From Truck Driver to Day Trader: Tony Pawlak's Journey to Financial Freedom

Speaker 2: 0:11

Welcome to Side Hustle City and thanks for joining us. Our goal is to help you connect to real people who found success turning their side hustle into a main hustle, and we hope you can too. I'm Adam Kaler. I'm joined by Kyle Stevie, my co-host. Let's get started, all right? Welcome back, everybody, to the Side Hustle City podcast. Today we've got Tony Pollock with us. Tony is a trader. Thanks for being on the show, tony.

Speaker 1: 0:41

Man, thanks so much for having me Honored to be here.

Speaker 2: 0:43

And, of course, I got Kyle Stevie over here. Yep, kyle Stevie with us once again in studio on my right side doing the Ed McMahon thing over here. Is that what I am? Hey, ed McMahon. People love Ed McMahon.

Speaker 3: 0:56

I'd rather be Andy from the hell of Conan O'Brien.

Speaker 2: 0:59

Well, there you go. You can be, andy. Andy's a funny guy. Yeah, he's way funnier than Ed McMahon. Yeah, exactly, and you're a funny guy, tony. You do this full time man. And there's a lot of people out there we were just talking before the show. Buddymind Brandon drives a box truck. He's sick of it. He's sick of, you know, doing the nine to five thing. Actually it's like a seven to three gig, I think, for him Sometimes later. But you know this is what he does. He drives around truck and he's tired of it. It's the same old thing. He's been doing it for 20 years. And he got into a course he was sold on it, on how to day trade, and he started playing around with that, got to know the market a little better. I don't think he got everything he wanted out of the course that he was in the particular one he was in and I'm not sure if you know, many traders share the same background as him. I mean, you sound like you kind of came from that same kind of background. Blue collar guy kind of got sick of doing the nine to five grind every day or whatever it was you were doing, and you know to control your life and started something on your own.

Speaker 1: 2:01

Yeah, man, that's exactly my story. I feel like those are the most people. Those type of people are the people that are driven the most to do this, because their life is so demanding and it's just you kind of get pushed into the dirt so long. Driving a truck is a tough way to make a living and that was that's why I was. I was after eight years I was done with it. I was like there's got to be a better way. There's got to be a better way to make money. There's got to be a better way to enjoy life. So I took what little that I had in my life savings I think it was like 30 something thousand bucks quit my job and I was like I'm going to trade full time, I'm going to do this. So my wife and I we moved to a, moved to a different state, bought a house where, like, we're going to be millionaires in two months. Man, let's go. You know, it's.

Speaker 2: 2:43

You had the plan man. It was like an accelerated plan.

Speaker 1: 2:46

Oh yeah, it was like it was all planned out, man. It was all ready to rock and roll. We were there is no way that this wasn't going to happen and two weeks in I had lost almost all, the whole, the whole trading account, almost Wow, it was bad. I mean, it was immediately the opposite of what I wanted.

Speaker 2: 3:00

And that's your life savings. That's all the money had, and that was it, man.

Speaker 1: 3:03

Yeah, that was it. So, um, about a month in that money is basically gone. And we just bought a house, mortgage, cars, the whole shebang right, and it was. It was stressful, so what I did? I went out and I got a loan. I didn't tell the bank what it was for. Personal loan, yeah, through that into my trading account. And that lasted another three weeks and I was gone. I mean gone fast.

Speaker 2: 3:33

So now you're out of your life savings. Then, on top of that, you take out a loan at whatever interest rate. You're down. That too, which I've seen that before in crypto, like, I've seen people, these young people they were taking out these zero interest rate credit cards for 18 months or whatever in the world it was, and then they would, they would trade with that money or they would just take a loan out on their house or take a loan on the house or something like that. Anyway, you can get money. These people were doing it. What?

Speaker 3: 3:56

gave you like the audacity to think that you were going to be able to do this, Like what was your experience with trading that you made you so sure that you were just going to hit it big.

Speaker 1: 4:08

Man. I don't know what it was. I honestly feel like God was pushing me there and I just kept feeling that in the back of my mind for like years that this is what I be doing for a living. It just felt like my purpose, my destiny, and that's what drove me, because if I didn't have that drive, I would have quit after I already lost a loan, like that was one of my lowest points I'd been in. But I don't know what it was. It was just something inside me that I just knew I'd make this work.

Speaker 2: 4:35

We have confidence, right. I mean we're guys, right. I mean it's like we're dudes, like this is what we all think, that we'll make it work. You know I can do this. I can, and you got your family and things like that, and it's like I'm going to. I'm going to do this. It's worth it. You know my wife doesn't want to see me miserable. It's probably not good for your relationship to be working in a dead end job that you don't like. So let me get out of this. Let me do something that we're both going to enjoy. We could learn from this. We could do it together, maybe, and make some money and enjoy life. But what like?

Speaker 3: 5:05

what experience did you have in trading at that point?

