 It is 5.47 Eastern time here in the Boston area, that means we start promptly in just three minutes. Three minutes start time here at Online Critter Central, your host for today, Melissa Armo with sockswish.com. We do want to thank each and every one of you for your time and your participation and again Melissa will be starting promptly in now just three minutes. Three minutes start time. Thank you so much everyone again and welcome. This is Online Critter Central, we want to welcome each and every one of you to the presentation today, drummers, are you ready? Okay, thanks for the talk. And without me, ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together and welcome our host and presenter, please welcome from the sockswish.com. Kevin and Kathy, thank you Online Trader Central for having me. Welcome. Welcome everyone. My name is Melissa Armo, sockswish, and today I'm going to talk about the strategy that I trade in the market and what I do is I day trade. I day trade gaps every day for fast profits. That's what I do. That's what I like to do. And it's interesting because when you are trading, you're risking money no matter what you do, swing trading, day trading, any kind of trading you do, you're risking money in the market. And personally, when I'm in something and out of something very, very quickly, I'm at less risk. So I like that. I'm an impatient person, so I like to make money fast. But I also like the fact that I'm not at risk for that long. It's a positive thing. So we're going to talk about that today. If you would like more information, you can email me at Melissa at thestoxwish.com. And you can feel free to go to my website, www.thesoxwish.com, if you'd like more information too. And also, you can go and sign up and register and subscribe to my YouTube site. You just put in and Google the sockswish because I have a ton of videos there, all of the prior webinars that I have done I have there. And you can join me and like me at any one of these pages. So we're really talking about today, day trading for money, for profits, for financial freedom. Because ultimately, whether you have a full-time job and you want to day trade on the side, or you're retired and you want to day trade on the side, or you want to completely switch careers because you feel like you're not happy with what you're doing or you're not making enough money, and you want to change careers and learn how to day trade as a full-time job, ultimately, all of these things that many people get into the market, risk money in the market, decide to do is for financial freedom. Now, what does this mean to you? What does financial freedom mean to you? It means something different to everyone, but for me, and when I think about it in general, it really means being able to pay your bills effortlessly. Meaning you're not living paycheck to paycheck. You're also not working more than 40 hours a week. Okay, a lot of people have salary jobs if they work 50, 60 hours a week. That's a lot. Also, financial freedom means having time for your family and friends time to do stuff. Where you're not chained to a desk all the time, and have time for leisure, can do things, weekends off, vacations. And getting to that point of realizing that the market can bring you financial freedom takes learning. It takes learning how to trade properly because if you don't know how to trade and risk your money in the market, what's going to happen? You're going to probably lose unless you get lucky. And you only can get lucky so many times and then things go against you. So when it gets to the point where you're like, wait a minute, how can I make this happen? You've got to figure something out that works. It's based on the information. And the right information makes a world of difference. It makes the difference between winning or losing, and it's really about having the right knowledge and focus. So how are you going to get that? Well, you've got to learn how. And you've really got to get conviction. Now, what is conviction? I haven't talked about this in any recent webinars. And I wanted to talk about it today because when I first, first started out training, I thought like this. And then when I first started the business, I taught like this. And it really is in every single class that I teach. But I rarely talk about it in webinars anymore. And I thought, why? People need this. People need conviction. Because a lot of people are trading. Some of you here tonight might be trading. And you might be training with zero conviction in the market. But then you have to say, why? Why am I doing it? Maybe you are doing something that doesn't make any sense, or you don't believe in it anymore. There's a strategy. Maybe you don't have a strategy at all. When you have conviction in a trading strategy, you can produce positive results. But when you do not have conviction in a trading strategy, do not expect positive results. And not only that, if you don't have conviction in the market as a source of wealth to pay you, you will not see positive results. In other words, if you have a negative attitude about the market, then that is the results that you will create. You can't waste years of your life trying to make a little bit of money in the market while losing because there's costly. Commissions are costly. Your time is costly. And you don't want to take tons and tons of trades, even if you're only risking 100 shares, 200 shares, 300 shares that are not of value, that are not making you any real money, and ultimately are costing you money because of the cost of having a platform and trading rooms and commissions and the brokerage fees. You've got to learn what trades are valuable. It's about, again, the focus. Don't waste time trading for months and years without any conviction and without a strategy. And you don't want to waste all day while also trading in the market. I traded, I'm usually done in a few minutes every day. I'm usually done every day before 10 o'clock. Sometimes I'm in a trade till after 10 o'clock, but when I say fast, which was in the title of the webinar, I'm talking about minutes, okay? Minutes, sometimes seconds. Today I was out of a piece of my trade within seconds because of the money that I was up and the way that it moved so quickly. You've got to have conviction and this will allow you to perform, okay? Many, many people say, you know, they ask me, they say, well, what are you doing Melissa? And I trade, I trade every day, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday if I get my strategy in the market. Well, I do it because I like it and I actually teach because I like it too, but I have a lot of conviction in my method and I know that people lack this that are out there trying to learn. People want information, they want something, okay? I only say to people, you know, that they go out and they talk about different things. Well, what is your, what are your credentials? My credentials are really that I created my own system. There is no one on this planet Earth or any other planet in the solar system that we live in that trades gaps the way that I do. I have a 26 point rating system, I made it up myself. I traded for three years and lost money in the market until I figured it out. That is my credential and I do it and I've been doing it for eight years. That's the best credential you could ever ask someone for because I made it up for myself. I really don't know any of you unless you're a student but years ago when I started teaching I didn't have any students, I knew no one. I wanted to do this for one reason and the reason was myself. I never dreamed that I'd be teaching anyone what I know and my friends and the broker that I traded that encouraged me to start a business and teach people my method years and years ago because they saw me making money and they realized that I had something very special. Part of the thing that what I do that's special is I really have a lot of conviction in what I do. So when people come to me and they learn from me and they're in the live trading room and I'm calling the trades in real live time they take them with me because they have conviction. They have conviction in what I taught them but they also have conviction in me because