 Hello, friends, traders, investors. This is Lee Lowell from smartoptionseller.com. How's everyone doing today? It is Saturday, April 24th, 2021. Welcome to another Saturday edition of our YouTube videos. We spell out some options trading strategies and we go over the charts and look at stocks and see what's been happening. This is what we call our Saturday synopsis, as you can see on your screen. We are giving you today the smartoptionseller guidelines for putoptionselling because that is what we do. We sell putoptions. That is our bread and butter. That is what we like to talk about the most here at smartoptionseller. We'd like to help you become a smartoptionseller by selling options and specifically putoptions. Every couple videos or so, every couple Saturdays, I once again talk about selling putoptions because in my opinion it's the best option trading strategy ever invented. Let's jump right in and talk more about selling putoptions, why we like to do it, how to do it, and what are our guidelines the way that we at smartoptionseller do it, which could be quite different from the way you might do it, but it's worked for us for many years, worked for me for many years. These are the guidelines that I follow. So let's talk about, and yes, I do have my Hawaii t-shirt on today. Someone was asking me about my time living in Hawaii. So yes, I have my Poipu Beach t-shirt on the island, the beautiful island of Kauai. And we love Kauai, we love Poipu Beach. And if you've ever been to Hawaii, I'm sure you feel the same. We love Kauai. So that's it. Sorry about that. We're talking about selling putoptions. So let's go over the basics once again and talk about what is putoptionselling, why do you want to do putoptionselling, and why is it such a great strategy? Number one, selling a putoption allows you to potentially buy a stock of your choosing, at a price of your choosing, and get paid to do it. It's an incredible way to make money. It's an incredible way to make income just for the sheer fact that you're interested in buying a stock at a price that you want to buy the stock for, and someone will pay you to do that. Why would someone pay you money to buy a stock at any price that you would like? Because the people buying the putoption contract from you, remember, you are the putoption seller, so someone is buying that contract from you, and when they buy it from you, they have to pay you. But the reason why they're paying you is because you're basically offering an insurance contract to them in case a stock falls in price. So let's say they bought a stock five years ago at this price right here, and they want to protect themselves for the stock falling down to this price. So what they'll do is they'll buy a putoption, which allows them to sell that stock at the price where they want to sell the stock for. And where you come in is that you will sell them that contract because you're okay buying that stock at whatever price you decide. You can, you know, if the stock price is here, you can choose to buy the stock here or buy the stock here. Whatever you choose, you choose the level. And I compare this to the old price line example where if you wanted to take a trip somewhere and you wanted to put in a bid on a flight, and you can choose any flight anywhere and decide how much you'd be willing to spend for that flight. And if price line liked your bid, they would let you fly in that flight for the price that you wanted. It's the same thing with selling put options on a stock. You decide which stock it is, and you decide, hey, I want to potentially buy this stock at whatever price. And so I'll sell a putoption contract. And the putoption buyer pays you and you wait it out to see if you get to buy the stock. Now the only way that you would ever get to buy the stock is if the stock actually fell to your price. Okay, let's just say the stock's at $100, and you want to buy that stock at $80 a share. You sell an $80 put option, someone pays you the money, and if the stock falls from $100 down to $80 by the expiration date, then you get to buy the stock at $80 a share. $20 discount, 20% off, you're happy, the putoption buyer is happy, so everyone makes out great. Now if the stock doesn't fall from $100 to $80, well you don't get to buy your shares of stock at $80. But your consolation prize is that you were paid money to do the transaction. All right, so you made a little money, you don't get to buy the stock, but you can do it again. And now you sell another putoption contract for an $80 strike price and collect another rounded income from the putoption buyer. And you can continually do that every couple months or however long expiration date you choose to remember, every option has an expiration date. So you sell a two-month option, and let's just say it expires worthless because the stock didn't fall to your price. You keep the money, you sell another putoption, the stock doesn't fall to your price, keep the money, sell another putoption. So if you think about it, you can continuously sell putoption contracts on multiple different stocks throughout the year, and you can collect all this income. Think about the insurance companies that sell insurance to, you know, you got your home insurance, your life insurance, your