Speaker 1: 5:09

Yeah, I had been trading on the side for maybe three years and you know it was kind of off and on, yeah, but I knew how to trade. My biggest issue was I had never, like had pressure to make money in trading. Trading on the side was just kind of like cool extra money. But when I had to pay my mortgage in three weeks and I had bills to pay, like that's when everything started to change for me and that's why I started to struggle in trading so much, because your your returns are directly related to your emotional control.

Speaker 2: 5:38

Not necessarily knowledge. Yes, good point.

Speaker 1: 5:41

Yep. So you know, I had the knowledge to make money when I quit my job, but I wasn't prepared for the emotional weight of how that screwed everything up. And I think most people fall into that pitfall as well, as like they can learn this stuff and they, they, they paper trade it right. It's like fake, simulated trading without real money and they do great and then they throw money into account and they just completely fall apart because now it's there and they're watching it and that was my story. You know. I fell apart through that. I I was like I have to make money. No-transcript. I lost that loan. I went and got some credit cards.

Speaker 2: 6:16

Oh man, you're really tripling down now.

Speaker 3: 6:19

This is like a Dave Ramsey night. Dave Ramsey is listening to this right now.

Speaker 2: 6:24

I'm sorry, dave Palpitations. Yeah, let me, let me.

Speaker 1: 6:26

This is not the way to go. This is the way I did it, but this is not the way to go. Don't take this route. So now the pressure is just 10 times heavier. Right, I was like I've got loans, I've got this, I've got that. And it was at this moment where I finally sat down and I was like I need to figure out what's going on, like I cannot Like this, is it? The banks are putting my, my name up on the wall, my picture? Like don't let this guy in, I don't know what he's doing. Go get a job. Like luckily, I had good credit for the eight years before, right, and so that's the only reason I got it. But I had no proof of income on anything and I cash out these credit cards. And it was like at the time when interest rates were like 3 percent, these were like 22 percent to cash out these credit cards. What year are you talking about? I was just all in. I had to start to figure out what was going on. And so that's when I sat back and I started to think Luckily I had the wherewithal to realize what I was doing wasn't working, so I wasn't just going to double down on what had already lost me all of my life savings. I took a different approach and I started to plan my trades instead of trade. I stopped trying to make money and I started to align myself with what the markets were trying to tell me. Right, does that make sense? So, it was this whole mental shift that I had of like. Instead of me trying to like, predict what the market's going to do and kind of tell the market what to do, oh, it's going to go down. Here's my money and it's gone. I took the opposite approach. I sat back and I was like, ok, what are they telling me? Where you know, how does this thing move? And that's really where I started diving into price action. And price action is simply what the it's the movements of the charts. It's how the charts move. They never go out of style. They've been moving the same way since the start of it all. I learned how the markets moved and then I started to dance with the markets instead of trying to fight the markets, and things started to change. On top of that, I started to again just problem solve. My mind went from like I have all these problems, I'm in trouble to if I have a problem, it can be solved. So what's the solution to this problem? And I started to think you know, I love credit spreads. It's a way of doing of trading. It's a strategy where you don't have to be correct on the movement. You just have to not be dead wrong and you'll win. So the market can go up, sideways, down. As long as they don't move past where you think it's not going to go, you win. So I started to do that and I the funny thing is is like how can I make two thousand dollars a week with a fifteen thousand dollar training account, which again is just a terrible way to go about it? But that was the situation I was in With my size account. A credit spread could make me five hundred dollars a month. How can I make two thousand dollars a week? So I got solving problems and solving problems and created a strategy that I was like man, this thing could actually work. And I still use this strategy to the day, to this day. I sell credit spreads and I sell them in a specific location. I can dive in more into this. I sell it in a specific location where I know I'm wrong. If I know I'm wrong, the charts will tell me and I can buy my own hedge, so I can turn a loser into a winner and if it stays above all those areas, I win. It doesn't matter what the markets do. As long as it stays above this level, I'll make my money. So I started doing that and slowly but surely. That's how I made my money to get out of debt and start paying our bills and climb my way out of it, and that's what's still keeping me as a full time trader today.

Speaker 2: 9:47

So this is options you're talking about. Right, these are. This is an options thing. So if people that don't understand options, I got a friend in Florida. He's got a market, I guess, futures kind of company where he has a newsletter, he has all the stuff that people can subscribe to and he does a lot of options stuff. But he's I think him and a lot of other people that have explained options to me, because I've never traded options they never can really simplify it down to like the regular person I mean and you being you know former guy, blue collar guy drove a truck explained options to us in a simple term why is it different than trading stocks? What is it? Why does it exist? Maybe, and then how does that even work?