I talk with such exactness when I trade and call the trades. Here's a good example. This was one last week. Now I took a couple of days off last week from running the room and I traded by myself. It's good to do that every once in a while. ACAM worked and was a long but I will tell you that the beginning of the morning of this, this was a gap, was tough. Now why was it tough? Because you see this here, this tail signifies that the stock when it opened had a big move down and I was looking to go along this and I did go along it but it wiggled and jiggled. It's hard to tell now because it's flat. This is just like on a PowerPoint chart but actually this was tough to do and if you didn't have to stop at the right place here it might have dinged you out and then gone on to work. This is a great example where I had a high level of conviction that the stock was along, not a short, okay? And again, you have to get the directional bias in your trade right in order to make money consistently but it was tough, it was not easy and what I mean by that is that you had to wait till it went and took off. A lot of times I take trades and we're up money immediately but not this one. It was a little bit squiggly here in the morning till it went up and blew but it was a really good trade, okay? So I'm teaching people how to do this. You can do it. Just because I've been doing this for eight years doesn't mean you can't learn it in one class or a couple of days or a couple of weeks or a couple of months, whatever your learning curve is. Everyone is a different learning curve when they're learning something new. It's like going to school and learning a different language. I get a lot of nice emails from my students. This is an email from James. He's doing extremely good. He had a nice trade today, the one that I called and last week he traded on his own because it took a couple of days off in the room and he was very proud of himself. He did SCSS, he picked the gap, he rated the gap, he's done the class and he was out before 10 and this is me teaching a person, a real live man actually, works for school district and he trades and he trades in the morning and so the point is that this is a regular guy that's doing it, okay? Hi German, how are you? And he's proud of himself and I'm proud of him too because I taught him the information, I taught him the knowledge and he's putting it into practice. So it's good sometimes when I take a few days off here and there for people to trade on their own even though they're in the room with me, this helps people get their own conviction, their own conviction to do it because that builds on yourself because ultimately you're risking your own money. James is risking his own money when he takes the trades. Even though he did the class with me and I called him in the room, it's his money that's on the line when he takes the trades and when he puts the size on and when he takes the risk because if he loses, he's gonna lose his own money but he's doing well and this is a great example and I have many great examples of students that are just regular people. So you don't have to have umpteen years of experience reading charts or looking at technical analysis or understanding anything I'm even talking about today or anything I'm gonna talk about today in order to learn it. That's the point I'm trying to get across. If you do have experience in the market and you do understand chart reading skills and you have basic chart reading skills or even more than basic skills, understanding candlesticks and overall chart a technical analysis, that's great but you still have to learn a system and a strategy within that chart analysis that's gonna tell you how to make money because just reading a chart basically chart like this ACAM here doesn't tell you how to make money because I could say, well ACAM's a long but if you don't know where to take it where the entry is, where to put the stop where's the target, where to hold it where to get in, where to get out you may lose money even going long something like this and this is a good example like I said because it was not an easy one that day. You can make money in the market consistently if you have a good mindset, a good system, a strategy to believe in and conviction and even if you don't have any conviction now because you've been put through the ringer with losing in the market or taking classes and not learning it doesn't mean you can't regain conviction within yourself. At the end of tonight I'm gonna talk about a motivational class I'm doing just a short class on Thursday. For those of you that signed up and registered tonight you're gonna get the link for free it's at noon on Thursday on the 18th but I think a lot of people sometimes need to remember what it felt like when they first, first started trading and how excited they were about all the money they could make and this is good. There's nothing like profits when you start to see the money rolling in and you learn a new system and you're making money every day that helps with that but of course people have to get to that point. One of the things that I like also about what I do is that I don't have to sit at my desk all day. You can make money trading gaps daily without sitting at your desk all day. Again, you have to be there for 30 minutes. You could be there for an hour. Prep in the morning between 9, 9.30 trade between 9.30 and 10. But you've gotta have a strategy to trade. Now, this is one here I'm just showing an example a stock that gapped. It closed the night before up here around $20 and 50 some cents and opened the next morning down here around 16 something. All a gap is, I'm not going to go into great detail here but all a gap is is where the stock closes at one price at four o'clock Eastern time and opens at a different price the next day at 9.30 which is when the market opens. What happens between here and here happens sometimes at night after four o'clock there's post-market trading and sometimes it happens in the morning in pre-market trading, okay? But this is the strategy. Now, how do I know that this particular stock or any stock in the market is something that is a good pick that I could short to make money or go long like Aincam. Well, I developed a method to figure this out, okay? So where do you start? Well, you start like I said, first, first, first with the focus of the strategy and my strategy is golden gaps. They are specialized strategy that's set up daily in the market. Why? Because they're made with institutional money. The market, the market and the spine, the QQQs today, the S&P, we'll just talk about the S&P. It got, it had a gap up today, it got bought, okay? It got bought with institutional money. Very easy to see the market was along today, rallied into the close, okay? And also one of the things I love about gaps is they're easy to see on a chart. If you want to make money in the market you need to have a focus each day. I usually do one thing, one trade, one pick, one stock symbol, that's it. Every once in a blue moon I might do two things. Usually I have two or three picks but I usually only do one because all you need is one to make money and it's good to focus on that particularly for trading size, which I am. And that focus will allow you to book profits quickly and if you're new, I say you should really just focus on one. But today, for example, everything is set up at the same time, if I had four hands I could have done them all, but I only did one. But if you want to trade you have got to have a strategy. You've got to have a system and you've got to have a reason for taking the trades. German is calling me Miss Melissa. That is hilarious. That sounds like a dance school teacher because when I took dancing lessons a long time ago every all of the girls that were the instructors we called Miss Lisa, Miss Melissa. That's so funny. It sounds like you're calling me a dance instructor. All right, German is a question, Miss Melissa. Which is the minimum to begin to trade comfortably? No, your English is fine. I understood everything you said. Minimum meaning, minimum is you have to be able to open up an account, okay? I don't know where your brokerage account is. I don't know if you have an