was going to make somewhere around 11%. Or I believe that's what it was. It had the ability to make 11% in about a month's time, just the way it was set up. And it had a very, very high probability of profit. Not only that, but I looked at the chart, the stock was going up. Gold is supposed to continue to go up. So that means the chart... This company Royal Gold should also continue to go up. And so if that happens, that's great. That's what I want because I want the stock that I bought to be called away. And I want that money to just be left. And I didn't want to do it, I didn't want to mess with it. It's a simple, easy trade. You don't have to manage it. You don't have to [inaudible 00:09:41] it. You don't have to do anything. You put the trade on, you wait till expiration day and you see, hey what happened with this trade? Most likely the stock is going to keep going up and I'm going to be assigned in my exercise. And my call option is going to force me to sell my stock, which I wanted to do anyway. And I was going to keep the gain. That was the plan. Now, as I already told you, I was in the trade for about a year. So it didn't exactly go according to plan. Instead of the stock continuing go up. The stock went down and then it kept going down. And so my option expired, which was good because I made some money. But now I'm sitting on a loss on the stock, which I don't even want. So now the idea is, okay what do I do now? Do I keep it? Or do I get out and take a loss? Well, I don't like taking a loss, who likes taking a loss. I don't like taking a loss. And who knows gold might also appreciate again. It might keep going up. Maybe this is a short time drop or something, who knows. And so I sold more calls, hoping that the stock would go up and I would be called away, that didn't happen. Sold more calls, expired, sold more calls, expired, sold more calls. And I go through month by month, day by day in the trade in the video. So if you want to pick that up, you can go through and see exactly how it happened and which calls I sold and why I picked those calls, all that. But in the end, it took me about a year to get out of this trade. And after a year I made about 8%. I think it was an 8% gain on this trade. So what should have been a one month trade where I could make 11% turned into a whole year problem, where I had to keep selling calls in order to make 8% for the year. Now 8% in a year is nothing to laugh at. That's a really good return. And that's what the stock market averages, 8% percent a year. So I did that and I took a trade where the stock went down. The stock was down and I still made 8%. So that's one thing to take away. Like, oh wow, how do you make money on a stock that's going down? Well, this is the way to do it. The other thing I want to point out, which is probably more important is that I never should have been in the trade in the first place. Now yes, we're going to place trades and we're going to miss and we're going to mess up, we're going to lose money on trades. That's normal. And then you have to know how to fix it. Fine. I get that. But I had no clue what was going on with this company. Didn't do any research into it. Don't know the company. I still have not looked into it. I still don't know what they do. And so that's not very smart. And that's exactly why I keep telling you to have a watch list. When you have a watch list... A watch list for those you don't know is a list of companies that you monitor, that you watch. And those are the ones that you trade. Now if you don't know how to make a watch list, we cover it in detail in passive trading, in the book. And then even in the passive trading formula, the course, we spent a lot of time on that in the course. And there are over a dozen different criteria to use, to pick the best stocks, underlying ETFs, indexes, all that to put on your watch list. And everybody's watch list is going to be different, unique, because you like trading some things. I like trading different things. We'll make different watch lists. No problem. That's not a big deal. The thing is when you don't stick to the watch list, you make mistakes like this one. And even though at the end of the year, I came out ahead, it was a lot of extra effort that I didn't really need to make. If I had stuck to my watch list, I wouldn't have had that problem. If I had wanted to play gold. And that was the plan. Gold was going up. I should have just played gold and gold is on my watch list. So I watch gold. I watch the chart of gold. I see how it's doing. I know how it behaves. This company didn't behave the same as gold. Gold kept going up, but this company went down and I couldn't figure out why. So the point again, I'm trying to make here is create your watch list. Stick to the watch list. There was another time and I tell this story many times where I traded a stock that wasn't on my watch list. And at that time it was Las Vegas Sands. And I did some cover calls on that one too. And the stock dropped all the way down to $2. And I had no clue why the stock was dropping because I didn't do my research because it wasn't on my watch list. I didn't know that the company was about to go out of business. They were going to declare bankruptcy. That was why the stock went all the way down to $2. Now, luckily for me the stock did not declare bankruptcy and then they recovered and I made all my money back and a lot more. But that's just another way that I lucky. There's no other way to say it. I should have lost all my money on that trade because I didn't do my homework and I didn't stick to my watch list. So even as a professional trader, I keep having to learn the same lessons over and over and over again. And that's normal. That's not a big deal. It happens, but I want you to learn from my mistakes. And so I don't want you to feel bad if you make mistakes. I don't want you to feel bad if you make the same mistake over and over again. But we need to get better at it. We need to keep improving. And that's the only way to do it by just getting reminded of it and saying, hey this for me was a great reminder. Like, Oh my God, geez I can't believe I did this again. But I did. And I learned how to fix it. And I did. Luckily I was able to do it. So now I have another reminder of, hey I need to focus on the watch list. Focus on the watch list. Focus on the watch list. I had a couple other trades that came up recently that somebody shared in our group, our Facebook group for members of the Passive Trading Formula. And I wanted to take them, but they were on stocks that I didn't really watch. And so I was like, oh no I can't. Okay, no I'm not going to do it. And then I went and found similar trades, similar strategy to stocks that I already own or stuff that are on my watch list. So I was happy. So I still made money. It's not like you can't make money by only sticking to your watch list, but you're going to make more money because you're sticking to things that you know. So that is in a sense, the gist of this episode. Basically I could have broken down and said, "Hey yeah, just got to, you got to stick to your watch list. But it makes a bigger impact when you hear the story behind it I think. As people, we love stories. We love hearing stories. And when you tell a story, it not only does it stick in your brain and you remember it more, but it shows the importance. Now, luckily I didn't lose any money on this. But if I did, it would have been a very expensive story. And then I would have been like, hey I lost X dollars doing this. I don't want you to lose X dollars. Don't do the same thing. So with that said, thank you for joining me for another edition. Again, the book is Passive Trading. It's out now, limited quantities are available for free. Go check it out. passivetrading.com/freebook. And if you have any questions, you can always email me help@optiongenius.com. If you need anything, we're always here for you. Join us in our free Facebook group, which is called the Alliance, Option Traders Alliance. You can get that at optiongenius.com/alliance. I believe that is the URL. If not just email us and we will get you the name and the URL to that. So you can join us in there, get the book, learn passive trading, start making money. And even on a stock that goes down, I still made 8%. So learn how to do that. Make all your troubles go away. Take care and trade with the odds in your favor. -- LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/ WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP: https://optiongenius.com/alliance Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps.