Speaker 1: 11:10

I'd love to you have two different types. I'm going to start from ground. One all right, and the way I teach. If I was trying to teach you how to drive, I'm not going to sit here and be like, all right. When you press the gas, it sends this electronic signal to the throttle and that throttle turns on. You know who cares about how the engine works? It's just gases go break a stop, right, Right. So there's two different types of options. You have calls and you have puts. Puts make money. I'll just general right. Puts make money when the stock goes down. Calls gain value and make money when the stock goes up. Ok, the easiest way to think about it is to rephrase it into a way where we understand things right. So if we're going to buy a house, you put earnest money down on that house, ok, so I now have a contract to purchase this house and I have a month or two to close on it. So I am now controlling a three hundred thousand dollar house for five grand, whatever my deposit was to hold this right. I have two months to buy this. So I haven't bought it yet, but I am under contract and I control the asset. Like the price can't change unless it's, you know, if it's written in the contract, it can't change and no one else can buy it except for me during that time. Well, let's say across the street we have an empty lot and over the next week they're going to make a decision of do they build a waste transfer facility or do they build a beautiful park. One is going to increase the value, one's going to decrease the value of that house, and the next week comes and let's say they build that waste transfer facility and so the house all of a sudden is worth two hundred and fifty thousand. That's drastic, but we get it right. So I'm down fifty grand. I can choose just to walk away from this contract and lose my five thousand dollar deposit, but I'm not underwater immediately on buying the house. Or I can buy the house and be underwater 50 grand. Either way you have your reason to do both. That's scenario number one. Scenario two is they build the park. So now the house is worth, you know, 350,000. You get 50,000 in equity automatically. You haven't even bought the house yet. You can spend a dime, except for the deposit. I have a few options with that. I can go ahead and just buy the house for the $300,000 that I was under contract to and I immediately have 50,000 in equity. Or I can turn around to someone else and get hey, who wants to pay me 10,000 to buy a house that's worth 350, but you are under contract. This contract you can buy for me is 300,000. You get instant 50,000. So to someone that's like, yeah, I'll pay you 10 grand to get 40,000 in equity, right, so you're making money without ever having to do anything and they're getting value because they're buying a house that's worth more money. That's exactly how calls work. Call options are basically me putting some deposit down for a certain amount of time to be able to buy the stock if I want to, but I don't have to. So if the stock goes up while I own this contract. So let's say I have a contract to buy it at a hundred bucks and the stock goes to 120. I can choose to exercise and go ahead. And, yeah, go ahead, and let's buy the stock at a hundred bucks I instantly get $20 in equity. Or I can turn to someone else and go hey, who wants to pay me more than what I paid for it? Who wants to pay me money to own my contract to buy this at a hundred bucks. So the majority of options out there are. People flipping them, like for me. I'm never buying the shares with my options. I'm purchasing something at a cheap price. With my knowledge of how the markets move, that gives me a high probability that this thing will be worth more than what it currently is in the future. And then I can turn around and flip that and sell that to someone else for a higher price than what I bought, for they're still getting value because, yeah, you know I might have spent $2,000 on this call option and they're going to pay me 10 grand for it, but they're yeah, they're paying me 10 grand, but they have equity. You know through the nose that they're still. It's a huge value for them. Right? It's the same concept that makes total sense.

Speaker 2: 14:45

Call options are so are you mostly buying call options? Are you doing puts as well?

Speaker 1: 14:50

I do puts as well. So I do both, depending on what the market's trying to tell me. So last year it was all puts, this year is all calls, yeah yeah. Whatever the charts are doing, that's what I do, and puts are basically just insurance. It's insurance on the stock market and most people don't even know you can buy insurance. Right, if you bought Apple at $30 is currently at like what? 170 or something. If you bought Apple at 20 bucks and Apple starts to crash, the only option you have is to sell it. You're like but if you sell it, where do you buy back? In Cause you owned it at $20, right, you never want to sell that. Well, you can buy insurance on that stock and that'll cover you dollar for dollar below a certain price. So you can cover yourself and make all that money and then just cash out of that insurance and you still own your stock. But you never lost a dime because your insurance kicked in. Or you can go yeah, go ahead and sell my stock at whatever my insurance price was and I won out. So that's what puts are basically oh, wow, yeah, and it's open to everyone. So that's what I teach people how to do. It's like here's all options work. This is what I do, and it gets really fun when you start going on the opposite side of these things, when you start selling options. So what that's doing is I'm basically agreeing to purchase a stock at a certain price, but you have to pay me to buy the stock. So if I was already planning on buying Apple at $100, if Apple gets to $100, I'm buying it. Well, apple's at $170. It's not there yet. So what can I do? I can go out to someone and say, hey, who wants to pay me $2,000 to buy their Apple shares from them at $100? And someone will pay me that, and so I make two grand, and the worst thing that can happen is I buy Apple at $100, which I was going to do anyways. So I'm getting paid to do something I was already going to do.

Speaker 2: 16:33

So it actually probably makes more sense to do it that way than even just go into your account and just buy Apple.

Speaker 1: 16:38

That's exactly how I've been making a living. That's what a credit spread is. So a credit spread is that plus me buying my own insurance, so it didn't take up a whole lot of capital. So that's how I've been able to stay alive. That's how I've been making a living. That's how I pulled myself out was because I knew high probability it would never get down there and if it did, I just buy the shares anyways which owned the shares and then I had them back up.

