 Let me know if you can see it. All right, it's loading. And OK, yeah, I see it. And there's my setup. That's done. OK, are you ready to start? Sure. All right, I'm going to start my recording again, and then you can start your presentation. So I am recording now. It's so great to be here at this whole presentation about women. Always great to talk about female traders. Of course, this is a male-dominated industry, and it's interesting because when I started trading, which was 15 years ago now, I realized that very quickly. There were very few women that were trading the market. But nowadays in 2023, there's a lot of women that actually do trade. So whether you're here, whether I'm in, whether a woman, we're going to talk today specifically about shorting. And today is a good day to talk about that. Why? Because the market is falling today. Fed Chairman Powell is talking today and tomorrow in front of Congress, testifying, answering questions, and the market collapsed. Collapsed this morning when he started talking. So if you have any questions, you can just type it in the room here. Let me see if I can say hi. I can answer questions as we go along today. I'm going to talk for the next hour or so. And again, I'm going to talk about shorting for fast profits. For those of you that don't know me, my name is Melissa Armo. If you have questions after today's lecture, you can email me at Melissathestockswitch.com. You can also call me at 929-3200 Gap. You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or Skype. And again, I trade the market. So today's a good day, again, to talk about shorting. Why? Because you could have shorted the market today and actually made money. You could have made money very fast in and out today in the morning. You could still be in the market. Actually, you could be puts in the overall market. Some of you may have seen me on television. I do appear on pretty much every single channel. I'm sure I'm going to be on this week talking about this market. I have had a bias, really, that the market was going to have another sell-off. When it was going to happen, I really didn't know. And for those of you that like to file fundamentals, you know that inflation is still very, very high. I personally follow the charts. I follow technical analysis. But I do have to talk about the fundamentals when I speak on TV, so I follow what's going on. And again, whether you talk about fundamentals or whether you love fundamentals or whether you love looking at the technicals, both things to me are leading me to believe that, in fact, the market is actually going to fall. And again, we saw that actually today. So, can you earn a living in the stock market? This is a question that I get a lot. The answer is yes. Okay, some people want to trade the market for some extra money on the side. Some people want to trade the market full-time. They may be retired. They may be just looking for a different job. But either way, if you've been trading for a long time and you haven't been successful, you probably don't have a strategy that works consistently in every market. Maybe it works some of the time, but it doesn't work all of the time. And again, right now, we're in a very choppy market since the beginning of 2023. We rallied in January, we fell in February, and now we just, just started the month of March. But I think overall, if you want to be successful, having a set strategy that works in any market conditions is really the key, okay, in order to have longevity because you've got to have consistency to have longevity. And to get anyone that has any questions, excuse me, just plop it in the room and I will see it as we're going along here today. Anyways, it's a new year and that can mean a new you and it's the time to go for it. You can change what you're doing. You can still have a good year trading even if you started off the year with some hiccups. If you didn't have a good year last year in 2022, don't worry about it. You've got the rest of 2023 to have a great year. So if it's your year, if this is really the year that you want to get serious about doing this, decide that you want to become a professional trader and do it, you have to give it your all. People always come to me and they say, you know, what does it take to be successful? One of the things you need to be successful is not only a positive attitude, but you also have to have the attitude that you're going to make it, you're going to do it, you're going to be successful no matter what. So guess what that means. That means no matter what, you're not going to quit. And I think a lot of traders feel like they want to jump from thing to thing to thing to thing to thing. If you're jumping around all the time doing different strategies or doing different things going along and short the same stock on the same day or the market, for example, you're going to have chopped up results. Again, the key to longevity and success is consistency, consistency in the system that you're using. Now I put in here last year's results. This is the day trade results. This is not options. I do do options as well. This was with an average risk just to give you an idea what you can make in a year with me of an average risk of about $2,800 per trade risk. Again, these are trades that I called in the live room on margin, okay? Your day results for last year was over 651,000. I did take some time off last year. I moved. It was something that was a major life change for me talking about having a new year and a new life. I started out this year in 2023 in a new home and a new place. I'm still unpacking. I'm still getting situated. Being in a new environment really actually can sometimes just motivate you to get to the next level. And I found that even personally for myself. So if your showroom chances are such that you are, again, living somewhere where you're not happy in a full-time job where you're not happy and maybe in a relationship where you're not fulfilled, make the change. Again, it's about empowering yourself to really make the necessary changes in your life. Nobody's gonna do it for you. The market doesn't care if you trade or not. The market doesn't care if you ever trade again, okay? You're the one that has to take it upon yourself to make the changes in your trading and your financial situation to improve your circumstances. As you heard the Fed chairman today, if you listen to him talking today, they're gonna keep raising rates, okay? They said today that is gonna take longer than we thought in order to lower the levels of inflation. So if that's the case, guess what? That means you're gonna be paying more for everything that you buy into 2023, okay? So how are you gonna combat that? Well, you can try to get a raise at your full-time job or you can try to earn more money by doing something on the side like trading. Now, as I was saying, one of the things that I was talking about was fast trades. Okay, so I like fast trading. I like fast day trading. And the reason I like that is because if you take a trade and you get in and