The Keeping Things Safe Code

Happy Cashflow Code Day!

It's time for another round of instant cash flow grabbed from the biggest and best real estate companies in the world…

All it takes is identifying the best cashflow code to use (which we do for you here) and then making a few clicks of your mouse…

Now, when most people want to keep important documents safe, they buy a strong box or a safe for their home…

And when they want an extra layer of protection, they'll use a safety deposit box at their local bank…

Those solutions are more than good enough for most folks…

But corporations and wealthy individuals choose today's company to secure their rarest and most valuable collectibles and assets…

They have a stronghold (pun intended) on the secure storage facility industry…

And they've been doing what they do since 1951 after converting from a facility that stored mushrooms…

Yup, the kind you put on pizza…

Physical assets and records used to make up the majority of what this company kept safe…

Whether it was Bill Gates' photography, Elton John's master recording, or artwork from the greats…

1960: One of Monet's original paintings being stored in one of the company's secure facilities

But over the last few years, they've been home to more and more, which, as you'll see below, is a big boost to the company's profitability and reach…

Data storage, 220 feet below ground

We've used cashflow codes from this company three times before to grab a total of $320 in instant income…

So let's get some cash flow for the fourth time from this company using this specific cashflow code:

IRM240119P00047500

Before we get to all the details, here's what I'm going to cover for you:

• The fundamental story: You'll see why I'm still so excited about this leader in secure storage. If you're ready to make some money from the company that keeps the rarest assets safe… you're going to love this opportunity!
• How the transaction works: You'll see how to generate at least $65 in instant cash flow. You'll see the steps involved… and I'll show you a screencast showing how to place this trade in your account.
• Ongoing support: If you're confused by ANYTHING below, simply submit a question here, and I'll do my best to cover it in our upcoming Q&A podcast that we'll email you on Tuesday around 4:00 pm ET. Remember, this is a learning process. So don't be hasty. Learn each week and write down your questions. Then listen to those podcasts to learn even more about what I'm showing you here.

Let's dive in…

What's Going On With the Economy?

Happy Cashflow Code Day!

OK, so the Fed is almost done hiking, or so it says, and the market is pricing a 30% chance of one more possible hike in the December meeting…

Currently, the bond market is becoming more confident that the Fed is done hiking and will hold rates higher longer than expected…

This is causing long-term rates to soar, squeezing capital costs across corporate America…

Right now, the 10-year treasury is at 16-year highs at 4.7%, and we'll likely see 30-year fixed mortgage rates hit 8% in the coming weeks…

As far as the weekly economic data goes, the long-term indicators are still pointing to a recession, agreeing with the conference board's leading indicators (fancy data Wall Street folks follow)…

Daily Shot

Even though talking heads continue to say a soft landing, long and variable lags can take a lot longer than people imagine…

Especially with so many consumers and businesses taking on debt at low-interest rates that will either have to be repaid or refinanced at much higher rates in the years to come…

Some economists have claimed that the Fed's hikes will move through the economy with lightning speed because the Fed telegraphs its plans ahead of time…

On the other hand, if most Americans gorged on debt and locked in low rates years ago, then why should you expect 5.25% worth of rate hikes done in record time to instantly hit the economy?

Because it won't, and there will be a massive amount of lag after 10 years of zero percent interest rates…

All of this is causing weakness in the overall economy with weakness in the stock and real estate markets.

Now, investors have a choice of putting money into accounts for a safe 5% return vs. taking on unnecessary risk…

While I think that's a great choice for most to put their money in, there's a tremendous amount of opportunity right now to beat the market and collect rich rent checks from the stock market.

Retire Rich with Stock Market ‘Mailbox Money'

Recently, I wrote that when it comes to the stock market, REITs get no respect on Wall Street.

When it comes to making money with investing, what's good for the goose isn't good for the gander…

That's because Wall Street hates cash-flowing stocks and loves high-growth stocks or stories like AI…

But when it comes to individual investors, dividends play a significant role in returns that investors have received during the past 50 years.

