 Hello everybody, Lee Lowell here, smartoptionseller.com. How's everyone doing today? Today is Saturday, February 20, 2021. Welcome to another edition of my Saturday YouTube videos. As you can see from the screen, today we are going to be talking about the five rules for selling put options. It's one of our most favorite topics, the one I get most questions about. It is what we do at the smartoptionseller.com. We are put option sellers in the stock market. It's what we do with our newsletters. It's what we teach people. It's one of the greatest all-time options trading strategies that I've come across in the last 30 years that I've been in the business. So once again, today we will be talking about about selling put options. So if you want to learn about selling put options, if you are a newbie and you don't know anything about it, you've heard about it, you want to learn a little bit more, stick around, that's what we will be talking about. And if you are a veteran options trader and you already know how to sell put options, well then you can watch too. Maybe you'll learn something. There's always a nugget here or two that you can learn. So let's jump right in. And after we do this, of course, we will do our Saturday synopsis where I look at the stock charts, various stock charts, and I will show you what I'm thinking, what I saw in the market over the last week and what may come forward for the next week's trading. Okay, so let's jump right in and talk about selling put options. And why do we want to sell put options and what's so great about selling put options? So first of all, one thing that you should know is that when you sell a put option contract, what you're essentially doing is you're obligating yourself to potentially buy a certain stock at a certain price by a certain date. There's no guarantees that you will actually buy the stock and but the best thing about it is that you will get paid upfront cash for your obligation. So if there's a stock out there that you're looking to buy but you don't want to buy it at its current price because maybe it's just too expensive for you right now, you can sell a put option contract at the level of the stock where you'd be willing to buy that stock and in exchange for your obligation, someone will pay you money right up front. So being the option seller, there's an put option buyer who will buy that option contract from you and when somebody buys something from you, they have to pay you for it. So if you like collecting money like we do, you can sell a put option. That's what we do with the smart option seller. We sell put options all day long every month on stocks that we would like to own at a cheaper price than where it currently trades. And if we get the chance to buy that stock, that could be a great thing. But the way that we do it is that we wanna buy these stocks at such cheap prices in the future that it's almost guaranteed that we won't get to buy the stock but that's okay, you know why? Because we're getting paid up front for our obligation. So we're making money off of our obligation. Think about insurance companies, okay? What do they do? Well, they sell you insurance on your car and your home, your life even. And if you don't get into a car accident, if your house doesn't burn down and if you don't die for 30 years, what you're doing is you're paying the insurance company all those premiums month after month after month or yearly however you end up paying your insurance. And the insurance companies collect all this money. It's sort of the same thing as a put option seller. You're selling somebody, you're selling someone insurance basically, that's what it is. You're gonna buy that stock from this other person at the price where you wanna buy it and they're gonna sell you that stock. So what they're looking to do is sell their stock at some point in the future if it's advantageous for them and what you will do is you will buy the stock from them. Potentially, there's no guarantee. So in a nutshell, it's all about wanting to potentially buy a stock at your price. So we're gonna look at some examples and we're gonna go over my list here. So first thing you wanna do is pick a stock that you're interested in buying and holding for the long term. This is a quality stock. A company that you know is quality, been around a long time, makes great products that everybody loves. Think Apple, right? Think Apple. Apple is a great company. There's like billions of iPhones around the world and they just keep pumping out these iPhones and people keep buying these iPhones. So Apple makes a lot of money. Its share price goes up over time. So you think Apple is gonna be a winner in the long run. So I'm just using this as an example, pick a stock that you'd be interested in buying for the long term and obviously that stock has a current price. Whatever it's trading for at today's prices. And you're interested in not buying it at today's prices, you're interested in buying it at a much cheaper price. Somewhere that you decide, a level where you decide you'd be comfortable buying the stock. And then what you do is you sell the corresponding put option at the strike price that matches your potential buy in level. And then you look to see how much the options are paying, how much someone would be willing to pay you. All options have different expiration dates. So the longer out in time you go on the expiration date scale, the more money someone will pay you. So you have to decide to wanna hold for the long term, for the short term and we'll look at some option prices to see what's going on there. And so it's essentially a way to make current income or passive income, I should say current and passive income by selling put options, okay? You're gonna sell put options and you're gonna create an obligation for yourself to potentially buy the