From Student Loans to Millionaire: Jason Brown’s Journey in Stock Trading

On today's episode of Right About Now, I talk to Jason Browns, top market expert. He produces the Brown report, you need to go check that out, brownreport.com. Anyway, Jason is amazing, he had him on the show, talks all about options, trading, how to learn and how to know the right things because ultimately we control our own financial destiny when we understand what is happening with our investments. Jason is a refreshing resource and someone that deserves your attention as you'll see on today's episode. Look at the mag seven 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. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes. Are you ready to start snapping necks and caching checks? Well, it starts right about now. What's up and welcome to right about now, we're always talking about what's right and what's now. We can talk about last year, we talk next year, no, we're not about the windshield looking too far ahead. We're not about the rear view mirror looking too far behind. We're actually about taking notice of what's here, what's now and how to get ahead in business and in life and that's why we bring all the experts. We got my friend and my buddy downtown Jason Brown. I gave him a name he didn't even ask for. That's what I do Jason, but welcome to show right and good to be here, man. I love it. I love it. I received it. Good. I appreciate that. Some people like, I don't think they do how to tape me. I give everybody pet names. It's love. I don't know. It says what I do. I love what you're doing. Jason, little options trading, power trades, university, author of five year millionaire. Damn. I'm going to be a five year. You're everybody likes to get in a hurry, but five years now is pretty good, Jason. It's a good, reasonable time frame. That's why I like it. It's doable and it's not 40 years. You're not looking at retirement. It's within your lifetime. We still enjoy it. I know. Hey, man. I had student loans and I wouldn't say I used every dollar wisely. Some might argue us using them for colleges and even wise, but we'll save that topic for another day at another guest. But no, I got the tension of taking out the student loan, throw it in the stop. It actually seems smart. It's like at least you're going to get a higher return. You would have hoped. But 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. I was my graduation money and I said, like, I want to invest. The girl asked me, like, why? I said, I want to be rich. Why was the 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, three years later. I'm going to have $6,000. You hear people say, just put to money and leave it. Come back. It'll grow. 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 just, like, I don't know what to tell you. Mario goes up, goes down. I'm like, I know what to tell you. Give me my $700. I can do this myself. 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 have something to show, but I don't want to. You want to do it hard, right? Yes. I had $500 bucks. I'm working for Sprint PCS, making $8 an hour. I make $64 bucks on a Saturday, $50 if you take out taxes. 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 the $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 $5. I thought, okay, just need to go to $5.50. It fell back down to $4 again. I thought the stock market's rigged. That's why they asked for your security number. They won't let it go to $5.50. I just had all these thoughts. It went back up to $5 and I said, I've seen this before. I got out at $5. You fell to $4. I got back in and went up to $5. I got out, made my first $100. 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, we call it 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 with a Michael at School of Business, Wayne State University here in Detroit, Michigan. And I knew that I went and saw financial aid of some of my buddies getting student loan refunds and I found out that because I didn't live on campus, she was like, oh, you can use the money to live on campus. I said, well, what if I live at home? She's like, well, you couldn't move on campus using for living expenses. So I'm like, basically, I can use it for whatever I want. And for me, I saw that as an opportunity to get more money into the stock market machine. So I took that $10,000 student loan and I grew it to like $113,000 as a 21-year-old college student. Amazing. Go to a great story, that would be if that was the end. But I think there's a part two coming. There's definitely a butt to that, right? Because what happened was I dropped out of school after that and 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 them back home to the neighborhood, with drugs, gangs, bars on the window, and a 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 that's kind of how I got into YouTube and teaching. And I was rebuilding my account and kind of record and documenting the whole process along the way. Hey, man, I admire just the gumption of it all because I love people to take chances. You're watching your surroundings. You maybe not have known everything and we don't always know everything. But you're watching, hey, people are investing to do these things. You get interested, you put $2,000 in the bank. You realize what a facade that is. And what happens is you get put into one fund where some guy that gets paid 30 grand a year, pays attention to it for about 10 minutes a month. It's the aggressive value fund here at Liberty Mutual Bank. Well, I'm making up bank nags. But I mean, I could see it. And we'll get you in the aggressive fund, son. We'll get you in that one. We'll see how it goes in a couple of years. Yeah. How it goes. That's exactly what I mean. Oh, I've ever started in school and they want you to get in the 401k plan to give you four boxes to check. And it's like, I'll give you that aggressive one. I don't think it's bad as yours. But it didn't go wonderful. Then I realized, okay, I can diversify this thing and do it like I want. But it might hurt again. You're wanting to get ahead. You want to do the right things. You're hearing the signals. This is how you do it. And then you heard it up and you took just a little bit of a slow path. 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 of me on trying to make half money. 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 I'm 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 $100,000 or more times. But that was part of it. One of the principles I learned from it that I talk about in my book for half a millionaires that I didn't have a 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 protection. It's like I should have took a portion of that money and protected that quarter million. I did, and 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 the day if it went right. Number one, you wouldn't like me, because I'd be super hair. I could think I knew everything. But number two, when the time to 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 away with the market going up. And I think a lot of people, that's like that. They get a little bit of success, but they don't really know what they're doing until they've been through a upmarket, downmarket, and a sideways market, tariffs, COVID, all that. They're kidding. Talking with Jason Brown, he is a stock market expert, options trader and author of five year millionaire. So Jason, we got the good, the bad, the ugly, and we came on to the side. This is the quote from the book, the roadmap for investing in the stock market, wealth accumulation and financial independence. We want that plan. Yeah, the plan starts with, you got to be educated first of all. Everybody wants to invest in the stock market, but it's hard to invest if you're not educated about how it works, when the buy, when the sale. And the first thing I tell people, or at least the roadmap that we talk about in the book, is number one, you got to have an account, 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 the 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 a stock in an uptrend, is it in a downtrend, is it in a silage? 