From Broke to Six Figures and Back: Jason Brown on Options Trading, Risk and Rebuilding Wealth

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1:57he didn't even ask for. That's what I do, Jason, but welcome to the show. Ryan, good to be here, man. I love it. I love it. I receive it. Good. I appreciate that. Some people are like, I don't think they know how to tape me. I give everybody pet names. It's love. I don't know. It's what I do. I love what you're doing, Jason. Little options trading. Power Trades University, author of Five-Year Millionaire. Damn, I'm going to be a five-year. Everybody likes to get in a hurry, but five years now is pretty good, Jason. It's a good, reasonable time frame. That's why I like it. It's doable, and it's not 40 years out.

2:28You're not looking at retirement. It's within your lifetime where you can still enjoy it. I know. Hey, man. I had student loans and I wouldn't say I used every dollar wisely. Some might argue using them for college isn't even wise, but we'll save that topic for another day at another guest. But I got the attention of taking out the student loan, throwing it in the stock. It actually seems smart. It's like at least you're going to get a higher return. You would have hoped. I'd love to start there a little bit, Jason, and then building towards what you're doing with five-year millionaire. Yeah, absolutely.

2:58So what happened when I was growing up, we were poor, sleeping in sleeping bags, and I was trying to figure out how to change our family's financial tree. And I actually took$2 ,000 to a bank at 18. That was my graduation money. And I said, I want to invest. The girl asked me, why? I was like, I want to be rich. Why else do people do this? And so basically, she said, you want aggressive funds. I'm like, yeah, that sounds about right. I need aggressive growth. And I'm thinking, okay, I'm going to come back two, three years later, I'm at$6 ,000. You hear people say, just put some money in, leave it, come back, it'll grow.

3:28Came back about two, three years later and it was down to$700. And so they lost majority of my money. They lost$1 ,300. So I'm like, I could have lost my own money. What happened? And pretty much she just like, I don't know what to tell you. Market goes up, goes down. I was like, I know what to tell you. Give me my 700. I can do this myself. And so I spent$200 on some Jordans. I was like, if I lose this other 500, at least I got some gym shoes out of the whole deal. I had 500 bucks. I'm working for Sprint PCS making$8 an hour. I make 64 bucks on a Saturday,$50 after you take out taxes. I was like, if I could just make 50 bucks with this$500, I wouldn't have to work a weekend.

4:10What I did was I bought Sprint at$5. It fell down to$4. I was like, oh man, I'm not that good at this. Maybe I'm not as smart as I I thought Sprint went back up to five. I thought, OK, just need to go to 550. It fell back down to four again. I thought the stock market's rigged. That's why they asked for your Social Security number. They won't let it go to 550. I just had all these thoughts. It went back up to five. And I said, I've seen this before. I got out at five. It fell to four. I got back in. It went up to five. I got out, made my first hundred dollars. I tell you that story because that was the first time I started to learn about patterns.

4:42If you drew that out on a paper, we call it a channel and stock pattern. So I got really good at these patterns and start studying what other patterns there were. And I said, how do I get more money into the machine? And so I had a scholarship to school to Mike Illich School of Business, Wayne State University here in Detroit, Michigan. And I knew that I went and saw financial aid. I saw my buddies getting student loan refunds. And I found out that because I didn't live on campus, she was like, oh, you can use the money to live on campus. I said, well, what if I live at home? She's like, well, you could move on campus, use it for living expenses.

5:09So I'm like, basically, I can use it for whatever I want. And for me, I saw that as an opportunity to get more money into the stock market machine. So I took that$10 ,000 student loan and I grew it to like$113 ,000 as a 21-year-old college student. Amazing. What a great story that would be if that was the end. But I think there's a part two coming. There's definitely a but to that, right? Because what happened was I dropped out of school after that. I made more money not being an engineer. And then I grew the account to about$300 ,000. And about three years later, at about 26, 27, I actually risked a quarter million trying to make half a million and I lose it all.

5:49So by the time I'm 27 ish, I'm flat broke, had to move back home to the neighborhood with drugs, gangs, bars on the window and really reset. But that's where this whole new Jason Brown was born. That's when I started documenting my life and saying, like, I know the stock market works. I've made money from it before. I just got to figure out what I did wrong. And that's kind of how I got into YouTube and teaching. And I was rebuilding my account and kind of recording and documenting the whole process along the way. This episode of Vibe Science is brought to you by Shopify. We talk a lot on this show about being intentional with the life you want to create.

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8:42Hey, man, I admire just the gumption of it all because I love people to take chances. You're watching your surroundings. You maybe not have known everything and we don't always know everything, but you're watching. Hey, people are investing and doing these things. You get interested, you put 2000 in the bank. You realize what a facade that is. And what happens is you get put into one fund where some guy that gets paid 30 grand a year pays attention to it for about 10 minutes a month. It's the aggressive value fund here at Liberty Mutual Bank. Well, I'm making up bank names, but I mean, I could see it.

