 We're going to get started. If you want to chat or ask a question, you have to go down to the chat box. You go down to two individual users, choose my name, and you can type. Does everyone know how to do that? I'm going to put another high in here. Bob knows how to do it. So if we are going along and you have a question, you will write it in the room. Debra knows how to do it. OK, great. Welcome, everyone. Today's topic is, for those of you who don't know, my name is Melissa Armell. And I am a stock swish. And today's topic is going to be about options. And specifically how you can focus really just on trading options and nothing else if you don't want to. So I happen to do options and day trades. So if you want to earn a living doing options or make money part-time doing options and just focus on that, you can. Now, what would be the benefits of that, or why would you just focus on options, for example? Well, for example, if you do not have the 25,000 necessary for a margin account, you can trade options with a cash account and you can open up an options account with as little as $2,000. So if you don't have the over 25K to trade on margin, you may want to just focus on options. Another reason why you might want to focus on options is if you have an retirement account. So say you have a retirement account. You are not allowed to trade a retirement account on margin. You can, however, buy calls and sell them in your options account. And you can buy puts and then sell them in an options account. So for those of you that don't know what a call is, a call is a long, basically, in an option. A put is a short. Now, for those of you that don't know what I do, I mostly focus on shorting. But I do go long sometimes. And I will go long in options or do calls. But I mostly focus on the downside. So we're mostly doing puts. Although, again, I will do calls. And again, any questions I saw some people come in late, you can write it at the bottom of the chat. You have to choose my name and then type in a question. Now, if you also don't know what I do, besides the fact that I focus on shorting, because I am very focused on what I do every day, trying to find the best pick, I'm focused on the gap. So what do I mean? I'm looking every day for a gap. And I developed a system that ranks the gap to determine if that particular gap in the stock of the market will follow through in the direction of the gap. So I developed a system where I will rate the gap. That is how I make the picks and the choices that I use to trade, that even the options. So again, if you want to come trade options with me, every single solitary trade that I call and everyone that you would get will be based on a gap. Now, let's go to, hey, Derek. I see Derek there. Deborah's asking about today. No, I did not do any video or AMD today. We can look at those charts. We can look at those charts. I watched AMD, but I didn't do it. We ended up doing today GIS as a day trade. And I didn't do any new options today, actually. I already have trades on. We did things earlier in the week. But here's an example. Does everybody see this? This is CCL. Can everyone see this as a daily chart of CCL? So first of all, let's just go over some very basics. What is a gap? A gap is a difference between the close and the open. CCL closed at 1580, 623. 623 was Friday. Monday was 626 and a gap down. Open at 1498. So this gap down. So we did a put, a put in CCL. So the high of the day was 1504. The low was 1390. And we bought the put and sold the put because it went to the target. The target was 14, fell, went to the target at 14, broke, went to 1390. We got in, got out. This was actually pretty cheap. But again, this is an inexpensive stock. We only do options with volume. Now, this is a good example just to show you, and I'm going to show you a few others here today, how you could focus on just doing options, even if you don't want to do any day trades. And trade and make money doing options each day. You get in, get out. Take it, get in, get out. Again, people, I think misunderstand options and they're looking for things that they don't always get and then they tend to lose an options or they don't do what I do, which is momentum trading. The whole point of momentum trading, and again, we do calls and we do puts. But momentum trading means you take the trade before the momentum comes in, then you get the momentum, then you're up, then you get out. This is not buy and hold forever or take a put and hold forever or whatever. I'm doing the weekly options. So essentially, even though options trades aren't on margin, you're almost pretty much sort of day trading them because you're basically holding them for a very short period of time. Now, you can hold trades overnight, and we're going to talk about some of those too. But some will go to the target the first day, the day that I call it, and CCL was one of these. So we got in, get out, boom, done. And again, why would you get out? You were up, we're looking for 50% to 100% in every single trade, and it went to the target. So on the options newsletter, if you decide to join it, I'll hold on a minute, my phone is gonna keep beeping. Let me just put it on the hook, hang on one second. Sorry, that was gonna keep beeping. If you decide to join the options newsletter, I give the targets in the letter, so you won't know where to get out, or you manage yourself based on your percentage of profit that you're looking to get in every trade. Now, for me, I do a combination of both. So I am looking for the target, and I am also looking for a certain ROI. In other words, I'm not gonna get out of a trade if I'm only up 10% or 15% or 20%, unless it's the very, very, very last day of the expiration of the option, and I have to get out of it. And I'm up 20%, I'm not gonna not get out of it, you know. So before I go to the next one I wanted to talk about, I will look at AMD, because I did look at that this morning, but then I never did anything with it. I'm not sure if it did anything, but I will look. No, I didn't do AMD, and that was a good decision here because Debra, was it you that was asking about AMD? There's nothing to do with AMD. So this was actually down this morning, and it was a nice gap this morning. It reversed. It ended up gapping down. It's still gapped down, but it's rallying with the market here today. So there's no play in this. You wouldn't short it, and if you went short it, you lost. You wouldn't go long. Why? Because it gapped down. So if you went long, obviously you made money, but this was not a good trade in my opinion. If you wanted to go long today, you would have looked for something strong in a bullish gap up, of which there was things to do today like that. So this is rallying today, but it's only rallying because the market's rallying. So if you went long this Debra, I would be out. This is not a trade that I would hold. And I don't think this was a good trade. And we actually looked at doing this to the downside today. Why? It was gapping down this morning. Okay. Actually, I'll show you where it was when I got up early and rolled out of bed. Here. So very early this morning, this was down at 105 and change. This is actually 4 a.m. 4 a.m. here. So I did look at it early this morning, but I didn't do it. It still ended up gapping down, but it did not gap down at 105, but it lifted on a gap down with the market. But that was something I was watching this morning early to short. We didn't do it then because it flipped. Now, gap fills is not something that I do. Why? Because it doesn't have a high win ratio of working. So while sometimes they work, sometimes anything works. Sometimes you can short a stock at new highs or go long something that's crap, but that doesn't have a high probability of working. So again, how to make money in the market. Everybody makes money some days. Traders that lose money year over year over year make money