People literally ask me this one question ALL THE TIME… “Allen, how did come up with such a lucrative, safe, and easy way to trade?” I explain it all in my new book Passive Trading, get your free book here  https://www.passivetrading.com/free-book! Option Genius was built with you...the individual trader, the breadwinner, the dreamer, the rock your family depends on ...in mind. Because we know what it takes to become a successful and profitable trader. And that’s exactly what we help you do best. Get your $1 trial of Simon Says Options, our most conservative and profitable trading service here https://simonsaysoptions.com/stockslist-ss-trial-offer.  -- Ho, ho, ho, passive traders. It's Christmas in July, or whenever you are listening to this. Why? Because I have a gift for you. After over two years ... Two and a half, three years? I don't know how long it took, but it took a long time, well over two years. I finished my Passive Trading book. It has been published. It has been printed. It's on sale at Amazon. You can go pick it up right now for $20. Or I do have some copies that I want you to have for free. I want to give them to you. I want everybody to have this book. I'm doing my part by giving them away, a limited number that I have that we got as part of the first run. All you have to do is go to passivetrading.com/freebook and you have all the details there. It is a printed book. We do have to ship it to you, so it will take a couple of days to get to you. It is passivetrading.com\freebook. Now, the book is free. I will need you to cover the shipping and handling costs, if you don't mind that. And you'll get the free book in your mail very soon. People have been asking about the audio book or the ebook version. Those are also available there for a little bit extra. But if you get the free book, you can get those as well. If you're ready to get started trading options, or investing the right way, or making some extra money on the side, you got to get this book. I mean, I call it Passive Trading: How to Make Consistent Money From the Stock Market in Just a Few Hours a Day for a reason, because that's what it is. And it delivers. It's been on Amazon for a couple weeks now. We already have well over a dozen positive five star reviews. Everybody else that's read it has loved it. We're getting some video testimonials in that we're adding to the website, too. So, I just can't wait. I'm really excited. I think this is going to really make a big deal. So again, passivetrading.com/freebook. I don't know how long the books are going to last. And if you want one, please go get one. Pick it up right now. Just pay for shipping. We'll send it out to you. Another announcement is that this show has been rated as one of the top trading podcasts! So we are super excited at that as well. Top Trading Podcast Trading scars. That's the type of this episode. What do you mean, Alan, by trading scars? What is a trading scar? Ooh, sounds dangerous. Well, when it comes to trading, we all lose money. There's nothing we can do about that. It happens on a regular basis, right? It's one of the things that happens. Like when you're playing football, you're going to get hurt. When you're trading, you're going to lose money. You're going to have a losing trade. Okay. Got it. Check. But then, when it happens a lot, or when it happens unexpectedly, or when the loss is especially large, it can leave a scar. It can hurt. It can go deep. That cut can go very deep, and it's really hard to get rid of. It's hard to get over. I mean, it's not a physical scar, right? It's a mental scar. It's something that affects our psyche. And for some people, that affects them all the way down to their core. That's a scar, though, that nobody else can see. You're walking down the street, nobody knows you've lost money in the stock market. You could see it and you can feel it, but nobody else can. And sure, there will be some people around you when you get your scar that will know that you got your scar, your family, your spouse, your kids, whatever, your friends if you tell them. They're going to see it. They're going to know you got it. But then, they're going to move on. You are going to carry that scar for a long time, and hopefully the scar will fade away. For some people, it doesn't. Losing a lot of money can be very painful. And that's what causes the scar, because we put a really, really big attachment to money. And we put a really, really big attachment to winning, and to being successful, and not failing. But normally, failing at something is a good thing. It's great sometimes. It might not feel like it at the time when you fail, but that is how we learn. When I'm teaching my kids, my eight-year-old, he gets really mad every time he gets something wrong. He just like, "I can't do it, Daddy. I can't do it." It's like, "Yes, you can. You got the answer wrong. It's okay. That's why we're learning. We're learning that what we did didn't work, so now we have to try a different way. We can't just give up. We've got to keep going. We got to move forward." So as you progress on your trading journey, you're going to build up these scars. Doesn't mean it's not going to hurt, but it's part of the game. You play the game, you're going to get hurt, and they're going to be scars as a history, as a memory, as a feeling that, hey, this happened. Don't forget. Now, the saddest thing is when a scar impacts a trader so deeply that they give up. Or even worse, they lose confidence in themselves. They change. Their personality changes. The way they feel about themselves, the way they think about themselves, the way they see themselves changes. And when I was learning how to trade, I met a fellow, a fellow trader, who was light years ahead of me. I mean, this guy was awesome. He was brilliant. I mean, he knew everything. He knew all the jargon. He knew all the trades. He was doing all these exotic strategies, and I couldn't even figure them out what he was doing. I had no clue what he was doing. He would explain stuff, and I'd be like, What?" It was like a two-year-old talking to a college student. That's what I was. Some of the things that he taught me I still don't understand. He was that brilliant. But, then he got cocky. He got arrogant. He didn't take precautions, and he screwed up. And It wasn't just a little, tiny screw up. It wasn't like, "Oh, yeah, he had a bad losing year. He lost when he should've won." No. He blew up big time, and he lost it all. Total account blow out. Zero. Gone. Lost all of his money. But then, more importantly than that, he lost his confidence. And because of that, every attempt that he made to build his account back up failed. He just couldn't get that winning touch again. Didn't matter what he knew, didn't matter how much experience he had, he couldn't get the winning touch back. He couldn't get back on his feet. That caused him to be depressed. He looked at himself as a trader. That was his identity. But, he was no longer a successful trader. Now he was just an