Master the Vertical Option Strategy: Insights from a Real-Life Fighter Pilot

 In this episode of "How to Trade It," Casey Stubbs sits down with the founder of Top Gun Options, Matthew "Whiz" Buckley. The conversation kicks off with Whiz sharing his background of being in the Navy and how he transitioned to become a successful trader.

Drawing parallels between military briefings and trading strategies, Whiz emphasizes the importance of being strategic and operational in addition to tactical. The two discuss Whiz's famous vertical option strategy and what is involved in its execution.

Some show highlights include...

• S-O-T Strategy and Red-Teaming
• Trade Plan, Discipline, and Risk Management
• Shift in Trading Approach – Double Vertical Option Strategy
• Psychedelic Space and Healing Initiatives

Resources Mentioned

• Books by "Whiz"...available on Amazon
• Top Gun Options Full Throttle

Connect with Matthew "Whiz" Buckley

• Website: https://topgunoptions.com/
• Website (non-profit): https://nofallenheroesfoundation.org/
• YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC-ooSZn3o1loFQBTp5Knyw
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/TopGunOptionsHQ
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100080715210829
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ematthewbuckley/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/official_whizbuckley/

Transcript

Casey Stubbs (00:00.362)
Hey traders, Casey Stubbs here, and I'm thrilled to welcome you to another exciting episode of How to Trade It. Today, I have the honor of sitting down with the one and only Wiz, founder of Top Gun Options. Get ready for an incredible journey as Wiz shares his background of being in the Navy and how he became a great trader. He talks about how he launched Top Gun Options and he draws parallels between military briefings and trading strategies. And of course, we'll add a high-

touch of humor as we discuss traders who might just have a death wish. Stay tuned as Wiz walks us through his strategic, operational, and tactical approach to trading, emphasizing the need for traders to be strategic and operational. He's going to give you a specific strategy and how to be tactical. So buckle up, traders. This episode is packed with wisdom, strategies, and maybe a few laughs. Let's dive in. Hey, Wiz, how are you doing today?

What's up, Casey? Thanks for having me, my brother. I appreciate it. All right. Well, I'm excited today. So give me a little rundown. How'd you get started trading options? Casey, I was born and raised in South Philly, South Jersey, and I was always taught service above self, right? Served your country, big Irish Catholic family. And so I knew I wanted to fly jets and I wanted to join the Navy. So from a young age, I knew I wanted to do that, but each morning before my dad would go to work, he was sitting there with the Atlantic City press in my face.

I remember looking on the back of the newspaper and seeing all these hieroglyphics and I'm like, dad, what is that stuff? He's like, those are stock prices. So folks, now you know how old I am. He's looking at stock prices in the newspaper. But my dad explained to me, well, buddy, that's a stock and let's say you and mom go to McDonald's today and buy a Happy Meal. If you owned shares in that company, you might make a little bit more money. That fascinated me. So when I went to the Navy, you don't join the Navy to be rich, right? You know as an army guy.

It ain't about the money when you serve your country. So in the Navy, I just started reading books on finance, started reading the Wall Street Journal because I was fascinated because obviously the military retirement ain't nothing right home about. So I took matters into my own hands. So I started applying everything I was learning as a fighter pilot to my trading, right? Because I have a saying that trading is a form of combat. Somebody is going to win and somebody is going to get the rear end handed to them. So why wouldn't I use the same

Casey Stubbs (02:26.882)
procedures, flying a fighter jet over Iraq that I did in my trading. And it worked extremely well, right? Having a strategy, a high level strategy, implementing tactics that support the strategy, contingency planning, right? Knowing if something bad happens, what I'm going to do and knowing what I'm going to do before the bad happens, right? Before I got airborne in a fighter jet, I contingency planned the time for me to figure out what to do.

