How the BerserkerMail launch almost killed my biz partner

Few people know how close to death my biz partner in BerserkerMail Troy Broussard came during the launch. Even I did not know at the time. But it was one of those things that started with health problems going back to the 2008 market crash when he lost all his money while living in Brazil. During that time he horribly mangled his neck while whoring himself out to write blog posts at $4.50 a pop, desperate to keep his kids in private school, instead of letting them get bullied, abused, or even killed in a Brazilian public school. (The national and international media recently declared an “epidemic of violence” in Brazilian public schools, if that tells you something.) And Troy was willing to do whatever it took to keep his kids from that violence. For example: He’d take insanely high pressure contracts where he had to write 200 articles in 48 hours, and was basically chained to his desk. And that worked for a while. But four straight years of doing this kind of crazy output seized up the base of his neck and he suffered sharp, shooting pains down both his arms when typing. He had to strap an ice pack on to keep going at all. And what ultimately happened was, large bone spurs grew out the front of his vertebrae and “fused” together. The whole thing permanently damaged his neck and spine, leaving him with two herniated discs within a millimeter of rupturing, but he didn’t really know it at the time. He just kept pushing himself, icing it, and churning out articles like a machine to keep his kids safe. Since then, he’s done everything you can possibly imagine to try to fix it: He’s had multiple stem cell injections at $20,000 a pop. He’s also invested in a high-end concierge chiropractor he pays a small fortune to be “on call” whenever his pain gets to vomiting and/or near blackout-levels. He has yet another team at another concierge-style medical service treating him for his condition. But even with all that, he can barely move his neck anymore without feeling excruciating pain. And the best doctors he could find have all told him the same thing: The only fix is with dangerous and risky surgery. So risky, in fact, it has a high chance of paralyzing him. Needless to say, he has learned to just deal with the pain. And it has since become a “part” of him, that he lives with, and manages the best he can. And this is how the BerserkerMail launch almost killed him: He flew down to Brazil during the launch to keep our development team there together. They were about ready to quit from the crushing workload Troy imposed on them while cracking the whip to get the platform launched on schedule. And Troy pushed himself really hard as well: Mainlining Mountain Dew and energy drinks just to get through 20+ hour days, grinding through weeks of work, and tweaking up his old neck injuries. And it was just like his article days again, with his neck jacked up and pain shooting down his arms and back, hunched over a screen, with little sleep. Even when he did catch a few hours of sleep, it was on a cheap little crappy bed that didn’t have a mattress. It was just some kind of “foam” he said. It was so bad it was seizing his neck up every night to the point where he didn’t even really want to go to sleep. It was less painful to just stay up — because if he did sleep, his whole neck would be jacked upon waking and he couldn’t do anything anyway. Troy did what he could, with massages and places to help loosen things up. But his neck was getting worse, and he was also pounding caffeine and sugar so hard he had no idea his glucose levels were going through the roof. He had never paid attention to that before. But there he was, his exhausted, broken body racked with extreme inflammation, living on caffeine and food so bad it’d probably make a rodent sick until, eventually he had a near-fatal diabetic reaction. He didn’t realize that’s what it was. He just knew he started feeling really, really bad. And the pain and misery peaked while getting ready to come home, and he got some tests done first. The doctors ran all the tests on him including even a prostate exam — as he started wondering if he had cancer due to one of his friends dying while suffering from similar symptoms. But what made it really spooky was he’d been living with pain for 15 years every single day. And he simply didn’t know what was just regular pain or what was something else. Since his neck injury, the first conscious thought he has each morning before opening his eyelids is a pain assessment. It sounds almost sadistic but his day starts with: “Okay, how am I feeling? It’s about a 4 out of 10 pain today. Not bad.” Or, “Holy crap, this is like an 8…” Even worse: he has some kind of freak tolerance to doctor-prescribed morphine, codeine, or other narcotic drugs. Percocet, Demerol… none of it makes any difference with his pain. The only thing he occasionally takes is some Advil. But that doesn’t take the pain away, either. It just loosens his neck up a little bit and relaxes the muscles. In fact, he literally would need 12 Advils at one time to feel any pain relief at all. Of course taking that many Advils at once would just rip his kidneys apart. So he doesn’t bother taking anything and suffers through it all, trying to manage with cold plunge tubs to reset his body. So what happened? He got on a plane and flew back to Florida and tried to just rest and not think about it. But as soon as he got off the plane, he turned his