account or you're looking to get an account. You have to have a brokerage account that allows you to actively day trade stocks in the US stock market, okay? And you've got to be able to short, German. Email me later, I can refer you to some brokers. There's tons of brokers all over the world but you have to be able to day trade actively. Money to Zoom Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and you have to be able to short. That's the main thing. Other than that, if you open up an account, you can risk $50 a trade or $1,000 a trade depending on how much money you have in the account. You want to look at the percentage of money that you have in the account and base it off of that. And this has to do also with your risk tolerance. I mean, even if you have $100,000 in a retail account, I'm not gonna tell you to run out right after the class and risk $15 in a trade if you're brand new. You should still probably baby step it and take it easy until you learn the strategy. And obviously, if you have an account with $2,500, you're not gonna risk $1,500 in a trade. That'd be more than 50% of your account in one trade and that doesn't make sense. A lot of this is common sense about what you're risking, German. We're gonna go over the trades today, Amiran. We're gonna go over them actually. Now, like I said, one of the main reasons to trade is large profits. Here was my profit in the ACAM and I didn't even hold this thing in this trade. I would have made another $4,000. I got out at the first target because it had wiggled and jiggled and was so wild. I thought it was gonna pull in before I blew up over the high. It didn't, it blew, it blew over the high. I got out when it right up to the high, I got out. And this is the money I made, but then it rallied $2 over the high. I mean, it was crazy. But this is the kind of thing I'm talking about to be able to make over $3,000 and are any, a thousand, 2,000, 3,000, 4,000, 5,000, any money with a comma in it, as far as I'm concerned, is a wonderful day. Any time I make money in the market and it's got a comma there, that's what I wanna see. Any comma day, I call them comma days is a good day for me because I'm working for minutes to make this money, literally. So very, very profitable strategy. Also, like I said, my day is done by 10 o'clock. I run the room, the room's open till 11, but it's rare that I'm in a trade pass then. Even sometimes when they keep going, I'm out of them before then because I'm up my goal for the day. This is about booking money. It's not about holding it forever and ever and ever and ever and ever. There are times I hold trades, but for the most part, I'm just looking to make my goal each day. And if you do this for a living, that's really kind of how you have to think about it. You have to be somewhat conservative in that, but I love the fact that the trade set up so quickly. And also one of the positive things about trading gaps is a good risk to reward payout. Now, what I mean by that, I mean for every dollar I risk, I'm looking to make three. Some days I make one to one, one to two. Some days I make one to five. You don't know until the stock sets up in the morning to see where it goes, okay? Now, how are you going to find and choose which gaps to trade? Now remember, I'm looking for the stock, ticker symbol. So I'm scanning in the morning, looking for the stock ticker symbol that happens to be gapping. There's thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of stocks in the market. They don't necessarily all gap every day. So you've got to get a watch list, which you can get from a scanner on your platform or you can just purchase a scanner, okay? But even then, after you get the group of things that are gapping, you need a system to decide well, which one am I going to do? How do I know ACAM is the right one? How do I know ACAM is a long and not a short? How do I know SCSS is a good one, okay? So you have to find the gaps, you get a list and then my system is I rate them. Now, what do I mean by rate them? What am I talking about? Aren't all gaps the same? No, no they're not. They're absolutely not the same. Sometimes, and I'm not saying this happens all the time, but every once in a while I see something and I just know that a shadow of a doubt and without a shadow of a doubt it's gonna work. Actually, ACAM was one of those ones last week. I even told everyone on my list, stock capped at night. I sent out an email at night and said it's gonna work, it's long. I don't know how many people did it based on my call the previous night, but I saw at night it was gonna work and I was so certain that it was gonna work and it did. Every once in a while I see something that I'm so certain of. I still rate my gaps every day, but not all gaps are the same. And some gaps are flat out just horrific, terrible. Wouldn't touch them with a 10 foot pole. And that's why I have the rating system. The rating system is a 26 point rating system which tells me stay away from this one, Melissa. Don't do it, it's gonna be hard or it's not gonna work or it's gonna be sloppy or it's great. It's fabulous, high odds. What you're looking for in the market is high odds. Anyone that says it's 100%, it always works 100% of the time, that isn't realistic. What you need is a system that has a high odds of working most of the time. So that every once in a while when it doesn't work, you're okay with that. You don't lose conviction in the system. You don't change anything you're doing. You don't get like a scaredy cat the next day then and don't trade because your inference gonna not work if yesterdays didn't work. You get up the next day, you do the same thing over and over and over and over and over again. It's about replication, okay? And proceeding, knowing that in the long haul over the weeks and months and year, your system works and you can make money. One of the other great things I love about trading gaps is the small stops. Now this was one from Friday, okay? This was Q-L-I-K. Here's the gap. Now this is a one minute chart. The stock closed the night before up here at four o'clock Eastern time. It's a one minute bar closed up here at 19 something and then in the morning a gap town here to 17 something. So in the morning, you're seeing the stock in this area and you're gonna rate it. Anyways, the stock opened, rallied, held, dropped, rallied, boom. So this had a nice small stop. And look, it fell off the planet. It was a short. It was a short. And you might not have noticed it was a short after this first bar here because this is a big, big bar. You might have thought it was a long, but it was and it was a short, okay? You can see how some people bought this here. Why? This did this little jiggy right in here and some people put the stop under the low. That's why this bar here goes like this. It's like a disaster when it hits under the low, it just goes, mm. And this is people getting stopped out. They went long the stop thinking it was gonna fill the gap because it did actually gap down like $2 from the previous night, but it was not a long, it was a short. And this is something that my system teaches you, okay? Also, specific time of the day. What's the time of the day here? 9.35, drops into what? 10 o'clock, boom. Again, 30 minutes out, done. It doesn't even matter where you get out. If you wanna get out here, here, here, here, here, here, wherever you get out. If you're taking my entries and you learn this in the class, you're up. It doesn't matter where you get out. Hold it, get out early, it doesn't matter, you're up. What you don't wanna do is hold this too long though, okay? But this was one that went to the target and the setups happened very, very fast and that's what's great about them. The setups happen fast, the stops are small, they have a lot of momentum in them. Now, what do I mean by momentum? It's just like that move that happened in QLIK or even the Acamp, which rallied $4 on the day. That's a move. A dollar or more, $2, $3, $4, $5, that's momentum and it's created with large institutional money in the market. That is what makes the gap in the first place and then they follow through in the day whether it's a long or a short by the continuation of the momentum of the buyer