average, or below average, or loser trader because he wasn't making any money. So, he went into a cycle of self-destruction. He started doing crazy things. He started using and abusing. Eventually, he ended up in rehab. Thankfully, he got out, and he's better now. But, that scar hurt deep. Recently, he reached out to me, and we got to talk. He's a great guy. He's trying to get back into trading now, and he is looking for somebody to stake him. Basically, what that means is he's looking for someone to give him the money to trade so that he can split the profits with them. It's kind of like a hedge fund, but the person who puts up the money gets more of the profits. Now, as a rule, I don't do that. But when I was talking to him, I realized that I was talking to somebody different than who I knew before. He wasn't the same person. He used to be full of energy, and charisma, and super charming. Now he's just boring, blah, no energy, no confidence. If he was the same as before, most likely he probably would have talked me into giving him some money. That's how powerful he was before. Even if I didn't want to, he'd probably talk me into it. But, his scars were still there, and they were limiting his confidence. They were limiting what he was asking for. He never even asked me. That's how scared he was. Before, he had no problems being brash and cocky. But now, he was bringing up ... He's like, "Oh, hey, I'm looking for somebody that can stake me. Do you know anybody? I'm doing really well? I got some records and dah, dah, dah. I got this new strategy I've come up with that's working really well. Blah, blah, blah." And I'm like, "Oh, good luck to you." He never even asked me to stake him once, even though I knew that is exactly why he called me. But, he didn't have the confidence to ask for the sale to go for it. But, that's my point. He was never able to overcome the scar. The thing is that only he could see it. I had forgotten about it. I had forgotten that he blew up. I remember that he was in rehab. That's the thing I remembered. But because the scar was there, and he knew about it, and he thought it was there, he acted differently. Maybe he thought that I still remembered what happened or maybe he thought that I cared. To be honest, what bothered me more was that he spiraled out of control. That was the concern to me when I was thinking about, "Hey, should I stake this guy or not?" Even though he hasn't asked me, I was thinking about it because I knew how good he was in the past. But, my concern was not that he blew up. I didn't even remember that. My concern was that I remember that he spiraled out of control. And to me, that was a bigger issue of not giving him money. I felt bad about it, that he's spiraled out of control, but not that he lost money. Because hey, everybody screws up. Everybody loses money, Some people more than others, some people bigger than others, r

People literally ask me this one question ALL THE TIME… “Allen, how did come up with such a lucrative, safe, and easy way to trade?” I explain it all in my new book Passive Trading, get your free book here  https://www.passivetrading.com/free-book! Option Genius was built with you...the individual trader, the breadwinner, the dreamer, the rock your family depends on ...in mind. Because we know what it takes to become a successful and profitable trader. And that’s exactly what we help you do best. Get your $1 trial of Simon Says Options, our most conservative and profitable trading service here https://simonsaysoptions.com/stockslist-ss-trial-offer.  -- Hello, passive traders. This is Allen coming to you with another episode of the Option Genius Podcast. Today, I am a proud papa. Not because of something my kids did, but something I did for them. See, what I've already done is, I hope to be, something that will set them up for a very cushy retirement, or a very happy life. Let me tell you what that is. Now, I have three children, nine-year-old boy, another eight-year-old boy, and then a four-year-old daughter. And I don't want to happen to them what happened to me. See when I graduated high school, things financially were not really good for our family. And I was the only child, so going to college was kind of a no-brainer, you were just going to go. And my kids, they're going to go. They don't have choice, they're going. With all the high competition for the job market and everything, you just need to go and you need to learn and get out there and be on your own. And so, when it was time for me to go to college, I applied for several schools. I got into some private schools, but they did not offer me the financial aid package that I needed to go there because basically I needed them to pay for everything. The one school that did though was Florida State. And Florida State gave me a financial aid package where, I believe at the time I do not remember exactly, but I believe it was costing somewhere around $8,000 a year to go there, that included room and board, for two semesters. And they were giving me $9,000 as part of the package. Now, part of that, a couple thousand, that was loan under my name, but still they were actually giving me more money than I needed to go there. So I was going to have everything paid for, and I was going to have a little bit of cash in my hand, in the bank, so that I could spend it on candy or trips or to the beach or whatever. So, that was my only option. Now I'm going to Florida State. Wasn't my first choice and I did not enjoy it there. Nothing against the school, it just, for me emotionally, mentally, I was just not in the right frame of mind to enjoy it and take advantage of it, which I do regret to this day. But, I wasn't there very long because, at the end of the first year I had to drop out and come back home. My dad had just started a new business that he had no knowledge of how to run because it was all computerized, and so he'd basically told me I needed to stay home and work with him in the business, which is what I did. Okay. No worries. I'm not bitter about it, that much. But the point was that we did not have the money for me to afford the schools that I wanted to really go to. And if I had gone to one of the schools that I actually got into, things would have been way different in my life. Now, I'm not complaining because I love my life, so everything I guess happened for the best. But for my children, I would like them to be able to go to the best school that they get into, whichever school they want to go to. Whether it be around the block or across the country. I don't want finances or money or lack of money to be the reason why they don't go to the best school and get the best education that is possible. And so, I don't know what school they're going to go to, but my oldest he asked me one day, he goes, "Hey dad, what's the best school in the country? What's the best college in the country?" I'm like, "Well, probably Harvard." He goes, "Okay, then I want to go to Harvard." And that was it. Since then, anybody asks him, "Hey, where are you going to go to college?" He goes, "Harvard." He's like, it's no big deal. He doesn't know how competitive it is. "Hey, I'm going to Harvard." I love that confidence in him. I told him, "It's going to be hard." He goes, "Yeah, no problem." That's a nine-year-old. Awesome. I love it. So as dad, as the finance guy in the family, my wife doesn't really worry about the finances, I do, so I need to figure out how we're going to pay for Harvard. Which when he gets there, it's probably going to be, I don't know, $300,000 a year? And plus now, I have three of them. So, you know it's going to be close to a million dollars that I'm going to be paying for college. So how am I going to do that? Geez, that's a lot of money.  