If I get shot at by a missile over Iraq is not when that happens. I do that in the air conditioning sitting in, you know, sipping on my diet coke and also managing risk. Now your listeners might be sitting there like, okay, this guy's a fighter pilot. He's going to talk about managing risk. Exactly. So, you know, whether it's an options trader or fighter pilot, we want to minimize all known risks. So I kind of jumbled all that stuff together and it made me a, I'd like to say somewhat decent trader.

It worked so well that I popped up on the radar of one of the largest volatility arbitrage firms in the country, headquartered in the Chicago Board of Trade. So they gave me a call and said, hey, whatever it is you do, come up and do it for our multi-billion dollar trading firm. So that's kind of what my door into trading was, was just kind of teaching myself how to do it and realizing it's not rocket surgery, so to speak. It's not relatively hard at all.

You use your brain a little bit and you can do pretty damn good. So I was in the Chicago board of trade for about three years, I would say. And my wife is from Boca Raton, so no offense to anybody from Chicago. I'm a beach guy. I need the heat and sun and warmth. And Lake Michigan just didn't do it for me. So we moved from Chicago around 2009, 2010. Came down here to Boca Raton, Florida, where I started Top Gun Options.

teaching people, retail traders, how to trade equity options. So that's kind of my, a little bit about my financial journey. No, that's pretty cool. And I like what you said about trading the same way that you were handling being a pilot, because whenever I was in the military, we would have a briefing, right? So we get everybody together and we're like, okay, we're going. And so like when I was in Iraq, I was a truck driver. And so we would.

Casey Stubbs (04:48.034)
get everybody together like, okay, we're picking up over here. We're going to pull in, then we're going to drop off and we're going to meet up. These are the potential risks that we would have along the way. If we run into somebody, this is what we're going to do. This is how we're going to respond. This is the person that we... We have a full, like you said, strategy and tactics. Then when it was over, we would do the after action

to say, okay, how well did we follow along with our plan? How did we execute? What could we do better? How could we improve? So. Yep, nailed it. With trading, it's like most people are like, okay, they're sitting in their room, they're all by themselves, they don't have like a sounding board, they don't have a team, they don't have any way to do those kinds of things. So. Correct. How do you actually implement that into trading? Great question, so you nailed it. I actually do a Monday through Thursday.

I do what's called a live trade brief, kind of like you just alluded to. Before I got airborne on a mission or you got on the ground on a mission, we knocked out a brief. So, I do a live trade brief, you know, Monday through Thursday from about 10, 10 to 11, depends on what's going on in the market and in the world. And we go through all of that. And I actually, we actually have two investment clubs. One's called Max Afterburner and one's called the Hunter. So you're right. Sitting there in your bunny slippers.

you know, drinking your cup of coffee, watching CNBC, you're kind of trading in a vacuum. So here at Top Gun Options, we have a group and we red team each other as trades off each other. What do I mean by that? Before I got airborne on a mission, you know, Casey, if you and I were planning together, we'd look at each other like, man, we're brilliant. This plan is airtight, let's get airborne. Uh-uh, that's when one of us would have gotten killed. We go grab a couple guys or gals that...

weren't involved in our planning, but they have situational awareness as to what's going on and we brief them on our plan. When we get done briefing them, they immediately turn into our enemy and they start ripping it apart. They start trying to poke holes in it, right? Because if you don't red team your trades or your plan, maybe in the business world, who's going to do it for you? The market or your competition and they'll gladly do it for you.

Casey Stubbs (07:01.214)
So kind of in our live trade briefs, we have a little bit of a red teaming process. Somebody will throw a trade up and say, hey, here's what I wanna do, here's why. Rip it apart, folks. And sometimes we make it better. Other times I look at it and go, damn, that's pretty solid. And I'll take that trade. So you're right, you need a little bit of a sense of community. And that's what we do here at Topgen options. We do live trade briefs, and then we also have our investment clubs. I love what you said. Army guys call it an after action.