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, 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, only have 500 bucks, only have $1,000, only have $4,000. That's not going to do much. And depending on who you're talking to, some people say, oh, just put, keep adding money to it and over time and it'll grow. But if you understand options, you can actually control some of the higher quality, better stocks and get an exponential return, even with a little bit of capital. So it's really key to learn about call options and put options in how you can supercharge your account, as well as protect it from losses. Talk to me, Jason, I'm going to play, I'm not always like devil's advocate, it's not the right word here. But more, I try to play reality. You and I would probably think, we're probably cut out a similar, similar class, being aggressive, wanting to make our own path, that entrepreneur or type spirit. Some people just don't want to take the time to learn it. It's crazy as that might sound, and it might sound lazy. It looks like Chinese checkers, or something on the board. How 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, you know? What's on? It's both on, to be honest with you. And I would never shun someone who doesn't want to learn 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? What are they doing with my money? Versus just me signing this paper and I'm sending 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 trust. I think what's important there is that you understand no one's gonna 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 100% returns at a 50% returns that I see sometimes you make. And I said, unless you got a $10, $20 million account, you're accounting big enough for someone to focus solely on you and your money and to grow it like that. They're gonna stick you, you got a hundred. I'm gonna take that box at the end of the sheet. Yeah, the dress is gonna stick you in some fun, right? And go find a hundred 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 the Series 6, 63, and 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, passed a 6, 63, and a 7. And right before we filed it with the state in the SEC, and you got to get sponsored and all that stuff, they wanted me to shut down my own website. And he said, I couldn't talk about stocks anymore, then I said, okay, no problem. Well, 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. They was like, oh, they just supply everybody. These funds, and they changed 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? I'm 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. I was basically a licensed sales rep. You have to have a little bit of interest in this, and you have to be educated enough to the point to understand how do you even pick somebody that you trust and is knowledgeable? Yeah, good advice. And I'll say this, as you were talking, Jason, I was thinking, back to college or into my education, why aren't we teaching six graders this? We should have another finance and stuff once you get into college and even high school a little bit, but we should be teaching our youth this from the get-go. I mean, shouldn't we? Good financial excellence, getting six grade. They're like, we should be starting earlier. You know, that's interesting conversation. I got so many thoughts around that. 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 they're a ten out of a adjacent? Come on, man. Okay, my wife's a principal and was in math major. That is pretty good. A lot of things. Mommy's gonna have to help you with that math. Send them same kids home and be like, we want to buy some stocks and invest. Some parents would be like, what? 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 extra curricular or nontraditional 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 teacher's on understanding themselves and then be, they're trying to just kind of 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. I like big ones. Hey, we're doing enough of the same shit for too long. By the way, if she's middle school principal, I'm out of tough job. She agrees with it, but it's more than she, hey, she's got enough problems that damn like, man. We keep, what do they say? Stay the same, stay the same. There's something there. There's a balance. I don't know if we're gonna solve that today, but it may be taking that. I think there's a huge opportunity there, for sure. If we had financially secure, at least knowledgeable kids in those areas, and maybe it's not stock options, but it's something. I mean, just teach them how to use credit. Let's start there. Let's teach them how to balance a checkbook or create a spreadsheet with a budget. 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% 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. We go create some type of goal partnership. There you go. As we close out here, Jason, talk to me about the Brown report. How do people, what's the first step here, both with you and in general, how you guide people, powertrage university, we got that, but walk me through some practical steps for our audience. Yeah, there's two things that we like to start people off with. So at the Brown report, we have the stock market starter pack. Those are for people who say, I don't even know where to open an account. I don't know how to read a chart. I don't know what I'm looking at. I don't know how much money I need, how much I want to make. And the stock market starter pack, we walk you through all that, how to get your first account open, how much money you need, how much you can expect to make, how to read the three most profitable chart patterns. 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 market's 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 thebrownreport.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, just say they don't have a million dollars and how to become a billionaire in five years, but like, or maybe a multi-millionaire. What's realistic? You're one following something like this. No guarantees, you can't control everything, but generally speaking. And my book, Five 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 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 could start with $4,000, 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% a month. Most people don't make 10% a year in the market because the S&P 500 turns my average 11%. For those of us who are using options, reading stock charts, I have those trades where I earned 10, 20, 30, 40, 50% 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% is doable. And when I love about what we do, all our trades are recorded. Everything is timestamped. 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 Swap network left 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%, it went up 30%, 20% in a month, earn two months in average 10%. Knowing that is possible and then getting a knowledge. So I think you can realistically expect 10% a month, but you have to grow until that 10% a month. You say to open account, you gotta learn, you gotta practice. Fair enough. Lastly, Jason, any hot stock tips, anything on the radar that this might 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, listen, look at the Mag 7 stocks. You got Microsoft who's crushing it with their Azure cloud services. You have Apple who has yet to do the Siri refresh. They just released a new phones, but they also haven't really made their big splash in AI, but that stocks move in 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's 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, working 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, they connect me on Instagram, I'm the brown report on Instagram, the brown report on YouTube. I'm pretty much the brown report 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 greedy, but fun and nice. The ones I know is one of my friends are all from Detroit that way. It's fun. 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 to find us, Ryan is right.com. I'll have a highlight links, everything from today's show. Thebrownreport.com will have links there. And of course, where to find us. Anytime, anywhere at RyanAlford had that blue check before you goodbye, baby. We'll see you next time. All right, about now. This has been right about now with RyanAlford, a Radcast Network production. Visit RyanisRate.com for full audio and video versions of the show, or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities. Thanks for listening.