 Happy Friday, Navigation Traders. Today is Friday, January 26th. Before we jump into the alerts from this week, I wanna take a minute and give you an update on a couple of upgrades to your pro membership. One, and this isn't quite ready yet, but it should be in there by Monday, is in the how to maximize your profits trading options in the short strangles course. I've been getting quite a few questions about how to roll a position from one expiration cycle to the next. We're getting down to the point now where we're under 21 days left in February. And so we've already rolled a couple of positions from February to March and we'll be doing a couple more next week. And so I've been getting a lot of questions. So I did another video. So we've got adjusting the trade part one, adjusting the trade part two, which shows, you know, rolling up one side of it staying in the same expiration cycle. On Monday, you should see another video added here called adjusting the trade part three will go right here. And that'll teach you step by step how to roll a position from one expiration cycle to the next. I realized I didn't have enough clarification in that course. So I made sure I created a new video and added it there. So look for that on Monday. Next upgrade and we'll be sending out an email to notify you of this as well. But we also created another mini course and this has automatically been upgraded, uploaded to your members area. So you don't have to do anything. So as a pro member, anytime we come out with new courses or content, it's just gonna automatically be put in your members area for you. And so another thing I've been getting a lot of questions about is option assignment. So when do my options get assigned, dividend risk, all these different questions? So this is a mini course, just six short videos talking about assignment as it relates to long options, long verticals, short options, short verticals and dividend risk. So any question you might have should be covered in this course. And so please let us know, give us some feedback. Let us know if there's any other questions surrounding dividend risk or option assignment that is kind of confusing to you and we'll be sure to add that here. But I think we've covered everything. So check that out and we'd love to hear some feedback on that. So let's go to the alerts, click on the alerts tab here, scroll down to the beginning of the week, first trade made on 122. So first trade we made was in NatGas. So we had a short call vertical that was from an iron condor. We went ahead and closed that out. And so if we go to the platform and take a look at NatGas right here. So we closed out that vertical but we still have this full iron condor on. You can see prices kind of hanging out in the upper range of our iron condor. So need a little bit of a down movement, some time to pass, some decay to happen. If we take a look at UNG on the chart, implied volatility continues to stay high right at the 90th percentile currently. So just looking for a little bit of a pullback and some contraction in IV to benefit that piece. Next trade was an opening adjusting trade in wheat. So we added an iron condor in wheat. So if we take a look at our graph here in wheat, what you'll see is you can see prices still here within our range, nothing to do with wheat. We're working our way back really nicely in wheat by another cycle or two and we'll be back in the profits on wheat after that big one directional move that we had to work our way out of. So that's going well. Next trade was a pre-earnings long call in Apple. So this is the trade we put on Monday. Looking for that typical upside momentum and continued expansion in implied volatility to benefit this trade. And so we haven't received that. And so if we take a look at Apple, you can see we're down on the trade. If typically we're gonna get a pop going into earnings in price, but we haven't seen that, we've seen some downside. So what I like to do is I like to give this a little bit of a chance, but if we don't see some upside movement in Apple on Monday of next week, I'm gonna cut this one loose and just take a loss. So that's where we're at with Apple, not seeing that typical upside movement before the earnings announcement like we usually do, but we'll continue to monitor. It could reverse fortune on Monday and into next week. So we'll wait and see. Next trade was an opening trade where we sold a vertical in Netflix. So this was a post earnings short put vertical in Netflix. So remember the way that this works per our earnings course is if a stock announces earnings and it opens up above the expected move. So I kind of marked the expected move with this little red line here. Netflix opened well above that. And just like it typically does, it continued to march higher and we're able to book a profit in Netflix within just a couple of days here. So that was a nice trade. Next trade was a rolling adjusting trade in FXI. So we simply rolled our puts from 45 to 50. So price breached our upside break even so we needed to roll our puts up. And with 24 days to expiration at the time, we typically like to do that. If we get under 21 days, we don't want to be in that expiration cycle anymore with these uncovered options like strangles and straddles. So we weren't quite at that 21 days, but there is no reason to roll that in the same expiration cycle and then three days later have to roll it out again. So we simply just did it all in one trade. So we rolled our puts from 45 to 50 and then rolled from February to March. And again, if this was kind of confusing because this is one of the trades that I got some questions on about rolling to the next expiration cycle, this is the new video that I just put in the strangles course that you'll be able to reference next week. But for now, let's take a look at FXI to see where we're at. If we take a look, you know, just again, continued upside parabolic move to the upside. And so we needed to adjust