stock. And I say potentially because there's no guarantee that you will buy the stock in the future. But what is guaranteed is that you will get the money that the option buyer pays you. That is guaranteed no matter what. So you're making money right from the get go when you sell the put option. Now, if in fact you do get to buy the stock at your price, you have to remember you have to pay for that stock. It's at least 100 shares. Every option contract consists of 100 shares of stock. So if you're looking to buy 100 shares at a potential $50 buy price, you have to make sure that you have $5,000 in the end if you have to fulfill your obligation. Until that day occurs, you don't have to hold the full $5,000 on hand at all times. You will be required to hold a smaller amount of money while the trade is active. That's what's called the margin requirement. And we can talk about that a little bit too a little bit later. So let's go to the charts here and just take a quick look to see what we wanna do. Let's pull up Apple since that's what we were talking about here. So Apple is a stock that you love. You love Apple. You don't own any shares yet, but you say to yourself, you know what? I wanna buy some Apple. I wanna get on on this thing. Look at Apple. It just keeps going up over time. We can take a long term look at Apple. Look at Apple. Just beautiful. Just goes up over time. Getting pretty high levels here. So you may be thinking, you know, it looks like it might be topping out. Maybe I don't wanna buy it at its current level. Maybe I wanna shoot for something, you know, a little bit down here if I could try to buy Apple for that price. So anyway, so Apple's trading around, you know, just under $130 a share and you're thinking, you know what? I think it may be due for a pullback. I don't wanna buy it at $130. You know, what's my buying level? What is my desired buying level potentially for Apple? Well, the way that we do it in our newsletter and the way that I teach people is you wanna get a good deal. You wanna try to buy the stock at a really cheap price. And to me, that's at least a 20% level below the current price. So if Apple's at $130, 20% is about a $26 drop. So you're looking to buy Apple maybe at $103 a share, somewhere at that level. That would be, you would really wanna buy Apple near $100 a share, let's say. Okay, that would be your preferred buy-in point. You don't wanna buy it at $130. You wanna buy it at $100. How do you do that? How can you buy Apple at $100 when it's currently trading at $130? Well, you can't do that in the open market. You can't go out in the open market and try to buy Apple at $100 because it's trading at $130. So what you do is you sell a put option at $100 strike price for some time in the future. You have to check the option chains to see what the expiration dates are paying. And we will look at that. So you say, okay, I want about a $30 discount from Apple's current price. I wanna buy Apple potentially at $100 a share. So now that you've decided that $100 is your preferred buy-in level, let's go look at the option chains to see what Apple is paying for those put options. Now, let me pull up the option chains for Apple. Now, these are small numbers here. This is the put options on the right. And we're gonna go out to, let's look at the June, 2021 put options for Apple at the $100 strike price. Let's see what those things are trading for. We scroll down here. I know these numbers are a little small. So at the $100 level right here, here's the 100 strike for the June, 2021 put options. That expired roughly four months or so. Okay, so you're looking at a four month option contract. Now, on Friday, yesterday, February 19, 2021, the Apple $100 puts for June went out at $1.58 bid at $1.65 offer. You figure, you wanna try to sell this option contract somewhere in between the bid and ask price. That's what you always wanna do. You wanna haggle, you wanna get a bargain. Whether you're buying stock, selling stock, buying options, selling options, you always wanna try to do something in between the bid ask. And you can do that. You put in a limit order at your preferred buy or sell price, whatever you're doing with the options. In this case, we're selling the put option, not buying it, we're selling the put option. So we're gonna shoot for $1.60 per contract. What does that mean? Well, each option contract consists of 100 shares of stock. So whatever prices you see here, you have to multiply by 100 and that'll tell you how much money you will actually be paid when you sell the put option. So if we put in an order to sell one of these put option contracts for $1.60 per contract, someone will pay us $160 today, right up front, just for our obligation to potentially buy 100 shares of Apple at $100 per share by June expiration. So when you enter this trade, when you sell this put option, you'll get $160 in your account. And now basically you're on the hook for the next four months to see what Apple stock does. Will Apple stock go up? Will it go down? Will it go sideways? You don't know, you just have to wait and see. But what you do know is that you have put in an obligation to buy 100 shares at $100 for the next four months. And how would that come to fruition? How would you actually end up buying the 100 shares at $100 at June? Well, here's what has to happen. In order for you to get those shares, Apple actually has to fall from its current price of $130 all the way down to $100 by June. And if Apple stock is trading at $100 or below at the June expiration date, then you will be called upon to fulfill your obligation and buy those 100 shares at $100 this year. Now, at that moment in time, are you going to be happy? Well, that depends. If Apple was truly, if you truly wanted to buy Apple at $100 a share, sure, you should be very happy. You just got to buy