For example, going back to 1960, 69% of the total return of the S&P 500 Index can be credited to reinvested dividends and the power of compounding…

You can see that dividends played a large role in terms of contribution to total returns…

But it's also a source of consistent income for investors.

I don't have a crystal ball, so I can't tell you when this is going to happen…

Markets move…

But that's why I don't need to be a market timer; I'm a value real estate investor…

The stock market provides me with the best of both worlds.

A Safe Way To Own Real Estate & Collect Rent Checks

And as you're learning and earning together, making money consistently in the stock market isn't hard when you have a market insider teaching you…

If you've been with me for the last 12 months, living the mailbox money dream has been amazing!

The K.I.S.S. strategy (keep it simple, stupid) is often the best way to achieve success in the stock and real estate market…

But getting rich in the stock market can be as simple as buying and holding Real Estate Investment Trusts…

These are the best-in-breed real estate stocks, with strong cash flows… wide moats… competitive market share… valuable real estate holdings… excellent balance sheets… and management teams that are generous with shareholder returns.

And that's my goal: Help you generate weekly real estate mailbox money with a few clicks of the mouse.

So here's another opportunity to make a new deposit into your account…

Today, we're going to tap into a rock-solid REIT every investor ought to own, especially during uncertainty.

IRM240119P00047500

Doomsday Bunker Cashflow!

The company I'm going to show you how to generate instant cash flow from today is Iron Mountain Inc., ticker symbol: IRM.

This is a REIT that specializes in secure storage facilities…

Iron Mountain was founded in 1951, and they are the global leader in storage and information management services trusted by more than 225,000 organizations around the world, including over 95% of the Fortune 1000.

It has a real estate network of more than 85 million square feet across more than 1,400 facilities in over 60 countries. Iron Mountain stores and protects billions of valued assets, including critical business information, highly sensitive data, and cultural and historical artifacts…

Not only are their real estate holdings diversified, but no single customer accounts for more than 1% of Iron Mountain's revenue, and it boasts a 98% customer retention rate…

A unique fact about this company is that it is a highly secured deep underground bunker beneath the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania, nicknamed “The Underground”…

It's buried inside a mountain, through the steel gate, behind the razor wire, and protected by the semiautomatic weapon-carrying guards.

It's something right out of a James Bond movie.

Source: Biz Journals

Beyond the guards and the gate you see in the photo above is a 25-foot-high corridor that descends 22 stories to the main archive…

The Underground facility encompasses 145 acres and offers 55 million total square feet of space…

Employees travel through seven miles of underground roads and two miles of railroad tunnels…

To avoid employees getting lost, there are 10,000 location markers, which are massive limestone pillars spaced 40 feet apart and labeled with numbers.

So, If you are thinking that this sounds like a very secure location, you're right!

Stored within this facility (and many others that Iron Mountain operates) are treasures that billionaires, family trusts, and companies want securely stored…

The underground facility functions as its own city…

It has 3,000 badged employees, a transit system, a water treatment center, a medical facility, and even its own fire department…

So, in other words, Iron Mountain facilities are as secure as Fort Knox…

Source: TenFourMagazine.com

But what's even more interesting is that Iron Mountain didn't start out in the secure storage facilities…

The company has changed a lot in 70 years.

Before it was converted into a business records storage facility in 1951…

…The company was a prosperous mushroom business founded by Herman Knaust the “Mushroom King”…

Knaust earned that nickname – and his fortune – from growing and selling white table mushrooms… the ones found on pizza…

So, in 1936, he bought a depleted iron ore mine in Kingston, New York.

Its limestone walls and underground lakes made it the perfect mushroom farm.

His operation soon became the world's biggest mushroom supplier. National brands like Heinz and Campbell Soup relied on Knaust's mushrooms…

In 1945, Knaust hired Jewish refugees from Europe who were fleeing the ravages of WWII…

They told stories of leveled cities, lost belongings, and cultural riches destroyed in the blitzkrieg.

