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

The Option Genius Podcast: Options Trading For The Individual Investor - Trading Stock Options For Income and Growth

No Sex For You - 98

Hey, passive traders. Howdy Ho, how's it going? Today I'm coming to you with a challenge. Yes, I'm actually going to challenge you, I had something I want you to do, or at least try because even if you try, it's gonna be better than not trying at all. And I believe that the word challenge has been watered down, you know, challenge used to be something tough, something hard to do something not everybody could accomplish. But now it's like, challenges in China that this ice bucket challenge, you know, thrives on your head, okay? No big deal. Right. So this particular challenge is actually going to be difficult. And it's not something that you're going to be able to do overnight, most likely, it's going to take some time, but I believe that this is a goal. That is very worthwhile. Now, let me give you a little background before I tell you the challenge, okay? They say, scientists, that is tell us that money can make us happy to a certain degree, right. So if you're making less than 75,000, they say, if you make more money, then you will be happier. Obviously, you'll have a better standard of living, less stress, all that good stuff, right. But after 75,000, the more you make, it doesn't really help that much, your level of happiness doesn't really change, you just stay at the same level. I believe the number is probably 100,000. Now, just because 100,000 - 6 figures is a good goal, everybody's like, Oh, yeah, make six figures. It's like a cool thing. So I would say, hey, that number is 100,000. So if you were making up to 100,000, you know, if you make more, you'll get happier. And then maybe after that, then you don't get happy anymore. But the thing is, that's really I think the point of life is to be happy. And then how do you after you're making that much money, then it becomes not about you, but it comes about how can you help other people, right, and then that's where it comes to the challenge. So I want you to be happier, I want you to be more successful. And I think that this challenge will be able to do both. First off, they have something called tithing, in Christianity. In Islam, they have something called Zakat. In Judaism and Hinduism and Buddhism, it's voluntary, I believe, to give money, not mandatory, but to encourage. So all the major religions have some sense of giving back to help, the less fortunate. The need. That's what I'm talking about. How much money of your income Do you give away? Whether it be a religious thing, or to a charity, or local cause? or whatever you want to do? How much of your money do you give away? Now some of you are thinking, Oh, Allen, hold on, they're barely making ends meet as it is. Don't be telling me about me giving away money. That's fine. You don't have to do it right away if you really can't, but I do believe that there is something that you can do. And if you do get it, it'll make everything better. It'll make you happier. And it'll make you more effective and more productive and wealthier. I've seen it with my own eyes. So here's the thing, if you're not giving anything, right now, zero. Now give me anything if you want, you know, tallied up to how much money do you give every month, on a monthly basis? Or on a yearly basis, however you want to figure out figure you know, find out what you make? How much did you give away to journeys to your religious institution? Maybe you know, give a loan to somebody that never got paid back. Because you knew Yeah, it's not very bad, that's also, you know, giving money to a friend or relative or whatever like that. Find out how much you make, find out how much you gave, what percentage is that? If you're not doing anything, if you're zero, I want you to get up to 5% I want you to give away 5% of your income. Okay, now this is for people who are like, really strict wrangling really, it's tight, everything is tight. And I think you should make it a family affair for all of us. The family should be on board with it. Wife, spouse, kids, husband, everybody. And maybe they all pitch in to help decide where the money goes. That'd be really cool thing. It's a good lesson to teach the kids as well. If you are giving something, but you're giving less than 10. Let's bump it up to 10. Okay, because if you already know how to give, then you got to make it a habit. You got to make it consistent. Okay, I'm going to get this much. Now I got to figure out where is it going to go? And that's the fun part. That's the fun part. We figured Oh my god, there are so many great places and great things that I want to help the world in. Which one do I get to help out? Eventually, the goal is to go higher. So for those of you who are giving 10% or more, you're not off the hook. Because the challenge the real challenge is to get you up to 20%. That's right, 20% of what you make your income now I'm not talking about taxes. I'm not gonna make it complicated. This could be before or after-tax, whatever. However you want to do it, that's up to you. But the challenge is to get up to 20% of your income given in a way to whatever you want whatever organization you want to, okay. How do you get there is an issue. So there are two things, two things you can do. Number one, you can lower your expenses, obviously, right? Now, I don't want you to lower your standard of living, I don't want you to live like a popper. So you know, cut the things that maybe you don't really use or need anymore. You know, maybe if you have a Netflix, and if you have an Amazon Prime, if you have a Hulu, and if you have a Disney plus, maybe you don't need all four of them. How much TV Do you watch anyway? Maybe you just need to or want to cut something, save some money. Maybe if you eat lunch out, five days a week, maybe you Brownbag at one day, not only will you be healthier, but you'll save money, you feel better about yourself. So, these little cutbacks, not only will they make you more financially stable, but they will also make you healthier, you know, you'll get out and do active stuff instead of watching TV. So we can only hope, right? The other way is to increase your income. Now 20% is a stretch by anybody's imagination, right? You're gonna have to really put your pen to paper and figure this out, like how much how can I do this, right? Go from 5 to 20 or 10 to 20, it's a big deal. So you're gonna have to make more money. And whether that's income from job income from business, investment, or trading, it's going to give you a