12 min
Is Trading A Job Or A Business - 120 The Option Genius Podcast: Options Trading For Income and Growth
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- Investing
Hey, this is Allen from option genius. And I am coming to you today from Galveston, which is a beach. So I drove down here today took day off, you know, just hanging out, get some time to think, enjoy the weather. It's not that hot, it's not that cold. But then take a look at this when I get here. This is what it looks like. All foggy, everything was fine. The whole day, everything - the whole road here was fine. It took us about an hour and a half to get here. Everything was fine, good here, and it's all foggy, you can barely see too far in the distance. But that's okay, because that gives me time to shoot you a quick video. And today what I wanted to ask you was are you treating your trading as a business? Or are you treating it as something else? Now, a lot of folks when they talk about their trading, you know, they compare it to their job. It's like, oh, how much do you want to make? Well, I want to make as much as I'm making my job. So they compare trading to their job. Now in the job, you have a performance review, right? So the company manager, whatever the boss tells you how you're doing you personally. And if you're doing well, if you're doing badly, it's all on you. And so if you compare your trading to your job, and you say, Oh yeah, this is my job, this is my second job, then it reflects on you, your results reflect on you. So what I want you to do instead is I want you to think about your trading as a business. Now a business in corporate speak, right? If you incorporate, you are not your business, you might own the business, but the business is a separate entity. Right now, I'm not telling you to go out and form a corporation for your trading - that's a separate topic. But I want you to think of your trading as a business.
Now, you might have heard the statistics right from the SBA, most companies go out of business within the first few years, almost 95% of them go out of business in the first 10 years. Now option genius has been around for 10 years, or more than 10 years, I think 1314 years now. So we must be doing something right. So that's good. I'm happy about that, that we survived. But when you think of your trading as a business, you understand that not everything goes smoothly, not everything goes perfectly. Right. Now, for example, at Option Genius, we might have a new marketing campaign. And we might launch it and I cost a bunch of money. And I have really high hopes and be really excited about it and it falls flat and it doesn't do anything. Every people hate it doesn't work. We lose money. Ah, man, it's disappointing. But it's not a personal failure. Right? It's something that we tried, that did not work. So big difference mentally, versus "Oh, my God", attaching it the results to yourself personally, versus "Oh, it was something else that we tried, and it did not work. Now everybody knows that a business. There are ups and downs, right? There's yours are you make profit, and there's years that you don't make profit. And in trading, we seem to forget that. We seem to think that we should always be making money, we seem to think that we should always every year should be profitable making money. But in the long run, it's not like that. And so if you think of it as a business, if you have a losing year, that's okay. Right? Because that happens. Maybe something happened differently this year in the economy or whatever that caused your business to lose money. That's okay. Business is still found sound, the the foundation of the business, it's still sound, we're not going to just throw the business away because it lost money. Especially if you'd lost money for a whole year. Right? We'll make it back. We have that confidence. Now, most entrepreneurs and then I think of us small time traders as entrepreneurs, because, you know, unless you're a professional managing other people's money, then you might be like, you know, a big CEO of a Fortune 500 company or whatever, you know, bear yourself to that. Well
Hey, this is Allen from option genius. And I am coming to you today from Galveston, which is a beach. So I drove down here today took day off, you know, just hanging out, get some time to think, enjoy the weather. It's not that hot, it's not that cold. But then take a look at this when I get here. This is what it looks like. All foggy, everything was fine. The whole day, everything - the whole road here was fine. It took us about an hour and a half to get here. Everything was fine, good here, and it's all foggy, you can barely see too far in the distance. But that's okay, because that gives me time to shoot you a quick video. And today what I wanted to ask you was are you treating your trading as a business? Or are you treating it as something else? Now, a lot of folks when they talk about their trading, you know, they compare it to their job. It's like, oh, how much do you want to make? Well, I want to make as much as I'm making my job. So they compare trading to their job. Now in the job, you have a performance review, right? So the company manager, whatever the boss tells you how you're doing you personally. And if you're doing well, if you're doing badly, it's all on you. And so if you compare your trading to your job, and you say, Oh yeah, this is my job, this is my second job, then it reflects on you, your results reflect on you. So what I want you to do instead is I want you to think about your trading as a business. Now a business in corporate speak, right? If you incorporate, you are not your business, you might own the business, but the business is a separate entity. Right now, I'm not telling you to go out and form a corporation for your trading - that's a separate topic. But I want you to think of your trading as a business.
Now, you might have heard the statistics right from the SBA, most companies go out of business within the first few years, almost 95% of them go out of business in the first 10 years. Now option genius has been around for 10 years, or more than 10 years, I think 1314 years now. So we must be doing something right. So that's good. I'm happy about that, that we survived. But when you think of your trading as a business, you understand that not everything goes smoothly, not everything goes perfectly. Right. Now, for example, at Option Genius, we might have a new marketing campaign. And we might launch it and I cost a bunch of money. And I have really high hopes and be really excited about it and it falls flat and it doesn't do anything. Every people hate it doesn't work. We lose money. Ah, man, it's disappointing. But it's not a personal failure. Right? It's something that we tried, that did not work. So big difference mentally, versus "Oh, my God", attaching it the results to yourself personally, versus "Oh, it was something else that we tried, and it did not work. Now everybody knows that a business. There are ups and downs, right? There's yours are you make profit, and there's years that you don't make profit. And in trading, we seem to forget that. We seem to think that we should always be making money, we seem to think that we should always every year should be profitable making money. But in the long run, it's not like that. And so if you think of it as a business, if you have a losing year, that's okay. Right? Because that happens. Maybe something happened differently this year in the economy or whatever that caused your business to lose money. That's okay. Business is still found sound, the the foundation of the business, it's still sound, we're not going to just throw the business away because it lost money. Especially if you'd lost money for a whole year. Right? We'll make it back. We have that confidence. Now, most entrepreneurs and then I think of us small time traders as entrepreneurs, because, you know, unless you're a professional managing other people's money, then you might be like, you know, a big CEO of a Fortune 500 company or whatever, you know, bear yourself to that. Well
12 min