report, I call it a debrief. So if we ever have a losing trade, we figure out what worked, what didn't, and how we're not going to do that again. So even, you know, you can't take a losing trade or a winning trade and just move on to the next one. You know, I'm a writer. Some people have Word docs, other people have Excel sheets. I have trade journals, man. I think I'm the only guy that keeps staples in Office Depot and business, because I go buy stuff and I write it down. And the reason I write stuff down

is because, to your point, in a brief, before I ever get into a trade, before I hit the mouse and hit execute, I know when I'm getting out. Same thing on a combat mission, man. You don't wanna be in the middle of it, the fog of war, the fog of trading, and going, hmm, when should I get out of this thing? Uh-uh, I make that decision before I place the trade. So, when I close it, either for a max profit or minimum loss, I write down what happened.

Why was I profitable or why did I lose money? And a lot of people don't do that. A lot of retail traders are just on to the next one, on to the next one without getting a solid list of the lessons learned. Otherwise, you're just gonna, you know, you're gonna keep touching the hot stove even though you burnt your hand five other times. So stop, stop touching the hot stove, get some lessons learned after you, after you debrief or you have your after action report and improve your execution.

Yeah, that's the funny thing about traders is the hot stove analogy. I don't know what it is about traders in general, but it seems like they tend to touch the hot stove about a thousand times and really sometimes they never wake up and it's just kind of strange how that happens. It is. It's frustrating. But having that sense of community too.

Casey Stubbs (09:18.186)
to kind of reinforce the, hey man, last time you did this, didn't that happen? It's like, oh man, you're right. So, yeah, having a little bit of a group definitely helps people out. Yeah, yes. Now, let's talk a little bit about strategy. What's the way that you look at the market and what's your strategy for trading? I call it S-O-T, strategic, operational, and then tactical.

Most retail traders are not the first two things. They're not strategic and they're not operational. They are just tactical. They wake up, bunny slippers, cup of coffee, somebody on CNBC in a nice suit said something, let me listen to them. Wrong. In our briefs, I step through S-O-T, strategic, operational, tactical. So the first five, 10, 15 minutes of my live trade brief is strategic. I pick up the binoculars, man, and I look around the globe.

You have got to know what's going on overseas because it will impact US markets. Whether it was the Brexit, the Greek debt crisis, Ukraine invading, being invaded by Russia, world events move US markets. Back when Donald Trump was president, man, that trade war, the back and forth between the tariffs and the trade war and this round and that. So you have got to pick up the binoculars and look around the globe first.

What's going on around the world and will it impact me tactically? So after the S, the strategic part of my brief, we peel the onion one layer deeper and we look operationally here in the United States. Fed announcement, what's the Fed up to? What's Janet Yellen saying? What are earnings doing? How's inflation looking? How's the jobs number? So we peel back the onion after we're looking around the world, we look in the United States, what's going on right now.

And then after we do a good operational brief of what's going on in the US with all of those things, then and only then can we get tactical and start looking at trades. If you just wake up and start looking at potential trades without doing those two things, strategic and operational, man, you're gonna get blown out. You're a very tactical trader. And you can kinda shuck and jive for a little bit, but you're gonna burn out. So that's kinda my...

Casey Stubbs (11:38.87)
Strategy from top down is SOT, strategic, operational, and then tactical. So diving into the tactical a little bit, so after you look at the big picture, global picture, United States, and then you get into the tactics, which is, is that where you find an individual stock, and you're like, okay. You got it. And I'm gonna buy this stock, and then you come up with the individual plan. Do you primarily stick with stock trading? I'm an options trader, so obviously we gotta know

I had to be a pretty damn good stock trader, but I remember trading stock, I'll never forget when I became an options trader, I was a F-18 instructor in Miramar in San Diego, and I was sitting in the ready room in like 2000 trading, and a buddy of mine, fellow Hornet pilot, was a financial advisor before he said, you know what, I wanna fly just for the Navy. And he was looking over my shoulder, and his call sign was hacksaw. He said, Wiz, you trade stocks? I'm like, yeah, man, I'm brilliant, look at me. He's like, well,

Do you trade options, right? Do you sell calls against your long stock? I'm like, I have no idea what you're saying and that sounds like witchcraft. So we went to lunch on base at the golf course and it was without a doubt the best lunch I had in my life. He's like, look at you, you own a thousand shares, whatever, you can go out a couple weeks from now, sell an upside call against this, bring in some money. I'm like, wait a minute, that's free money. He's like, welcome to options trading. So.