I started looking into college savings plans. What are the different options out there? You got the 529, you got the Coverdell, you got some other stuff. Doing my research, and I came to the conclusion that, I think that the best thing that I could do for them is to open up Roth IRAs. Now that might be sounding a little weird, right? A Roth IRA for a kid? How do you do that? They have to have income? Right. They have to. They do have to have income. They have to have a job. So that was an obstacle that we had to overcome. Okay, what job can we give them? Well, lucky for me, my wife has another business, which is a daycare. And on the daycare, we have to have pictures of happy children on the website, in the marketing materials, the brochures, the pamphlets, that things we hand out. And so, why not instead of paying other kids for their pictures or stock pictures or whatever, why not we pay our own children? Take their pictures professionally, and have that in our marketing materials? So that is what we did. So, we had professional pictures taken. We do it every year, and we have those pictures as part of our marketing plan. And so the kids get paid for this. Now, currently the tax law says that if your child is working for you or if your child was working anywhere really, they can get paid up to $12,000 a year without having to pay any income tax. Now, going to give you a disclaimer here, check with your accountant on this. Talk to your accountant, and talk to your tax professional, whatever, make sure this is correct. This is what I been told. And so you can do $12,000 a year without paying any income taxes. And, if you're earning money, you can put $6,000 a year into an IRA, whether it's a Roth or a regular IRA. Now for them, obviously I chose the Roth IRA because they're not paying any taxes on the income anyway. And so the money is paid to them tax-free. It goes into the Roth IRA, and there's no tax there. And then later on, when it actually comes out, after they retire or whatever age, 65, they take the money out of, it should come out of their tax-free as well. So you kind of get like a triple whammy here. So I really love this idea. I think it's one of my better ideas I've ever had. And so one of the ways that you can actually pay for college is that you can withdraw the money that you put in the IRA for college. In fact, if you look at the rules of how the Roth IRA works, any money that you put in, any deposit that you put in, you can withdraw that money at any time. So let's say you put $5,000 into it. You can take that $5,000 back. The gains, if that $5,000 goes to $6,000, you cannot take that extra $1,000 out. If you do, you have to be taxes and you have to pay fees. So that you don't want to, because you don't want to pay the fees and taxes until you can at whatever the age is, I believe it's 65, when you could start taking money out of your Roth IRA. Or 59 and a half or whatever the number is. You find a way to get your child paid for work that they're actually doing. And in my case, they're models. If you have your own business, they could work in your business doing accounting, bookkeeping, maintenance, anything. And that money that they get paid, you don't have to pay income tax on it, and it goes straight into the Roth IRA. And then if you need to, and I'm hoping that I will not need to do this, because I'm also investing in 529s for the children, and I'm hoping that I'll be able to use the 529s and whatever money I have at that time to pay for it so we don't have to touch the IRA. But I'm investing in the IRA first. And then once I do that for all three of them, then I put money in 529s every year for two of the children. So, I put about $5,000 each, for each child. So currently each child has $20,000 in their IRA. I've been doing it for four years. The accounts haven't really gone up very much in the last four years. They're going up, they went down, maybe I'm picking the wrong stocks. I don't know. But for whatever reason, they're roughly based on where they started. And even this year, we had a 35% bear market. It's still about the same. Now, one thing I briefly mentioned earlier, you can take money out of an IRA that you deposited. So when it comes times to college, we're going to use the 529 funds first. Use up all that money, because that 529 can only be used for educational expenses. And that's why I only have two of them. So, the older kid, he's got his account. And the middle kid, the eight-year-old, he has his account. For the baby, I'm not putting in yet, just in case. I don't want to have too much money in the 529. Because if the three of them don't use it up, then we have to take it out and pay fees on that and all that stuff. So I don't want to bother with that. So I'm going to use the 529 money up first. Then my own money. And then if that's not there for whatever reason, then we'll tap into the IRAs and take money out of there. My hope is, we never have to, and this money just sits there and it grows and grows and grows until age 65. Over the weekend, I got to thinking, I sa

People literally ask me this one question ALL THE TIME… “Allen, how did come up with such a lucrative, safe, and easy way to trade?” I explain it all in my new book Passive Trading, get your free book here  https://www.passivetrading.com/free-book! Option Genius was built with you...the individual trader, the breadwinner, the dreamer, the rock your family depends on ...in mind. Because we know what it takes to become a successful and profitable trader. And that’s exactly what we help you do best. Get your $1 trial of Simon Says Options, our most conservative and profitable trading service here https://simonsaysoptions.com/stockslist-ss-trial-offer.  -- Passive traders, I hope you are well wherever you are. As I record this, corona is still with us. Not the beer, the disease, the virus. And the economy is opening up again almost everywhere. It's open in some form or fashion in the United States, and the stock market is jumping up and down both without any rhyme or reason in many cases. But the Fed is behind us, and with that, I believe with the Fed pumping as much money into the economy, the stocks are only going to rally, and so people are really trying to take advantage. I had a friend who is a friend of the family. He just graduated from college about a year ago. He was working full time and he got laid off. And so I had helped him and walked him through the whole unemployment process of how to apply for it and whatnot. He started getting his checks and his checks were in the vicinity of about $700 or $800 a week. This was more than he was making from his job because he was working on a commission basis as a salesperson. And so now he's got more money coming in than he's ever had before. And when I checked in with him, his comment was, "Yeah, I can't wait to put this money in my Robinhood account." That threw me for a loop. I said, "Wait a minute. You have no income. You have all these expenses. What do you mean you're going to take all your money from unemployment and put it in your Robinhood account? You're going to gamble it? I don't understand." I was like, "No, man. You just graduated from college. Your mom paid for everything. Your mom is working seven days a week. You need to go take this money and give it to her." And that kind of, he was like, "Oh, yeah, right. You're right. You're right." I don't know if he did or not, but that kind of told me what the thought process is of some of these youngsters. I was talking to another relative. He came over and he said, "Yeah, I'm in the stock market now." This one is a little bit older. He was about 26-years-old or so. And he's like, "Yeah, I'm trading. I'm in the stock market." I was like, "Oh, really." "Yeah. I bought some airlines and I bought some cruise lines." And yeah, that's wonderful. But you got to know when you're going to get out. You just can't buy it and hold it forever. These things are probably going to go back down. Anyway, I'm bringing all this up because these youngsters don't really understand how the markets work. And for some reason, with all the advent of these cheap, free brokers, like Robinhood and Webull, and they're really appealing to the younger kids, and they have more of a gambling mentality. My attention was drawn to an article where on June 13th, a fellow named Bill Brewster who works at Sylmar Capital, basically he's in the financial space, he's an analyst, he posted that his cousin had just committed suicide. And the reason for him committing suicide was that he started trading in his Robinhood account. Somehow his account showed him that he was owing about $700,000 in losses because he was trading on margin. So Bill is asking, how does a 20 year old with no income get access to that kind of leverage? And it's incredible. It's true. So if you are a parent and if your child is of this age, in their early twenties, maybe you should talk to them about it because a lot of kids are looking at this as a quick way to get rich. It's all over the internet. It's all over the Facebook groups, Instagram, all these places. And this seems to be like the new gold rush. Everything is going up. The cruise lines are going up 8%, 10% a day. You got to get in, you got to get in and you got to get in with options. You got to be buying options on this thing and use margin to do so, so it boosts your return even higher. These people don't know any clue of what they're talking about, what they're doing, and it's just ending really badly for some already. And it's going to end bad for many more in the future. So if you're a youngster in your twenties, then you need to realize that this is not the way to do it. If you want to do it, go ahead. If you want to gamble, go ahead with money that you have, do not use margin. And even if you're an adult, yeah, if you're twenties, you're already an adult, but if you're in your forties or fifties or sixties, and you're trying to gamble on these stocks, please don't do it with margin. Do it only with money that you can afford to lose because every time there is a financial disaster, there are always people who commit their lives and they commit suicide and it's a horrible story. It's not worth it. It's not worth committing suicide. I had a friend who committed suicide. He was my brother-in-law. He shot my sister, killed himself, shot the kids. And to this day, we don't know why. We could have helped if he had reached out and asked for help. We think it was financial related issues. They had other emotional issues and all that stuff too, but I think the thing that ticked him off and the thing that set everything in motion was his finances, and he could have reached out. And even in that case, it was leveraged. They had borrowed too much money. And so borrowing money never leads to good things unless you know what you're doing. And most cases, if you're looking to borrow a lot of money, then you don't know what you're doing, especially within the stock market. So margin is a good thing as option traders, as option sellers, we need a margin account so that we can sell our spreads, but you don't want to use that margin to be borrowing stocks and borrowing against options. Things are going ups and down right now. The stock market is very volatile. It's very crazy. It can go up, it can go down any day now. There's nobody that knows how to predict a future in the stock market. Nobody can and the people who say they can are lying. And that's it, that's plain and simple. So let this podcast issue episode, and let this young child who unfortunately lost his life to this, be a warning that we don't need to be trading with margin, number one. We don't need to be taking wild bets, number two. And we don't need to be taking our own lives. Our life is worth a lot more than even 700,000 that child apparently had run up in debt to Robinhood. Now, Robinhood did not, they were asked about it. They know about the situation, but they did not share any details of the trading account or how he got so much debt or margin. But they were where of the situation. They did release a statement that they were saddened to hear the news, and they reached out to the family to share their condolences. Let this be a lesson that you need to act prudently when it comes to your finances and suicide is never the answer. So if you're hearing this and you are in some kind of situation, you need help, reach out to somebody who can help you. If you have nobody reach out to me, I'll do my best, whatever I can do. But there is always another option. It's never too late. Everything, there's a book by this woman, Marie Forleo. It's an excellent book. Everything is Figureoutable, that's the name of the book. It's actually a great book. Pick that up if you have to, you get some help, talk to somebody. And worst comes to worse, you owe them money, big deal. There are other things, there are worse things in his life. So please, please don't take your life, get some help. All right? And I don't even know if I should say it on this episode, but trade with the odds in your favor. Be careful out there. -- LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/ WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP:  https://optiongenius.com/alliance Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps.