out in five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and I always trade in the morning, the beginning part of the day, then I don't have to worry about the wiggles and jiggles of the overall market. I don't have to worry about the Fed test to fight. I don't have to worry about economic data coming out later in the day. I don't have to worry about the market going sideways or reversing. So when you do fast trades, again, you don't have to worry about the gyrations of the market. So the faster you can get in and out to make money, the better off you're gonna be in the long run, okay? So what is one of the other things you need to be successful? Besides a consistent strategy, you also need confidence, okay? So traders very often, I find, and again, I've been teaching people my system for the last 10 years. I find that traders lack confidence in their ability to trade well. They're constantly second-guessing themselves. They lack confidence in their choices of what to trade. Should we go long this market? Should we short this market? You've seen that back and forth in the market. You can't be like that when you're taking a trade. You can't put money on, risk money, like it's a croc shoot, 50-50. That's what I call zero conviction and zero confidence. Why put your money on and why risk it if that's how you feel about it, okay? So being confident is extremely important for you to be successful, not just in trading but in anything in life. Lack of confidence is usually a result of lack of knowledge. In general, there's a lack of confidence in traders across the board. So if this sounds like I'm talking to you, okay, you know what you need to do. Work on that. It's time to get confident. And a lot of times the reality is people aren't confident because they don't have confidence in the right knowledge. They don't have confidence in a system, okay? So what gives you confidence information? The correct information that you get if you can use it and you believe in it gives you the confidence. The confidence will help you make money. That means you could take a trade and the trade might be down before it goes up and turns positive but you don't kill the trade because you believe in the trade. It also helps you not to be flip-flopping, switching strategies all the time, switching direction all the time, specifically with the market gyrations that we've seen this year. So again, alleviate the anxiety of trading by learning what to do. Very, very important. And again, a lot of times once people start to trade after they've been trading for a number of years they don't think they have to learn or do take any classes anymore. They feel like they know everything even though they're losing but that's simply not true. Even if you've been doing this for a very long time, longer than I'm teaching or longer than I'm alive actually, if you don't have a set strategy, you know what you're doing, you need to learn what to do. So again, if anything that I say for the rest of this lecture makes any sense to you or resonates with you, you can reach out to me to discuss this more with me but I think confidence is a big factor for people when they're trying to make decisions with trading, it is one of the reasons why people are back and forth choppy with their results. For me, it's always been about having one strategy, okay? That's all I do. That's all that I need. If I wanna make more money, again, I do day trades and options. I use the same strategy for both and I just take more risk, okay? So it's not about using a million different strategies. One strategy is all you need and guess what? You get good at it. You get good at it. So let's talk about what I do. My strategy focus is on what? Shorting, now, what is a short? A short is when you're betting, if you wanna call that, that a stock price will drop, okay? I'm just gonna use this as an example here. This is a chart of eBay. This was yesterday's eBay. So again, a red bar to the downside to pick what? To pick selling, the stock price fell yesterday in eBay. I'm sure this is falling today again as well. But anyways, if you had shorted eBay, for example, yesterday, and I'm just gonna make up a number here, at $47.75, or $45.75, you could have made what? $0.75, for example, if you got in and out, $0.45.75 and got out at $0.45, you could have made $0.75. And 1,000 shares, that would have been what? $750. 2,000 would have been what, $1,500. So again, 50 cents, a dollar. This stock did move more than a dollar yesterday. It's the idea of where you get in, get out. Get in, get out. The idea of day trading and making money fast is getting in and out very, very quickly. This is not long-term investing. But the nice thing about shorting is that short moves very often happen fast and big. And as an active individual trader, how do you make money in the market? Fast and big, okay? Because unless you have a position or account where you can take 50,000 shares of the spy or something like that, you've gotta get a dollar, $2, $3, you gotta get the big moves in stocks. And again, I'm looking for precise entries when I'm taking these trades as well. Now, not only do I focus on shorting, okay? I also focus on looking at the gap. So what is a gap? Let's talk about it. Let's talk about the eBay gap back here. So we did this trade. What happened? Stop close to your gap down. What is a gap? A gap is a difference between the close and the open. Simple. So again, eBay closed up here the night before, around 47 and change, boom. Open in the morning. So this is four o'clock Eastern time. This talk is at one price. And then in the morning, the next day at 9.30, the stock is at a different price. It is opening at a lower price. And in this case here in eBay, it was under 46. It's like 45 and change. We shorted this. We got in, got out, boom. That was on the 23rd, okay? Could have done the same thing yesterday. This gap down yesterday too. So eBay closed here, open here, fell, boom. Okay? Now why do I like to focus on shorting? The whole concept of shorting is you're capturing a panicky move. Now while there is something called panic buying, that's rare, okay? Panic buying is something that's so rare that you almost never see it, okay? Panic to the downside is something you see literally every day or almost every day in the market. Okay? Not necessarily the market indices, but in stock specifically. Although sometimes you see it in the market. Today you saw panic selling in the market. You saw it when Powell talked, okay? He did not say that they're going to raise rates a half a point, but he certainly gave an indication that they might or that they're gonna raise rates deep into 2023, which I always thought that they would because we're nowhere near a 2% level of inflation, but you had panic. So people went, boom, and you saw the market crash. It was really right around 10 o'clock when he released his statement, what he was gonna say in the Congress, which of course he did, and then he started talking. Raju is asking me a question, how do I select stocks? Well, that is