Speaker 2: 17:00

Well, how many shares is the call or how many shares is the put? Isn't that like, yeah, a thousand shares or something crazy? It's one put is a hundred shares, a hundred shares, okay, a hundred shares, okay. So you can do that.

Speaker 1: 17:11

I mean yeah, yeah, and you can control how long that contract is in effect, for you could do it for two days, you could do it for two years. Of course the longer timeframe is going to cost more money. It's kind of like insurance on anything right you can. You can buy insurance on your house for a year, you can buy it for the next two days, or whatever right. So you can be in control and of course, the two day insurance is not going to cost as much as the two year one would. So that's exactly how the puts are played out as well.

Speaker 2: 17:35

So you're a smart guy, so I was just looking yesterday. The VIX is in the toilet. It is super low right now, and I just saw some people putting out some stuff on Twitter the other day like, hey, now might be a good time to long the VIX. What do you think? Do you think it's just going to mean it's been looking like it's been looking terrible for years?

Speaker 1: 17:57

And that's that's the thing. It's timing. So is that the right thing to do? Yes, is it the right time to do it? That's where knowing price action helps Price act. The charts will tell you exactly what's about to happen, with high probabilities. So that's how I trade. So, like right now, do I want to just buy puts and short this thing with, with seven or eight bull weeks in a row on the S&P 500? Yeah, but am I inputs right now? No, why? Because I haven't seen that reversal yet. So I can go to a shorter timeframe. Timeframes are like dominoes. Right, you're going to go bearish on a 10 minute before you go bearish on an hourly timeframe. You go bearish on an hourly timeframe before you go bearish on a daily timeframe. So if I want to catch a move early, I just go to a shorter timeframe, and so I'm waiting for, like that one or two hour timeframe to flip bearish, and when they do, I'm getting in. Does that mean I'm getting it at the exact top? No, I'm going to wait for price action to tell me that the bears are taken over. So I sacrifice some of the entry to get some more of that confirmation, because that's the key, is the timing. This thing might go straight to all time highs on 11 bull weeks in a row. So I don't want to just buy the VIX or buy puts or short the markets just because it's high, just like I don't want to buy the markets just because they're low. The markets will tell me exactly yes, we're low and the bulls are showing signs that they're taking over strength. The bears are giving up. Then I buy. Vice versa.

Speaker 3: 19:21

We're at the end of the year and they're down 72%.

Speaker 1: 19:23

I don't know what that is.

Speaker 2: 19:24

I don't know if the bulls are the volatility index, that's the volatility in the market or whatever, and it's that's the indicator. Like when COVID happened, the VIX shot way up because the market took a nose dive Right and you would have loved to be in a short VIX position or a long VIX position at that point and then, right after all that happened, go short on the VIX. You'd still be making money to this day if you had been short on the VIX. It's down 90.

Speaker 3: 19:50

So over the last five years it's down 98%.

Speaker 2: 19:53

Yeah, yeah, that's just the volatility index. This is what it is. What does that mean? It's how much volatility is in the market, like how much. You can explain it. You know better than we do, tony. Well, you wanted it.

Speaker 1: 20:05

Yeah, it's your volatility index. Meaning, the easiest way to think about it, it's tying the price of the options. So if a hurricane is three miles off the coast of Florida and you own a house and you don't have any hurricane insurance, you're going to make a phone call. I'm like I need some insurance first off. No one to do it, but if they did, it'd be an arm and a leg right. You'd pay through the nose, Whereas if it's not hurricane season, there's no side of a hurricane, it's not on anyone's mind. That's the time to buy it right. That'd be cheapest Still going to cost money, but it's not as expensive. And that's exactly what happens to options. When the markets are tanking, everyone's buying insurance because they're all scared, which means insurance is through the roof. When the markets are cruising higher and no one's thinking about oh, life is good, I'm making all this money, and no fears in the market, Options tend to be a little bit cheaper. So that's how the VIX, in a simple way that's one of the ways that you can that the VIX will influence the markets and influence really the price of options. So right now, options are relatively cheap compared to when VIX was a lot higher a couple years back.

Speaker 2: 21:08

Yeah, so you can use the VIX to actually as a piece of your strategy, to determine what's going on in the market, and that's more of like a broader look I would say. You mentioned timeframes and things like that. I mean, if you're looking at the VIX, I mean that's probably going to be, you're looking at like more of a longer term thing. But I mean, if stuff starts happening in the market, the VIX starts to spike. You might be like, hey, somebody at Wall Street knows something that's going on, like what's happening right now. Maybe the Fed came out and spoke and said something disastrous and everything falls apart. I mean, the Fed came out today. I can't. I don't know what they actually said. I think they mentioned maybe rates dropping in March or something like that, or there's that and there's rumors of six quarter point drops somewhere along the line Six. now, Of course it's because it was five. Yeah, now it's six and 2024.

Speaker 3: 21:56

Few listen to a couple podcasts. That's what they're reading into the tea leaves. Well, that'd be nice because I got a close on a house in 2024.

