Podcast – Episode 001 – Financial Freedom By Using Stock Options

 

 

Welcome to the initial, the inaugural, the very first episode of the Option Genius podcast. My name is Allen Sama, and I am so grateful that you are tuning in. On this podcast, we’re going to be talking about investing, trading with options, with a bias towards selling options, because hey, they are the best way to make money in the markets, and I’m a little bit biased, as well as talking with other professional and newbie traders. I’m not going to be giving out trades on the podcast, although we might use trades as examples when we’re discussing certain topics. But overall, the goal of this podcast is not to be giving out trades and that sort of thing. Welcome to the initial, the inaugural, the very first episode of the Option Genius podcast. My name is Allen Sama, and I am so grateful that you are tuning in. On this podcast, we’re going to be talking about investing, trading with options, with a bias towards selling options, because hey, they are the best way to make money in the markets, and I’m a little bit biased, as well as talking with other professional and newbie traders. I’m not going to be giving out trades on the podcast, although we might use trades as examples when we’re discussing certain topics. But overall, the goal of this podcast is not to be giving out trades and that sort of thing.

Now normally when it comes to options, the subject can be very dry and boring. It can also get really, really technical, especially when you’re talking about trades. This is what I aim to overcome thought, because I want to share with you, I want to educate, I want to entertain, and I want to have some fun at the same time. So you’re going to be getting my thoughts on trading and my tips from what I have learned in my 10 plus years of professional trading, as well as my corny jokes. Now, I’m probably not going to be 100% politically correct, and there might be a bad word here and there. But we’re not going to be discussing politics, religion, or any other controversial topic.

Well, unless it relates to trading. So I do want to thank you for joining me on this experience. Hopefully, you do get value out of it. I mean, it’s not going to be actually easy for me. I am a super, super duper introvert. I keep to myself. I keep my interests and my opinions to myself. Even when I’m asked, you know? I’m still hesitant to give my opinion because normally, I get in trouble for it. So I hope you will please excuse any imperfections. I’m going to be messing up. I am normal. I am not a professional speaker. I am just doing what I’m doing to get the knowledge out there that people don’t have. What I know I want to impart to you.

Nowhere will I say that I am the world’s foremost experts on options, or I am the most knowledgeable about a certain topic. There are people that are way, way, way smarter than I am. But I bring a special twist to what I thinking. I mean, a lot of people tell me that I can take complicated matters and make them very simple, and so that is what I’m trying to do. Right? The more people that are out there trying to help, the better everyone is, right? But I do would like you to let me know if there is something. Something that you like, that’d be great. If you tell me, “Hey I like this, that was awesome,” we can do more of that. Or if you don’t like. If there’s something that went wrong, something that you didn’t like, please let us know and we’ll try to fix it.

If you do like the podcast, I would humbly ask that you leave a review and subscribe, because that will help us grow, and that will help us get the word out. Right now, I aim to have about one new episode every week, although that could change. And like I said, you could always reach out to me. I’m available at OptionGenius.com. If you want to email, it’s Help@OptionGenius.com. Again, the word is Help@OptionGenius.com. We welcome all suggestions, all the time. Now, on this first episode, I thought I would explain a little bit about why I did create Option Genius oh so many years ago.

And it all comes down to one word. And that one word is freedom. From as long as I could remember, I have always strived to have freedom in my life, although I didn’t know it until very recently. I mean, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a billionaire. That’s the thing that when they ask all the kids, the kids, “Oh, I want to be a doctor, I want to be a lawyer, I want to be an engineer.” And my mom really wanted me to be an engineer. But for some reason, I couldn’t think of anything, and I wanted to be a billionaire. I didn’t want to be pigeonholed in one profession, in one area. I wanted to do it all. I wanted that freedom. And I wanted the freedom from having a lot of money.

Not because of the money itself. I mean, you know, when I’m a little kid, you really don’t want that many big things right? You want some new toys. You want some crayons and all that stuff. But I wanted to be a billionaire because of the limits. Now, growing up, we weren’t that wealthy. We weren’t wealthy at all. We weren’t … We were okay for some years, and some years were really tough and what not. So I heard the word no a lot. I heard the word, “No, he can’t have that.” I heard the word, “No, you can’t go there.” I heard the word, “No, we can’t put you in that class,” or, “You can’t take part in that activity because we don’t have …” Couldn’t play tackle football when I was in elementary school and junior high because we didn’t have health insurance.

