robin laylon
by rachelle rogers

Robin Laylon is a trader. Not the wampum for Manhattan Island kind, but the Wall Street for wampum kind. Robin has developed a low risk/high reward technique for trading stock options and is passionate about teaching it to others.

We’re at my dining room table, drinking tea. With her spiky blond hair, a generous laugh and confident demeanor, Robin is a no nonsense woman out to make a difference.

“The other night on TV,” she begins, “I heard Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad Poor Dad, give a daunting statistic. A study of baby boomer women and retirement said 80% are not going to have a sufficient amount of money to take care of themselves in a style that’s comfortable. Not the style they might like, but a style that is comfortable and safe. It’s daunting.”

She likes the word daunting.

“Most women didn’t get the financial education men did,” Robin continues. “Schools didn’t provide it. I was of the generation when everybody said — make sure you marry a husband that’s got a really good career. For the generation before me, that message was even stronger.”

Robin wound up getting her financial education the hard way — by losing almost everything she had.

“I was an investor. I’d inherited money from a friend, and I happened to have it in mutual funds at a time when the market was in probably the biggest boom we’ve ever seen. It was called the dot com boom. It wasn’t because of my skill in investing. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”

She closes her eyes for a moment as if searching for the next thought.

“Unfortunately, because I didn’t have any financial education, I thought the market was going to keep going up. I knew nothing. I thought you were supposed to keep your money in there no matter what.”

The market, however, kept falling. By the time the dust had settled, Robin, then living in Taos, NM, had gone from having in excess of $400,000 to just $3000 between herself and homelessness. Looking at the huge contrast between her previous lifestyle and being forced out of an early and fine retirement in a resort town with few job opportunities, she had little choice but to go back to work as a faux finisher and house painter.

“It was at that time,” she says, “that I thought — if there was a way money could disappear so quickly, there might, if I educated myself, be a way it could just as quickly grow.”

At forty-five Robin felt she didn’t have twenty or thirty years to wait for investments to slowly appreciate. She wanted a quick way to make at least some of her money back. Knowing a little about trading — exposing money to the market at opportune times indicated by specific signals on a stock chart — Robin studied on her own and began to buy when risk was low and opportunity for reward was high.

“It took a few years of trial and error. All the material I read was so difficult. It was like Greek to me.”

Soon the small market for faux finishing and house painting in Taos, NM dried up and Robin decided to relocate. In a precarious financial and emotional state, she arrived in Asheville in 2004 and went to work as a dishwasher. Faced with what she did not want, Robin began thinking about what she did want. Continuing to trade and educate herself as best she could, she eventually came upon an options trading manual so clearly and simply written that things began to click into place.

“It was the first thing that made sense to me. It pretty much changed my life.”
Robin explains that stock options give one the right but not the obligation to buy securities at a specified price on or before a specified date. She compares it to a down payment. A premium is paid to control a certain number of shares of stock. One of the most appealing aspects of this kind of investing is that a trader can control hundreds of shares with as little as $300 to $500.

Experimenting with the techniques in the manual, Robin slowly taught herself first how to paper trade, then to trade real time. After a while, she saw that some things worked well and some didn’t. She took the ones that did, and together with methods she’d gleaned from trial and error in the school of hard knocks, she began to put together her own trading system, which proved consistently successful.

“I like to set it up to where I can make at least 50% on my money Generally speaking, on the moves that come around ten to twelve times a year I’m usually making at least 100% every time using the same set up of the low risk/high reward ratio I teach people how to do.”

Robin adds that a trader can turn a small amount of money into a very large amount in a couple of years by doing the same thing over and over and over. She explains that the best traders find a system that works and keep using it.

Soon friends, and friends of friends began to ask her about what she was doing. Before she knew it, Robin was holding classes on a regular basis. In the last year, she’s taught almost a hundred people how to trade, 80% of them women.

Robin is passionate about presenting the opportunity for people, especially women, to create passive income.

“It’s really important that women start learning how to put their money to work, and about how to become financially independent.”

Learning to cultivate the mindset for financial abundance is an important aspect of Robin’s work. As an offshoot of her trading classes, she recently started a women’s abundance group, which, among other things, addresses how to create the right mindset for sustaining financial prosperity; how to change what Harv Eker, author of Millionaire Mind, refers to as one’s financial blueprint, current attitudes about money which most often stem from those of one’s parents.

“Women in my trading classes tend to learn in a different way than men. Men seem to take to the information with the sense — I can do this, all I need to learn are the tools and I can do it. And they act accordingly. Oooo. Down the court. Slam dunk. Baskets.”

She laughs, drops an imaginary ball into the hoop.

“Most of the men I’ve taught are real time trading now, compared to a very small percentage of women. Most women have been taught that it’s not necessary to learn to control their financial destiny. Some are made to feel it’s too complicated. It’s time women stepped onto the court.”

In addition to classes, Robin and her students are creating a trading community.
“Now that I’ve graduated enough people who are real time trading and getting good results, it’s becoming exciting.”

Some of Robin’s students provide the space for her classes. Others create charts everyone can use. Traders keep in touch by email or phone, comparing notes and ideas, supporting and learning from one another. And there’s an enlightened aspect to all that Robin is about. A student of spiritual and metaphysical perspectives, she incorporates into her trading an understanding of how energy works.

“It’s wonderful to expend energy and make it abundant. Money is energy. It needs to flow, to be spread around.”

She pauses. For a moment, her smile disappears.

“Hoarding money, hoarding information, hoarding anything is cutting off the flow.”
She says she’s learned that lesson, and it’s a good one to teach.
“I’m pretty esoteric in my classes. It’s not just the toolbox that you get. You’re also going to get ideas about money, about how, according to my vast and not always pleasant experiences, energy works. In the past, I’ve been a very good example of what not to do. I point those things out.”

As another offshoot of her trading classes, Robin has plans to create a 501c3 nonprofit for the purpose of educating particularly, but not exclusively, women about financial well being and creating passive streams of income through trading, entrepreneurship, real estate, internet publishing, etc.

“I would like to make this kind of information available to those who might not be able to readily access it otherwise.”

This is not the first time Robin has worked for the betterment of women. Years ago, in San Francisco, she had a social service nonprofit in which she provided support services to prostitutes who wanted to leave the sex industry.

“I used to tell people I spend a lot of time in jail, because I did a support group at the program facility in San Francisco every week for years. I had an office downtown. I used to walk the stroll with the girls in the evening and pass out business cards.”
The idea was to help these women, if they wanted, to gain a degree of confidence, get off drugs and alcohol, find decent housing and change their employment situation.
“There were not a lot of wins, but when you saw someone change her life, it was a really good feeling.”

Robin trusts that her financial education nonprofit will draw more takers.

“I think the more value you add to your life and to other people’s lives, the more successful you become. So that’s what I want my work to be about. Adding value to people’s lives.”

* * *

For information about Robin’s options trading classes, please contact her at 828.357.8200 or visit her website: optionsreasy.com

Rachelle Rogers is a writer, poet and editor. Nonfiction author of Creative Crafts Desk Handbook and fiction author of A Love Apart, she has received competitive recognition in memoir, fiction and poetry, has been a reader with UNCA’s Writers at Home program, and was granted a 2002 Wildacres Artist Residency. Her work has appeared in several literary journals including Passager, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, and in WNC Woman. [ rachellerogers.com ]