selling that comes into the stock on the given day. So gaps are formed by one thing only large institutional money. That's how you're getting the moves. That's how you're making any money at all. You wouldn't make any money as an individual person if you didn't trade stocks that move. I do not trade penny stocks. I will never trade penny stocks. I'm not saying that they don't move, they move but they don't move anywhere near like the stocks that I trade. I would fall asleep before I would trade a penny stock or I'd have to take 250,000 shares to make any money and that would be way too risky. I like stocks that have volume and momentum and they move and institutions are buying or selling them and that's how you make money with good risk to reward as an individual trader without having to have hundreds of thousands of dollars, okay? Which you don't need to trade. You can have a normal account and you take the trade and you put it in the stock and we're gonna go over that. But gaps are an event. It's an event, it's an event that's happening in a chart and by the way, the gap up today in the S&P as an event creates a sense of urgency. Shorts are covering, the longs are coming in and that's an action is being forced by participants of the stock and this is why Gap Trading is incredibly powerful and it tells you what to do. It tells you what to do beforehand because you see it in the pre-market or the post-market. You can prepare yourself. You can mentally prepare myself. I'm doing it, I'm doing it, I'm doing it, I'm doing it, I love it, I have 100% conviction. I mentally prepare myself every day. In fact, I mentally prepare myself for what I'm doing tomorrow tonight. I even know what I'm doing tomorrow. Training gaps is a powerful and profitable way to trade because you're trading on the side of power money. Now, how do you pick which gap to trade? Well, you need a system. How many gaps are there in a day? There's a lot. Hundreds if you look at all of the markets, but you only need one. So obviously you can find one in all the hundreds and thousands and you need a proven system to find the best gap because there's a lot of them and like I said, they don't all work. So I teach my system, the system that I do every day, the system that I personally trade, the trades I call on the live trading room, it is a 26 point professional bearish gap rating system. The purpose of the system is to help you evaluate which gap to trade each morning using a checklist, which I do every day. Even though I see things like tonight and last week, before I rate it, I can eyeball it now and say, ooh, this is a good one. I still go through the process every morning. I still rate my gaps every morning and fill out the worksheet. And if you take the class, you'll get my worksheet. You fill it out. And what gives me the edge is not only that I have a system that I have 100% conviction in, but also that it's 26 points. That's a lot of things. That's a lot. That's a lot for anyone. And this is where the edge is. So if I'm looking at 100 things and I'm honing it down to one that has 24 points, that's a high, high, high percentage of chance of working. There is no such thing as 100%, as I said to you. So you've got to put the odds in your favor, push it over to the edge, like what is the most possible thing that could work today? And that's where the reigning system in the checklist helps you, okay? Okay, we have a couple of questions here. Mike, Mick, how much time does it take to go through the 26 points process? Well, if you're new, it may take you five to eight minutes per gap to go through it if you are brand, brand new. If you're not new, one to two minutes. Personally, I like to take my time. I make a little list for myself and then I rate the ones on the list and I scan in the morning, I take my time. But if you're in a hurry, you could do it in under two minutes. If you're brand new, you's probably gonna take you like five or six or seven to go through everything till you get used to it. But it's like riding a bike. It's like you get up every day and you do it. And then in a couple of days and a couple of weeks, you're like, oh, there it is. And you just do it quickly. It doesn't have to take you a long time. I know you're like, oh my gosh, it takes so long, but you're really not rating 1,000 things. There might be 1,000 gaps every day, but you're not rating 1,000. First of all, you're focusing on the shorts. So that right there cuts chunks to the list in half because you're only gonna focus on the stocks that are gapping down. That's number one, that immediately cuts off 50% of the things that are gapping. Then after that, you go through and you scan just looking at them before you rate them to make a watch list of the ones that you like the best. And after doing the class, you can eyeball that to see. And then you rate those. If there's no good ones in there, you go back and find more, but there's always something to do. Even in non-earning season or earnings season, there's always gaps. Amira has a question. He's saying, what is the success rate and what is the drawdown? I have different people that track me in the room, to be honest. Boots, I think, is here tonight. He tracked my trades, I think, for a year after he did the class without trading live, I think, and said my success rate was over 80%. Personally, I've never tracked every single solitary trade I've ever taken in any given year, but I know my system works as I'm making money. I would say to be conservative over 70%. But Boots did track it last year in 2015 and said over 80%. And he had time to do it because he's retired and he wanted to make sure that everything was good before he started trading live, but he did the class first and then was in the room. So he had mentally prepared himself to do it and now he's trading live. So as far as drawdowns go, I don't call that many trades, Amira. Literally, I don't call that many trades. It's like for someone to, you, I would have to, if you don't have any certificate drawdowns in your account if you traded with me, will you? I don't even know what that would look like. We'd have to lose money every day for a week. That has, this never happened. I mean, losing once a week, I don't even do, but I'm telling you that not every trade works. So be prepared, two or three trades a month may not work, but I don't consider that a drawdown. Drawdowns to me are some of the horror stories that I get from people when I talk to them in the phone about the class that are thinking about learning from me that tell me where their account has these massive swings where they'll take 10 trades in a row and be down until one works. That absolutely does not happen. I'm not calling that many trades. It would be nearly impossible to have any significant drawdowns unless you press the button with 10,000 shares and you meant to take 100. And that's on you for not sizing yourself, right, or doing a fat finger, as far as the actual trades themselves, I'm not hard to follow because I don't call that many trades. Everyone knows when I'm watching because that's the only chart I have up on any given morning. And I usually only do one thing a day myself. I might call two things, do one and call two, but only do the one. But I mean, when I think of drawdowns or the problems that I've heard or horror stories I've heard from people, it's where they've got 10 grand in an account or 25 grand account or 50 grand, let's say 50 grand in an account and they are doing something or fine in a room and it's calling different trades and things and they've drawn down like 10, 15 grand of their account of a $50,000 account and that's a massive drawdown with that size of account even and they've got 35,000 left and then they're worried if they're gonna have any good trades left to bring them back up to par. Any good system should not have significant drawdowns. When I think of drawdowns, I think of massive losses in your account and that just doesn't happen when people take my direction in the room because of the fact that I'm not calling that many trades. I purposely do not call that many trades because I purposely want to stay focused. I also don't feel any crazy need to keep trading after I've made my goal