 For those of you who don't know O'Fear, he's the CEO of CML Capital Market Laboratories. He's the one that created the CML Backtester. So the CML Backtester is something that we use every day to not only find trade opportunities, but also to confirm trading strategies. And backtesting is not everything. So you're not always only gonna place a trade just because the back test said you should because there are situations where something can perform very well over a period of time and then not perform. So we definitely use it as an integral part of our trading and it's really helped us find additional opportunities as well. So before we jump in, quick disclaimer, the results here provided for general information, we are not registered financial advisors and obviously there is risk in trading options. So make sure that you are aware of that risk. Make sure you read characteristics and risks of standardized options. Also understand navigation, financial and CML are separate unaffiliated companies and we're not responsible for each other's services and products. So with that, we'll get started and back to O'Fear just to give you a quick little overview of him. I mentioned he's the CEO, co-founder of CML. He's also the inventor of the Forensic Alpha model and in the accounting and governance risk model both of which were sold to MSCI. He's been on all kinds of financial television stations Bloomberg, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, you name it. He's very active on Twitter. So if you're on Twitter, he's a great follow, constantly posting really helpful information there and just a great guy overall. So we will go ahead and jump in. And what I wanna do now is let me, I'm gonna share with you a quick video that O'Fear put together so you will be able to hear him walking you through some things. The video is gonna last about 15 minutes and it gives you a quick overview of what we're wanting to make sure that you understand about the software and the power of what it does. And then as soon as the video is over, I'm gonna jump back in and jump back on the platform live and we'll share with you some really cool stuff that we've got going on. So let's talk about answers. Does momentum trading actually work? I mean, we've all had great momentum trades and we've all lost on momentum trades. But empirically, does this work? And if so, when has been the best trade entry? Which stocks have worked the best? And what has been the best time to exit? What are realistic average returns? What are historical win rates? If momentum trading has worked in the past, it should be empirical and explicit. And that's it. Also, how about technical analysis or technical trading? Does it really work? It's all over social media and fintech news. And if it really does work, okay then. Which indicator has worked the best historically on which stocks, at what times, when has been the best time to exit? Again, what are realistic average returns? What are historical win rates? It doesn't matter how much noise there is out there. If technical analysis works, the results should be empirical and explicit. That's it. And what about non-directional option trading? Has there been a way to profit from this low volatility world, this low VIX world, without making a directional bet, without betting on a bull market continuing, or even more abrupt if we go into a bear market or a correction? Again, empirically, does this work? And if so, when has been the best trade entry? Which stocks have worked the best? And what has been the best time to exit? What are realistic average returns? What are historical win rates? Answers, that's what this is all about. We're going to cover all of this, and we're going to do it pretty quickly. We'll start with momentum, then technical analysis combined with momentum, then non-directional history. All right, let's go. We're going to start with momentum. We'll start with our first pre-earnings pattern. I call this a directional bet on optimism. So one of the least recognized but most important phenomena surrounding this bull market is the amount of optimism that sets in the two weeks before earnings in the mega technology stocks. We're talking the fang stocks. Now, this is totally irrespective of whether the stocks have a history of beating earnings, and in fact, many of them don't. But in the two weeks before earnings, there is a massive momentum rally into the event. What the scanner will help us see later is that while there is this two week pattern, sometimes one week or even just three days presents a better trading window, both with respect to consistency of the win rate, and of course, total returns. We'll start with two weeks here and address the other time periods when we cover the scanner. Let's look at a simple idea. Let's just buy a monthly call option and alphabet two weeks before earnings and selling the call before the earnings announcement. So we'll get long a call. We'll go to custom earnings handling. We'll open the trade 14 days before earnings and we will close the trade one day before earnings. We are not taking an earnings bet. This is a pre-earnings trade. And here are the results. We can see across the board, this has been a winner. And just to see what's happening, we can look at the stock price. This is a two year stock chart of alphabet where the blue E-icons represent the earnings. What's so interesting here is that while the stock almost always rallies before earnings, you can see that with these little yellow arrows into the earnings. The stock goes down off of earnings a lot. In fact, that's what these yellow rectangles are. This is how many times alphabet missed earnings. It's just a coin flip, but it never interferes with this optimism, this bullish momentum. While we're looking at this, we might as well look at the rest of fang. So I'm just gonna put the rest of the tickers in here. Comma delimited. As I said, this works with all of the mega tech stocks, but what we need to do to find the best trades is to focus on the win rates. Netflix and Amazon are a coin flip. Even though the returns are positive, these aren't the best of breed, but a good trade turns into a great trade only after we do risk control. So let's drop a tight stop on these calls and also a tight limit. We'll go down to the close trade one section. We will close these long calls if they go up by 30% in a two-week period, and we'll also close them if they go down by 30% in a two-week period. All of a sudden, the trade is clearly an alphabet in Facebook, not Apple, Netflix, or Amazon. So let's focus on those two. Now we can see the