 Okay, welcome everyone to today's session on how to recession proof your portfolio. Before we get going, firstly, a brief introduction to myself. After I graduated from university, I joined a city PLC consulting firm. I left with some colleagues and went on to successfully co-found and exit a consulting startup, which was focused on C-suite executive search for technology businesses. Essentially, I front row seat to the dot-com bubble, witnessing people make and lose a fortune in the market, sometimes quite literally overnight. So I decided to explore my curiosity for markets with some capital to play with and some time on my hands. I started day trading the S&P 500, but probably more appropriate at that period, day gambling. After some early beginners' luck, I racked up some pretty solid gains. However, as is often the case, my beginners' luck ran out and I eventually gave back all my gains and ultimately experienced a significant six-figure hit to my capital. To say this was a gut wrenching and sobering experience is an understatement. I really had to stand back and figure out if it was feasible for me to make a living from the markets. So I decided to get serious about trading and sought out a mentor with an excellent trading track record. Working with my mentor for a period of 18 months, it was a time during which I upped not just my technical game in terms of researching, developing, extensively back and forward testing strategies that crucially suited my personality, all of which were underpinned by a rigorous risk management approach. But most importantly, during the period of mentorship, I significantly developed my mental game. And probably most importantly of all, I made the watershed shift from being a highly goal-orientated individual really just focused on financial gains to becoming purely process-orientated. So what does that actually mean? Well, it means I had to stop focusing on what I could make from the markets and start focusing solely on managing my mindset to allow me to consistently execute my trading strategy. Once you become process-orientated and have a professional trading mindset, and you understand the true nature of trading being a numbers game in which you're simply playing the probabilities, you lose that emotional investment and hellish emotional roller coaster of living and dying by the outcomes of individual trades. So my focus now is on the next 100 trades because I know if I focus on excellence in execution, my edge will demonstrate itself over an extended series of outcomes. My multi-strategy approach has delivered profitable annual returns since 2008. Since 2013, I've also been managing investor capital through a managed account service, again, delivering annual positive returns. I'm currently responsible for managing a multi-million dollar portfolio. Since 2010, I've also met hundreds of private traders of all experience levels, from complete novices to former CME floor traders in developing the technical and mental skills to re-consistent returns from the markets. In addition to my fund management and mentoring, I'm a resident market expert exclusively providing market and trade analysis to tick mill clients. I provide an in-depth daily market outlook, breaking down fundamental and technical drivers for the day ahead. I also provide daily technical trade setup videos for a few of the markets that I'm actively tracking for the session ahead. I also run Tick Mills Future Strategy Group where I post a daily video outlining my pre-market trading plan ahead of the New York cash trading session for the S&P 500. I give my bias for the day ahead and specific action areas where I'm looking to engage the market. I'll post some links at the end of today's sessions for those of you who are interested in learning more about the groups or following my daily trade ideas. So hopefully that gives you a flavor of where I'm coming from and I want to jump into today's material. First of all, I want to take a temperature check on economically where we are and where we could be going. We are more likely than not heading into a recession. Currently, we're in an inflationary risk-off environment driven by the post-pandemic stimulus wearing off and the bills becoming due. And a global supply chain issues underpinned with the conflict in Eastern Europe, adding further pressure to commodity and energy prices, squeezing those prices further, which could ultimately prove to push the economies into recession as global central banks start hiking rates into tightening and weakening financial conditions driven by a global cost of living concern. But no matter where we are in the business cycle, it's important to build an investment or a trading plan. Research shows that it doesn't matter when you start investing as long as you do it systematically. If you're new to investing, the first thing to do is to set up a cash reserve. Your cash reserve should be three to six months of your salary. If you need cash for any reason during a recession, you won't be forced to sell investments to meet that need. Over time, your investments can grow and your cash reserve could allow you to take advantage of market opportunities in the future. Remember, recessions are more short and sharper than expansions and patience is more often than not rewarded. So don't base your decisions on today's headlines. Markets are essentially a discounting mechanism and they often lead economic conditions by six to 12 months. This can be confusing for less experienced investors or traders and really underpins the importance of having a plan. So with respect to the plan, first and foremost, we want to decide what your financial goals are and most importantly, your timeframes. The important aspect of defining your timeframe is that it will allow you to focus on your objectives and not near-term market noise or headlines. Then you need to assess your risk tolerance. A person's age, investment goals, income and comfort level all play into determining their risk tolerance. An aggressive investor or someone with a higher risk tolerance is willing to risk