Seth Williams: Hey there, how's it going? This is Seth Williams. Welcome to the REtipster podcast. Today, I'm talking with Jason Brown, the founder of PowerTrades University and the Brown Report. Jason is a stock market investor and options trader who has built a large following by teaching everyday people how to navigate the markets in a way that's actually understandable and realistic. What's interesting about Jason's story is that it's not just a straight line of success. He had some big wins early on and lost six figures and then rebuilt from scratch and then turned that experience into a framework he now teaches to others. Over the past five years, he's written a book called Five-Year Millionaire. He appeared on networks like the Schwab Network and Fox and continues to grow his education platform around stock and options trading. Now, let me just stop here and say, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know, we don't usually talk about the stock market. We focus mostly on real estate and land investing, but I wanted to have Jason on because I know him personally, and I think there's a lot we can learn by comparing these two worlds. And also when we say stock market, a lot of people might think about like putting money into a 401k and mutual funds and index funds and just letting it sit there for 20 or 30 years. That's not what Jason is doing. Jason teaches a much more active approach. It's not necessarily sitting in front of a screen all day, like a day trader, but it's making intentional trades based on what you think the market is going to do, sometimes over days or weeks or months, using tools like stock options to try and grow your money faster. So it's a very different game than passive investing, and it comes with a very different level of risk and involvement. So Jason, welcome to the show. How's it going?

Jason Brown: Seth, good to be here, man, and good to catch up with you again.

Seth Williams: Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah. So for people who have not heard of you before, what is it you actually do today?

Jason Brown: Well, before we cut the mic on, I was just saying we're very similar investors in the stock market and investors in land and in real estate. And hopefully I can convey that message across today. But what is it that I actually do? So I trade stocks and options. Now, when people hear the word trade, I think just by, you know, society, they immediately go to day trading, like as if that's the only type of trading. But when I say I trade stocks and options, I basically look for patterns in the market the same way that people look for patterns in real estate and or they look for houses that are undervalued or neighborhoods that are up in comment. I do the same thing in stocks, but I do it by looking at charts. I do it by looking at what's called support and resistance, a place where a stock might be oversold or a place where might be overbought.

Jason Brown: And I come in and I look to capitalize on that price appreciation. So if Apple was 200 bucks, it's now down to 100. We know it's not going to zero. I may say, hey, I think it can at least get back to 120, 130. And so I am trading in Apple at 100 and I'm looking to get out at 130. Make that 30 point spread. No different than buying a property or land and looking to capitalize on that appreciation. And when I say trade, that trade could happen over six months. It goes back up 30 points. It could happen over the next 12 months. So it's not necessarily day trading, but, trading just means I'm not looking to hold it long term. It's not a retirement thing. It's more like I just want to take advantage of the price appreciation. And when that happens, if it's six months, if it's 30 days, if it's 90 days, then I'm getting out.

Seth Williams: Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, when you phrase it like that, it actually reminds me a lot of how we find a land deal. We'll find a property that we're pretty confident is worth X amount, and we can buy it far below that amount. When you're talking about that Apple example, So let's say at one point in time, it's a 200. And then at another point in time, it's a 100. How do you know which one is the objective truth? Like, what if 200 was just overvalued and it's never going there again? Or, and I don't think that's going to happen, but you know, how do you know, like, okay, like this is an accurate reading on what it's actually worth. It's almost like you kind of have to know the future to some extent, right? Well, that's what, that's a really great question. And the answer lies in why I like stocks versus cryptocurrency or Bitcoin or all this other stuff is because you don't really know why it's going up or why it's going down. What I love about stocks, very similar to real estate, I can look at a balance sheet. I can say Apple sells this amount of phones, this amount of service revenue, this amount of itunes subscribers icloud subscribers based on that tech companies are getting paid a 10x multiple so it shouldn't be trading lower than roughly this now why might it trade lower than that there's news there's war there's tariffs so there's fear and different things like that that cause volatility to make it. Uh behave uh erratically no different than you might look at a landowner a property owner they might have a death the grandkids got the property just want to get rid of it that fear property taxes are coming they want to sell it before they default on the loan there's things that make it volatile and the reason it might be trading or selling for lower than normal but if you know what to look for then you can assess it and say i believe this is why it's going to get back to that price. Now, do you know for sure? You never know for sure, but it's about having about a 70, 80% confidence based on this. And then you also are thinking about the future. You may say, well, if we were talking about Apple present day, one of the things I'm telling our investors inside of our platform is like, you got to think about it. Apple has not released anything with AI yet. They also have not revamped Siri. They've made it through the tariffs issue. So they're past that. So it's more upside than there is downside with respect to the revamp of Siri, with respect to them rolling out their A.I. On their phone that hasn't rolled out yet. So you start to say, OK, this is where it should be based on current conditions. But what about if they knock it out of the park in these other areas with wearables, if they create glasses, et cetera? Same way you might be like, what happens when people move in here and a new grocery store is coming to this area and they're going to build a Sam's Club over here? right? Or people are moving out of their houses and downsizing, they need storage. So you start to take all that data and you forecast out and make some assumptions, but an educated assumption of why you think the stock is going to go back to that place. So that's the proper way to do it. I know sometimes investing is a bad name because the wrong way that people do it is they just kind of shake some dice and roll it and be like, yeah, I think it's going to go up to 350. And you're like, where did you get that number from? I'm like, I just feel good about Apple. You're like, Yeah, no, that's called gambling. Well, do you think we're in like an AI bubble right now in the stock market?