staggering returns and we can see 15 wins on one loss if we held these two as a portfolio. And just so you know, we're not pulling a fast one on you and that calls always work on these companies, we can just look at the 15 days after earnings. So we'll open one day after earnings and close 15 days after earnings and these trades are actually negative. So this is in fact a pre-earnings momentum trade based on the personality of this bull market. While we're here, let's go ahead and look at another trade that's very similar. We'll go to custom earnings and this time we're gonna look to open the trade just one week before earnings. So seven days before earnings and closing it the day before, as opposed to the two weeks before earnings trades we looked at with Google and Facebook. And this time we'll look at Nvidia. So we're gonna buy a call, seven days before earnings, close it the day before earnings, we'll put a stop and a limit and we'll look at the last three years. And here we can see with Nvidia, 11 wins and one loss with a 1,352 total return. And if you're wondering how I knew to look at Nvidia a week before earnings, this is how. We're going to introduce the Pro Scanner which is available to trade machine pro members. We select Pro Scan, then we select Buy Strategy. We can choose any grouping of stocks but for now we'll use the S&P 500. Since we're looking at pre-earnings momentum trades, we're going to scroll down to the pre-earning section. You'll note that we scan for 14 day, seven day and three day pre-earnings momentum trades. We'll select the 14 day since that's what we're looking at with Google. The scanner automatically sorts the results by win rate. And since the 14 day scan does not use a stop or limit, the highest win rate in this group of tickers is actually the Tech Gem Akamai with 10 wins out of the last 11 earning sessions for a 91% win rate. We can see a 38% average return per trade and that includes the one loss. That's over 38% for just 14 days. The total back test return is 426%. Finally, we can see Google and here are the results before we put in the stop or the limit. We can also sort our results by the total back test return. So this is for the trader that's comfortable with the back test that has shown a lower win rate but larger returns. Let's now look at the one week back tests and just look at the three year results. So we'll tap on seven days and we'll deactivate the other buttons. We can see Nvidia here. This is a tech darling that has had immense pre earnings momentum showing 11 wins out of the last 12 pre earning sessions with an average return of 39% in a week or 493%. For those of us that like trading the tech names, we can select the NASDAQ 100 and sharpen our scan results. We can find a familiar name as well which is Microsoft at the top of the list which has won for three years in a row the one week before earnings showing an average trade return of 50% per week. Microsoft is one of those curiously forgotten tech names. Let's let the rest of the world forget about Microsoft. We will not. Now this seven day pre earnings back test and the three day earnings back test which is really just a tight swing trade do in fact implement a stop and limit of 40%. This is our first exposure to the trade machine pro scanner and all we have done so far is just look at a very small subset of another subset which are pre earning scans, the momentum patterns. But this leads us to one of the other benefits of the pro scanner. We can simply click on a ticker and it will load the back test in our trade machine for us. So let's click on Microsoft and here are our Microsoft results. 12 wins, no losses. And down here is where the limit gain and the stop loss have already been implemented. We can click on custom strategies and we'll see we are looking at in fact this one week trade. So we finished step one. We found answers from momentum trading. Yes, it does work. The trade entry can be three days, seven days maybe even 14 days before earnings. The scanner shows us which securities have worked the best in the past. It shows us when to exit using the stop loss and the limit gain. It shows us what the historical return are. It shows us what the historical win rates are. So has momentum trading worked? Yes, it has. Now let's turn to technical trading. While there are hundreds, if not thousands of technical indicators, in the trade machine we focus on very few. Right now we're gonna focus on what has been called the TTM squeeze. First discovered by famed trader John Carter. This signal is actually a combination of three technical indicators to make a single signal. And that signal can either be bullish or it can be bearish. Now it's always important to understand precisely what a trade is doing. So to understand this signal we have written a full blown dossier with the videos you get to the dossiers by going to the discover tab and then looking under FAQ you can go to technicals in the TTM squeeze. And when you tap on that link you get a full blown explanation of how this works. So not to run too long, we're gonna skip a description, but remember the details are available through the discover tab and there is never an excuse to trade without understanding the facility behind it. And while this might sound complex as we've introduced it, like most technical trading it really isn't. It's very clever, it's very useful and it's also very easy to understand. So now we will look at technical trading with options and we won't pay attention to earnings at all. The idea behind the squeeze is that for the vast majority of the time stocks tend to move pretty quietly sideways. Then they move abruptly either up or down and we're not talking about those big earnings moves. That is we're here to answer the question we posed at the top of this video. Does technical analysis work? Here we go. So we'll enter our tickers, we'll look at five of them. We'll look at getting long a call spread, never trading earnings and doing it during the bull squeeze. We'll set our days to expiration to 15. So we're gonna be looking at about two week options. Then we're gonna go to settings and we're gonna go ahead and put it five years back in history. And here are the results. We can see in the three mega cap tech names we got Facebook, Amazon and Alibaba. We're looking at high win rates and large returns. Then we look at another momentum tech name, Activision, which has 10 wins and one loss. And then we just look at another momentum name which isn't a tech stock and this is just Domino's Pizza which has seen 12 wins and no losses for a 423% return over the last