That was my segue in options trading. I haven't looked back. Maybe I'll buy some stock and do a covered call if it's got a high dividend type of thing, but I am purely an options trader. To your point, when we get down to that tactical level at Topgen options, I have a seven step trade plan from what's my strategic mindset, what's the target, the ETF, the stock, the index, and then step three of my trade plan is what's called commit criteria.

When I'm flying around in an F-18 overhead the carrier and there's bad guys a couple hundred miles away, they're far away and they're not pointing at me. That does not hit what I call my commit criteria that I'm gonna commit my jet to go after them. Okay, now they're pointing at me, now they're climbing and accelerating. One, two, three, that hit my commit criteria. I'm gonna go point my nose at them. So in a trade, step three of our trade plan is commit criteria for why are you committing capital to this trade? I call it a...

Casey Stubbs (14:05.906)
your elevator pitch. If anybody's in sales, you know, you got 30 seconds or from the 30th floor to the ground floor to sell me on something. So you got to hit me with three to five sentences as to why you're committing your hard earned money to this trade. Three to five sentences, go. So that's the commit criteria part of our trade. And then an important aspect of our trade plan is any time one of those sentences changes, why are you still in the trade?

because a lot of people get in the middle of a trade and they're like, oh man, this is going against me. Should I leave? I'm like, why did you get in it? Well, these reasons. Did those reasons change? Yeah, why are you still in it, right? So I call it a pilot and command moment, right? If you look at your commit criteria, you know, a couple weeks or however long into a trade, and some of those senses have changed, you should eject. I call it eject. You should eject out of the trade. If you don't,

know that you signed for the jet, man. I signed for my F-18, you signed for yours, Casey, you signed for your portfolio, so know if this thing flies into the side of a mountain and you lose money, that's on you, right? So having a solid trade plan, and like I said, coming back a couple weeks later and seeing, that's why I write this stuff down, because when I look at a Word document or an Excel sheet, it's antiseptic, right? I can kind of blow it off. When I see my own chicken scratch, like,

hey, get out at this profit target or get out at this min loss. I wrote that. There's something about picking up a pen, engaging your brain housing group, and writing down when you're gonna get out for max profit or min loss, that kinda makes me look at my own writing going, dude, you should be getting out if you don't, you know, we're an idiot type of thing. So our trade plan process is pretty tight. I took it from Flying Fighters and mixed it with what I did.

in Chicago and the Chicago Board of Trade and came up with a nice, cool, uh, tight trade plan for people. Yeah, that's great. Welcome to the strategy segment where I talk about one of my trades that I make. I'm going to make an options trade, very simple strategy where I just buy weekly call options. And the idea is that I'm going to make one trade a week right here on the show and see how it goes. I'm using a.

Casey Stubbs (16:29.582)
great software that I've been testing by wise traders and I've been working with Guy Cohen on it and he's been teaching me and helping me do it. So I wanted to really do a live test on it. And so every week we're going to see this segment where I'm talking about this particular trade. And so for the first one, I bought Roblox and I bought it on November 2nd and the price that I paid was $6.

and 85 cents for the options contract. I bought a January 20, 25 call option for the 40 to 50 strike price. And I'm gonna keep this tracked in a spreadsheet and I plan on holding it for as long as it's continuing to move up. Or if it goes down, I'm gonna cut it. But I'm gonna give everybody an update every week. So this is the first trade was Roblox. I took this trade and.

