Episode 1331: The Low-Stress Revenue Stream for Business Owners with Troy Broussard

What if you could generate more cash flow from the market without staring at charts all day or taking unnecessary risks? In this episode of Sharkpreneur, Seth Greene interviews Troy Broussard, CEO and Founder of Low Stress Trading, who shares how entrepreneurship, health scares, crypto losses, and high-stress trading led him to develop a simpler, more disciplined approach to options trading. He explains that his framework uses covered calls and cash-secured puts within a repeatable, mathematically based system designed to generate cash flow without the demands of day trading. Troy also discusses why patience and discipline are more important than prior trading experience, and he shares examples of students who have used the framework to pursue greater financial independence. Key Takeaways: → More aggressive trading isn't necessarily better because day trading and other high-intensity strategies can create unnecessary stress and risk. → Simplicity is a core objective, with the goal of creating an approach that does not require spending all day watching the market. → A successful strategy should be predictable, repeatable, and mathematically grounded, giving people a framework beyond intuition. → Patience is essential when trades don't immediately deliver the desired results, especially during periods of market volatility or pullbacks. → The ultimate goal is financial freedom, and the strategy is designed to help people generate additional cash flow and greater financial independence. With a background in electrical and nuclear engineering from his time in the U. S. Navy, Troy Broussard has spent the past two decades building a career as a parallel entrepreneur. He’s founded multiple companies in software development, SEO, marketing automation, and business coaching, and still actively runs 5 of them. He’s also authored more than 45 privately published books. Today, Troy is best known as the CEO & Founder of Low Stress Trading, which has taught thousands of students a simple, repeatable framework for generating weekly premium from options trading in just an hour or two each week. Connect With Troy: Website: https://troybroussard.com/

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Sharkpreneur Podcast with Kevin Harrington and Seth Green. Kevin Harrington is the inventor of the infomercial, one of the original sharks from the hit TV show Shark Tank, and has generated over $5 billion in TV and digital direct response sales. Seth Green is the world's first trusted authority on cutting-edge direct response marketing, a bestselling author, and the only three-time marketer of the year nominee. On the podcast, Kevin and Seth interview sharkpreneurs who share straight talk on what it takes to explode your business.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Forty-nine faces looked to him in triumph. Over the last 12 months, they had each taken turns and promoted his business for a week at a time, driving over $987,342 in revenue. What if you had a network of 50 centers of influence who promoted your business every week for a year? Grab your copy of the number one Amazon bestselling book, The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Business with a Podcast. It's 33% off the Amazon price by going to ultimatenpodcastbook.com. Again, that website for 33% off the Amazon price is ultimatenpodcastbook.com. Welcome to the podcast. This is your host Seth Green. Today, I've got the good fortune to be interviewing Troy Broussard from Low Stress Options. Troy, thanks so much for joining us.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  Oh, you know, I'm happy to be here as always. I appreciate the invite.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  My pleasure. Full disclosure, I am currently a client of Low Stress Options, so I just wanted to get that out of the way. Now, let's go back in time a little bit because you haven't always been in this business. How did you get started?

• 1:39Speaker 02

  You know, I've done a lot in my career. Honestly, when I tell everything that I've done, it would waste your entire podcast here and people wouldn't believe it anyway. This is like the 28th company that I've created and, you know, people like to say, "Oh, you're a serial entrepreneur." No, I'm a parallel entrepreneur. I rather loathe that serial term because it's like the squirrel chasing the latest and greatest, and that's not me. But I maintain my businesses, right? So I run five different companies right now. I build them up, I get them going, I put a COO and staff in place and let them pretty much stay on their own, right? And move into the next thing that I'm doing.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  But I had kind of a panic down in Brazil, running my software company a while ago, that sent me into... I was really lucky. I mean, I could have easily gone into a diabetic coma. My spike was so high. People have, you know, died from the A1C levels that I hit. I was at like 14.7, just massive spike. And, you know, it caused me to have kind of a wake-up call about my life and the stress levels and the amount of stuff I was doing. I ended up going blind for about three weeks. Not where I couldn't see anything, but legally blind. I couldn't, you know, read a computer screen. I couldn't read my phone without shoving it right in my eye, you know?