9:12And we'll get you in the aggressive fund, son. We'll get you in that one. We'll see how it goes in a couple of years. Yeah, how it goes.

9:23I remember starting in school and they want you to get in the 401k plan. They give you four boxes to check. And it's like, I'll give you, I took that aggressive one. I don't think it went as bad as yours, but it didn't go wonderful. Then I realized, okay, I can diversify this thing and do it like I want. But admire, again, you're wanting to get ahead. You're wanting to do the right things. You're hearing the signals. This is how you do it. And then you earn it up and you took a little bit of the slow path. and it sounds like you got a little greedy. And I'm just going to say, I don't know. I mean, every detail of that, but maybe it was oversold to you, misrepresented.

9:54There's probably a lot of details to that, but it sounds like maybe you tried to get in a hurry. When I saw the opportunity with the StockmarGridor account to$300 ,000, when I started to lose it, there was a lot of different things wrapped up into it. A, I did get greedy. I was risking a quarter million trying to make half a month. I was actually up$100 ,000 in that trade before it went against me. And I remember saying$100 ,000 is not enough. I'll never say that again, by the way. But at that moment, I was like,$100 ,000, what am I going to do with that? Because I was trying to make half a million.

10:23In my head, I was trying to make half a million in one investment. Not really, I could have made$100 ,000 four more times. But that was part of it. One of the principles I learned from it that I talk about in my book, Five Year Millionaire, is that I didn't have an I'm wrong level. So I didn't have a level of say, hey, if this goes against me, when am I going to get out? How am I going to save my account? I didn't have any protection. Now I talk about how to use put options as protection. It's like I should have took a portion of that money and protected that quarter million. I didn't. I just thought it's going up and I'm going along for the ride, never thinking that it can go down.

10:53So it definitely humbled me, but I wouldn't be the same guy I am today if it went right. Number one, you wouldn't like me because I'd be super arrogant, think I knew everything. But number two, when the times get tough in the market, I'd realize I didn't really know anything. I don't think I knew as much as I thought. I was just riding the wave of the market going up. And I think a lot of people invest like that. They get a little bit of success, but they don't really know what they're doing until they've been through an up market, down market and a sideways market. Tariffs, covid, all that. No kidding.

11:22Talking with Jason Brown. He is a stock market expert, options trader and author, a five year millionaire. So, Jason, we got the good, the bad, the ugly. And we came on the other side. This is the quote from the book, the roadmap for investing in the stock market, wealth accumulation and financial independence. We want that plan. Yeah, the plan starts with you got to be educated. First of all, everybody wants to invest in the stock market, but it's hard to invest if you're not educated about how it works, when to buy, when to sell. And the first thing I tell people, or at least the roadmap that we talk about in the book is, number one, you got to have an account.

11:56You got to have access to the market and we want you to practice before you ever put real money down. But then that goes into the education piece because it's like golf. If you don't know what to practice, you start to develop a bad swing. You want to be educated to the point of what am I practicing and how do I know I'm practicing in it the right way? And the steps you want to take, or at least that we teach, is number one, you want to be able to read stock charts. A lot of people start with fundamentals first. But the reality is, if I look at a stock chart, I could tell just by looking at is the stock in an uptrend?

12:27Is it in a downtrend? Is it in a sideways? If it's in a downtrend, then I can go look at the fundamentals and find out why it's in the downtrend. If it's in an uptrend, then I can go look at the fundamentals and find out why. But initially, that chart is going to tell you if you're in a stock that's going up, going down or is going sideways. Then from there, just taking a look at the fundamentals and saying, like, well, why is it going up and why do I think it's going to continue to go up? And then the third piece of it is using options to supercharge your results as well as protect your account.

12:57Most people don't get excited about investing because they say, oh, I only have 500 bucks, I only have a thousand dollars, I only have four thousand dollars. that's not going to do much. And depending on who you're talking to, some people say, I just put, keep adding money to it and over time it'll grow. But if you understand options, you can actually control some of the higher quality, better stocks and get an exponential return, even with a little bit of capital. So it's really key to learn about call options and put options and how you can supercharge your account as well as protect it from losses.

13:28Talk to me, Jason, I'm going to play. I'm not always like devil's advocate. It's not the right word here, but more I try to play reality. You and I would probably think we're probably cut out of similar cloths, being aggressive, wanting to make our own path, that entrepreneur type spirit. Some people just don't want to take the time to learn it. As crazy as that might sound, and it might sound lazy, it looks like Chinese checkers or something on the board. How do you navigate this? Is that just when, hey, you need to find a good financial advisor that you trust, or is it stop fooling yourself, learn this stuff, it's important, get over it?

14:00Which one? It's both and, to be honest with you. And I would never shun someone who doesn't want to learn, because you do have to have an interest. I don't have to say you have to be passionate about it, but you have to have an interest to want to know, how do I grow my money? What are they doing with my money versus just me signing this paper and I'm sending them a statement every month that I don't know how to read. So you have to have some interest. And I think it's very important that we're not trying to take people who aren't interested in the market and make them interested. it. If you're already interested, we're saying, hey, here's a roadmap and a blueprint to help you get better and understand it.

