Hey, glad you're here.

Before we get into strategies, trades, and calculators I want to tell you who I am and why I built this. Because I think it matters who you learn from.

Honestly, my love for money started long before the stock market. As a kid, when most of my friends were spending birthday cash on toys, I was the one holding onto it. I liked having it. I liked watching it add up. I just didn't know yet what to do with it. I bought my first stock in my sophomore year of high school. I was 15, didn't really know what I was doing, but was completely hooked from day one. There's something so exciting about checking your investments and seeing whether they're up or down and then, for me, figuring out why. Was it a general market move or something specific to the stock? Doing that research was genuinely enjoyable, and over time it helped me build a mental database of what moves the market and individual stocks and allowed me to start testing out investment strategies of my own.

Over the next decade I kept investing, kept learning, and kept putting real money into the market, not paper trading, not simulations. Real capital, real outcomes, and real lessons.

I went on to study Business Finance in college, which gave me the academic foundation to pair with my hands-on experience. But the most formative years of my financial education came right after graduation.

I spent four and a half years working as an Account Specialist alongside a financial advisor with over 25 years of industry experience. During that time, I was inside real client portfolios every single day watching how money actually gets managed, how decisions get made under pressure, and how even the most experienced investors can let emotions drive their choices. That experience changed how I think about investing permanently.

During that time, I also earned my:

About 4 years ago I discovered call options and everything clicked into a new gear.

I'd read about options in my Series 7 study materials, and one idea stuck with me that the best way to truly learn options wasn't to study them endlessly but to put real money on the line and experience them firsthand. So that's what I did.

What the books didn't prepare me for was the real-world execution side of things. Trading platforms each have their own terminology; their own order flows, their own quirks. Things that sound simple in a textbook become surprisingly confusing the first time you're staring at an options chain trying to place your first trade.

And then there were the moments nobody warns you about.

One of my first lessons came when I had nine call options expire in the money which sounds like a good thing, and it was except I hadn't thought through what happened next. Expiring in the money meant my account was about to automatically purchase 900 shares of the underlying stock. At the time my total account value was around $18,000 with only $1,000 sitting in cash. That purchase was going to cost me over $10,000. Money I didn't have.

I called customer service not really knowing what to expect. The rep was genuinely helpful he walked me through exactly what would happen, explained that the shares would be purchased on margin, meaning the brokerage would essentially loan me the money to cover the purchase. Once the shares were in my account, I could sell them immediately, pay back the borrowed amount, and keep the profit. At the end the Rep even congratulated me on the trade for making a decent profit.

It wasn't a disaster. It actually worked out well. But it was a real wake-up; call options have mechanics that textbooks gloss over, and you want to understand them before you're in the middle of them at 8am on a Monday morning wondering what just happened to your account.

Those early experiences, the wins, the confusion, the phone calls to customer service shaped how I think about teaching this. Because the gap between understanding options conceptually and actually executing them confidently is real. And that gap is exactly what this newsletter is designed to close.

Options gave me a way to turn limited cash into extraordinary returns. Instead of needing thousands of dollars to build a meaningful position in a stock, I could use a fraction of that capital to control hundreds of shares and put myself in position for outsized gains. A few hundred dollars could do what several thousand couldn't.

Done right, options are one of the most powerful tools available to a regular investor. And I'm going to show you exactly how.

Leveraged Trades is built to be not just another finance newsletter full of jargon and hot takes. I want this to be genuinely useful. Informative and engaging, yes, but also fun. I've always found that learning from real examples beats reading theory every time, and that's exactly how this newsletter is structured. Real trades, real numbers, real outcomes with enough context to actually understand what happened and why.

I'll be straight with you: I don't have all the answers. I'm still learning, still making mistakes, still figuring things out in real time just like you. The market has a way of humbling even the most experienced investors, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or hasn't been at it long enough.

What I do have is over a decade of real experience, genuine curiosity, and a habit of documenting everything. That's what this newsletter runs on. Not a polished performance of expertise, just an honest account of what's working, what isn't, and what the numbers actually say.

Here's what you'll get every month inside Leveraged Trades:

It doesn't matter if you've never looked at an options contract in your life or if you've been trading for years and want to go deeper. This newsletter is built to meet you where you are and take you further. In the coming weeks we're starting from the ground up. I'll break down exactly what a call option is, how it works, and why it's worth your attention using real data, and real examples that make the concepts click. I'll also walk you through what an options chain actually looks like on a trading platform and how to read it without feeling lost.

I also want to address something I hear a lot. Many people I've talked to won't go near options contracts because they believe the risk is simply too great. I understand that hesitation. But throughout this newsletter I want to show you how manageable that risk actually is when you understand what you're doing. The goal isn't to eliminate risk, it's to understand it, size it correctly, and use it to your advantage.

Key Takeaways From This Issue

If you have questions, thoughts, or just want to say hi, reply to this email. I read every single one. Let's get to work.

— Dustin
Leveraged Trades
Turn Small Investments Into Extraordinary Returns

P.S. If you know someone who's been curious about investing or options trading, send them to leveragedtrades.com. The more the merrier on this journey.