some days. That's what keeps them going. In order to make this worth your time and worthwhile to do it, so you're not wasting your time and wasting your bullets or your cash, you need to make money in more trades than you lose. And on top of that, you have to have some big winners. You have to have some big winners. What would be a big winner? I mean, again, we just got done talking about CCO. CCO, I didn't consider a big winner, but it certainly was a nice winner. It was a good winner, it was solid. What do I think was a big winner this week? Tesla. So I called a couple of puts in Tesla back since last week, actually, and they went. So again, while you can train options as if you're doing day trades, where you're in and out of the same day, you can also hold them overnight. Now, why would you do that if it didn't go yet? If the momentum didn't come into it yet? If you were down in the trade, okay, and you stole plenty of time left in it, you have a week left or no, you wouldn't kill it, okay? So there are many times where I'm in a trade that goes in my favor overnight and then I ended up being up a lot because I was down in the trade. I was already in it, took it, did it, wanted it to go, didn't go yet, but still have plenty of time left in it. And again, I'm always doing the weeklies, okay? Now, as far as Tesla, again, I'm going back to last week. So I called one, two, three. I called three trades in Tesla. I called the 250 puts, the 245 puts, and the 240 puts. And this is how it's set up. So on 622, I called the first trade. I called the 250 puts. It gapped down, reversed. If you took the trade, you were down into the close, boom. Gapped down here the next day, fell, started to go, boom. This is Monday the 26th, fell. I called the 245s here, they won here, and I called a third trade here, which was the 240s, which it almost got to, 240, 70. So that was a nice setup. And again, we ended up doing different strikes and getting different points in it, but it went to all these numbers. It took a series of three days. How did it make it down? It made it down from the gaps, okay? So again, I'll hold something overnight. Now again, if you're taking a trading, you're in an option and you have the cash account, you should be fine with holding the trade overnight, as long as you're okay with your risk. You should be fine holding it overnight, whether you're up a little, flat, or down, if your risk is okay. So this is again, something that's very important that people need to know. When you're trading options, again, not only do you have to have more winners and losers, you have to have your trades, all of your trades, if you do 10 trades a week, five trades a week, whatever, have to have the same risk or close to the same risk in every trade, otherwise you're also not gonna be consistent to even analyze your results to know what you're gonna do, to say, oh, I'm doing well or I could make these adjustments or I'm doing really great. You have to look at each trade to compare apples to apples. If your risk is $1,000 a train, then that's it or has to be close to that. Or if it's 500 or if it's 2,000 or whatever. This is not an exact science, but you can say I'm gonna take one contract of every trade. One contract in CCL, in those CCL puts, did not cost the same as one contract, for example, in Tesla. So you can always do the same contracts. One contract equals 100 shares. You have to say, oh, I'm gonna spend $1,500 per trade. Okay, then some of the ones that are on the lower cost position side are a little bit more inexpensive like CCL, compared to something like Tesla, you can load up. You can do more. You can do more. And everything we're doing, by the way, has volume. We're never ever taking options in any stock or at all without it having volume. And that's the same thing with my day trades. And I just think that's a good rule of thumb for whatever kind of trading you're doing, no matter what anyways. But anyways, this, while it looks strange, which actually one of the most profitable trades of the week, because the fact is that it followed through in again, down, boom, and fell. And again, this was a nice fat red bar on the 26th. Okay, now I'm gonna go look, since Deborah wanted me to look at NVIDIA, I will look at that quickly. And while I'm doing this, let me know if anybody has any questions. This again, Deborah, I would not have done for the same reason, I would not have done AMD. It gapped down. It just happens to be rallying with the market. Also, NVIDIA is a very expensive to trade. In order to make any money, any real money in NVIDIA, it's gotta go. It's gotta go like the dickens. It's gotta pop. We did NVIDIA, actually we did calls in NVIDIA back here. So, I mean, it's gotta make a move. This here was a good move, why? It gapped up. This here gapped down, so I would not do a call in it. I wouldn't go long in it. This is a strong stock, I will say that. But the only reason this is rallying today is because of the market. And as soon as the market gives it up, this will be done. I'm not even sure there's any risk to rewarding this here today because this is not a big bar for NVIDIA and it is expensive to train. Also, Mew has earnings out tonight. If Mew collapses, so will this. So, I don't know what you're doing with this right now, Deborah. I don't think this is a good trade either. Not that this isn't strong, not that you might not want to do a call eventually in this, but not at this juncture and not going into Mew earnings. Okay, any questions before I get to the next thing? Any questions about anything I said so far? You traded NVIDL once the market opened and traded at levels and leveraged NVIDIA? Okay. That sounds difficult. Again, some days I get up and I don't do anything at all. Some days I have a good gap and I do it and we're done. It's try to make trading as easy as you can for yourself. I mean, you could try to find something on any day to go long or short, weak or strong, calls or puts or whatever you want if you've got the market direction right. Why? Because most given days things will go with the market. So the market rally today, you could have gone long virtually almost anything and made money. It doesn't mean that that's a good trade and how many days does the market run for two hours or three hours up from the open? Rare, rare. So we did not do a put in this today, but I will show you the day trade we did in here today. I didn't do a put in it. I actually didn't even look at what this cost, but if you were in the trading room with me and you wanted to do a put, if they offer puts in general mills, this is GIS, I don't know if they do. I've never done a put in this, but you could have done a put instead of the day trade. Again, sometimes I'll look at something and say I want to get in and out as a day trade and I don't want to do a put, but sometimes I do both. Whatever I do though, I'm trying to make it as easy as possible for myself to make money. If I think it's going to be difficult, then the answer is always no, meaning don't trade, don't do anything, okay? And so I think a lot of people right now have 100% conviction this market's higher. Why? We were rallying today. We rallied yesterday. And whether this continues or not, I wrote this in the email yesterday. I don't have 100% conviction that that's the case, but we shall see. But either way, anything you choose to do, be very careful, because if you get the market wrong or you need the market for your trade, you're gonna have a tough time making money. Now, I'll just quickly show you what we did in this today. We shorted it, got in, got out, boom. Again, you could have done an option in this if there are even options in this and everyone looked up to see what they cost or the volume. But I didn't do one in that today. But you could have done options in other things today. Again, you would have looked, if you were gonna go long to buy something