Speaker 2: 22:04

So I'm waiting for it, but yeah, so that's really interesting. So I think one of the things that people could learn from what you're saying is you just tried to go into the market not knowing what other options you had available to you. Right, when you found this credit spread option strategy, it worked for you. This was something that you found out that you were good at, based on your personality and your trading stock, and it just it resonated with you and it worked and you started making money. And you know I think you know just taking a course on the stock market may not be good for everybody, but taking different courses on different strategies, different styles If this is something you're considering doing as a full-time gig, you're going to quit your job. You're going to go into the stock market. You're going to quit your job. You're going to quit your course. Maybe something from like a Dave Ramsey or something that tells you to you know not. You know, throw all your money. You know bar, get your credit cards and put it in the stock market. But different courses from different people have different strategies and then see what works for you. I mean, do you have a lot of students that take your course that have come from other courses and maybe something didn't work for them and they're looking for options.

Speaker 1: 23:22

Oh, totally yeah. So I average about 2,000 hours a year in coaching and the majority of it I donate for free because I want to help people. So, like right now, I can share a link with you for your listeners. They'll get like 20 hours of free education. Like I just give everything away for free. I do have a few paid stuff but and I'll get into that of why those two are paid out of like the 50 courses that are not. I'll dive into that if you want me to, but yeah, there are courses that I would say. Another analogy is this right, they're gonna stick on the analogies. People teach you how to drive a car, but they don't ever teach you the laws of the road. So you get in a car, you understand how to, how to turn left and turn right and go and stop, but you have no idea what side of the road you're supposed to. You don't know what a stoplight is. So you're driving on the wrong side of the road and you keep getting accidents. You're like I just want to go to California but you can't make it three miles because you just keep getting wrecks right. So that's kind of how people are approaching trading is they're getting, and sometimes that's just the field out there that they're doing, because, honestly, it's easier to sell them a portion of the puzzle than they've given them the whole truth of like, hey, this isn't going to make you a millionaire tomorrow, but this will, like pay your bill If you understand the whole picture. Like, you will make millions of dollars if you have a million dollar trading account, right, but I'm going to show you how to make five to 10% of your trading account a month and over time you stack that. That turns into quite a bit Like. That's the truth. So you need to know the laws of trading, not just a strategy, right? Strategies don't make you money. Knowing when to apply that strategy and how to apply that and how to manage your risk is how you're going to make money and keep that money that you make over 100 trades. I always say this like anyone can get rich in the stock market. It's who can keep the money that they've made after 100 trades. That really is like the line in the sand. The Warren Buffets of the world? Yeah, exactly. Who can keep the money they actually make? Because anyone can go throw their whole bank account at a trade and hit it good and it's a coin flip Win or lose, right. But if they do the exact same philosophy on the next trade, odds are it's going to be a loser and they're going to give up, and odds are they're going to put on twice the amount because they just won on the first one. They're like I'm a genius, I can make a million dollars on this If I would have just put a hundred grand on that trade. Instead of 10 grand, I'm at a million. And so the next trade they do it. And then they lose everything. And then they're like the stock market's rigged. They're like no, you're just driving on the wrong side of the road.

Speaker 2: 25:47

Same thing happens in gambling. I mean it's you know. You make a good bet on a football game and you're like I'm a genius, let me just you know. But I only made a hundred bucks on that bet. I'll put 10 times that much on the next one because I'm so smart. I know this team, you know.

Speaker 3: 26:01

I know the Bengals, I know the Cowboys, I know the starting court, the opposing team, starting quarterbacks hurt, yeah, something like that, something like that, yeah. You have all the special.

Speaker 2: 26:09

I use that same strategy in the last game. Right, and that's the strategy, but you're betting on a different team now.

Speaker 1: 26:17

Right, so yeah, and that's what I focus on is I teach the laws around trading, so I'll teach you strategy. I give you stuff whatever you want. I'll give you a thousand strategies. It's if you get in your car again, car analogy whatever you get in the car and the car doesn't start, you don't just go grab a pair of pliers, like you have to figure out what's wrong with a car. Just having a pair of pliers in your hand doesn't, it's not going to help you. No, you pull the hood and your battery is dead. Cool, now what tool do I need to take the battery off the car? Strategies are just tools. You need them to make money, but they're not going to be the thing that's going to make you money. The thing that makes you money is diagnosing the markets. If the markets go up, I can give you the greatest bear strategy in the world, but this year you would have just got crushed. Right, it's knowing when to apply it and showing you the laws and rules of how to do this. And that's what I focus on is giving everyone the big picture. It's like I'm not going to be here promising you a million dollars tomorrow, but I will promise you. You will get the whole picture and you'll have an idea of exactly how to bring in consistent money. You're going to lose all the time. I lose all the time, but when I lose, I lose small, and when I'm right, I win big and that's all that matters, right?

Speaker 2: 27:20

It's right You're flipping a coin and not telling you it's got to win more than you lose, right?

