 Happy Monday, trade hackers. Today is April 6th. Welcome to today's update. Starting with the trade hacker question of the day. Got this by email. If I trade futures, am I responsible for buying or delivering the physical commodity? Now, that makes sense, right? Because if we trade options on stocks, we can sometimes get assigned the actual stock, right? So it kind of makes sense to wonder, if I'm trading commodities, options on commodities, can I get assigned to a point where I actually have to take delivery or be responsible for delivering the physical goods? And so a situation might happen where, you know, let's say you have a short strangle on an oil, for example, I'm looking at a chart of oil, and we've had a big move in oil recently. And so, you know, your options could have gone in the money, right? And so if you have a short in the money option, there is the potential of getting assigned. However, on futures options, that can only happen if you hold them through expiration, if you let them expire. And what happens is in different commodities and different contracts and different expiration cycles are a little bit different. We have an entire course on futures options that kind of goes through the different symbols and what each one does. But basically, you can't get assigned early. So it's only if you hold them through expiration. And if you do, you will either, depending on the contract, you'll either get assigned the underlying futures contract or it settles to cash. So it just depends. So that's options on futures. So for example, if we go to the trade tab in oil, and let's look at, for example, the June cycle here, you know, the 38 days to expiration, you can see the June cycle of the options also is tied to the June futures contract CLM 20. M is representing June. So June 2020. So you could get assigned the June oil contract. Now, the question also in relation to that is, yeah, but what if I'm trading, what if I'm actually trading the underlying future and I let it expire? Can that create a situation? And the answer is no. I mean, on these electronic platforms that we trade on today, your broker is A, going to give you multiple warnings to close it out before expiration. And if you don't, they are going to simply close it out for you. Okay. So I've never, ever heard of anyone taking physical delivery or having to deliver. That just doesn't happen. There are specific brokers and organizations that farmers and other, you know, energy traders use to actually physically deliver and take delivery of different products. But that is not going to happen on a TD Ameritrade, a Tastyworks and E-Trade, any kind of electronic platform. They know that you are not trading specifically to take or deliver products. And so they're not going to allow that to happen. So hopefully that helps. Speaking of oil, oil down about almost 8% today. It was down a little bit more earlier. And it was popping up last week in anticipation that there was a potential agreement coming between Saudi Arabia and Russia with their whole disagreement on the oil supply and demand situation. And so that was kind of the anticipation. And it came out today saying, well, well, well, hold on, you know, we're, we're talking about having an agreement by today, Monday, but now that's being delayed to potentially Thursday or we'll see what happens. So oil coming back down a little bit. So that's what's happening in oil. What else is going on? S&Ps up 140, big upday in the markets. S&Ps up 140, Dow's up over 1200, Nasdaq up over 400, Russell up over 64. If we take a look at our MarketWatch tab, and I'm just looking at the largest 100 stocks, I mean, look at this, there's only two stocks at the entire 100 are declining. One of which is Conoco Phillips, oil company, makes sense. And the other is Gilead, which is a biotech. So not really tracking with overall stocks. It's more of an anticipation of the different products that they're producing. So big, strong upday. I mean, when you see a correlation like that with everything up, I mean, that's, that's a pretty powerful move. Now, what do I think that means? Well, if we take a look at just the S&P, for example, you're seeing this up move, I really think that, I mean, we have a, I think, I think at the very top, I think we could see 2800. I think we could rally up to 2800. I think if we rally up to 2800, I still think we're going to roll over. I just do not see a rally to new highs. I don't see this bear market being over. I think we are in for some more volatility and by volatility, I mean downside. So that's my take. So what did we do today? Well, we added a weekly double calendar spread in SPX. We closed out an Iron Duck book to profit, made a couple of other little adjustments. But again, we're just kind of letting our positions work for us. I did want to, I did read something over the weekend that I wanted to share. And that is in relation to earnings. You know, we've got some upcoming earnings announcements. For example, some of the airlines, look at Delta DAL. Delta is actually slightly down today. Yeah, slightly down today. And so they've got upcoming earnings, United Airlines, Delta, and then some of the banks are going to start reporting soon. Now what you'll see here is a lot of these, usually if they have their normal report date, you'll see a little light bulb on thinkorswim. I don't know if you can see that. It's kind of small, but on that little earnings indication, it shows a light bulb. What you'll see on a lot of these though, that they have upcoming earnings, but there's a question mark on that blue circle. As you can see on Delta here, there's a question mark. And what's happened is the SEC has pretty much come out and said, if you need to push your earnings date, if you need to push guidance to a different date, go ahead and do it. They're basically giving companies free reign to change the date, change their, you know, potential guidance. And so what does that mean for us? Well, you know, typically we know the date is pretty set. I mean, there have definitely been situations in the past where companies have come out and moved their date for one reason or another, but they're typically very, very solid as far as the date and time that they release and what they are required to report on that earnings announcement. That's not the case. I mean, with everything going on and companies not really knowing the impact of the coronavirus situation yet, the SEC has basically come out and said, Hey, you can push things if you need to do whatever you need to take care of your people kind of thing. And so as far as us trading earnings, we're probably going to be very, very selective on the earnings trades that we make this upcoming cycle because of that. And here's the thing, I mean, these companies could, you know, the day of when they're supposed to report earnings, they could come out and say, no, we're deciding to push it. Now that completely throws off the earnings strategies like we teach in our earnings course. And so it's just not the same game. And so be very, very careful if you are planning to trade some of these upcoming earnings, be very careful with the strategy that you use and what your expectation is. You know, we just don't know what's going to happen. Will we still get the same implied volatility crush? Obviously, if they push earnings to a new date, the option cycle that you place a trade in will not react the same way as you thought it might. And so just I'm just kind of warning you to be very, very careful and we're going to be very selective of trading earnings if we trade them at all. So I hope that helps everybody. Keep your position size small. Stay safe. We'll talk to you tomorrow.