what you'd come and learn in my 16 hour class Raju. Today is an introduction where I'm gonna talk a little bit about shorting, a little bit about gaps. It's only a one hour lecture today. I have a 16 hour class that I teach once a month where I go through a process that I teach people on a weekend, it's always on a Saturday on Sunday, always on a weekend, how I find what stock I'm going to pick that I'm going to short that day. It is a 26 point rating system. So it is something that takes hours to teach and hours to go through, but that's how I make the picks. And that's how I make the picks like the eBay. It's also how I'm calling the market will sell off again as well. But you can't deny that the market rallied on Thursday. You can't deny that the market rallied on Friday. You can't deny that the market rallied in January either. And this is one of the reasons that people have found this year tricky. Cause they said, oh, well, we set the low for the year. Boom, we're just gonna keep going up and up and up and up and up and up. No, again, traders 10, and this is a, I'm gonna make a generalization, a blanket statement here. Traders 10 prefer to go long. For as long as I'm alive, I'll never know why. Other than the fact that people just understand the idea of buying low and selling high, I don't know. People like to buy dips, they prefer to go long. I'm not in that camp. It's one of the reasons I'm successful shorting. I have no hesitation, no fear in shorting, even in a bullish market, even bullish stocks too. But people in general with the exception of me prefer to go long. Maybe it's because so many people are invested in the retirement account, so they learn to go long first before they ever learn to short. I don't know. But you have to know how to do both, actually. I go to the short side first. I really, really do. But I will go long as well, but I only go long when I can find a good short. You know what I'm saying. So anyways, the fact is that many stocks in any given day have no strategy to trade as a day trade. That's just the reality. Many stocks in any given day are going with the market. And you gotta remember that trading is not long-term investing where you trade the trend. So again, the idea of getting in and out fast is you're not worried about the trend. You're not worried about the market. You're not worried about any of that at all. And learning what to do saves you money in the long run and it saves you time. So many people, you know, when they decide that they wanna learn something or take a class or do something new, they always wanna quick make the money back right away so that they paid for the course. The idea of learning something like a system like mine, a system that it took me more than three years to develop, something that I've been doing for 15 years, okay, the whole idea and the purpose of it is for you to learn it and to take your time learning it and to actually implement it, understand it, utilize it on a daily basis, not rush out and try to make the cost of my class, which is seven grand in like a day. While there are people that do that depending on what their risk is, okay, or what trades we get after the class, that really shouldn't be the reason that you're trying to do it and then make money after the fact. The idea is to learn something you could do forever. So I've been doing this for a long, long time and I've been doing it nothing else, okay? And I've been teaching people long enough to know against some of the idiosyncrasies of traders, some of the thought processes of traders. Part of it is things that I went through when I was trading as well when I started out, but I never was against shorting. I always saw that you could make a lot of money shorting and I'm a very impatient person. So the idea of getting the fast trade and making the fast money was something that always, always, always, always appealed to me. It errs my side of my personality. I did not want to sit and trade for six and a half hours a day the whole time the market's open. I did not want to do that. I never wanted to do that. And if you tend to trade all day, you actually tend to get money back to the market, okay? So let's go over here against some more examples of gaps. So what is a gap? A gap is a difference between the close and the open. There are bullish gaps and there are bearish gaps. Let's just look at a bullish gap, for example. So this was Friday. This was Monday morning. Market closed here. No, I'm sorry. This was Thursday. This was Friday morning. Market gapped up Friday morning. So actually the market opened higher. Again, this is a chart of the spy and it rallied. So you could have bought the market Friday. We actually power trended all day on Friday. Apple ran up, went over 150 and you could have gone long. Could have gone along almost anything Friday, actually. So that's a bullish gap. Here is a bearish gap. Gonna go back in the middle of February. Market closed here. Gapped down, fell, boom, fell. Again, fell off a cliff. So again, the market is something that I look at every day. Do I trade the market every day? No. Do I look at the market to see if it's something that I might want to trade? Yes. But I don't necessarily trade the market every day. But let's go over again. What is a gap? A stock gaps on the opening price today is different than the closing price of yesterday's trading. A gap is a break in price action from one day to the next. Simple. Can you short every bearish gap? No. Again, as I said earlier, I qualify them to find the best one. Some gaps reverse. Can you short every bullish gap? No. Some bullish gaps hold and rally. Some drop. I'm not in a camp that believes that gap fills work. Some people do gap fills. While they sometimes work, they do not consistently work in order to make money. So again, how do you become successful and stay in the long game here? You have to be able to do something that consistently works over and over and over and over again, okay? So again, eBay was something that we did back here on the 23rd. You can do it as a quick short as a day trade, which you would need a margin account to do, which is exactly what I did, or you could also do an option. Now, I don't call options in my day trading room. I call the exact entry and the stop and the exit in the live room for the day trade, which you'd have to have a margin account. Now, if you wanna do the trade in the room as an option, that's up to you. You could basically do a fast trade as an option. I tend to do options trades though for the longer haul. Unless I get a big move in the particular day, I'm looking to hold options a little bit longer, trying to get them overnight in the overnight move. But you could have done this quick in and you could have done this quick out. So again, my focus is on gaps, particularly bearish gaps, because again, I'm looking to get the follow through to the downside based on selling and panic, panic action, okay? Again, like you're seeing in the market. Now, right now, what's happening in the market in 2023? The market has