 You're right guys, so yes, I'm interested in conversations going on, you know, last night with regards to several things and one of them is obviously the risk of sentiment, right? And keeping up to date with the risk of sentiment and I do want to kind of talk about risk of sentiment and I guess my approach, not necessarily, you know, how you should trade it, right? Because we all know that in a risk-off environment what should typically happen, you know? Now before I get into that, just, you know, risk-off in itself. One of the key things that I've learned over the years is to try to understand what the market really cares about. And at the moment the market is, you know, caring about the, you know, Russia invading Ukraine, right? That is a thing in the US, Biden is saying that, you know, he believes an attack is coming. So that definitely sounds very risk-offish and the market is actually reacting in that and typically should react to that kind of environment, right, that scenario, you know, what is happening. Now, as a trader you have to decide what it is that you really want to do in a risk-off environment, whether you want to, you know, sit out, yeah, which is what I generally will tend to do and I say generally and typically because there are some risk events that, you know, and I couldn't say which ones they are, but when it comes to war, yeah, war is going to become almost, and it's horrible thing to say, but price will not keep going down because there is a war. Some wars have lasted for years, right? But then there is some sort of normality to the war, right? You know, if you think about, you know, Syria and Libya and stuff like that in the past, like those wars and invasions, yeah, yes, were typically risk-off events, but during those times you still had, you know, the yen didn't just keep strengthening and strengthening, and Swiss franc didn't just keep strengthening, you know what I mean, and money keep going into those safe haven assets, you know what I mean, there are period, there are, there is a time where, you know, where that risk-off is actually priced in, plus you always have to remember that there's a liquidity issue, right? Everyone can't get short, you know what I mean, there has to be liquidity to provide those continuous shorts and the money is not necessarily made where the obvious trade is, right? So you have to keep that in mind. At some point, this risk-off event will be priced into the market, it's being priced in now, which is probably why you're seeing, you know, for example, the New Zealand, Swiss, New Zealand yen, you know what I mean, start to, you know, fall in any kind of, you know, safe haven currency strengthen and commodity currencies not strengthen, right? So prices are reacting at the moment typically, yeah, to what it should do in a risk-off environment, right? So then getting back to what is really, you know, your approach and our approach to certain things. So and I say our, but you know, it's got to be kind of subjective. Now my approach to risk-off and risk-on environments is this, is risk-off, right? So row, row, right? Risk-on, risk-off. The risk-off side, I have a general view, yeah, that problems will always get resolved eventually, yeah? Whether it's war, whether it's, you know, I mean, you know, the virus, etc. Problems will always get resolved eventually. And as a, I guess, as the human race, one of the things that we do is problem-solve, right? We don't like chaos and, you know, I mean, for too long an uncertainty for too long, right? People want to fix things and, you know, I mean, get on with their lives and just live normal lives, stress-free, etc. So, you know, there's always a resolution. There's always light at the end of the tunnel at some point. So with that, you know, I guess overall view, overall view, I tend to look at risk-off as buying opportunities. So again, as I said, there are risk-off scenarios where I might think to myself, this is just so obviously and so blatant that, you know, I might start taking maybe a bit of a speculative position. But in maybe the war scenarios, I will generally, I generally and typically will wait for things to kind of resolve because, you know, you've got all these, you know, talks, diplomats, da-da-da-da, whatever it is. And even if war does kind of break out to a certain degree, God forbid, again, there's going to be some sort of resolution. So with that being said, if I want to be a buyer of a currency that I know should be, you know, hiking rates and the fundamentals, etc., etc. Yeah. What, let's say, for example, just a typical, you know, I don't know, dollar Swiss, right? Or even even more, even better CAD, CAD yen, right? CAD yen currency pair, right? So as a commodity currency, you know, in a risk-off environment, typically, you know, they should go down and money should flow into the safe havens, right? Now, you can trade, you know, buy the yen, yeah, if you want to buy the yen, I'm not saying that you shouldn't, right? Everyone's got their own thing that they want to do. But what I typically look towards is looking for when there are bargains, right? So let me just do that. And let's say, for example, there's, you know, we're in a, you know, we've got demand zones, right? And then all of a sudden, we get like, we get, you know, risk-off, right? And risk-off starts to kind of go through these zones. Now, nobody knows, nobody knows, nobody has a clue, yeah? As to, you know, which zone is going to react. Of course, it can cut through like a hot knife through butter at some of these zones, and some zones might be profit-taking. Again, even during a risk-off environment, there are pullbacks in the same way that in risk-on environments, there are pullbacks, because we have to understand liquidity, you know, and things like that, right? So that's, that's always the, I won't say the driving factor, but in the short term, there is the driving factor, right? Unfair auctions that need to be filled, you know, market makers, da-da-da-da, right? So you have to always remember that. The market's not going to keep going down forever from that