‘steal yourself wealthy’ lesson from a nuke engineer-turned-trader

Following is part one of a looooooong training/interview I recently did with my business partner in my newest venture in the realm of helping my boys & ghouls who like the idea of using trading as a way to supplement their copywriting and/or direct marketing-driven businesses. I remember being fascinated with one of Gary Halbert's ads about doing that. And I saw my biz partner Troy Broussard's vision and enthusiasm for trading (I seriously think he was put on this earth to do and teach this - he is obsessed) and for his vision for it... and wanted to be a part of it, and have since invested quite a bit of money into buying shares in it, and now here we are... As for Troy: He is a former Navy nuke engineer-turned-businessman & software developer who has been applying his way of solving problems and methodizing everything he does to trading Options which he is enormously successful at. He also has quite a few enormously successful students, too, including several Email Players subscribers who seem to “gravitate” towards this. Again, this is a very long interview/training (especially this first part). And I’ve broken it up into 5 parts. But even if you have zero desire to trade, it doesn’t matter. The lessons about directing & growing money below are well worth thinking about. Also, if you end up buying in to Troy's coaching I will give you an extremely valuable gift. Valuable both in perceived and legitimate retail value. I am, at the end of the day, not above bribing the hell out of people to buy from my businesses... Okay, here goes: ==== BEN SETTLE: Why should anybody care about anything you have to say about trading or using it to grow their business’ money? TROY BROUSSARD: Well, here's the thing. It's like getting divorce advice from somebody that's never been divorced. It's probably the last person you want to talk to. Or getting fitness advice from somebody that's thin and trim and has never had to lose 50 or 75 pounds. They really don't have that personalized experience. When it comes to finances, I have probably made some of the biggest mistakes that you can make, and I've learned tremendously from that. And as somebody that's made millions a couple of times in my life and then lost it a couple of times and now making it a third time, I've learned a lot in that journey. And finances is the same way. So, I've made the mistakes and I know very personally the repercussions from those mistakes and how to help people avoid them. So if you're looking for the perfect pedigree or the hedge fund trader that’s overseen a $200M fund for 10 years, or something like that, I'm not your guy. But if you're looking for the simplest approach, something that allows you to be effective, to be successful with trading without having to learn all the complexities of it, then I am that guy. If you want to just boil it down to its essence and get a high 98% win rate and very low stress and low time commitment, one to two hour a week kind of approach to managing your finances, then I'm the guy. Myself and my partner John Sanpietro, that's what we focus on with Low Stress Options and our company, Low Stress Trading. We really take this seriously in that mantra. So I think that is what really sets us apart from anybody else, in that we really practice what we preach. We are active traders. We don't need to teach the trading program to be profitable. A lot of people are just making money selling it, and they're not making money doing it. You’ll see this with us. We disclose all of our trades realtime for you to follow and you’ll see we practice what we preach, we do it, we live-trade with our clients, and that is something that I think allows people to embrace trading that would normally be afraid of it. Because, we're not that uptight hedge fund guy that's made $130 million and we're not chest thumping and trying to prove to you how smart we are by constantly teaching you something new. We don't do that. We only teach two strategies in our framework, and that's all we do. And we weave them into a comprehensive framework. Then all we do is wash, rinse and repeat. And I think that's a very different approach in this financial world. BEN SETTLE: Is your background as a nuclear engineer applicable to trading? TROY BROUSSARD: I believe so. Because what you learn as a nuke is attention to detail. And believe it or not, it's mostly repetitive work that you're doing. You don't want to be reinventing the wheel when you're working with a nuclear reactor. You want a very fine-tuned, systematic framework that you follow. That's the same approach with trading. I think that a lot of people that get into trading for the sex appeal of day trading, and that is not what we're doing. You would not want to be just winging it with a nuclear reactor and you certainly don’t want to be overtired or emotionally amped up. You want to follow a very specific process for everything you do. And the same is true with your finances. You don't want to wing it. You don’t want to overtrade and you don’t want your emotions driving your money. And when you're day trading, sure, you might make some great money one day, but you might lose a lot the next day. And I've done it. I've done thousands of day trades. And at one point to give you an idea of how much I have done with day trading, at one point I paid over $8,000 in a month just in fees for my day trades. Just in the fees. And the fees on it, it's like $1.30 per contract. So that gives you an idea of how much volume I was doing in day trading to pay that much