auto insurance, and you pay the premium for all this insurance, and most likely it's never going to pay off. Most likely you'll never have to file a claim. And so you're just paying all this money over all these years just to protect yourself, to insure yourself, to give you peace of mind. Well, that's what putoption buyers are doing. They have an investment, they bought stocks sometime in the future, I mean in the past. And so now they're protecting themselves. They're buying a putoption contract, which will allow them to get rid of their stock if a stock starts to decline in value. Now you was the putoption seller, you're the insurance company. You're selling these contracts, this insurance to the putoption buyers, but you're choosing the terms. You're choosing which stock you want, you're choosing what price level you'd want to buy the stock for. And so if the stock doesn't fall to your price, you don't get to buy the stock. It's just like if you don't get into a car accident, you're just going to lose the premium. That's what happens to the putoption buyers. If the stock doesn't fall, they've lost their insurance by the expiration date. So they buy another contract and you sell them that contract. So you keep the process rolling month after month or every couple months, whatever. So we understand the process of putoption selling is that you choose a stock that you potentially want to buy sometime in the future at a lower price than where the stock is currently trading. And you sell the putoption contract and you make your money. You collect your money. Now if the stock does fall to your price, then you have to pay up, have to pay for the stock in full. But you're happy because you got to choose the price to buy the stock. So here's our smart options seller guidelines for putselling. This is the way that we do it and the way that I would recommend people to engage in putoption selling. Now this is not personal investment advice. This is just my guidelines for how I sell putoptions. Number one, you want to stick to the quality stocks. You want to stick to the brand name, the sector leaders, dividend aristocrats, just the top-notch companies. If you choose stocks that you don't know anything about or you got a tip from somebody or you heard it on TV and you don't know anything about the company, you may want to think twice because you may end up having to buy a stock that you really don't want to buy. If you don't know anything about it, the stock could crash and burn on you. So just stick to the quality. Now how do you find the quality stocks? Well, I talked about this before in a prior video and I can put that on the screen a little bit towards the end here. But where do you find stocks that you can trade or feel good about? So we talked about dividend achievers. Now this is from the dripinvesting.org website right up here, dripinvesting.org. And what you could do is you can download the Excel spreadsheet right here where my mouse is. Just click on the Excel spreadsheet and it'll open up to, let me see if I have it here. This is the Excel spreadsheet that you'll get. Now the dividend aristocrats are companies that have raised their dividends every year for 25 years in a row. So these are quality companies right here. So here's all the company names. Now you want to choose the Champions tab down here. I call them aristocrats. These are the companies that have raised dividends for 25 years in a row and it's in alphabetical order. And this number of years column right here, you can see how many years the company has consistently raised their dividends. So you go through the list, you can weed out some of the companies that you may or may not like. So that's the dripinvesting.org website, another site that you can go to. I've talked about in the past, stockfetcher.com right here, stockfetcher.com. It's a screening website so you can put in your own parameters, fundamental or technical analysis and it'll spit out a number of stocks that meet your requirements. And another screener you could look for is at finviz.com, finviz. Click on the screener right here at the top. Click on this and it'll bring up all these categories that you can choose from. You've got descriptive, fundamental and or technical and it'll give you choices that you can choose. So those are three things right there. You've got the dripinvesting.org, the stockfetcher, and the dividend or risk rates. That's where you can start to, if you don't have a list of stocks that you're watching, you can create a watch list there. I have a number of stocks that I already watch all the time that I know are quality companies. In our newsletter, I choose the stocks that we sell put options on. So you want to stick to the quality stocks. Companies that you know, companies have been around a long time, companies that are the leaders in their sectors. And it has to be a stock that you actually want to buy. You don't want to sell put options on stocks that you have no interest in buying. You have to sell put options on a stock that you would feel good about buying sometime in the future at a cheaper price than where it currently trades. You want to get a discount. You want to try to buy the stock at a discount to where it's currently trading. Well, how much of