 Hey everyone, welcome to this week's video update. Today's Friday, September 16th. Taking a quick look at the markets before we jump into our trades. Obviously it was a big down day, big down week for stocks. Monday was higher but then the CPI data came out on Tuesday and stocks just absolutely got annihilated. Had a little pause on Wednesday and then further down side Thursday and then today. Although we're starting to get a little bit of a bounce, got back about half of what the market was down today. It's about two o'clock so we got almost an hour left before the market closes at the time of this recording. But big down week in stocks, gold and silver also seeing some downside although bouncing a little bit today. So much for gold being the inflation hedge that it was thought of at one point. And then notes and bonds continue to just melt to the downside as well, pushing yields higher. Oil, a little bit back and forth this week. Pretty much closing pretty close to where it opened. Natural gas continues to have massive swings in both directions on Wednesday. We had a huge up day natural gas up over 10% and then very next day took it all back plus some and then another 6.5% down today. The grains, soybeans got a little bit of a pop early in the week and then have just been kind of trailing off the rest of the week. The euro and the pound kind of back and forth initial drop on that CPI data and then climbing back up the rest of the week. Bitcoin continues to stay under the $20,000 level and then Ethereum had the infamous merge this week which they've been talking about for a couple of years but coming down in price a little bit. So Ethereum down at the 1400 level. So that's a quick look at the markets. Let's jump into our trades for the week. We'll start by strategy starting with the calendar trades. On Monday added a new TGIF and SPX. We ended up getting out of that one before the end of this week obviously. We also closed one of our monster calendars, booked almost a 9% profit on that one. And then this trade was closed five of eight of our contracts on TGIF and then closed the remaining three later that day. Closed the call calendar in one of our TGIFs and SPX on this alert. Closed three remaining contracts on our rut. And then we closed one of two contracts on our NDX, booked almost 35% on that one. Entered a new TGIF in NDX that we still have. So I'll show you that on the platform. And then we closed our remaining contract on our TGIF and NDX that expired this week, booked a little over 35% on that one. And then we got crushed a little bit on our SPX trades. One of which, we were in the realm of closing it at our exit point. The other one where we ended up closing out the remaining put calendar, this one, this one got away from us a little bit from a standpoint of it, it went a little bit past where we wanted to exit as far as our kind of our stop loss. There was some really good conversation in the community in the calendar chat though this week if you haven't checked that out. Obviously, on a week like this, I mean, going back to the S&P because we were trading SPX, I mean, this was the biggest one day drop that we've seen in two years and then it continued on the rest of the week. So one thing that I said in relation to this and just kind of zooming out on your perspective when something like this happens is that, A, it doesn't happen that often. It's a situation where you're never going to be profitable on every single trade. You have to be able to, you have to expect that you're gonna take some losses. And especially with the strategy that we trade where you're sitting out up as a range bound delta neutral type trade, there's just no way to defend against this. So you just have to understand that you need to be able to accept losses when situations like this happen and move on. It's just another trade out of many and you've gotta take the perspective that you're trading the probabilities based on a large number of trade occurrences over time with the understanding that we're gonna take losses like this. And this was the perfect kind of imperfect, the perfect setup to take a loss because we had four big updates where implied volatility was contracting which is the perfect time to get in and then the market just fell out of bed and got crushed on those SPX positions. We had a similar situation back in June where we had this massive four day drop but we didn't even participate in that. So we didn't get hurt in that one at all and it just happened to be because we consolidated before that leading up to the drop we got out of a bunch of positions with profits and that consolidation didn't have any on when this tank happened. So that's a situation where we didn't get hurt but most of the time when you have that kind of, I don't even know in perspective what it was from an expected move standpoint but it had to be at least to maybe three standard deviation move and there's just no way to defend against that. That's just one of those situations where you're like, yep, taken a loss, moving on and we know that this is a very, very profitable strategy but you're gonna have situations like that where you do take losses. So make sure you're taking the right perspective on that and then two, make sure you're position sizing correctly. What I'm afraid happens a lot of times and