Stuff like that. I never wanted that. I wanted to break those bonds and I wanted to have freedom from that stuff. So as I grew up, I always thought it’d be really cool to be a trader. A full time trader, kind of like you see in the movies and on Wall Street where they’re, “Oh yeah, buy, sell, do this, do that.” I mean, those guys are super smart, right? They’re even called masters of the universe. Geez. But I wanted that because … Not because of the fame and the fortune but because of the freedom the trader has. I mean, making money out of thin air right? How cool is that right? Isn’t that freaking amazing?

And I mean that’s the kind of stuff that we’re going to be talking about on this podcast. And so when I started my Option Genius website, it was to help people. Because by that time, I had been trading already, and I had this method. I mean, I’m not the only one doing it, but I found the method, and I refined it, and I got it to where it was working for me, and I wanted to help other people to help them get the freedom that I had. And so we started this membership website and we would give out trades. The stuff that I was doing in my own accounts, I have it to other people, and they would go and some would do it in their accounts, and some would learn from them, and some would not. And that was fine.

They did whatever they want with it. But I never really pushed it. I mean, I hardly advertised the site at all. We didn’t have any trading products where actually I would take somebody like step by step and say, “Okay, this is how you do this. And this is how you do this.” I mean, we did have a lot of educational material on the website. So I would write stuff. I would write articles, I made some videos. All that stuff was there, but it was very scattered and haphazard. There was no linking. So if somebody wanted to learn a particular strategy, they couldn’t say, “Okay, this is the first video, this is the second,” and take them step by step.

We didn’t have that because we didn’t really need it because it was like a trading advisory. And so I kept thinking about that, and we did add a couple other things just because people kept asking for it. You know, like, “Hey, can you do this? Or how do you do this? Or how do I do this?” So to answer those questions, and basically because I was lazy, I was getting the same questions over and over again, I would make a video or I would write something. Or we came out with another service to take advantage of something that I was doing. So stuff like that we would do, but really, I was still playing small.

I wasn’t really reaching out there. I wasn’t really helping as many people as I could with this information. And so in early 2017, I decided to change that. I decided to make some changes to really push, to really get bigger, and to help more people. When you’re blessed with something as I have been, whether it’s information, or whether it’s knowledge, or some kind of ability, I think it’s our duty to go out there and help as many other people as we can. And option trading, the way we do it, the way I do it, is it’s relatively, I don’t want to say simple. I mean its simple to understand. It’s a little bit harder to actually implement it properly.

But it’s not as hard as what’s made it out to be. All the other stuff, like if you want to be a trading person, you have to know technical analysis and you have to do fundamental analysis. And then you have to know market timing, and you have to do swing trading. And you have to know all this other crazy mumbo jumbo stuff, and watch the news, and read the Wall Street Journal, and look at the Investor’s Business Daily, and the Forest … It’s just so hard and so crazy. But it doesn’t have to be that way and it’s not that way. And so I found something that really works for me, works really well. And I have the life that just about everybody I know envies.

And I don’t say that to like brag about it, but I want to impress upon you that it can be yours as well if you follow the path. And the path is there, and so I just want to get the message of that path out there. And so I know that it’s my time to help. And it’s my time to be heard. I mean, we made so many changes. We redesigned the website to make all the information more helpful, easily accessible. We came out with new trainings to take people on the journey and to show them how they can get their own freedom. Up till then, I was working from home in my office, which was an extra bedroom. And I had the library next door, so I was comfortable working from home.

But now, we said, “No. If we’re going to make this, we need to have a team of people. We need to have an office.” And so I got an office. And I’ve got staff now. We’re like a real business now. And so we’re out there helping people, putting out content. We just started the Option Traders Alliance, which is a free Facebook group for people. If you want to join, if you want to talk about options, you can go over there. Go to Facebook and search for the Option Traders Alliance. Just join in there. There are already hundreds of people in there talking about options every day. If you can’t find it on Facebook, just email us and we’ll get you the link. And then the thing is with this podcast. With this podcast I hope to bring the message of options trading to a whole new audience out there. So then the question is okay, enough about me right? Enough about me talking about myself and what I’m trying to do. What is it that it can do for you? What can options do for you. Well, I think I broke it down into three areas to make it simpler. First of all, there’s financial freedom.