• 3:04Speaker 02

  And I couldn't drive. My wife had to shuffle me around. And it was a real wake-up call, right? And during that same time, a really good friend of mine in his 40s died of cancer, and that kind of shook me up too, right? And so I kind of took a year off and kind of just started thinking of what I could do different. I'd been in the software as a service company and automation and email and marketing side of things for so long that I wanted to kind of look at other things that could be less work, less stressful. And I remembered back to, you know, how much fun I had trading crypto for years.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  And I'd been an early investor in Bitcoin since $110 Bitcoin, right? And, you know, I'd love to say that I was smart enough to hold on to it through all those years, but I'm not going to lie to you, you know? I thought I was a genius when I flipped it for a 10x, you know, ROI and say, "Hey, 10x my money, great." Yeah, now look at it, right? But I've been in and out of crypto for years. I still, I still, you know, hold and do it. I don't trade it, but I just hold it. And so I kind of had that trading bug hit me, right? And I kind of got into that. And then, just long story short, you know, all the drama in crypto and the Celsius and all the other things that happened. And then what really hit me does FTX collapse.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  So I had a lot of money on FTX. I mean, a lot. I was doing like 20 and 30 Ethereum grid line trades where I would have, you know, literally like 200 Ethereum traded across multiple price points, sitting there on the exchange, doing limit orders and stuff. And so I had, in order to do those types of trades, you have to have your money on the exchange. And I got to this point where I had done really well with crypto. I had, you know, blown up my portfolio in a year and done really great with it. And I just started like feeling a little stressed about having that much money sitting on the exchange. And so, you know, call it divine intervention, call it just plain candid dumb luck.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  It is what it is. But about a week before FTX collapsed, I took like 95% of my money off of the exchanges. And I had, you know, put it into cold storage and decided to kind of take a break for a little bit. And the next week, FTX collapsed, right? And I still lost, you know, several thousand dollars in the collapse, but it was nothing compared to what I had on that exchange. And so that was like yet another cold dose of, you know, a cold shower for me, right? I had the health scare and then I had the financial scare. And I said, you know, "Look, I like trading. I'm having fun with trading, but I don't like, you know, this drama about the money and it's unregulated. There's all kinds of..."

• 5:58Speaker 02

  This was under the Biden administration where they had just an all-out war on the, the SEC did on crypto, was suing everybody, Kraken and Coinbase and all kinds of stuff. And I just said, you know, "I need something a little more chill than this," right? And so I started looking into stock trading and that kind of, you know, got me into things. I, like everybody, made the mistake of going aggressive first instead of going conservative, right? And so I got into day trading and trading SPY on the one-minute charts and swing trading and shorting and all kinds of crazy stuff, even dabbled in Forex for a little bit. Never played around with futures, but looked at them a little bit, but did a whole bunch

• 6:41Speaker 02

  of credit spreads and debit spreads and playing that game. And it, I ended up kind of creating the same thing I was trying to avoid, right? I ended up creating more stress and drama. And when I lost a bunch of money on day trading on a Friday when I was headed out, I thought I couldn't lose. I had these trades open. They were just set to expire worthless and it was going to be, you know, about a $3,000 day. And I got cocky and I said, "Honey, let's jump in the car and leave early on the weekend. We're headed up to Savannah, Georgia for a fun family getaway." And on the way there, you know, Powell got up there and spoke on stage and the whole

• 7:21Speaker 02

  thing collapsed and that, you know, $3,000, $4,000 profit turned into an $11,000 loss and an emergency wire money into my account for a margin call and all this stuff, right? And, you know, that just sent me down the path of realizing I had to do something different, man, which I started experimenting around with the wheel strategy and very common in the industry, very conservative approach, but a little too conservative for me. It just wasn't making enough money, right? And, you know, the wheel strategy is a great strategy. I don't talk down about it at all. It's, we are based on the wheel strategy, on the premise of it for what we teach.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  But what I did is I took the same tools as the wheel strategy, which is covered calls and cash secured puts. And I bolted on a framework around it, a set of kind of guidelines of how to refine it and make it, I would say, hyper-effective compared to the wheel strategy, right? And so, you know, we tend to get a lot higher results than it in a shorter time and with smaller account sizes, right? Which was a big issue for me because I was very gun-shy at this point. I didn't want to have to put a quarter of a million in to make 20,000 or 30,000 a year. Like, that wasn't going to do it for me, which is kind of typical in the wheel strategy.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  And so, you know, that's, that's kind of what led my adventure in testing, man.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  That is a fascinating story. Full disclosure, I'm a customer of your email company as well. So the name Low Stress Options is intriguing. What does that mean to you?