been up and down and up and down and trading in a very tight range for the majority of this year. I did not look at January and say, oh my God, this market is bullish in 2023. I looked at January and I looked at February and I looked at even the months of the weeks in January before February even occurred. And to me, the market was sideways, okay? So the market could trade in a range, which makes it difficult if you're doing long-term trading, like if your long-term swing trade or long-term investing makes it difficult to stay in a position when you're down, which you may have to until the market gets out of the range. So what are your options? What are your choices of how to trade and make money in this type of market? You find specific stocks to trade that have momentum and moves. You trade the market in one direction and one direction only. Whether you wanna go long or short it is up to you. And you get the momentum on that day and get out and you basically do a fast trade in even the market. Because if you're looking to hold right now, you're getting chop, chop, chopped in the market. Or I'm just saying the market, I could say the spy, I could say the QQQs. So you gotta ask yourself, are you making money so far this year? Yes or no? If you are not, then something you're doing is not working right. So I'm telling you, if you've lost money from this point, since January up until now, if you think the market is gonna get out of this range in a day or a week, or even after Powell talks tomorrow, it's probably not. It's probably not. We could be in the chop that we are in, the back of worth in the market, into well into the summer, well into the summer, well into the next earnings season, which doesn't start till spring, which is in April. April, May into early June, and then maybe possibly even into the late summer months. Like the market may not choose a very, very clear direction for follow through until later in 2023. So you don't wanna lose money if you've lost money for the first two months of the year for the next two months or the next six months. So I always tell people, it's okay to take a step back. It's okay to evaluate, because as I was saying earlier, if your confidence is low, your confidence is just gonna continue to go in the toilet if you continue to keep losing. So you can get yourself out of it. It doesn't mean you have to stop trading. It means you have to change what you're doing, because if you don't change what you're doing, you're going to continue to lose. And keep in mind, like I said, don't trade without a strategy. Don't take ideas from strangers. You're here and you're listening to different people all day today. But the fact is, unless you know who I am, unless you've come to my webinars before, unless you've talked to me in the phone or email, you don't know who I am. I am a stranger to you. Or unless you've seen me on TV multiple times. I think it's a good idea for people to get to know someone first. Get to know them. Get an idea of what they're doing and follow them for a while so you build trust. So you say, yeah, I see what this person's saying. I see what Melissa's getting at. I can see here. I can see this makes sense. She said this would happen and it did. And I've been following her for a while. You can't short everything that gaps down. You can't short everything in market. You can't even short everything on a day like today. There were stocks that rallied today, okay? There were stocks that rallied today and had green bars that you could have gone long despite the fact the market fell. Even in the morning, okay? So it is about selective choices no matter what you do. Now I always get this question as well. Can you short in any market? The answer is yes. So I taught myself how to do this method, created this method. Like I said, 15 years ago now at the time the market was bullish. It was a bullish market. So if the market wants to fall off a cliff, we wanna break October's 2022 lows and we actually wanna drop and then go bearish which is fine by me. I'll know how to short. But I've been shorting in a bullish market for the last umpteen years. So it's not about the trend of the overall market to get specific short trades and people need to do that and understand that. Again, the idea of getting out of a trade in several minutes or even a couple of days, one or two days in a pot is the idea of trading the momentum. You can get momentum to the upside and you can get momentum to the downside but I'm telling you in general you'll get faster momentum to the downside than you will to the upside for the same reason that I explained earlier about panic. And what is the advantage of fast moves? Okay, just the whole idea that you can get out you don't have to worry about the hiccups as the day goes on. You don't have to worry about economic data. You don't have to worry about what the Fed's saying. You don't have to worry about anything that's happening in Russia, Ukraine, whatever. Short moves happen fast and there's an advantage to getting in and making a dollar in something or two dollars in something in five, 10 minutes. So the other benefit of shorting is again, like I said, you're having niche because many traders do not know how to short correctly. They're scared to short, okay. And many traders or more traders than not prefer to go long than short. And what if the market does turn bearish? We're actually in a bullish market. Based on the way that I read charts and technicals we never enter the bear market. We never entered a bear market at all in 2022. Now that's not what other people were saying that were on TV with me. I don't make choices of trend decisions based on percentages. People said we were down 20%. We're in a bearish market. That's not how I read it, okay. So we never entered a bear market even in 2022 based on the way that I calculate the trend. But we might, we might this year, okay. How are we might next year? Who knows? Remember next year is an election year. I think if we would do that, if we would go into a downtrend, it would tend to happen in the second part, the latter part of 2023 going into 2024. But if you don't know how to short and we actually do enter a bearish market, you're not gonna make money going long as often as you will shorting and you will need to know how to do it. So again, let's talk about some fast trades here. Just to show you an example. This was Costco, okay. This was Friday. This had earnings. Stock closed up here. This is a little expensive. Again, you could have done this as a day in trade. You could have done this as an option. Stock closed here, gap down. So it closed up here at around 45 and change. Gap down here in the morning around 472 and change. So one, two, three, four. In the first four minutes of the day, take it over, the stock fell approximately down to 466-ish. So the stock fell like $10, boom, in the first four minutes of the day. Actually in the first 15 minutes of the day, looks like it went to like 465. So if you did this and you played this and you got in and out, you were