 What's up, Navigation Traders? Welcome to this week's video update. Today's Friday, February 7th. We're going to review all the alerts, all the positions for the week, exclusively for our pro members, before we jump in. Just want to take a look at the markets overall. S&P's down 20 points today, so that's helping us out on our short delta, also creating a little pop in implied volatility. But what's interesting, and just one comment I wanted to make here is, this big down day that we had last Friday, S&P's down over 60 points. Everything was being blamed on the coronavirus in the media. It's not like the coronavirus got better, but we saw gap higher, gap higher, gap higher, gap higher, until today finally getting a little bit of relief. We had exceptional job numbers this morning. The non-farm payrolls were released at 7.30 a.m. central time this morning and blew the estimates out of the water, yet we're still down. Now the media is back on the bandwagon of blaming this down day on the coronavirus. The reason I point this out is it's critical that you don't trade, especially directionally, based on news. It's a losing battle. The media is always going to try to find a headline to make you believe that's what's causing the market to do what it's doing that day. And the reality is, it's not really always the case. Of course, we saw situations where, if we look back a little bit, when we had the missiles fired from Iran and overnight, the market was down. I mean, that's pretty obvious that the market was down because of that. And then seeing things turned around because it ended up looking like that was going to be the end of it and not much of an issue. So the market rallied right back up. So sometimes you'll see things like that. But the bottom line is, if it hits the press, if it hits the TV, if it hits the Twitter, if it hits the internet, it's already too late. So trying to trade based on news is just a losing battle. So just thought that was interesting. Everywhere I look today, today's down day was about the coronavirus, but yet four days previous was a massive rally and seemingly no talk about the coronavirus as it related to the market's reaction those days. So just a little FYI. Let's jump over to the community before we talk about the alerts. Talk about who got caught being hot this week. This week goes to one of our members. He's been with us for about seven months or so, and he's just been a great asset to the community. His name is William Deal and always ready to jump in, answer traders questions, sharing trade ideas, asking great questions, just always adding value. So congrats, William, you got caught being hot. Alright, let's jump into the alerts, starting with Monday the third, Nat gas. So we rolled one of our, well, our remaining short strangle from the 22 day expiration cycle out to the 52 day expiration cycle and adjusted our calls from 2.35 down to two because the market had moved lower. So we're just rolling down our calls, collecting that credit. We kept the puts at the 1.9 strike. So if we go to the platform, I want to point something else out here. And you can see just kind of the massive slide that Natty gas has been on. But what I want to show you on the trade tab is in toss. We've got some funky stuff going on with the with the deltas and the in the positioning of these deltas within the trade tab. You can see, you know, obviously the shaded area and up, those are the in the money calls. The shaded area and down are the in the money puts. But look at the deltas, you know, on the on the put side, a, you know, you look at the 26 and the 31 are at the money. Well, that's that's not correct. And you look over here and it goes from, you know, 20 to 25 to 40 to 75 to 112. And they stay at 112 going all the way up. So it's just a miss. It's just a misfire on on tosses part. And the part of the reason I know that is if you look at tasty works, it doesn't look like this. And so that's going to translate to some goofiness over on the analyze tab. And so if you look at the analyze tab, we are actually up a couple hundred bucks on this trade. But yet this goofy PNL line shows that we're down 540 ish. So you just got to kind of, I mean, if you look at your monitor tab, you're going to see the accurate PNL. So you can't pay attention to the analyze tab. We do know it's, you know, obviously inside of our range, which is accurate and the expiration numbers are accurate. But just this PNL line is not. So just a little FYI on Natty gas. Next trade closing trade in Netflix. So we had on a reverse iron duck in Netflix and reverse ducks have not treated as well. Obviously with the market just ripping higher at crazy rates. We got caught in the updraft with Netflix. And so it hit our exit point. So we just bailed on on that one. Next trade was a closing trade in SPX. So we had a regular iron duck on an SPX price ran higher. And so we just went ahead and closed this out booked a beak profit on SPX rolling adjusting trade in XLK. So we've got a long put vertical in XLK. We're just keeping that in there for that short delta. And so if we take a look at XLK, here's what that looks like. See prices hanging out right here inside the range. So just again, holding that for some potential more downside action. Speaking of short delta, we're at about one to one on our short delta versus our theta ratio. So we've done a we've done a really good job of not letting our short delta accumulate too heavily in this up move that we've seen. And part of that is not doing just strangles and iron condors and delta neutral strategies, but putting on those iron ducks, which we're just booking those big profits and potentially repositioning. And so that's really helped kind of lessen that situation where I talk about the short delta dilemma where we get too overly short when we have these big rip your face off rallies. And so that that's really helped with that. Now, I wouldn't