phone back on and saw a message alert. The message was from the doctor in Brazil telling him they got some of his tests back, and to: “Get your ass to the ER.” So he went straight to urgent care and his glucose was like 365, which is seriously pegged. And then everything went downhill from there for a while. For example, he went legally blind for about two weeks. His sugar level was so high it was causing damage to his retinas and and he couldn’t drive. He also had to change the fonts on his phone and his computer to be “geriatric-sized,” and even then it was hard to see. He couldn’t really write or work on the computer at all. He had to cut it down to just the bare minimum. And he wasn’t even able to email his list each day during that time. That’s all just for starters, too — I haven’t even mentioned his potentially fatal heart and blood pressure issues yet, that also emerged at the time and still plague him to this day. Plus, Troy has asked me not to reveal some of the other things that happened to him out of respect for his medical privacy, as well as for the sake of his dignity. And who can blame him? The guy went through hell. He realistically could have died, or ended up with a limb or two amputated, or even suffered the same fate as the late comedian Patrice O’Neal, whose similarly high blood sugar put him in a sort of “waking coma” where he couldn’t speak or move anything — including not even his eyelids. That guy was just existing in his body, like a starfish or amoeba, until he died. I suspect Troy was well on his way to his own living hell like that. And even though the BerserkerMail launch that almost killed Troy was three years ago, he’s still not out of the woods today. Recently, for instance, he got a coronary calcium score test. If you’ve never had one, a 300 on a calcium score test means you have a severe risk of cardiac issues and could potentially drop dead at any moment. Troy’s score? A whopping 2,399! That’s in the 99.7 percentile. And soon he will have to undergo another, far more invasive test, where they insert a tube into his wrist and “thread” it up towards his heart to check for where the blockages and problems are. This is a test where there will be a heart surgeon standing by… fully expecting to have to crack Troy’s chest open to do surgery. Hopefully not, but he ain’t exactly optimistic about getting out of that. In fact, this has him so freaked out he’s been making preparations for the worst, like talking about granting me voting proxy in one or both of our companies, and flying his son in from Brazil to figure out some estate issues. It’s a bit hair-raising even writing about this, in a lot of ways. Needless to say, all this is why he disappeared from everything software-related after the BerserkerMail launch. Usually I’d hear from Troy several times per day. But after that I barely heard from him at all for months, and we let our COO (Email Players subscriber Nicole English) handle the day-to-day and the team, while Troy did what he had to do to recover. Short story long: One day, months later and totally out of the blue, Troy starts blowing up my phone with Marco Polo (the app we use to communicate with cross-country) messages again. And no joke, when I saw him I thought it was someone else staring back at me from my phone’s screen. The guy went from looking and sounding like the grim reaper was hovering over him to behaving like a kid in the candy store. His color was back, he was thinner, and he looked a lot healthier. Just a totally different guy than I’d been working with during our BerserkerMail launch and, before that, the Learnistic and SocialLair launches. Stefania said she legitimately almost didn’t recognize him, either. And when I asked what was going on, he said he’d been having a lot of fun making a small fortune trading with his business. You see, Troy is a Navy Nuclear Engineer-turned-software designer. He is also one of the top email automation guys on the planet. Nobody better, in my opinion. It’s why BerserkerMail is so superior to other ESPs in so many ways. His precision and perfectionism, and seeing minute, almost invisible, details even our brilliant team of hand-picked developers miss, is almost uncanny. And during that down time, trying to NOT think about our software offers… he started combining his knowledge of math, systems (from overseeing nuclear reactors in submarines, etc), and marketing automation to create a framework for trading he was applying to crypto, specifically. He had already been a big crypto guy. He had also funded multiple company startups from trading crypto. And so he saw the possibility of getting what he wanted out of life with trading — like not dealing with a bunch of people and doing things on his own terms so he could manage his pain and health. And most important of all… he figured it could help him avoid his ongoing nightmare of his family finding his corpse slumped over his keyboard from overwork and stress. That was (still is) a terrifying fear he has. And while he was making bank with crypto, he found turning it into consistent cash flow was getting harder due to ill-defined regulations and tax laws, and with random exchanges being shut down. Back then the FTX exchange was collapsing and the SEC was threatening to shut it down, and there were all kinds of lawsuits. The Feds were also fining Coinbase, and they were fining Kraken, and they were shutting down KuCoin, and every day it was some new drama. Troy couldn’t even log into his