Those stories of lost identities via missing personal records are what spurred the idea to start protecting vital information from wars or other disasters in his mines…

By the end of the war, Knaust's view of the world had changed dramatically. And soon enough, the Cold War era brought that frightening vision closer to home…

So, in 1951, Knaust made his move…

He dismantled his farm… and converted the cavern into nuke-proof storage.

You can say Knaust was the original doomsday prepper…

“If an atom bomb burst right on top of us,” Knaust said upon reopening, “it wouldn't even make a Geiger counter flicker here in the vaults.”…

Knaust named his new operation after the mine: Iron Mountain Atomic Storage.

There were bunk beds, showers, and kitchens…

Nearby businesses rented space where they could send employees to hide out in case bombs began to fall.

But the real value of the space becomes noticeable with Iron Mountain's storage capacity…

Folks loaded the facility with their irreplaceable goods. It housed files, records, mementos, paintings, and even stamp collections… anything that people and businesses couldn't bear to lose…

Today, Iron Mountain (NYSE: IRM) is done with bomb shelters. But it still reigns supreme in the safe-storage industry… with a modern twist…

Its present-day business is divided into three parts…

Two of those segments are more established… and they made the company what it is today.

Its “records and information management” (“RIM”) segment is the largest…

This represents 83% of Iron Mountain's business.

Iron Mountain offers the ultimate in secure data storage…

It's a nerve center for global data…

The company now houses the servers for five of the top 10 global cloud service providers.

In other words, today, Iron Mountain is a high-tech business… But it wasn't caught in the recent market meltdown.

That's because it's recession-proof; it does not experience significant reductions in storage rental revenue during recessions or economic downturns.

Year-to-date, the stock price is up 13%, trading around $57 while providing a dividend of 4.54% to equity holders…

In its most recent earnings release, the company reported record revenues of $1.36B and increased its dividend payout by 5%…

That's great to hear because they previously paused any increases to the dividend payout.

While this high inflationary environment has been a headwind to most companies, it's been a tailwind to Iron Mountain's profitability…

When you think of bullet-proof companies, Iron Mountain is a textbook example…

That's because trust is this company's key resource. And it's fundamental to Iron Mountain's newest growth driver.

Bigger Data Pipelines & Storage

As Ice hockey star Wayne Gretzky famously said, “I skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.”

We're on the edge of a data revolution. People and companies are swimming in information that needs storage…

And that means big tailwinds for Iron Mountain's global data centers…

Currently, this segment only represents around 9% of Iron Mountain's revenue… But it's a major growth driver – one that makes this company future-proof…

In 2022, the world generated five exabytes of data per day…

For context, an exabyte is equal to one quintillion bytes…

In other words, if a gigabyte were the size of Earth, an exabyte would be the size of the sun.

A single exabyte defies human comprehension – let alone five every day…

But what's most absurd is how quickly that figure will grow…

By 2025, it's expected we'll create 463 exabytes per day. That's 92 times the amount of data produced in 2022…

So, as more data increases, the need for storage does, too…

These storage facilities are called data centers and are filled with servers and network equipment…

These data centers are an emerging trend in real estate because the data centers are massive buildings…

They process all the information we send and create with our smartphones and other connected devices…

For the past 15 years, it has been growing this part of its business…

You'll soon hear about real estate investors trying to speculate on these “data farms”…

But with one click, we can tap into this already established “Data REIT” that already owns, operates, and finances data centers…

Iron Mountain is making this business its specialty… and it will take the company into the future…

And allows us to collect from this cash cow over and over again…

So, if you'd like to collect a weekly rent check from The King of the (Storage) Mountain, this is the cashflow code to do it best.

The Keeping Things Safe Cashflow Code

Here's this week's cashflow code we're going to use: IRM240119P00047500

At last glance, this cashflow code is trading between $.60 and $.70 per contract.

So that means for every contract sold, I'm going to collect between $60 and $70 of cash flow. If you sell more than one contract, the cash flow you'd generate would go up.