this. So we rolled up from the 45 to the 50. So essentially now we have the 50 straddle. So we're short the 50 calls, we're short the 50 puts and just need a little bit of a downside movement and some more contraction in IV to benefit that piece. Can see if we want to stay in this trade implied volatility is still nice and high at the 100th percentile. So just looking for a little bit of two-sided action to benefit that piece. Next trade was an opening adjusting trade in soybeans. So similar to wheat, we just simply added an iron condor on in here and to continue collecting that credit, extending duration on that trade, similar to wheat, we are working our way back nicely in this, should be another cycle or so to get back to profitability, assuming price stays in a decent range. So, and then the next trade was actually a right kind of back to back was a closing adjusting trade where we had a put vertical from a previous iron condor on, went ahead and closed that out, booked a little bit of a profit on that piece and then added this other one. So this is still pretty centered on our trade here. So tiny bit of profit, not enough to take off yet. So we'll continue to monitor and manage our soybeans. Next trade was a closing adjusting trade in wheat where we bought back this iron condor, booked over 40% of max profit on this piece of the trade. And then we're still holding our other iron condor where you can see prices right here. So well within our range, just need a little bit of downside more contraction in IV and time to pass to benefit that one. Next trade was in XRT. So this is a rolling adjusting trade in XRT. So very similar where we are in the FEB cycle. So we wanted to roll from February to March because we're getting close to that 21 days to expiration and with price breaching our upside break even, we needed to roll our puts up. So we rolled our puts from 44 to 48. So if we take a look at XRT, here's what that looks like now. So just need a little bit of downside here to benefit that. And then the other trade, which I'm showing here is a theoretical position, but because it's still in our other account and we're waiting to migrate it over when we have to roll or make an adjustment. But the other one is a full strangle at the 43, 48 strikes here. You can see price has breached our upside short strike. So I was looking to adjust, but there's still a decent amount of premium in there and we're still in February here. So early next week, regardless of what price does, if we continue to move higher or lower, we're going to probably need to roll those puts up and then we'll roll that out from February to March. So I just didn't want to take care of that today. I wanted to give it over the weekend a little bit more time to see what happens. But regardless of what the price does, we will be rolling that from February to March. Because remember, when with these uncovered options, with these short strangles and straddles, it really makes sense to roll out with right now we've got 21 days in Feb and we've got 49 days. So we're approaching that 45 day mark, which is the optimal time to be in these trades. And so with our trade experience and our rigorous back testing, what we found is that gamma, that risk really starts to accelerate once you get under that 21 days to expiration. So we want to roll out to a more optimal timeframe, reduce our gamma risk and continue to monitor. And that's going to lower our risk over time as well as enhance our return. So look for that early next week. And let's see, what was our next trade? Next trade was in TLT. So what we did here is we closed out, we had bought a long put vertical in TLT and we closed that out. If we take a look at TLT, which we've since after that alert, we put on another one. But you can see we said we put that on around here, got a nice move down, booked a profit, prices popped its head back up. And so we actually put on another one, which I'll just go ahead and go over that now since we're on it. So we just bought a long put vertical. And I got a couple of questions about this because I said, we're adding long delta to our portfolio. Keep in mind, I'm relating that to a spy weighted, spy beta weighted delta. So if we look at the actual delta of TLT itself, it's short delta because we want the price to go down on this trade. But bonds typically have an inverse correlation to stocks, meaning if stocks go up, bonds go down. And so if you beta weight your delta to SPY, so you're looking at kind of apples to apples with all your trades, what that does is that actually gives us some long beta weighted delta in our portfolio. You know, we always talk about keeping that short bias, that short directional delta in our overall portfolio for protection, but we're getting a little bit overweight to the short side. So by doing this, it adds a little bit of long spy weighted delta, even though as the delta relates to TLT itself, we want the price to go down. So hopefully that kind of gives you a little bit of clarification there. It just has to do with that inverse correlation to stocks and bonds. Next trade was a closing trade in SPX. So this was that SPX calendar that we had on. We're just kind of extending duration. We rolled the short strike to this week to try to give us a little bit more time. Unfortunately, SPX just continued moving higher, so we went ahead and closed that out, took a loss on that trade and just moving on. If we take a look at our closed trades real quick, what you'll see is we're continuing to book a lot of winners. We took a $440 loss overall on that SPX calendar spread, after all adjustments and rolls and additions. So took a loss there, but still with closing trades, still doing good as far as, you know, just continuing to book those winners and managing our positions mechanically as we should. Next trade was, let's see, after that SPX one, where am I here? There we go, there's the selling, there's the closing. Next trade was an opening trade