perspective. So what I tend to have the view is that risk-off pushes prices to where I want to be a buyer, right? It can push prices to basically bargain, you know, bargain value, right? So me personally, I just find it easier to trade in one direction, regardless of whether I, you know, lose that trade, and I might even lose that trade, right? Cool. That's just what it is. But at some point, yeah, first of all, price is going to have to go higher simply because of liquidity, right? One, right? And unfair auctions of market makers and just, you know, general, you know, the fact that even that risk-off sentiment has now been priced in, yeah? So it's going to find, it's going to find the floor, it's going to find the value at some point, yeah? And where traders generally go wrong is because they keep trading both sides of the markets, both sides of the markets, and trying to pick highs and lows that they actually get, you know, by the time certain situations arise, or, you know, should I buy here because they've lost here and they've tried to buy there. And, you know what I mean? It's like, it's a mismatch of things. And because you traders are trying to pick highs and lows all the time, it basically, I'll say they blow their account, but, you know, they feel a lot of pain during that time trying to buy highs and lows. Whereas for me, I'm just looking at it, okay, I know the value of the Canadian dollar potentially is definitely a bargain. Is it a bargain here? Right? Yes or no? No, cool. No worries. If that's a previous demand zone, is it a bargain here? No, okay, cool. I know that at some point, yeah, it's going to go to the upside. Right? Because, like I said, not only do we have, you know, in fact, that market makers are going to have to, you know, make some money at some point and there's going to be pullbacks, liquidity, you know, auctions and stuff like that. But also as well, the war and the crisis is going to be priced in as well. And also, again, resolution, right? There's going to be a resolution. It's going to be, you know, the problem's going to get solved at some point. Yeah. So with all that being said, generally, what I tend to do is look at it as far as, okay, we're coming down brilliant, where can I try? And in a way, it's like you're trying to pick the bottom. You know, you're trying to pick the lows. And I don't mind doing that at certain levels. And of course, I'm not just randomly taking, you know, certain levels, right? I'm actually looking to see what the setups are. And also as well, reducing my risk size. So rather than, you know, going in at, you know, maybe three positions, maybe going at, you know, two positions or maybe one position, going at smaller position size, I'm not trying to go in, you know, because it's a more of a difficult environment to trade in. But like I said, at some point, this will turn around. And once, you know, prices, I guess, the environment gets resolved, right? Let's say, for example, Putin backs out and, you know, they come to some agreement and, you know, everything is great again. Yeah. The upside potential for the currency that you've bought, yeah, if you're again planning on holding an understanding fundamentals as well, yeah, and understand this is severely undervalued, yeah, down here. If I lose three or four trades, yeah, that's fine. You know, five trades in a row, that's fine for me. Because I know that if I get in on this low, yeah, that the upside potential can be 10, 15, 20, 30 to one. So from that perspective, it's about maximizing your trade idea. So I'm not taking, you know, three or four or five or even six or seven losses, right? I'm not taking those losses only to get into a trade to take, you know, a two to one. That's just nonsense, you know, or three to one. The idea, again, this is backed by, you know, your fundamental analysis is to understand how much of a bargain this is, yeah, how much of a bargain this is when risk comes back on, yeah, against the yen. Because once this comes back on, and we start to talk about, you know, high hiking rates and who's going to be first to hike rates and da, da, da, da, da, right, then, you know, the Canadian dollar is going to be severely undervalued and you've got a lot more upside potential. So from that perspective, you know, that's really, I would say my personal approach to risk off. And I do want to give, I guess, more of an example as well. You know, a few years back, 2020, I think it was just before the, the, the, it was, it was just before COVID, right? So beginning of 2020, the year started off really with, I think, basically Trump ordered the airstrike, killed key Iranian general, general in Iraq, yeah. And I told him, Kamene, Kamene, I think is Kamene Nile, whatever his vows, severe retaliation for the killing now. For those of you who were with me at the time, you know, you remember and you will, you know, remember that we were like, Oh, do you know what? This is going to be crazy risk off. You know, I mean, the war is starting. Yeah. And it doesn't get more hawker, say hawkish or bullish, but hawkish or dovish, but it doesn't get more risk off than this, right? At the time, this is January the third 2020. So the US is sending more troops to the Middle East after President Donald Trump ordered a drone strike, right? In Iraq, they're killed one of Iran's most powerful generals. And, you know, this was like, this was like as risk off as it possibly could have got. Yeah. So I remember thinking to myself, this is going to, you know, this is definitely going to, you know, buy by the end by the Swiss Frank and buy and, you know, sell the other currencies. But what you'll find is, is that what we found is that the price is the story quickly kind of evaporated, right? In a sense that the retaliation didn't come. And then it was just like, you know, in fact, prices moved a lot higher, right? Prices moved higher from there. So you would have thought that for example, the dollar Swiss, you know, Swiss Frank should be the stronger currency, especially because the dollar is, you know, the one involved in, you know, the drone strike, etc. But