Investing insights from a Nuclear engineer-turned-trader

First full disclosure #1: I’m not a “trading” guy. I have spent many years wanting to care about trading to supplement my business profits, have always thought it’d be great to do trading, but I am to trading what most wannabe writers are to writing who want to have written but never really get around to writing anything: i.e., I want to “have” traded, but don’t really want to do any trading. Which brings me to full disclosure #2: I’ve also been benefiting from trading and even profiting from it. How? Because someone who very much is a trading guy, who has used his trading know-how to fill his own coffers, and now spends much of his time trading and loving every single minute of it… is my business partner in BerserkerMail Troy Broussard. And the way I’ve been profiting from trading using his methods without making a single trade myself is, he takes a portion of our sales in our software company each month and uses a clever method he’s figured out for trading (trading Options specifically) to start bringing in some steady, and very reliable results for us so far. Which brings me to the here and now: Since I know jack about trading anything other than baseball cards when I was a kid… with less than an infantile grasp on the subject, I recently decided to interview him on it all, what he does (so I can at least know how I am benefiting from it…) and how others on my list can use his same methods to potentially do the same. None of this is investment or financial advice. Just me doing an aggressive “inquisition” on Troy about what he does. And yes before you ask: There is an offer if you’re so inclined, to get his coaching on this. And if you do, and if you use my affiliate link, you’ll get a valuable bonus (described in the P.S.) But forget about that for now. First, here’s part 1 of our interview: === BEN SETTLE: Alright, so Troy, who are you and what is specifically your science and your systems background before we get into all the investing stuff? TROY BROUSSARD: At my core, I would say that I am a businessman, a techie. I've always been a super high attention to detail kind of guy in everything I do, and that led me to study nuclear engineering as a submariner in the Navy. Later I studied electrical engineering in college. Neither of those programs I completed, by the way. I'm not actually a college graduate, don't have an electrical engineering degree, and I left the nuclear engineering program early because of the NROTC scholarship I got. So, while I don't want to misrepresent my background, I have that focus and that level of intensity and quite honestly, what has always led at the forefront for me has been my tenacity. I grew up lower middle class, lower level incomes, not poor, but certainly nowhere near middle class, and I always wanted to escape that. I wanted to escape that mediocrity of life and so the way that I have always done it is just massive attention to detail and massive effort and quite frankly, doing what others are just not willing to do, and that led me into becoming a self-taught programmer. Even in high school, I taught myself computer-aided design, and literally in high school, I was teaching the architectural firm in town. They hired me to teach them and set up DesignCAD so that they could do their blueprints and stuff digitally. Here I was as a student teaching architects. That's just the level that I've done everything in my life with intensity and focus and just getting to the nuts and bolts of things and creating systems that really make it simple at the end of the day. So, I go deep down the rabbit hole. My partner in the options company, John Sanpietro, likes to call me the mad scientist because that's the way I am. I'm always testing out theories and going deep, deep, deep down that rabbit hole to explore outcomes and then after I figure it out, I simplify it into something that is a framework that someone else can follow. BEN SETTLE: Did this carry over from when you were working at Encyclopædia Britannica in charge of their tech department? TROY BROUSSARD: Yeah, absolutely, because that really fostered everything I do with teaching and taught me a lot of patience. You'll probably laugh at the concept of referring to myself as “patient” because I know you don't consider me to be a very patient guy, but I really had to learn to bridge the gap between non-techies and the world of technology at Britannica. It really did set me up for everything I've done as an entrepreneur in creating courses, SaaS platforms, training programs, consulting and teaching, because I had to learn how to interact with people that really didn't have a grasp or an understanding on technology. So, when I went to Britannica, they were still using the mainframe for their backend. They were not even using desktop systems when I went there. So, we really did transform their entire technology within that company in the years that I was there. In the beginning I was part of the team and then later ended up heading up several teams as an Executive Director of Technology. But yeah, it was absolutely a core transition for me of understanding how to bridge that knowledge gap. BEN SETTLE: So, you are clearly qualified to talk about science, technology and all that, and I'm putting you on the spot a little bit. But why the hell would anyone listen to you, Troy Broussard, about investing? TROY BROUSSARD: It's a good question. It's a fair question. I'm actually very glad that you're asking. I don't like to dance around this. I think probably the single biggest qualification that I have is that I have done so much of it and made so many mistakes that I have really proven the waters and am battle tested so that you don't have to make the same mistakes that I have made. I started investing in the stock market back in the late '90s in my corporate world and built up a really good retirement fund. I was single. I was making really good money and I wasn't out buying expensive cars and doing crazy stuff, I was saving my money and I was doing really good. Then I made the major mistake about 10 years later of deciding to cash out my retirement and roll it into some land development businesses that I was doing with my brothers. And that's the single worst mistake you can ever make is to cash out your retirement. I even paid a 10% IRS penalty