Speaker 1: 27:24

Yeah, exactly, money wise, yeah. I mean, if we're flipping a coin is like on head you get a thousand dollars and on tell, as you pay me 300 bucks. You can flip it as many times as you want. It's a no brainer Do it, because it's going to be a 50-50 shot and you're making way more on heads and you're losing on tells. That's trading. It's not a knowledge game. It's not like an intelligence thing, it's a skill. If you can get really good at knowing when you're wrong and lose small, and get really good at knowing when you're right and holding that thing to win big, you'll make it. It's just the problem is people get into a trade and they lose and then they freak out and they try to make that money back. They usually leave the system completely and do something they've never done because they're just trying to get their money back, and so they fall apart even more or they sit there and hope that it'll turn around. It'll turn around. I haven't taken this loss unless I get out of the trade. And what if it reverses and I can get my money back and I just get out for break even, and then they lose, they lose, they lose and those trades keep going even further. So instead of losing 300, they lose 3000 because they weren't willing to get out. And then when they're up on a trade, they're like I'm up $200 and 10 minutes and they take it. So what are you doing? You're winning small and you're losing big, and over 100 trades you're going backwards. And that's the main issue that people are struggling with in trading is their emotions. Completely screw them and get them to do the exact opposite of what's going to make them successful.

Speaker 2: 28:45

Sometimes you got to think what would be the opposite of what I want to do right now. What's the opposite of what I think, what my brain, what my lizard brain thinks I should do right now? Like, what's the opposite of that? Like I'm on your website right now real trading or real-life-tradingcom, which is a great domain name. And number one the basics you teach people how to diagnose the markets. Number two intro, to go from noob to master and then mindset. That's what we're talking about now is this mindset thing. Like you said, you can learn all the strategies, you can know all that stuff, but if you don't understand how the market works in the psychology the market and the psychology of successful traders, it's just not going to work out.

Speaker 1: 29:29

Yeah, You've got to know, first off, how the game of trading is even played, why your mindset, the natural way of thinking, is going to cost you money. You've got to flip that. You've got to let go of it, accept the loss, accept the risk and understand that losing $300 is not the end of the world. As long as you're making $600 or more when you're right, and you've got to allow that to win when you're up $200, don't take it because you're not actually going anywhere. If you make $200 when you're right and lose $300 when you're wrong, you're going backwards in the long run. It feels good. Now I just made $200. This is one trade out of $100, right. So there's just so many little nuances that you've got to learn and figure out. If you go to real life trading on YouTube, I think we have what is it like? 10,000 hours of free education for content on videos. I don't know how many videos we have on there, but that's what we specialize in is we want to flood this world with real education, with real knowledge of how to do this, and we give it all out. We make our money through trading. Now people can pay us monthly to come join and trade alongside of us. That's really cool. Like I said, we do have I'm just a part of real life trading. We have a lot of traders professional traders inside of real life trading. They have different courses and stuff. The only two courses that I charge for are the ones that I want people to pay attention to the most, so I'll explain that a little bit more. It's I've given away. Like I said, I give away the most of my stuff. I gave a group of 30 people this $3,000 course and I didn't tell them how much it was, I just gave it to them as a gift. Two people went through it out of the 30.

Speaker 2: 31:11

Two of the 30?. Because you didn't put a price tag on it, you got to put a price tag.

Speaker 3: 31:16

I don't think that makes much sense. They have to spend something.

Speaker 2: 31:19

Well, I don't know, A lot of people have to spend money and then they want to do something. But even then, to your point.

Speaker 3: 31:26

You may bump that up to like eight out of 30.

Speaker 2: 31:30

Because people get hyped up, right. They see, oh, you know, they'll listen to this podcast and they'll be like oh man, I'm going to reallifetradingcom, I'm going to go download these two free courses and I'm going to do it, and then they get about 10, 20% in the win and then they move off to something else.

Speaker 3: 31:44

Because they get the same reason why they're stuck where they're at right now they don't believe that they're worth improving their life, or they just are lazy and they don't want to improve their life.

Speaker 2: 31:57

Well, they think that they can't do it Like I'll never be like Tony, that's what I'm saying yeah, I'll never be able to do this. I don't have time to do that. I got these kids, I got this thing going on. I got you know, that's a lot of our listeners, though. I mean they want to do something, they want to hear about it, but it's like are they going to pull the trigger?

Speaker 3: 32:14

Yeah, but until they need to. Like, everybody wants to do something, but until you need to do it, until you get the fire in your ass, it doesn't matter, that's right.

Speaker 2: 32:20

Till this recession hits us really hard Fire under your ass.

Speaker 3: 32:23

You got fire in your ass. You better get some water, but that is too late.

Speaker 2: 32:25

I mean it's like yeah, if you don't want to get sick, you should start exercising before you get sick. Right, don't start exercising once you find out you're sick.

Speaker 3: 32:31

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 32:32

Start exercising right before you get sick.

Speaker 3: 32:34

Yeah, this health insurance companies didn't pay that buy those buildings themselves. That's right.

