Inside the 'Stock Renting' Loophole: How Regular People Get Paid From Stocks They Don't Own

Every Week, Someone Pitches Me a Way to Make Money From Stocks Without Buying Any. I Delete Almost All of Them.

I've written about personal finance for 12 years.

Almost every week, someone emails me a "secret" way to make money from the stock market. No risk. No experience. No stock picking.

I delete nearly all of them.

This one I didn't.

Partly because of where it came from: the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

And partly because the man behind it said something none of the others ever had.

"Don't take my word for it. I'll do it on my own account while you watch."

If you've been told the stock market is only for people with spare money and decades to wait, what he showed me is worth the next few minutes of your time.

I'm not going to explain how it works in this article. It takes him about an hour and a whiteboard, and I'd get it wrong in a few paragraphs.

At the end, I'll tell you where he shows it, live, every week.

I Expected to Write a Warning. For Years I've Told Readers to Ignore Promises Exactly Like This One.

For years, I've given readers one simple rule.

If someone says you can make money from stocks no matter what the price does, ignore them.

Most people are told there are only two ways to make money from the stock market.

Buy stocks and wait, sometimes for decades, and hope the price is higher when you need the money.

Or trade, and try to guess where a stock goes next more often than you guess wrong.

Both depend on the price going your way. That's what I've always told readers.

So when a man named Ben told me he gets paid every Monday whether the stock goes up, goes down or stays flat, I assumed I'd be writing a warning.

I asked him to prove it.

He did, and I'll tell you exactly what I saw. But first, he wanted me to hear where it came from. Because it didn't start with him.

Two Years Ago, Ben Was Losing Money Almost Every Week. "I'd Decided I Didn't Have What It Takes."

Ben never worked on Wall Street. He never worked at a bank.

Two years ago, he was a regular guy trying to make extra money from the stock market. And he was losing it, almost every week.

"I was up before the market opened," he told me. "Coffee in one hand, phone in the other. Then ten hours a day, five days a week, watching one number on a screen."

"Some weeks I made money. Most weeks I lost all of it, and more."

He checked his phone at breakfast and at dinner. He spent his Sundays worrying about Monday.

"Every Sunday night I promised myself next week would be different," he said. "It never was."

"Eventually I decided I just didn't have what it takes."

He was ready to quit.

So he bought a ticket to one last trading conference. He wanted one last try before he gave it up for good.

The Most Important Person at That Trading Conference Wasn't Attending It

"It was a ballroom full of speakers selling the same thing," Ben said. "Get rich fast. Rented Lamborghinis out front."

He left after a few talks and went down to the hotel bar.

There was one other man at the bar. Quiet. About Ben's age. He was watching the conference crowd, and none of it seemed to impress him.

Ben sat two stools down and complained about the speakers.

"Oh, I'm not with that," the man said. "Wrong hotel, wrong weekend."

Then he looked over at the ballroom. "None of them trade, you know. Not really."

"I work on Wall Street," he told Ben. "The way the professionals trade and the way those people trade are complete opposites."

"It's a shame. There's a whole other side to this that nobody in that room will ever show them."

Ben asked what he meant.

The man told him about the first thing he ever heard on the trading floor that made no sense to him.

A trader near him was bragging. "I rented out Apple this week."

Another said he'd made two thousand dollars "renting out" Google.

"You can't rent a stock," he remembered thinking.

It took him a full year to understand what they were doing.

Ben Won't Tell Me the Man's Name. His Job Was Matching Every Buyer and Seller on the Stock Exchange Floor.

I asked Ben for the man's full name three times. He wouldn't give it to me.

"That was the deal," he said. "He keeps his name private. I call him Mr. V."

What Ben would tell me is what Mr. V did.

He started on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange younger than almost anyone. He worked a few feet from where the TV show Mad Money is filmed.

He was a designated market maker. Every buyer and every seller in dozens of stocks went through him, all day, every day.

"So I saw what regular investors never get to see," Mr. V told Ben. "Who was buying. Who was selling. And which side left with the money every Friday."

On one side were the regular investors. New names every week. The same losses every week.

On the other side were the professionals. The same few firms, week after week. Paid at the start of every week.

And they didn't need to be right about where any stock was going.

The Professionals Got Paid at the Start of Every Week. The Regular Investors Were the Ones Paying Them.

Every trade has two sides. That part isn't a secret. It's how a stock market works.

When a regular investor makes a short-term trade, they need three things to go right. The stock has to move the right way. It has to move far enough. And it has to do it before a certain day.

Miss one, and they lose.

The professional on the other side needs none of those things. The professional is paid at the start, then waits. Most weeks, the money stays with the professional.

Ben had been on the paying side every week for two years.