Jason Brown: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. I think we're in an AI correction, but not a bubble. And the reason I say that the difference between the correction and the bubble, the correction is when people get too exuberant, they get too far ahead of the build out and the capabilities and they run the price up. And so it kind of corrects back and say, OK, let's slow down. We got something here, but we're not there yet. A bubble is where it's just all hype. There's no real time savings. There's no real leverage from companies or corporation. It's just more hype. You just threw AI in the name and people are paying the X multiple. We're actually really seeing. I'll give you a real example of number one. we haven't seen the peak of AI, but I'll give you a real example of something I went through with AI that's real savings for real people. I was doing my books and I was on with a QuickBooks expert that charges by the hour through QuickBooks. And we couldn't find where we were off on our balance sheet. And I processed probably 500 plus transactions a month through my CRM. So we're going through 500 plus transactions, but then there's a process and fee. So you can might as well just double that. We're going to a thousand plus transacts from the process and feed to the payment collected. She wanted me to go one by one each month until we found where it was off. I said, no, thank you. I downloaded all the spreadsheets, uploaded it to ChatGPT. I said, we are off by this much and this much is in QuickBooks. This is what the statements say. Uploaded it all. It went through thinking, 10 minutes thinking. It said, because you closed the book for this month on this date, but that transaction process from the credit card the day before, but it didn't hit the books to the closing statement. So it's through the next month off. it found it like in 10 minutes, we were able to either change the date of where we close the books or account for those couple of transactions in the next period. Done. That lady would have had me being charged a hundred dollars an hour for, I don't know how long either going through it together or me, I would have spent all day and night pulling my hair out. And I would have just said, forget it. I don't know where we're off. And I would have just made a manual journal entry, but that was a real life example where it saved me. And I'm not even a corporation. Well, I mean, I am. I run a little small business, but I'm not a Fortune 500 company that might be going through that on a larger scale across multiple entities, across multiple divisions. You know how much time savings that would save that company from their bookkeepers, their hourly workers just combing through trying to find out where some truck driver miscategorizes gas mileage. And that's just a small example of where this stuff is going. And so it has real use, real utility, and it has yet to sprinkle down to the masses. And then when you look at technology the way. That if you look back when the internet was being born, you had no idea the applications that were going to get built on top of it. And it's the same with AI. We have no idea what applications are going to be built on top. If someone would have told your grandparents, there'll be something called the internet. They'd be like, you're lying. Then when they got the internet, they thought it was just good for spell check and chat rooms and maybe send an email to avoid putting it in the mail. They never thought they'd be signing stuff, legal documents on DocuSign, which is an application that got built on the back of the internet. They never thought that they would be sending payments through Apple Pay on their phone. They never thought that there would be a PayPal taking payments over the internet and they wouldn't be writing paper checks. So we still have no idea of the applications that will be built on top of AI that will make life simple and easier yet. So we're far away from the boom. And then those are just business applications. What about the applications for fun? We never thought there'd be a Facebook, a YouTube, a TikTok. So we have no idea just yet how far this can go. We're just scratching the surface. And that's why logically we're not in the bubble. We can't be yet. We're just getting started. Yeah.

Seth Williams: I had heard somebody say a few years back, I don't know that I believe this at all, but he was saying something to the effect of if I have all the historical data of everything that has ever happened, everything, I could use that and basically predict the future. Again, don't know if that's true. Don't know how well-founded that is. But if we just pretend for a moment that that is true, or if there's even a seed of truth to that, do you think AI can do any of this analysis for you and even make accurate predictions? If it's able to scrape all of human history, all of the stock market, everything that's ever happened, could it possibly do a better job than we could as humans?

Jason Brown: I don't know that they could do a better job than we can as humans, because the future is still unpredictable. So they can't predict the COVID-19. It can't say, okay, on seven years, it's going to be a pandemic. It also can't predict a Russia-Ukraine war. It can't predict Israel-Palestine war, right? So it. There will always be some portion of it that is going to throw it off. What it can do is say roughly if that happens, this is how long it will last. This is maybe how far stocks will drop, how much real estate will drop, et cetera. So it's more about that knowledge being power to say when we went through something similar, what was the outcome? But it won't necessarily be able to predict the future. If that's the case, then we all have the same level playing field and somebody will do something the opposite on purpose to just throw that thing off. And they'll create a virus to throw the machine off. So I think what's powerful about it is, you know, I started to look into Airbnbs and then people were telling me about like, go on AirDNA, I think it was, or Airtable. And you could put in this and it would pull up like what the property is going for, what the rents are going for. It'll do like the holiday spike periods. It'll do like the vacancy rate. That is a form of AI saying we have all this data, we can crunch it and we can do it for this area and tell you what you should expect from a rental income, a vacancy standpoint, et cetera. So that is the power of taking historical data, throwing it into a machine that can crunch it way faster than a human. And I think what's powerful about AI, you might not have to wait for somebody to build an air DNA or air table. You can do it yourself from home. If you've got a little bit of knowledge of how to upload some spreadsheets, give it a zip code, give it an area, say, hey, go scrape Zillow, go scrape. Airbnb, tell me what these dates are going for. So now the regular person can build something without having a big budget or a thousand person research team as well. And it will give you better analysis or allowed you to build something custom for your own business. So it's very powerful to have historical data, but it's not the only determination of what's going to happen in the future.

Seth Williams: So pulling back a little bit, when you say you trade in the stock market, what does that actually mean in your day-to-day life? Like, are you in front of the computer all day, every day, or do you just kind of check in an hour a day to do some things and move on? Or what does this look like in your life?

