 Welcome everyone to this week's video update, today's Friday, December 30th, the last trading day of the year. So hope everybody had a good year learning the trade and look forward to a great new year going forward. Let's jump in and take a look at the trades that we made this week starting on, remember the market was closed Monday. So starting on Tuesday, December 27th, we made our first trade of the week and we put on a new iron condor in the soybean future. So let's take a look at soybeans, Ford slash ZS. Now remember the implied volatility indicator does not work on some futures contracts and even the ETF, the corresponding ETF to soybeans doesn't give you a reading. So with these grains like soybeans, wheat, corn, these are really things that you just kind of have to monitor on your own to figure out if there's enough juice in the options to make it worthwhile and putting on these premium selling strategies. So if we take a look at where we're at in soybeans, so we've got two different iron condors on. This is the original one that we put on and as you can see prices moved down here, hasn't breached our break even so we're still holding that and that's in the February cycle, which currently has 28 days to go. So we've got a lot of time, we could either make an adjustment if it keeps moving down or we can, you know, if it moves up, obviously take that off for a profit. So we'll continue to monitor that and what I like to do is once price moves out of the center, if it moves, you know, into a range on the downside or the upside. A lot of times I like, if IV still permits, I like to add on another position to collect more credit and give ourselves a chance to be right. Now, if you look at the profit line, it shows that we're down about $175 on this trade. However, remember, soybean markets are closed. They close at 1.15 or 1.30 and so a lot of times that profit line is going to be inaccurate. So we're right about break even on this trade at this point. So we'll continue to monitor that. Next trade we made was an opening adjusting trade in FXY. So we sold another strangle in FXY. So if we take a look at where we're at, here's the original one that we had on that's still in the January cycle. The January cycle has about 21 days to expiration. So we've got some time there. So what we're doing here is we're really just continuing to let this theta decay, hoping that the price stays in a fairly narrow range. If we get any kind of a contraction in IV, I'll most likely take this off next week. So with the adjustment, it shows we're down a little over $300 on this trade, but that's not taking into account the adjusted role that we already did. So we're almost break even on this trade here. And then in the alerts, the trade that I just added on was another strangle. So again, we collect more credit, widen out our break evens, give ourselves a chance to make some more money on FXY. Next trade we looked at was a closing trade in TLT. So this was an iron condor that we had on TLT. So we close that out for a nice profit. If we take a look at TLT at the charts, you can see IVs, we got that contraction here, which allowed us to take that off for a nice profit. IV is creeping back up currently at 67. And so we also have this other iron condor on that we'll continue to monitor, but not really any profit or loss on that trade at this point. So moving on to the next trade here, sold a straddle in XLF. So if we take a look at XLF, we've got a couple positions on here. So we've got this straddle here where you see prices moved up. And so what we did here is instead of rolling up our put, we simply, because there's so much time left, I simply wanted to get more of a position on in XLF. So I added another XLF straddle, and I did that in the February cycle. So you can see we've got a straddle above price, or we've got a straddle below price. And so we'll continue to monitor and manage that. If we get a move up and implied volatility contracts, we'll take that off for a profit if it declines, we'll take the other one off and then continue to monitor these back and forth. So XLF, if you look at where the IV is currently, still around 47, so not bad. So if we get a contraction there, we'll hopefully look to manage one or both of those for a profit. Bought an iron condor back, a closing trade in SPY. So we closed that out for a nice profit. SPY, we don't have a current position on because IV was so low. We took those off when implied volatility contracted, took those off for a nice profit. With the last few days having this down move in the overall market, implied volatility is spiking back up. So if we can get a couple more down days next week, we can get even more of a spike in implied volatility, that'll be a great opportunity to put on new positions. And hopefully we can take advantage of that next week, assuming implied volatility stays high for us. So we'll wait to see what happens there. GDX, we closed out our GDX strangle for a nice profit. This was a really cool trade, which I'll probably do a video specifically on this as an anatomy of this whole trade as we walk through it. But this is one where we entered our original strangle back on 11-8. So November 8, we had to make three different adjustments. We rolled the calls, we rolled to the next month, we added another position. We took that off for profit all together. We made a really nice profit in GDX all together. So if we take a look at GDX, back on 11-8 right here is where we put on our original trade. And then implied volatility went down, but then it spiked back up. We had