mind having a little bit more short delta with with where we are in the overall market. But, you know, going back to the S&Ps, you know, we've got this rip higher here up to new highs, we're seeing a little bit of a pullback, you know, I wouldn't doubt if the market, you know, just continues higher next week. Does that mean we're going to do anything different with our positions? No, we'll can I mean, we'll continue to potentially add some little directional plays here and there. But then also, you know, continue to, you know, especially if implied volatility stays decent, we'll continue to add positions. Some of them that I'm looking at, and I put this in the current positions in Outlook, but some of the ETFs that I'm looking at for next week, EWZ, it's not quite up to 50 yet, but if we get a little bit more downside and EWZ, that'll come up to a point where we might potentially start selling premium. EWW is pretty close as well. It's right near that 50 level. XRT is above that level. So these are three that we are looking to add some more premium in next week, assuming implied volatility stays decent. But if it does, but if the markets do turn and rip higher again, then we will just kind of keep doing our thing and, you know, still adding iron ducks and some other things without selling naked premium on some of those ETFs. Okay, where was I here? Next trade, opening trade in SPX. So we opened up a new iron duck in SPX. I'd like to get a couple more of these on if we get some more down movement. But here's where we're at with this one. Let me check the boxes here to get that displayed. And you can see prices hanging out right here pretty close to where we put it on. This one is out in at February 25th is the expiration date. So currently at about an 87% pop. So got a nice big range to move down into if the market does go down on this. Next trade, opening trade in RUT. So we put on a weekly double calendar. Did this with, you know, we typically like to be in that six to eight day range on that front week where we put this on. It was at nine. I just like the way that it set up with the risk reward using the back week at 15 days to expiration. And what I mean by that is the initial, now remember on a double calendar, on a calendar spread when you're using two different expiration cycles, the width of your break evens will expand and contract based on implied volatility and price movement. And your max profit will expand and contract. So this isn't put, you know, this could definitely change throughout the life of the trade. But when we initiated the trade, you know, we've got a max loss of that 630 bucks, 628. And we've got a max profit if we go right here into the dip about a little over 800 bucks. So that's a good risk reward better than we usually get on these. And part of that is because implied volatility is higher, the options are trading richer. We benefit from implied volatility expansion on these calendars. So we like to get in on a kind of a dip in IV contraction. But at the same time, the richer those options are kind of the wider, the higher pop you get on these things, as well as, you know, a little bit better risk reward ratios. So that's where we're at. So we're up about 100 bucks on this trade. And so hopefully we stay in range for the next few days. And we're able to book a profit on this next week. Next trade opening trade in Tesla. So we put on a new iron duck in Tesla talk about a crazy train. Tesla has been on a crazy train. Look at a one year chart gives it a little bit more, more bang for the for the eyes. You know, we talked about in one of our kind of daily trade hacker update videos when it was trading right here, right, right around the 400 level, you know, I said, I think this thing is going to explode beyond that high at that point, because that was near the the all time highs, I believe, or at least a recent high back here. And it looked like it was just ready to break out. And sure enough, it did. It had that little pullback right here. I think we did a duck. I was wanting to I was wanting to get long actually do some verticals. But wait, I was waiting just for a little bit more pullback and it did not give it to us and it just ripped higher. And you know, my thought was, okay, this thing is going to get to 600 a I didn't think it was going to get there this quickly. And in order to I know it was going to blast almost up to 1000 in a parabolic move. Now when you see something like this, you know, this this had to be a short squeeze. And what I mean by that is, Tesla is one of the most shorted stocks out there. There's a lot of big hedge funds and be big people that are known for shorting Tesla, having short positions in Tesla. And so what happens when when you see a stock like this start to rally, and there's a huge short position against it, there's going to be a an uncle point, right? There's going to be a point where these short sellers are like, I got to get out. And so to cover their shorts, they are buying stock, right? When you when you sell a stock short, you're borrowing those shares and hoping to buy them back at a lower price. And so when you cover your short positions, you're actually buying stock, which pushes the price even higher. And then the typical situation in a short string short squeeze is you have this explosive move to the upside, and then it comes back to a little bit back to reality. Now, still at 740, right? Still at 748. So it's still way above here. But that is that is a atypical situation in a short squeeze. So anyway, just a little info on that. But here's here's our position. So we put on a an iron duck and see prices moved up a little bit since we put this on. So obviously, we got a big range here to the downside. If we can get a duck head, if not, we will continue higher. And we've got how many days left on this one? Yeah, seven days. So this one expires next Friday. Next trade closing trade in SPX. So