strong, you would have bought a call and in something weak, you would have bought a put. But if you're really someone that just doesn't want a day trade, you don't want to open a margin account or you don't have the money to open a margin account. Or the only cash that you have is the cash in your retirement account. And like I said earlier, you could not trade on margin with that. Then you must focus on options, particularly if it's your retirement account, you want to make sure that you're finding quality, quality, quality trades. If it's your retirement account, you don't want to lose. It's not like a regular trading account where you're like, oh, I can refund it. No, you can't. If you lose money in your retirement account, you can't stick any more in. That's it, you lost money in your retirement account. And until the next time when you are able to do a contribution is the next time that you will be able to put more money in. It is not like a regular trading account. And you must be very, very careful trading a retirement account. I personally do not, I'm not trading my retirement account. I'm sitting in cash waiting for this market. I'm not long this market. And again, if you pushed me up against the wall and I was on Fox News Live and I had to answer the question, I'd say we're lower. I think we're lower. And I don't think we make a new high this year. And we're very close to doing that. So what is, there's six months left in the year. Either we're gonna make a brand new well-timed high this year in the market, or we're lower because there's six more months left in the year. And that is a long time, a long time. So we will make new highs if we keep going. We got plenty of time left to do it. I don't see it that way. And again, I put my money where my mouth is. I haven't gone on my retirement account because I don't wanna lose. I'm still young enough that, the market could come back even if we fall. But I know, particularly because I'm a trader that I would be extremely bothered if I bought positions in stocks or the market and we fell off watching my account turn upside down. And you know, that happened to a lot of people at the beginning of COVID in 2020 when the market had that massive sell-off. Of course the markets recovered since then, but it was very upsetting for people to look at their 401K statements in their IRA and see all the profits that they have been up from 2019 in the rally, you know, disappear in that sell-off. I was gonna say something else and I forgot what I was gonna say. Any questions, any questions so far? Now, one of the benefits of, oh, we were gonna talk about VA, one of the other benefits of doing options is taking a train, you can only lose what you have at risk. So basically, when you're taking a train, if you do risk $1,000 and the trade goes completely 100% against you, the only thing you're gonna lose is what? $1,000. So I don't use stops in my options. Basically the risk is a stop. So it's like the insurance. The stop is like the insurance, you can't lose any more than you risk. So in that sense, doing options is much more safe, for example, than doing swing trades where you are on margin, two to one margin if you're doing swing trades overnight. Of course in a swing trade, you don't have a set timeframe, but again, the benefit of options is a fixed risk that you have on, which is no more than you have the position total of cost. Actually, let me go back to the market here really quickly. So anyways, we rallied today. It is 12, 30 in the afternoon, no more data out the rest of the day. The next data that we'll be reporting will be Thursday morning. We have the unemployment claims every Thursday. So talking about risk and how options work. Well, one of the things that's nice about options is volatility because if you're trading on the right side and momentum comes in and it's volatile, if you've ever traded options, again, if you haven't, you don't know, but if you've ever traded options, the options chain will go like woo, it'll go up. For example, and I'm just talking out loud here and making this up to make a point of what I'm trying to say as an example, let's say we got three and a half hours left in the day. I mean, actually, let me blow this up. Let's say this guy here, this is a spy, which by the way, did get down today, okay? Spy closed yesterday at 436.17, open in the morning today, 435.05. Let's say this completely, 100% reverses today. Goes red between now and four o'clock. Could that happen? Yes, it could. There's enough time left in the day we could reverse. So again, what would that mean? We'd have to go under the low, 434.41, and we are currently trading at 436, that's about $2. So if we go $2 down, it's gonna, the options chain inputs, if you wanted to buy a put in the spy would go woo, and it would start to go in your favor. If you took it for example here, if you bought a put here, and I'm just making this up, I didn't send this trade out right now, but I'm making this up. If you bought a 435 put, for example, and then we flip, woo, and we go green to red, fall all the way down into the close. That would create volatility, panic, anxiety, and then again, volatility and the options change, which would be in your favor if in fact you were short, if that scenario would set up, okay? Now if you wanted to go long today, which I would not and I did not, okay? You would have to believe that the market was higher that was gonna continue rally if you bought a call. If you said I don't think it's lower, Melissa, I'm not buying into that, okay? Again, Debra went long today. If you truly believe that the market was higher and had 100% conviction that it was, you would not buy puts, you would buy calls. Now I wouldn't do that, why? Because the market gap down today. Even if I wanted to go long the market, I wouldn't do it today. I would wait. But if you thought it was higher and you wanted to buy a call and you thought the volatility was gonna come into the upside, how would that set up? How would that set up, okay? Because at the end of the day, you'd have to believe, again, you have to get the price up when you're buying and a call is buying. She'd have to say, okay, well if I'm gonna, I would buy and again, you can buy many, many, many, many, many different strikes in the market. So okay, well I'm gonna buy the 437 calls in the spot. Well in order to make money, it's gotta run up through 47 and go pooh! Just like a putt would, but to the downside, this would be the upside, this would be the reverse. You'd have to get a move. Not just a little rinky dinker up to the high, you want profit, you want volatility. So what would volatility look like to the upside if it would do that? Which I don't think it's going to today between now and four, but if it would, it would have to run up to like 440, 439-ish. Then the options chain would go whew! Like again, if you've never traded options, you don't know what I mean, but if you have and you've watched options chains when a trade is running in your favor. And when I say running, I mean running where the options is priced of what you're in is running in your favor up. Okay, I don't, that the second scenario is the least likely scenario between now and four o'clock. So we either, boom, we close right like this, or we do scenario one or two, and if we close right like this, we'll be no volatility to play in either direction in the market today at all, and the market will just sit here and wait until tomorrow. Which is a possibility, it is the summer, it is going into a holiday week, some people are leaving now, July 4th is in less than a week. July 4th is Tuesday, today is Wednesday, some people are taking a week off, this is their last day of work for a week, going on vacation. So the market may just close looking like this, but falling would be the better play here if we would want volatility in a trade. It hasn't set up that way yet, it