account without sweating and wondering if it’d be shut down. He was excited he had found a solution, but yet he was bummed out because all the drama around it wasn’t sustainable, especially at that time, when he was trying to avoid stress. So while he’s still a passionate about crypto, the uncertainty grated on him. His goal at that point wasn’t just money for his business. He was good with that already with trading. What he wanted was a low stress way of having it — where he wasn’t tethered to his desk all day, jacking up his neck & blood pressure, or worried about reactivating any of his ghoulish health problems. So what did he do next? He decided to see what would happen if he applied certain aspects of the framework he’d started formulating with crypto to day trading. He also went deep for about a year going into other types of stock trading and swing trading, too. Plus, he did a lot of spreads, which are a risky form of options trading. And while some parts of the framework he’d started working out earlier helped make him a lot of cashflow doing these other kinds of trading, it was all even more stressful than trading crypto. In fact, true story about that: Troy wears a CGM (continuous glucose monitor) due to his diabetes. When he’s calm or doing something he loves, it’s at near-perfect levels. But when he was day trading he would routinely watch his glucose spike clear off the charts! Guy’d have to stop in the middle of trading and do squats and pushups to get his blood flowing. Not exactly “low stress,” is it? So he stopped that and experimented with trading SPY, which is an exchange-traded fund that tracks the performance of the S&P 500 index. He was trading between 20 and 100 contracts in one trade, multiple times per day, some days trading more than a million dollars in trading volume. So he was killing it with that, too, but he also took a lot of losses. Same with some riskier kinds of Options trading he did. In one month alone he paid over $8,000 in fees. Realize the fees for Options trading are only about 65 cents per contract. So to spend $8,000, 65 cents at a time, meant he was doing a LOT of trading, to say the least — and all to net about $20,000 per month. But he also had to take a lot of risks and deal with a lot of stress again. Later on, he subscribed to a guru’s alerts who made billions trading for hedge funds. And it dawned on Troy that was ultimately unsustainable, too. You see, he was winning four out of five trades, and he was winning above the averages of the market, and his account was growing. But it was all just a delusion. Because the truth of the matter is, he still didn’t know how to do any of it himself. Instead, all he was doing was trading this guru’s alerts. That means, the guru would send out an alert to do a trade, which was fine. But it was also another form of stress unto itself, because when the guru sent out the alerts, Troy had to take it within as little as two minutes. But if he missed a trade within that two-minute window, he wouldn’t get the trade. So, once again, Troy was still chained to the desk. And both psychologically and physically… it was no different, and even worse, than sitting there writing articles for 12 hours a day. Because now there was a timing aspect to the stress, where he had to respond as soon as he got the alert. So he’s waiting for an alert, he’s watching the charts, and he’s waiting… and the guru is going to hit him any minute… but then life happens (one of his kids needs help with something, his doctor calls with test results, he has to answer the call of nature… whatever it was…) and he had to leave the desk for a few minutes, and the alert came, and then it’d go south on him, and then he had to scramble to try to recoup the loss he just took. At one point it got so intense Troy even toted his laptop into the bathroom. It was the only way he’d be sure not to miss an alert. Plus, again, there was still that stress of not knowing how the guru was placing the trades. i.e., if the guru had a coronary, how exactly was Troy going to be in business? His success was reliant upon this guru which he realized was just stupid. And that’s when he threw up his arms and realized this all had to stop, and he would have to do something different. The way Troy saw it, lots of trading success is not much fun or all that useful if you’re constantly bound up with anxiety, or writhing around in pain all day or, worse a walking, breathing “cardiac event” waiting to happen like he was. And so it went… With Troy trying one new thing after another, making lots of cashflow, but still running into the same perpetually stressful state of relying on alerts or having to be on “call” constantly the moment the bell opened, or tolerating an endless cycle of “buy, hold, buy, hope it goes up, sell it at a profit” events. This got really messed up when he applied it to swing trading. He was banking $800 to $5,000 in a day doing that. But then he also had days where he lost $11,000. Lots of ups and downs. Lots of drama. And lots of “roller coaster” like stress. His salt of the earth, long suffering wife Edina (probably one of the sweetest human beings I have ever met, and who was one of just four people at my own wedding to Stefania during the Covid lockdowns) would have to walk on egg shells around Troy depending on if he had a bad day trading or not. He’d just go ballistic on the poor woman depending on his trades on any given day. And so Troy put an end to swing trading, too. And on