a discount? Well, that's up to you. 10% discount, 20% discount. You can look at the stock charts and see, okay, the stock's here. Is there a support level or a moving average level that you would see that, okay, the stock should have a lot of support there. I think I'll try to buy the stock there. So you choose. You look at the charts, do your fundamental analysis. You decide as a 10% discount, good for me, 20%, whatever. You decide. The way we do it at smart options seller is that we always try to choose a strike price of the put option at least 20% below the current price of the stock. Stocks at 100. We look at least at the $80 put. That's a 20% cushion or buffer that I call it between the current stock price and the strike price, at a minimum. Okay, that's what we do. And typically, we like to shoot for one to three months out in time, expiration dates. Some people like to trade weekly options. That's hard to do because those weekly options, in order to get any kind of premium out of them, that's what the option price is called a premium. In order to sell an option and get decent premium out of it with one week left to go, the strike price is going to be very close to the current price of the stock. You're not going to get a lot of that cushion. So what we do is in order for us to get that 20% cushion, we typically have to go one to three months out in time. That's just the way we do it. And we look for a 25 to 30 cents per contract premium. When we sell these put options, that's what we do. We're very conservative. We play it very safe. We just try to hit singles. And by doing so, we choose the out-of-the-money strike prices, 20% buffer. And we shoot for the 25 to 30 cents per contract. These typically have upwards of 95% probability of being profitable for us, which means the stock won't fall to the strike price level. That's what we're hoping for. We don't want the stock to fall to the strike price. We just want to collect the money, have the option expire worthless, and then repeat for the next round. And if the off chance, we do have to buy the stock, well, then that's fine. We'll buy stock at a very cheap price, and we'll hold on to it. We'll sell covered calls and do whatever, whatever the next step is. So that's the goal here is to shoot for 20% buffer, 25 to 30 cents premium, and one to three months out in time. And it also has to be a stock that you're somewhat bullish on. If the stock looks like it's in a bear market, just going down, it's not a stock we're going to choose. We want to see a stock that's going upwards. So we can look at charts, and I can show you some option examples, just so you know what we're doing. But the whole point here is that as option sellers, by selling these out-of-the-money put options, you'll have very high probabilities of having a winning trade. And by that, I mean the option will expire worthless at expiration. So you can repeat the process over and over and over again, just collecting this income over time that at the end of the year, like, wow, I just made all this income just from selling put options safely and conservatively. That's how we do it. Other people that like to take on a little more risk so they can choose a strike price closer to the current price of the stock, you'll get paid more money, but you don't have as much buffer. If we get another nasty down move, you might not be so happy about buying the stock at the strike price. So to each their own, you choose whatever strike prices you like, whatever expiration you choose, whatever you like as well. So let's take a quick look at a chart here and figure out what would be good. How do you sell put options? So let's just pull up the chart of Apple because I always like to talk about Apple. I'm bullish on Apple. I think the long term, Apple will continue to rise. It's been kind of meandering around, but it looks like it's almost ready to go again. So if you're somewhat bullish on Apple and you're not interested in buying Apple at its current price of $134, you know, consider selling a put option. Consider selling a put option at the strike price where you would be somewhat comfortable buying. Where is that strike price? Well, you know, look at the charts. Here's a 200 day moving average. Maybe you'd be comfortable potentially buying Apple at $120 a year or maybe 110 or even 100, okay? It's at 134 now. Buying at the 100 strike price potentially would give you a $34 discount from its current price. That's almost a 30% drop in the stock price. So once you've decided, okay, I've decided, you know, Apple's the stock that I like. I wanna try to buy Apple. I'm gonna sell a put option. Well, your next step is to go to the option chain and see how much you could get or how much someone would be willing to pay you for that option contract when you sell to them. So now it just becomes a manual labor process where you have to go through expiration dates and see how much the options are paying at the strike price where you're considering selling that put option. So, you know, let's go out to at least June. The June 18, 2021 expiration is 56 days in the future and I'm sorry, this is not Apple. This is Intel. We'll look at Intel in a minute. So here's Apple June, 2021 expiration 56 days out. Apple last traded $134.29 