done in five minutes. That's it. So again, this was the biggest move this stock had the whole day, actually. And again, this is a sell-off and you would have wanted to short. So what am I looking for? When I'm looking for the gap, when I'm looking to take the trade, when I'm looking for the selling or the buying, whatever, it depends if I'm going long or short. If I'm doing a call or put, I'm always looking for the institutional money. So institutional money is big money. That's in the market. It's big footprints of money that are in the market. It could be hedge funds and there's all kinds of hedge funds. There's small hedge funds, there's large hedge funds. There are big professional traders that take big positions. It's a big position with volume that will come into a stock that would sell it, push the stock price down, or buy it that would do what? Push the stock price up, okay? Here's an example of institutional money that is bearish, why what happened? Again, eBay stock price fell. This is the day that we did hear the 23rd. And then again, just talking about yesterday, where you could have done it a second time, a second time here, okay? This is a big move for the stock. Again, see the red bar. So this is bearish to the downside, all right? So in general, I think a lot of times traders want to do what's something that is tricky, but really trading is not that hard. It's just people don't understand how to read what's going on. Like was I surprised today that when Powell released the statement, the market crashed? No. In fact, I sent out an email to all the subscribers. No one should be surprised today this market crashed. No one, because I've been talking about it, okay? So you've got to trade with the power, not against it. We were not long this market. Theoretically, could you have gone along the market in the last few days before today made money? If you got in, if you got out, yes. Did I do it? No, why? I had 0% conviction that this market would fall through to the upside. So I wasn't surprised when we crashed today. You've got to trade with power, not against it. So for me, it is about finding that institutional money. How do I do it? How do I spot it? How do I find it? Again, in the pre-market, in the gap. Cause that's where I'm seeing the gap. So I'm seeing the gap, the live gap in the pre-market way before the open. Sometimes I see it at night, okay? But I only see it in the morning. So I decide what I'm doing before I even, you know, take a trade before the market even opens. I'm seeing all of that very early. And again, sometimes at night. So if you learn how to spot institutional money and trade with it, it's gonna be so much easier for you to make money. If you're trading against it, it's gonna be hard for you to make money. One of the reasons why people have found 2023 so difficult is because we've been sideways. We've been in a very tight range. So you could say, well, Melissa, I thought this was institutional money that was buying the market. I say, no. It's like, well, why haven't we fallen off a planet than every day? Because again, you have people that are actually long in the market for the last several weeks and actually the last several years that aren't in that panic mode yet. So you haven't seen a massive sell-off yet because people are still long in the market. Institutional money is still long in the market and they're still up, okay? But you have to make money on a regular basis if you want a day trade for a career. You cannot have losing day, losing day, losing day, losing day, losing day. You're gonna burn through your account. You're gonna burn through your money and you'll have to refund it. So you wanna get on track. And even if you do it with small size, I'd rather say people be green with small size than lose. So what do I do? I follow the moves that institutional money makes in the market and I capture those moves on a small timeframe each and every single solitary day. So even if you think institutional money isn't there, it is, it's in charge of the market and stocks at all times. A big flow of money going a certain direction is what moves the market, stocks, and creates a momentum and sets the trend in charts. When you're really looking for institutional money, you're really reading the side of the power in a stock. You wanna be on the side of the power in order for you to make money trading. Institutional money is in charge in the market and stocks at all time. And it will always be the case, okay? This will always be the case and that's why it's so important to see that and to have conviction in it and also to trade with it. And if you learn how to read the footprints of big position players before the momentum occurs, because after it happens, it's basically too late, okay? You have to get in the trade before the momentum so you could be in the trade to make the money during the momentum where the momentum's actually happening. You wanna be in it when the sell-off occurs, like that Costco. You gotta be in the right direction in order to profit, okay? But you have to understand how to trade with the side of power. You can't be afraid of it, all right? You need to be able to understand as you can be aggressive in it, like trading right out of the game, the first few minutes of the day as well, if you wanna call that aggressive, which some people do. But it's very important to find this power because it really has the ability to pay you and then you can be done trading so early in the morning. You can also win big. And again, shorting really, really will give you a niche. So it's, for me, it's only about one strategy, one focus, it's shorting gaps, it's getting in and out fast. In this market, it has been extremely important to do that. It is the only way to go right now. While there are things that have had some follow-through to the downside and the upside, the reality is that fast trades are important in this type of market. When you're in the chop, until the market situates itself and makes a determination if it's really gonna go back up to the highs, which it's not right now, or if it's gonna fall off a cliff, which it might, I don't know, it might not. The reality is that in this type of market, if you wanna make money, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, I don't care if you're doing day trades or options, the best thing that you can do for yourself is to take fast trades because you're gonna get caught in something that doesn't make any sense. So you're gonna be up in a trader then down in a trade and losing a trade that you were up in and then you're gonna be mad at yourself and then your confidence is gonna take a hit and so will your account. Right now there's far too many people that are making statements or basically just guessing what the future holds for the Fed's decision-making in reference to inflation, the economy and rates. Why people were saying the Fed was gonna lower rates in the second half of the year or not raise rates? I never got on board with that. I never thought that they were gonna say