From Broke to Six Figures and Back: Jason Brown on Options Trading, Risk and Rebuilding Wealth

Look at the MAG7 stocks and just follow the money. Money is going into AI, infrastructure, cloud, storage, data centers. I would tell people to look there, at least at the time of this recording. You don't win by following the playbook. You win by rewriting it. 700 episodes deep with the people who actually built something real. No theory, no fluff, no shortcuts. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford.

It actually seems smart. It's like, at least you're going to get a higher return. You would have hoped. I'd love to start there a little bit, Jason, and then building towards what you're doing with Five Year Millionaire. Yeah, absolutely. So what happened when I was growing up, we were poor, sleeping in sleeping bags, and I was trying to figure out how to change our family's financial tree. And I actually took $2,000 to a bank at 18. That was my graduation money. And I said, like, I want to invest. The girl asked me, like, why? I was like, I want to be rich. Like, why else do people do this? And so basically she said, you want aggressive funds. I'm like, yeah, that sounds about right.

I need aggressive growth. And I'm thinking, OK, I'm going to come back two or three years later. I'm at $6,000. You hear people say, just put some money in, leave it, come back, it'll grow. Yeah. came back about two, three years later, and it was down to $700. And so they lost majority of my money. They lost $1,300. So I'm like, I could have lost my own money. What happened? And pretty much, she's just like, I don't know what to tell you. Market goes up, goes down. I was like, I know what to tell you. Give me my $700. I can do this myself. And so I spent $200 on some Jordans. I was like, if I lose this other $500, at least I got some gym shoes out of the whole deal.

You know, I got something to show for that money. Yeah, your own heart. Right? Yes. I had 500 bucks. I'm working for Sprint PCS making $8 an hour. I make 64 bucks on a Saturday, $50 after you take out taxes. And I was like, I could just make 50 bucks with this $500. I wouldn't have to work a weekend. What I did was I bought Sprint at $5. It fell down to $4. I was like, oh man, I'm not that good at this. Maybe I'm not as smart as I thought. Sprint went back up to five. I thought, OK, I just need to go to 550. It fell back down to four again. I thought the stock market's rigged. That's why they asked for your Social Security number.

They won't let it go to 550. I just had all these thoughts. It went back up to five. And I said, I've seen this before. I got out at five. It fell to four. I got back in. It went up to five. I got out, made my first hundred dollars. I tell you that story because that was the first time I started to learn about patterns. If you drew that out on a paper, it would be called a channel and stock pattern. So I got really good at these patterns and start studying what other patterns there were. And I said, how do I get more money into the machine? And so I had a scholarship to school, the Mike Illich School of Business, Wayne State University here in Detroit, Michigan.

But I think there's a part two coming. There's definitely a but to that, right? Because what happened was I dropped out of school after that. I made more money not being an engineer. And then I grew the account to about $300,000. And about three years later, at about 26, 27, I actually risked a quarter million trying to make half a million and I lose it all. So by the time I'm 27-ish, I'm flat broke, had to move back home to the neighborhood with drugs, gangs, bars on the window and really reset. But that's where this whole new Jason Brown was born. That's when I started documenting my life and saying, like, I know the stock market works. I've made money from it before. I just got to figure out what I did wrong.

And it sounds like you got a little greedy. And I'm just going to say, I don't know. I mean, every detail of that. But maybe it was oversold to you, misrepresented. There's probably a lot of details to that. But it sounds like maybe you tried to get in a hurry. When I saw the opportunity with the stock market, I counted $300,000. When I started to lose it, there was a lot of different things wrapped up into it. A, I did get greedy. I was risking a quarter million trying to make half a million. I was actually up $100,000 in that trade before it went against me. And I remember saying $100,000 is not enough. I'll never say that again, by the way. But at that moment, I was like, $100,000, what am I going to do with that?

Because I was trying to make half a million. In my head, I was trying to make half a million in one. investment. Not really, I could have made a hundred thousand four more times, but that was part of it. One of the principles I learned from it that I talk about in my book, Five Year Millionaire, is that I didn't have an I'm wrong level. So I didn't have a level of say, hey, if this goes against me, when am I going to get out? How am I going to save my account? I didn't have any protection. Now I talk about how to use put options as protection. It's like I should have took a portion of that money and protected that quarter million. I didn't.