five years. We can just tap on a back test tile. We can see the total return. We can see the average return. We can see the number of wins and losses. We can see what the stock has done over the last five years and how this strategy is done. Another thing to note, if we look at Amazon for example, over five years this trigger only fired 11 times. And it turns out that over the last five years that's 1,824 days, this signal was live for only 144 days. So less than 8% of the time. This is a signal which doesn't happen very often but when it does, it tends to carry a very strong indicator. While we have done the empirical analysis and the TTM squeeze technical indicator is in fact statistically significantly better than just buying a call spread, which is to say this isn't just happening because there's a bull market. It's fair to ask, does this indicator work during a bull market trying to find bearish indicators? And the answer is yes it can. We can now do the same thing but with the bear squeeze. So we'll enter our tickers, we'll go to a put spread, we'll go to never trade earnings and we'll look at the bear squeeze. And for this, we will add 40% limits and 40% gains and we'll look at the 30 day options. In this case, we're looking at a large cap tech stock, a European bank, two retailers, that's Kohl's and Kroger and one industrial with Federal Express. And again, we can see when you pick the right companies, you've got high win rates and large returns. The second technical indicator we looked at is the CML mammoth. That's for moving average and momentum model. And here's how it works. We started with several moving averages. Then we took them and we'd lined them up relative to where they were for each other. That is which ones were above the others and which ones were below the others. Testing all of the various combinations. We also tested how far apart the moving averages were from each other. That is were they really spread out or were they tightly grouped together. Then with some machine learning techniques, we founded the comparisons and the moving averages that helped predict future stock returns. The next step was to include the current stock price in this measurement, where it lined up relative to the moving averages and how far it was from them. Once we had a definitive solution for that, we turned to momentum. We didn't only look if a stock had moved up or down on consecutive days, but also by how much? Was it a small move up or a large move up or a small move down or a large move down? Finally, we looked at the Bollinger Bands and the Keltner Channels and if the stock was above or below the key levels. With all of that, we were able to build the CML Moving Average Momentum Indicator, CML Mammoth, an empirical and explicitly tested technical indicator that shows when a stock is heating up. We have the full details of how this technical indicator was created, including the full equation that allows you to calculate it yourself in the Discover tab with great detail. Now let's look at some of the results. We'll start out by entering four tickers. We'll do two of the chip giants, NVIDIA and LAM Research. We'll do everyone's favorite momentum stock, Netflix. And then just for a change of pace, we'll look at Ford Motors, the automobile manufacturer. We'll look at getting long a call, never trading earnings, and we will use the Boll Mammoth Technical Indicator. And here are our results. Over the last five years, using the options that are the closest to 14 days. You can see across the board, the results are enormous. And we can see the win rates. With NVIDIA, we're looking at a 60% win rate. So this trade certainly does lose. With LAM Research, we're looking at a win rate of 65%. With Netflix, we're actually looking at a win rate of 53.5%, so 23 wins and 20 losses. And with Ford, over five years, even though this only triggered seven times, it did in fact win all seven times. But the key to notice here is that this trade doesn't occur a lot. It does occur more frequently with stocks that are more volatile. So we can see that technology stocks have more trades triggered than Ford over the last five years. But let's dive deeper. If we tap on a backtest tile, we can see the details. So for NVIDIA, we can see the average return was 40.8%. 21 wins and 14 losses. So an average return of 40%, over 35 trades every two weeks. The average win was over 114% and the average loss was 69%. So when this trade goes bad, it certainly is a substantial loser. But the trades win more often than they lose and when the trades win, they're substantially larger, almost two to one than the losses. We can take a look at Ford, a less volatile stock. We can see the average trade return, again, this is over 14 days, is 65.5% with seven wins and no losses. However, over five years, this only occurred seven times. So it's a trade that requires patience. As always, to learn more about the model, you can just go to the Discover tab and underneath Frequently Asked Question, you can go to the details behind the CML Mammoth model. Tap on that link and here you will see a full description of the model, how to use it, the general idea behind it and then step by step, variable by variable, the statistical results, the significance and all of the details that allow you to recreate this model yourself if you want to. So that's it. We wanted answers to these questions. Does technical trading actually work? What is the signal for trade entry? It's the bull or bear squeeze or the bull or bear mammoth models. And where do we find discovery of the companies or ETFs where this has worked the best in the past? As always, it goes back to the pro scanner. And now we have completed step two. We have with great specificity, questioned, tested and discovered the results of patterned pre-earnings momentum and technical momentum, irrespective of earnings. Our final task now is to answer what about non-directional option trading? And here we go. It's long been believed and proven that simply owning an at-the-money straddle in most stocks is a loser. In fact, we can do it with our back tester looking at Google. Here it is, getting long a straddle, doing nothing with earnings over the last three years, buying the 30 day option. This trade has only a 41% win rate and has down 57% over the last three years. But we started this discussion with the question, which is what about non-directional option trading? Is there a way to profit from it? Without betting on a bull market continuing or even more abruptly, even if we go into a bear market or correction, and we want empirical results, does