Stock Forex

Faced with time and financial freedom, I ended up writ­ing a book. I never did go back to college to get my teaching degree, but I did end up with a book in the bookstores. Since that time, I have written several more. I entered the lecture circuit and started traveling the country. My semiretired state was really becoming a fun career. This also gave me the opportunity to make more money.

I knew I didn’t want to put the excess money into savings accounts. I did buy a lot of second mortgages, which kept my cash flow ever increasing. In addition, $5,000 here and $10,000 there went into stock market investments.

I opened up a brokerage account and bought mutual funds, one of which had gone up in value 14% each of the previous three years. As soon as I bought it, it went down 2%. Quite a few stocks went up in value, but most of them floundered around and many went down. I figured the stock market was not for me, because I was going to have to learn a whole new set of rules and vocabulary to be successful at it. Meanwhile, I was still involved with real estate and teaching seminars.

Then I got a call from a friend who at that time was a stockbroker. He wanted to take me to lunch and explain what he was doing with many of his clients.

At lunch that day, I listened to a most fascinating idea, which struck a responsive chord telling me it was right and true, especially at that time. He wanted me to buy 100 shares of Motorola stock. (I don’t do this with Motorola any more. The stock started to climb up to $100 a share and has since had a two-for-one split. The stock went back down to $50 and is now trading at around $70 a share. Maybe it will roll again, but I am just not sure.)

I bought 100 shares of Motorola at $50 a share for $5,000 plus $80 in commissions. The stockbroker asked me to put the stock up for sale at $60. Those of you who are familiar with the stock market and have brokerage accounts realize that you can put an order in to sell and take off for Hawaii. If, and when, the stock hits $60 a share, the sale will be triggered automatically by computer.

I put in the order to sell at $60 a share. About six weeks later, the stock hit $60 and the computer sold it. I had $6,000 in my account, minus about $90 in commissions. I made about $830 profit on this transaction. Then the stockbroker said to put in an order to buy the stock again at $50 a share. I put in an order for 108 shares at $50. About five weeks later the stock rolled backed down to $50 and the computer triggered a buy. Now I was the owner of 108 shares of Motorola at $50 a share.

At that time, the stock dropped down to around $48 or $49, and I was getting kind of worried. But it climbed right back up to $60 a share and the computer triggered a sale again. I had the excess profit in my account. The stock rolled from $50 to $60 a share several times and kept climbing up to $61to $62, so I did miss out on some of the profits. I did this particular stock many times for several years.

This cab driver had found a way to do a meter drop on Wall Street.

I contend that the stock market makes a perfect home-based business and/or a perfect place to develop extra income even if you are working or relying on an existing business. I am convinced that in every respect and aspect it is far superior to most other businesses. I have had a lot of businesses, from one-man shows to a large (in my estimation) 300+ employee corpo­ration. Currently I am Director and President of Profit Financial Corporation—whose main subsidiary, Wade Cook Seminars, Inc., is a powerhouse.

I have taken years to build the business and took it public in May of 1995.1 only bring this up because I have employees, payroll taxes, advertising, and every other outlay of cash as well as concerns and considerations associated with running a large business. At times the “busyness” gets in the way of my true loves: family, teaching and working the brokerage accounts. I have tried to blend them together. I do owe an allegiance to my shareholders to be profitable. I have to make public how I work my stock and option deals in the corporate account. It is fun, profitable, and is building a tidy fortune for my immediate family (wife and children) and my share­holder family.

I realize that as I make a case for treating the stock market like a business, that I am competing with every “Amway” type company out there. My story is different though, be­cause I am not inviting you to join my “downline.” I want you to make a ton of bucks and keep ALL of them. I judge my success as an educator, not by how much I put into people but how much they get out of it. The business comparison can go a long way because you are probably familiar with most aspects (whether you are actually experienced or not) of running a business. Indeed, being familiar with what it takes to be successful may have caused you to get into business. We will dispel some falsehoods in a most unusual way. I will approach the comparison of using the stock market as a business by first stating the we are going to take a totally unconventional approach to creating a stock market income portfolio.

This made it clear to me that the bottom line to wealth is duplication and repetition. A hamburger in Tampa Bay must taste just like a hamburger in San Francisco Bay, and McDonalds took advantage of this, not by selling one gigantic hamburger, but by selling billions of little ones—and french fries. Repetition made the McDonalds fortune.

About nine months after I started driving, Mrs. Potter called us all in for a meeting between shifts. While we were waiting for her to come in, all the cab drivers were bragging about how much money they were making. Bill Marsh sat there and said he had made more money in one month than anybody there. I casually asked him how much he made. With a note of triumph, he said, “One month I made $900.” All the cab drivers started oohing over him, thinking that $900 was a lot of money.