Hopefully you guys enjoy following along. Give me some feedback if you like this segment, the strategy segment, at podcastattradingstrategyguides.com. All right, now on with the show. Now, when you're doing your checkup to see if it's time to eject or not, how often are you revisiting the trade? A lot of my trade, and this is really interesting, I'm glad you asked this, because a lot of my trades are set it and forget it. Not like I never look at it again, but here's, because a lot of folks,

are, as we talked about, very tactical traders. They'll place a trade and five minutes later, if it's red on their screen, they start panicking. I'm like, whoa, man, you gotta, so. When I was a lowly retail trader, right, I would adjust trades like crazy. Like, oh, it'd go against me a little bit, I'd adjust. And then, of course, a little bit later, it would go the way it was supposed to be going. I'm like, why did I do that? I would have death by adjustments on my options trades. I got to Chicago.

and started hanging out with the pros and they're like, adjustments? I'm like, yeah, you know, I can roll it up, roll it down, roll it out. They're like, dude, you knew the max risk when you got into the trade, right? I'm like, yeah, of course I did. Then that's the max risk, man. Live a better life, let that thing go type of thing. I'm like, wow, that completely changed the way I traded.

Casey Stubbs (18:51.806)
Now, a lot of retail traders look at a trade and go, oh my God, if I lose money on this trade, I'm gonna freak out. Then you're trading too large a position. Now, my trades, the max risk in many of my trades are an amount of money that I go, man, it's gonna suck, but it's not going to destroy me. I'll live the fight another day. I call it SOP, you know SOP, standard operating procedures. So in my personal portfolio and my model portfolios at Top Gun Options, I use a 5% rule.

$100,000 model portfolio, 5%. I do not want to risk more than 5% on any one trade. You can be 2.5%, you can be 7.5%, 10% is a little insane, but I personally use five. If I take the max loss in a trade, it's gonna leave a mark, but I ain't crying and head in the hands type of thing. So, pick a percentage of your portfolio and

Let that trade fly, because there are people like, oh my god, I got out of it early, and if I had kept it to expiration, would have made a max profit. I'm like, that's the learning point right there, folks. So maybe trade a little bit smaller and get more comfortable letting trades go, right? Because if your commit criteria, if those three to five sentences you came up with are solid and the trade's going against you, stay in it, man. If they're solid, if they've changed, uh-oh, those two sentences are no longer true.

then you think about getting out of it. But, you know, old me, Casey was a adjust, and I'd roll and maneuver so many times, I wouldn't even know if I'm making money or losing money, right? It's just death by adjustments. Hanging out with the pros, they're like, dude, let's go to the bar. I'm like, it's the middle of the day. Nah, let's go to the bar type of thing. They know what the max risk is, and if it happens, it happens. If it doesn't, they profit. So it's really interesting to see the two different mindsets between a pro.

and a retail trader. Yeah, that's very interesting because I think if you just let it go, it gives you more time to do other things, free up your day, free up your mental capital so you can think about more important things and do things, kind of relax a little bit, which is great because you don't want to be stressed out all the time. Correct. I mean, just let it go. I like that strategy. So when you first started, you got into covered calls, you'd buy the shares and you'd sell a premium.

Casey Stubbs (21:15.378)
said that you don't really do that anymore. Now you're more into just options. So give me an example of like a specific strategy that you would use. Are you just selling for premium? No, well, especially now looking at the market we're in with potentially World War III, you know, and the S&P is essentially down 20% from its high a couple months ago. We had that June, July-ish, you know, we had a summer tech rally and then the world ended, right? So the main tactic that I've been employing for the past couple months,

is a tactic called a double vertical. And these things have been printing money. Now you gotta be right, obviously, I mean, stupid statement, but of course you have to be right in trading. But this one you have to be really right. And here's what I mean. For example, today, or no, it was yesterday, in a live trade brief, I put on what is called a bullish double vertical on the S&P 500. I went out to mid-November, expecting a little bit of a Santa Claus rally. Now.