How will this cashflow code generate that cash? Well, this cashflow code identifies the Iron Mountain, Inc. (IRM) January 19th, 2024, $47.50 put option that we're selling for cash. (Module 3 of the quick start series specifically covers options pricing and how to conduct these transactions if you need a refresher.)

Here's a screencast of me finding this cashflow code and entering the transaction in my brokerage account:

Here are the instructions written out…

Action-to-Take: Sell-to-open Iron Mountain, Inc. (IRM) January 19th, 2024 $47.50 put option

Here's what I do while in a brokerage account if you're not just copying and pasting the cashflow code. (Remember, depending on what brokerage platform you're using, it might look different than my video. But these instructions should help.)

Step 1: I type in the ticker symbol IRM

Step 2: I open the options chain for the January 19, 2024 expiration cycle.

Step 3: I locate the $47.50 “PUT” strike, which is located in the January 19, 2024 expiration cycle

Step 4: I double-checked the ticker symbol, expiration, strike and options contract type or what I call the “cash flow code”: IRM240119P00047500

Step 5: I click on the “BID” price to open the order entry menu. (The bid price will be lower than the ask price.) The order entry MUST say “SELL” & “SINGLE”

Step 6: I select how many contracts to sell-to-open (remember from the quick-start series, this strategy is to “selling-to-open” or “STO… not buying.)

Step 7: I enter my price at $.65 since prices are trading between $.60 and $.70… $.65 is in the middle of the market and will likely get filled at that price, which is why I chose that.

Step 8: Click “Confirm & Send” to review the order. This is where I double-check again to make sure that it matches the exact cashflow code, quantity, buying power effect and that I'm selling-to-open.

Step 9: Then I press “send”

Or, if you're using ThinkorSwim, you can paste the pre-populated order with this code SELL -1 IRM 100 19 JAN 24 47.5 PUT @.65 LMT

Remember, it's best to use your paper trading account for this starting out. After you've done it successfully in your paper trading account, if you feel confident enough, then you can replicate it in a real money account.

Now, this instant cashflow transaction in a margin account would've meant that the broker would have set aside $475.50 in buying power for every put contract we sold. (I discuss margin accounts in detail in Module 2 of the quick start series.)

You don't have to use margin, but if you do, that's important to understand and ask questions about.

This margin calculation is based on the broker's margin schedule, which is determined by the current expected range. This requirement could increase, which is why you'd want to have a cushion of cash in your account if you use margin on these trades. That helps you make sure you don't get into trouble.

Now, if we wanted to use a cash-secured approach (cash-secured put-selling is also covered with JP in Module 2!) on this transaction, we would've used a cash account.

In that case, the broker would set aside $4,685 for every put sold.

This cash set aside is to make sure that if IRM share prices started dropping below the strike price by expiration, I would be able to take on the risk of buying back the stock instead of keeping my cash flow.

Let's play out a few scenarios…

Ok, so here's how I am going to manage this cash flow position.

Best case: I'm going to be looking to buy-to-close the Iron Mountain, Inc. (IRM), $47.50 put option contract at a 57% profit or at $.30 per contract. The reason is because we want to manage to keep our profits and reduce our market exposure. The stock market moves, and we want to dance with it, not stand still.

Once we lock in our profit, we can redeploy for another opportunity with more cash flow opportunity.

So, best case scenario… generate and keep instant cash flow.

Then rinse and repeat…

Worst case: We don't have to worry about Iron Mountain, Inc. (IRM) going bankrupt, so the real risk is short-term market volatility that could push shares below our $46.85 (strike price – premium collected).

If that does happen in the short term, I'll buy-to-close this position and roll it out for more time while collecting more cash flow.

So, in other words, we would just need a little time for the market to go in our favor. This will take a little more buying power, and why we always want to keep 50% of our buying power available.

Next steps…

Ok, so this alert covered A LOT…

Read this multiple times… write down your questions as you go.

And then, submit them on this page in the question box. I’ll answer them in an upcoming Q&A podcast. Those podcasts are sent to you each week, and I’ll do my best to get to everyone’s specific questions.

Josh Belanger
Editor, Weekly Cashflow Triggers