for the day. I'm very, very disciplined where I actually, I want to turn my system down. I want to shut it down. I don't wanna be swayed or sucked into doing something after my goal is in for the day. It's very easy to do that. You know, when you're trading, you're doing this, sometimes you feel like, oh, la, la, la and it's like you're playing a computer game but you're not, it's your own money and back in the day when I was trading alone and teaching myself, I had to force the discipline upon myself. Now it's much easier in running the room and that's one of the benefits of running the room even though it's challenging to trade live in front of people. But one of the biggest benefits is that the people make me accountable to myself for the choices that I make and that has helped me. But I also put it on you to be accountable where I say stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. We're not doing anything else today or that's it or get out, you know. And some of the trades today went on to some bigger targets but I really knew the market was gonna rally today. I just wasn't sure what time. So I said be careful, be careful today and don't hold anything to some crazy number. How much time should it be a lot for the winning process of potential gaps? If you sign up for the room, your chances of making money immediately are extremely high. You don't have to sign up for the room though after the class. You can trade by yourself. You will have a shorter learning curve and make money right away if you sign up for the room after the class. Some people do that, sign up for the room after the class, trade in the room for a month, get it going and then they're off on their own. Some people do the class, don't sign up for the room, just prefer to trade on their own. That's fine too. Some people do the class, sign up for the room and stay. Stay because it's just easier by having me call the trades. Even though they are doing it and could do it on their own, it's just easier for them and they don't have to get up as early as me. I get up early and look for stuff and start scanning, you know, early in the morning. And people that are in the room could just roll out of bed and I put the ratings in the room and the targets and the support and the resistance. So a newbie person, brand, brand new to trading or brand new to gaps, I would say you're really, my best advice to you is to join the room after the class because it will help you put it into practice faster by just taking my calls. Just do exactly what I'm doing in the room. And I tell people that are there for a long, long time to do just exactly what I'm doing in the room. Some people do, some people do their own things too. You know, that's up to that. But as I was saying here, a checklist is efficient. It's efficient to save your time and efficiency counts. How much effort and time are you putting into your trading each day? All my time and effort is done before the open. That's a very much important time for me. And I know that if I do more prep for the open, I'll make more money on the open faster. And trading officially helps you get better results. Less time, less work and more money. Less stress and better results. I hate the stress. We were talking about that today earlier. I don't wanna be stressed out. I don't wanna be in a trade and up $1.50 and have it rally against me 65 cents to try to make another 20 cents. I could care less about the 20 cents extra. I don't want it to rally against me and give back that profit in the rally. I'll just take it, okay? So for me, the idea of trading quickly and getting in and out quickly is less stressful, okay? And I'm done early. I have the rest of the day myself. My money isn't at risk and I know my goal is in. And I don't take any more trades, okay? Gaps are done in the morning and have a great momentum results. Again, because of the institutions, either they sell off the stock in the morning or they buy it. Having a checklist keeps you efficient to stay away from not great plays and then to stick to the good ones. You've got to have something to help you focus and for me, it's the checklist. Let me just see here. How much prep time do you spend each day? Personally, I am on a very strict schedule that I'm on. I get up in the morning before I even go to the gym and I look to see what the market's doing. Tonight I look to see what things were gapping tonight. Now, I didn't do any prep thing. I didn't read any gaps tonight and I won't read anything in the morning when I get out of bed before I go to the gym. But I look at stuff just to get an idea of is there a good one? Like I said, in my mind, I'm like getting excited, getting excited for tomorrow or something like that. Then when I get back from the gym, after I go work out, I have breakfast and I sit down between eight, eight, 30-ish and then I start to scan. So between eight and nine o'clock, I'm scanning and reading. But I don't have to do that. I have a routine, a system, I do it, I just, I'm on a schedule. And then I talk in the room between nine and nine, 30 and write the information in the room and then at nine, 30 we trade. Well, if you're in California, you have to be in the room no later than nine a.m., which is six a.m. Eastern time on the West Coast. You don't have to be there at eight, eight, 30. I'm doing the work if you're in the room. You should be there by nine. You really should be there by nine, nine, 15. You don't want to roll out of bed and start trading at nine, 25. The 26 checklist sounds overwhelming. So all 26 items have to meet your targets in order to buy a stop. The 26 checklist, it sounds overwhelming, but it's really not Hunter once you learn it. It sounds like a lot overwhelming like, but it's not once you learn it. Like I said, it's like riding a bike. You just have to learn it. Do they have to get all 26? No, the gold is 20 of the 26. So for example, if I get up in the morning and look at a gap and I rate a gap, it doesn't have to get a perfect score. It has to get 20. It's a six point cushion. Now, what does that mean? It means if I have three gaps and one rates 21 and one rates 22 and one rates 23, guess which one I'm doing? I'm doing the run the weights 23. I'm doing the higher rated gaps of the three gaps. So you will still go with the highest rated one if you're only doing one. You can do everyone that rates over 20 if you want to do them all, okay? But like I said, I like to do one, but you don't have to get 26. You only have to get 20 of the 26, okay? Now let's go over the one that happened from here today. This was the one here today, CYH 216 that was today. Here's a one minute chart. Stop, you can't see this here because the clock's behind the one minute, but this is where it gapped down from, this is Friday, okay? Because the market was closed yesterday, it was Friday. Stop close to your gap down. Open today, rally. So you see it closed up here around 18 something and it opened down here around 13 something. It gapped down, it fell off a planet actually. Gapped down more than $5 overnight. Open, rally, dropped. Here is the short. So I looked at the morning, rated this gap, CYH is a short. I looked to short this. Now if it had not rated good, I wouldn't have shorted it. I wouldn't have gone along it. I wouldn't have done anything at all. I just would have found something else and there was another good one. Anyways, this dropped, boom. I got out of some of this right into this first drop. This was like a 40 some cent move in here quickly, quickly, quickly, quickly. I got out of half. Push back, base, base, base. Dropped, went to the first target, I was all out. And then it did actually end up going to the next two targets. So the entry time for this, actually this, it was not 931, it was 932. Price of the entry was 13.90. Stop was over 14.30. Risk was 40 cents. So you have to size yourself according to this, the stop. 3,000 shares, again this is an advanced risk, but people in the room are doing this with me. It was $1,200. Exit at the first target I got out of half into the first drop, 13.55. Profit booked quickly, 5.25. Exit at the second target, 13.25. Total profit, $1,500 in 11 minutes. Now this did go to 13, it actually broke 13, went to 