right here where my mouse is. And let's just say you're interested in potentially buying Apple at the $100 strike price. Here's the strike column. Here's the 100, here's the puts on this side. These are all the puts, bid ass comms. The only thing you need to look at is the bid ass column. That is the most current price for that option contract. So the 100 puts went out on Friday, April 23rd, 2021, 30 cent bid at 33 cent offer. You always wanna try to make the trade somewhere in between the current bid ass spread. So let's just say you can sell that 100 put strike for 31 cents per contract. The option multiplier, there's always, there's 100 shares in every option contract. So you have to multiply these prices by 100 to understand how much you'll get. So if you sell the contract for 31 cents per contract, options trade and contracts, you'll get $31. The put option buyer will pay you $31 for every contract you sell. How many shares of Apple are you willing to buy? If you're only willing to buy 100 shares, then you only sell one put option contract. And for that obligation, for your agreement to buy 100 shares of Apple at $100 a share, someone will pay you $31. Okay, if you're interested in buying 500 shares of Apple, someone will pay you about $150. You know, it's five contracts times $31. It's roughly $155. Now you have an obligation to buy 500 shares of Apple at $100 a share if and only if Apple drops from its current price down to 100 at expiration date. Okay, so you're sort of on the hook here. You're on the hook to potentially buy shares of Apple at $100 a share. That's a $34 discount in the next 56 days. If Apple doesn't fall to 100 in the next 56 days, then you're off the hook. You don't have to buy the shares. And you just keep your $31 per contract or your $155 a contract, $155 if you sold five contracts. So you need to decide how many contracts you wanna sell, which will entail how many potential shares of stock you might end up buying. So stay within your comfort zone. Don't just sell put options indiscriminately because you know you'll get money. You don't wanna do that because you could get in over your head. And there's also the margin requirement. You have to keep some cash in the account to cover the potential purchase of the shares so that your broker will kind of keep you in check as well. All right, so that's how you do it. That's how you sell put options. That's how you decide. You decide on the stock, you decide on the level that you want to potentially buy the shares and you just go and sell the put options. And if the stock falls to your level, then you have to follow through and pay for the shares. If the stock doesn't fall to your level, the trade will expire and keep the cash and then you just sell another round of put options for the next time. So I had Intel here up on the screen. Let's go back to Intel. Let's take a quick look at the Intel chart. So Intel had earnings the other day and obviously it dropped pretty big. Dropped about four dolls between earnings announcement. It closed the other day and here's where it closed Friday, yesterday, April 23rd. So Intel was looking good. It just came off the lows, it's making highs and then now it's got knocked back down again. If Intel is a company that, hey, you know what? It's taking a little bit of a beating. I think I might want to get long some Intel shares potentially where, what's my put option strike? Where would I want to potentially buy Intel? Well, the low was about $44 a share. Even at the pandemic, the low was about $44 a share. You know, maybe you choose a strike price down here at the $45, $44 level. Let's see what kind of options Intel has, what kind of put options and what they're paying. And remember, this is not a recommendation. This is not investment advice. These are just examples that I'm showing you. So we have Intel pulled up here. Let's go out to July because now they just announced earnings. So you can safely go three months out in the future before the next earnings. I don't really like to trade over an earnings announcements. I like to trade in between the earnings announcements. So Intel just announced, so you can safely go out about three months till the next earning. So let's see. So here's the strike prices. Here's the bid ask. So maybe the 47 and a half puts, you can get $33, $34 a contract if you sell one contract. 47 and a half puts, Intel's at $59. So that's roughly a $12 discount. That's about a 20% cushion. Let's go back, take a look at the chart. 