money in just fees alone. So I've done that. But with that background of structure and predictability, when you're dealing with a nuclear reactor, you don't want surprises. You don't want to wing it. You want predictable precision and a framework that you follow. And that really does lend to exactly how we approach Low Stress Options. We teach it in a way that follows a consistent, disciplined framework that is very streamlined and very easy. We've reduced probably 98% of what most people will teach in Options and really simplified it, hyper simplified it to just one or two things that we teach. BEN SETTLE: What does steal yourself wealthy mean? TROY BROUSSARD: All right. So I'm going to give you the abbreviated version of this, because I'm literally writing an entire book about this and my experience with it. But it goes back to a story that I have to tell you to put it in context for you or make it make sense. So in 1986, I went down to Brazil as an exchange student at 16 years old. And while I was there, Brazil was going through probably the worst economy it's gone through in the last a 100 years or so. They had hyperinflation at a rate of 30% a month. Not a year, a month. 30% hyperinflation per month. And when I got there, I was really confused about the money, because you would get the equivalent of a $1 bill, but on the note it said a 1000 Cruzeiros. But yet when you went to buy with it, you got the equivalent of just one Cruzado. When they introduced the new currency, they just renamed it, and chopped three zeros off the value of the existing notes. And they hadn't even had time to reprint the new money. So you were transacting in a way that was just really odd. I don't think Americans can even really comprehend this. So let me just paint an example for you. I want you to first imagine that the dollar has deflated so much now, that you go to the grocery market to buy a loaf of bread, it costs you $3,000 to buy a loaf of bread. That's the first mental hurdle to get over. And it's really a mind warp to even comprehend the concept of the dollar being so devalued that you’re paying $3,000 for a loaf of bread. But if the dollar was deflated so severely, that would be the scenario you would find yourself in. Now, you start to finally adapt to that $3,000 loaf of bread, only to wake up one morning and go to the store and the bread is not $3,000 anymore. Now it's three “new dollars”. And you look at that and you're like: “Well, wait. So now it's only $3?" "No, this isn't the dollar. This is the new dollar. This is the dollar 2.0. This is a completely different dollar, it's a different currency. It's not the same thing." "Well, how do I pay for it then?" "Okay, well just give me 3000 of the old dollars and we'll call that three new dollars and you're okay." And so it's this really weird mind warp of inflation, and that's what we were going through when I went down to Brazil. They had $1000 Cruzeiro notes that were now worth one single Cruzado. And every month, inflation was devaluing the money 30%. So it was a crazy economic time. And my father that I lived with in my host family, his name is Maximo. I call him my rich dad because unlike Robert Kiyosaki, that made up the rich dad poor dad story, I actually had a rich dad and a poor dad. My birth father was really my poor dad. He had a poor mindset about finances and wealth building and I suffered my entire life from that lack of knowledge. But it wasn't really his fault. He didn't have that background. But, Maximo was my rich dad and I lived with him when I went down to Brazil at 16 and he became a huge influence in my whole life. To this day, he is still a great and dear friend of mine and I still call him “Dad”. He's my rich dad because he had a rich mindset and has been very successful in life and business. This is what he taught me. So in 1986, he had multiple stores that were franchises. One for each of his three children. He had two daughters and a son. They each had their own franchise and it was a perfume shop and shampoos and things like that. Kind of like a Bed, Bath and Beyond, only a Brazilian franchise. And each of his children had one of these franchises. Every month they would go to Sao Paulo and they would have their franchise meetings, and they were coming back from these franchise meetings with just this bewilderment, because every one of these meetings, there was less and less people there, more and more franchises had gone under, had folded and the 30% hyperinflation of the times and they were going out of business left and right. And none of Maximos franchises were in financial turmoil. So it just didn’t make sense. And his children said: “Dad. What the hell is going on? Everybody else is failing. And yeah, our business is down. We see the business is down, but we haven't had to make any layoffs and we haven't failed. So what are we doing different? Everybody keeps asking us what we're doing and we don't have any answers.” When he bought these franchises for them, he put them in charge of running the day-to-day operations, the hiring, the firing, the managing everything except handling the money. And when it came to handling the money, he took care of it for him. And Brazil's complicated in that sense. You need an accountant and they deal with all kinds of stuff. So he just said: “Look. Rather than teach you this, I'm going to take care of that for you." So he handled the money. And so when they asked him and they confronted him what they were doing different, he said... And I can only do this on video with the gesture because he's Brazilian, but he's got