12.80 something. So I could have held this longer. But again, I like to be out quickly. My goal is in for the day, I'm done. So it dropped in here, got out of half, rallied back, got out of the rest, boom. But this did keep going. I knew the market would rally today though and I just wasn't sure what time so I wanted to be out of it. But I was literally in and out of this trade in 11 minutes. Now let me look at the other questions here. Hold on, we have a couple questions here. Actually I think this is the whole thing. What time frame is it? This is a one minute. You can go down here and look at it. Everything here in the entries I do is in a one minute chart. One minute chart. Based on your win-loss ratio and profit-target stop-loss, what percentage of capital are you willing to risk per trade? Well, if you have a retail account and a prop account mic, it's going to be different. Why? Let's just say for example, if you have a retail trading account with $30,000, okay, your leverage is four to one. Okay, and I'm just using an average. So you have $120,000 in buying power. You have 30 grand in the account. You could very well risk $1,000, $1,500 on a trade with a $30,000 account, but I think that's high. I actually think that's a lot. So it has to do with your risk tolerance, but with a $30,000 retail account, I would probably risk $3,000, $4,500 per trade. That's my professional advice. And then your BP is about 120. Now, obviously though, if you're good, you could risk more, but I would build that account up. Now let's just say if you have a prop account, you have $5,000 in a prop account, okay? Let's say they give you the same buying power as a retail place, 100, some thousand, okay? So you essentially have as much buying power to take the same size as somebody with $30,000 in a retail account, although they will have a daily soft loss on you set on your account for you. Either way, $500 for the $5,000 account is 10% of the account. I think that's too high. I would risk something like $200, $250 for the $5,000 account in my professional opinion, okay? So that's, you know, but this is, you know, your own risk tolerance is your own. I can give you what my thoughts are, but I think people need to make money. It's not about risking the farm, build your account up. Start the account with $2,500, build it up to five. Start the account with $5,000, build it up to 10. Start an account with $30,000, build it up to 50. You know what I'm saying? That's just my two cents. All right, let's look at Go-Go. This is the other one today here too. Go-Go, open, rallying, another nice gap. Again, close the night before you can't see the closed last bar at four o'clock, because of the clock here, but it's around 13 something up here, a gap down here to nine something. Beautiful gap, once again, fell off a planet. Big green bar here, but it held, dropped, broke, boom. Again, look at the quick move here in the morning. 10 minutes, you could have held this one down to a crazy number two. Entry time, 9.33, price of the entry of the short. You're shorting $9.72, stop is over 10, 10. What does this mean? It means you are out if it boops you out of that number. That's it, it's a hard stock, it's a limit order. Risk at 38 cents, okay? On 3,000 shares, again, you're riskin' every trade should be same or equal, 11.40. Exit 8.50, total profit, $3,660 in 12 minutes. All of these trades are in the similar time of the day. Have the momentum in them, go very quickly. And actually, I'm giving you two here today that went farther, but this is normally what I'm looking at doing here, okay? Right here is the entry in Go-Go, this candlestick here. Again, this is a one minute chart, okay? So the philosophy behind what I do, behind my system, is to analyze a large time frame for the points. That's on the daily chart. I'm deciding the 26 points of the daily chart for the directional bias of the gap in which gap I'm doing. And all large traders of every kind look at large time frames to make decisions, particularly institutional traders. And you're trying to train with them so you can get the money from them. You're working with them together, jointly. As they're buying, you wanna buy. If they're selling, you wanna shorten to their selling. And you're looking to make entry decisions and exit decisions based on the small time frame, which is the one minute chart, which is the entries I just showed you. This is the high degree of focus and accuracy, and you've gotta have that if you wanna get the risk to reward. And also if you wanna make it the money quickly. And also if you wanna make thousands of dollars, this fast, using the daily chart to make the decision for the stock pick allows for accuracy in the direction. And using the one minute chart allows for good risk to reward trades with accuracy. So my system teaches you how to find stocks to trade that number one have a high probability of directional bias for the entire day. Number two, big moves on the day, which is how you're gonna make the money. Number three, early confirmation of my bias in the move between 9.30 and 10. And you're ending your out. And then number four, precise entries with follow-through and a good risk to reward. And you're looking for a good risk to reward. But it all comes down to the checklist. It may seem like a lot of things, like oh my gosh, how could I possibly get all this done in time, but I do, I do every day. And so does everybody that's ever done my class. So of course it's possible. You just get used to it. You just get used to doing it, you just fill it out. It takes a couple minutes. And it's worth it. The prep time that it takes you to do this, whether you sit down and spend 30 minutes or 45 minutes or 15 minutes or 20 minutes is worth it. Getting up early in the morning, if that's what it takes to make money, you can go back to bed, okay? If you live on the West Coast. But ultimately, this idea of having a checklist helps you get the edge. Because it pinpoints ahead of time which stock will have the move before it does it. It's already moved, who cares? It's too late, okay? Having a checklist keeps you organized and focused. And having a checklist forces you to look at what you should be looking at in a chart and to stop to make the correct decision. A lot of times what happens is people don't know what to do. They wait and see what the market's doing into the open, make the decision what to look at between 9.30 and 10 and take the trade after 10 o'clock. And then guess what? 80% of the move is done. If you tried to get in any of the things that I just showed you today, after 10 o'clock you lost, or you had to flip them, okay? It doesn't make any sense. You've got to know what you're doing, have the focus be in and be out. The checklist is a plan of action. I'm going to do this. Here's where I'm looking to take it. Here's where I'm looking to get out at an area and the target. And everyone that puts money in the market should have a plan of action and a checklist. And professional traders do, I mean, they just do. And any person in any field has a checklist. If you're a pilot, if you're a doctor, anything, okay? Now, why do the points work? Because it's a detailed analysis of the price action in a stock. Remember when we were talking earlier about the fact that gaps are an event. And it also works because everything that is being looked at in each point uses the daily chart. The daily chart of a stock is the most powerful and real indication as to the trend in a stock for any trader of any kind on any given day. The price reading on the daily chart tells you everything you need to know. If I had one chart to trade, if someone said, Melissa, we're taking away all your charts, you only have one chart. Everything's down. You got one chart to trade today, Melissa. What's it going to be? I'd pick the daily chart. I'd pick the daily chart and still trade with accuracy. That is how you know if it's a long or a short and you will not make money in the market if you don't get the direction right in the stock you're trading, okay? I know this sounds very basic and it's really common sense, but many, many people take the directional bias wrong in any trades they do. Someone today said something to me, if