Jason Brown: Yeah. Now, because I'm passionate about the stock market, I look at it every day, not to be confused with I do something every day. That's a big difference. I look at it every day because I'm passionate. Where do we open? Where do we close? What's Apple doing today? What's Broadcom doing? NVIDIA. That doesn't mean I actually sit down, pull the trigger, buy, sell all day. I look at it just because I like to get a pulse on. Is anything selling off or coming back to an area where I would like to buy it? Do I want to set an alert? A lot of times I'm just doing research. I say, okay, if this were to get down to here, I want to know about it. But as I go on about my gym, the day with going to the gym, be with my kids, you may not, pay attention. So I'll set a lot of alerts. So some of my days is just spent like saying, Hey, where would I be interested in buying this at? Or if a stock is running up, I say it's getting too far too fast. Where would I be interested in taking a bearish or a put option position? Meaning I think the stock is going to come down. So a lot of it is doing research. A lot of days I'm setting alerts. A lot of days I'm also just coaching and teaching other people how it works while we're waiting for something to happen. So there's not something to do every day. So we may say, what should we be learning or what should we be preparing for when the opportunity arises? Outside of that, I mean, I'm at the gym, I'm with my kids. I might be shooting the YouTube videos, teaching about the market or talking about what I'm seeing. I might be doing a news appearance, something like that. So a portion of it is trading. Should I say a portion of it is more research, alerts, learning, then there's an even smaller portion that's actually trading. And then there's a bigger portion that's like, what do I do with the rest of this free time? Because also, I don't think it's healthy to just look at stocks all day and research all day. You know, there has to be some balance there. And I like to get from in front of computer, get outside. I'm into cars. I might go to a car meet. I might go have lunch downtown. town. I might meet up with friends. I'm in an entrepreneur's organization. We might have an event, a motivational speaker might come speak to us. I might read a book. So there is a lot of this that has nothing to do with the actual stock market, despite what people think.

Seth Williams: Now, you mentioned options there. Can you explain in simple terms what options are and why you use them?

Jason Brown: What I love about options and talking to real estate people is that real estate people People use options all the time and they just don't know it. And so the way I like to explain options and I'll explain it in real estate terms, I'll do it with a house. Let's just say you can do the same thing with land, but let's just say you. We're both in Michigan. You're in Grand Rapids. Let's just say I see a house or a piece of land in Grand Rapids. I come up to you and say, hey, you have this land for sale for $200,000. Great. I say, I want to buy the land. You say, all right, well, give me an earnest money deposit to show that you're serious and you have 30 days to get a survey or an appraisal, an inspection, et cetera. No problem. I'll put two thousand dollars down. Right. Is that cool? I'll give you two thousand dollars to hold for 30 days while I do an inspection and I do an appraisal. And then at the end of 30 days, I can buy the land or not buy the land. I get my inspection done, my appraisal done. And next week they come back and say, good news. This land is around here for what's going on is actually going for about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. So you say you have what? Fifty thousand dollars of equity in that land. Well, let's just say a farmer comes behind me or whether it's land or house. And he says, oh, I've been looking at this land. Looks like it's under contract. And you're like, you know, I got it under contract. But I tell you what, I don't necessarily need this land or this house. I can move somewhere else. I can put my farm somewhere else. It appraised for two fifty dollars. I have it under contract for $200,000. If you give me $50,000 for this contract, then you can go buy the land for $200,000. So you are all in at $250,000, which it appraised for. Now, for me, I controlled a $200,000 piece of land for $2,000. And then I sold that $2,000 contract to the farmer for 50,000. So I made 50,000 off of $2,000. I never had to come up with the full $200,000 to buy the land because I controlled it for 30 days. I had it under contract for 30 days. Well, that is called a call option in the stock market. If I saw Apple trading for, let's just stick with the 200, $200. I can buy a $200 call option for 30 days, six months, a year, up to three years out. Those are called LEAP, long-term equity asset positions. I can buy options all the way out to three years. And if Apple goes to 250, I controlled it for a fraction of the cost by buying that option. The same way you control that land for $2,000, you didn't have to come up with 200,000. That's how options work. And the reason it's powerful is because it allows you to get involved in a game that you wouldn't have normally otherwise been priced out of. How many people won't even look at that land because they're like, I can't even afford the $200,000. But if you could control it and then transfer that contract to somebody who does have $200,000, then you would be more excited about getting in the game. And in real estate, they call it wholesaling, right? Getting something under contract, selling it to somebody else. And you kind of make the difference in the middle. It is the same concept. They basically bought a call option on a property or a piece of land.

Seth Williams: So in that scenario there, if you're buying a call option on $200 Apple stock, it's like, how much are you paying for that call option? Like how much less is it than the actual price of the stock? Does it depend how far out it goes or?

Jason Brown: Well, let's call it an option chain. So there are prices on the exchange that'll tell you, but I'm actually logging in just so I can give you a real example since we're looking at Apple. So as of right now, Apple is actually trading for two hundred and forty seven dollars. So a two hundred would be a bad example. But let's just say you wanted to control Apple. All the way out till next year at 247. So instead of buying it for $247, you just want the right to buy it for 247 all the way out to next year. So as I look up this right now, options trade on even numbers. So you would have to buy a 250 strike price option, but that strike price option is going for $31.75. That is the big difference from coming up with. $241, $247. So it sounds like if you're good at making accurate predictions and you don't have gobs and gobs of money, this is a good way to potentially make a lot of money a lot faster without spending a lot of money in the stock market. Is that kind of the long and the short of why do options? Yeah. Well, think about it like this. Options trade in shares of a hundred. So if we were to take that example further. You would need $24,700 to buy Apple right here today, 100 shares. Or you can control it for the next year for $3,180. That is a big difference. More people will have 3,180 than they will 24,700. Now, to your point, if Apple were to, let's say it went up $100 on your 100 shares, you would make $10,000. But if it went up 100 points on your options, you might make $20,000, $30,000 because you would make the same amount. But from a percentage standpoint, the percentage of gain using $24,000 and the percentage gain using $3,100 is going to be tenfold because you didn't use as much money. And so that's the game that you're playing. end. But whether you buy the option or the stock, I want to be very, very clear. You still have to look at a stock chart and look at where the market and where the stock is going because you still have to accurately predict or guesstimate. I say guess because you're estimating and you're a little bit guessing because no one knows the future. You still need to accurately look at it and say it's underpriced. Where can it go based on what, based on what happened in the next six to 12 months, you don't want to leave that part out because I think. When stocks, options, investments gets a bad name, when people say, I'm not going to look at a chart, I don't know where it can go, I just know I can control it for $3,000, I think I'm going to make a ton of money. You still have to be able to look at a chart, look at why you want to buy this, why you want to invest it, where you think it can go. But it is a more cost-effective way to do what you were going to do anyway, or to control things you might have been priced out of. And that's what excited me about it. When I was starting off, I didn't have a lot of money. I said, well, how do I get the Googles, the Netflix, the Teslas? These are thousand dollar companies. And so I'm like, wow. So just because I don't have that kind of money, I can never invest in some of the greatest companies. But then when I learned about options, I said, I don't have to own it. I can just control it and go along for the ride and still participate as if I had the money that the big boys do.