logical, tangible, physical goal that look, I need to make "s" because that's the challenges. And then you got to figure out how you're going to do it. Now, it's not gonna happen overnight, like I said, can take some time. But I do believe if you set your mind to this challenge, and if you take it seriously, and if you do it, and you strive, and if you're on a 5%, right now, even if you get to 10, you know, and you'll get all the way to 20. Eventually, you will, if you want to, but even if you get to 10, that's going to make huge differences in your life. And then eventually, you know, maybe you feel like, okay, I don't need to give the whole point. But if you stop, you have 20% of your income just sitting there that you can use to build wealth, to build anything. Right. So it's basically building a financial discipline, to spend less, but also, it's pushing you to grow and to make more. And I think that's the real benefit. So yes, you'll feel better about yourself, you know, you're helping other people, you make a difference in the world. And who knows, by giving more money, it'll probably come back. That's the way it works, right? The more you give, the more you get back. But it will also force you to be thinking about more income. Now, obviously, we all think about Oh, man, I gotta make more money. I gotta make more money. Yeah, but this is a real number. You need to make a real plan. And then enact put that plan in motion. You know, step one, step two, step three, step four, and then you can drag and so how do you how good did I do? And you can make it a game? Because that's what is a challenge. It's a game, I'm throwing down the gauntlet and challenging you, and you get to make the world a better place. Now, for me, I'm right now I am about 20%. I'm not saying that to brag. I'm just saying that it is possible. Okay, I didn't get there years ago. Right, it took some time. But we built in a habit in my family, me and my wife, we both had a habit. Okay, we're going to start with, we started with 12 and a half percent. That's what we started with. And then we did a little bit extra, oh, hey, you know, this guy needs some help, we need to, you know, he needs a couple grand to fix his car, or this kid needs, you know, to pay his tuition payment for the month for the semester, give him some money here, or send it to charity or, or whatnot. But we came up with creative ways to do it. One of the things that I do with the kids is I've given money to this organization called Kiva, K-I-V-A-dot-org. Basically, what you do is you loan micro loans to people in other countries. So if you give maybe $1,000, each loan that you give is only 25 bucks, right? So you take the 1000 put it in the website and send it to them. And then you choose who to give the loan to. And you can give each person $25. Now, obviously, the people might need more. So there are several people giving loans. But the people then pay the loans back. So you get more money to lend to more people. Now the point here is not to make interest on it. You've given it the money away, but it gets repaid and then you get to learn it again to somebody else and get repaid and learn again, learn again. So I do this, my kids. And so now my boys, they're 8 and 10 right now, they get to choose who we give the loans And I haven't added any more money into it because the money comes back and we get more loans. And every couple of months, we look at it and say, How much money do we have? Okay, let's make some loans. And they decide who they want. They go through all of the available loans and look at the pictures and look at the description of what they need the money for, what country do they live in? Are they a man or a female? Are they a group? Are they individual? Are they going to be able to give the money back? Does it make does it make sense what they're trying to what they need the money for? They make all these decisions on their own, and then they pick. And then they track, like, How much money did they get back, you know how their loans doing. So they feel good about themselves. But they're also learning how to be a good lender, which eventually is something that I want them to know, because I want them to be making investments, that's part of the job, right, you have to know how to get your capital back. So we're using doing good to teach. So if you have kids, I think that's definitely one of the plays, one of the ways you can do it. But again, the challenge is to get yourself up to 20%, giving the money back or giving the money away. I'd be interested to know how many of you guys would actually check me up on this challenge, and how many are actually going to be able to accomplish it, it's going to be amazing. But if you get up to 20%, the feeling that you're going to feel it's unbelievable, where you actually, you know, you you feel on top of the world really does not only do you want less, like you desire less, it just makes you desire less things be less materialistic, because you're, you're not only looking at what you need, but then you're thinking, Okay, I need to raise, like I say, you're going to give away $20,000 a year, okay? You have to look for places to give the $20,000. And so you have to research. And when you're doing the research, you're going to find out all the things and all the people and all the places that are suffering, and need help. And you're going to feel so grateful for the life that you have. And whatever situation you're in right now, you're going to feel amazing. For a while, you know, I'm really in a blessed situation to be able to give away $20,000. And then you're going to help those people and you've got a few really good budgets. Not only that, but you've also increased your income hopefully. Right? And then the big thing about it is that the way the US taxes are, you don't even have to, it doesn't have to be a full 20,000. If you're making 100,000 You don't have to give away the full 20 like to make 20% because then there's taxes and stuff. So the more money you give, the more tax break you get. So you're not really having to in order to get 20% of your income, you're not really having to give away 20% 100,000 it's because of the tax breaks. So it's really cool. I thought I'd share this with you. It's an interesting idea. I think it'll definitely help you. So yeah, it's not easy. It's a challenge, right? Are you gonna, do it? I hope you do hope you give it a shot. Because not only will it change your life, it'll change your family's life and change the world. So with that, remember to trade with the odds in your favor, and good luck. 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.