World War III could be coming, Israel-Iran, oil 200 bucks, all bets are off, but I'm ready to do a bearish double vertical. On the way down as the S&Ps imploded for the past month, month and a half, I've been pounding it into the dirt. We'll start with that, with a bearish double vertical. What's a double vertical? It's simply two trades on top of each other with the same strategic mindset. So let's talk through it real quick. You know, for the past two months, I've been bearish, right? So.

If you're bearish, I was bearish, I didn't think the S&P was going to go up. So what I would do would be sell a bear call spread. That's the roof, right? A bear call spreads the roof up here. I don't think the S&P is going to go through the roof. I think it's going down. So selling a bear call spread up here, it's also called a credit spread. You bring in money. You're paid to put a roof on the market. So there's one trade, bear call spread, credit spread, roof.

I'd take that money that the market gave me and I'd go buy a bear put spread, which is a debit spread. So I simply take the cash from the bear call spread and go finance a bear put spread, which is also a vertical spread, right? So there you go, boom. Bearish, double, vertical. Bear call spread, bear put spread. And these trades, you know,

Casey Stubbs (23:41.642)
returns anywhere from six to 10 grand. We did a bearish double vertical last week. I was flying out to Colorado to do a healing retreat with my foundation. It was one of those, set it and forget it. They took our phone so we can like focus. Trade was up 10 grand on limited risk. I think it was like $3,500 in risk. So these bearish double verticals can be, or any double vertical can be very profitable. The one we did yesterday that I started with was a bullish double vertical, getting ready for

Maybe in the next three weeks, World War III doesn't really happen and people start saying, you know what? I think we're oversold and we're going to get a little bit of a Christmas bounce. So I put on a bull put spread on the S&P 500 credit spread and that helped finance a bull call spread. I actually can have at various times, I have both of them on sometimes, dueling double verticals as the market implodes, close the bearish one and then as it rebounds, close the bullish one.

I call it dog fighting the market, just like in a fighter jet you can dog fight it, I call it dog fighting the market. In a volatile market, these double verticals are pretty cool. As you know, Casey, everybody's a genius when the market's going straight up, right? Not really. It's when the market turns and we start doing this stuff, that's where you make your money as an options trader. We've been having a lot of fun with the double verticals. With that specific strategy, what's the next step?

Strategy the double vertical it's a directional trade So if you're bullish on it and the markets bullish that's when you get the big returns You got it exactly like it like I started the whole discussion saying you got to be right I usually got to be right on every trade to make money But this one you have to be really right if you have on a bullish or bearish double vertical on the market does the exact opposite You got a eject out of it, but you'll know I mean You're we know when these swings are coming and as you know case momentum

Once something either starts catching a bid or to the up or down side, you can feel it and you know either to get out of the way or to join it. One of my wizisms is when something's on a tear, up or down, either join it or get out of the way. So those are the two things you can do, join it or get out of the way. Now, for people that are like, okay, I'm trying to find my strategy, trying to figure out what they wanna do in trading, give me an idea of how

Casey Stubbs (26:06.574)
how much time it takes you to execute these trades and then to manage it, which you said you're doing a set and forget, because are you placing a trade every day? Are you doing it every week? How long, what's the duration of the trades? Great question. So at Topgen options, we have a couple of different model portfolios. One of them is AR, accelerated retirement. So those are longer dated trades. Today we actually looked at a synthetic stock trade on the CBO, CBOE, the Chicago Board Options Exchange.

I looked at it three months ago when it was at 138 and didn't get filled and the thing's up, it added 30 bucks. Take a look at the SIBO because of options volume and trading, right? And especially people are trading these zero DTE options right now, like it's the cocaine or something like that. So the SIBO trade is actually out two years into the future, it's a leap, right? So in the AR portfolio, that's a set it and forget it. That thing's out.