could, it might, but I'm letting you know that would be the better play because the play to the upside like I'm saying has very low probability, does that make sense? So when you're trading an option, I'm gonna go over now to talk about BA, when you're trading an option, volatility is your friend. If you get it in the right direction, if it moves against you, then you have the insurance, which the insurance is your risk, you can't lose more than you have at risk, again, which is unlike swing trades or even unlike day trades. Even if I do a day trade and I put a stop in, I could get blown through the stop. I put the stop in to make sure that I get out and I do get filled 99% of the time, but again, there's no guarantees. You are guaranteed that you cannot lose more than you have on in the trade at risk when you take an option, that's for sure. So that is again, important, but volatility in your favor is what you want. And one of the reasons I prefer to short is that I like the volatility to the downside more, again, doing puts and options, which is a short because of the fact that panic comes in very, very quickly in a stock or the market when something sells off and falls and that creates a big move fast. Fast is good. Actually, before I talk about this, let's look at this. I just want to look at that for a second. Okay, so let's look at BA. Can everybody see BA? This is a daily chart of BA. So we were talking about, oh, somebody has a question here. Melissa, could that momentum with a gap work anytime during the day? Well, first of all, you're not doing any gap anywhere. Let me make that clear. Again, if you sign up for my newsletter for the options newsletter standalone product, you're getting the newsletters, I'm reading the gaps for you. If you do my class, you will learn how to rate the gaps. You cannot short or buy a put in every gap down and you cannot go long or buy a call in every gap up. But if you're asking me the timing, the timing of this setup, which is I think of what you're asking me, Derek, the timing is I'm looking for him shooting within the time that I call the trade. So for example, because it's a shortened week with the holiday, if I did call a trade right now at 1230 in the afternoon, I would call a July 7th expiration. That means I'm looking for the momentum, Derek, to happen any time between now and July 7th. So you're asking me, could it happen any time in the afternoon? Sure, it can happen any time between now and July 7th. Does that make sense? So again, this is, we're looking for the momentum in an ideal world. It happens right away. Boom! Just like happen with CCO. Take the trade, go to the target, bang, bang, boom and out. I don't even have to worry about the expiration date that went, it was done. Now, Tesla was a different example because the Tesla trades that I called last week were expired this week on Friday. But again, I got out of those when that had the momentum took a day or two or three. So you're asking me if it could happen at 10 o'clock in the morning or three o'clock in the afternoon. Sure, it could happen in any time during the day in the time that I call the trade. Does that make sense? Now, I don't know if you're asking about that because I was talking about the spy. But if you're saying, like I gave you a scenario. I have no idea if that scenario hits. But I did say that that could hit. So if you're like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. This gap down today, yeah. Did I call any new trades in the market today? No. Why? This gap today didn't rate 20 points or more per my system. So I didn't do a spy short here today. But could this do exactly the way that I gave you that scenario? Yes, it could. Yes, it could. And I'm already in some things short and they will start to go then if that occurs between now and four o'clock or they can go tomorrow morning. So again, I didn't enter a new spy put here today. But you could be in one already. Again, part of trading right now, and this is just where 2023 is. I think where the market is. I think where trading is right now is you have to be patient sometimes to get something to go big. Like you could scalp something. That's what Deborah was talking about earlier. Deborah basically scalped two trades today that were long. So they worked with the market as I call them scouts. What I'm looking to do an option, I'm really not looking to scalp it. I'm looking for the momentum. That could happen on the live day or it could happen in a following day after I've already been in the trade in a consecutive gap down or consecutive gap up. In an ideal world, every trade goes the day that I call it. Has a big fat red bar if it's a put or a big fat green bar if it's a call. But that's not reality and not every trade sets up that way. And so that's why you have to give it a week or so. Again, like I said, if I called a trade today or did a trade this afternoon, I would give myself a week and a half. Now let's go back to BA. So BA, this is last week. This was the 16th, then we had the Juneteenth holiday market was closed, boom. So this was Friday. Friday the market closed at 219.99, boom. Open in the morning, 218.89. This was Tuesday because the market was closed on Monday. See the size of the bar. It was fat, it was red, it fell. I called a put, it fell to the target, the target was 212. That was the first target anyways. It went there, broke it, boom, done. You could have been in and out here or you could have get out the next day here. Now I just wanna show you though the power of momentum. I did call the 215 puts on this day. I don't remember what time I sent them out. Anyways, I called the 215 puts. They expired on the 23rd. I did not hold this trade to the 23rd. But that trade went almost $13 through the strike if you held it the very last day. That was in a short week. It was a four day week for the market. But that is the power of trading options with momentum with my system in the gap. And again, talking about the topic for today that you could only focus on options and make money, only focus on options and do this for a living, you can't. Because again, you get normal trades like CCO, you're in and out, boom. And then you get a couple of really big winners like this. And then you're putting together basically a paycheck to pay yourself that month. So I did call a couple of trades in this. Now this backed up the last couple of days. It's falling today. So this is falling. I don't know where it goes tomorrow. I'll be watching it, but this was the sell-off. So we did puts. And as funky as it looks, it did it in the gap. So even though the bars look strange after that first day, the stock price was falling. And again, in reference to options, as long as you're getting it lower and lower and lower and lower, if you're gonna put your up money. And the volatility in this case here in BA did come in the first day. And then came in the second day when it got down because it dropped in here and the low of the bar was 209.38. So this is a tail, but it was actually red. It was actually red on the day. 621, we can look at it. That got stuck in the 15 minute. This was red in the morning. That's the 15 minute went and fell. This was the first day we did it. Again, it's a 15 minute. So it's all about the pick. Derek was asking about, it's all about the pick. If the pick is good, it will go within the time of the option. If the pick's not good, or if the market goes against the pick, even if the pick was good, but the market is something that's totally in reverse of the pick, the trade could not work and it could lose and fail. So again, whether it goes that same exact moment that you take it, or it takes a little bit of time, we all like things to go immediately, but that is just not always the case. Now we are reversing, we are doing one of these scenarios that I just talked about right now. How interesting, how interesting. Let me look up and