that but people said that and created a massive rally for several days in the month of January. All those people were caught upside down unless they took the profits out and some people are still on the market from those long positions in January thinking the Fed was gonna back off. Now people are changing their tune after today but there was nothing that the Fed ever said that they were gonna lower rates. The Fed has stayed on pace saying we are going to continue to do everything we can to bring inflation down to 2%. If the Fed raises rates a quarter point every month for the next nine months, starting March until the end of the year, they still won't bring inflation down to 2%. It won't happen by the end of the year, that's impossible. And I also don't believe the economic data that inflation is under 8% because I'm a consumer and I literally buy tons of stuff all the time from food to everything. While I don't have a car and I don't drive in Manhattan because I don't need to, I follow oil prices but I purchase everything else. Nothing has gone down in price. And even oil prices have ticked slightly down but they're up in the last 24 months. So, again, getting in and getting out is gonna prevent you from having to deal with all of the chitter-chatter, everything people are saying on TV and everywhere else when you're reading stuff. Now let's talk about a couple trades here that I did. Now I was talking about options. We did a spy putt. So I sent this trade on Tuesday. If you sign up for the options newsletter, you get the trade, you take the trade when you get it. It was 10, 14 in the morning, so it was a little bit after the open. I called the 400 spy putts. Again, date of this was the 21st, it expired the 24. It's kind of a fast trade, but when it worked, cost was relatively cheap. $2.20, I think, is cheap for a spy putt. We'll look at the chart in a minute. An advanced trader risk of 40 contracts you could have made $14,200. And again, if you took around 1,000 risk, which is 1,105 contracts, you could have made 1775. This is a great trade. It's 161% return investment. And we're gonna look at the chart. I always get these questions about options. Always, always, always. As far as the exits go. Actually, let's hear, I'm gonna show you this day first. Here's the gap. So market close here, gap down, fell. If you got out of the trade at the end of the day or you get out of trade the next day, you were up more than 100% no matter where you got out. You don't need to even think to get out of this trade here or here. No one should be holding trades until the very, very, very, very, very last day if they're up more than 100%, which you were here and you were here. So the whole idea, again, of doing options, even if you do the options newsletter with me, is you're still getting a fast trade. You're still getting the quick momentum. This is fast to me. Whether you get out here or here. You have to get it and get in, get out. You have to get it, get in, boom, get out. So that was a nice trade that fell into the strike and through the strike, take it over, called it early in the morning. We were still above the strike and fell through the strike through 400. When you take a trade, if I call the trade and it goes through the strike, you have to get out of that trade. That's gonna be a profitable trade. Timing is important for options, very important. And again, the faster the better, the quicker the better, this again was what? It was a short, because we did puts, okay? Any questions about that? Now, they have recently come out with daily options in the spy and the kings. So if I happen to short the market as a day trade, like if I wanna short the spy on margin, which I sometimes do, and sometimes I do the option as well, you can actually do daily options with a daily expiration. So that's really beneficial. If you don't have a margin account and you wanna trade options and you don't wanna do the weeklies, which I am calling the weeklies in the newsletter and I'm not gonna stop doing that. But if you're in the live room and you don't have a margin account or if you're trading, for example, your retirement account or your IRA, you don't have a margin account, okay? So you can't just short, you could do the daily expiration and buy a put and get in and out as a day trade quick. That is something now that you can do. This is something new. This has just happened recently. It's only in the queues and the spy. So that's actually a positive for people that want to trade options that don't have a margin account or again, because of certain restrictions, they have a retirement account that they're trading. But anyways, gaps have huge opportunity because they spot power money, just like you saw in that move with the market back in February. Now, let's get back to just talking more the nuts and bolts of gaps. Gaps are created with large institutional money. That is what makes a gap in the first place. The gaps that I trade, okay? Like I said, the professional gaps that happen and play out in stocks are formed by one thing and one thing only, large institutional money. Therefore, you need a way that will help you pick the correction to play the gap and confirm that the large money will flow with it by having a formula to rate and qualify the gap. You get confirmation and conviction that the large institutional money is on your side and then you play it. Gaps are an event and they create a sense of urgency. Thus, an action is being forced by participants of the stock. This is why gap trading is incredibly powerful. This is why you can get big moves and you can get the big moves fast, okay? Trading gaps is a powerful and profitable way to trade because you're trading on the side of power money and that makes it a heck of a lot easier for you to make money as one individual rather than trying to take massive, massive positions in something, okay? Any questions about that? Now, again, someone asked me earlier, how do I find the gaps? I rate them and I use a checklist. This is what I teach in the class, okay? It tells me what to look for. I don't know what I'm doing until I rate the gap. I don't know what I'm doing until I go through the process. I could go through that process at night when I see post-market gaps but I very often wait to the morning and do it in the morning. I like to wait to the morning because I feel like I'm clear headed in the morning. I'm also a morning person. I get up early and again, I like to see what the market's doing as well. Sometime the market can help me. If I get the market falling, that will help me get a short to a bigger target, okay? But you have to think about the benefits of what you're doing when you take a long position, when you take a short position and the timing it takes to get it. Like I said, panic buying is something that exists but it's very, very rare. Panic selling is something that is not as rare and actually happens almost every single day in some stock that's somewhere that's trading in the market. And if you didn't make money in 2022, you didn't