47 and a half, that's right about here. Okay, is that enough of a cushion for you? Is that an area that you'd be comfortable buying Intel? Well, it was kind of down here in that 47 and a half range for a bit and then it shot back up. You know, will Intel get its footing and continue to go higher? Who's to say? We never know. If you think 47 and a half dollars would be a good price to potentially buy Intel, then you can sell that put option. So it's all about looking at the charts, looking at some support levels, see where the stock has traded in the past and make your decision, make your line in the sand that okay, I'm okay buying the stock here. Now just remember, if you sell the put option and the stock just keeps dropping and you're like, you know what, I don't really feel comfortable with this stock anymore, you can always get out. You get out of the trade, right? If you sold the put option, now you have to buy that put option back. That's how you close out the trade. You sell it first and then you buy it back, that same put option, that'll completely close the trade. Now, will you be able to buy it back for a cheaper price than what you sold it for? Depends where the stock is and depends where we are on the expiration scale. Let's just say you sold that Intel put for $33 or 33 cents a contract and now it's at 50 cents a contract. Well, you have to buy it back at 50 cents. You take a $17 loss, a 17 cent per contract loss because you have to buy that put option back to close it out. And if you have to buy it back for a higher price than what you originally sold it for, you'll lock in a loss. If you can buy it back for a cheaper price, something cheaper than 33 cents, let's say you can buy it back for 25 cents a contract, well, you would lock in $8 gain, $8 gain. Okay, it all depends where the stock is trading at the time that you go to buy it back. So you know, you're never married to a position you can get out at any time. Okay, so don't worry about that. If you're not feeling comfortable about the stock anymore, just buy the option back and get out. You may have to take a loss or maybe you can get a squeak out a small gain. It's hard to say. It all depends on where the stock is trading and where we are in the expiration cycle. Okay, so that's your once again, your lesson on selling put options, why we like to sell put options. The reason why is because if you choose your strike prices with that at least 20% buffer most of the time, like 95% of the time, the way that we do it, the stock doesn't fall that far and the option will just expire without any value. And that's just like the insurance companies just collecting the premiums month after month after month and they make a lot of money by selling these insurance contracts. That's the same thing with selling put options. You're selling insurance to somebody for a scenario that most likely will not come to fruition and that means that the stock most likely will not fall to the level. As long as you're smart and you choose the right strike prices. And in this case, if you do have to pay out, like if an insurance company had to pay out a claim, the way that you would pay out a claim is that you just have to buy the stock. You'd have to buy the stock but you'd buy it at a very cheap price compared to where it was. So is that a bad thing? Matt, you know, probably not. You're buying the stock at a discount and then hopefully the stock will just go back up over time. So you hold on for the appreciation. You can sell covered calls and make more money doing that. So that's why we like to sell put options because they have such a high probability of expiring worthless and or the stock not dropping to your strike price. It's a great money maker. We do it very conservatively. You know, we're hitting singles. You know, we're very safe. We have a lot of buffer. So that's what we like to do. Okay, so there's your lesson once again on selling put options. Now, let us move on to the next phase of our video which is what we call our Saturday synopsis where we look at the charts. We see what happened over the prior week and try to gauge what may be coming down the pike for next week and beyond. So here's the intel. Let's go open up our SPY chart. We always start with the SPY. This is the exchange traded fund for the S&P 500. So once again, the market just continues to go up. We had a very tight range this week. The market started out on the highs and then Tuesday and Wednesday, it dropped a little bit. And then Thursday and Friday, it bounced right back up. You know, I talked about last week, we're always looking at price patterns. We're always looking at support and resistance. We're always looking at moving averages. For those of you who are new here, I use three simple moving averages on the charts. I got the blue 20-day, the red 50-day and the green or orange 200-day moving averages. These are all simple moving averages, not exponential. These are simple moving averages. And down here is the 14-day RSI indicator which is an overbought, oversold indicator. And that's all I use. So, and I look for price patterns and I look to see how the price action bounces off the moving averages. This is bar charts, I mean, daily bars. Each bar is one day's worth of trading, okay? And we look to see how the price action moves and compared to the moving averages. Now, last week I said the market was trying to get, was getting a little ahead of itself, okay? When you see a big, a lot of space in between the moving average and the price action, the market is tending to get a little ahead of itself and a pullback is probably in the future. What kind of a pullback? It's hard to say, but we like to see a pullback to either the 20-day or the 50-day moving average. If you look at the movement of the S&P 500, you can see it's been hugging the 20-day and the 50-day at times and then it bounces. A stock that's in motion tends to stay in that motion until something pushes it in the other direction. You'll see that we've had a nice upwards