more money for the possibility of better returns than a more conservative investor who has a lower risk tolerance. Once you've defined your goals, timeframes and risk tolerance, it's key to stay calm and remember that aside from market gyrations, the general path for markets is from the lower left to the upper rise of the chart. So if you still have concerns, revisit your strategy to figure out if it still meets your objectives. So what I'd like to now is talk a bit about managing portfolios during a recessionary environment. It's important that your investment style is taken into consideration, whether you take a more aggressive or a conservative approach. Those who are aggressive understand volatility and accept it. They may be willing to take on risk. They may not be concerned about immediate liquidity concerns. On the other hand, those who are more conservative may want to accept lower returns. An aggressive investor may allocate more to stocks, but a conservative investor may have a larger allocation to bonds and shorter-term investments. While painful in the short-term, patients during recessions usually earn long-term rewards. Trading and strategic investing can help you to stay the course. Strategic investing takes a longer term view. This is a long-term approach with potentially a multi-year view. It's often used to fund retirement or education expenses down the road. With this approach, you systematically plan to allocate money to different asset classes depending on your risk tolerance. These assets may be stocks, bonds, commodities, or ETFs. Models are generally built around an aggressive, moderate, or conservative approach. For an instance, an aggressive model might have 80% in stocks and 20% in bonds. A conservative model might have 20% in stocks and 80% in bonds. What's important is to understand market volatility. You need to have a certain amount of tolerance to stay through your planned timeframe. But also remember, a key aspect of investing and trading is that cash is a valid position. During recessionary periods, building cash reserves will enhance your ability to take advantage of opportunities as they present themselves. If you're just getting started with investing, don't worry about when you get started. This is true even if we're in a recession. To keep your portfolio on track, you may need to rebalance or deploy capital to more tactical trading opportunities. In other words, you might need to sell one type of investment to buy another time. Let's say your plan calls for 50% stocks and 50% bonds, but stock value has increased more than the value of the bonds in the past year. That puts your portfolio actually at 70% stocks and 30% bonds. In that case, you could sell stocks to buy more bonds to rebalance your portfolio, always thinking about your goals and your timeframe. Or you might find that you're not the risk taker that you thought you were. You could add bonds to create a more conservative portfolio model. If you find that your ability to handle more volatility and risk has increased, then you could look to add stocks. But you can still change your portfolio to take advantage of opportunities or decrease your risk. In contrast to strategic investing, tactical trading responds to near-term market conditions. The other scenario is to consider a model based around the business cycle as we talked about at the beginning. The market cycle has four phases, expansion, peak, recession, and recovery. Some sectors perform better than others during different parts of the business cycle. In the midst of a recession, consumer staples such as food and clothing, health care, utility, and energy stocks tend to outperform. During the recovery phase, real estate, consumer discretionary, industrial sector stocks then outperform other sectors. Aggressive investors might buy stocks in sectors like consumer discretionary. These are goods that people won't buy or don't need to buy stories such as TVs and vacations, etc. They trade below fair value during a recessionary environment and become almost a bargain. These investors are willing to wait for the growth until the recovery begins. On the other hand, less aggressive investors could add stocks that pay dividends. This can help soften the blow of stock price declines. This is when you contribute the same amount of money per pay period to each stock or ETF that you've chosen in advance. When share prices are down, you'll end up buying more shares. When share prices are up, you'll end up buying fewer shares. The best part about this strategy is there's no need to second guess when the market will be up or down. Another excellent approach to help passive investors is dollar cost averaging. It's an investment strategy in which the intention is to minimize the impact of volatility when investing or purchasing a financial asset. It's also referred to as unit cost averaging, incremental averaging, or cost averaging effect. This strategy, in which instead of making one lump sum purchase of the financial instrument, the investment is divided into smaller sums that are invested separately at regulated predetermined intervals until the full amount of capital is exhausted. The volatility of an instrument is the risk of upward or downward movement, which is inherently present in financial markets. So dollar cost averaging essentially minimizes volatility risk by attempting to lower the overall cost and average base of the investment. I'd like to close up talking about how I personally smooth volatility impacts on my investments and taking a look at a couple of potential market opportunities that could be developing in the coming weeks or months. Personally, I've framed the market from a multi-time frame perspective. I run three core accounts. One is set up for short-term trading, one to five-day views. One is set up for position trading, one to three-week views, and then I have an investment account working on a 12 to 18 month view. One excellent instrument to manage volatility is using equity indices to gauge the market cycle. Personally, I actively trade arguably the global