see what's going on. I'm just gonna take this off. I wanna see if something happened here, newsworthy that we're following. And if you have any questions, let me know. I don't see anything. But is it, so we were just talking. We were just talking here. And I laid out a scenario. I laid out this scenario here. And this is playing out. And this is what I'm very good at doing. Hello, you did this 537, 437 call around 10.15. And it went from 19 cents to 42 cents. Okay, you must have done the daily spy calls then if you paid 19 cents, right? That's not out till next week for 19 cents. And then again around 11.27, 17 cents to 13 cents. And then you're gonna put, okay. Ryan just did a short and a long and a short and a long and a short and a long and a short and a long. I don't trade like that Ryan. So yes, you can capture 10 cents, 15 cents, 20 cents. You absolutely had to have done the daily explorations. If you do a daily exploration in the market that something new, they started that earlier this year. Then you have to pretty much scalp every trade. I do not do that. So that again is scalping, which is what I do. I trade momentum. To me, I think it's a heck of a lot easier to look at something, rank the gap, take the trade and let it play out. If you wanna fast trade again, this would have been a bigger move doing this today short rather than being in, out, in, out, in, out, in, out, in, out. But the other thing, Ryan, that I don't do is I'm not going long something and short something the same day. Can anybody guess why? Derek, Daryld, some of you that have been around with me a while, why would I not go long the spy today and short the spy today? Ryan did it, he made money, I'm happy he was profitable but I don't think that was a good idea. Why won't I go long and short something the same day? Joe, you've been around a while. Bob, take a guess, is anybody there? Neil, I think you've been following me for a while even though you haven't signed up yet. Why won't I go long the spy and short the spy in the same day? Or Tesla or BA or anything? Can you think of any possible reason? Daryld says momentum tends to remain in the same direction commitment. Well, Ryan's saying he did make money going long today and he did make money shorting. Again, he did the daily explorations which is why they were so cheap. Because you can't have 100% conviction, momentum flows one way. Well, momentum can go in two directions. We had a big rally yesterday and we sold off the day before. We had a red bar on Monday. We had a green bar Tuesday. The reason that I don't do different positions in different directions in the same stock or the market the same day is because I'm only playing the gap in the direction of the gap if I take a trade. That's number one. And number two is you can have 100% conviction that something's going higher and it's going lower. How do you make money in the market? Well, either you think it's going to fall in which case you short it or buy a put or you think it's going to rally in which case you buy a call or you would go long. So a lot of day traders do what I said earlier is called scalping. They'll take trades back and forth to support a resistance in both directions. You never really get any big profits or any big moves doing that. For example, let's say this does do the scenario I set up a couple of minutes ago and actually I am in a put in the market. I didn't take that put today. I did that before today, a couple of days ago. But the big trade is if the market falls off a planet, it's not scalping it. The big trade is trying to make 100, 200, 300, 400% if the market falls off a planet. So again, trying to get the most bang for your buck is what you want to do with your cash. Scalping, you never end up really having any big trades and you're still going to have losers when you scalp. That's the problem. So if you're scalping and you never have any big winners and you still have losers, how do you ever pull really pull ahead? But getting back to trading something in one direction once a day or twice a day, whatever, more than one train, you can't believe that the market's gonna make new highs and is higher and believe that it's also gonna drop and it's lower in the same day or the same week or the same month. So you just like, again, it's like having the bias. The bias, whatever that bias happens to be in, you can believe that the market's higher. Disagree with me with the bias here. Say Melissa, we're gonna run up to 450 by Friday. That's gonna happen. I'm long. That's fine. I can respect that. But to trade at both sides, this is what a lot of traders do though, but then they never really make any real money. And so that's, you're better off just saying, boom. And that's how I do it. Like I'm all in doing this. CCL is gonna fall and I'm shorting it, boom. Or BA or whatever. You can't believe that something's gonna rally and fall at the same time. You don't know the answer. If you say to yourself, uh-uh-uh, you're 50-50. And 50-50 odds are not good enough odds to take a trade and risk money and I don't care if it's $500 or $5,000. The odds are not good enough if you're 50-50 because there's too many people that are trading and there's too many people that want your money and there's too many people quite frankly that have a lot more money than you and they can wipe out your position very, very quickly. Now the one thing Ryan did is he did play the dailies, the daily expirations, which can be lucrative if you take a trade and get it and get in and out in one day because of the cost of them. They can be very cheap. Again, it's gotta have a move that day, but that is a new thing that they've introduced earlier in the year to allow people to be able to take positions much more cost-effective. I still would prefer to see Ryan do one trade in one direction and believe in it, believe in the trade. Look at how this is doing exactly what I just said. I've been doing this for a long time. That's why people come and learn from me. There you go, it's doing it. This is doing exactly what I just said 15, 20 minutes ago. Darryl, are you in any puts? Darryl's on the newsletter already. Deborah, wow, would it been hard for me to hold a spy put through yesterday? Why? Why? Why? Now, you could have scouted it. If you, I called the trade here. You could have got out with money. But again, that was a scalp. If you want the big move, you wouldn't have got out here. If you held it through here, you were down in the trade, that's true. But what's hard about holding it? You can't lose in one trade. You have to be able to take a risk where you won't let the trade play out. One green bar doesn't mean it's the end of the world. And even if the trade completely loses and goes bust, we'll see. I think my trade's gonna work. But if the trade I took lost, it's one loss. That's it, that's why you can't risk your whole account. You have to be okay with the risk that you're taking. It's not the end of the world if something goes against you. And if you have plenty of time left and you believe in the gap, then you should be okay with that. I don't, we weren't up huge. We were up more than I thought. It didn't make any sense. But if you listened to everything that was going on, if you were watching the news yesterday and you heard everything was going on the news, again, we were down on Monday, I'll just recap. Monday we were down because fears of Russia and Ukraine escalation, and then by Tuesday, everything's fine, everything's great, boop-a-doop-a-do. And then the market rallied and then we had a good couple of reports. We had a few good economic data reports on Tuesday and then the market rallied. It was a one day green bar rally. It wasn't something that should have made you panic out of a trade. Darrell's in it. Well, that's, that's that, well, Darrell, I would be patient here. It's one o'clock. You don't have to make that decision now because