a big move down. We had to roll down our calls, we ended up putting on another, we ended up rolling out to the next expiration cycle somewhere around here. And then when implied volatility spiked up again, we put on another position. It contracted right away, took that off for a profit, and then you see price move back up. And on this day we took off everything for a really nice profit. And now implied volatility has since spiked back up, and if it gets over 50, we will look to put on another GDX position potentially next week. So stay tuned for that. FXC, we bought a strangle. We had this on for 15 days. IV basically didn't contract too much, but as time passed over 15 days, we were able to take that off for about a 30% of max profit in FXC. So if you take a look at what is going on in FXC, implied volatility is kind of staying high. There's a lot of uncertainty in the currencies right now, giving us good opportunity to put trades on. And so we took that one off, that we took one of the strangles off for a nice profit, and we added on just today a butterfly. Now my course is not available yet on butterflies. So I'm hoping to finalize things and get it completed here in the next couple months. And so you'll have a better idea about how to do this. But essentially look at this, I mean if you look at the graph, essentially what that mirrors is if you put on an iron condor where the short strikes are at the exact same strike, that kind of looks exactly like what a butterfly is from the visual graph perspective. So it's defined risk. The most we can lose on this trade is $465, and that's if you're doing three contracts, but we collect a large credit. So our break evens, our range is more narrow than a typical iron condor or strangle, but we collect a lot more credit. So we got a lot more profit potential, and we look to manage these quicker. So the other way you can look at this is it's a straddle with defined risk. So we like to put these on, remember strangles and iron condors, we want to put those on when IV is over 50. With these we can a lot of times we'll do a more narrow range like a butterfly or a straddle when implied volatility is over 70. So you can see implied volatility percentiles at 79 right now. So that's why it's set up well for a butterfly, and that's why I chose this over an iron condor or a strangle. You could have done either one. It's always good to mix up your strategies, and so in this case it's set up well for a butterfly, and that's why we chose to put that trade on for this trade. So continue to monitor that, hopefully if price stays in a narrow range and we get a contraction in IV we'll take that off for a profit. So we'll continue to send out alerts on monitoring FXE. GLD, closing trade, we bought back an iron condor, IV was at 25 at that point when we bought it back, if we look at GLD. So we had two iron condors on, and we took this one off that was over here, it was more on this side, more closer to this side as far as the range goes. So we took that one off for a nice profit, and we still have this other GLD on, if we get a nice move down we'll take this one off for a profit. If implied volatility kind of gets above 30 or 40 or obviously higher, we'll look to put another iron condor on to kind of widen out that range and get it a little bit more centered, but for now we're just going to leave this one on and continue to monitor that. Next trade was a opening trade in IWM, so IV percentile got to around 48, and that was yesterday that we put that trade on on Thursday, so 48 close to 50, so we went ahead and put on that iron condor in IWM. You can see we're just a little bit in the profit here, still very centered on our graph, nothing to do but wait on IWM, and like I said, if these other indices like SPY and the Q's and IWM, if they continue to fall, that's going to push IV up, giving us more opportunity to put more trades on, so we'll so stay tuned for that next week. Yesterday, Thursday again, we bought back a strangle in Natty Gas for a nice profit, so we were still holding another natural gas position on, so actually let me go to... so this is our previous iron condor. You can see this was an adjusted strangle, and you can see price has been moving down the last couple days, so we're at a nice profit of over $600 on this trade. I'd like to see a little bit more of a move down and take this off for a good size profit, but if it doesn't, we'll continue to monitor and manage that one, so that one's got 21 days left to expiration, excuse me, 27 days left to expiration, so still a lot of time left. In conjunction with that, we put on another strangle in Natty Gas in the March cycle, which has 55 days to expiration. Remember, we always want to put these on between 30 and 60 days, that's the sweet spot where you get your best bang for your buck, so if we look at our... the new strangle that we put on on Thursday, you can see we just put this on, got a little bit of profit, but we'll continue to monitor and manage that. I already mentioned the butterfly in FXE. I already mentioned the new strangle we just sold Thursday in Natty Gas, and then the last trade, which we did today on Friday, was we bought back, we closed out our straddle that we had in SLV, so let's take a look at SLV, and we have no position on there, you can see we put this on 15 days ago, and we had a nice contraction in the last few days in IV, gave us a nice chance to take that off for about a 25% profit, which is what we want to manage those straddles at. So great trade, so let's look at some of these other trades that we've