• 8:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, it really is emblematic of everything. You know, I think of all the things we got right, the thing we got the most right was the name of the company, right? My, you know, I don't need to scare everybody and pull my shirt down here on camera, but you know, I've got a 14-inch scar on my chest where I was gutted like a fish about a year ago and had a triple heart bypass surgery. And, you know, low stress is absolutely at the core of everything we do. I wanted something that would allow me to make up for lost time. I lost my entire retirement in early 2000s when I cashed it out and paid the IRS penalty to invest it in a land development company

• 9:43Speaker 02

  that I was in with my brothers. And, you know, that didn't turn out so well in 2008, as I'm sure most people can tell. We made millions before we got there, but we lost a lot more in the process, you know? And, and so for me, low stress was really at the core of everything we do. It's why this isn't day trading. It's something that you can do in an hour to a week. It's something that as a full-time, you know, employee, you can do. We have doctors. We even have like a surgeon that trades this. We have chiropractors and dentists that trade it. It's, it's a very straightforward approach that really doesn't take a lot of time.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  And it is low stress and, and that's what we keep it in, right? I like to say it's boringly profitable, Seth. We don't try to teach you everything we can. I don't try to impress you with how much I know about options. I don't try to impress you with my background and all of that kind of stuff. I, I just want to impress you with simplicity. That's it. I want to make it, you know, there's a, there's a really good analogy that a friend of mine says, and I think it's absolutely on target. And he says for something to be, you know, hyper-successful, it's got to be predictable. It's got to be repeatable, and it's got to be mathematically based. And, and that's what this is, right? It's a very predictable framework. You know kind of what's going to happen.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  There's parameters. You stay within them. It's most importantly, repeatable. And, and this is the thing, you know, in all the other companies that, that I've built, I was able to be successful in most of them, a couple of them not. But most of them, I was able to be successful myself. But getting somebody else to be able to repeat your success, that is the secret sauce, right? Because a lot of people have kind of an intuitive thing that they do. Like, I'll give you an example, speaking on stage, being a successful speaker, right? You can't teach that. Now, you can take somebody from a level three to a level six or something. Like, you can improve them, but you can't make somebody an eight, nine, or 10 as a speaker.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  They either have that natural charisma and know how to read a room intuitively, right? Or they don't. And can you make them better? Yes, but you can't, you know, really just teach that. It's not repeatable. And so that was a big focus for me, is creating a framework that was repeatable for people to follow. And I'm really proud of that more than anything else. We have people that, the vast majority of our students have never traded an option before, don't even know what an option is when they started up with us. And, and, and that's what I'm kind of most proud about. But then lastly, it's got to be based on math. The math has to math, as I like to say, you know, the math has got to math.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  You've got to make it make sense mathematically, and, and that's what we do, right?

• 12:41Speaker 01

  That is absolutely incredible for, I love that you answered a question before I asked it about the vast majority of your folks have never traded an option before, which talks about how easily learnable your strategy is. Tell us a little bit, obviously, we don't want you to give away the secret sauce, but tell us a little bit about, say, the type, one of, an example of a student and kind of what, because you talk about replicating success. Give us an example, and their identity can be John Smith if it needs to be confidential. But talk a little bit about an example of one successful student, kind of where they were when they started and where they're at now.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, we just had a student that posted a review up on TrustPilot just, just today. And he, you know, left his full name and, you know, so I, it's already out there in the public. And, and that's something I can, I can share with you. And I'll, I'll pull that up here in just a second so I can, you know, give you that so people can go read it for themselves. Just one second here. But his name is, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, Jack Rodasta. And he just posted a review. He's been with us for many months now. And I, I love the storyline because he said, you know,

