How to Scale Up Your Trading The Option Genius Podcast: Options Trading For Income and Growth

Hello. Hello. Hello. I want to do a little bit different today and I am going to be answering a question that I got from a podcast listener. This is a question that we get frequently, and I do encourage you to send us questions. If you have anything regarding trading or investing that we can help with, I'm more than willing for you to reach out to us. Email us, it's help@optiongenius.com. Hopefully we can help you. If there is something we can do and point you in the right direction, we will, if not, we'll tell you straight out, hey, we are not experts in that. We don't know. Maybe we'll try to find a resource for you or something, but we do our best to help everybody out as much as possible because in the end, we're all in this together, right? Nobody's getting out of this alive. Might as well help each other and make the world a better place. Right?
This is the question I get often and got this question recently from a listener. The question says, the one thing I struggle with is constantly being scared out of the market. I have a trading plan with iron condors and credit spreads and failed to follow it by not trading frequently enough or with enough size. How is the best way to scale up your trading to make a bigger income out of it? Basically, the fellow is saying that he does trades, mostly spreads, but he's hesitant and scared to not do it enough and not do it with enough money when he does do it. He's thinking about how can he scale up his trading to be better at it or make more money from it? The first thing you need to realize is that fear is not always a bad thing. I mean, it's there to alert you to danger, right? That's why we get scared, something dangerous happening, but it's also there to alert you to opportunity as well.
We look at fear as a negative thing, but fear is just a common response, right? It doesn't have to be something that is bad for us that we are afraid of. Anything outside of our comfort zone can be scary, but that doesn't mean that it's bad for us. A lot of people are scared of placing their first trade. They're scared of investing money in the stock market because they're afraid to lose it, which is one possible outcome. Yes, but you can mitigate that and you can protect against that. When you look at it and you say, look, there are trillions of kazillions of dollars, whatever invested in stocks around the world, what do those people know that I don't, that I'm afraid to put my money in the stock market? What are the people that are trading profitably and consistently? What do they know that I don't know that I'm not consistent? That's why I'm afraid of making trades or making bigger trades.
Is there a secret out there that they know that I don't? Well, most likely not. There are certain ways to do things and once you learn those things, you can follow them methodically, but the problem is fear and emotions. I'll get to that. The second thing you need to realize is that being out of the market is not a bad thing either, right? We don't have to be trading every single expiration cycle. You don't have to be exposed all the time. You get to pick and choose. If the markets get scary and volatile, there's nothing wrong with taking a step back, catching your breath and reassessing to decide if you want to get back in, or if you want to wait until things calm down. Now this fellow thinks that it's a problem that he's not trading enough. He wants to trade more and he's not trading with enough size. It would be a bigger problem if he was trading and he was losing money, but that's not what he said. He said that he has a plan, but he's just not doing it enough.
If his plan is profitable, then it doesn't matter if he's trading every month because he's making something. As long as you're making something and you're compounding it, eventually it's going to grow and just let it grow and grow and grow. If you're not comfortable in the market all the time, and if you're not comfortable making your trade