if you look at what happened from, you know, from the third of January, yeah, yes, prices came down, but it didn't sell off. Do you know what I mean? It didn't, it did not sell off. Yeah. As I thought it would have, right? So you might be thinking to yourself, well, does risk off really work? Or risk off? And it goes back to my original point. You have to also, you have to, but, but it's very difficult to predict what the, how the market is going to react in every single scenario. Some scenarios where you think that the market should react in a certain way, it doesn't. And some scenarios you think that the, you know, market, you know, may not react, it does, right? But it's not our job to necessarily, you know, predict how the market is going to react. Yes, we look back historically and say this is how, you know, the market has typically reacted, but every scenario is different. So, so my understanding of that is rather than trying to say, oh, we're in a risk off scenario. Yep, you better be selling. Oh, we're in a risk on environment. Oh, you better be buying. Because as we know, it's not as simple as that. And risk isn't a binary thing. It's not risk on or risk off. It is a, there's scales to risk, right? My thing is, is just for me and how I found trading in risk off environments is that, right, what I want to do is I still want to get long on a dollar because when the dust settles, yeah, if the dust settles sooner rather than later, yeah, then, you know, we should want to go, you know, higher. If it becomes a non-event, then I'm buying for cheap. Yes, I could lose a few trades, you know, going short, not necessarily, you've got to select your levels carefully. And again, as well, you know, there's, there's, you know, things like trend line breaks. If you, you know, if you want to understand, you know, and not get into a trade and try to pick the bottom, yeah, there are, you know, our trend line, the trend line break theory, which I'm not going to go into necessarily in this video, right, where you're understanding, you know, when the market is likely to go from a, you know, trending market to a ranging market, for example, and then you get, you can get involved in a potential, you know, maybe double bottom if you want to call it double bottom, but more of a ranging fair value market state. So, so, so ultimately, you've got, you know, going back to risk off and my approach is there's going to be, you know, more risk, there's going to be risk on at some point, or there's going to be less risk off risk off is going to be priced into the market value always prevails at the end, you know, emotionally, there are, there are definitely, you know, traders who are emotional and thinking it's going to be the next big thing, but ultimately, it's all about value and liquidity. Yeah, it's all about a value and liquidity in a risk off environment, you get pullbacks. And when you're in that pullback, let's say, for example, you managed to, you know, get in on a trade, right, to the low side. And then obviously, you know, you get, you're getting a pullback. And then during that pullback, what could happen because this could be, you know, this could be maybe Monday, right, maybe by Friday, by the end of the week, all of a sudden, you know, Putin says, you know what, we're not invading Russia, Biden comes out and says, you know, where, where, where, you know, we're not, we're not going to, you know, everything's been resolved, everything's fine or whatever it is. Then all of a sudden, the market's going to go, oh, okay, so the, so what we were pricing in, isn't that now. So now we've got a price in what the, you know, the commodity currency is worth versus a safe haven asset, and prices have come down, you know, 4500 pips, you know what I mean? Then you could be in that trade and all of a sudden while you're in that trade, risk sentiment changes. So, you know, nobody knows where the reversal is. Trading is all about probabilities and your risk reward, I said all about. There's obviously more than that. But generally, from a very simplistic level, it's about, you know, when you're looking to trade and things like that, it's just a case of, you know, can I make more, yeah, on my winning trades, then lose when I lose a trade, yeah? And again, we know swing trading and, you know, fundamental analysis, holding trades for the long term, you know, we're looking at, you know, bigger trades than when we lose, yeah? Because we understand at some point, this was value, right? So during Corona, you know, during that March 2020, then all of a sudden, we did the opposite, right? We did the opposite because there was light at the end of the tunnel when it came to certain things. Of course, prices did go, you know, a bit lower than whatever it is, the dollar, and I'm not trying to, you know, explain all of this and what was happening throughout 2021, of course, you know, safe haven currencies. But the point is, is that even during a risk off environment, yeah, as well as obviously, you've got to consider, you know, what was going on, monitored policy-wise and economy-wise, etc. There are pullbacks. There are definitely pullbacks to get involved in that. And again, it's not going to happen every single day or every single week, but it's just picking those moments, right? So anyways, let me get back to the discussion room. And I know there was something about geopolitics. And geopolitics, again, I used to kind of be, you know, into geopolitics a lot myself years ago, you know, reading up on everything, especially when you're learning fundamentals, right? Because they're generally tied. Fundamentals is generally tied to a fundamental analysis, right? So you've got intermarket analysis. But what I realized over the years, again, is that it's more about, I would say, the narratives, because we can get dragged from pillar to post about what story may, you know, affect, you know, this price. And none of us would truly ever know what price or what events are going to affect price and in what way into the degree, right? Some stories, I'll give you another example, for example, the