Speaker 2: 32:38

That's right. But the same thing it's like before you. The recession hits and you're living high on the hog. And everybody knew everybody pays attention to the markets and understands economics knows we were going to go into, like the decisions that the Fed was making, the decisions that this administration was making, the printing of the money, the interest rates going up. We knew that was a recipe for disaster. We knew the US economy goes through cycles and one of those pieces, parts of the cycle, is a recession, and we were in a good part, an expansion part of the cycle for a long time, a very and unusually long time. Yeah, this was coming. This was something that was going to happen. You couldn't hold off any longer. And here we are. People were buying expensive cars. They were, you know, buying new houses. They were sending their kids to private schools. They were doing all this stuff because it just seemed like money was cheap. Everything was going great. Stock market was rocking and rolling and in a matter of what? A year, less than a year, almost everything changed. Yeah, I mean, this is one of the fastest outside of the housing crisis. This is probably one of the fastest plummets that I've seen in a long time.

Speaker 3: 33:59

Well, it's because interest rates went to 10, 15 year highs or something like that in the course of like three months? No, yeah, because inflation was so bad. And all these companies? You ever listen to Patrick Bedd-David's stuff? He's been talking about these zombie companies forever. But the zombie companies are the ones that need the debt to pay off their operations. They're not making enough money from the actual business operations itself to remain self-sustaining, and there are some big ass companies that are suffering through this. I accept the long lines that their operations just pay, just enough to pay overhead.

Speaker 2: 34:39

And they're borrowing money.

Speaker 3: 34:40

They're borrowing money to pay an expansion or for that high interest rates, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 34:46

When interest rates were next to nothing. That's a business model viable that you could get away with. Once you start pushing 10, 15%, they're struggling. Like you said, they're hard. It was free money, before, it was easy money and now things are reversing. You see that in the charts. It's funny. You'll have companies that have gone up 200% over the last three years and within six months have given up that entire three-year move. Because as soon as that game changed of money is no longer cheap, the investors knew they're like they're out Cash. It move on and there's a lot of companies out there right now that we're going to start seeing a little bit more details coming in throughout this year. So I honestly think we're going to we'll make a new all-time high here on the stock market. I mean, shoot, we're only a couple of percentage away from it.

Speaker 2: 35:32

Now, yeah, we are. Yeah, I mean that was the most foolish. My portfolio is back. I mean that was crazy, just when I felt like selling Tony, just when I felt like calling my broker and saying what the hell's going on, why, what, what is happening? Next thing, you know, boom. It just reversed course and now I'm higher than what I was before all this stuff started collapsing. It's crazy.

Speaker 1: 35:53

And it's really a big part of it this year is just squeezing out the bears right. So everyone was so bearish this year that, if the markets go higher, every bear is losing money, and to the point where their broker forces them to close because they don't have any more money. So they have to exit. And you have to buy it to exit whenever you're short. It just keeps cranking these markets higher, and even to this day. I mean we have a huge short pessimists on the market right now because everyone's seeing the economy. They're seeing what's going on Like how is this thing not going down? It's not going to go down until all the bears have been beaten, beat up enough and punched in the face enough that they're fine. They're going to be like okay, all right, I give, which is going to be about a new all-time high, and that's also going to be the exact time when everyone that exited is going to jump back into the markets, going life is good now. And that's the cycle that people get stuck in. Everyone buys at the high and it drops Right, whereas for me it's like I bought at the start of November and I waited, by the way, five months. I missed the entire first four months move of this year because it didn't get to my entry and I wasn't going to buy, you know, five weeks in a row, I was going to wait for a pullback. Pulled back, I loaded in and those things are up. My calls that I bought at expire, by the way, next September. I've got plenty. It's time All time. Those are already up 600%.

Speaker 2: 37:11

Damn. I need to get options. What am I doing? I thought my GBTC trade was great. Shout out about that. When it was in the toilet I was like man, 11 bucks for GBTC. I was like I'm getting in on this Like the. I don't know if you know that, but the there's like an arbitrage with GBTC in the actual spot Bitcoin. So the GBTC price was 40% less because GBTC grayscale has to hold so much Bitcoin. Right, the entire fund is just Bitcoin. Right, they have actual Bitcoin and the number of Bitcoin that they had in GBTC was 40%, or it was the stock of GBTC itself was pricing in the Bitcoin that they held 40% less than what Bitcoin is actually worth. So they could sell the Bitcoin.

Speaker 3: 37:55

They could just like 26,000 or something like that.

Speaker 2: 37:58

Yeah, Like back then it was like I think Bitcoin was at like 15 grand, 16 grand. It was low right when I was getting back in and it was low, but it would have been like Bitcoin in their wallet was only worth $10,000, because it's the market that drives it, not the Bitcoin price.

Speaker 3: 38:14

It's the price of Bitcoin and that totally go away from this whole topic. Did you see what happened at our place? No, what place Then in Texas? No, you don't see, oh, rodeum. You didn't see what Winston did there, rodeum.

Speaker 2: 38:27

Oh, they tried to see.