"It had nothing to do with how smart I was," Ben said. "I was on the side that has to be right three times in five days."

When Ben told Mr. V he'd been putting in ten hours a day, Mr. V wasn't surprised.

"The hours were never the problem," he told Ben. "You could put in a hundred a week and it wouldn't change anything. What matters is which side of the trade you're on."

I've interviewed a lot of people who lost money trading. Almost all of them worked hard at it. None of them had ever been told there was another side to be on.

There Are 4 Ways Regular People Make Money From Stocks. Only One Pays Before the Price Moves.

After talking to Ben, here's how I'd sum up the choices a regular person has.

1. Buy stocks and wait. It works if you have decades. But you only make money if the price goes up, and it takes a large account to produce a real income.

2. Day trading. Hours at a screen every day. Most people who try it lose money.

3. Short-term trades that need a big move. A little money down for a big payout, but only if the direction, the size and the timing all go right. This is what Ben was doing.

4. Stock renting. You're paid on day one. You don't predict where the stock goes. The money is yours whether the stock goes up, goes down or stays flat. It takes about an hour a week.

The first three all need the price to go your way. The fourth doesn't.

That is exactly what made me suspicious.

So I asked Ben to show me.

"Watch the Cash Balance," Ben Said. Then He Clicked One Button on His Real Account.

We got on a video call on a Monday morning, while the market was open. Ben shared his screen.

It was his real brokerage account. He pointed to the cash balance at the top.

"Remember that number," he said.

He had an order already filled in. He clicked Send.

A few seconds later, the cash balance was about $500 higher.

"I didn't buy anything," he said. "I don't own that stock. I didn't predict anything. And that $500 is mine to keep, whatever that stock does this week."

I asked him to explain what he'd just done.

He laughed. "That takes a whiteboard and about an hour," he said.

Then he showed me his whole Monday. Four trades, all set up in about an hour.

$354. $433. $291. $592.

$1,670 in about an hour. Then he closed the laptop.

"I don't open it again until Friday," he said. "There's nothing to watch."

Mr. V Started With $2,500. He Now Runs a Multi-Million Dollar Hedge Fund on the Same Method.

Ben says Mr. V once had the same question I did. Can a regular person do this without Wall Street's money?

The firms do it with hundreds of millions of dollars, thousands of positions and full teams.

So Mr. V put $2,500 into an account of his own to find out.

"It does work small," he told Ben. "But the firms win by doing thousands of them. On a personal account, you win by picking the right stocks."

He spent years working out which stocks qualify, which to skip and which weeks to sit out. Some weeks he lost money. Most weeks he won.

Then he left the floor. Today he runs a multi-million dollar hedge fund on the same method.

At the bar, Ben asked him for proof. Mr. V put his laptop on the bar and showed him his own account, one week at a time.

Week one: $420, collected Monday. The stock barely moved. On Friday it was still his.

Week two: $380. Same result.

"Those are the small ones," he told Ben. "On my bigger accounts I've collected $2,700 or more on a single one. Last year one of my accounts grew 60%. That was $228,000."

Ben asked what I would have asked. "What's the catch?"

"Nothing is guaranteed," Mr. V said. "Some weeks a stock drops. That's why you only use companies you'd be happy to own. The rules for choosing the stock matter more than anything."

That answer is the reason I kept reporting. People running scams don't usually tell you that nothing is guaranteed.

A Hedge Fund Manager Who Hates Cameras, and a Losing Trader Who Was Good at One Thing

Ben asked Mr. V why he didn't teach it himself.

"Because I'm a trader," Mr. V said. "I don't know the first thing about teaching, and I hate being on camera."

Ben had one skill, he told me. "Taking something complicated and making it simple enough for anyone to follow."

So they made a deal. Mr. V would teach Ben everything. Ben would get it to as many regular people as he could. Mr. V would never appear on camera.

They shook hands on it.

Over the next few months, they turned Mr. V's decisions into a short checklist. A stock passes three criteria, or you skip it that week.

Then Ben tested it on his own account.

Week one: $300. Week two: $272. Week three: $316.

"Same person who'd decided he didn't have what it takes," Ben said. "Different side of the trade."

Then Ben Taught Friends. These Are the Numbers They've Reported.

Ben started with friends who had lost money in the market. Then friends of friends.

Here's what they've reported to him:

• Josh: four in one week. $426, $333, $342 and $990.
• Carl: about $700 a week, week after week.
• Richard: up $9,319 in three months.
• Ryan: $1,400 in one week, without looking at a chart.
• John: $453 on a single Friday.
• Lance: $65,000 to $79,000 in five months, without day trading once.
• Trevor: $1,060 in two weeks on shares he already owned.
• Julian: his first one went against him. The stock dropped. He followed the rules. Thirty days later he was $2,454 ahead.