Evergrande story, right? When it was, when they were about to default, yeah, when it was deferred, when it first came out, where there was a possibility that Evergrande was going to default, all of a sudden the market went, you know, jittery and started selling off and all that kind of stuff. I don't know if you guys remember that. But then whenever grand actually did, you know, come to some sort of default or there was a like the market didn't even react. Do you know what I mean? It was like, well, yeah, well, we know this. You know what I mean? We expected that Evergrande was going to default on certain things or go into some sort of admin administration. But the market did not react to it, not in the slightest. It's like almost like the rumor of it, the market moved. The actual fact of it, you know, happening, yeah, and the fact that they would, they, you know, their accounts and whatever it is, the whole story, just literally just disappeared from the market. So it's so again, like I said, it's trading in a risk offering environment for me and trying to pick and, you know, what the market is and the narrative that's going to be decided on that is going to move the market, I found to be very, very difficult to do consistently. Yeah, consistently. So again, for me, what I do is I literally just look for buying opportunities because once things come back to normal, you know, and things always generally do come back to normal at some point, you know, it's buying opportunities. Yeah, so that's really my view on it. And I know a lot of you do know that as well, because you've been with me for a while and I've explained this, but just for, just to the general guys, the new guys as well, who have not traded in this kind of environment, that's my overall position. So if you see, if you're wondering why, you know, I'm not, you know, why isn't the ongoing short and buying the Japanese Gen or buying the Swiss Frank at this moment in time, this is the reason why, because I'm just waiting for the bargain, right? I'm not trying to pass, you know, a prop firm challenge, right? I've got all the time in the world to sit on my hands and wait for the, for the, you know, the market to give me the right opportunity. And that's not to say that you shouldn't be trading, you know, prop firms and things like that. But it's just one of the issues you may have if, for example, you're trying to pass a prop firm challenge within 30 days or 60 days where you have to take, where you're forced to take, you know, a trade or trades that really and truly aren't the best trades, because not every single day or every single week, there are going to be, you know, top notch trading opportunities and buying opportunities. And when I say trading, I mean buying opportunities, because ultimately it's about value and looking for, you know, looking for the right opportunity that's going to be, you know, maybe that five, 10, 15, 20 to one, 30 to one type trades. Those are the ones, right? But yeah, geopolitics, interesting. I try not to get drawn down the rabbit hole anymore. You know, I've got enough to, you know, think about and do. So it's, it's very, but yeah, I would say just try to be aware of what is going on 100%. And with experience, I guess you'll start to come to maybe the same conclusion as me. And again, it just depends on your interest as well. But what I don't want you to do is go so far down to the point where you're saying, well, you know, there's this that happened in Nicaragua, and how is that going to affect the Japanese gent? It's like, like, you know, I mean, it's like, that's, that's not a story, you know, I mean, and, but, but we can have those are blinkers on where we're thinking that every single, you know, geopolitical issue, how is that going to affect price? And when you start getting to that point, then it's like, you know, you've got a bit too far down the rabbit hole, because ultimately, you know, we don't need that, right? We don't need that. I don't need that. And we don't need that to continuously, you know, be profitable and make money in the markets. We just, you know, should focus on, yes, you know, our bread and butter and just, you know, do and that and just continue to, you know, follow that process rather than going down the rabbit hole, right? But, but I'm with you guys, but I just haven't got the time to, you know, go on to, you know, into geopolitics, because like I said, it could go on, on and on and on. But yeah, I'm definitely aware of what's what's happening. So monetary policy in allied and allied with return dovish, maybe interest rates. Yeah, I mean, again, I was probably say Euro. I'd have to have a think about that matter of fact. I think I'd have to have a think about that. But not to say that you're wrong on that jar brain at all, because it depends on obviously the economy depends on inflation and interest rate cut depending on the inflation is high. I don't think they can do that. You know, I mean, if it's above their 2% target, then, you know, I don't think they'll ever start, you know, cutting rates, because if you start cutting rates, you're just going to fuel the, the inflation fire, you know what I mean? So not too sure on that, but, you know, maybe it might have a higher tolerance for inflation, but I don't think they'll end up, you know, cutting interest rates. For that, it depends on how bad things go. But you never, you never really know. But again, this could be just all posturing and, and just jaw boning with with the with Russia and you kept crane, you know, I mean, it's like, who blinks first, who's going to back down? But, but eventually, hopefully, someone does back down sooner rather than later. And then all of a sudden, you know, those commodity companies start looking like absolute bargains against the safe haven currencies. Anyways, I'll get into maybe some of some of these charts as well. So actually, matter of fact, let me do that in a separate video. I'll do that in a separate video. So yeah, I'll make a second video now and, and covering some of the some of the charts and maybe some of the other comments.