Now remember, my lowest month was over $3,200. But I said with a smile, “Boy, that is a lot of money, Bill.” No way was I going to mention to these guys how much I was making. They could see the rental properties I was buying and draw their own conclusions, but to this day, they still don’t know.

On to real estate. At first, I did not follow the lesson I learned as a cab driver. I went out and started the old buy-and-wait game. I waited for inflation, waited for Washington D.C. tax write offs, and waited for other things I had no control over. After a year of playing the buy-and-wait game— the rental game—I had to sell one of my properties. I desper­ately needed money. I sold the property, received some cash for the down payment and carried back a mortgage. The key, however, is that I didn’t get all cash up front. I sold the property under what you would call “owner financing.”

I sat in my taxi, staring at the check I received from the down payment, and realized something: I had purchased this little property with $1,200 down; when I sold it, even after closing costs, I still ended up with $2,200—$1,000 more than I put into this property in the beginning. And, I would receive net monthly payments of $125 for 28 years.

I just stared at the check. I had stumbled across a whole new way of investing. I thought, why am I playing this buy-and-wait game? Why am I turning my life over to renters? Why wait for tax write offs out of Washington D.C., hoping some benevolent congressman gets a depreciation bill passed through Congress? Why am I doing things I have no control over? Why don’t I just go out and buy properties to sell? Why not do the meter drop with my properties?

I figured that I could sell a couple more rentals right away and then target properties I could buy and fix up a little bit, then turn around and sell on this “money machine.”

Back then, I did not call it the “Money Machine.” I called this “turning properties” or “flipping properties.” Neverthe­less, I realized that I had to treat real estate like the “meter drop.” Instead of getting in and waiting, why not just buy for the sole purpose of reselling? This way I could build up a huge base of deeds of trust and mortgages and have monthly checks coming in. In the end it was these monthly checks that allowed me, and will allow you, to live the way we want.

At that time I had a lot of rental properties, but they were only making a little bit of money. If one renter didn’t pay one month, it ruined the profits for the whole month. I was constantly putting more money into taking care of these properties. Any of you who have had rental properties real­ize that no matter what kind of money you have lying around in the bank, any rental property will “eat it up” and take it away from you. The giant “sucking sound” is real.

The rental game is just not what it is cracked up to be. However, the “Money Machine” is a fabulous way to make money by literally forcing the issue—rapidly accumulating wealth. I did this over the next year. I went out specifically looking for properties I could buy and sell quickly. Again, it was the meter drop. Get the passenger in, get the passenger out, and get on to the next deal. After doing many of these properties, I was able to quit and retire at the age of twenty-nine.

When I was young, my goals were not lofty. I didn’t want to be President of the United States or conquer the world. My dream was to become a college professor. To educate myself to reach my dream, I needed income. I could not get any money from my parents, and because we were a middle class family, it was hard to get college grants and loans.

To generate income, I started up an insurance agency. I figured that if I wrote enough policies, I could have continual income from premiums—at least enough to support me through .college. But as hard as I worked to get policies on the books, it was still hard to get paid. I was successful, but it just wasn’t enough.

So I made two moves that changed my life permanently. First, inspired by the book How I Took a Thousand Dollars and Made Five Million Investing in Real Estate by William Nickerson, I turned to real estate. I borrowed money to buy my first couple of properties.

Second, simply out of the need to buy groceries for my family, I latched onto a job driving a taxicab. Have you ever had one of those experiences that afterwards continues to change just about everything else you do? Driving a taxi was just such an experience for me.

In order for you to understand what this is all about, you need to come back with me to my first day driving a cab. The company I started driving for, Yellow Cab Company in Tacoma, Washington, had a mandatory rule that entailed spending a day training with a cab driver-trainer named Bill Marsh.

After being out with Bill for about 45 minutes—30 minutes at Denny’s getting him a cup of coffee—I realized that I could handle this cab driving business on my own. As I watched what he did, it dawned on me that to be a successful cab driver you only had to do one thing.

I asked Bill if he would take me back to the lobby to get my own taxi. He said I had to spend the whole “mandatory” day with him. “Look,” I said, “could you please just take me back?”

Back at the cab company I talked to the owner/partner. “Mrs. Potter?” I said, “My name is Wade Cook. I’m a brand new cab driver. You don’t know me, but is there any way I can just take a taxi out for the day?”

She replied, “Oh no, no. You have to spend the day with Bill Marsh.”

I persisted. I explained to her that I knew Tacoma really well and told her that if she didn’t like what I did by five or six o’clock that afternoon, she would never see me again. She listened and ended up giving me a little beat-up Dodge Dart for the day.