in CAT. So this was an earnings short strangle. So this is where we put this trade on just the day before they announced earnings and we want to manage it the next day after they announced earnings because you get this implied volatility crush. Now what happened was we got that crush, we had price here, I was trying to get filled at about 20 cents to book a really nice profit on that trade, about an 80, 90% winner, but yeah, about a 90% of max profit winner. But then prices ran away to the downside. So we ended up closing this for about 50% of max profit, which is still a great trade overnight. You know, price did reverse and we would have got out at better prices. So hopefully some of you guys got out at better prices than we did, but I just didn't want to see this thing run away from us and take away our profit. And the other thing here is this was a very small volatility crush. You know, typically we're seeing much larger volatility crushes after an earnings announcement, but in this case it did dip and give us a chance to make a profit, but not near as much as we typically see. So interesting how the market continues to move higher and when that happens implied volatility typically is getting sucked out of the market, but with this market, we're seeing the market go up and implied volatility go up. So it's a very interesting dynamic. And so we just got to kind of continue to manage our short deltas, not get too short. So we haven't added a bunch more short delta, which is good, but we're still getting hurt on the overall short delta of our portfolio, but you've got to continue to manage that risk. And so one way we do that is just by continuing to add positions on. And that's what we'll continue to do. You know, I think one of the, you know, just kind of taking a pause here and just looking at the overall market. I mean, look at this thing. It is unbelievably, you know, it's parabolic. I mean, we've basically had zero down days. We've had a couple tiny down days all year, all month. And we've just got this parabolic move to the upside. And so that is really hard to manage when you're selling premium. But again, we're not adding new short positions. We're not trying to get more short. We're just managing our current portfolio and that short delta that we use for protection is causing a drag on our performance right now. But the way that I look at it is this. We're gonna continue to put on positions, book profits, and wait for this to become a little bit more two-sided. And we're not gonna add to our short delta. We're not gonna continue getting short up and up and up. That's the way you absolutely get killed. So we're just gonna continue to monitor and manage. And the way that I look at this is if I didn't have any positions on and I came in, let's say I took a vacation for two months or I fell asleep for a few months, didn't have any positions on and I were to come into this market right now, would I be getting long? Absolutely not. Would I want short delta? Absolutely, because the pot odds are in our favor that at some point we're gonna see some downside. So I know it's really difficult when we have these huge one-directional moves like we've had in stocks, but you've just got to stay mechanical and continue to adjust and roll just like we teach. And eventually this thing's gonna turn around. So just keep doing what you're supposed to do. Okay, next trade was in Netflix. So that's where we closed out that short put vertical. I already mentioned that one. Next trade was a closing adjusting trade in XLV. So we closed out of our put vertical side of an iron condor in XLV because price had gone up and breached our breakeven. We take a look at XLV, we've got two positions on in here. This is the one where it breached our breakeven. So need some downside here to benefit that piece and that's in February. So we'll continue to hold and monitor that and potentially roll that as we get closer to expiration. With February, we still got 21 days to expiration. So no hurry to roll that at this point. And then the other piece that we have in XLV is another full iron condor where you can see price has come up and breached through our breakeven. But with these narrow iron condors, you're still gonna have some premium in those puts on a trade like this. So you can see we're only a little over half of the, about two thirds of the juice out of there. So we still got a lot of juice in those puts. So no need to adjust yet. Just because it breached our breakeven, there's still some value in those puts. So no need to take those off. But still looking for some downside and implied volatility has continued to creep up. So we haven't gotten that contraction yet that we need to benefit that piece either yet. So still holding on to that one. Next trade was a rolling adjusting trade in EWW. So we rolled our puts from the 45 to the 52 and with just 22 days to expiration, again, we're rolling from Feb to March. So if we take a look at EWW, go to the analyze tab, you can see this is what our graph looks like now. Just need a little bit of downside movement, implied volatility starting to contract a little bit in EWW. But if we can get some more time to pass and just a little bit of a pullback right there, should be able to get out of that one with a little bit of a profit. Next trade was a closing trade in CAP. So that was our earnings short strangle. I already talked about that. Next trade was a rolling adjusting trade in EWZ. So kind of the same thing. We're rolling a lot of these positions from February to March. So we rolled and with price breaching our upside short strike, we rolled from 40 to 45 and then rolled from February to March. So if we take a look at EWZ, kind of the same story. Now in this one, we did get a contraction in implied volatility, but with the big move in price, we wanted to continue to roll out. And so very, very similar to EWW. We just need a little bit of a down move, some more time to pass to benefit that