Seth Williams: And you can also bet on the stock value going down, right? That's a put option.

Jason Brown: Absolutely. And how often do you do that versus a call option? Like, is it kind of 50-50? Or are you always more looking at it through the lens of like, what's going to go up today? Do you have a preference? Yeah. So it's actually more 70-30. 70% call options, probably 30, more 70-30, 80-20. And the reason is long-term, the market goes up more than it goes down. When it goes down, it gets all the news and all the press. But if you zoom out, you could take COVID-19. You can take the 08 real estate market crash. Doesn't matter. Long term, we go higher. So you're typically buying more call options or long term bullish investments. But those times when it falls, it falls quick and fast. They say stocks take the stairs up and they jump out the window on the way down. Right. Like when they fall, they fall really, really quick. And if you are paying attention to things getting oversold, if you're paying attention to political and economic turmoil. You can position yourself to say, I think we're due for a pullback. We're due for a reset. And those put options really pay out big because when stocks fall, they fall pretty fast.

Seth Williams: Yeah. That whole thing you're saying about paying attention to what's going on. So that sounds totally accurate, but like there's so much going on. Like when you were talking about Apple earlier about how like they don't have AI yet. They haven't done Siri yet. And they haven't released any new products yet. there's just like so much data to like wrap your mind around and draw meaning from that to decide whether you think it's going to go up or down. So like, how do you realistically know what to pay attention to? You have some like AI alerts set up to let you know, Hey, this little information happened today, FYI, or like, how do you distill it down to actually figure out what's going to happen?

Jason Brown: Yeah. Because this is a real estate podcast. I'm trying to make so many real estate

Seth Williams: Yeah, yeah. Totally appreciate that, by the way. It's helpful. And I like to compare this to real estate. How do you know where to pay attention to? Do I get into Airbnbs? Do I get into storage units? Do I get into land? Do I get into parking lots? Do I get into gas station? Do I get into commercial space that I rent out to CVS and Walmart? So I own the land, but McDonald's rents it from me or Chick-fil-A. There's so much. Do I get into multifamily? Do I get into HUD housing? Do I get into special needs housing? Do I get into senior living facilities, right? So the stock market is very similar. There's all these broad array of sectors that you can get into. You have to say, do I want to be in tech? Don't want to be in consumer staples. Don't want to be in biomedical like with the Wagovi pills and these weight loss pills and these cancer drugs. You can pick what sector you want to be interested in that. It might just be your general interest. I'm genuinely interested in tech or I'm generally interested in biotech, which is that the drug space. You also could be generally interested in real estate. There are real estate stocks. You also could be generally interested in what we call the picks and shovels play, which is, you know, if real estate is booming, if construction is booming, you want to look at companies like Caterpillar and people that make the heavy duty construction equipment as digging foundations. So there's so many sectors, subsectors, then niche industries, the way it's so many states, cities on down to land, multifamily, single family parking lots. And then you drill down into a specific neighborhood. So I like tech. I use tech. So I'm just genuinely interested in it. I'm also interested in places that I shop. So I pay attention to Walmart. I pay attention to Costco, pay attention to Ross stores with people losing weight. Guess what? All these people are quickly losing weight and they're quickly needing to go out and buy new clothes. So I'm like, oh, where are most people shopping at when they lose weight, especially the women? So I'm just, those are things that's interesting to me. No different than in real estate. You may be like, a lot of people are moving South. A lot of people are moving to Phoenix. oh because the laws changed in california people are migrating to arizona what's that doing to real estate so you're basically taking things that you're interested in and you're asking smart questions to say where's the money moving where are the people moving where's the technology moving and you're asking that same questions in the stock market and you want to pay attention to that i can guarantee for every five stocks that i can talk about there's probably 5 000 that i couldn't tell you one thing about that somebody else is looking at and saying these people made the GOP one drug. And I'm like, I hate biotech. I don't like biotech because one day the drug is approved. Next day they found out they got a side effect. The stock gets crushed. Next day they say, just kidding. They found out that was a different drug. It's too much for me. Right. But somebody else loves it because a biotech drug can go from zero to hero overnight. So you have to pick the spaces that you're interested in. So to your point of that question, you can't follow everything. You just want to follow the things that'll keep you interested and that you feel like you can make money from. And some people follow stocks that have, I forget what they call it, but these stocks that are just environmental friendly, they invest in it because they believe the mission and the cause. So they follow that. That's also one way to do your research, but it really just depends on what you're interested in. You may get in here and start to follow real estate stocks. There's REIT, real estate investment trusts. You might follow commercial real estate stocks because you already have a real estate background, or you might find this boring because you're like, I'm already following real estate. Why am I following them? So it just really depends on what you're interested in. And then you want to start to ask those smart questions, set up alerts, follow the news on what's going on in that industry. Same way you would follow what's going on in that neighborhood or in that sector of real estate.

Seth Williams: Well, I'm curious, what's the most you've ever made in one trade and how long did it take and like what went right to make that happen?