for cashing out that account. So, when that happened, I had to learn the hard way how to build that back up from scratch and I've done that through just massive aggressive trading in both crypto and now in options as well, and I started out with crypto and that was very useful and instructional, but crypto is a complex world. It's the Wild Wild West. There aren't a lot of regulations in place. Exchanges have gone out of business and people have lost their money. I've lost some money and stuff like that. It's very promising and has some really great yields, and I was able to make incredible income. At one point, I was trading over $3.5 million in volume every single month in crypto. So, I mean, I went really deep down this trading investing background and then have transitioned now where I still do some crypto and I still have a big portfolio there and I maintain it. But I wanted something that was less dramatic and didn't require me being a day trader and didn't require me being in front of the computer all the time. So everything that I teach in Low Stress Options, everything is a derivative of that process of all of those iterations. You know what I teach is really mastery, right? My Memoirs of Mastery coaching program and all the books that I've written on the subject of mastery. And mastery really is about execution and refinement. You don't go to learn kung fu and write a big check and overnight turn into a kung fu master. It doesn't matter how many zeros you add on that check either, you can't buy experience! To be a kung fu master, you probably are going to spend 20 or 30 years and then even then, the more you think you know about it, the more you're probably learning. That is the path of mastery, and it's a path of massive iteration and repetition and testing. So why Troy? Why me? Because I do it. I practice it, and I'm not running a marketing company looking to just manipulate the herd into buying a product. I'm really practicing what I'm preaching and that's I think the biggest differentiation of anything else. That combined with the fact that my expertise over the years has been about taking complex areas or complex topics and simplifying them, and that's what I really do with investing and what I really focus on with the options training. There are thousands of different strategies with options out there and dozens of very, very popular ones and we only teach one and there's a reason for that. We focus on and teach simplicity and repetition in the least risky manner possible. But yeah, that's about all I can say on that, I think. BEN SETTLE: Well, I can confirm quite confidently that... I mean, I've been working with you for the last several years and I saw you basically working 24/7 on software. You got burned out on that and then you just plunged head deep into the investing world and now this is your obsession. I mean, I can absolutely say that without any hesitation, and I'm sure that everyone who knows you has observed the same thing. So, when you say mastery and all that, this isn't just a line. Like this is all you do. We barely even see you in the software anymore. TROY BROUSSARD: Yeah, and I am quite obsessed with it because I'm obsessed with it in many ways and not just investing, but particularly this options approach that we use and teach. In many ways, I feel like this is the culmination of my entire adult life that I was really made for this. It is the perfect combination of all the skill sets that I've mastered over the years and so yeah. Quite frankly, I have become obsessed with it, but funny enough, I spend much more of my time actually in the community, moderating the community, posting, helping people, creating training content, recording instructional videos, all of those things, than I do actually running the framework itself because the process that we teach is really something you can do in a couple of hours a week, and that's our promise. That's what we deliver on one to two hours a week of your time. So, the actual trading itself doesn't really take all that much time. What I'm going so deep into is how I can make it easier for people, how I can add to the training, how I can support the community and help people reproduce those same results that my partner and I are getting. BEN SETTLE: Okay. So, before I ask you about options specifically, I want to pull back just a second and what is your overall approach to investing that makes just the way you do it unique, just to investing as a whole? Because from what I can tell, and maybe I'm wrong. Your approach is very unique and it's the same thing you do with crypto and the same thing you do with options fundamentally. Is that true or am I off on that? === So ends part 1 of my investing interview with a Nuclear engineer-turned-trader. I’ll be sending out part 2 tomorrow. In the meantime: If you want more info on Troy’s Options coaching and get an extremely valuable bonus (see the PS) with it should you decide to partake of it via my affiliate link below, then sign up by Friday 10/13 at midnight EDT: [https∶//www.EmailPlayers.com/options]( Ben Settle P.S. The bonus I am offering to those who buy Troy’s coaching by the deadline via my righteous affiliate link? Your pick of any ONE of the books below that I sell. To read more about a specific book below, Google is your friend. NOTE: You have exactly 48-hours after you buy Troy’s coaching to let me know which book you choose as your bonus, otherwise you are disqualified from this bonus part of the offer. None of this waiting around for 4 months and then deciding to tell me. I hate “tail” in marketing in all its evil forms. All right, following is the list of books to choose from. Remember, you have 48 hours after buying Troy’s coaching to tell me which one. Otherwise no bonus book for you. Here is the list of books to choose from: * Markauteur * elBenbo Press * Affiliate Launch Copynomicon * Copy Slacker * Email Client Horde * List Swell * Social Lair * Copy Troll * Infotainment Jackpot * Brand Barbarian * Breakneck Content * Nofluence * Copy Salesliloquies Vol 1 You have exactly 48-hours after you buy Troy’s coaching to let me know which book you choose as your bonus, otherwise you are disqualified from this bonus part of the offer. I’m repeating this so many times here so there is no confusion. 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