momentum, always hugging the 20-day or 50-day and then it goes up and bounces. Goes up and bounces, goes up and bounces. So there will always be this normal ebb and flow pullbacks along the way. And if you're looking to get in, if you're looking to time your entry, you want to wait until the stock or the index pulls back to one of these areas, okay? The 20-day is your first stop. If it blows through there, then you look for the 50-day moving average as the next line of support. Which one do you choose? Well, you can nibble a little bit. If it hits the 20-day, nibble a little bit. If it comes down to the 50-day, you nibble a little more and you wait to see if it bounces, okay? But most of the time, a stock that's in a nice uptrend, either the 20-day or the 50-day will catch most of the bounce. You won't see it go all the way down to the 200-day unless something very severe happens. And as far as I can tell, there's really nothing to derail this momentum. Here in the US, people have been talking about interest rates going up. President Biden possibly increasing the capital gains rates for very wealthy individuals. These are talking points that some people will latch onto and think, okay, this is it. Now the next bear market's gonna have, we've hit a top, we're never gonna go any higher. That's just not how it works. Over here, you could have said, if this is the market, you could have said, okay, we've hit a top here, it's not going any higher, I'm gonna sell all my shares now and then look what happens. Uh-oh, market just goes up, up, up, up. And you'd be very upset that you sold all your shares here. So yes, the market is always gonna make new highs. All the time it's gonna make new highs. Eventually it's gonna make even more new highs. For some reason people like to think, oh, this is it, this is the next bear market, we've hit a top, it's selling off, and then it balances and it sells off a little more and then it balances and then it just continues to go. The market is meant to go up over time. I say this all the time. The stock market is made up of real companies that create real products that people buy and spend money on. And the more money these companies make, the better their earnings will be and the stock price will follow the earnings higher. That's how it works, okay? The history of the stock market, let's look at a monthly chart, go back many, many years. The stock market goes up, okay? So we can get some sideways action for some time, but eventually the stock market will go up and up and up. No matter what interest rates are doing, no matter we have pandemics, wars, there can be a pause in the bullishness, but eventually the market will continue to go up. The market is a forward-looking mechanism. It always looks the brighter days ahead, so the market goes up. So don't fear the small pullbacks, okay? They will be caught, they will be caught by the support here. So that's the S&P 500. Things look good, had a little sell-off, but rally towards the end of the week. Tried to make new highs at the end of the week. Let's look at the NASDAQ, we'll look at the QQQ. Which is just like the SPY, just the exchange traded fund for the NASDAQ composite. So we'll open it up here. So the NASDAQ got real strong. We had this congestion pattern, the triangle pattern that I like to show. When you get a congestion pattern like this, it's gonna blast out higher or lower in one direction or the other. Most likely higher is the path of least resistance because it was coming from under, okay? It was coming, bullishness got some congestion. The path of least resistance is typically in the same direction from where it had come, okay? It had come from the downside, moving upwards, congested for a little bit and powered higher. Had this little bit of a pullback here early on in the week, but managed to pop up and not much changed throughout the whole week. So the NASDAQ's starting to look strong. We've got major earnings coming out this week by all the big players. We've got Apple and Google and Amazon and Facebook and Microsoft, a lot of the big players will decide the fate, I think, of the major market averages by the end of this week. And if earnings look decent and or the future guidance looks strong, this market's gonna go, okay? So here, it didn't come back and touch the 20-day moving average yet. So it's hard to say whether if the market's gonna pull back anymore or not. Don't know yet, but by the end of next week, we'll know which way the market wants to go. So the triple Qs look good, SPY looks good. Let's take a look at the Dow. Let's take a quick look at the Dow. Let me pull that up here. Dow just continues this nice, slow grind higher, right? Almost touched the 20-day moving average here. Very quiet week, you know, very quiet week. This is the whole week right here, not a lot of action. You know, it's taking a breather. It's gone up quite a bit. Markets have to take a breather every now and again. That keeps the market healthy. That keeps things in check. You don't want it to go too vertical, like straight up because then you get that quick, nasty sell-off, that elevator down move that just scares people. We don't want that. We don't want that. We'd like nice, slow and steady, hovering banging off the moving average