Jason Brown: So the most I've ever made in one trade was actually four, I think it was $420,000 in one trade. That trade again was one where just paying attention. When I think back, I probably should have made a ton more if I, you know, when you really are dialed in, but this was actually right somewhere after while the pandemic was unfolding, I actually saw that two stocks. Everybody needed to have during this time. One was Zoom and one was DocuSign. I saw everything getting signed on DocuSign. There was no other way to do business or transact. Same thing with Zoom. If you were to talk to your grandparents and said, we should do a Zoom, they'd be like, I'm not downloading a thing. I'm good. Come see me. If you don't went to your church and said, hey, churches should be online as well in case people can't make it, they'd be like, nope, we like people coming into our building. The pandemic hit. Grandparents were using Zoom. Churches were using Zoom. Therapy went over Zoom. So what happened or what I saw happening was the companies that were normally had 2%, 5%, 10% growth a year, they pulled forward five, 10 years worth of customers. And they had 1,000% growth, which translated into they're going to crush earnings. They're going to have a ton of cash coming in. The stock price is going to be immediately worth more. And so I had bought about $200,000 worth of call options on DocuSign. Sure enough, earnings beat, et cetera, stock pop. I made about 400, I think in 10,000, 20,000, something like that. Pulled out about 600,000 of those dollars. I think it was over like maybe 30 days, 60 days. And I actually documented it on my YouTube channel and I walked people through the trade, what I saw, why I bought it. And then also what happened was Zoom reported earnings like a week before and Zoom blew out earnings. And so they're in a similar sector. So I said, if Zoom blew out earnings, DocuSign is kind of the non-competitor equivalent of a digital transformation that's happening during this time. So again, it was that research, that forward thinking, paying attention to what was happening in the market, And so, boom, I made about four hundred thousand. That was my that was my biggest trade. Another trade that I should have been paying attention to that when I say I should have made more, I probably should have bought two hundred thousand dollars worth of puts on Peloton. Because the reality is everyone bought these bikes. But once the world opened back up, nobody was riding the bikes. People weren't exercising on them anymore. They were canceling their subscriptions. Plus, once you buy one bike, you don't need two bikes. I should have saw that from a trend standpoint. There's no way that stock could have stayed at that sustained level and sure enough peloton went from like 300 bucks down to i don't know what it's trading at today maybe even i mean yeah look at it it's trading at looks like four dollars and 58 cents but if you zoom out stock was trading at about 170 during the pandemic no way uh it was going to sustain that level because we're going to do buy two bikes i mean they got one product um and once people have bought it they own it so what else are they going to sell? They're not really big on clothes. So I should have saw that one from a standpoint of, I should have bought some put options because I knew that stock was coming down. I just, I don't know what I was doing around that time. Maybe I was just celebrating from the 400K that I made.

Seth Williams: Well, that's really interesting because like in hindsight, this stuff seems so obvious. Like, you know, of course that was going to happen, but like, how would you look at the world today and find similar situations to zoom and DocuSign and Peloton to know like, oh, well, of course this is happening. So of course it's going to go up or go down. Like, is there any way to look at the current information we have today and make that determination?

Jason Brown: Yeah. So it's really about exercising your brain and that muscle to do those analysis on the daily, weekly, monthly basis. That's where I talked about majority of the time you're doing research versus buying stocks and selling stocks, especially if you. Want to be more accurate versus just throwing money around and shoot from the hip. You're researching where, where is this going? Where are people moving? What's happening with these properties? Why are people putting stuff in stores? Why are people moving more into multifamilies? Oh, because high interest rates. Okay. If interest rates affect these types of people, what does that mean? You're just kind of drilling down. You want to do the same thing in the stock market. You say, OK, everybody's using AI or will be. What does that mean? Oh, in order for them to use AI, they have to build data center. OK, what is the data center? OK, what do they need in data centers? Oh, that's just a room full of storage, full of servers. OK, what do they need for this room full of servers to work? They need chips. They need memory. OK, who makes chips? Who makes memory? NVIDIA. Who else? AMD, Intel. OK, who's the best of those three? Okay. In order for them to make the chips, what do they need? Oh, every chip needs copper in it. Okay. Who's the biggest copper company producing? Okay. Wait, in order for those copper companies to produce more copper. They got to go mine the copper somewhere. How do they mine it? Oh, they need trucks from Caterpillar. Right. So you're just you're trying to ask questions and drill down and say, OK, in order to get these people what they need so that these people can use what they need to use. Who are all the players? What are all the components and what happens? Oh, in order for all these data centers to run, they need power. They need energy. Who's the big power player? Should I be looking at DTE? Should I be looking at consumers energy? Should I be looking at wind solar? Should I be looking at Elon Musk's company? Right. Solar City. I don't. These are the questions you want to start asking yourself. I'm sorry to say, of course, this is where the ball is going. This is where it's moving. Now, you never know with 100 percent certainty, but it's more about that 70, 80 percent that this is where the hockey puck is going. and you kind of want to skate there. I think about us being in, you know, Michigan, that Wayne Gretzky quote, and they said, what made you such a good hockey player? I forget the exact question. But he said, I never skated to where the puck was at. I always skated to where the puck was going. And that's, he has the foresight to see three plays ahead. If he hits it to him, him, the puck's going over to that right-hand corner. I'm skating to the right-hand corner. It's the same thing with real estate or it's the same thing with the stock market, with AI or with anything. You start to say, where is the puck going? Where is this going? And that takes a little bit of foresight, a little bit of forward thinking. And you have to train your brain for that. That's not natural for everybody. Some people can't think past tomorrow. Some people still looking behind yesterday of what they missed and even looking forward. So it takes a skill set to say, I mean, how many people, you know, actually take an hour out of their day and just say, where's the world going? Where is the market going? Where is technology going? Where is real estate going? With interest rates, with baby boomers getting older, where are things going? Only so many people have the foresight to say, I'm going to build senior care living because all these baby boomers are going to get old and need somewhere to live. Right. Only a few people are thinking about that. The rest of us are like, what am I eating for lunch tomorrow? You know, like what's on TV tonight? And did Michigan win the championship? By the way, they did. But I mean, that's what some people are thinking about. And then others are thinking, where's the ball going and how can I make money from it?