this work and if so, when has been the best trade entry, which stocks have worked the best, and what has been the best time to exit? Since we've seen normally owning a straddle in Google has been a loser, let's try something different. We'll come down to custom earnings and now we'll look at opening the trade one day after earnings and closing it the week after earnings. That is, it's a one week trade right after earnings. So the stock does its gymnastics after earnings, we wait a full day, then we buy a straddle with the 30 day options and here are those results. Over the last 11 earning periods, it has won nine times and only lost twice with a 263% total return. Remember, when we did this without using custom earnings dating, it was a 57.5% loser. We can find dozens if not hundreds of these opportunities where owning volatility looks like a loser and the market believes it to be a loser, but timing it correctly around earnings has proven to be a gigantic winner and the answer of course, whether it's before earnings or after earnings is in the pro scanner. So we go back to the pro scanner, we go by strategy, we pick our ticker group, in this case we'll just look at the S&P 500, we have the seven days post earnings long straddle which we looked at with Google or if we prefer, we can look at seven days pre earnings or even 14 days pre earnings. So these three scans find us the companies where owning volatility even in this low VIX world has been a winner, so we can't answer empirically. It does work, we do know the best trade entry, we do know which stocks have worked the best and we do know the best time to exit by using our stops and limits. We started this discussion saying we wanted answers to three questions. Has momentum trading actually worked? Has technical analysis actually worked? Has non-directional option trading actually worked? And if so, we should have empirical and explicit answers for each of those. We've answered our questions and we have been empirical and we have been explicit. There are other questions that the trade machine can answer like has non-directional option trading while selling options worked. And if so, when and in which securities and what are the historical win rates? The trade machine was built to answer questions for traders. It was built to be empirical, it was built to be explicit and of course, it was built to be easy to use. There's so much more the scanner has including custom portfolio building but for now, we have succeeded in our goal. We have answered our questions and we hope you are a more powerful trader for watching. Thank you for your time. Now of course, we just focused on earnings related trades. If you like trading the actual event, we have a button for that. You can just click only trade earnings and test any strategy you want whether it be custom or pre-built during the earnings event. And of course, for all other times you can always just select never trade earnings and you can do the same thing. You can create your own custom strategy or pre-built strategies. And finally, it bears repeating while we just looked at the fang stocks, we cover every stock and every ETF and every index in North America as well. The opportunities are there. You just need to find them. So this is it. This is how people profit from the option market. It's preparation, not luck. Thanks for watching. All right, so we are back. So good news everybody. Our friend Ophir, we were able to figure out our technical difficulties. And so Ophir, if you wanna go ahead and grab the screen here. Sure. Ophir is with us and I already kind of gave him the intro so no need to really recap that at all but he's gonna go ahead and take it from here. I was gonna have to ad-lib and try to act like Ophir, but good news is the real, the man, the myth, the legend is here. So he's gonna take it on. So Ophir, go ahead. Awesome. Thank you, Steve. Can you guys see my screen? Oh, I need to get the... Yeah, you can. Everything good? Should just look like a trade machine. Okay. So first of all, I was supposed to say this before the video but I wasn't here so I'll say it after the video. The results here are provided for general informational purposes. So it can be used to the viewers. The materials are not a substitute for obtaining professional advice from a qualified person from a corporation. And so none of this is meant to be advice. Okay, good. So that video went pretty fast and generally it's a little bit easier to digest with an intro. So instead of getting an intro, I'm gonna get an outro. Okay, also by the way, there's plumbing getting done in our building and so that's gonna be really enjoyable sound that we're gonna hear lots of drills. So enjoy that as well. So what we looked at, take a step back, where the five, this is explicitly empirically tested. I'm not just making it up. These are the five most successful trading strategies during this bull market. Each bull market or bear market has its own personality. Okay. The last five years of this bull market has had this personality. One is to ride the trend, which has been unbelievably strong. So pre-earnings momentum, not taking an earnings bet, right? No earnings bets. Pre-earnings momentum. Okay, that's one. The next two most successful trades during this bull market have been through two technical indicators, bullish and bearish, right? The squeeze and mammoth. Okay. The last two are completely non-directional, right? So the ones we looked at in the video were actually owning options, owning volatility. So owning straddles before after earnings. There's another non-directional trade which sells options, but is protected, doesn't have unlimited loss, which has also been successful. So I'm gonna show that as well. But before I do any of that, I just wanna give a little bit of sort of guidance to what this thing is that we were all looking at, right? So there's just three tabs. There's the back test tab and that's where I would try something like, what did we look at? Let's say Microsoft buying a call, I don't know, seven days before earnings, closing of the day of earnings, doing a stop and a limit. And so, okay, this is the back testing window. Okay? All right, these were seven options, look. So this is where we do our back testing. The second window is the pro scanner, okay? And so this is where we would go and say, hey, you know what? I'm gonna start constructing a portfolio of trades. I will start with bullish momentum. I'm gonna move further and beyond just bullish bets, but for now I'm gonna start with that. So I'm gonna look at the NASDAQ 100. I don't know, I like the