I have never paid full price for anything.

In 2003, I picked up a 1965 Porsche for $12,500. It is now insured for $125,000. In 2009, I bought an $18,000 Rolex Daytona for $9,000 and sold it days later for $12,000.

In 2010, when the housing market fell apart, I bought four condos at $40,000 each, collected $12,000 a year per condo for twelve years, then sold them for three to four times what I paid.

My father taught me this.

He was not a rich man, but he knew the value of a dollar, and he knew that everything in life is negotiable.

That lesson followed me into the stock market, and it has made me more money over 46 years than every car, watch, and condo deal combined.

I call the strategy a phantom bid.

Here is how it works. A company you want to own is trading at $44 a share.

You tell the market you will only buy it at $30. The moment you make that offer, the market pays you cash upfront just for showing up.

From there, one of two things happens.

If the stock never drops to $30, your offer disappears, and you keep every dollar the market paid you. If the stock drops to $30, you buy a world-class company at a price nobody else got, and you still keep the cash you collected upfront.

Either way, you win.

You either walk away with the premium or you walk away with the stock at your price, plus the premium on top of it.

The offer disappears like a phantom. The cash does not.

On Wall Street, this is known as selling a put.

The name alone has kept most investors away from it for decades. I have been doing it for my entire investing career.

My record stands at 161 wins out of 169 trades. The losses on the eight trades I did not win were capped at exactly what I risked going in.

Nothing more.

YOUR ACTION PLAN

Right now, cash payments for phantom bids are two to three times higher than normal due to what is happening in the gold market.

I’ll be sharing my target list next week, so be sure to tune into the War Room so you don’t miss out.

FUN FACT FRIDAY

Warren Buffett has been using phantom bids for decades. In 1993 he sold puts on Coca-Cola and collected $7.5 million in premium. The puts expired worthless.

He kept every dollar without buying a single share. When asked about it, he described it as getting paid to agree to buy something you want at a price you want to pay.