• 13:57Speaker 02

  you put your faith in like the professional money market and managers and all of that. And he had done that. And I don't want to be accused of misquoting the statistics. So please read the actual post to get the exact numbers. So I don't want to, I don't remember the exact number off my head. But what he talked about is, you know, how he got like, I think it was like 5.7% year-to-date with his money manager. And in the first month alone with us, he hit over 7% in just the very first month and, and moving his, you know, portfolio over to us rather than just leaving it in kind of a money manager-based stuff. And, and we see this time and time again. There's hundreds of reviews up there. Now, there's the occasional, like anything, man, there's the occasional naysayer,

• 14:42Speaker 02

  the guys that, you know, want to live and die by unrealized, you know, losses and gains and all of that. But I like to tell people, you know, just look at the word. It says unreal right at the beginning of it. It is. It's theoretical. It's unrealized. And, you know, I, just like you can't pay the bills with Facebook likes, you can't pay your mortgage with unrealized gains either because they are unreal. So we don't talk about the unrealized numbers. We talk about cash numbers, which, you know, if you have an accounting background, you kind of understand this, this cash versus accrual-based accounting, right? There are two different ways of how you can report your accounting to the IRS. And they're both respected, and they're both legal, and they're both accurate, right?

• 15:27Speaker 02

  And that's what we do. We do a cash-based tracking, which is accurate to the penny. And it has to be because we real-time synchronize with your brokerage and balance to the penny with your brokerage balance. It's just that the perspective that we look at is cash-generated as opposed to theoretical losses or theoretical gains, right? So, yeah. Jack has, has done really good with this, but I'm sorry, I miss, did I misspeak his name? I'm terrible with names. I'm a numbers guy. Yeah, Jack.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  You know, I'm a Navy Nuke guy, right? So I'm a numbers guy, not a, not a names guy. But, but Jack's one of many, like, we just had, one of the, probably the most predominant ones for me is a lady that is retired already. She's living off social security. She had a small nest egg. And she was, she's, by her own admission, she said she was about six months away from having to sell her little place and move in with her brother. And she's like, you know, my place isn't anything fancy. It's just a little one-bedroom, small, little 1,200-foot, you know, home. But it's mine, and it's my space, and I have my independence, right? And she came in and got started with this.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  And she's been able to maintain that and now has added cash flow to supplement her social security and is in just cloud nine, you know, so happy that she didn't get forced into, you know, finances dictating her future. She was able to stay independent. So that's probably the one that honestly is the most touching for me because it's, everything we do is really about financial freedom.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  That is absolutely incredible. You've helped so many thousands of people achieve that financial independence. What's your biggest challenge now?

• 17:17Speaker 02

  You know, you have to continue to create goals for yourself. And, and my goal is not really my personal account. I'm trading a large account at this point. I've more than hit my personal goals. So I'm not really, you know, focused on that. My goal is, is focusing on the community. We didn't track this for the first, like, 18 months of the, of the company. But in the last 18 months, we rolled out a challenge coin program where, you know, people prove their, their earnings through their account. And then we reward that with the coins that we send out for them when they hit their first 1,000 and they hit their 5,000 in premiums and all of that, right? All the way up to $5 million.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  And, you know, so we have a very accurate tracking of the people in the last 18 months. Now, it's not fully encumbering of everyone because some people decide not to, to track, right? So some people don't share that, and that, and that's okay. So it's only a subset. But what's there is already crossed over $53 million that we've helped our students generate. And I don't take success, I don't take, you know, credit for that. It's, it's their success. They earned it. They did the work. They put in the effort learning the framework. They, you know, put it on the line. They showed up every week. So I don't want to act like I'm taking credit for that. I'm not.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  I gave them a tool, but they had to, you know, swing the hammer, right? And they had to hit their nut, their thumb instead of the nail every once in a while as well, which is part of the process. But I'm really fixated on that number. I want to get that to 100 million. I want to get that to a billion. Those are the, that's what drives me at this point. It's, it's not really my own personal goal anymore.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  That is amazing. What is the goal? You talk, again, we're not quoting specifics, but you talk about what the goal is for a low-stress options student in terms of the rate of return they're kind of shooting for. Can you just tease us just a little bit?