seven day pre-earnings trade. All right. Let me see the companies with the most wins. All right, here's Microsoft 11 or no. By the way, it's 15 or no. It was 12 or no and it just won today as well. Nvidia, I said, okay, I'm gonna put on some of these trades. Here you can see where earnings are. So Microsoft earnings are in a week. If you like, Nvidia earnings are probably in the middle of February, so you can put this one on. Okay, so that's what the scanner is. And of course, you can also look at the S&P 500 or the Dow 30. Then you can start looking at the non-directional trades, right? The pre-earnings straddles. And let's just look at this NASDAQ. I like the NASDAQ 100 not because I'm in love with tech so much, just that the markets are very tight and that allows us as option traders to not worry about slippage, right? So Apple, if you're wondering what the best trade is in Apple before earnings, it's actually just betting on the fact that it's gonna move a lot. We just wrote an article called the Magnificent Pattern in Apple that bets on analysts disagree. I mean, have we ever been more in a time where analysts are disagreeing, right? So that's the pro scanner, okay? And then there's the discover tab. The discover tab has frequently asked questions. So here's what you learn about it. There's just literally a video tutorial. It's like eight minutes how to use this thing. It's not about trading, it's just what do the buttons actually do? How to use the scanner, then it gets into greater depth about the technicals and things like that. But it's the market insights that is probably our most popular part of the tool other than the backtester, of course. Three times a week, so you can see the dates. I write a dossier about a back test. That is relevant. So for example, just yesterday I wrote this, okay? I call it the Kingpin because this is a Microsoft one week before earnings trade and it's one fortune times in a row. And now it's one 15 times in a row because it's spiked today for a 40% gain. So this is four years in a row. Okay, great. But I also write things that are non-directional, right? So I call this one the option intelligence. So this is Google. Forget betting if it's gonna go up or down since the market is ripping and the event is gonna come on the first. Afterwards, there's been a pattern after earnings that Google just moves a lot. And if you do it with an at-the-money relationship, if you do it with an at-the-money iron condor, you start getting really large results, okay? So that's what the Discover tab is. It has frequently asked questions and it has a bunch of insights. Some are directional, some are non-directional, some are technical, most are not technical. So that's the software, okay? So just maybe you can sort of feel comfortable with it. Now, having done all that, there's a couple of things I wanna show you. Two trades I really wanna go over. For those of you that are getting maybe a little bit worried about the bull market, maybe there's a better way to trade it than just getting along. Here's one non-directional trade that I did not address in the video. So I'm gonna look at the NASDAQ 100. It's actually a post-earnings trade. So it's selling an iron condor after earnings. Facebook, Illumina, these companies have been remarkable winners. So let's just click on Facebook and open a new tab with that load. And another thing I wanna bring up while that's loading is a trade that just feel like when you leave this webinar, at the very least you'll know something that you had never seen before probably. So all right, here is Facebook. All I did in this strategy is I waited two days after earnings. So you know the earnings and the Facebook stock was crazy, blah, blah, blah. Doesn't matter. Let it all calm down two days afterwards for the next three weeks. If you were to sell an iron condor, here are the results. So while Facebook in the last three years is up 135%, oh my God, it's an amazing bull market. Yeah, well, it turns out that just selling a little bit of volatility has quadrupled the stock, well, let's say triple the stock. And there are a lot of these and this is a great strategy to have if you're also buying volatility, right? These are hedges against each other and they allow you to extract signal out of the market without worrying if there's gonna be news about North Korea or if the VIX is gonna go up or whatever. Another strategy that is near and dear to my heart that I wanna share, I basically try to share with everyone is the VXX, okay? And so for those of you that are not familiar with the VXX, I'll have a little description written when we get it ready because reading it is always much clearly up. So first of all, this is an all-time chart of the VXX. Doesn't matter what it is right now, it's an all-time chart. It's down 99.96%. This is actually written in August. It's actually down 99.98% and it's supposed to be, okay? So the VXX goes down if VIX options are in contango, okay? And contango is just a really fancy finance word which means the later months are priced higher than the earlier months. So let me give you an explicit example. I took a snapshot on August 22nd, last year. VIX trades futures. The futures trade can trade like options. So they have many expirations. So here's the August 23rd, to the August 30th, September 6th, all the way down. These are all the expirations for VIXX. This is the price, the futures price. And you can see every single forward price is larger than the next one. This is called contango. It's a normal and it's, while you can get really deep into it, the reality is it's just a market structure that exists in a market where interest rates are positive. This is supposed to happen. We're supposed to be in contango. When we get out of contango, it's called backwardation. It's got a really weird name and it does happen once in a while, but for the long run, this is what it is. So VXX goes down if the VIX is in contango. But here's an interesting reality. When the VIX goes out of contango, you can see VXX can rip in your face, right? In general, this is down 99.96%. We got these little periods. It was like, oh, you got crushed if you're on puts. So the question is, there must be a way. There must be a strategy that has worked in this, worked extremely well in this, but also allowed us to avoid this because if we just take a long-term view, it's down. Every once in a while, you build a bump. So I'm gonna show you how to use a back tester. That is how to use the power, computing power to find the best strategies, right? So even if you don't want the software, this is the most