 Hey everybody, welcome to this week's video update. Today is Friday, December 9th. Let's jump in and go through the trades that we made for the week starting on Monday, December 5th. So the first trade we made was an adjusting trade in our natural gas strangle. So as you can see, we bought back our 255 put and we rolled that up to the 345. Just rolling up the puts. Our call side was breached so we rolled the puts up to the 30 delta, just like we always do. Let's go to the platform and take a look. So as you can see, the puts were down here at the 245 level. Price has continued to run up in natural gas. We've had a huge move to the upside, breached our calls. So we simply rolled our puts up to the 30 delta to the 345 right here. You can see prices continue to move up, but we'll continue to manage that. If we need to make an adjustment next week, we will. In the January cycle, there's only 18 days left. So if we do make an adjustment, more than likely we will roll that position out to the February cycle. We also put on another strangle in natural gas in the February cycle to collect more credit. With the market closed, you're going to see the graph looks a little bit odd right now. But as you can see, price is very centered, nothing to do on that one. So hopefully we get a contraction. If we take a look at where implied volatility is in natural gas, as you can see, it's still extremely high. So great time to be putting on new short premium positions. And we'll continue to monitor that into next week. So I mentioned that. We put on that new strangle in natural gas in February. In IWM, we bought back our put side, the untested side. I did not add another iron condor because IVs contracted so much. So we'll wait for a little bit of a pop in IV hopefully next week and look to add another iron condor to collect more credit there. So let's take a look at where we stand in IWM. So as you can see, these stock indexes have continued to just have extended powerful moves to the upside, which obviously creates a contraction in volatility. So if we look at our graphs here, we've got this call side of one of our iron condors blew through our call side. So we're at a decent loss on that one, but we took the profit off on the put side. And then same thing for this call on the other iron condor. We're probably going to sustain the max loss on this, but this is why you've got to keep your size in check. When you put on an iron condor, you've got to be willing to take that full loss. Now this is an extraordinary move that we've had in IWM, so you're not going to see this very often at all, but this is a situation where you've got to make sure you keep your size small. And next week, if we do get a little bit of a pop in implied volatility, we'll put on another iron condor, collect more credit, and we'll work our way out of this loss. It may take a couple months, but that's what you've got to do. When you have huge moves like this, you've got to leave your tested side on, continue to add additional trades, and continue to eat away at those losses. And sometimes it takes a few months to get back, but that's just how trading works. Let's see. Next trade was in SPX. So again, another stock index where the implied volatility is currently very low at 10 when I put this on. So calendar spreads, remember, if you watch the calendar course, calendar spreads benefit from an increase in implied volatility. So the best time to put those on is when implied volatility is low. So you can see it was at 10 when I put this on. It's actually contracted even more now where it's down to zero. And again, it's because we've had this huge move. There's less perceived risk in the marketplace, and so we put that on. So the initial one we put on was the 22.05 right here. Now just within the week, we had a move where the price moved outside of our break even. So as an adjustment, we added another calendar. So now we added the 22.60, and we just did that today. So you can see it widens at our break evens and gives us more time to be right. And so now we continue to wait. So again, if we get a pop implied volatility, that'll help our position. Most likely won't be able to take this off next week, but typically two, three weeks is the kind of a timeframe that you're in these calendar trades for. So again, we want to mix up our keep putting on new positions. We want to mix up our strategies, diversify our strategies. And that's how you're going to continue to be profitable over time. So SPX, next one was we put on an iron condor in Goldman Sachs. And not only the stock indices had extraordinary moves to the upside, but also the financial stocks in particular have had really big moves. Now we got in this trade a couple of days ago, but look at what Goldman Sachs has done it. And the crazy thing about this is look at the implied volatility, even though it's going up, implied volatility is increasing as well, giving us a good opportunity to put on premium selling strategies in Goldman Sachs. So we're down a little bit in this because the implied volatility did spike from where we put it on, but still well within our centered, well within our range. So we'll continue to monitor that. And then oil, Ford slash CL, we closed a trade for a nice profit. We had that on for about 15 days. Implied volatility has contracted nicely all the way down to five. So it was a great time to get out of that trade for about a 40 to 50% of max profit. So if we took a look, take a look at oil, we've got, yeah, we put this trade on back on 1122. So this day right here, we got a small move down in oil, and then it just ripped higher, then it came back down a little bit. And that's when we took the trade off and look what happened to implied volatility during that time. When we put it on implied volatility, it was about 63 spiked up on us and then just got crushed, which allowed our position to be profitable. And we took that off for a nice profit in just 15 days. Let's see, closing trade in FXE. So we put a straddle on in FXE back on 1121. And we took that off. Remember on straddles, we want to take that off for about a 25% of max profit. So we got a nice contraction in FXE. We're able to take that one off. So if we take a look at FXE, as you can see, we put this trade on back on 1121. So this day right here, this little green bar, and implied volatility was in the 80s at that point. We had a little bit of a move up, and then a drop down, and at the same time, implied volatility contracted nicely, giving us a chance to get out of that for a nice profit. Moving on, next trade was an adjusting trade in SPY. So in this trade, we bought back the call verticals, and then we put on another iron condor to collect more credit. And we did that in the new iron condor in the January cycle. So if we took a look at SPY, again, same kind of story with the other