I just thought it's going up and I'm going along for the ride, never thinking that it can go down. So It definitely humbled me, but I wouldn't be the same guy I am today if it went right. Number one, you wouldn't like me because I'd be super arrogant, think I knew everything. But number two, when the times get tough in the market, I'd realize I didn't really know anything. I don't think I knew as much as I thought. I was just riding the wave of the market going up. And I think a lot of people invest like that. They get a little bit of success, but they don't really know what they're doing until they've been through an up market, down market and a sideways market.

You got to have access to the market. And we want you to practice before you ever put real money down. But then that goes into the education piece because it's like golf. If you don't know what to practice, you start to develop a bad swing. You want to be educated to the point of what am I practicing and how do I know I'm practicing in it the right way? And the steps you want to take, or at least that we teach, is number one, you want to be able to read stock charts. A lot of people start with fundamentals first, but the reality is if I look at a stock chart, I could tell just by looking at, is the stock in an uptrend? Is it in a downtrend?

Is it in a sideways? If it's in a downtrend, then I can go look at the fundamentals and find out why it's in a downtrend. If it's in an uptrend, Then I can go look at the fundamentals and find out why. But initially, that chart is going to tell you if you're in a stock that's going up, going down or is going sideways. Then from there, just taking a look at the fundamentals and saying, like, well, why is it going up and why do I think it's going to continue to go up? And then the third piece of it is using options to supercharge your results as well as protect your account. Most people don't get excited about investing because they say, oh, I only have 500 bucks.

Some people just don't want to take the time to learn it. As crazy as that might sound, and it might sound lazy. It looks like Chinese checkers or something on the board. How do you navigate this? Is that just when, hey, you need to find a good financial advisor that you trust? Or is it stop fooling yourself, learn this stuff. It's important. Get over it. Which one? It's both and, to be honest with you. And I would never shun someone who doesn't want to learn this because you do have to have an interest. I don't have to say you have to be passionate about it, but you have to have an interest to want to know how do I grow my money? You know, what are they doing with my money versus just me signing this paper and I'm sending me a statement every month that I don't know how to read?

So you have to have some interest. And I think it's very important that we're not trying to take people who aren't interested in the market and make them interested. If you're already interested, we're saying, hey, here's a roadmap and a blueprint to help you get better and understand it. If you're not interested in managing your money, you are left to finding a good financial advisor or a person you're trying to. trust. I think what's important there is that you understand no one's going to manage your money like you are. So just make sure your expectations are in alignment. People say, well, I don't really want to learn it. I just want to give it to somebody and I want them to give me the 100% returns or the 50% returns that I see sometimes you make.

And I said, unless you got a 10, $20 million account, your account ain't big enough for someone to focus solely on you and your money and to grow it like that. They're going to stick you. You got 100. I'm going to check that box at the end of the sheet. Yeah. And they're just going to stick you in some fun, right? And go find 100 more people like you because they only make 2% off of it. In order for them to make their living, they just got to find a bunch of you who don't care. Just as long as your expectations are aligned. And I think the other thing that's a little bit dangerous about that is people say, I want to find someone I trust.

But how do you know who to trust if you don't understand it yourself? And most people don't have an answer for that. They say something like, oh, this person went to school for it. Going to school does not equal trust. Going to school just means you know how to pass a test. Taking a series 6, 63, or 7 just means you know how to pass a test. I found when I went to study to become a wealth manager, I studied to become a financial planner. planner past the six, 63 and the seven. And right before we filed it with the state and the SEC, you got to get sponsored and all that stuff. They wanted me to shut down my own website. They said, I couldn't talk about stocks anymore.

Then I said, OK, no problem. How does it work? When do we actually pick the stocks and help people? Oh, we don't pick the stocks. We pick from these three different funds from American funds, Fidelity. And I forget who the third company was. It was like, oh, they just supply everybody these funds and they change one letter or one ticker symbol. And now it's like our custom fund. I'm like, so we don't even manage the money? Like, no, like you just got to be licensed in order to sell these securities and make a list of all your friends and who's their financial planner or who they use and see if you can bring their account over. And I thought that's interesting because people would have thought they could trust me just because I had a license and I wasn't even managing the money.

You'd have to make it corrective for that. We should be introducing this stuff earlier. There's so many problems with trying to do it. You got the parents who don't understand it, so they can't help at home. You think there are 10 hours of rejection? Come on, man.