Darrell, this could fall all the way down today. We've got three more hours. So I would sit tight, Darrell. But anyways, Deborah brings up a good point. Deborah brings up a perfect point. Again, she said she would have been nervous, nervous about the green bar. But if you have a week left in a trade, you shouldn't be nervous about one green. But either way, don't you understand? That's the whole thing about trading while you have to know what you're doing. Nothing goes straight down all the time. Nothing goes straight up all the time. That's exactly why probably people like Ryan Scalp, they don't, they, they're like, oh, this is gonna get too choppy. Better get out quick, boom. Better reverse it, woo. Because again, you have to believe. You have to believe in your trade. You have to understand what's going on. You still can't take more risk to can afford to lose. You still can't do that. You still have to size yourself accurately. But you have to believe in the trade. This is the exact kind of thing why people get upset about trading the market and then they complain when they lose. And I said, well, why would you complain when you lose? Because you took the trading, you didn't know what you were doing in the first place. If you believe in the gap, which I do when I take a trade, then you follow it through to its natural conclusion, win or lose. But anyways, I was talking to somebody yesterday because I did see, I had a class yesterday and then I looked at the end of the day and I said, oh, that's interesting. Because we did rally more than I thought we would yesterday too. And I said, well, we got to be down today. And then we were, then we were. But I was talking to somebody yesterday and she was like, this is a typical day where this is like a trap for people. Retail traders, because retail traders love to buy dips. So people bought the dip yesterday. Who? Retail traders. I am not following retail traders when I take trades. I am looking for institutional money when I take a trade. So you follow institutional money, you're not gonna get trapped. In my opinion, yesterday you could have gone long as a day trade, could have gotten in and got out, boom. But again, I don't think that was a good setup even yesterday, not after the rally we had for the last month, even if you wanted to go long. There's nothing to tell you that we were gonna continue to go up at this juncture that you would take a trade and go long and do a call, for example, do an option. There's absolutely nothing in this chart that tells you that we're gonna go higher in the next week. Nothing. Now you may say, well, Melissa, okay, but there's nothing here that tells you we're gonna go lower. Well, I disagree with you. But you still couldn't prove to me or convince me there's anything that's gonna show me that we're going higher because there isn't. We're going into a holiday week. We're going into a time where there's tons and tons of stuff going on overseas that could escalate, that could affect the market and will not affect the market in a positive way. And again, the Fed shares talking and people are making statements. And every time he says something, you see volatility in the market. And it's never to the upside. I mean, if you're listening to what he's saying, he's talking about raising rates. Now I don't know if this is just why we reversed here at 1230. I couldn't find anything, but it could be. Anyways, one of the reasons that people lose trading is they don't have 100% conviction in anything that they're doing. And as soon as the second, they take the trade and they're up, they get scared, they kill it and they're up a little bit and they get scared. Or they take the trade, they're up, oh my God, I love it, it's fabulous, it's going. And then it starts to back all the way around and then they kill it. Again, then you should have got out when it dropped in the first place, for example, if you were short. Or people take a trade, they say, I love it, I love it, it's gonna go, it looks great, and then it reverses the next day. This is, again, if you're in an option, if you're in an overnight, and then people kill it, and then you test yourself and say, well, you didn't really believe in the trade in the first place, so why did you do it if you killed it? Again, whether you killed it, if it's down to 50% or 60% or whatever, then you didn't believe in the trade. Or you had too much risk on it in trade. I don't know. That's something that each person has to handle themselves. But a lot of people, again, lose money trading because they're doing too many different things in one stock, up and down, and they really don't understand why they're doing the trade. You cannot go long and support everywhere and expect to make money, just like you can't short resistance everywhere and expect to make money. Why? There's a million resistances and a million supports in stocks. How do you know which one's gonna hold? You don't. You don't. And that's one of the reasons why I played the gap. Because in playing that gap, I feel if it rates 20 points or more for me, I have the odds in my favor that it will continue in the direction of the gap. In an ideal world, it goes the same day that I called it and I will get in and get out. And if I'm up enough, but as far as holding something, because I believe in the trade and believe in what I'm doing, I have no problem holding through a trade that's down. And if you did the put that I called on Monday and you killed it yesterday with a loss, and this trade goes on to work, you'll be kicking yourself in the butt, Deborah. Very good to hear my thought process isn't yes, but mental will definitely make more money, yeah. But you people are pointing out, again, this is the mentality, like this is the, it's your minds. So you see how human nature, human nature is decisions are made based on fear. Again, this just confirms why I like to short because you can tell this within yourself. You're like, oh my God, crap. I'm in this thing, it's reversing against me, crap. And then you get out. Look at this. Daryl, don't you dare kill this trade, Daryl. Daryl's getting antsy even though he did it. Daryl, you can always ask me what I think. Daryl did make the money in BA. That one you did good, didn't you? Daryl did BA, Daryl made money in that. Oh, Tessa. Oh no, you did Tessa? Oh, you did the Tessa made money, okay. You didn't do the BA? Okay. There was something else I wanted to say. No, the BA's from last week. The BA's from last week, Daryl. Last week's BA's. I was just gonna say something. I'm trying to think of what I'm trying to convey what I'm trying to say. It's like, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna use as an example actually, because this just happened. It's hard to believe this was a week ago. It feels like it was a year ago because no one's talking about this on TV anymore. Remember last week with the submarine? The submarine disaster. It was nonstop news for like three, four days. Now nobody remembers it ever happened. But anyways, those people decided to go in that submarine. It was absolutely not safe. I mean, I don't think anyone would say that it was safe. You know? So the people decided to do it. Now, if someone said to you, do you wanna go in that submarine? This is before the disaster. The company actually, I read shut down. It's closed now. They closed, they were there gone. They shut their headquarters last week. But anyways, before that, if somebody said to you, these are the risks, boom, boom, boom and boom, do you want to go in this submarine? Would anyone here have done that knowing the risk even before the accident? Would anyone at all have taken the chance? It's in all seriousness. Like I don't, I couldn't have talked to one person that would have done that. I mean, there was just, there were safety things that they didn't follow. There was just a lot of mistakes that were made there. But people had