stocks just continuing to rip higher. So we've got to make these necessary adjustments. So here's the new iron condor that we put on. And then we've got these other call sides to our previous iron condor still on. So assuming we can get a move down next week, we'll take this off. We've only got, in December, we've only got seven days left to expiration. So we really need a move down pretty quickly to get out of that for a kind of a break-even or potentially a small profit. If it keeps moving higher, we're obviously going to take a loss on that side, as well as this one is most likely going to remain at max loss, unless we get a major move down next week. So we'll continue to monitor that. Make sure you keep your position small. So any loss that you take is not going to hurt your account to a large extent. Let's see. Next one is in TLT. So in TLT, implied volatility continues to stay high at 77. So we entered a new iron condor in TLT. And so let's go to that trade first. So we did that in January. Our previous positions were in the December cycle. And this is the new one we added in January, so it's still very centered. We'll wait for that one. Hopefully, we get a contraction. The FOMC makes an announcement. Probably going to raise rates. The consensus is about 97% chance that they'll raise rates a quarter to 50 basis points. So we could see a little bit of volatility in TLT, but most likely after that announcement, which is on Wednesday, we'll see a decent contraction in IV. So we're still at 65. After the announcement, most likely we'll see a contraction there, but we'll see what happens there. Actually, let's go back to TLT and look at the rest of the positions in there. So we've got that. We have another iron condor in December. And I actually had an order in to take off our call side because our put side got tested. I didn't get filled, so we'll look to potentially take that off next week. And then we've got one other put side that'll most likely be a max loss on that unless we get a huge move to the upside in bond. So we'll take that loss and move on and continue to add positions to get that money back. And the last trade, which was today, was we added that additional calendar in SPX, which I already went over. So we've got the double calendar in SPX. Let's take a look at some of the other positions that we also have on. We've still got a position on in the oil future. So we took one strangle off. We've still got one adjusted strangle left. So we need a little bit of a move down. We're about at break even on this trade overall with the adjustments and everything we've done. So if we can get a nice move down in oil, we'll take that off for a nice profit. And natural gas. We already went over that one, bonds. We've got a strangle still in bonds, still fairly centered. And so we'll wait for that contraction in IV and hopefully get out of that trade in the next week or so. In the soybean futures, we've got an iron condor. Profit line looks a little skewed because the market's closed right now, but it's pretty fairly well-centered, right at about break even on the trade at this point. So looking for potentially a little bit of a move up or to stay right where it is and hopefully take that off for a profit in the next week or two. EWW, we've got a strangle on. It's moved up on us a little bit. We're at right at about break even at this point. So we'll continue to wait and hopefully get a contraction there. And EWW, actually we've already gotten a really good size contraction. We just need some time to go by to exit that trade. FXY, again we've got a strangle on in there. Let's move down on us here. So we're down slightly on that trade, but we need a little bit of a move up. And let's see where IV is in FXY. We've had a good contraction. So we've got the IV contraction we wanted. Let's just move down a little bit so we just need it to stay in a little bit of a range and we can get out of that one for a nice profit potentially next week or in the next week or two. GDX, we had a pretty good spike in implied volatility and a good move down today. But we're still fairly centered in our adjusted strangle. We're at about break even on this trade. Remember, we rolled this from December to January last week. So we'll continue to wait and wait for our profit line to move up before we get out of this trade for a nice profit. GLD, we've got a put side still on here. Looking for a move up in GLD. We've got one other put side. That's probably going to be at a max loss on that side. And then we had simultaneously added another iron condor, which is still centered. We're in the profit there, so we'll continue to collect that credit and make moves to get back that loss from the previous iron condor on that one. Again, sometimes this takes a couple months, but we'll continue to work it and make it happen. Goldman Sachs, iron condor, we went over that one. We went over IWM, SPX, TLT, XBI. So this is an adjusted strangle that we've rolled out to January last week. That's working nicely. We're at about break even on this trade, so we'll continue to wait and potentially take that trade off once we get a contraction in the IV or as time passes and we wait for that one to improve. XLF, which is the Financial Sector ETF. We've had some nice high volatility in there along with an extended move. We take a look at our trade. It's moved up on us, so it's outside of our range. We made one adjustment and it's continued to move higher. So if we look at our call side, excuse me, our put side, we've still got some juice. We've still got some premium in that trade. So I'm not looking to make another adjustment yet. If it continues to move higher next week, we'll potentially look to make an adjustment and may have to go inverted and then wait and potentially roll that trade out to February. So nothing else to do at this point. XLU, again, this is another trade we rolled from December to January. So we'll just continue to wait on this one. Again, we're at about break even on the overall trade. With adjustments and everything. So we'll continue to wait, forget a little bit of a move down, get out of this one for small profit. And XLV, still very centered in our strangle here. So we'll just continue to wait on XLV. And as you can see, we got a nice contraction and implied volatility. So now we just need some more time to go by to make our profit line continue to rise. So hope that was all helpful. If you guys have any questions, please post them. Post them in the forum. We're really trying to advocate members start instead of emailing. Go ahead and post post them in the members only forum. This helps us be a little bit more efficient to answer your questions as well as gives other members the ability to answer your questions as well. So have a great weekend. Be ready for some more trades next week. See you then.