• 19:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, we have a metric that we shoot for. And, you know, I want to be very clear because people think that when I say this, that somehow you're guaranteed this. No, you're not. Nothing is guaranteed in the stock market, right? A company can go out of business. Things can go wrong, right? We've had CEOs executed on the street. We've had, you know, crazy financial things happen, you know, Lehman Brothers and Enron and all kinds of stuff, right? So, anything can happen in the stock market. But what we target and this framework is a 1% a week on your portfolio, right? And that is a metric

• 20:04Speaker 02

  that, you know, a lot of our students are hitting very consistently. Now, sometimes there's going to be weeks where you don't hit that, right? And if the market has a big pullback, then you're certainly not going to hit that same 1%. But the difference is you'll be making money when the market's going down. Now, maybe you'll be making less money, okay? But investors sit there, if the market collapses 50% like it did in the dot-com era between 2000 and 2013, it dropped 55%. That's what's known as a lost decade, right? And if you get, you know, into that situation, you have nothing that you can do other than wait for it to recover. Now, maybe you've got a little bit of dividend

• 20:48Speaker 02

  money coming in or something, but other than that, you're just going to be sitting there. And I call it, instead of, you know, buy and hold, I call it buy and hope because you're hoping the market recovers, right? But with us, you know, are you going to hit 1% a week in, you know, in the lost decade type scenario? No, you're not. But you're going to be making, you know, 0.3%, 0.5% a week. You're still going to be making money every single week and chipping away at that and recovering your account a lot faster than you would if you were just sitting there as a buy and hold investor. So, you know, for me, that's, that's what we talk about in the framework. We target 1%. If you look at the sales page, in fact, you'll see that I'm very disclosing of the fact

• 21:33Speaker 02

  you're not going to always get it. I had a period for like 21 out of 22 weeks that's disclosed right on the sales page where I did not hit 1%. And that happens, right? I was heavy in a position that pulled back like 75%. But I came out of it making a lot of money. I came out of it making profit. I just had to be patient, right? And I like to tell people in this, this particular program, those are the only two skills you need is discipline and patience. That's it. If you don't have the tech background, if you don't have the trading background, if you've never opened a brokerage account, if you've never traded stock, never traded off, we can help you with all of that. What we can't do is make you patient, right? What we can't do is insist that you trade every week and follow

• 22:16Speaker 02

  the framework. Those discipline skills, those patience skills, that's really the, the secret sauce, and it's really the only two ingredients you need to have.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  Well, we greatly appreciate your time. We know it's incredibly valuable. For our folks watching and listening who want to learn the low-stress options way to financial freedom and generating extra revenue, where should they go?

• 22:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's really simple. LowStressOptions.com. Make sure when you go there, you'll see that it's different than anybody else in the industry. It's not a little squeeze page that gives you a one little blurb, right? It is the entire offer on that sales page before you even opt in. And so, if you read through it and you're not comfortable, you don't like what you see, you don't even need to opt in, right? And we don't like playing games with people. I'm former military. We like to be full disclosure. Now, I highly encourage you to click the link and, you know, join onto the email list so that we can send you alerts about when we do live presentations. We do them every single week. And then jump on a presentation. We do them on Zoom meetings, just like this, where

• 23:20Speaker 02

  you can see us face to face, ask any questions you have. Be skeptical, be jaded. I encourage that. We have to earn your trust. And if we don't, then you shouldn't invest. And, you know, the sales page is really long. It's really long. That's a litmus test. Remember I said you're going to need a little patience? So, there you go.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  Well, we greatly appreciate your time. We know it's incredibly valuable. This has been Seth Green with Troy Broussard from LowStressOptions.com. Troy, thanks again for joining us.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  Thank you, Seth. Appreciate it.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Our pleasure. Thanks, everybody, for watching or listening. We'll talk to you or see you next time.