People literally ask me this one question ALL THE TIME… “Allen, how did come up with such a lucrative, safe, and easy way to trade?” I explain it all in my new book Passive Trading, get your free book here  https://www.passivetrading.com/free-book! Option Genius was built with you...the individual trader, the breadwinner, the dreamer, the rock your family depends on ...in mind. Because we know what it takes to become a successful and profitable trader. And that’s exactly what we help you do best. Get your $1 trial of Simon Says Options, our most conservative and profitable trading service here https://simonsaysoptions.com/stockslist-ss-trial-offer.  -- A PASSIVE TRADER IS A NEW BREED OF INVESTOR. SMARTER, CONFIDENT, RELAXED, AND FREE. PASSIVE TRADERS ARE WINNERS. THEY KEEP THE ODDS ON THEIR SIDE, TAKE CALCULATED RISKS, AND MAKE CONSISTENT PROFITS OVER AND OVER. PASSIVE TRADERS ARE FLEXIBLE.  THEY KNOW HOW TO ADJUST WHEN THE MARKET DOES AND STILL BE PROFITABLE. THEY PLAY THEIR OWN GAME AND USE WALL STREET’S SECRETS TO THEIR BENEFIT. PASSIVE TRADERS ARE INDEPENDENT AND CAN THINK FOR THEMSELVES. THEY KNOW THAT NO ONE CARES ABOUT THEIR MONEY MORE THAN THEY DO, SO THEY MANAGE IT THEMSELVES, AND BETTER THAN THE EXPERTS. THEY DO NOT RELY ON FINANCIAL PLANNERS, MUTUAL FUNDS, OR ROBOTS TO CHARGE INSANE AMOUNTS OF FESS WHILE PROVIDING BELOW AVERAGE YIELDS. PASSIVE TRADERS ARE PATIENT. THEY SIT BACK AND LET THE GAINS COME TO THEM BY KEEPING THINGS SIMPLE. PASSIVE TRADERS ARE DETERMINED. THEY KNOW THEIR “WHY” AND IT PUSHES THEM TO STAY FOCUSED AND NEVER GIVE UP. IF YOU ASKED A MONEY MANAGER THEY’D TELL YOU THAT PASSIVE TRADING IS IMPOSSIBLE – THE LITTLE GUY IS NOT SUPPOSED TO BEAT WALL STREET. YET IT IS HAPPENING EVERY DAY. PASSIVE TRADERS KNOW THAT LIFE IS A GIFT AND SHOULD BE LIVED TO THE FULLEST. MONEY IS NOT THE END GOAL. SO PASSIVE TRADERS MAKE THEIR MONEY WORK FOR THEM, GENERATING AN INCOME 24 HOURS A DAY, 365 DAYS A YEAR, SO THAT THEY CAN SPEND THEIR TIME DOING WHATEVER MAKES THEM HAPPY. PASSIVE TRADERS ARE IN CONTROL OF THEIR DESTINY, THEIR FINANCES, THEIR EMOTIONS, AND IN TURN, THEIR LIVES. PASSIVE TRADERS… DEFINE THEIR OWN DESTINY MARCH TO THEIR OWN BEAT MAKE THE WORLD BETTER LIVE THEIR IDEAL LIFE PASSIVE TRADERS ARE MOTIVATED KNOWING THAT THE ODDS ARE IN THEIR FAVOR.   I AM A PASSIVE TRADER!   Link to Podcast Episode 50: https://optiongenius.com/blog/what-is-passive-trading/   Passive Trading: How To Generate Consistent Monthly Income From The Stock Market In Just Minutes A Day -- LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/ WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP:  https://optiongenius.com/alliance Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps.