know how to short. The market had so many moves to the downside in the overall market in 2022. And again, whether you did options or day trades last year, whether you held trades or did fast trades, it was a really, really easy year in 2022 to short the market. This year, since it started the year again, we're only two months and six days into the year or seven days into the year. But this has not been as easy as 2022 so far to get flushes in downward moves holding. You could have held for days and weeks sometimes in the market in puts and shorts in 2022. But if you were going long in 2022 every dip, you lost last year and you probably lost a lot of money. And the problem with January was people were going long dips. They have not given up on going long dips. People are still not gonna give up on going long dips. If we're up tomorrow and people go long, they dip up on support tomorrow, I guarantee you it's gonna fail when, what time, I don't know, what day, I don't know. But people will not give up on going long dips. Even people that lost for 12 months straight in 2022, because it worked in 2021 because the market power trended most of the year in 2021 but that was an anomaly. And if you go back and look at the economic data, again, talk about economic data that we saw in 2021, the data didn't match up what was going on in the overall economy then. It was jobs that were added back to the economy, not new jobs that were created. So what do I do? How do I figure all of this out? Again, I look at the gap. And I ran the gap using my 26 point rating system. This is what you come and learn from me. This is what you're paying me money for. You're paying me for my time. You're paying me to teach you how I know how to do this. And because I've done this for 15 years and nothing else, I'm very good at reading the market and I'm very good at reading price, okay? Again, I'm good at reading direction, directional bias. Do things happen exactly every second that I wanted to happen that I predict? No, but more times they do than don't, which is how I'm successful. Everybody has trades that sometimes lose. I do too, that's why you stops. But I have more trades that work than don't. And that's how you can be in this game and do it for a long, long time. Because if you're tanking your account and losing days and weeks on end, you're not gonna be able to sustain yourself, okay? And again, that is one of the things that people find difficult about trading, why they wanna quit and jump around from thing to thing. But it may just be what you're doing. Just simply flat out, doesn't work, okay? So you can change what you're doing. And it shouldn't be a big deal either. It's okay to change what you're doing. But getting back to what I was saying about buying the dips. If you wanna trade effectively, you need a niche. So for me, it's shorting, for me, it's the fast trades. For me, it's getting in and getting out. For me, it's gaps. But you cannot go with the crowd of day traders if you wanna make money. And like I was saying, many, many day traders tend to buy dips in the market. They'll do it in a bullish market. They'll do it in a bearish market. They'll do it in stocks and downtrends, uptrends, wherever they'll do it, okay? They'll do it on any moving average that they see because they think it's gonna hold. But again, while sometimes that may work, it does not work consistently, AKA 2022. Which by the way, like I said, was a bullish year. The market would held the uptrend all year in 2022. It did not break the uptrend. So even if you bought the dips in the market, you couldn't have made money. You've been in a bullish trend last year. So what does that tell you? But again, if you're someone that's trading and you're actively trading, having an edge being different actually helps you, okay? And once you get good at what you're doing, you could take a small account, build it into a large account. You could take a large account and build it even into a larger account. You can start out with day trades and then you could do options. You could start out with options and do day trades. You could do whatever works for you, okay? Whatever you feel comfortable with. But success requires a plan. For me, it's a 26 point checklist that I use to check off every single solitary day. What I am doing, I tally it up. If I get a gap that rates 20 points or more, I take it in the direction of the gap. If I don't, I don't do it. So again, having a set of rules is extremely important because otherwise you're trading on the fly. You're listening to what people are saying on TV. Again, you're listening to strangers. You're going to free trading room trials and you don't know why a person is doing something or why they're not. And that's important. How can you have conviction that something's going to fall or rally or risk your money in a trade if you don't understand why that person is doing it? The whole idea of even like I said, listening to me is getting to know me, seeing if what I'm saying is making sense. I'm not telling you to do XYZ today, okay? Because you don't understand why I'm doing it. And everybody that's in my live trading room has taken my class. There's a reason for that. The trade set up fast. You got to know what you're doing. I want people to be successful. I don't want people to lose. I want them to make money. So you got to know what you're doing. But anyways, getting back to this. Having a checklist keeps you organized and focused and having a checklist forces you to look at what you should be looking at in a chart in a stock to make the correct decision. Having a checklist helps assist you with your directional bias. Again, my preferred bias is always to the downside first. And having a checklist keeps you on track to reach your goals, which your goals should be what? You want to make money. That's the whole point. A checklist is a plan of action. Everyone that puts money into the market should have a plan of action, a checklist. And what if you are someone that is investing in the market long term? What if you're over the age of 55 or over the age of 60 and you're invested in the market for your retirement? You better know what you're doing. You should have a plan of action. You need to sit down with someone and make a plan with someone else then, a financial advisor, if you don't know what to do it. What if the market really does fall again? What are you gonna do? We're far, far, far off the highs. The last time we hit the highs and the queues was the end of 2021 and in this five was the beginning of 2022. It was more than a year ago, okay? You need a plan of action for your money if you want to be successful. Start to think like someone that's rich even if you're not. Because whatever money you have, you're gonna lose it if you don't have a plan of action for what you're doing. And that means day trading, long-term investing, anything. So on a professional level, all high-income career field specialists have checklists. If you are a pilot, you're a doctor, you're gonna perform surgery on someone, you need a checklist. So let's go over some day trades here that we did. I'm just looking at the time. So we did it, this was a nice day trade. This was a short, boom. Here it went, fell off a planet, we shorted low. 203.40, this was a trade on margin. 