14:33If you're not interested in managing your money, you are left to finding a good financial advisor or a person you trust. I think what's important there is that you understand no one's going to manage your money like you are. So just make sure your expectations are in alignment. People say, well, I don't really want to learn it. I just want to give it to somebody and I want them to give me the 100 % returns or the 50 % returns that I see sometimes you make. And I said, unless you got a 10,$20 million account, your account ain't big enough for someone to focus solely on you and your money and to grow it like that.

15:04They're going to stick you. You got to check that box at the end of the sheet. Yeah. And they're just going to stick you in some fun, right? And go find a hundred more people like you because they only make 2 % off of in order for them to make their living. They just got to find a bunch of you who don't care. Just as long as your expectations are aligned. And I think the other thing that's a little bit dangerous about that is people say, I want to find someone I trust. But how do you know who to trust if you don't understand it yourself? And most people don't have an answer for that. They say something like, oh, this person went to school for it.

15:35Going to school does not equal trust. Going to school just means you know how to pass a test. Taking a series 6, 63, and 7 just means you know how to pass a test. I found when I went to study to become a wealth manager, I studied to become a financial planner, passed the 6, 63, and the 7. And right before we filed it with the state in the SEC and you got to get sponsored and all that stuff. They wanted me to shut down my own website. They said, I couldn't talk about stocks anymore. Then I said, okay, no problem. How does it work? When do we actually pick the stocks and help people? Oh, we don't pick the stocks.

16:03We pick from these three different funds, from American funds, Fidelity. And I forget who the third company was. It was like, oh, they just supply everybody these funds and they change one letter or one ticker symbol. And now it's like our custom fund. I'm like, so we don't even manage the money? They're like, no. You just got to be licensed in order to sell these securities and make a list of all your friends and who's their financial planner or who they use and see if you can bring their account over. And I thought that's interesting because people would have thought they could trust me just because I had a license and I wasn't even managing the money.

16:32I was basically a licensed sales rep. You have to have a little bit of interest in this and you have to be educated enough to the point to understand how do you even pick somebody that you trust and is knowledgeable? Yeah, good advice. And I'll say this, as you were talking, Jason, I was thinking back to college or to my education. Why are we teaching sixth graders this? We should have another finance and stuff once you get into college and even high school a little bit. But we should be teaching our youth this from the get go. I mean, should we get financial excellence in sixth grade? I feel like we should be starting earlier.

17:04You know, that's interesting conversation. I got so many thoughts around that. You'd have to make it corrective for that. We should be introducing this stuff earlier. There's so many problems with trying to do it. You got the parents who don't understand it, so they can't help at home. You think there are 10 hours of rejection? Come on, man.

17:23My wife's a principal and was a math major. Daddy's pretty good at a lot of things. Mommy's going to have to help you with that math. Look, send them same kids home and be like, we want to buy some stocks and invest. And parents are like, what? Huh? True. But yeah, there's a balance there, but I'll let you finish your thought. The school's trying to cater to the average student. So maybe in affluent neighborhoods or unique schools, able to introduce some of these extracurricular or non-traditional learning paths. But when you try to look at school as a whole and they're trying to teach a broad spectrum of kids, I just don't think they have the bandwidth to introduce investing and investing concepts.

18:01A, if the teachers don't understand it themselves. And then B, they're trying to just kind of blanket teach it across all students. Although I believe all the students could learn it, I just don't know that the schools are ready to kind of take on that task. I like big challenges, Jason. I like big on it big. Hey, we're doing enough of the same shit for too long. My wife, she's a middle school principal. I'm at a tough job. She agrees with it, but it's more than she. Hey, she's got enough problems that I'm like, man, we keep what they say. Stay the same. Stay the same. There's something there.

18:28There's a balance. I don't know if we're going to solve that today, but it may be. No, I think there's a huge opportunity there, though, for sure. If we had financially secure, at least knowledgeable kids in those areas, and maybe it's not stock options, but it's something. I mean, just teach them how to use credit. You know, let's start there. Let's teach them how to balance a checkbook or create a spreadsheet with a budget. The whole gamut of financial literacy is just missing from school at an early age. Teach them how to pay taxes. Most kids probably don't even know that they don't even get to keep 100 percent of their paycheck, especially if they started a business.

18:58There's so many things in the financial literacy space that could be taught in schools. But like you said, I don't know that we go solve that today, but maybe maybe somebody's listening and we we go create some type of cool partnership. There you go. Today's episode is sponsored by Vented. I'm not somebody who spends a lot of time thinking about my closet. Honestly, I rotate through the same five shirts, a couple pairs of jeans and maybe two jackets. But somehow my closet was still packed. So I finally went through everything and found a bunch of clothes I hadn't worn in forever. Instead of putting them back and telling myself I'd wear them someday.

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