People literally ask me this one question ALL THE TIME… “Allen, how did come up with such a lucrative, safe, and easy way to trade?” I explain it all in my new book Passive Trading, get your free book here  https://www.passivetrading.com/free-book! Option Genius was built with you...the individual trader, the breadwinner, the dreamer, the rock your family depends on ...in mind. Because we know what it takes to become a successful and profitable trader. And that’s exactly what we help you do best. Get your $1 trial of Simon Says Options, our most conservative and profitable trading service here https://simonsaysoptions.com/stockslist-ss-trial-offer.  -- Today, I wanted to talk about creating a quarantine playbook. Obviously this corona thing has changed things. Everywhere you look, people have been affected, and we've been doing podcast episodes about this for a few weeks. It's on top of everybody's mind. It's what everybody's thinking about. It's affected, everybody. And luckily now we've gotten to the point where everything is ... A lot of things are reopening. Some are already open, some are getting ready to open or they're opening slowly. I'm in Texas, and they opened a couple of weeks ago. I think gyms are open this week. Restaurants are at 50% capacity. Doctors are open. They're taking patients and everything. So, things are trying to get back to normal, but there are still a lot of people who think that things will never get back to normal. We really don't know what's going to happen. Nobody knows. Everybody's trying to predict. Hopefully there's a vaccine or not or what, but it has really thrown everybody for a loop. We had a mandated recession, right? Bear market, 35% drop because of this virus. You already know this. You're probably watching the news. You've been listening to me, trading this market. And it's been difficult because it's something that has never been done before. We've never seen it before. Right? But the numbers are going down right now. Depending on what state you are, fatalities are going down. I know in Texas, we're in Texas, the numbers are actually going up. Numbers of how many people sick with the virus are actually going up because now they're testing more people, but they're still opening it up. Hopefully the deaths will continue to go down. People who are sick or the virus will continue to go down. But the experts say that when everything opens up again completely, the virus can come back. If it doesn't come back now, in a month from now or two months from now, it can come back when flu season starts, at the end of the year. September, October, whenever it starts getting a little cooler, flu season is going to come, and they're saying that corona is going to come with it. So are we going to have to start shutting down in a couple of weeks if cases go back up? That's what some of the governors have said. Even in Texas, pure Republican, they are saying that if the numbers get out of hand, they're going to start shutting down again. If it comes back with a vengeance in September, maybe they have to shut down again over then. So we need to be prepared. Even if this virus is eradicated, maybe a vaccine comes out tomorrow and we don't have to worry about corona ever. Well, that's not true, because it's going to take a while to get everybody vaccinated. And there's still going to be those people who do not want to be vaccinated and refuse to be vaccinated. So we'll still see about that. But this is one virus which can easily mutate. There can be other viruses, other pandemics, and as the world is getting closer and travel is getting faster, it's just going to increase. So if there's a virus, if there's an illness, there's still Ebola out there, SARS is still out there, Zika is still out there, H1N1 is still out there. All these diseases are still out there. They have no cures for them. They can easily transfer to us in the United States, or maybe there's a virus that starts here and goes over there, what goes across the pond? Who knows? As investors, as traders, we need to be prepared. Even as individuals, we need to be prepared if a quarantine happens again. So I want to do a little mind experiment with you. Knowing what you know now, if you could go back in time or if you could send a letter to yourself or a video or whatever to yourself, 30 days before the quarantine hit, what would you tell yourself? Make a playbook. Now, this podcast is about finances and investments. So I'm going to stay and say, Hey, yeah, let's make an investment playbook, a trading playbook for quarantine. Now you could obviously add other things to it. I mean, what would you have done differently? Stocked up more on toilet paper? I don't know. A lot of people would have in advance. Buy more beef jerky, maybe? I don't know, but when it comes to finances, we had a steep bear market. Market has dropped like 30% in two weeks. And then we had a rally off the bottom. And now we're kind of in no man's land. We're at 50% retracement from the bottom and the top, and now nobody knows what's going to happen in the market. But there are certain stocks that are doing really well. Certain stocks are hitting all time highs. Certain stocks are at all time lows, and they're probably going out of business. They're going bankrupt. So when the quarantine hits again, whether it's corona, COVID-19, or something else, if you take some time and create a playbook of what to do, you will be prepared for when this happens again. It might be in two or three weeks, it might be close to the end of the year, it might be next year, it might be another virus. I don't know. The only way we learn is by looking at history and then learning from it. That's how we learn from our mistakes. And this is not necessarily a mistake, but we're learning from history. First time, we didn't know what to do. If it happens again and we don't know how to take advantage of it, well, that's on us. That's our fault. You know, they say, "You fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me," because I should have known it was coming. And we know that most likely it is coming. So, prepare yourself. If you need more cash, if you need to take out a loan, you have that money ready, whatever you need to do, have a playbook. What are some of the things that could be on your playbook? Well, get ready to short, because the market is going to drop. But not everything's going to drop. What are you going to invest in? When are you going to invest? If you have no money sitting on the sideline, then you won't be able to take advantage. If you're a hundred percent invested, then when it drops, you're going to have a big loss, and then when it recovers, you won't have enough money to put back in. So that's why, when we're doing passive trading, we're selling options, but we're keeping money on the side. So if there is a drop in the market and our favorite stocks lose, then we can go ahead and start buying them. What strategies are you going to be using? In a bear market something like an [iron condor 00:06:34] was not going to work. The market volatility shoots up sky high, butterflies, calendars, all these non-directional trades will not work because there's just too much volatility. So this is something you need to think about in advance, something you need to be aware of. Now we've already