Seth Williams: I really appreciate that breakdown. That's super helpful. Just thinking about, you know, the data centers and then the chips and then the copper and then the construction equipment. And I wonder, like, how often can you make wrong assumptions about where that's headed? Like, for example, yeah, Caterpillar is going to go up. But what if they don't end up buying it from Caterpillar? What if they buy it from Kubota or some other random company? Well, sorry, you just put a bunch of money into the wrong stock. Are there certain ways to know, like, no, no, this has to happen. Like, this is a foolproof thing. Copper is going to go up versus like, well, it might go up. Maybe not. Like, how could you really stress test your assumptions on it?

Jason Brown: The only other way is to get into politics and be Nancy Pelosi in them and have some insider trader information to know a hundred. No, I'm joking. Nancy, don't come come after me. I want the government. But I mean, that's the only way. Right. Because I do feel like sometimes they know what's happening before it happens. I mean, if you look at some of their trade investments, but just short of being in politics and having insider trader information, You never know 100%. It's always about 80, 90% probability in statistics, right? It's kind of like asking me, how do I know if I get in my car and drive to Grand Rapids, I'm going to make it safely? Well, what I do know is if I don't do it on New Year's Eve, I got a better chance of getting up there without any drunk drivers being on the road. I do know if I don't do it between the hours of one and three in the morning, I got a better chance of avoiding people coming out of the club or the bar is drunk. And so it's all about probability and statistics. You don't know 100% for sure you're going to make it to the destination or that this company is going to benefit from it. But you're about 80, 90% sure you say, well, do they want the best construction equipment or they want the second best? Okay, maybe they want the second best. So I'll also look at John Deere. But most people don't want the third and fourth best construction equipment because they got to get this job done because they need the data center built properly so they can get paid. So you also got to think about who's incentivized to go with the best companies, who's incentivized to maybe save money and go with the second best company. OK, so they'll get some tailwinds. But very unlikely, you're like, let's go with the fourth and cheapest company because you'll never get another data center contract again to build it if you're not using the best equipment. So there's also just a normal ebb and flow of who should win this. If you look at what's going on with aerospace and defense, you say, well, OK, Boeing makes our airplanes. Well, how do you know Boeing is going to get the contract or General Electric is going to make the parts for the plane? It's like, well, let's think about it. Do we need airplanes falling out of the sky? No, we don't. So we need the best companies making them. Check. OK, are we going to outsource our plane manufacturing to China or Canada when we are starting beef and wars with people? Probably will never outsource our plane making and plane manufacturing. OK, so if we're at war, we're loaning Ukraine missiles and rockets. We're fighting over here in Iran and we're doing all this. We have to replenish this stock of missiles, planes, drones. Who's making this stuff? They are absolutely going to get the next billion dollar government contract. We got to replenish this stuff. We got to have the best missiles. We got to have the best planes and we're not going to outsource it. So you start looking at Lockheed Martin. You start looking at Boeing. You start looking at General Electric GE. Is it a foregone conclusion? No, but more than likely, those three are going to get a lion's share of these contracts. And we got to replace the rockets and missiles with all the turmoil going on in the world. And we will always have to have the most advanced military. So you could probably bet those stocks are going higher. There's a good chance. Do I know for sure? No, but it's a good chance. So when you think about it like that, again, you have to have your brain trained to do research and human behavior and business psychology. Could you learn it in school? Sure. But could you also learn it by listening to a podcast like this and just leaving away with a different way to think about stuff starts to set you out on that path of what are some good questions to ask myself to start thinking like an investor? And then bring it back to the AI conversation. You can also, now that you're thinking different, you can ask AI, what are some trends changing that I should be aware of in real estate or in technology? Who stands to benefit from that? Who makes the products and services that go into that? ChatGPT will go out and bring this information back for you. And maybe you can even say, what are some questions I'm not even thinking about that I should be asking myself, right? That is the power of AI now. Before you would just have to Google, What questions am I not thinking about? And you would hope somebody wrote a blog post about it. Now, I actually interact with you and say, hey, you should be also thinking about this. You could tell what what would a Harvard business student think about what type of modeling of research and stocks would he apply to the stock market or to real estate? And they might give you a whole Harvard review of like this, how a Harvard student would do it. And it would be questions you would have never thought to ask yourself because you didn't go to Harvard. But it has access to Harvard level articles and information through the power of scouring the entire internet, which is so powerful. So you can train yourself to start to think, or at least get a framework of things you can think about. One of the frameworks I tell people at its most simplest level is, I say, Jason, what stocks should I buy? And they might also say, well, what real estate should I buy? But it's even more. Simpler for stocks. I said, just look at the stuff you know, like, and trust. You know your iPhone, you like it, you trust that it's not going to get hacked. Why aren't you looking at Apple stocks? You like your Android phone, your Google watch? Why aren't you looking at Google stock? You like watching YouTube video? It's owned by Google. Even the women, I love hanging around women. They are always an indicator of where the market is going. I remember when every woman in the world was like altar beauty altar i'm going to all and i'm like what is altar they wouldn't say the beauty part they would just say altar and i remember i went with my wife one time never forget this she's like i need to run in here real quick i'm like okay. We ran in here. It wasn't real quick. The line was out the door. I remember stepping out on the curb, looking up like, what store is this? I immediately pulled out my phone and was like, what's their stock symbol? Because I was like, I couldn't believe this line around the store was wrapped with women by makeup, lipstick. And I was like, what is this place? And then when I was driving around, I kept seeing coming soon all to all. I'm like, what is this? I see the signs and I finally stopped in one, I think the stock took off to $300 from the time I looked at it. Not like immediately, but over the next six months to one to two years, stock took off. So it's like, where are people shopping? Where are they buying? Where's the new trend? If you just pay attention to what you like and what you do, that is a framework for what could be happening on a global scale and why you should be paying attention to that stock. So that's just a simple research framework. So it's interesting. You're talking about the timeframe of how long Ulta took to go up like that. I'm curious, how much time is too long for you to wait for a trade? Do you want to see the action happening within three or six months or 12 or three years? What's the window of time look like for you? The type of trader that I am now, I'm more like a 90-day, six months to a year trader every week it's going to fluctuate every day it's going to fluctuate but when you zoom out over time that direction that i usually look at is correct whether that's up or down and so rather stressing about it every day because you look at every little move it's up today it's down today it's up tomorrow it's down the day after that that'll stress you out and i realized if i just took a step back it's like. Over the next six months, it's up. Over the next 90 days, it's up. So that's typically my time frame. 90 days, six months, even more so now. I've been getting into stuff that I go out about a year on just because I don't want to look at it every day. I also don't want to second guess myself every other week. I like to say, give myself time to be right. And so I'd rather just give myself time to be right. Focus on the stocks that I like. If they pull back a little bit much, I might add to my position and bring my average cost down. But that's about the timeframe. Now, obviously you can shrink the timeframe on down to a day. There's some people that's looking at it every hour, every minute. I think it's going to be up in the next 10 minutes, down the next 10 minutes. That to me is stress. And then I like to tell people, most people can't accurately predict stocks because they don't look at charts and do any research it is very rare that you're going to come in and actually predict what it's going to do from minute to minute hour to hour or day by day it's almost impossible even if you're right a couple days in a row it is impossible. And the market is not open 365 days because there's weekends. But if it was, it is virtually impossible to be right every single day. Do you know how good you would have to be? And even if you were good to be right every single day, you're setting yourself up for the impossible. So but when you say, can I be right every 90 days, every six months, you know, a year time frame, if you're doing a correct analysis, it's very hard to be wrong every year. right? It's very hard. Oh, I'll find a way. It's hard. It's hard long-term to be wrong every year. If you have a framework to how you're assessing these stocks before you go into them, you know, I think same with real estate. I mean, if you're just buying the wrong property every year, there's something wrong with your analysis. It has to be. It's very hard to look at the comp rates, look where people are moving, do your analysis, offer $10,000 below asking and still be wrong every year. There's something wrong with your process at that point. It has to be. You've got the wrong contractors. You're doing the wrong. You're underestimating your repairs. There's something wrong with the process at that point. But it's very hard to have a really reasonable process and still be wrong every year. Can you be wrong some years? Sure. Stuff happens. People get laid off. Company gets found with fraud in the stock market and it crashes. I get it. But barring any like pandemic and random things, it's very hard to be wrong every single year, both in real estate and in the stock market.