crowded trade in institutional finance, literally hundreds of millions of dollars a year are made on this trade. I'm not recommending it. I just want to show it to you, okay? So here's the idea. Let's pretend we want it to get along a VXX put, okay, never try out, sorry, one second, over here. Let's look at the 50 delta. You're supposed to write a ring somewhere. Okay, so here's what it looks like if we got long, actually it's going in front of the back, let's go through yours. All right, so given this chart, sorry, whatever that tab, right, given this chart, getting long puts should have worked over the last three years, owning a 30-day put has returned 1,093%. And if you click on a back test tile, yeah, the VXX has been down 94.4%. Okay, so not super surprising. What is a little surprising is the win rate. We're only winning 59% of the time, which if you look at this chart, it's like, man, we should be winning like 75% of the time or more. So here's the power of the back tester. This is the result of using the monthly option. See what happened if we use the monthly option. All of a sudden, our win rate goes up to 75%. I think I have stopped some of this, I think I did it off. So this shows you the power of the back testers. The returns are essentially the same, which is utterly absurd for obviously, since this product goes down all the time. But we can go from a 59% winner to a 75% winner. This trade is actually a part of my portfolio. I'm generally long, long dated VXX puts, not all the time, but I usually just roll it. And sometimes I'd be put spread. So we can try with the put spread very easily. Let's try like a 50 and put spread. I know that the win rate should go up. Oh, it's gonna stay the same. Okay, so there you go. So that's why I buy puts and not put spread. So at the very least, everyone at least knows that such a trade exists. So check out the VXX, try to understand what it means, what Contango is and how this trade that everyone in institutional finance is doing, why they do it. So the goal of CML is to break the information asymmetry between the institutions and retail. My entire life has been on the other side. I was essentially building the information asymmetry for institutions. That's what I did. My models are used over companies with assets under management over a trillion dollars. That's what I did. I tried to make really rich people, really richer. And that's a very empty feeling. And we started CML to do the opposite, to try to have retail. So this is one of the most common institutional trades that you'll find. All right, so see if I've got anything else to show. I think that's essentially it. One thing I will say, I'm not sure if Steve did, this software is normally $129 a month. It's month to month, cancel whenever you want. But for navigation trading, we have it for just $79 a month. You use this link to make sure you get that discount, cmlvis.com navt for navigation trading, navt. If you don't like it after the first month, you get a full refund. So if you really want to be careful, you can try it for a month and just paper trade. If it doesn't work, don't worry about it. We'll give you your money back, no questions asked. And if don't worry if it takes, it doesn't have to be exactly 30 days. If it took you 43 days to decide to do like it, that's fine too. We're not here to trick you out of $79. So that's how you sign up for it. And I figure I actually just posted on the side. I think everybody should be able to see it. There's a link that says, there's a button that says get instant access. And that actually links directly to that URL that you just mentioned. Yeah, awesome, excellent. So this is just, we have to remember that in trading, and I know it's it's said over and over again, in trading you really do have to have a plan. And a plan doesn't mean I want to get bullish. And a plan doesn't even mean I want to get bullish apple. And a plan doesn't even mean I want to get bullish apple a week before earnings. A plan means I want these options on this day with this stop and this limit. And these are the other trades that are counteracting to that that work in the other direction that have won historically. That is how institutional finance works. They're rules-based, they're diversified, and that's how they profit. The idea that we can just gut feel it, well, you could be an awesome gut trader. You can be better if you have computing power and machine learning at your side. Okay, so this is the end of my formal presentation. As I said, this is how people profit from the option market. Take an idea and you optimize it, right? The process, in that process, you find the stocks and the ETFs and which expiration to trade and which strikes to trade and the best time to enter and the best time to exit the best implementation of a stop or a limit, right? It gives us a full trading strategy from open to close and the results are empirical and explicit. We don't have to guess anymore. So thanks for listening and I'm open to taking questions for as long as you guys wanna ask them. Yeah, Ophira, it looks like Richard had a question. When do you exit the VX put spread? What are the kind of the parameter? Do you have any specific parameters in your major trade? Sure, so let's go first, let's go to the long put. So as of right now as it's set, I have no stops and limits. So this trade ends when the options expire, okay? But let's try something. What happens if we put like a 75% limit and a 75% stop? Is that good or bad? I don't know, I don't know what the results are gonna be. So the results are worse. This is one trade that you would wanna let fly, right? You would wanna let keep going. With other trades, it makes a huge difference as to whether or not you use a stop or a limit. I toggle with this on almost every trade. I don't go one percent at a time because that's just overfitting but I try a 30% stop. I try a 50% stop. I try a 70% stop. And that is how I test all of these ideas. And by the way, that's how I test every idea. One more thing, I'll show you the pro scanner which I don't think it's covered very well. If you go by ticker, you can actually just enter a list of tickers that interest you. Maybe you're not interested in the Mazek 100 or I don't know, maybe you trade Goldman Sachs on. Let me just put in enough names that it's gonna give us some results. Let's try Ford, let's try JP, Morgan, let's try Adobe, let's try Baidu. If you're only interested in the list of companies, you can do that. And now the scanner is only looking at these tickers. So you can, let's say you're interested in trading these 10 