a large Italian influence and heritage. And so he talks like an Italian, he talks with his hands. He looked at them and said: "My children, because I steal you blind every single day." It’s hard to do this justice in writing, because of the hand signal he made when saying it. And everybody's eyes get big because they're like: "What the hell are you talking about, Dad, that you steal his blind?" And he calls us all in to sit down and have a talk, and he invites me in, which is really cool. He treated me as a son, as family from day one. And so he sat me down and he said: "Look. For the last five years, this is what I've been doing." Every single day when he would go to the three stores and collect the daily receipts and close out the cash for the day, and then he would go to the bank, that's what normally people would do. And then when they would take that deposit and drop it in the bank. He didn't do that. He cashed out the day, and then before he went to the bank, he would steal anywhere from 5 to 20% of the daily take, depending on if it was a good day or a weekday. If they had really weak sales that day, he might only steal 5%. If they had a really good day and they just had all kinds of great cashflow that day, he might steal 20%. And he would take that money and he would go to a currency exchange. A currency exchange is where you would buy dollars if you were going to travel internationally, for example, to the US and you needed dollars. So he would buy dollars with that 5 to 20%, and then he would take the remainder to the bank and deposit it. But he would take those dollars home and stuff it away in a safety security box that he had and hide it away and he never told anybody about it. And he did that for like five years, where every single business day they were in business, he was stealing a little bit of the profits and he was converting it to dollars. So when the economy went to hell in a hand basket and 30% hyperinflation was hitting, he would go back and every day grab some of those dollars, take them to the currency exchange, convert them into the currency of the day, which was now the Cruzado, and he would then use that to pay the bills and not have to fire people and cover payroll. He was able to do that because he had these extensive reserves. That's what the concept of stealing yourself wealthy is all about. That's where it comes from. It's a real example. It's a real life history for me. It's something that I experienced, and I think very few Americans have ever even gone through any kind of severe inflation or devaluation of their monetary system like what I went through and experienced down in Brazil in the 80’s… and it had a profound effect on me. But, we can really sum it up to two things, two important steps to steal yourself wealthy. The first step is to make micro-transactions where you're taking a little bit off the top of your income on a daily basis. Today in the digital world, we might say every time you get a transfer from your merchant account, take 5%, take 10% off the top. So that's the one thing. It's the discipline of stealing from yourself off the top and paying yourself first, that small little amount that you don't even miss. The second thing is that, instead of just putting that money in a savings account, find a way of putting that money into an asset class that grows disproportionately to the dollar or whatever your currency is if you're listening or reading this internationally. You'll have your own monetary system, and that's what we're doing. So what he was doing, he wasn't just saving the money. If he had just saved the money and put it in the bank, he would have gone out of business like everybody else, because the money had been massively deflated over those five or six years. Massively. We're talking thousands and thousands of percent of deflated value that he would've lost. He would've never been able to stay in business had he just saved the money. So it's not just about grabbing a little off the top and saving it, but it's about grabbing a little off the top and putting it into an asset class that is preserving your value and growing against your own currency. And that is really the whole lesson behind “Steal Yourself Wealthy.” And believe it or not, that's the short version. BEN SETTLE: Is this the engine behind what drives your Options trading too? 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 3/8 at midnight EDT: [https∶//www.EmailPlayers.com/options]( Or… If you want to get a look at Troy’s methods, see how they “tick”, even hold his feet to the fire and badger him with questions (the more hostile and super skeptical the better — he loves this stuff), make him show and PROVE to you that he knows what he speaks of… here’s the deal: He’s having a live demo tonight via Zoom at the link below. You can grill him, challenge him, try to stump him - outright badger him about it, even. i.e., ask all your questions and make him prove he’s the real deal and can help. (I certainly did before letting him trade Options with Learnistic cash) The day: Today The time: 5:00 EDT/ 4:00 CDT / 3:00 MDT / 2:00 PDT The URL: [https∶//www.EmailPlayers.com/options/live]( Ben Settle P.S. The bonus I am offering to those who buy Troy’s Low Stress Trading 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. This email was sent by Ben Settle as owner of Settle, LLC. Copyright © 2024 Settle, LLC. All Rights Reserved. No part of this email may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from Settle, LLC. Click here to [unsubscribe]( Settle, LLC PO Box 1056 Gold Beach Oregon 97444 USA