Seth Williams: Well, on that whole thing about just the fact that, you know, everybody's going to be wrong sometimes, everybody's going to be right sometimes. I know I've heard you talk about this idea of not trading under pressure. Like if you need money for rent, like don't use that money to trade in the stock market. And totally get that. But do you have some kind of formula for like, how low should the stakes be before you start trading your money? Like, say if I've got all my needs met, but I've got an extra 10 grand to the side, I can just play with. I can just burn it just to be, have fun in the stock market and see what I can do. Is there some like ratio of like, only use X percent of your net worth or income to trade, but don't go above this line? Any ideas come to mind for that?

Jason Brown: Yeah. So when I think about how much you should use, it becomes, this is where they call it personal finance because it's personal to everyone. I'll give you two examples. When I first got started in the stock market, I was dead broke. I had no money. I remember when I made some money, lost it, I was deep in debt. Now I was about, I don't know, a hundred plus thousand dollars in debt, student loans, credit cards. I had a lien on me, et cetera. I made about an extra thousand dollars selling cell phones at Sprint PC. Well, I had worked at Verizon at this time, working for Verizon. I said, okay, if I take my thousand dollar that I make extra commission and I put it towards my debt, let's just say that's $10,000 a year. I said, it will take me 10 years to get out of debt. Now, I said, if I take this thousand dollars and I put it in the stock market, it is possible I can make one hundred thousand dollars in a year. It is possible for me to be out of debt by next year. For me, that was worth taking the risk to get out of debt quicker versus maybe Dave Ramsey would have said, don't you invest until you pay off every credit card and every penny of that student loan. Who's right? Who's wrong? Dave is right for the person who can't handle the stress of knowing I lost a thousand dollars and that could have went towards my credit card debt. To me, I'm like, I lost a thousand dollars, but I paid the minimum on my credit card debt. Next month, I'm going to use a thousand again to try to make ten thousand from it so I can get out of debt quicker. That was more interesting to me to be able to get out of debt quicker than it was to pay the full amount and know it's going to take me 10 years. So it really just depends on the person. Now, if you're on the other side of the coin, like some of us are, you're like, OK, I don't have any debt and I have extra 10 grand. You can put the whole 10 grand in there, but then it goes back to what is your personal finance plan? If you're like, but I really should be putting another five grand in my Roth and preparing for retirement, then maybe you only put five grand into the stock market. If you're like, I'm really also trying to build my real estate portfolio because this is going to be my retirement income. Again, maybe you put five grand. If you have 10 grand every month, for example, you put five grand in the stock market, maybe you put five grand away and you're like, that's $60,000 at the end of the year, I'm going to use to buy another property or put down as a down payment. So that's where personal finance becomes really personal. And what's important is you have a plan. It's not really about a percentage and do this, do that. It's like, well, what's your plan for the money? What's your goal? What is even your goal for getting in the stock market. Because if you're like, oh, I got five grand, I can just blow it on the stock market. Well, what's your goal? Is it to have fun? Because you could just go downtown to MGM and have fun. So what is the goal? You really have to think about that. And that's what I would say when it comes to figuring out how much or a certain number that you should put away into the stock market. It boils down to the plan. Most people don't have a plan, though. Yeah.