1200 shares, this was 32.40, boom. Again, nice drop, $4 in-out and done fast trade. As it was 199.45, it actually continued. Just wanna show this in here, came down in here, went to 191 and change. But I got out of the first trade, the fast trade. But this moved $8 past on that day where I got out of it. Again, I'd like to be done early. But look at that, profit was $4,740. So I did not always get the best exit, but I get the best entry and the right pick. So I got in and out quick, boom. Got the drop here, but it continued. That was on March 1st, that was last Wednesday. Here it was, here's the big bar, volumes down here. So that was a really, really nice short. eBay we already talked about, the day of this was 223. We shorted it, 45.25, boom. Got out at 43.80, huge trade. Big size was a great stop. Again, got the move, got the flush, $1.45, $1.50, boom, out. Again, how to get a trade like this and make this much money and something like this because of the fact that we had a precise entry, we hit it early, we got in quick and we got in at the perfect time to get the majority of the move. Again, this continued. Okay, that was February 23rd. And again, this is a gap down. Stock closed here, gap down, fell, boom. This is another one we did 214. This may look kind of funky, but this was a gap down. Google closed here, gap down. We shorted this in the tail, got in and out. So this may look funky here because it closed green with a green head, but actually we got the short move to the downside here in the tail. This is where you can see where it continued lower here after the fact. So again, this is, you might think this is pricey. You could have done a put. Could have done a put in this. Entry was $93.75, we added. Beautiful move, $1 plus $42.80. We got this, got in, got out, boom, done. Here's the bigger chart here of the day. Actually that was Valentine's Day. So again, when you're looking to trade, it's about momentum. It's about getting the direction right. And for me, it's all about the prep time. If you look at the time that you spend trading versus the time that you're actually trading, this is me. This is all the time I'm spending prepping. This is the time that I'm trading. I spend very little time trading, most of the time doing the analyzing, doing the gap rating, looking at the market, scanning for gaps, trying to find the best thing to do. So I might take an hour to get ready in the morning, two hours to get ready in the morning and I'm done in three minutes. But that's okay. Again, it's the whole purpose of getting done very early in the day. I'm looking to trade between 9.30 and 10 a.m. Eastern time. So again, talking about trading for a living, if you want to consistently make money in the market, the only way that's gonna happen is you have a high winning strategy, good money management, and a good mentor to follow. A mentor helps you when you're feeling blue, when you're feeling down, when a trade doesn't work, when you don't understand something, when you make a mistake, when the markets choppy like right now. A mentor will help keep you on track and everybody really needs that, okay? But again, the fast trades is extremely important, more so than ever in this type of market environment. It is about chunking it out. You can do fast trades and options, like I said. And you could do that even more so now with the queues and the spies, with the daily expirations. But it's all about making money. It's not about buying something and holding it forever, whether it's a put or a call. It's the idea about getting in and out very, very quickly. So again, if you're thinking about trading, if you wanna do this, if you've been trading in what you're doing, isn't working, you can empower yourself to trade. You can change what you're doing. You can go from being unsuccessful and losing money in the market to becoming successful and making money in the market. And it doesn't have to take forever. Everybody might have a different learning curve, you might have no learning curve, I don't know. I've taught people from all walks of life. I've taught men, I've taught women, I've taught young people, I've taught people that are older than me. I've taught people in different countries in the world, some people that, you know, there's a little bit of a language barrier too. It's a language of charts, okay. So the class is charts, charts, charts, where we go through and I'm showing you and I'm trying to explain it and I try to do the best I can. So my class is called the Golden Gap course. It teaches a 26 point rating system to find the best stock to trade each day. The course also teaches you how to enter and exit the stock of the day. This is very important too. The course teaches price analysis and tactical analysis on an advanced level. So it is a full two-day course on how to strategically find, pick, and play stocks that are professional bearish gaps. I teach this class once a month, the class is online. So the class from March is in a couple of weeks. If you're interested in plenty of time to plan, it's March 25th and 26th. That is the class for this month. Class of the class tuition is 69.99 classes online. Again, if you wanna sign up, you must email me for sign up forums. I'm doing a special that's going on through the end of this week, through Friday. If you sign up for the March class, by Friday, March 10th, you'll are seeing the Gap Osh's newsletter free for 12 months for one year, which takes you into March of 2024. The room free for 12 months, which takes you into March of 2024. You'd have to sign up by Friday, five o'clock as a deadline. So I don't really know if we have time here, probably not to look at what the market's doing right now. But again, PAL is testifying tomorrow too. So the volatility that we saw today will continue into tomorrow in the market. But again, if you're someone that has been having a difficult time since the beginning of this year, or even last year in 2022, you have to consider the idea of learning how to short and particularly the idea of doing fast trades because then you don't have to worry about what the market's doing. You don't have to worry about when you have testimony like this two days. You don't have to worry about so many other things that are going on if you can get in and out of a trade and make money in five, 10 minutes. Any last minute questions here? I'm not gonna get into details about any charts or how I have my charts set up today, Roju. We don't have time for that. Any general questions here today? Listen, it was great to see everyone. Thank you so much, David, for having me. Here's my email, it's melissa at thestockswitch.com. If you'd like more information, if you wanna sign up for the special, if you have questions, feel free to email me there. Good luck, everybody.