Speaker 3: 38:27

Yeah, they went in there with armed guards and tried to get them out, even though the judge had given it, even though they had won an arbitration.

Speaker 2: 38:35

Yeah, I saw that.

Speaker 3: 38:36

Yeah, screw the arbitration. We didn't think we should have had a good arbitration. We're just going to come in here with guns.

Speaker 2: 38:42

Yeah, it's a big Bitcoin mining operation that some of us are investing in. It's like the biggest in the country In the country yeah, it's down in Texas. Their energy supplier goes in there. They're building like Rodeum's building with armed guards and confiscates like shuts down the electric and the whole operation, the whole operation really. It's like when your machines aren't running, you're losing money, right.

Speaker 3: 39:06

They got an emergency injunction. Now that can be back in operating, but the whole thing was because that's the craziest energy contract that they got for 10 years, whereas they're getting what? 2.7 cents per kilowatt hour or something Great deal yeah. It was like that's the reason everybody got in was because it was such a huge competitive advantage versus everybody else that was mining in the US. Well, apparently it didn't work out very well for Winston, and they did the same thing to a Japanese company. I want to say mob another Japanese company down there too.

Speaker 2: 39:37

It's wild, yeah. But you get a contract and now you're you're angry about it. Well, they're saying cause Riot?

Speaker 3: 39:42

bought them cause they've been purchased twice and Riot said that their contract superseded this, without anybody's even ruling on this contract. They just withheld all this money that they were selling because, when they were producing this energy from mining the Bitcoin, they're selling it back into Texas's electric system, the ERCOT, and they're supposed to be getting paid for all the electricity that they provide the state of Texas, so they weren't paying the people that they had contracts with that were actually running the miners. Oh, I see it's dirty.

Speaker 2: 40:15

Yeah, it's wild Sorry.

Speaker 3: 40:16

I didn't mean to.

Speaker 2: 40:18

When you get in a crypto world, Tony, everything gets kind of nuts. It's not trading options. It's not as clean and nice and easy as what you got everybody into. But, yeah, man, it is what it is and it gets crazy, but tell everybody just once again. Reallifetradingcom. There's a couple of videos on here that I saw. Step one here. There's a beginner trader video. There's an intermediate trader video. I would imagine you want them to watch those videos before they ever start taking a class is because they're you know. You need to know at least the basics of the market and what you're doing here before you go spending money on courses.

Speaker 1: 40:52

Totally. Yep, all of that is for free. We have a ton of stuff for beginners on our YouTube channel. I've actually made like a custom step by step to walk someone through brand new all the way through making money, whatever. If you go to reallifetradingcom slash Tony Pollock, I'll send you that link. They can go there as well. So that's kind of broken down into steps where it's just like my courses, my free stuff and kind of what I do. And you know I am not a, I'm not bit. I don't know that much about crypto. I trade crypto but I'm not an expert in that. But one thing I do know is how to pay my bills through trading and that's what I focus on. He said, that's what I teach and I've been doing this now for a little over five years successfully. So if you want to learn how to bring in some consistent money, how to make five to 10% a month of your trading account or your investment account or IRA or whatever, I'll show you step by step of exactly how to do that. And, like I said, those things are free. Even the stuff I charge for is technically free because it's 100% money back guarantee. So if it doesn't change your life, just hit me up, I'll do that. Why can I make that? Because those are the things that I'm using every single day to make my money, so I know they work. So that's why I put that behind it, because I'm like, if you're not making money on this, something's off, hit me up, I'll give you a free coaching session where figure out what's going on, because something is skewed.

Speaker 3: 42:17

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 42:18

So in the meantime, on outside of all of that is where I'm teaching you the laws of trading right. What are the other pieces of puzzle that you need to know to find that success? So I'll send you that link. You can do that. But also real-lifetradingcom is a place where you'll find the whole package there and get you going and come trade with us and start your trading journey. But for sure, yeah, everything you need to know to start trading, like the basics of what is a chart, what is a candle, what is a timeframe it's all there for free. So feel free to go through those courses and get started with that before you even jump in anything else. For sure, Take it step by step, Nice.

Speaker 2: 42:55

All right, tony. So hey, man, I appreciate it. Thanks for being on the show, thanks for explaining options of people. That was, yeah, that was the easiest explanation that I think I've ever had and it totally makes sense because I'm a real estate guy too. So you made that. You write up my alley right there, so, but I really appreciate it, man. And yeah, definitely, people go to the site we're going to have Tony's info in the description of the podcast and go click on those links and check out his courses.

Speaker 1: 43:20

All right, tony. Yes, thanks so much for having me.

Speaker 3: 43:22

Thank you, sir.

Speaker 1: 43:23

See you, man.

Speaker 2: 43:24

Thanks for having us on this week's episode of Side Hustle City. Will you have heard from our guests? Now let's hear from you. Join our community on Facebook, Side Hustle City. It's a group where people share ideas, share their inspirational stories and motivate each other to be successful and turn their side hustle into their main hustle. We'll see you there and we'll see you next week on the show. Thank, you.