Seth Williams: This idea of taking a thousand bucks and turning it into a hundred grand in a year. Do you have any like case studies or examples or like like what has to go right for that to actually happen? Like, is it basically just making a series of good decisions over and over again? Or like, does it go down at some point in that process? Or like, if I want to do that right now, like what's my game plan?

Jason Brown: Yeah, I want to be a thousand to a hundred thousand in a year is extreme, but a thousand to ten thousand a year is very reasonable in the stock market. Because like I said, you have that leverage. If a stock goes up at one thousand can turn three thousand. So then what starts to happen is you go into your next trade with three thousand. You could technically do that three times at once. So let's just say you had an investment in the stock market. It went from one thousand three thousand in 90 days. You now have nine months, but you have three sets of a thousand. Now, if you do that one more time or spread out over three different stocks, they all make three thousand each. You could end the year with twelve thousand dollars. Haven't only started with one thousand and technically only made four trades technically. So that's not a lot of trades. That's not a lot of investing. But it comes down to, are you researching? What's moving? What stocks? Is this the best time to buy? Is this the best time to sell? That's why it's more research than it is putting the money into something. People say, I got $10,000. What should I do? I said, paper trade, virtual trade. Make sure you understand how to research and practice first. Then if you're right practicing, you can add real money. But the research is where really the rubber meets the road. Because I can give you a million dollars right now and say, invest it for me, Seth. If you're like. I don't know what stocks to buy. Then the money isn't the asset. Your knowledge and research of how to go find the assets that can move is really where the money is made. It's not people say I would be richer if I had more money to invest. It's like, okay, here, I'll give you a hundred thousand of my money. What would you invest in? Well, now I got to go take a course or I got to learn real estate or now I got to go learn the stuff. It's like, no, you should have been learning it. So when the $100,000 shows up, you're ready, which lets me know that the $100,000 isn't the asset. It's this right here, what you know. Do you know how to grow it, whether it's in the stock market or in real estate? And so that's what has to go right. But the first thing that needs to go right is your level of being able to research and do some basic chart reading and understanding of where the puck is going.

Seth Williams: How much research do you have to put in before you feel confident doing a trade? Like, is it a certain number of hours or like the Ulta example? Like, do you just kind of go into a store like, man, there's a long line around here. Might as well trade with this one. Like, are you looking at some chart somewhere? Like, how do you know? OK, I officially have enough information. I can confidently make this trade now.

Jason Brown: Yeah. So like in that auto situation or most any situation, I first start with a chart. I say, where's the stock been? Where is it currently at? Where do I think it can go? Those are like the three questions. Where has it been? Where is it at? Where do I think it can go? So auto, I immediately looked up the ticker symbol. And then when I went home, I pulled up the chart and say, where has it been? Where is it at and where it can go? That's the first thing. Second thing, just from after looking at the chart, I say, what do they do? So I don't go. What do they do first? I go look at the chart. Where has it been? Where is it at? Where can it go? Then I'm saying, OK, who is this company? What do they make? So then I'll do just a basic profile search. Like, what do they make? Who are their customers? Oh, it's women. It's makeup. It's this. Is that? I'm like, oh, OK. Right. Those are the first two starting points. The third thing I might do is go look at the option chain and say, OK, how much to control this stock? And for how long, how long do I think it'll take to go where I think and go and how much will that cost me? And I'll look for ways to hedge. Right. Is there a way to do a strategy where I reduce some of the risk to get involved in this, which might be a covered call, might be a covered put? I won't explain what those are. They probably can Google them, but it's a way to kind of get paid up front and take some money off the table just to get your feet wet with the trade. So that's the process that I would go through. Maybe the fourth thing, you know, for those who are listening, I'll also say, who is their competitors? I'm trying to figure out, are they the best at this? Are they the only ones that do this? Because you might've found them and then you might find that maybe it's Maybelline is bigger than them or something. So maybe I should be going with Maybelline or maybe I should be going with, I don't even know another beauty supply, but you. So so those are the steps that I would take initially. Now, what you could do once you have your kind of initial analysis, like I built what's called a stock market research agent or power trades agent for our members. It pulls back the research the same way that I would do. So our members can go into our platform, put in a ticker symbol. It'll pull back a summary of the company, their most recent earnings, the questions that were asked on the earnings call, headwinds, tailwinds, major competitors, where did the growth or the loss come from in their revenue? So it'll pull back a research report so that you don't have to think about it. And you can leave pretty confident. You have a general understanding of what this company does, who their competitors are, and where things can go. And then you just need to go look at the chart on your own. So I like using tools like that or building my own to say, this is my research process. That's awesome. And that's where you start to get faster with it. When you say, okay, how can I process a hundred stocks in a day? I run it through this kind of systematic approach. Sure. Yeah. It makes a ton of sense.

Seth Williams: Well, Jason, totally appreciate you hanging out with me today. It's been awesome to talk to you. Hopefully the listeners out there got some new insights to the stock market trading concept that they maybe had never thought of before. I know, I know. Sorry about that. But if people want to find out more about you, Jason, where should they go? What's the best place?

Jason Brown: Yeah, well, thanks for having me. It's been cool to kind of just catch up. Yeah, of course. With you over this last hour. The best place to just catch up with me or learn about me is thebrownreport.com. That's where they can connect with me through all my social platforms. They can check out our free PDF. They can check out the book, the podcast. Everything is just at thebrownreport.com or brownreport.com. Even if you drop the the, I own both URLs. Cool, man.

Seth Williams: And I will include links to all of Jason's stuff in the show notes, retipster.com forward slash 271. Jason, again, great to have you. Everybody else, we'll talk to you next time.