The Give Away Challenge - 97

How Fast Can You Start Trading For a Living - 96

How to be a black belt spread master. Black belt. Hiya! Like karate, right? Black Belt, that's the best belt you can get. So how can you be a spread master with a black belt? Let's talk about that. First thing we got to do, though, is go over the disclaimer, of course, trading and falls risk. It's not suitable for everybody, you can lose money, you probably will lose money. So don't raise too much. You don't want the spouse kicking out of the house. Right? Got it. Okay, so the last from the class, right? Karate Kid, the original, with Mr. Miyagi, that one rules. I love Jackie Chan. He did great. But the original Karate Kid, the original Miyagi, it was just kick ass. And I'm gonna have to tell you a little bit story here. Karate Kid. My parents actually took me to see this in the theaters. And I loved it. Right made kind of dates content your whole life, but I loved it. The original one is just a classic story of this guy. He's a little bit nerdy, he's skinny, he moves to this new town, he doesn't have any friends. He meets a girl. And then he gets picked on by this group of thugs, you know, and they know karate. And they're beating him up of over and over and over again. And then finally there's this guy's This is recluse, right? This guy who just takes him under his wing becomes like a father figure to him because he didn't have a father and teaches him how to defend himself and teaches him karate and karate is for defense. That's a very horrible, horrible accent. But, you know, that's what Mr. Miyagi teaches him. The Karate is for defense, and it's about life. And it's about meditation and being calm and peaceful. And all these things he gives him shows him how to do respect, right, how to give respect. And that's what karate is about. But the thugs, all they're talking about is no mercy, no mercy, right. karate used to win and beat in pummel, and, and destroy. And so we have the rest of the movie. And eventually, hopefully, you know, hopefully, you've seen the movie. If not go watch it. But I'm going to spoil that for you here. There's a karate tournament. And, of course, The Karate Kid wins in amazing fashion. Right? And then there's Karate Kid, part two. And so he goes to Japan, I'm not gonna tell the whole story. But that one was good, too. So if you haven't watched them, the originals, you got to go back and watch them again. And then now on Netflix, they have come out with a new series called Cobra Kai. So I guess they wanted to make more money from The Karate Kid. Right? And so they brought back all the actors. And they have a whole new series, where it continues the story. It's I think it's like 30 years in the future. 30 years have gone by since the original Karate Kid movie. And you see, all the actors have grown up, and they're all there except for of course, unfortunately, Mr. Miyagi Pat Morita, because he is unfortunately, he has passed away. But all the other actors are there. And that was I've been watching that. And it was cool. And I love the I mean, the acting is really bad. To be honest, the acting in this series is pretty bad. The story is like ehhh, you know, but I love how they showed the other side of the story. Like in The Karate Kid movie, you see everything from Daniel-san perspective. He's the kid who's just moved here how hard it is for him. You know, he's got a single mom, his mom is annoying. He's trying to make friends. But he's getting beaten up all the time. You see it from his perspective. In the in the Cobra Kai series. It starts you off. The main character is the main thug, the one that was torturing Daniel-san, and it shows you from his perspective, and he's telling the story of how this kid Daniel came to his town and messed up his life. stole his girlfriend, beat him in the tournament, made his sensei hate him, all this kind of stuff. So I loved how they showed both sides of the coin, the flip. And I mean, it was really well done. That part was really well done. Anyway, why am I telling you all this? Because after I saw the karate kid, I, of course, wanted to learn karate. Just like after I saw Top Gun, I wanted to be a fighter pilot. And after I saw Jaws, I didn't go swimming for years. But when I saw Karate Kid, I wanted to learn karate. So I told my parents, I want to learn karate, I'll put me in a glass looking too hot for me in class. So they did, buster, right? And so I joined a karate class. And I'm you see they have these belts. So you want to of course, you start off as a white belt, meaning you know nothing. And then you get a different color belt as you grow and you get better and better and better. And eventually you get to a black belt. And then when you get a black belt, it goes even higher. From there, you can get degrees of black belts. So I started off as a white belt, know nothing. And they started with basic stuff, right? How do you throw a punch? How do you do a kick? How do you Block a Punch? How do you block a kick? How do you block this and that and so you got four or five or 10 you know, basic moves, and you practice and that's what we did. That was the whole glass practicing, practicing, practicing, practicing practicing. Maybe you do a sparring with somebody else a little bit in very, very slow motion. But you're practicing the same moves over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Eventually, I got tired of the same moves, and I'm ready to move up. So I go to my sensei (Sensei, as your teacher) I go to my sensei and Sensei, please show me some of the moves for the next belt because I want to practice at home. And I want to get really good so that I can take the test and I can go to the next belt. And what he told me is that I already know the moves. What are