got on. We've got XRT, which is the retail ETF, you can see that's a strangle, still pretty centered in a little bit of profit there, we'll continue to wait and monitor that. Take a look at XLU, we've got... we've still got this adjusted strangle, it's just been hanging out here, up kind of near our breakeven point to the upside, you know, we're in a position where we're either going to need to roll up our put to collect more credit or look to potentially, you know, with this trade next week, it's got 21 days to expiration, the next cycle's got 49, so next week if it continues to hang around that same spot, we'll probably just roll it all out to the February cycle, collect more credit, widen our breakevens, give us more time to be right on that trade. We could theoretically, the other option would be to just take this off. We're, you know, with the adjustments, with the rolls and the additional credit we've collected, we're in the profit, shows at about $18, but with the other roll, we're up, you know, over a hundred bucks on the trade, so we could theoretically just take it off if we want it. It depends really on what's going on with XLU as far as implied volatility goes. You know, at 47, you know, that's still a decent range to keep that position on. If implied volatility was really low, like under 20, I would simply just take off the trade because it's not worth keeping on because the risk of implied volatility spiking and hurting our position isn't worth the risk, but in this case, it's still a decent range, still some decent premium in there. If we get a contraction and a move down, we'll take that off for a nice profit. XLF, we already went over that one, TLT, went over SPY, SPX. This is a trade that we've had this calendar on for some time now. Remember, we originally put on the 2205 and price came out and breached our break even, so we added on another calendar, like I teach in my course, as the adjustment. So now we've got this double calendar on. SPX has since moved down. It's extremely centered, but we want more profit. We're up about $175 on the trade, but we want to continue to let that theta decay, and this spike that we're seeing in implied volatility is helping our position. So remember, we put this calendar on when implied volatility is low, we want to apply the volatility of spike, and that benefits a calendar position. So it's just not enough profit to take off yet, so we'll give that some more time and potentially take that off next week. Same exact thing in the cues. So we've got this calendar here. Coming close to our break even, if it gets to our break even and we're at a break even on our profit or profitable, I'll most likely just take that off. Because implied volatility has spiked so much, don't necessarily want to put on another calendar. I like to put on the calendars when implied volatility is low. If it's way up here, I'm not probably going to look to put on another calendar. I'll just take this off for a small profit. So we'll continue to send out alerts and monitor that next week. Lulu. Lulu Lemon, we've got this iron condor on. Remember, Lulu is not on my iron condor watch list. However, because of the activity going on in Lulu right now and implied volatility staying high, even after earnings, implied volatility only dropped into the 60 level. Right now it's currently at 66. So good trading vehicle. The spreads are extremely tight. So if you look at the at the money spreads, you know, we're at 3 cents, which is very tight and there's a lot of open interest, a lot of volume. So it's been a great trading vehicle. I'm not going to put it on my watch list because sometimes these stocks come in and out of favor and I only want stocks on my watch list that are that always have that liquidity, always have that volume. But from time to time, these stocks will come into play. And so that's that's why we are trading Lulu. Goldman Sachs, if we take a look at Goldman, we've got this iron condor on, we've had had on we've had on for a couple of weeks now. implied volatility has contracted a little bit, what did contract and then it's it's crept back up, but price has kind of stayed in a steady range after this huge move up in the financials. And so we're just continuing to let that decay. If we get a little bit of a move down and some more decay, we'll take that off for a nice profit. Let's see what else do we have? No, no, no position in EWW, no position in bonds, we went over. Oh, the last one would be oil. So for slash CL. This position has been a little bit of a pain. We've we've adjusted this twice. But oil continue to make, you know, really big move up. So we've rolled our puts up twice. implied volatility is so low. So that's why I'm hesitant to put on another strangle to why not our break evens here. Right now, we're just can we're already inverted. So we've got 21 days left, excuse me, 18 days left in oil in this position. So we'll wait for either a down move in oil to get out. Or if we don't get that sometime next week, we will look to roll that from the February to the March cycle, collect more credit, widen our break evens and give ourselves more time to be right. So I hope that was helpful. Everybody have a great weekend. Look forward to the new year. Great trading next year. And if you have any questions, please leave them in the members forum right here. I've created this forum to help try to create some synergy so that I can answer your questions. Other members might be able to jump in and help answer any questions you have as well. So happy trading. We'll talk to you next week.