trade. Next trade was an opening trade that we did today in Facebook. So this was a pre-earnings long call. And if we take a look at Facebook, you can see we're up some money on this one, about $122. I'd like to, if we can get a quick pop up to 191 or 192 and book a nice profit into Facebook, that'd be good. So we can pop our head up to new highs early next week. We'll book a profit there or continue to manage that. You know, this is another one, kind of like we're trying to do an Apple. We're just looking for that upside momentum going into the earnings. So this is a trade, remember, we're not taking any earnings risk. We're gonna be out of this trade before they announce. So stay tuned for that early next week. And lastly, we did another opening trade in TLT, which I already kind of mentioned. This was the long put vertical. So looking for some more downside movement in TLT. So you can see we're pretty much at where we got in here. So just need a little bit of downside to benefit that one. So let's go over some of the other positions that we have on. One is in the Euro and we've got a strangle on here, still pretty centered in our range, nothing to do looking for some implied volatility contraction in that one to benefit that. If we take a look at the chart, you can see IV percentile still above 50, it's just that 60 level. So just looking for some contraction there to benefit that trade. Next trade, another position we have on is in the Ford slash ES. So we've got this short call spread, need some downside movement and we've got this long put spread, which is very similar trade. I'm just looking for some downside there. In Natty Gas, I already went over that one, in the notes. So in the 10 year note, we've got a strangle on here, you can see prices right here, kind of hidden behind that red hash mark, but still well within our range. If we take a look at the implied volatility of TLT, which is what we use for the IV on both the 10 year notes and 30 year bonds, you can see IV percentile, the 67. So for this, we can continue to look for some contraction in implied volatility. Oops, going back to the platform. Soybeans, I went over wheat, I went over apple, I went over DIA. So we've got a couple of positions on in here. We've got the full iron condor, which you can see is in the upper end of our range. Just need a little bit more contraction in implied volatility. And this is kind of what I was talking about earlier, even with stocks going up, the implied volatility has stayed high, which is not typical. So if stocks do have a significant turnaround, we're gonna see implied volatility even go higher, which will bode well for putting on new positions. Of course, it'll help our current positions as well. So we've got that iron condor, and then we've also got these other call spreads on in DIA. So we've got this one here, which again, we're not doing anything yet. It's in February. We've got 21 days to expiration. We're almost at a max loss on that. So there's no reason to do anything. We'll continue to wait and roll as we get closer to expiration on that one. And then same thing with this one here. So very similar positions, just about a strike different there. So we'll continue to watch that. Went over EWW, EWZ, Facebook, FXI. I think I went over that one. Just we've got this adjusted strangle. So just looking for a little bit of downside there. GLD, the gold ETF. We've got an iron condor on here, very centered, tiny bit of profit, not enough to take off yet. If we take a look at the chart, GLD. Again, implied volatility staying high. And another kind of anomaly here. And this doesn't happen all the time, but a lot of times, if we see stocks going up, we'll see gold going down. Because GLD historically has been a bit of a flight to quality. So if stocks go down, gold goes up. But again, we've got gold going up here too with implied volatility high. So, A, it gives us a good opportunity to put new trades on. But just looking for some contraction there to benefit that piece. IBM, so this is that adjusted strangle that we're still holding. Looking for a little bit of downside. We're gonna roll this one early next week as well and probably reposition those strikes. Just needed about, just need a couple hundred dollars out of this trade to get back to profitability in IBM, so that's in February. And because it is a short strangle, we'll be looking to roll that next week out to March. IWM, we've got this short call vertical. So just need a little bit of downside to benefit that piece. And again, with implied volatility staying high, we've only got that one piece of the trade on an IWM. So we may add an iron condor into IWM next week, assuming implied volatility stays high. And then the cues, we've got three pieces on here. We've got these short call verticals that we're part of an iron condor. These first two are in FEB, so we are not going to roll those yet, but we'll look to roll those as we get closer to expiration. And then this one is shown as a theoretical position because it's in the other account, but this is one that we also have on. So just need some downside there as well. And we'll be looking to roll and manage these as we get closer to expiration. I went over TLT, XLU. We've got this March, you know, tight iron condor. Price still well within our range here, so nothing to do there. I went over XLV and XRT. I went over that as well. So those are all the trades. Those are all the positions. Hopefully we get a little bit of two-sided action next week. Just stay, just continue to stay mechanical and do your adjustments and rolls as you're supposed to. And don't start adding more short positions because there's nothing that says that the market can't continue higher, but it's just a matter of time. At some point, we're gonna see some two-sided action and get back some of these positions that we're currently down in. So hope that was helpful. Everybody have a great weekend and we'll talk to you next week.