and on it continued… I could spend another 50+ pages probably covering all the thousands of iterations Troy did to make various kinds of trading work. But none of them really gave him that low stress existence he needed until he reached out to his friend Markus who trades options with what’s called “the wheel strategy.” Troy found it to be a really conservative and VERY low-stress kind of strategy. And he definitely liked that part. He also loved the fact that it had a super high win rate, that it was easy to manage, and had a low time commitment. But alas… he looked at how long it took and how slow it was going to be, and he just couldn’t do it. When he ran the numbers he saw he’d need a quarter of a million dollars in his account just to make maybe $50,000 a year. And then it’d probably take four or five years to get it to six figures. His attitude had less to do with greed, though. It was more about the fact he’d already tasted death. Troy had truly experienced how fragile life is. He didn’t want to spend whatever time he has left (“tomorrow is promised to nobody” ain’t just a line for him, it’s his reality each day) eeking out so little profit in that much time, and the numbers just didn’t pan out. But still, something about the wheel strategy really attracted him to it. So he started applying parts of that framework he’d created over thousands of trades and iterations (going back to when he was doing crypto) to the wheel strategy. And the more he played with it, the more he got excited and kept going deeper into figuring out how to tweak the approach with his framework. You could say Troy’s framework is a hyper effective version of the wheel strategy, but with his own rules he’d developed over thousands of trades. And by combining his framework with this wheel strategy, Troy legitimately invented his own low stress and almost flawlessly successful: “Trading framework.” Not a “system”, it’s not like that. Just a framework that, unlike buying alerts services, once you learn it you do not need him anymore (unless you want to keep learning new ways of applying it, of course, that he is constantly testing) and that’s probably the opposite of super risky or super stressful. It did not require tens of thousands of dollars to begin trading to see any real results with, either, like a lot of trading methods do. And when he started dialing it in, he found it took only about an hour, maybe two hours max, per week… and the work was almost as simple and pleasant as checking his email. i.e., very low stress. And with very low losses and low risk for his business if he followed the framework. Of course, there is always SOME risk and loss and stress in trading. Anyone telling you otherwise is lying through their teeth. But not only did Troy’s framework bring in consistent wins, the returns were, frankly, unbelievable even to him. For example: Troy was targeting 1% returns each week. Which was about 4% returns per month. Which then compounded to around… which can compound (through the magic of compounding) into 68% returns per year. I suspect most traders would agree 68% per year is almost unheard of outside of politicians dabbling with insider trading. But Troy found as long as he stayed inside his framework, and as long as he did not get “creative” with it… and (this is important) as long as he exercised PATIENCE… and did not try to complicate what was almost laughably simple… then it was working almost like clockwork. Believe it or not: It worked so consistently, and so reliably, and so profitably for him that, at first, he assumed it was some kind of “fluke” and would eventually break. So he kept trading and trading and trading… we’re talking hundreds of trades and then, thousands of trades… and he kept seeing the same thing each time: consistently getting about 98% win rates, averaging about 1% per week, in about 1-2 hours per week… and seeing those same results week in, and week out… even if the market was pulling back or outright tanking. But, even so: Troy couldn’t help wondering if this was just something only he could do, with his experience, and with his training and motivations and ambition… or could anyone else do it, too? So he shared his framework with some friends and colleagues. Especially people who’d seen a lot of trading methods and who did a lot of trading themselves. Like, for example: Email Players subscriber Jon Alexander (who was CMO of Agora’s Legacy Research, and has just about seen everything under the stun probably with trading). Troy also got introduced via Email Players subscriber Tom Beal to Jon’s boss at the time over at Agora Financial — Fernando Cruz — who even invited Troy to hang out with him in his box seats at a Miami Dolphins game. Troy got the sense Fernando had him there to feel out if maybe he was potentially someone Agora might do business with in some way, shape, or form. But it became clear real quick that was not going to happen. Why? Because Agora is big on the “pedigree.” I don’t think this is a big mystery to anyone on any of their mailing lists. They primarily only deal with guys who have impressive credentials who’ve made $150 million as hedge fund managers and that sort of thing. But Troy is just a regular guy who figured out a way to trade options in a way that had low stress, high wins, and almost no real barrier to entry. (For example, Troy helps his 9-year old son Nicholas use the framework via a custodial account). Which in hindsight was good for Troy. Especially considering