Not one of them works on Wall Street.

Ben Teaches It Live Every Sunday. I Signed Up for the Class to See for Myself.

Ben doesn't teach this in articles. He teaches it live.

It's called the Live Stock Renting Masterclass, and it runs every Sunday at [SUNDAY TIME + TIME ZONE]. It lasts about [CLASS LENGTH].

I signed up and sat in on one.

Here's what Ben covers:

• Why someone pays him before the stock moves, and why that money is his whether the stock goes up, goes down or stays flat.
• His real account on screen. The previous Monday's trades, one at a time.
• The three criteria a stock has to pass before he'll use it.
• The one kind of stock he says you should never use. It looks like it passes every test. He says it costs people more money than any other mistake.
• What happens in a week when a stock drops. He puts Mr. V's real trade log on screen, six trades in a row, including the bad week.
• How it fits into one hour on Monday morning.
• Live questions. He took questions in the chat until the end.

I came in skeptical. I left understanding something about the stock market that I'd covered for 12 years without ever explaining it to readers.

It was plainer than I expected. A whiteboard, a real account and a checklist.

"My Trades Got Consistent": What Ben's Students Say on Camera

Ben sent me videos from people he's taught. Here's what three of them said.

The third one is the one I keep thinking about. He wasn't claiming to be good at picking stocks. He followed the checklist.

Who Ben Says Should Come on Sunday, and Who Shouldn't

I asked Ben who the class is for. Here's his list.

• People with jobs who can't watch a screen all day.
• People five or ten years from retiring who want money coming in every week after the paychecks stop.
• People who've lost money trading and are close to giving up.
• People who've never traded and assumed the stock market was for people with more money and more time.
• People who want the same income every week more than one big win.

And who isn't it for?

"Anyone who wants to triple their money by Friday on one lucky trade," he said. "That's not what this is."

You don't need a brokerage account to attend. You don't need any experience. Ben asks people to bring a pen and paper.

Stay Until the End. If You Learn Nothing, You Get Your Money Back.

Ben makes one promise to everyone who signs up.

Stay for the whole class. If you leave without learning something new about how money is made in the stock market, email [SUPPORT EMAIL] and you get a full refund.

No forms. No questions.

Why Does a Class Ben Could Give Away for Free Cost $3?

I asked him that directly.

"When it's free, most people sign up and never come," he said. "Or they come with the class in one window and their phone in their hand."

"This takes about an hour of real attention to understand. I'd rather teach 50 people who are paying attention than 500 who aren't."

So he charges $3. "It's enough that you put it in your calendar and show up," he said. "And it costs less than a coffee."

For comparison:

• The conference ticket where Ben met Mr. V cost him far more than $3.
• Trading alert services charge hundreds of dollars a month. Trading coaches charge thousands.
• In week one of the account Mr. V showed Ben, he collected $420 on a single stock.

$3. One Sunday. About [CLASS LENGTH]. A full refund if you learn nothing.

How to Get Your Seat (It Took Me Under 2 Minutes)

1. Click the button on this page.
2. Enter your name and email. Use one you check, because the class link goes there.
3. Pay $3 with your card.
4. Open the email with your link, and add it to your calendar.
5. On Sunday at [SUNDAY TIME + TIME ZONE], click the link. Bring a pen and paper.

My Verdict: I Came to Write a Warning. Instead, I'm Telling You to Go on Sunday.

I started this story expecting to warn you about it.

I'm not going to.

Nothing is guaranteed. Mr. V says that himself, and so does Ben. Some weeks a stock drops.

But here's what I can tell you after 12 years of writing about money.

Every Monday, someone gets paid at the start of the week. For most of my readers, it has always been someone else.

If nothing changes, next Monday will look like last Monday. Your money waits in an account for prices to go up. Or you're back at a screen, guessing.

Ben spent two years on the paying side because nobody showed him there was another side. Most of my readers are in the same position. That isn't their fault.

But now you know it exists.

Picture the Monday Ben described to me. Coffee. A short checklist. About an hour. The money is in the account before the coffee is finished.

Then the laptop closes, and nobody checks a phone until Friday.

That's what the people Ben taught told him they wanted. Not to become traders. To have money coming in every week, on top of the paycheck.

The class costs $3. It takes about an hour. And you get your money back if you learn nothing.

If you've ever thought the stock market was for people with more money and more time than you, go on Sunday.

P.S. "I rented out Apple this week." That sentence made no sense to a man standing on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. It took him a year to work out what it meant. On Sunday, Ben shows it in about an hour, on a real account, for $3.