we have time, we'll look at it, but we're running out of time, you might not have time, about Groupon. Groupon got up today and it rallied big in the morning and someone was calling that as a climactic. I said, oh my Lanta. Meaning they wanted to short it, okay? I said, don't short this stock. It's a long, it's going to go over $4 and blow. And that's exactly what it did. I don't know how it closed, but you will not make money if you don't get the direction right. And I think a lot of people, many, many people do not understand that. This is common sense, but it's true. You've got to get the direction right or you're going to lose. Anyways, here's QLIK, stock close to your gap down. This was Friday. We did look at this chart earlier. Here was the entry, boom, here's the drop. This one, you waited a couple of minutes, still in the one minute chart, still in the morning, still between 9.30 and 10. Okay, not all trades set up at the exact at the same time, but you're looking within that 30 minute period. Price of the entry, 17.62. Again, got to put the stop in. You can't have an unlimited risk. 17.85, and this one here, if your risk was around 1,200 bucks, you can risk, you can take 5,000 shares with 23 cents. This is a good size. A risk, $1,150. Exit at the first target, 17. Boom, 15.50, you get out. Your day could have been done here. You could have got out of the whole thing. But then it kept dropping. Next target, 16, it actually went to 15-something, which is crazy. So this is phenomenal. Let's go back and look at it. Here's the short, okay? Here's the drop. In the first five minutes you take it, it goes to the target, the first target. So you must get out of something. You must get out of something here. You can get out of the whole thing, half, a quarter, whatever. Again, we're talking about this in the room today. You cannot not get out of something when you're up. And of course, as soon as you take this, you're up. This happens a lot of time with my entries. Now, let's go back. Say you said, I'm gonna hold it, I'm gonna hold it. You could have dropped, let it rally, lower the stop. But I still think it's better to book the money because you have to get something green to know that it's in. Anyway, say you get out of half, let it rally, got the drop, okay? It did continue on, like I said, and broke 16-1 to 15-something, but really the next target was $16. And it absolutely went there. And it went there all in the morning and very, very quickly. So you literally did it here. And even if you held half of it, a quarter of it, a piece of it, the whole thing down into the next number, 16, it got there. It got there in less than 30 minutes, okay? And literally, you could do one of these trades a week and make a comfortable living, three, four, five grand. I mean, that's enough money for some people to live off of per week. And you get these kind of moves because of the gap, because of the gap, and the momentum that comes into the gap. But if you're going to buy this, you're gonna lose. And some people did, but I didn't, because I know that this was a good gap to short based on the raining system. Now, someone was asking earlier about how much to risk. If you're brand, brand new and you don't have the money to risk $1,000, it doesn't matter, you can still trade. You take the exact same trade, get out of half, let the rest drop. You can risk a small amount that you can afford, a hundred bucks, $115, and 500 shares. What does this mean? You can still make good money. You're still gonna make $560 on that QLIK, risking $150, that's beautiful, that's huge, it's fabulous. I mean, you risk a hundred bucks and $500, $500 a day actually is $2,500 a week. $2,500 a week is 10 grand a month. Now, I'm not saying we get trades like this every second, but we do. So, this is a good, solid train that is not a crazy risk. If you got the entry right and did everything perfect, you don't have to risk $1,000 to make money in the market. So, risk what you can afford so that you focus on this instead of being all obsessed about the risk and then screwing it up or doing something wrong or killing it too earlier, not putting in the stop, okay? It's very important. Let me just see here some of the questions. Do I trade gas alongside as well? Toots has asked me a question. Yes, I do occasionally go long, I went long ACAM. I actually went long Cisco last week as well. Every once in a while I go long, I called the market long today in the room. I didn't go along the market today in the room, but you can go long gaps. Yes, I prefer to short. Why? Things that happen short go quickly, faster. I have a bullish gap pass, I do not do it on a regular basis, but I am doing it in March. If you're interested in that, it's during the week. It'll be March 8th and 9th and 10th if you wanna sign up for that one, too. But in the room, I prefer the shorts because I just prefer to do them myself. Having known a sunny fluctuation in rain rate over the years affected overall by bull or bear markets. First of all, I've traded only since 2008, so I haven't even traded. I haven't even traded for 10 years of my life. Isn't that funny? I haven't even traded for 10 years of my life. But as far as markets, during the time that I've traded, okay, the market was in a brief, brief downtrend for the period of the time when I started out in 2008, but then it quickly reversed and started the bullish uptrend. So I've only traded, really, in a bullish market. The market's been bullish for most of the time that I've traded and created my system. It really has nothing to do with anything then, to be honest with you, Mike. You can go longer short gaps, whether the market's bullish or bearish, because I'm in and out so quickly. And usually what happens is the market doesn't figure out what it's doing for the day until 10 o'clock. Now, I am good at reading the market. I will tell you that. But I don't look and watch and read the market every single solitary day into the open because I'm trading my gaps into the open. But if I did, I bet I could call the market act, really, a lot in the morning, too, because the market gaps almost every day. And so you could rate the gaps in the market and trade the gaps in the market and you could rate ETFs. I don't do that. I prefer stocks, but you could, okay? Ending the trades at gaps, you can rate. ETFs, whatever, okay? But it doesn't have anything to do with whether or not the gap's gonna work because the sell-off or the buying action comes into the morning between 9.30 and 10, regardless of overall market direction. Because that gap thing happened for a reason. Whether it happened for a downgrade or somebody quit or somebody's on the news or Kramer called it as his top pick tonight or the stock had earnings or it collapsed to the roof or China fell off a planet, the stock is gaping for something, some kind of reason that made that gap. It has nothing to do with the market. Do you understand? My problem's in and out. What if you can't get a margin account? What do you mean, what if you can't get a margin account? I don't know anybody that can't get a margin account. I don't understand that question, Walter. You might wanna email me later. Kathy can send you my emails. I don't know anyone that can't get a margin account. I'm confused by that question. You can get a proprietary day trading account based on margin if you can't open up a retail account. So getting back to what I was saying, trading with size, the only difference between a beginner trader and intermediate trader is size. Obviously the goal should be size. The goal isn't doing more trades, the goal is trading with size to make more money. Doing the same thing, exactly, and just adding the size. That is the goal, okay? It's really the focus that has to do with your brain and how your brain works, okay? You've gotta keep your brain healthy. You've gotta go to sleep at night. You've gotta get up in the morning. You've gotta eat breakfast, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Have a snack. You've gotta take care of yourself, okay? All the things you need to do to keep your brain healthy, you must do. This, you, here, listen. I told you I'm doing that free class on Thursday if you wanna sign up, email