stocks. You can find the strategies one at a time. It's okay, where is my technical bullish when I wanna get long? Okay, Ford and then bull mammoth has been incredibly good. Okay, that's my bullish technical play. Now where's my bullish technical play? And then you go through and you find the bearish plays that you wanna do. And then you say, okay, I wanna write some momentum. Which one has the best momentum? Okay, Netflix, pre earnings momentum, as we just saw, right? Pre earnings momentum, okay. So now let me find one that's a post earnings trade that doesn't bet on momentum. Okay, here we go Adobe one month after earnings selling the ball. And so you can construct your strategies, construct your portfolio with the scanner, either ticker by ticker or just group by group, however you like. And I think that's so powerful of fear because, and something that we harp on all the time at navigation trading. And that's the whole reason in our trade alerts in our navigation alerts portfolio where we've got iron condors which are positive theta trades. We've got long straddles and long calls leading up to earnings that don't have to stay in a specific range. So if there's a blowout to one direction or another you're gonna benefit from that. And it's so critical. And this is something that, I think a lot of newer traders don't really understand the concept of it first. And that is managing your account as a portfolio. I think so many times newer traders wanna manage each, and it's not that you're not managing each trade in itself, but you have to look at the effect of that specific trade on your overall portfolio. So if you just have a bunch of iron condors in your account, well, if you have a huge move in the market there's a good chance you're gonna get blown out to one side or the other. But if you have iron condors and butterflies along with long straddles and long calls based on statistically driven trades, then overall that's how you maximize your consistency and maximize your profits trading. Yeah, and we can be even explicit about it. Google's after earnings, the one week after earnings buying a straddle, remember after, stop not during the event, after earnings has been a winner nine out of 12 times with gigantic returns. Great, okay, good. So owning the vol and Google, but that's after earnings. But we can equally do a strategy at the same time, which bets on little volatility, sorry. And that would be in Facebook, right? So you can trade or Adobe, right? So this is selling an iron condor right now. And what I showed you before was buying a straddle. So these are two positions which have high win rates, have had high returns, but have totally different volatility positions. One is long theta and one is short theta. And therefore you can extract the signal out of the market without worrying about one of those days where you check your phone and you're like, oh my God, the market's crashing or the market's ripping and I, you know, I have an iron condor and it's gonna rip through it. So you can really go, we encourage you to go strategy by strategy, find the stocks you wanna trade, the back test that looked the most appealing to you and really have yourself set up in every direction, long vol, short vol, long deltas, short deltas. It saves you from any kind of catastrophe and it extracts the signal that you're finding out of the back tester and takes out part of the luck. Cause honestly, if our president says something cuckoo or if North Korea says something cuckoo or if the federal reserve says something cuckoo, we can't control that. That's not about being a good or bad trader. That's just the market happening to us. If the market, if we're well diversified, the market doesn't happen to us, we happen to the market. Ophir, it looks like we got a couple more questions. James says, so you just type in a ticker and it will tell you what underlying fits the best strategy. Actually, so in the scanner, that's actually true, right? So let's just say you're only interested in the most famous stock in the world, Apple. Okay, it goes down all of the scans we have for Apple and here we go. So I'm just gonna go through these quickly. The best strategy, it automatically starts by win rate. Okay, so Apple, one month after earnings, selling a put spread has been the best. I wanna show you what that looks like so we know what are we talking about. Okay, we always get super heavy usage after the market is funny. Okay, so what is this trade? This trade says wait two days after earnings. So I'll be explicit. Apple's earnings are February 1st after the close. Two days after February 1st are February 3rd. Trades, the back tester uses end of day prices. So this would be February 3rd, selling a put spread and holding it for about a month. That is the first trade in Apple that has the highest win rate. We can go back to where I think I have the window still open. So why would I do such a thing? Okay, right, the next one is covered calls. Here's earnings momentum. So this was after earnings. Here's what you can do pre earnings. For example, buying the straddle, right? So yes, you can enter a ticker and look for the strategies that have worked the best or you can look at an index and look strategy by strategy. Either way, it works just fine. Cool, hey, Jewel, just asking a question. Hope you're doing well. I heard I've been going back and forth by email. One strategy of fear that we've been kind of tossing around and trying to optimize and figure out the best way to trade it is doing kind of a combination trade of buying a straddle and a calendar at the same time where you get that positive theta to offset the negative theta. And you can, regardless if it stays in range or if it has a big move, sometimes it can benefit depending on the price you get in. So, and I think maybe Jewel, that's where your question was going. She says, can you test custom spreads? Yeah, let's do it together. So Steve, you tell me what the strategy is. So here's what I'm doing guys. I'm gonna click custom. So these are all canned strategies. You can also just do custom. Click custom, then you click add. All right, what is- Let's start with the calendar. All right, we'll add it. We're long a 50-day, three-day put and you're selling longer or shorter? Selling the shorter term, so let's say 15 day. Okay, so I'm gonna short same delta, same number of contracts. All right, and you wanted to buy a straddle? Yeah, and actually we would actually, the way that we've been testing it is doing it on a ratio. So we would actually, so for one long straddle, we would buy, let's say two or three calendar spreads. Can you do that all in one or would you test those separately? Yeah, you're gonna change the number. So you want more straddles than calendars or more calendars than straddles? The other way around, yeah, more calendars than straddles. Okay, on what ratio? Let's just do three to one. Three calendars to one straddle. Okay, so just to make it easier, I'm gonna do three, oh no, we are short. Short the 15 day put, long 30 day put, and then half the money straddle. Correct. How long out? Let's do 15 days. So we're gonna be long a 50 delta put on a one to three ratio, right? Correct. And long the call on a one to three ratio, is that it? And we're gonna call this Steve's Cool Strategy. Perfect, I like it. To the G. Okay, so I'm gonna save it. Of the same options that I've done this twice, it is. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're selling the same option that we're buying, so we gotta be careful here. We are. Yeah, got it. And when I'm doing the testing trades, I actually kind of offset the calendar a little bit because of that reason. Okay, so let's change this short put, which is the one that's getting duplicated. We wanna do it three times, and we want it to be 15 days. But, do you mind if I do like a 45 delta? Sure, yep. So Steve's Cool Strategy is loaded. I'm testing it on Facebook and Apple. Custom strategies take a little bit of time to load because it's all new to the back tester, so let's let it do its thing. But it's good to know that you can test any strategy, and you can also save as many as you like. You don't have a limit. I suppose if you put 10,000 in there, it would get confused, but, you know, you can do what you like. And the nice thing is once you do it, you can try it on as many tickers as you like as well. So it doesn't work great in Facebook, or the finish with Apple, but you can test as many tickers as you like once you have the strategy. So let me make sure that this is good. Okay, yeah, so far for these didn't work great. I'm sure it does work great for other ones. Oh, we probably never want to trade earnings, right? Yeah, let's avoid earnings. And mainly we've been testing them on kind of the big indexes like SPX and things like that. Oh, yeah, okay, sure. And you don't have to go through that. I really wanted to show people how you can really customize any strategy that you want to see. Yeah, it's also a good reminder, guys. We have the indices. We have SPX, we have NDX. You can also use SPY, IWM. We have every index in North America, every ETF. In fact, one of my favorite trades is an ETF, it's XLF, which is the financial ETF. It is a rolling call spread. So that's loading. While you're doing that, a couple of other things. Oh, Mike, so you're asking, so you just talked about treating your trades like a portfolio. How do you balance your trades overall? That really depends on the environment that we're in. So when we're in an environment of high implied volatility, we're gonna be selling a lot more premium as a percentage of our overall allocation. If we're in lower implied volatility environments, we might be, and during earnings, we may be buying more premium, buying long calls leading up or buying straddles and that sort of thing. So it really depends on the environment. Yeah, agreed. One thing I would say, while it's scary to watch the market keep going up and to feel bullish, this is just opinion, it's not advice, right? It's okay to follow the trend. In fact, I have a rule of thumb, which is I follow the trend until it doesn't work twice in a row. Stop working twice in a row? Okay, I'm gonna stop doing that trade. That's how I know that I'm, I never have to worry about missing out. I'm gonna try, I'm gonna try. I'm gonna keep winning on these pre-earnings trades. It's pre-earnings momentum, it just keeps working. Eventually, it will stop working. I mean, the market's not gonna go forever. Well, I mean, there's one story that says it's gonna go for the next 28 years, but let's just assume that's not the case. But I just keep trying until it doesn't. And it stops like, okay, great. I have a stop on my trades. It's no big deal. No trade wins all the time. And then I stop. So this is one of my favorite trades. This is, don't know what the strategy is. It's simply buying a 30 day at the money call, long, a 50 delta call. And then every week I'm selling a Tony Delta call against it. And I make sure that this is unchecked. If this is checked, this just closes after a week. But if it's unchecked, it means the seven day option keeps, I keep selling against it. And this is what it's done in the XLF in the last three years, right? The XLF itself, this is the financial ETF. So there's no earnings here. There's no takeovers or bankruptcies. The ETF is up 63%, but just buying a call and selling calls against it is up 1100%. I mean, these are things you just, nobody knows this just inherently. Nobody says, ah, you know what a great trade was that was 20X the index, you need a computer to do it. So use a computer to do it and try all of your ideas. That's what it's here for, right? It doesn't mean that it's guaranteed it's going to win. What it does mean is that over the last three years or five years or six months, what our peer years said, it has worked. And that's the way you can test your ideas empirically rather than say, I don't know, it feels pretty good. So. I don't see any other questions, any other last questions before we sign off here. Oh fear, really appreciate you coming on and kind of doing this presentation. It's always very insightful to kind of show for to see how you use the software that you built. And we use it every day in the same kind of way to find different opportunities and look for different statistical data. Yeah, we always say navigation trading, we trade based on statistics and probabilities, not hyper-emotion. And this plays exactly into the way we trade. So awesome stuff. Sure, thank you very much. Thanks for everyone who attended. Thank you, Steve, so much for giving me the opportunity. I'll give you the screen back. Cool, yeah. And it's basically, I'll just write up here again. It is cmlviz.com forward slash nav t. Everybody can see that type text and that's where you go. If you want to get the discounted price, like Ophir said, it's for normal everyday visitors. It's $129 a month, but he's been generous enough to offer us a special. So if you sign up through navigation tradings link, you get it for $79 a month. So great stuff. Have a good evening everybody and look forward to good rest of the week of trading. All right, bye guys, have a great week. Take care.