lines. That just makes people feel good, you know, feel confident, feel safe. But if it gets too far ahead of itself, it's going to have a pullback. But for now, things look strong still. The next few weeks of earnings, especially next week, we'll see where the markets want to go. Let's take a quick look at the VIX because the VIX moves inversely to the general market. Has fallen below the long-term trend line here since last summer, last August or so, couldn't get through the 20 level. But as the market started to go up, the VIX finally got through 20 level, almost hit 15 down here. Almost hit 15. Let's move this up, open it up. Here's 15, almost tagged it. Getting back to its long-term average here. So the VIX moving down, options are getting cheaper. Option prices are getting cheaper. People are feeling more comfortable and confident about the long-term trajectory of the market. All right, let's take a look at a couple individual stocks. Let's go back to Apple. We always look at some of the more popular name brand companies. I like Apple. I'm bullish Apple. I'm waiting for this thing to get off its rear and really go higher. All-time highs here around $145 a share. Apple is reporting earnings on, I think, Wednesday? Wednesday next week, the 28th. So we'll see. Had the W pattern that we looked at, that's a bullish pattern. Had the resistance level busted through that. So it's kind of meandering here. Maybe it's storing up energy for that next move higher. We'll see. Earnings will tell the tale. I'm hoping for a nice move upwards. Let's look at Amazon. Amazon still caught in this longer, longer channel, bounced off the bottom here. So it looks like this area, this blue line here was the good support. You have one, two, three bounces off of it. So it could not get through the 28, 50, 29, $2900 level and it just powered higher. So Amazon's looking okay. Earnings this week. We'll see what happens. It's all coming down to earnings. Google is having earnings, I think, as well. This week, Google's just been strong. Been a monster. I mean, look at this thing go. Just been going up, up, up, up, up. Almost all-time new highs today. Maybe all-time new highs, just under $2,300 a share. Closed today, you can see right here. 22.99 and 93 cents. Just tagged over, went above 3,000 intraday. I mean, $2,300 intraday. So Google really looks like it wants to keep going. Maybe a little pullback, but earnings will tell the tale. What else do we have? Tesla, yeah, I think Tesla is on Monday, I think Tesla releases earnings on Monday next week. Tesla's just kind of been, you know, kind of, it's kind of an ugly, ugly chart for Tesla here. Lot of congestion patterns, blowing through the congestion patterns. Got above this resistance line here, but it's coming back down to it. It looks like if it can stay above this level, like I think that's the $700 level roughly, maybe 710, if it can stay above that, it's probably gonna bounce and go higher. But earnings will tell the tale. So I'm kind of in a wait and see mode at the end of this week to see where these stocks are trading after their earnings. What else? We looked at Walmart last week. Walmart is making this pattern. Walmart doesn't announce for a few more weeks, I don't think, but you have this uptrend here. So you draw the trend line, you connect the bottoms of each bar and you draw this trend line and it has this flat top here. So this is the resistance line that Walmart is trying to get above and he has the 200-day moving average. So this is also a line in the sand, the 200-day moving average. It's hovering right on the 200-day moving average here and hovering on the end of this, the bottom of this upper trend line. So Walmart needs to get above roughly 141 or so to really give it the next leg higher. Having trouble doing that, but I'd like to see Walmart start to go. You know, if you're thinking about getting long Walmart, maybe you wait for it to jump above the resistance line here because it could get knocked down and you don't wanna buy too early. So that's Walmart. Intel, we looked at Intel got knocked down. Microsoft is also announcing earnings this week. Microsoft is doing good. It finally got above the resistance line here. It was in this channel for a while. Finally, finally, finally moved above. Now trading above the 20-day and 50-day, which is good. So we may see a little bit of a pullback to this area potentially as a support. You know, unless earnings and future looks good, future outlooks looks good, Microsoft should continue to go higher. Let's take a look at some other stocks. Netflix came out with their earnings this week as well. The numbers didn't excite many people. So you can see the big gap move lower. Big space right here. Here's where it closed one day and here's where it opened the next day. So we have a big gap space here that eventually should be filled. You know, Netflix isn't going anywhere. Netflix will still be around for a long time. Just had a little bit of a setback and I have to believe Netflix over time will start to move back up again. But for now, if you're bullish, maybe you want to nibble on some shares here or maybe sell some put spreads, out of the money put spreads if you're a little bullish on Netflix. But it got knocked back