me. And everyone that's here is getting the link, but I'm telling you, this is what sets the winners apart from the losers. The people that win in the market have a great brain and they're very intelligent and the people that lose do not. They do not have a healthy brain. Something can happen and I'm in a trade and I just instinctively do it and my brain sees it almost before I can even speak the words out of my mouth sometimes. Okay, today was a good example actually because I saw that move that we had and I got out of half of it very quickly. And that happens often. Your brain has to be sharp and on point. The idea of you being sharp and on point from 9.30 all the way till four o'clock Eastern time is hard. The idea of you being perfect for five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes even, that's actually realistic. That's actually very realistic. Your brain could be right there to do everything you need to do to make that money and then you can go to the pool, go to the gym, do whatever you want for the rest of the day. Many traders put so much stress on themselves and they're there and they're there and they're sitting at their desk and they're looking and thinking and looking and looking and sees things that they don't see and then they start to make it up and they're there all day for six and a half hours. It's exhausting, it's tiring, it's hard on your brain, don't do it, okay? So again, I have a system, I use a checklist and I teach a class, it's called the Golden Gap course. The course teaches the strategy and how to trade gaps. The course teaches a 26 point rating system to find the best stock to trade each day. The course also teaches you how to play the stock on the day which is the entries, where to put the stops. And the course teaches you chart analysis and technical analysis at an advanced level. So the reasons to take my class and do my system is if you wanna make money quickly and be out and done by 10 o'clock, have good risk reward trains, find the stocks that have the momentum, okay, for the consistent moves. You've got to have moves that happen in stocks, otherwise you're gonna need the market or you're gonna need to be waiting for hours for it to go, which I don't like to do, okay? It's ultimately the momentum that comes into golden gaps and this is how you get the money very quickly. It's how you get the money into the open, which is when the institutions are taking their positions on and off and they have a pre-planned before the market. They're also creating gaps and explosive moves come into these stocks. Akim was an explosive move. Gogo today was an explosive move. The market today was explosive move even, but you had to wait for it. Gap trading is profitable, okay? You just have to learn how to do it, but you can learn how to do it. There are people I'm teaching that are regular people that are doing it. They don't have millions of dollars. They're risking what they can afford and they are making money. So whatever you have now, just take that to make money. It will add up over time. My class will teach you how to make money in the market and that is very important because of all the things you can learn, this good information ultimately, you are really trying to do this to profit and make money. And I will teach you how to get conviction in the market again if you've lost it somewhere along the way as a place to actually pay you. And I can give people referrals if you wanna talk to people that have done my class, regular people, okay? Now let me just see here some questions. I'll bring up the information about the class. It's a full two-day course on how to strategically find, pick and play stocks that are professional gaps. Retakes are free, the class is online and it's this weekend. Saturday and Sunday, February 20th and 21st from nine to five Eastern time. Cost of the class is $39.99. Email me if you wanna sign up. The class is online and this is the bearish class. The bullish one is in March. I don't do that one that often. The bearish one is what I focus on mostly because I mostly do this in the room. And it's a complete system that I teach you how to trade, everything I know. Now, let me go look. Am I a pure technical trader or do I use fundamentals? No, I don't use fundamentals. If you use fundamentals and it helps you, I'm not gonna dissuade you from that. At all, Mike, go for it. If you sign up for the class, this class this weekend by Friday, I'm giving a swing trade letter free for the year. It's normally $1,000 and this is a nice bonus. Cisco, ACAM, both of those bullish gaps that happened last week actually were swing trades that had nice follow through. And this is another one that I called a while ago that is falling, falling, falling, falling, falling, way back when. So swing trades are things where you're doing overnights. You would take less size because your risk is going to be more because you're in overnights. We can still make money doing them and it's all still based on gaps. So like I said, there's a special offer for everyone here. I'm doing a class Thursday. Empower yourself to trade the market. It's Thursday, February 18th at noon. Email me at infoatthesoxswitch.com if you wanna sign up and register for this. And think about what you wanna do this year. Do you want to teach yourself something new in your own life that you're gonna make extra money? Maybe for a career, maybe for saving for retirement, maybe for just part-time income, something that you're gonna say, you know what? I think this is worth it. I really think this is worth my time. I'm gonna do something different this year. Or maybe you're trading last year or the prior years and what you're doing wasn't working. Maybe you don't have a strategy at all and you need one. What softwares recommend and do your stock searches? I just use the softwares on my platform. Top 20 gap lists, downs and ups in the Nasdaq and New York exchange hunter. But you can buy any scanner out there. I don't have a separate scanner. I just use the top 20 lists, that's 40 picks. And it's actually, you get the longs and the shorts if you wanna look at them both. Mike has another question here. So did I understand you correctly that your bread and butter trades are from bearish gaps? Yes, but no, I'm always looking to do the gap in the direction of the gap, Mike. So for example, let's say I rated go-go and go-go rates good as a short. Boom, you can short it. What if I rated go-go and it didn't rate good? No, I did, but I'm just saying. Let's just say I rated go-go and I rated 10 points. It wouldn't be a good short. It probably would be a long then, but I'm not going long it. Does that make sense? The live trading room is $250 a month. In order to join the live trading room, you have to be a student of the Golden Gap class. Everyone in the room is a student, too. So you're eligible to sign up for the room after you take the class. But if you want a free trial, you can email me and you can trial the room the rest of the week. I'll tell you right now, there's a good one tomorrow. Let me tell you right now, there's a good one tomorrow. So if you wanna email me tonight, I'll send you a trial for Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. I have people sometimes that come in and do the trials and make money on the trials. Now, I'm not saying you should do that. I think you should observe what I'm doing and the trade set up fast like I showed you. But I will tell you that I know right now there's a good one tomorrow. I'm not gonna do anything with it tonight because I'm tired, but it'll be a good day. I'm not fit every day, isn't a good day. Sundays are better than others. All right, have a good night, everyone. If you have any other questions, email me here. Email me if you'd like a trial. Email me if you'd like to sign up for the class. Email me if you want any information at all and go to my YouTube site, just Google the stocks which are in YouTube and just subscribe there. All my videos and webinars and plays of the days are there. Thank you, Gallahad. I'm sure he knows the good one for tonight. Thanks so much on my Trader Central and don't forget the free class Thursday at noon. Very good, everyone. Empower yourself to trade.