that Legacy Research division of Agora shut down last year after some SEC pressure, Porter Stansberry pulling out, and some other drama with their people. But back to the story: Troy kept trading and refining and honing his framework, tweaking this, and adjusting that… and no matter how many trades he made, and no matter how crazy some of those trades seemed… it still kept achieving that nearly flawless 98% Win Rate. Think about this: The average consumer dabbling with trading loses 70% of the time. And the really good ones get maybe (maybe!) a 72% win rate — which means they are still losing almost 30% of the time. So in other words, they might win $1,000, then win $1,300, then win $2,200, and then boom — lose $6,000. I mean, that’s the game. And it’s very risky and very stressful, and it’s why so few are really any good at it. But with Troy’s framework, applied specifically to options trading exactly as he teaches it, it’s been a nearly flawless 98% average win rate across the board for both him and, also, several others (not everyone, especially if they did not put in the time and work) he’s shared his method with since. Yes, I am aware this sounds crazy. Probably even like the usual “star-story-solution” sales pitch. But should you decide to look at this more closely yourself, I believe you will agree that, if anything, I am UNDER-hyping this. But still, I’d be disappointed in you if you weren’t skeptical or if you didn’t find this hard to believe. I tend to only like dealing with skeptics, and have very little patience for impulse buyers. Anyway, I say all this as a warning. Because all of this gets even MORE unbelievable — although also more exciting — when you do the math. Especially when you look at how a “measly” 1% per week in returns can potentially compound over just a short time period. As Troy told a small group of VIP students at his house this past June: “It’s already hard for them to believe the five-year return. I calculated this, you can check my work easily for yourself. But what if I opened up a account for my child when they were born and put $1,000 in it, never added another penny and just traded it for 18 years. $11.2 million, $1,000 compounds into 11.2, only at 1% with not a penny extra added, just from micro compounding 1% a week for 18 years. It is unbelievably high. And so we actually limited it. We need to put a disclaimer on that calculator why we don’t go beyond five years.” All right, enough build up and tease. If you want to know more about Troy’s methods then the first link below is to a live call with him where you can hold his feet to the fire and make him prove it all to you — and he would love it if you did. He welcomes and loves hostile skeptics about this. No matter how jaded you are, you probably are nowhere near as jaded as he was. For my part though: If you buy Troy Broussard’s Low Stress Trading offer via using RefCode SETTLE at the link below before tonight, Sunday 10/20 at midnight EDT I will send you a copy of my next book (about World-Building) called: “ParaSELL Universe” It’s a compilation of the following Email Players issues: October 2020, December 2020, April 2021, July 2021, September 2021, January 2023, February 2023, August 2023, September 2023, and November 2023. And these issues collectively show how to create an alternate reality & marketing “universe” for your business where you’re king & customers/clients potentially buy simply because you decree it. This phenomenon is based on the twin concepts I’ve pioneered of: * World-Building and... * Sixth-Generation Marketing Warfare The latter is where selling can be done well before anyone sees an offer or before a product is even created — and with a lot of the selling potentially being done by that company’s fans & customers (as well as its haters & trolls)… without those customers necessarily even being aware of it. This will be my most expensive book after it launches at a discount next month. But it’s yours free if you buy Low Stress Trading with RefCode SETTLE at the link below by tonight’s deadline. I got three links if this is of interest to you. Link #1 — is to sign up for today’s last live, free training on how Low Stress Trading works in “real time”, see Troy’s bare nekid account, and see how he does his thing, ask questions, even outright badger him if you choose to prove he’s telling you the truth (go ahead and do it, he WANTS you to try to stump him)… [( Link #2 — is to the Low Stress Trading TrustPilot reviews. I cannot legally vouch for any of the claims there, of course. And many are so surreal the three attorneys we hire telling us we can’t really use them as-is in our marketing, but you can read them independently on that site: [( Link #3 — is to read the ParaSELL Universe book sales letter (order button disabled) I will send you if you buy before the deadline… [( “3 links in an email, Ben???” Yes, I am breaking all kinds of my own email “rules” here. But it’s important you make an informed purchase. Today’s last live training is at 5:00 EDT / 4:00 CDT / 3:00 MDT / 2:00 PDT NOTE: If you end up buying the offer, use RefCode SETTLE on the order form. If you don’t, you won’t get the ParaSELL Universe book bonus. Ben Settle This email was sent by Ben Settle as owner of Settle, LLC. Copyright © 2024 Settle, LLC. All Rights Reserved. No part of this email may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from Settle, LLC. Click here to [unsubscribe]( Settle, LLC PO Box 1056 Gold Beach Oregon 97444 USA