No more worries about making ends meet. Having more than enough for safety and security. Now, when you went to school, you heard about Abraham Mazlow and his hierarchy of needs, and at the bottom there’s safety and security. Well, years ago, I had this thing where I wanted to help people. I always wanted to do that as well. So I wanted to help people, I wanted to do stuff. But then, again, financially, things were not really good for us at that time. So somebody, a mentor, put this in my head. He goes, “You can’t help when you can’t help.” And that hit me like, “Oh my god, this guy. He’s completely true.” I mean, if I cannot take care of myself, how am I going to go out and help other people? And so that’s when I decided, “Hey, I need to get serious. I need to go back to college and graduate, make money, so that I can support myself, I can support my family. And then I can actually go out and help other people.”

So that’s what … The same thing for you. If you’re not financially stable, you’re not going to be able to help anybody. You’re going to have a lot of money issues. You’re going to have a lot of stress on your life. And so I don’t want that. So options trading and options selling, the Option Genius way, really can give you that financial freedom where you have more money coming in than you have going out in expenses, so you can live the life that you want. The second way that options can help you is to give you time freedom. And by that I mean that you can do what you want, when you want.

Do you want to travel? You can do that. Do you want to volunteer? You can do that. Do you want to learn stuff? Do you want to go back to school? Do you want to teach? Whatever you want to do, you can do because of the way that we trade options. I keep saying over and over again that I trade options in about 20 minutes a day. And that’s not really an exaggeration. There are some days where I trade longer, and then some days when I don’t trade at all. I just check my phone and say, “Oh, my positions are doing fine. I’m taking the day off. I don’t have to trade today.”

And that’s the way we do it, will allow you that time freedom. So I mean, if you imagine if you could trade for like let’s say an hour. You’re getting a full time income from something that you spend an hour doing, and then the rest of the day, you can spend time with your kids, your spouse, do whatever you want, write a book. All the things that right now that you’re saying, “Oh, I don’t have time for this. I don’t have time for this. I want to take a dance class, I don’t have time. I want to learn this, I don’t have time. Oh, that movie that I’ve been wanting to see for the last three years, I don’t have time.” Well, you can make some changes and these options can give you that time freedom.

The third is choice freedom. So this is where you can live your life on your terms. There’s no restrictions. That’s really what I’ve been aiming for and striving for my whole life. So I had a mentor who’s actually a boss. And I asked him, “Hey, when you came up with this company that you came up with, how’d you come up with this idea?” And he told me that when he started was he didn’t know what he wanted to do, and he came up with a do not do list. And that was a super cool idea, and based on that do not do list, he looked at everything, and then he looked at all the possibilities, and this company, which was a publishing company, was the answer for him.

And so recently, or awhile back, I came up with my own do not do list. And so people say, “Hey, you should find your passion, and that’s what you should do with your life.” Well, I mean, I’ve been looking for my passion for 40 years now, and I’m not really sure what it is. But this do not do list really helped me in a sense that I said, “Okay, I want to be my own boss. That’s one of my requirements. I want to work whenever I want to work. I don’t want to have a dress code, because for me, ties, suits, slacks, those are not my preferred choice.” And I mean, I hate shaving, so most days, you’re going to see me scruffy. You’re going to see me in a t-shirt and shorts if you come to my office, with sneakers if I am wearing sneakers. Or I might be walking around barefoot.

That’s what I’m comfortable in, that’s the way I am. I don’t want to have any employees. Now I do, but they’re good employees. I don’t want to deal with that mess. Like if you have company, if you have a store, you have to deal with all these employees. I don’t want to have inventory. I don’t want to deal with that. I want to work from wherever I want to work, as many hours as I want to put in. If I want to take some time off, I can do that. So I had this long list, and I don’t have it in front of me, so I can’t go through everything, but I had this list of all the stuff that I wanted that would be in a perfect thing that I did not want to compromise on.

And for me, it came out to trading. Trading fit all those holes. All the check-boxes I could check off. “Yeah. This, this, this, this, this.” All this stuff. You could do it with not to … You could get started with not too much money, that was another one. That was a big one because at that time I didn’t have a lot of money. And so trading really, really saved me in a sense. And so I want to bring that out. So that is what this podcast is all about. I mean, every episode is going to be looking at a different area of trading options. But most of them are not going to dwell on the nitty gritty stuff.