benchmark for risk sentiment, the S&P 500. The technical trading platform offers access to both the spot market and the futures market with excellent execution, spreads, and low transaction costs. Essentially, I'm a market technician using predefined technical patterns that demonstrate a probabilistic outcome. An important aspect of these patterns is that they are aligned specifically to market psychology and specifically to market participant sentiment. Essentially, I employ three facets to assessing the market, technical setup, sentiment, and fundamentals. I use these components to manage my trading and investment accounts. In the charts you can see on the screen, it's the S&P 500 on a daily timeframe. One of the core patterns I use is referred to as a measured move in which I track the current market move versus prior swings in the same direction, or as Elliott Wave technicians referred to, equal X. In the example on the screen, I was looking for the S&P 500 to test the 3800 level versus the prior swing high as noted by the blue arrows that you can see on the screen. You can also see from those blue arrows the synchronicity between the time and price that both of those down legs developed and then when we tested that 3800 level, I was also watching sentiment to see how stretchy we were. As you can see from the Goldman Sachs and Bank of America sets, we were pretty stretched. Then I watched for price reversals to confirm the setup and I entered the market. It's important to remember that even in bear markets or recessionary environments, we can see significant bear market rallies. Trading like this allows me to hold on to investments that may be struggling and helps to smooth out the overall equity curve of my accounts. Right, let's wrap things up by looking at some potential opportunities that are available on the TickMill platform. First of all, I want to introduce you to another chart. This is similar to the business cycle, but this is a specific chart which references trading and investment. It helps to define the phases and investor psychology that repeat over and over again in markets and specific financial instruments themselves. So if we remember the pattern here that we're looking at to the downside, the blowoff phase to the downside, and then if we take a look at, I'm going to pull up the chart here of the Chinese internet stock Baidu. We're looking on a weekly timeframe and we can see here the similarities in terms of the structure of the price action versus that chart we were looking at before. And so what I'm looking at in terms of Baidu here is we've had a significant waterfall decline. We've come into a support area. We've come into a support area and we have a potential double bottom in place here on a weekly timeframe. We also have significant momentum divergence in play. And so what I'm actually looking for here is a break through this trend channel here on the downside and this high volume node through the $155, $160 level to actually set up a squeeze to the upside to test at least into the pivot there of potentially $200 on the upside. Now that's the technical setup and you'll remember that I talked about sentiment and fundamentals. Well the fundamental driver that I'm tracking here for this potential opportunity is that there is a growing market chatter that come this autumn, the Chinese government and the People's Bank of China are going to release massive fiscal stimulus to underpin obviously what has been a very difficult period for the economy based upon the zero COVID policy and the lockdowns that they've experienced. We've also got another fundamental driver that's in play here insofar as the Chinese government are starting to walk back that heavy regulatory chatter or heavy regulatory stance they had earlier in the year that drove these prices down. So the combination of those two things, the technical setup and sentiment in general suggests to me that coming into the back end of summer and into the fall there's potential here for a quite marked move in terms of Baidu. The next stock I'm looking at, similar idea is Alibaba, probably better well known than Baidu but the similar setup here, we have that same pattern that we saw on that chart. This waterfall moves to the downside steep descending trend channel. So I'm looking now for any breakthrough that trend channel as an opportunity to set long positions ultimately then looking for a move back up at least into that pivot and the high volume note here towards 170, 180 on the upside. Now the converse to these setups is defined by the energy sector at the moment. This is the Bloomberg sector analysis for the major groups within the S&P 500 and you can quite clearly see energy has massively outperformed obviously driven by the issues within the Eastern European conflict. But if we take a look at the XLE, the ETF here for energy, we can see here that we're seeing quite a pronounced momentum move to the upside. So in almost the opposite fashion towards what I was talking about those Chinese internet stocks, I'm looking for any pullbacks back into this high volume mode in the 80 area, again watching for price confirmation reversals to the upside to engage on the long side and I can see us testing later into the year certainly as we head into the the autumn of four when energy becomes a desired commodity that we could be uptesting this major trend line resistance 115, any breakthrough there and the upside could be quite significant heading into the back end of the year. So there's just a couple of ideas just to finish off with there that I'm tracking and finally I'd like to say that trading technical office advances like Max mentioned at the start, FCA regulated, they've received multiple awards for products and services, competitive trading conditions, multiple assets available on their platforms, educational material, the blog where you can access expert traders like myself on a daily basis, they're developing more trading tools and generally a really professional environment professional support, they're a firm that are built for traders and by traders.