this is another iron duck that we had the options. We just let those expire booked beak profit on that trade. Next trade closing adjusting trade in GC. So we closed out the iron condor booked almost 40% of max profit on that piece of the trade. And then we're still holding our short call vertical piece. And looking for a little bit of down movement on that, I'll go to the platform here in a minute, because we also added back into this the next day. But next trade was a rolling adjusting trade in Apple. So again, another one we're holding for that short delta exposure rolled that out to March with 43 days. So we take a look at Apple, which is actually going down a little bit today, which is good. Hopefully this is a little bit of a little bit of a topping pattern for Apple. We could definitely use some downside for that short delta position because we've been taking this heat all this time. So let's look at that Apple hanging out pretty close to where it was when we rolled just inside the range, but looking for some more downside to benefit that piece. And then the next trade is the addition in gold. So we added back in a new iron condor in gold out in the cycle with 48 days to expiration. And so let's take a look at our two pieces in gold. So here's the iron condor prices hanging out right here. And you may have noticed with the skew in these options, we've got a lot more room to the upside than we do to the downside of this iron condor. And that's just due to that put skew and excuse me, call skew in this case. And I don't mind having that, especially when we have this other piece on here where we need it to move down. So on this one, we'll benefit from it moving down. Whereas the other piece, we get a little bit more room to the upside. So price is hanging out right here. We need some movement back down into range. And if we get that, we'll close that one. And lastly, we did an opening trade today in GILD. Now GILD is not one that we really trade much, but a huge implied volatility spike in GILD, even after their earnings announcement. Reason being is they're doing some clinical trials for the coronavirus. So that's really pumping up the implied volatility, pumping up the price of the options. And so we went ahead and sold some premium. You can see even after the earnings announcement, we're seeing implied volatility in the 100 level 90s. And I don't typically trade a lot of biotechs just because different announcements can come out and really move those stocks. But you can see we've already had some big movements in here. And so the thought process is maybe that big, wild swings are out of the way. And from here, it's kind of found its footing. And if things kind of settle down, implied volatility will contract, and we will benefit from that. So we sold a short strangle here. Price is hanging out right here. And so just waiting for some theta decay, IV contraction in that. One thing I did want to mention, and I didn't post this in the alert, and I meant to reply in the community on the alert just to give you my thoughts. But with a stock like this, typically when we sell premium, when we sell a short strangle, we're going to be willing to roll that. Roll up or down the untested sides, roll out to the next cycle, and just continue to collect credits and eventually book a profit if it goes against us. In a stock like this, I'm not going to do that. This is one where we may roll once, but that would probably be it. I'm not going to chase this thing around for months like I would some of the other ETFs and things that we trade, just because it's not a stock that I really want to be in long term. We're just playing this for kind of a short term implied volatility contraction. And depending on where things are, if price moves out of the range one way or another and implied volatility contracts down below 50, for example, we may just close it and take a loss. Now, we've got over 66% pop on this, so high probability trade and for booking at 30 to 50% of max profit turns it into about a 90% probability of profit, but just wanted to give you my thoughts. If we do get the IV contraction and we're not profitable, we will probably just close it and move on. So those are all the alerts. Let's take a look at some of our other positions, oil down about a percent today, still well within range. We're down obviously because of the IV contraction as well as the move down, but still well within range, so nothing to do there. ES, we've got this long put vertical here that we're holding for short delta. Just need some more down movement to get back into range there. I mentioned gold, I mentioned natty bonds. So we've got this, what's been a 161 straddle that we've had for a bit now. This was originally adjusted from a strangle, but what I was looking at today is if we were to get out of this for about 800 bucks on profit on this piece since our role, we will be back to break even on this trade. So we started this trade. In fact, let me just go to the let me just go to it on our current portfolio, show you what I'm talking about. ZB, yeah. So we started this back in May and this thing just got annihilated. It went way against us right from the very beginning. So we've been battling this and implied volatility has stayed high. So one question now, also I want to answer because I got this in the community is is it worth it to stay in a trade like this instead of redeploying that capital when you're staying in a trade this long? Is it even worth trying to get back to profits where you could have just used that for other things? Well, that's a great question and the answer is it depends on what else is available. TLT and bonds have continued to be one of the symbols that has him high implied volatility. So I want to be short premium in that symbol. If implied volatility got down really low and there was opportunities elsewhere, then yeah, I would have just cut my losses and moved on. But in this case, we went ahead and rolled this and we are back to a point where we're almost back to profits and that's what you want to do. That's the thought process that you want to have when deciding whether to keep it or whether to cut it loose. The other thing is, of course, your account size. If you have a smaller account, you need to cut things loose quicker. Whereas if you have an account that is more manageable and you have the buying power to roll this along with doing the other positions, taking those other opportunities, that plays a major role as well. So anyway, we're pretty close to back to profits in ZB. So that'll be a nice one to potentially take off the board. And I'm looking for 20%, 25% of max profit here. We've got a lot of time, 49 days. We only put this on seven days ago. So we've accumulated basically 600 bucks since our last roll. And so we'll take profits quick if they come as a percentage of this, but otherwise, we'll just keep managing as needed. Wheat up a little bit today in our range here. Got some profit, not quite enough to take off yet. I would like to add another wheat position. This one has 14 days, so we would do it out in the next cycle in the April, what TOS calls the April cycle. In fact, if I go to the continuous contracts, that is going to be the one with 49 days to expiration at this point. So Monday, that'll have about 46. And so that's what we'll be looking to potentially add there. Apple, I mentioned that one. Delta down just a little bit today. I was a little disappointed on the little bit of a rally we got here. I thought we were going to break to new lows and just go ahead and book profits on this one instead, followed the rest of the market and ripped higher. Now it's come down the last couple of days, but we are holding this long put that we're just doing for a short-term directional, just putting a little bit of short delta. I thought the airlines were going to see a little bit more downside with the whole coronavirus, but it's held pretty steady. But prices right here, so we just need a little bit of a downside move to potentially book profits there. DE, John Deere, price is hanging out right here. Just holding this for short delta, looking for a little bit more downside to benefit that one. DIA, so we're going to be looking to potentially roll our FEB piece next week. We've got what, 14 days? Yeah, 14 days in FEB. We've got 42 here. We might even roll this FEB, just skip over March just to kind of diversify our duration and roll that out to April. If we're straight selling premium, we typically like to be under 60 days, but if we're pretty directional like this, I don't mind going out a little further, especially with this. This is a hedge. We're holding this for that short delta exposure, so rolling this out next week will be down into the 60s as far as the DTE, so that will be the plan in DIA. Then we've got this other piece that's already out in March, and you can see prices still hanging on within the range there, looking for some more downside on that one as well. FXI, we've got this short strangle, prices hanging out right here, well within the range. Got a little bit of profit, just waiting for some more before we book that. I mentioned GILD, IWM, we've got this long put vertical also for that short delta exposure. You can see we've got some profit, but just looking for some more before we do anything with that. QQQ, same story, short delta, one in FEB, one in March, so same thing here. We'll probably take this FEB and roll it out to April, and hopefully we get a little bit of downside action early next week before we do that. I mentioned RUT, did I mention SMH? We've got this short strangle here, just waiting for some more time to pass, some more theta to the K. If we look at the charts, we started to get that implied volatility contraction we wanted, and then it popped up higher, so took away a little bit of our profits today, but we want to book 30%, 40%, 50% of max on that one. I mentioned SPX, SPY, another FEB position that we'll be looking to roll over the next week or so, out to March or April. Tesla, I mentioned that. VIX, we've got this bunker trade on. We take these theoreticals off, so prices hanging out right here, so no profit, no loss, it's just hanging out. Again, got this protection. The one other thing that I mentioned in that class that I'm going to add a couple more videos as we move through these, but one of the things that I've been testing and I think would be a decent addition to that class is the setup criteria, setting it up where price is hanging out right here near this short strike, whereas I've also been looking at setting it up so that price actually starts out here. By doing that, when we get this spike, the P&L line flattens out here, and as I mentioned, I mentioned this in the class, that your real benefit is when you get a really major spike in VIX. Just a little one's not really going to do much as far as protection, because we already have a lot of that downside protection in our iron ducts, in our strangles, in our iron condors, in some of our other short delta positions. This is really for that massive kind of black swan, big market correction type event, but I also think if you're looking for protection that comes quicker than a huge massive spike, if you start with your price out here in relation to your short strike, that can potentially give you a quicker profit if things start to go, and you don't need as big of a spike for that to profit. There's not a right or wrong way to do it, but I am going to add another video or two just kind of explaining that as an alternative setup criteria, and I'll have more specifics about that. XBI, price is hanging out right here in our short strangle, so just waiting for some more theta decay there, and then I mentioned XLK. So that's all the alerts, that's all the positions, everybody have a great weekend, talk to you next week.