I know it happens because I get the emails and the messages is we've had such a good success the last four months in a row with very few losses on our calendar spreads and so what typically happens at that point is people start to think this strategy is awesome. I'm gonna size up, I'm gonna scale up my size and then what happens, boom, they get hit with a loser like this and it can really shake your confidence. So just make sure that you are going into every single trade with the understanding that, hey, if I have to get out of this at my exit point for a loss, am I able to mentally handle that from a mental and a financial standpoint? And I think if you just, if you have that mindset stuff we talk about on the podcast all the time, if you keep that mindset, you're gonna be fine but so just don't let, you know, just one situation like this that happens very rarely, you know, don't let that shake your confidence in a strategy or your own trading ability or whatever else it is. So hope that helps kind of give a little bit of perspective on what's going on. So, okay, so let's go back to the platform and take a look at our current calendar positions. We've just got two positions on. One is in NDX. This is the TGIF that we put on earlier this week and price is hanging out right here kind of under our put strike. We're net with this little bounce that we're seeing late in the day. We're up a tiny bit of money but we'll hold that into next week and hopefully we can book some nice profits to get back of some of what the SPX trades took from us this week. And then the other calendar trade that we have on is our QQQ monster calendar, price hanging out right here. So we got a lot of time on that one. So well within range. So just waiting kind of in wait and C mode on that one. On to our butterfly trades. So let's start with the beginning of the week on Monday. So here's where we closed out one of three contracts on our flathead woodpecker in oil. So we're still holding two. So I'll show you that. We added a new one in IWM with 31 days to expiration. Added a new one in SPY with 64 days to expiration. And then today with the down move and actually if we would have held it it would have bounced back into range but it was getting down near our break even. So we went ahead and closed that one out, took a small loss on that to protect from any further downside. So let's go to the platform. I'll show you the current positions we have starting with IWM. Actually, let's start with the futures starting with oil. So like I said, we closed out one of three contracts. So we're still holding two and you can see we're up another $240 some dollars on our remaining couple contracts. Natty gas, we've got a couple of positions on. This one we've already taken off. We started with just two contracts on this. We've already taken off one. We're up another $100 and some dollars on that remaining one. If natural gas does decide to reverse and come back up we got a potential for a lot more profit. If not, we're getting closer to expiration on 928. So sometime next week we may just close this out and book whatever profits are left there. Our other Natty gas price was way up here at one point a couple of days ago and it's come all the way back down into our max profit tent here. So we've got a lot of time left on that one. So we'll see what happens into the next few weeks there. IWM. All right, so let's go in order of duration here. We've got this one with an October 5th. You can see we're slightly up on that one just waiting for some more. If we get a bounce into next week we'll probably be able to take off part of that for a 10% profit. If it starts coming down we'll have to manage it from there. October 14th is this one. You can see prices hanging out right here. So we need a bounce on that one. And then lastly we've got this October 21 and prices hanging out within our woodpecker head here. So just looking for some more time to pass, some more theta to decay there. SPY. We've got two positions on here. This is our one that we just put on this week. This is a longer duration one. Let me try to scoot this over a little bit for ya. Oh, there we go. Tossed it back to a little choppy. Anyway, prices hanging out right here. So I've got a lot of time left on that one. And then this one with the October 21 expiration. Prices kinda hanging out right here centered as well. So could use a little bounce for our butterflies. And those are all of our butterfly trades. Next, Iron Ducks. Couple of trades here. Number one, we did a new one in SPX with 17 days to expiration. We did a new one in RUT with 22 days to expiration. And then we closed out our QQQ one that was gonna expire today and booked almost max profit on that one. So I think it was like $640 profit on that one. So let's go to the platform and look at our other positions. All right, so we've got our one in RUT. You can see prices hanging out right here. A little bit lower than where we put it on. And then in SPX, we've got two positions. This one here is right in the center of the duck head. And then this one here, I don't know why Toss is giving us this delay here, but let's see if we can, there we go. Let's see, gotta wait for this to update. Got a little spinning wheel going on. Yeah, so this one expires next week on the 20th. And so, or the 19th actually. Sorry