down. It's trading below the 200-day moving average, but I can't see that lasting for long. Netflix is a good stock, good company. I'm sure it's gonna get its mojo back. Let's see, what else do we have? Disney, Disney, we love Disney. I lived in Florida for a long time. Disney has its hands everywhere in Orlando, Florida. But Disney right now is in this little bit of a downtrend. You can always draw trend lines. This is what you do. This is part of technical analysis. Right now, it's sort of in this little bit of a downtrending channel here. And until it breaks out above it and gets above the moving averages again, Disney's path of least resistance is lower. I'm not sure when Disney announces earnings, probably in the next few weeks as well. So it'll probably stay contained into this channel, maybe sideways action until the earnings announcements. But for now, it has to break above the downtrending channel line and get back above the moving averages in order for me to feel bullish about Disney again. What other stocks? PayPal is another one we've looked at in the past. PayPal's got a nice uptrending pattern here, which is good. Sitting on support right at the 50-day moving average and the 20-day, they're both kind of converging right here, so this could be a nice little support area right here, could see a bounce. The next move for PayPal could be a bounce. It's been in an uptrend, it's at its pullback. So hopefully, if you're long PayPal, this could be a bounce here. What other stocks do we like to look at? Twitter? Let's take a quick look at Twitter. We have a position in Twitter. We've sold put options on Twitter. It's done very well for us. The reason why is because when we got in, we got in on the bounce here. Twitter went up, we waited for the pullback, exactly what we did. We sold some puts when Twitter was here and it's gone up and it's come back down a little, but the time decay works when you sell options. Time decay is your friend. We love time decay, so Twitter's working out for us. Anything else of note? Any other stocks that... People like to talk about GameStop still. We look at GameStop. I've had this pattern up here. It's in this congestion pattern. I'm not trading GameStop. It's just too, too crazy, but maybe it's gonna break out above or below the pattern here. I think that's about it. What do we got? Oh yeah, we got some of the Bitcoin stocks. Let's look at Mara real quick. We also have a position in Mara. It's falling below the channel that I've drawn. Here's the up channel, but Bitcoin itself had a pretty nasty week. It got knocked down pretty good. It was trading near $65,000 a coin. It got knocked down to $50,000 a coin. So a quick $15,000 drop. So of course, Mara and Riot had a pullback this week. It's falling below the channel here, but if Bitcoin gets its mojo back this week, Mara will go back up. Let's take a quick look at Ryan. It's another Bitcoin-related stock. It was in this congestion pattern. It fell down through, but that's because Bitcoin fell as well. Will it find some support? Yeah, who knows? Bitcoin needs to go back up. So these are more volatile stocks because Bitcoin itself is very volatile. So you have to play with caution. We put options on Mara, but we chose way, way, way, way out of the money strike prices. So we still have lots of cushion on Mara. We still have lots of cushion on that. Okay, so I think that'll do it. I think that's it for the major stocks. Go through my list here. Oh, AMD. We always look at AMD. Let's look at that real quick because we've been waiting for AMD to fulfill this W pattern, which I said the last week or so. It has to get above $85,000, $86,000 in order to feel bullish. It just has not gotten its mojo. Couldn't get above the downtrending channel line. Couldn't get above the moving averages. So it's still kind of hanging around here, waiting for it to get above $85 at least for a number of days. And then I would feel strongly about getting bullish. Earnings probably come out in a couple of weeks as well. So we have to keep an eye on that. So we're out of the game on AMD for right now, just watching and waiting. All right, everyone. So that's it for the synopsis here. That's it for looking at the charts. And let's just quickly talk about our website, our smart option seller website. Let's go there quickly is, of course, selling put options. That's our main theme here. Go to our website, click on the put selling basics. This is our free guide about how to sell puts. Put in your name and email address here and we'll send you a free guide. Our services that we offer, two newsletters. We have our classic put option selling newsletter. We have our spread newsletter and our one-on-one coaching. If you ever want to get a leg up, need some more information, want to get ahead of the game, we have some great coaching to offer. All right, if you found this video useful, as I say every week, please give me a thumbs up. Please subscribe to the channel, hit that red button so you won't miss another video. Give me a comment, send me an email. I love hearing from you all. All right, that'll do it for me today. I hope everyone has a great weekend and a great trading week ahead. I will see everyone next Saturday. Hopefully, this is Lee Lowell signing off.