Our Story
Cash Flow University was founded in September 2022 by Stephen Manning, an entrepreneur and lifelong investor who had spent years watching retail investors get burned by speculative trading services, lottery-ticket option plays, and "gurus" who never showed their actual results. What started as a small group of friends sharing trade ideas in a private chat has grown into a community of 1,200+ traders.
Why We Started
The options trading space is loud. Social media is full of screenshots of overnight gains, sketchy alert services charging thousands of dollars a month, and "educators" who have never traded a real account. Meanwhile, the people who make a living selling options, institutional desks, market makers, and disciplined retail sellers, operate quietly using the same handful of strategies: covered calls, cash-secured puts, and credit spreads.
CFU was started to close that gap. We wanted to build a place where everyday traders could learn the same risk-managed, probability-based approach used by professionals, with full transparency around results, methodology, and risk. No hype. No pump-and-dump alerts. No hidden track record.
The Problem We Solve
Most retail traders lose money because they trade without a defined edge, without position sizing rules, and without a plan for what to do when a trade goes against them. CFU solves this by giving members a complete framework: entries, position sizing, and a stated management plan on every alert, whether that plan is a stop, a roll, or holding to expiry, paired with the education needed to understand why each trade was selected. Members aren't just copying alerts. They're learning a repeatable system they can run for the rest of their investing lives.
What Makes CFU Different
Unlike typical options education, CFU publishes its complete trading track record , every trade, every outcome, win or loss. We focus on income-generating strategies, most of them defined-risk spreads. More than half of our closed trades are spreads with a fixed maximum loss. The rest are cash-secured puts, covered calls and long options, and a small number are undefined-risk positions such as strangles. All of them are posted and recorded the same way. And our Discord gives peer support and answers during market hours, which turns isolated retail traders into a connected, accountable group.
If you want to understand exactly how it all works, read our How CFU Works page or explore membership options.