you talking about, Sensei, what I found out was that the moves in karate are generally the same at all the belts. The thing is that there is more complexity at the higher levels. So what he showed me is that in slow motion, he stood in front of me, and in slow motion, he threw a punch, and I blocked it. And I was able to block it, because that's what I learned as a white belt, he did a little kick, and I blocked it. But then he did it a little bit faster. And he pulled me on my butt. Right, because I didn't know how to block it, even though I should have been able to block it. And then he moved to the side a little bit. And he punched me from the side. And I didn't know how to block it. And then he hit me from the back. And he did I don't know how to block it. And then he had, you know, he hit me with to like combination really fast. And I didn't know how to block it. Even though I knew the moves, I didn't know the combinations, I didn't have the speed to block him. So then he told me to do the same thing to him. And he used the same moves to block everything I did didn't matter how fast I did it, or what side I did it, he was using the exact same moves, the block the basic block, the basic, you know, the the basic kick and punch and all that stuff to beat me, it was just the same thing. So that was his lesson for me at the time he goes, you need to focus and work on perfecting the moves that you already know, before you go to the next level. And so he sent me back, right? And do the block do the kick Faster, faster, better, better, crisper, more, more provision. So in The Karate Kid movie, if you if you watched it you remember it you know you remember wax on wax off, wax on wax on paint the fence up and down defense up and down. Those were the moves that Mr. Miyagi was teaching Daniel-san, and he made him do it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, until he got so good at these basic moves, that he was good enough to go into the tournament and fight and win. You know, it was the same moves and Mr. Miyagi, he didn't have any belts, so he didn't tell Daniel-san. Okay, now your white belt. Now your green belt. Now your Brembo may even have any moves. He was just teaching karate, or karate, I guess if you say if you say it properly. But it wasn't about going from belt to belt. It was just learning he was about learning how to do the thing. Right? So now when we talk about credit spreads, we talk about learning the trade, learning how to do it, it's about learning the thing. So if you're a basic trader, and you want to get a really, really good trader, is there extra stuff that you got to learn? No, the moves are the same. The rules are the same, the basics are the same. There's more complexity, definitely at the higher levels. It gets scarier when you're dealing with larger numbers. You know, when you're not putting 500 into a trade, but you're putting 50,000 into a trade? Yeah, you can scare the heck out of you. That's more complexity. But the work that you got to do is the same. The basics are the same, you keep doing the same thing, punch, kick, wax on, wax off, that's all the same. It's just more complexity at higher, higher levels. So you got to do the work. Right? Now you take a look at Bruce Lee, the master of karate, right, the king. He's known to say that I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 different kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times. Because if you focus and you excel and you expert at one particular thing, you can beat anybody else that that's not proficient. Okay, so even Bruce Lee did the same thing. The same exercise is the same, you got to master the basics. Every time I start losing money. The first thing I do is I stopped doing everything complicated. And I go back to the basics. Just take out everything, go back to the basics. That happens in everything I do, whether it's trading, or whether it's with my family, whether it's with marketing, whatever I want to do even like chess, you know, if you're if you're a good chess player, you start doing all the gambits, right, you start doing all the moves, but there might be a time when you start losing over and over and over again and you're like, I don't know what to do. If you don't know what to do, you go back to the basics, right, go back to the beginning. And then you build up again, slowly, slowly, slowly. So just like in karate, just like in chess, just like in anything else that you want to learn. You got to do the work. If you want to be a master If you want to be a credit spread Master, and that's what I want you to be in this program, that's the reason for this program, you got to put in the work. And that's why we do it over and over and over and over and over. And yes, it can get methodical, it can get boring. But that's how you become a master. That is how you become a credit spread black belt by doing the same move 1000 times 10,000 times, being able to put on a trade in your sleep, being able to have the rules ingrained in your brain so that you can recite them. And then eventually, I want you to be so good that you can teach other people, you can teach your kids, you can teach your family, you can teach your friends, your co-workers, you can teach them how to do this stuff. That's how good I want you to be a black belt, credit spread master. That's the point of this program. That's where I want you to be at the end of the program. And we're going to do it by putting in the work. So if you're with me, hey, yeah, we're gonna do it. We're gonna get you there. That's without any doubt in my mind that I can get you there. You have to put in the work. And you already know what that means, right? So if you're ready, let's do this. 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.