I took it out that first day and made $110—that was my net. The second day I came back with about $90 profits and the third day about $140.1 was off and running. I began making between $3,200 and $3,800 a month. I needed about $1,200 a month to live on. I was able to take the rest, holding some out for taxes, and apply it to buying and fixing up houses. With this money, I purchased nine rental houses my first year.

My point here is the lesson I learned in driving a taxi—to me the most significant and powerful financial lesson I have ever learned in my life. In fact, since then I’ve hobnobbed with some of the greatest financial minds in the country (doing radio, TV talk shows and seminars in 43 different states), and nothing I’ve learned from any of those men and women is more powerful than what I learned my first day driving a cab. The lesson is simply this—MONEY IS MADE IN THE METER DROP.

What does “the meter drop” mean? Every time you get into a taxi, the driver pushes the meter down (nowadays it’s a computerized button), and it costs you $1.50 to $2. Whether it is a $5 run or a $50 run, you still pay $1.50 every time you get in the cab.

Many cab drivers only take big runs. In Tacoma they positioned themselves in town to get the run to Sea-Tac Airport, a $30 to $35 fare. At the same time, I was beating the cab to death by going for all the small runs. I would take the $3, $6 and $8 runs. At the end of some busy days I would have up to forty, fifty or sixty runs. You see the difference? I was killing them. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve had my share of big runs too. Sometimes a little $6 run would turn into a $15 run because the person my passenger was going to visit wasn’t home. However, those extra meter drops really added up to a lot of cash.

Can you get rich working for someone else?

Probably not, unless you make excess income and then get that extra income producing great returns.

Can you get rich owning your own business?

Yes, but most businesses fail. Even if the business does not fail, most take up too much of the owner’s (manager’s) time working on things which do not make him or her rich.

Is the American Dream still alive and well?

It truly is.

One secret of wealth accumulation has been that little extra something put aside and left to compound. Is the time right for you to “get rich?” After all, someone becomes a millionaire every 37 minutes. When is it going to be your turn? What superior knowledge do you have? What risks are you willing to take? What time can you donate to making a great financial life? This chapter is about getting rich—filthy rich if you want, with more income than you can possibly spend. I have thought long and hard about what I could write, what I could do to help you become a “cash flow millionaire.” I want you to read every word of this. Do not skip anything. I will build a case for you and show you in many ways that you can build up $12,000 to $35,000 per month cash flow—and do it in the next year. I will show you how to do it without vitamin pills, or any other multilevel concern. I will show you how to do it by first eliminating the risk—or at least making risk so negligible as to make it a non-item.

You will use Bear market strategies in the midst of a Bull market, and you can get started with $500 if that is all you have. It is doable. I have made tens of thousands of dollars a day—if you attend a stock market training session we will show you how you can build up this level of income. And you do not have to go through nine years of costly trial and error like I did. You will not have to be at the mercy of unscrupu­lous and unintelligent stockbrokers, as I have been. You can cut to the chase, start making huge returns in days and keep all your profits.

You might be asking yourself, “How can Wade possibly be talking about the stock market? Especially when funds man­agers claim bragging rights with 12% returns?” Can invest­ing really produce 18 to 42% monthly returns—month in and month out? And what kind of returns are these? I will answer all of those questions, but for now allow me to start with the last question. The kind of returns I am speaking of are actual cash—either hitting your account or mailed to your home or business. It is not growth, not tax savings, but money you can use.

For awhile—at least in the beginning—I suggest you use it for portfolio enhancement, either building more cash flow by doing more of what you did before, or buying some “hold” investments; or applying it to other formulas. Later, with a small amount of money, delve into riskier but incredibly profitable strategies to really make a big “bang” on your bottom line. Regardless of your choice, your return is in cash, not some poor substitute. I have always contended that WE, you and I and all my other students, can make more together than we ever can alone. It is true. I will lead the way. I will try and test new ideas, formulas, strategies, processes—you come along, buy my book, attend my ongoing classes, and then make millions, spending your profits the way you like.

Each person who attends my seminars does so for his own personal reasons. Some are just getting started and need to learn the basics, others are in business or want to be, and need help “growing” their business. Others are making good money but paying a high price in terms of stress, time away from their families, et cetera. Others have tax problems and a host of others are in various stages and want to learn how to keep and protect what they have as well as pass on what they have “scraped” together throughout their lives. And while they come for various reasons, they all have one thing in com­mon—they know there is a better way. A more excellent way, if you will. What is the saying, “Winners just find a better way to get there?”

Now that I have asked all these questions, who is this person asking these questions? Let me introduce myself briefly. I realize you may not know anything about me or my back­ground, or to what extent it will help you make more money. So I will be brief, but you need to walk in my shoes for a moment. I cannot help you in the present unless you know what got me here, what drives me, what my fears and passions are.