to sign the waiver and knew the risks. And so you would have had to make a decision to go into that submarine knowing full to well the risks. Would anyone have chosen to do that? This is a serious question. No one's answering me. I mean, no one I know would have, or no one that I've talked to just making conversation. Ivan said no. Deborah said no way. They fired an engineer two years ago for reporting flaws. That's right. That was a red flag. That was a red flag. He was trying to do the right thing and they fired him. But either way, the people didn't know that. They didn't disclose that. However, the people still knew. It was very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very risky. So when you trade, you need to know the risks. There are risks associated with trading. So you're always weighing the pros versus the cons. So in other words, you can't make money if you don't take risk. They couldn't see the Titanic unless they took risk. They could have gone on a different ship. There were other ones that did this, okay? If they really wanted to see the Titanic, they could have taken a better risk and gone on a different thing that had, different sub that had followed the rules, you know? So the reality is you weighed the pros versus the cons and the risks. The other thing, if you wanted to go on the sub, you say, well, do I really, really, really, really, really? Do I wanna see that Titanic today? Like, for me personally, I have no interest in that kind of thing. I could watch a movie and see it, you know? But like, you'd have to say, well, is this worth the payoff, the payoff, if the people had come back safely, was they would have seen the Titanic and they would have, you know, gotten what they paid for. But the reality is that when you take a trade, Ryan's saying bingo, it's about the risk, when you take a trade, you weigh the pros versus the cons, you have to take risk and you have to say, how badly do I want the money? How much do I want the money? And you should always say that you want the money. I mean, every trade you take, you should always have an expectation with yourself that you'll win. But you have to weigh the pros versus the cons for the risk. So you have to put the odds in your favor because there are more bad trades that you could take in any one given day in a six and a half an hour trading day than there are good trades. There are more bad setups in stocks and the market on any given day than there are. That's why most traders lose. So you have to put the odds in your favor looking for calculated risk, high odds trades, high odds it's gonna go, high odds it could have a big move, high odds it's gonna work in your favor. That may not happen in the timing that you want it to happen as fast as you want it to. Like Deborah's saying she would have been upset and freaked out if she was gonna put a Monday and it ran up on Tuesday, but the trade is time to go. So yes, the trade may work, but it may not work exactly when Deborah wants it to work because that's life and that's the market. And that's the trickiness in the market that sucks people in because everybody when push comes to shove say that they want the money but do they really want the money? Because if they really want the money they'll put the needle to the grindstone and they'll do the work to understand what's happening to price, what's happening to chart and to learn a system or strategy that actually will show you where the price is gonna take you and for me that's the gap, but at the end of the day you have to believe in it because if you don't believe in it then that is not a good trade for you to take that has the high probability that you want and you have to take the risk to make the money anyway. So if you have to take risk and you know you have to take risk take the best risk possible. Again, getting back to the submarine nobody needs to go down to see that Titanic ever more ever again from now until the end of time. That is not a need. That is a want and a desire. Now people need money and they need cash and they want to trade for a living and that is something that they desire to do because they may not like what they do for a living and they may just want extra money and they don't have enough money coming in for the job right now with inflation. But you know again trading is still a desire of something you wanna do but you need to understand what you're doing when you take risk and you need to take trades that have high odds of working and you need to believe that something's gonna go in the direction that you take it and again if you think something's higher and lower then that's not believing, that's 50-50. But you know, you can't get away from the risk factor. You can't get away from that. So you have to take trades that are quality trades that put the odds in your favor and the trickiness of the market is exactly what Deborah pointed out. You're in a trade, you love it, love it, love it. You go to bed at night. That trade was looking good, sitting pretty at four o'clock and we were down actually a little bit Monday night and then we flipped on Tuesday and if that makes you panic then you don't understand the gap, didn't believe in it or had too much risk on. But that's exactly what people get frustrated with the market as traders because that type of chop happens and it happens more than it doesn't and people get sucked in and then they kill a trade with a loss and then it goes on to work. I'm sure that's happened to you if you're trading. You're like, oh crap, I knew that was gonna work. Why did I kill it? Well, you shouldn't have killed it, you know? Your thoughts are now in a new bullish market so you can see quick short covering rally and so you scout. Well, here's, I'm just gonna say one more thing and then I'll let everybody go unless anybody has any other questions. I'll make a comment and Deborah's comment about the market. Anybody else wanna ask any questions before I make a comment on Deborah's market comment? It's only 1.15 or 1.12. You have two hours and 45 minutes left in the day so you just gotta play it out. Anyways, Deborah's commenting about the market. Again, we're close to new hives. So let's go back. Beginning of 2022. I'm just looking at the spy right now. High was 479.98. 479, all right, let's be exact. 479 minus we're trading out at 435 so that's $44. So $44, we could go $44 a month in the spy and we could make a new high if we wanted to. So we are closer to making a new high now than we've been at any point in time in the last, you know, 18 months. So again, that is one scenario that could set up. Why? Because we're very close to doing it. If we're gonna do it, and I said this earlier, then we're just gonna do it. We're not gonna mess around here. We're gonna do it and we're gonna go, okay? What's another scenario that could set up, Deborah? What's scenario two? We talked about scenario one and two for today. Let's talk about long term the next six months, scenario one and two. So scenario one is we go out, we make new highs, it happens during earnings season in July of August. Market goes up, flies, goes to 500 in the spy. What's scenario two? Scenario two is, even though Deborah's saying, oh my God, we're in a bullish market, I have to go long every day, scenario two is we don't continue higher and then what? Then what happens, Deborah? We break down and then what? I mean, again, you could list the fundamental reasons why you think we're higher or you could list the fundamental reasons why we're lower. You could make an argument either way. I'm on Newsmax on Friday. I don't know what my topic is yet. But if it's economy or something, you could say, well, if they said to you your topic, you're on Newsmax Friday with me. You say, well, your topic is I want you to go on and I want you to take the side of convincing me why the market's higher. And then you have to make a list. What would be the reasons