Black Belt Credit Spread Trader- 95

How I Invest My Money - 94

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

How to Trade and Invest in 2021 - 93

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.

It's Time to Get Real - 92

How To Fill In The Gaps To Trading Success - 91

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.

Should You Go Into Debt To Trade? - 90

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.

Are You Sedated? - 89

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

Her First Trade Ever - 88

How to Scale Up Your Trading - 87

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.

Did Oil Prices Really Go Negative? - 86

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.

Ring That Bell - 85

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.

"I Turned $10k into $25k" - 84

Let's talk trading. Especially how to trade options for income. Buying Puts and Calls is great, but selling options is much better. Whether you want to trade for a living, have a side hustle, or make extra monthly income from stocks, this is the place. We are here to help individual investors learn to trade options in a way that is simple, fun and profitable. The goal is to help you achieve Freedom. Financial freedom so you have no more worries about making ends meet and so you have more than enough for safety and security. Time Freedom so you can do what you want when you want. And Choice Freedom so you can live your life on your terms with no restrictions. We call it living the Option Genius Lifestyle. Where you can earn consistent monthly income by selling options using safe, conservative strategies. We place high probability trades and earn market beating returns in a way that takes just a few minutes a day. Listen in to learn how you can do the same. Hear from professional traders that have beaten the game. Some of the strategies we discuss are covered calls, naked puts, credit spreads, vertical spreads, iron condors, butterfly spreads, calendar spreads, strangles, straddles, and more. This podcast is about how we trade options and how it lets us life a lifestyle other people can hardly imagine. Trade from anywhere in the world, for just a few minutes a day, in a way that is super safe and can still make more than the averages? Listen in to learn how and check us out at OptionGenius.com

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The Option Genius Podcast: Options Trading For The Individua...

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