Two years in the future, I put that in my filing cabinet. I might sell some weekly calls against it to bring in some extra coin, but that's a long-term bullish trade. So there's an example of did that one trade, and I'll care and feed it every once in a while with some short calls. Today, every Wednesday, we do what's called a weekly options brief, and those are tactical trades. We did a sniper shot this morning. As the S&P opened up, I sold a bear call spread. About 20 minutes later, as the S&P rolled over,

got out of it, you know, six, seven hundred bucks in about 15 minutes. So those are very tactical trades. And then in the primary brief, which is every Tuesday morning, those are the front months. This is where we did the bullish double vertical out three weeks from now. So it really just depends on the day of the week and the portfolio that I do. Sometimes, I sit on my hands, man. Cash is a position, right? If you got a big question mark sitting over your head about what's going on, don't do anything. Sometimes the best trade is no,

The directional one, out a couple weeks I felt good putting on, but sometimes with a Fed, this announcement, he's not raising rates and he shouldn't shock, but some of the ones in the past with his Fed meeting and press conference, I didn't do anything those weeks until he got done talking because there was massive, I remember, what was it? The last Jackson Hole speech, man, he brought some fire and brimstone and it was look out below for a while.

Casey Stubbs (28:32.726)
So sometimes I sit on my hands, other times I'm actively engaged. Trading's a form of combat, so it just depends on what the market's showing me. One of the, another whiz-ism is trade the market you have, not the one you want, right? So don't look at the market or a stock and try and, it doesn't care about you, man. So trade what you have, not what you want. Yeah, no, that's good. You can't make it happen.

no matter how much you want, the market's in control and you just got to go with what the market's giving you. That's a great wiz-ism. I like that. You got it. Yeah. And also the strategic side of things with understanding the Fed meetings, I know so many traders that have just either totally forgot about it or didn't think it was a big deal, and then they just get totally destroyed. And so being prepared for that is great. And I love that framework as far as...

being prepared, it just helps you get in the right frame of mind, helps you execute, helps you instill discipline, helps build teamwork, all of that stuff, it's really good. And yeah, great. So tell us a little bit about how people can find out more about what you do, how to get involved with what you're doing and participate in growing wealth with WIS. Well, I appreciate that, man. So obviously you can go to our website, topconoptions.com, but we have an interesting, a really interesting

brief that we do each month about saving lives and making money. You wanna talk about a win-win? I mean, making money's great, but how about making money and potentially saving lives? So, if you head to go.topgunoptions.com slash healing, I do a brief on the next, well, the only sector that I'm bullish on, you ready for this, for the rest of my life. The psychedelic space is going.

It's not going to explode. It's already exploding, but it's going to explode even more. The cannabis sector, I wouldn't even touch it with a 10-foot pole. A lot of Americans see cannabis as recreational. I get that they started medicinal, but there's a cloud, so to speak, over the cannabis sector. The psychedelic healing space. If you want, go check out the Max Afterburner podcast. That's my podcast where I debrief our medicine experiences and our journeys. If any of you have watched the movie,

Casey Stubbs (30:52.786)
Lone survivor or read the book Lone Survivor about Navy Seal Marcus Luttrell. I did the medicine two and a half years ago with Marcus Luttrell. And also if anybody knows Jared Taylor, JT from Black Rifle Coffee, great public company. So it was me, JT, another Navy Seal and an NFL player suffering from just horrific CTE or TBI traumatic brain injury. And I'll tell you what, Casey, that was decades.

decades of healing in a weekend. I've never been a better husband, father, human, trader. I didn't do the medicine to be a better trader, but a lot of stuff in my life got a hell of a lot better after doing psychedelic assisted therapy. So, I think this time next year, hopefully before, MDMA will be legal, rescheduled for therapeutic use, and the psychedelic sector is going to explode. So again, if you'd like to join me for a free brief, it's go.

Topgunoptions.com slash healing. And there's public psychedelic companies right now folks that you can buy. MindMed, Cybin, Atai. I've met the executives from just about every one of those companies and I can tell you what I'm bullish on and I'm buying with both hands. But this is, especially with the world. So the United States and the world are in a nose dive, man. Nose dive. The rise of these medicines hopefully are gonna intersect that nose dive and help heal.