We’re not going to go into all the Greeks, and what is the best time to go from expiration to trading and what not. I mean, we’ll discuss things like that in the future. But what I really want to discuss are the things that can really make a difference to you and to your trading. I mean seriously, I’ve seen it over and over again, you can make money with almost any strategy if you do it right. The trick is to figure out how to do it right. I mean, I have seen that you can give two people the same exact trading plan, the same exact rules. “This is how you trade. This is the trade. This is when you’re going to get it. This is what you’re looking for. This is the set up. This is when you get out. This is how you fix a trade if something goes against you. This is how much money you put into it.”

Exact same trading. A to Z training rules you can give them, the trading plan, they can have it in their hand. One of them will make money, the other one won’t. Why? That is what we’re going to be discussing. Because success leaves clues. Our job is to play the detective, to follow the breadcrumbs and use what we learned to make ourselves better traders. Now, I’ve been doing this for a long time, and so that’s why I feel that I am qualifies to be your guide on this journey. I’m not saying that I know everything. I don’t know everything, and that’s why from time to time, I’m going to bring on other people, other traders, other … I hate to call myself a guru. I am not a guru.

But I will bring on other gurus that have trading products, that have educational products, to get their secrets. To get them and to tell us their stories and to see what are they doing. What’s working? What’s not working. Because the markets change. They change on a regular basis. What worked like five years ago might not be working today. Right now, we’re in a low volatility environment, so you have to make tweaks to your changing. When we go back into a high volatility environment, you’re going to have to make tweaks then. So we’ll be doing this on a regular basis, and we’ll make tweaks as we go along the way.

So that is really what I have in mind for this podcast. Again, I would love to hear your comments. I would love to get your feedback. I really want to thank you for taking this journey with me. Lastly, I you enjoy the show, like I said, please leave a review. Please subscribe. Download all the episodes. That will really help the show to keep it going. And the last thing I want to do is I wanted to stress on you that I would like you to remember that you should be trading with the odds in your favor.

Now, that’s kind of become like my tagline, you know? Trade with the odds in your favor. And what does that mean? I had somebody ask me that, like, “What are you talking about, trade with the odds in your favor?” Well, the way we sell options is we do high probability trades. And so we’re putting on trades that have a 70%, 80%, 90% probability of making money, probability of working out. So even if you don’t do anything to the trade, you have a very, very high probability of working out. Then, sometimes, those trades will still get in trouble. So we have the ability to make adjustments and change the trade and fix it and play with it. Because with options, when you have options, I mean you literally have unlimited options.

Pun intended, right? So that’s the way we do it, and that’s why I say that if you’re thinking about buying a stock, it’s a 50/50 coin flip. It might go up, it might go down, there’s no way to know. With the trading that we do, it’s very high probability trades. So when you have a trade, when you have a strategy, when you have a method that puts the odds in your favor, you’re going to win a lot more than you’re going to lose. And that winning builds your confidences. It gives you the momentum to keep going so that when you do have a loss, you can overcome it and say, “You know what? Okay, I lost one trade out of 10, but overall, I’m doing good. I’m moving in the right direction.”

There are other trading styles out there, and I’m not going to bash any other trading style because people can make money with other trading styles. But they’re much harder to work with. I mean, there’s a trading style where you lose maybe 10 times, or 12 times, or 20 times before you get one win. But when you get that one win, it’s a big win. And hopefully it will make up for all those other losses. Day traders do that a lot. They get in, they do lots, and lots, and lots of trades, and they have lots and lots and lots of losses. But they’re hoping that those few big losses, or the few big wins that they have can overcome all those losses and you have a good day.

That’s one way to do it. That didn’t work for me. It doesn’t work for most people. Most people are still not profitable trading. So we’re trying to reverse that trend. We’re trying to reverse that time and that number and say, “You know what? There is a way where you can be profitable most of the time. And if you start off in that way, there’s a good chance that you’re going to end up in that way.” Because putting on a trade is easy. You can follow some rules and I can show you the rules and say, “Here, this is how you find a trade, this is how you put it on.” That’s not a big deal.

Adjusting the trade when it goes against you, that’s the stuff that we have to learn. That’s the stuff we have to work on and spend the most amount of time on. And so while it’s not easy, it’s not something that takes a couple days, it is doable. And if I can do it, I know you can do it. And hopefully we’ll be doing it together. Okay, so remember, trade with the odds in your favor, folks. And take care.