that you think the market's higher, that the recession fears are over, everything's fine, we're having good economic numbers, employment is tight, you could make the list, you could make the case, you could talk against me on Newsmax, I could take one side, you could take another. That's how it works. But again, we're not making trading decisions based on that because absolutely no one knows what the earnings are gonna be for companies out in July or August. Actually, no one really knows for sure if we're gonna go into recession at the end of 2023, 2024. While the Fed may like to think and talk like they know that they're gonna get inflation down to, before they said 2%, now they're saying 3%, before they said a year, then they're saying two years, now they're saying 2025, they don't know, they don't know either, okay? So what we do know, and we can all agree on, and nobody can argue otherwise, is that currently right now, the spy is trading roughly around 435 and change. That's what we know. And we also know the last time the stock market made a brand new Altam high in the spy was the beginning of 2022, which was a long time ago, it was 18 months ago. We also can all agree like Debra was saying that we're not far off the highs now. We're really not. So yeah, we could do it. And you know what, if we're gonna do it, then we're just gonna do it. Boom, that's it, done, we do it. But if we don't do it, again, what's gonna happen? People are gonna get frustrated, people are gonna lose money, people are gonna be upset, people are gonna get, they sucked us all in long and now it's lower, I knew it was, and this is what people get upset. They're in long positions, they're in calls, they're in swing trains, they're going long every day with the market, rallying and then all of a sudden, they're losing, losing, losing. And then they continue to buy the dip and then we do not go back up to the highs and then people get frustrated that they lose and they're losing. So again, you see why just focusing on one thing, one strategy, one pick, one direction, one trade a day or two, if you want to, is so much easier than scalping, going two directions in one day or even trying to read what the market's doing. Again, we did GIS today, that had nothing to do with the market, we did BA, we did Tesla, they had nothing to do with the market. Again, while I'm playing the market, I focus on specific stocks to try to get the move because again, like I said, I didn't expect the market to rally yesterday. Did it mean that I killed my trade? No, no, and I will win big if that trade works in my favor and I will get paid for the knowledge and for having the conviction to hold it. So again, taking a train, setting your risk, understanding what it's doing, letting it play out, believing in the direction, sticking to one strategy, all these things are good tips because if it was that easy to trade to just say the market's bullish, Debra, let's just go long every day, let's just go long. Let's just go, let's just go long. And I know a lot of people are doing that and they're doing it because we've rallied really for the last month in June and we have rallied since the start of the year. So, you know, there were many days you could have done that but that is not gonna last. Well, today I just did the GIS. I didn't do anything other than this today. Actually, this looks lower, but it might be running out of steam, but it still looks lower. You're welcome, long. Did I hear me right earlier and the call that your default strategy to our options is to day trade them? No, I didn't say that. What do you mean? What do you mean by default? You lost me. I said you can day trade options if you want to because they can go in the same day. If they don't go in the same day and holding them, I think you're confused because we were talking about somebody did options on the daily expiration, Darryl. Maybe that's what you're talking about. There's daily expirations in the spy and the queues. I'm not calling them in the newsletter. I think they're too tight, but they're cheap and very profitable if you get a big move on the day. So, if for example, you get a big fat rain bar or a big fat red bar and you take a daily expiration that expires that day by four o'clock and you take that trade, that could be extremely profitable if it has a big fat move because the costs will be cheap. You'd have to hold it more than a couple of minutes. Other than that, I'm not sure what your question was really. I think you were confused because I was talking about the daily expirations. Options trades, if you're in and out, you lost me there, Deborah. I didn't get what you were saying. You wait for the momentum to come in, then you get out, then you get out. Deborah, I'm not sure what you meant and does anyone else have any other questions? I think this was a good lecture. I hope some of what I said made sense. Deborah, I didn't understand what you said. Deborah, I still think you should join. You'll learn a lot for sure. Darryl, did I answer your question? Did anybody else have any other questions? Be picky about what you trade. Be picky about what you trade, okay? Again, you want to be selective and that counts. And if you're not picky about what you trade, again, you're gonna lose. So that's the bugaboo. And while some trades may not be good trades that work sometimes, that's the trickery of the market that you could fold into thinking that XYZ is XYZ and it's not. And that's the thing. Again, it's the lure of the market. I should put it that way. It's the lure of the market that makes you think that it's just as easy as going along in a bullish market and it's not. You know what I mean? Great lecture. If anyone has any questions, you can always email me here, okay? And I will see some of you. Oh, another question. Options are through day trade. They can still flag you as a pattern if your balance is under 25K. If, unless you have it set up as a cash account. So again, it depends on how you have this. That is a question for your broker. You can set up a cash. It's set it up as a cash account, Deborah. And you can do that then. So you have to talk to the broker because yes, you can get in and out, but you have to have it set up as an options account that's on cash account. And if you do, then you are okay. And whoever you trade with, you have to talk to them about that. But yes, that's possible. And I do have people doing that. Would the spy, are you talking about today? Are you talking about today, Ivan? Or are you talking about the next week or a couple of days? Ivan's saying is the spy gonna get down to 430 or 425 if it turns down. I don't know if that happens between now and four o'clock. Could it? Sure. It's starting to tank a bit. Again, we talked about the scenario earlier, but Ivan, I saw you come in late. I think you were in the other room, Ivan. So you missed discussion earlier, but I will send you the video on taping this, but we played out the scenario that could happen in the market earlier before we started to fall. I said the least possible scenario for the market in the next couple of days or today is that the market rallies and continues up. So therefore, either we hold, sit in our butts, and don't go anywhere, or we fall. So to answer your question, the answer is yes, unless we just sit in our butts and don't go anywhere. And I think that could happen next week because of the holiday. So I still think we can get action in the market today, Thursday and Friday. I think next week could be dead because the holiday is in the middle of the week. So to answer your question, Ivan, yes. You gotta watch it. Okay, great. Ivan, I'll send you the replay. Any other questions, email me, melissathesockswish.com. If anyone's interested in the class, email me. I started in July 4th special today. I will get that video up too. Please be careful. Very, very careful. All right, have a good day.