I mean, these medicines have the power to turn warriors into peacemakers. So, yeah, I'm curious. So you mentioned you were with a lot of veteran and military people with this. So is this something to help with PTSD? Oh my God. Yeah, it is. So Casey, the most recent study on MDMA maps 71% of the people in the study, many of them were veterans. You ready for this? With non-

I love dropping the D, it's an injury, not a disorder. So to me, by definition, non-treatable means they can't be healed. 71% after going through the MDMA, the whole thing, showed zero PTS. They were clinically healed, right? I can't, I'm blown, it gives me goosebumps when I tell people the results, and you can Google it. Google Maps, MAPS, MDMA,

Casey Stubbs (33:23.035)
I was going to lead with money and I failed. Let me lead with saving lives. As you know, Case, anywhere from, you pick a number, 22 to 44 veterans take their own lives every day. One is too many. The generational trauma from a suicide is a horror. So maybe we save some of those ladies and gentlemen, let alone the money and.

The biggest threat to this case between us ladies here is big pharma. They do not want any of this stuff. Marcus told me he's like, whiz I was on. I don't want anything that has anything to do with health and healing in any space whatsoever. No man. You know, he told me he's like, whiz I was on 15 meds, you know, five to wake up five for lunch, five to go to bed. Since Marcus did the medicine, he hasn't taken a single med and the VA is a pill center in my opinion.

They are in bed with big pharma, so these medicines, Google Ibogaine, I-B-O-gaine, G-A-I-N-E, it can cure addiction. It is used for heroin addicts. 85% of heroin addicts in a study that did Ibogaine, up to three years after one treatment, never even looked at the stuff again. So the opioid crisis, the fentanyl crisis, these medicines have the potential to heal. So very long answer to your short question, but that's...

That's what I'm bullish on right now, man, into the future. I would buy the psychedelic space with both hands. Okay, so just for clarification, it's, I definitely recommend they check out this webinar, but the webinar is gonna talk about the investment side and also the, both sides of it, the healing side. So if someone's interested in, let's say they're going in there, and they're like, oh man, that's not, I don't wanna have anything to do with that, but they're interested in the investment, they should still come.

That's exactly right, man. Let me appeal to your inner Gordon Gekko. If you wanna make a potentially a ton of money, you come. If you're interested in healing and stuff, that's why it's a win-win. Making money and helping people heal. If you invest in this space, some of these public psychedelic companies, you're allowing them to do studies like this. So you could be so opposed to psychedelics and make a ton of money. So it's funny, because sometimes I get political in my live trade briefs and I've had members go, dude.

Casey Stubbs (35:38.682)
I can't stand your politics, but I love the way that you make money. So, you know, just like Gordon Gekko said in the movie Wall Street, if you want a friend, get a dog. I'll teach you how to make money, man. But if you don't like the underlying, don't trade them. You know, get a conscience or something like that. But my mission objective is to teach you how to make money. But if you can make money and potentially save and change the lives of your fellow humans, that's a win-win in my book, Casey. All right. Drop that link one more time and we're going to put it in the description also.

You bet, it's go.topgunoptions.com slash healing. And I'll see you in that brief on psychedelics and making money. Well, Wiz, thanks a lot, man. Great, great stuff. Everybody go ahead and check out that link. Definitely do it. I'm gonna do it. And that's it for this episode. We'll see you guys next time. And that wraps up another episode of How to Trade It. A huge thank you to Wiz for sharing his insights.

from the military-inspired trade plan process to the double vertical strategy and the importance of strategic patience. Remember traders, the responsibility for your portfolio lies in having a solid trade plan and as Wiz humorously puts it, let's avoid that death wish. Thanks for listening. Until next time, this is Casey Stubbs. Here's to your trading success.