been through it to some degree. We can say it's not over yet, but we've been through the worst in this cycle. If there's another cycle, you should know what to do and be prepared. That's what I want you to do. That's what I want to focus on in this episode. That's what I'm talking about is having you sit down and take a look at what really happened. What hurt you and how can you protect yourself? There are some of you who are looking and thinking about it, and they're like, "Man, I lost my job." There are a lot of people, 40 million people, who lost their job. Hopefully a bunch of them will get their jobs back, but a lot of them will not get their jobs back. Well, if we have another virus in six months, another quarantine, you're going to lose your job again if you don't do anything about it. So if you're not investing, if you're not passive trading, if you're not doing anything with options, then you need to learn now so that you can do it when you're stuck at home. Because right now, yes, the government is printing as much money as they can. Yes, they're sending everybody checks. They might send everybody more checks, but they can't keep doing that forever. Eventually they're going to stop and you need to take care of yourself. What if you had a nice cushy job, but now you have to work from home, and working from home also means that your kids are home, and so you're not getting anything done? Or maybe you're a freelancer and you get paid by the hour, but you can't get stuff done because you got to take care of your kid. Well, maybe you need another source of income. So when I'm talking to people, traders, I'm hearing two different stories. The one story that I'm hearing is that, "Man, I don't know what's going on. Everything is so crazy. I don't know what to do. I don't want to trade right now because it's so up in the air. I don't know if I should buy stocks. They might go back down. I don't know if I should sell everything, because it might keep going up. I don't know what to do." On the other side, I'm hearing that "Man, I need to take full responsibility and I need to take control. I gave away my power. I need to grab my power back. I need to be in control of my life. And I'm going to do that by trading. I'm going to learn how to trade and I'm going to learn how to take control of my finances. I'm going to get my house in order, because I was on risky sand, I was on quicksand. And I didn't know it, but now because of the virus, I'm sinking, and I need to fix it." Those people are taking action, and they are joining courses, and they are asking questions, and th

People literally ask me this one question ALL THE TIME… “Allen, how did come up with such a lucrative, safe, and easy way to trade?” I explain it all in my new book Passive Trading, get your free book here  https://www.passivetrading.com/free-book! Option Genius was built with you...the individual trader, the breadwinner, the dreamer, the rock your family depends on ...in mind. Because we know what it takes to become a successful and profitable trader. And that’s exactly what we help you do best. Get your $1 trial of Simon Says Options, our most conservative and profitable trading service here https://simonsaysoptions.com/stockslist-ss-trial-offer.  -- I am willing to bet that you did not know that retirement as we know it today is a pretty new concept. And by pretty new I mean about 60 years old? And if you are like me, you probably never even thought about it. See in the past, most people lived on farms or in little villages and you worked the land or did your craft. Basically you kept working until you died. That started to change in Germany in 1883. That is when the Chancellor Otto von Bismark first came up with a plan to give a government supplied income to those who were disabled from work by age and invalidity. And after much political fighting they passed a law to create a retirement system for citizens over the age of 65. Life expectancy was way lower than 65 at the time. In the US it was not until 1935 that FDR created the Social Security Act that gave benefits to workers over the age of 65. Life expectancy was around 58 at the time. So again, very few were expected to collect from social security. But by 1960, life expectancy jumped up to almost 70 years. That is when the first lucky ones were able to actually live long enough to stop working and collect retirement benefits. That is when leisure became a pursuit. That’s when retirement communities became a thing and gold became available to the masses. So it has only been a few short decades that Americans have looked forward to a rewarding life of fun after a life spent working. Currently the SS administration estimates that there are about 47 million retired people in the country. But how are those people doing? Not too well. The #1 fear of those over 50 years of age is running out of money in retirement while at the same time, More than half of all American families have less than $4,000 set aside for retirement. Thanks to advances in science and healthcare, life expectancy continues to advance. I myself am planning to live to at least 100. But that is a problem that is getting worse. Most retirees expect Social security to be there. But the average retiree only get about $14,000 a year from SS. That’s living below the poverty line. The SS fund is in series trouble and unless the government fixes it soon, the administration might have to cut payments to beneficiaries. Those that expect to keep working past 65 and often unable to do so.   Why? 3 main reasons. Poor health. This is the primary reason for workers retiring early. No jobs. Age discrimination is a thing. And companies would prefer to hire younger, cheaper employees than older ones. Family issues. You might end up having to care for a loved one, like a spouse, child or grandchild.   But again it wasn’t always this way. Families used to take care of their own. But thanks to the industrial revolution that went away. To keep workers happy, companies started pension plans. The idea was that you work for one company, stay loyal, and they will take care of you in your old age. It worked great, until companies decided that they would rather not do that anymore. So new laws and regulations were passed. Retirement plans like IRA and 401ks were created. And the age of Wall Street was born. Now it’s not the family’s job to take care of the elderly. It’s not the company’s job and the government is not up to the challenge. So we are told to rely on Wall Street and our friendly financial planner. Except that he isn’t so friendly like we discussed in episode 71. So what do we do? Is there anyone we can trust? In a word, yes. You trust yourself. You take responsibility and you invest the time to educate yourself. You manage your own money and use Wall Street’s tools to do so. But don’t get suckered by their marketing and psychological tricks. I am so happy to be able to take the Passive Trading philosophy and methodology and put it in book form to take it to the masses. The Great American Retirement Experiment has failed us. Time to put the odds in our favor. -- LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/ WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP:  https://optiongenius.com/alliance Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps.