Why do real estate investors love passive trading? That's what I want to talk about today. So a couple weeks ago, I attended a friend's real estate conference in Dallas. And it's mainly for folks who like to buy large, real multifamily and commercial real estate, with a focus on how to attract investors. So they're buying these big properties or using investors to give part of the money so that they can go and do their thing. Well, while I was there, my friend, he already knows what I'm doing. I've known him for a few years, he asked me to get on the stage, and share with everybody what I do and how I trade. Because as it turns out, a lot of real estate investors love passive trading. Because I mean, it just makes sense to them. Right? Right out of the gate, like there you explain to them? Oh, yeah, that's just like real estate, right?
Now, whenever you hear the word passive investing, you think real estate, passive trading is a way to trade the stock market, but in a way, that doesn't take a lot of time. So supposedly, when you're passive investing in the real estate, you put the money in, you invest, but it doesn't take a lot of time doesn't always happen. If you've ever done any kind of real estate investing, you kind of know that, right? So when it comes to real estate, there are four main benefits, right? So there's the cash flow, because hopefully, money's coming in every month from rent, right? Then there's appreciation. So hopefully, again, the property value is going up every year, little by little, sometimes it goes down. But you know, a little bit every year is normally what it technically happens. There's amortization, this is where you know, you have a loan, you have a mortgage, and every month you pay the payment, and then the amount goes down, the amount of the equity goes up, and the amount of the loan goes down. So you own a little bit more of the house every month, that happens automatically every time you send out. So there's amortization, where equity is going up. Then number four, you have depreciation. This is a temporary tax break from the government. Because normally, you sell a property, you have to pay taxes on it, but it with depreciation, you can tell the government, hey, look, the value of my property is going down. So every year you get a tax break. But then when you sell the property, then you have to pay it all back. So it does help with your taxes while you own the property. But eventually, you do have to pay it back. Now I love all of these, right? Especially since you can get all four and more from passive trading. How let's talk about it.
Number one - cashflow, right, we get monthly or even weekly cash flows from weekly options from selling options. And what's better, we don't have to deal with tenants, toilets, or termites. The big three tiers of real estate, right? No tenants, no toilets, no termites, no worries about folks moving out in the middle of the night and property being vacant for months. No worries about them messing up the place and spending money to fix it. No buying insurance or property taxes, right? We don't have to pay for homeowners insurance and renter's insurance on our properties and paying property taxes every year, whether there's any making money, not all that stuff. So basically, it's a much more peaceful experience in my mind, right?
Number two is appreciation. Right? Yeah, our stocks go up, right, usually a lot more than real estate. I mean, sure, they go down too. But if that happens that let us buy us cheaper, right? We get to buy the stocks cheaper when they go down. And so our cash flow continues anyway, we're still even if the stock goes down, cash flow still going, we're still selling options. But if it goes down, we can buy more. Number three amortization. Well, that was you know, equity going up, we don't recommend taking out a loan to buy our stocks. So instead, what we can do is we can start with a lot less, a lot less money, right? So you don't need 10%, 20% down actually, nowadays, if you're an investor, you need 20%, 25%, depending on your credit, and they get credit checks. So to start with passive trading, nobody checks your credit, you're gonna have bad credit doesn't matter. And you don't need 20% down, you start with a little bit, you can start with 500 bucks, 1000 bucks, 5000 10,000. Any amount, right. But if you want, you could use margin. Now margin is a loan to buy stocks. So you can borrow up to 50% of the amount you need, right?
Now, if you have more money. So if you have a larger account, I think it's roughly depending on the broker, but I believe it's about 125,000 in your account. If you have that then you can apply for something called portfolio margin, which will pretty much let you buy your stock with about 20% down Just like real estate, and again, with no credit check, that's pretty cool. Then we have number four, right depreciation, well, our stocks do not depreciate. But depending on what you're trading, you can get 6040 treatment on your taxes. And that's basically 60% of your gains are going to be capital gains long term, and 40% will be short term. It's called 1256. That's the section of the tax code. So your broker or your accountant will know, it's like, it's a this is 1256 trades, they'll know it. But this is for the options we sell. Now, the stocks we own, we want to keep them for a long time. So if we sell those for more than a year, after we bought them, then we do get the long term capital gain treatment.
Now, there are two more benefits to passive trading, that real estate doesn't have number one-- costs, it costs a lot more money to invest in real estate, that typical deal requires title fees, realtor fees, appraisal fees, loan fees, closing fees, and a whole bunch of taxes, right, all different types of taxes, local, county, city state, all TIF stamp taxes, they still have those, right? You have fees when you buy. And when you sell. Now, with passive trading, you don't have all those taxes, all those fees, you just pay the Commission, which in many cases can be zero, or less than $1 per option. So a lot cheaper to do, the cost involved is a lot cheaper. Number two liquidity. So to sell a single family house, it can take you months, a larger property can take years, even if you have a buyer ready to buy the house, it can still take a month or two months, right? They have to get the appraisal, the title, all that stuff, they have to get the loan, even if they have the cash, it still takes time to do the closing and the title and all that stuff. To exit an options trade or a stock position. I mean, takes literally seconds. And it is cash sitting in your account instantly. Now, I just recently closed an account with over $4,000 to transfer over to my hedge fund. Right? Took me about a minute to close all my positions. I had the money transferred to my bank within two days. So it was in from from exit to bank. My hands - two days. You can't do that in real estate. Right? Oh, and there's actually a third benefit that I forgot to passive trading. And that's how we know about the probability of profit. When you're getting into an options trade, you know, in advance, What are my chances? What are the statistics say, on all of our option trades before we make that, when investing in real estate? There's no really way to know if you're gonna make money or not. You hope so? That's why you're doing it right. But I'm pretty sure you know, many people who have lost money on real estate that thought that they were gonna make money, but they didn't, right. I mean, he was like a sure thing property, right. But he didn't, I'm one of those people.
A friend of mine approached me and said, Hey, I got this house, I want to buy it, I want to fix it up and flip it and we're gonna make X dollars. And I'm like, Okay, it looks good on everything on paper look great. We ended up losing 30 grand, because it wasn't just a house and all that stuff. And you have to know what you're doing, right? And my friend at that time he This was his first property. So I made the mistake of going with a newbie guy. But we learned we both learned and we went on and then we've done more since then. That's because I have nothing against real estate, right? I own a bunch of it, I own will own more. But it's just a harder way to start. And there's nothing close to being passive. For sure. I mean, even with my friend, he was doing all the work, but I was still going out there to the property looking, trying to find stuff, you know, looking at costs. I mean, he was not passive for in any way. So if you're a real estate investor, okay, keep doing what you're doing. If it's working, you're making money, awesome, do not stop. I'm not telling you to stop. I'm telling you maybe take a look at passive trading. It's very similar to what you're already doing. And it's easy to find the time for, right? Options trading is becoming more and more and more popular. Every year that goes by more and more options are being traded. And as more and more real estate investors find out about it. They're coming over in droves.
I mean, I have a friend of mine, who owns a very large internet business about real estate. He's well known in the industry. He's a big name. And he has a site where you go there you become a member and they'll tell you of all these properties that are for sale that are not on the MLS. They're not actively on the market. So he's been in real estate for a long time. He comes up to me and says oh, I want to get into options. I'm Like, what are you talking about? You're already busy. What are you doing? Why do you want to do that? He goes, Man, I got plenty of time.
And another real estate friend of mine told me about this thing called Iron condors. Do you trade those? I'm like, of course, I trade those, you know what I do. And so we talked about it. And we went on and on. And he's been trading those for years. Because while you're trading in real estate, the deals don't come all the time. Right, it takes gotta look at a lot of deals, to find one that really works. So in the meantime, you could be putting on your trades doesn't take a lot more time, it takes a lot less money, it's a lot less headache. So that's it. That's why I think that real estate investing is pretty close to passive trading. I mean, there's differences, of course, like everything else. But if you are a real estate investor, you're gonna find that passive trading comes pretty naturally, you're already going to understand it pretty well. And it's got the same goal, right? You got an asset, we want to cashflow that asset, we want to keep the asset, right. The thing is, ain't nobody messing up your asset. It will go down in price to go up in price to go down and go up. That's the way it works, doesn't matter because we're keeping the asset and keeping the stock. You keep cash flowing the stock. Right? So there we go, my friends, I want you to always be trading with the odds in your favor. And if you're buying real estate, I'm sorry, but you cannot know the odds. So come on over to passive trading. And then you can also be working with the odds in your favor. Take care. Bye bye