about this. For some reason, sometimes when I'm recording, Toss gets a little jumpy on me, kind of delayed when I click and drag on stuff. So let go, give it a minute. Okay, there we go. All right, so this one we're up a few hundred bucks on. So if price can kind of stabilize here as long as it doesn't get too crazy to the downside early next week, we should be able to book a nice profit on that one as well. So those are our ducks. Option selling, had a few trades here, starting with Tuesday. We added a new short strangle in MES. Did that one with 94 days to expiration. Then we rolled down some calls in our ZN position. We were over 50% of max profit on the call side, so we just rolled those down, collect some credit. We did a new short call vertical in UVXY. This is a purely implied volatility contraction play after that spike in IV. We also closed out our EWZ short strangle. On this alert we closed four of the six, booked over 40% of max profit, and then just held the remaining two to try to squeeze some more out, which we ended up closing today. We also rolled down calls on our 45 day MES short strangle. And then here's where we closed out our remaining contracts on our EWZ, booked exactly 50% of max on that one. And then we added a new short call vertical in UVXY today with 28 days to expiration. So just another implied volatility contraction. So if we get a little bit of stability slash bounce in stocks in the next week, those UVXY trades should do pretty good. So let's take a look at our premium selling positions. One we've got, we've still got a short strangle here in four slash six E. We've adjusted this once, and so we booked a credit plus what we're up here. So we're pretty close to our exit point on our profit target on six E. So hopefully if price can kind of stay similar to where it's at and get a little bit more theta decay, we should be able to book that next week. In CL we still have this iron condor. And you can see we're up a little bit. If oil bounces higher, we'll be in really good shape. And then in MES, we've got our three positions. This is our one that we have not adjusted yet. We're pretty much at break even on that one. Here is this one, we're profitable, but we have not quite hit our profit target on that one. And then our shortest duration is this one here. And we've now adjusted this one four different times. And if we can just kind of settle down here or get a little bit of a bounce, we should be able to take this one off pretty soon as well. We're up a little bit of money after all adjustments, but need a little bit more theta decay to book that one. And then lastly on our short strangles, we've got ZN. We've adjusted this one this week just the one time. And so need a little bit more time to pass before we can hit our profit target on that. So those are the, oh, and then let me go back to the UVXY one is over here. We've got those two short call verticals in UVXY. Here's the one, here's the first one we put on. You can see it pushed out of range because Implied Volatility has spiked a little bit further. And when we put that on, I said, hey, if Implied Volatility keeps spiking, we're gonna add another one. And that's what we did here with a little bit different expiration. And just after putting this on today, it's already contracted, we're up about a hundred bucks. So we want to get to about 50% of max profit. It's kind of our profit target on this one. So it doesn't take long if price just kind of stabilizes or bounces into next week, we should be able to book that. So those are our options selling. And then lastly, NTT. So I'll show you our NTT positions hit a new all-time P&L in my NTT account this week. Continues to do very well. Current positions I have on are 10Y. I've been ever since this point here, started buying, scaled out, dipped back down, bought again, scaled out as it goes up and dipping down a little bit today. I've got just a couple of contracts left on that one. So I'm just gonna keep holding these as long as it stays in an uptrend. We're obviously in a rising interest rate environment and with the CPI data and inflation data coming out, continuing to put pressure on the Fed to keep raising rates. So I'm gonna continue to stay long these. I've also got short MES using the S&P, using the micro S&P for MES. When we had that big drop on the CPI, unfortunately we are not in it because the candles were green at that point, but then it bounced back up, got short a couple of days ago and we've got this nice move down in stocks. And then lastly, I'm long wheat. This is a ZW chart, and I'm actually using XW as what I'm trading. So in a buy the dip, so looking for an extension higher at a wheat and then same thing with corn. I've been in this one and been kind of scaling out, scaling in, scaling out, scaling in. And actually this candle did barely turn red at the end of the day, so I'm still in this. So hopefully we get a bounce in the next week and I will get out. Otherwise, if it stays red, I will be closing it out first thing Monday. So that's it my friends. Those are all the trades. Those are all the positions. Hope everybody has a good weekend. Come back next week, ready to go. I will be for you day traders. I'll be running the live stream on Monday morning at the market open. So look forward to seeing you then. Take care.