True. But yeah, there's a balance there, but I'll let you finish your thought. The school's trying to cater to the average student. So maybe in affluent neighborhoods or unique schools, able to introduce some of these extracurricular or non-traditional learning paths. But when you try to look at school as a whole and they're trying to teach a broad spectrum of kids, I just don't think they have the bandwidth to introduce investing and investing concepts, A, if the teachers don't understand it themselves. And then B, they're trying to just kind of block blanket, teach it across all students. Although I believe all the students could learn it, I just don't know that the schools are ready to kind of take on that task. I like big challenges, Jason.

The whole gamut of financial literacy is just missing from school at an early age. Teach them how to pay taxes. Most kids probably don't even know that they don't even get to keep 100 percent of their paycheck. especially if they started a business. There's so many things in the financial literacy space that could be taught in schools. But like you said, I don't know that we go solve that today. But maybe, maybe somebody's listening and we go create some type of cool partnership. There you go.

And it's completely free PDF download. The second one is the stock. option starter pack. So maybe you've already been investing, but you want to know how to supercharge your account or your returns, as well as protect it when the markets dip or learn how to make money from stocks in the market falling. We got the stock option starter pack. So both of those are available at the brown report.com. One of the best free resources to get anyone from a beginner to someone who's even been experienced to the next level. I love it, man. I mean, what's realistic if someone coming in, they said they don't have a million dollars and how to become a billionaire in five years, but like or a multimillionaire. What's realistic year one following something like this?

And no guarantees, you can't control everything, but generally speaking. In my book, Five Year Millionaire, I break down how you can start with $4,000 and if you can earn 10% a month for 60 trades or five years, you'd actually have $1.2 million. Most people think to become a millionaire in five years, they got to start with 100,000 or they got to start with half a million. But really, if you can start with four thousand dollars, you could grow it to a million, 1.2 million in five years. When you say what's realistic, I like to answer that two different ways. What's realistic for people who are knowledgeable and what's realistic for people who are not knowledgeable? When people are not knowledgeable, they don't believe you can earn 10 percent a month.

Most people don't make 10 percent a year in the market because the S&P 500 returns on average 11 percent. For those of us who are using options, reading stock charts, I have those trades where I earn 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 percent a month. And so that is realistic, but it's not realistic without knowledge and without practicing and without learning the industries. I know that 10 percent is doable. And what I love about. What we do, all our trades are recorded. Everything is time-stamped. You can go back over the years and say, do these trades really make 10% on average a month? Do a segment on the Charles Schwab Network live from the New York Stock Exchange. I do a segment called Three Stocks, Three Options.

Those are public stock picks that I give with the option trade. You can also go see those trades and see like, whoa, It went up 50 percent. It went up 30 percent, 20 percent in a month or in two months and average 10 percent. Knowing that is possible and then getting the knowledge. So I think you can realistically expect 10 percent a month, but you have to grow until that 10 percent a month. You set an open account. You got to learn. You got to practice. Fair enough. Lastly, Jason, any hot stock tips, anything on the radar that somebody should be aware of? I like to say, follow the money. At the time of this recording, the money is going into AI, is going into semiconductor stocks, is going into cloud and storage.

Right now, follow the money. The simplest way for most people listening, look at the MAG-7 stocks, you got money. Microsoft, who's crushing it with their Azure cloud services. You have Apple, who has yet to do the Siri refresh, but they also haven't really made their big splash in AI. But that stock's moving higher. You got NVIDIA, who's just crushing it, making the chips and building data centers. Look at the Mag 7 stocks and just follow the money. Money is going into AI infrastructure. cloud storage data centers, I would tell people to look there, at least at the time of this recording. Jason, jam-packed action value all in one. Where can everybody learn more? You mentioned it, thebrownreport.com. I think I heard, but give those digital digits.

We're the digital... locations. The best place is thebrownreport.com. From there, they can connect with me on LinkedIn and connect me on Instagram. I'm thebrownreport on Instagram, thebrownreport on YouTube. I'm pretty much thebrownreport everywhere. So they just go to thebrownreport.com and check out free PDF and all things Jason Brown. I know. Downtown Jason Brown. I like that though. Especially Detroit too. Detroit man. Downtown Jason Brown seems to fit. I love my Detroit people. They're like gritty, but fun and nice. The ones I know, some of my friends are all from Detroit that way. That's funny. I also have a place downtown Detroit, too. Hey, see? Downtown Detroit, Jason Brown. I love it, man. I appreciate you coming on. Ryan, I appreciate you, brother. Hey, man, you know where to find us.