Apple for a $30 discount from where it was trading four months prior. And you will have to pay $10,000. You need to have at least $10,000 in your brokerage account to pay for those shares in full. And then come Monday morning after that Friday expiration, you will now have 100 shares of Apple sitting in your account and your account will be debited by your broker, $10,000. So let's just say between now and June, Apple is fluctuating up and down, goes up, it goes down, it goes sideways. And you'll notice that over time, now, option prices are not stagnant. Option prices will fluctuate higher and lower based upon where the stock goes and based upon the time until expiration. So let's just say Apple was still trading around $130 at the June expiration. It didn't drop to 100, it's still trading at 130. What is this Apple $100 put worth now, now that we've reached the June expiration? Well, this put option will be worth zero. This put option contract will have zero value because it's not worth anyone selling shares of Apple to you at $130 when they can sell Apple at $130 in the open market. So this $100 put won't have a value anymore. It'll be worth zero. So essentially what happens is that you sold it for $160, now it's worth $0. You would just walk away with your $160 in your pocket and the trade is over, it's done with. You didn't get to buy the shares at $100 because Apple stayed at $130. So you got $160 free and clear, you walk away and the trade is over. But let's just say Apple did fall to $100 by June, you get your shares and now you're an owner of Apple at $100 a share. Well, what happens if Apple now all of a sudden starts to tick down to $95, $90, $80? Well, if Apple starts to go down to 80 bucks, well now you're in the hole, just like every other investor that owns shares of Apple, you're looking at a paper loss at the moment because Apple has fallen below the area where you bought the option con, you bought the shares of stock. Now, you also wanna know what your actual break even is. Since you're buying shares at $100 a share, what you can do is subtract the original amount you took in, you took in $1.60 per contract. So that actually lowers your buy-in level to $98.40 per share for Apple, you take the 100 strike price and you minus out the premium that you took in when you first sold the option. So now you actually have a cost basis of $98.40. But even still, if Apple drops to $80, you're still looking at an $18 per share paper loss. So what do you do? Well, do you hold on because you have a long-term view of Apple and you think eventually it's going to go up? That's up to you. Any investment could go down in price after you've purchased it. And it can also go up. You hold on for price appreciation. So you have to play the stock, you have to play your investment just like you would with any other investment. Do you hold forever? Do you set a stop loss for yourself? If you bought Apple for $100 a share, what if Apple falls to $50 a share? Are you still holding on? What if we have another pandemic? Are you still holding on to your Apple shares? That's up to you to decide. I can't make this decision for you. Maybe you set a 20 or 25% stop loss on your shares. If you bought Apple at 100, you sell a 25% stop loss. You're selling Apple out at $75 a share. And you take the $25 per share loss. It's up to you. You have to play it how you deem necessary. Stay within your comfort zone. But if you're in for the long haul and you think, you know what, I'm holding on to my Apple shares till the day I die, then you could do that as well. As we know, Apple's a very successful company. The stock most likely will continue to go up over time. So the whole point of selling put options is all about, number one, picking a stock that you want to hold for the long term. Decide on a really cheap price that you'd like to buy the stock. Now you have to look at the charts and figure out how do I assess what would be a good buying level for Apple? Where do I want to buy Apple? Do I want a 10% discount, 20% discount, 30% discount, completely up to you to decide. Do you use the moving averages as areas of support? If you're, this is a 200 day moving average. If you're thinking 200 day moving average would give Apple a really good support level. Well, right now it's right around $111 or so. Maybe you put in, you sell 111 strike price or whatever strike price is closest to $111 could be the $110 puts. You decide. Let me show you, the strike prices for Apple in June at least, goes all the way down to, scroll up here. The $18.75 strike price is listed. Now it doesn't have any value, but you can potentially obligate yourself to buy Apple for $18.75, if someone's willing to pay you. As I said earlier, the longer you go out in time in the expiration scale, the more money you will get. So let's take a look at, let's just go out to what's the longest dated Apple options are, March 2023. So just over two years from now, Apple options are listed. The lowest strike listed is the 65 put option. That's trading, I don't know, $275. You'll get for selling one of these things and you're obligating yourself to buy Apple at $165. That's almost a 50% discount from its current price. Let's take a look at, I wanna see how far down these strike prices go. Let's look at January 2023, see if they have the really low strike price. Okay, so here, the $30 strike price. You can obligate yourself to buy Apple for $30 a share. It's over a $100 move from its current price. And someone will give you 32 bucks in your pocket today. $32 for your obligation to buy 100 shares of Apple at $30 a share. Let's take a look at the charts and see where $30 is on Apple. Okay, right now you can't see it because I've got $50 is the low, but here I'll squeeze this in a little. So here's Apple, $30 a share, okay. Someone will give you $32 for your obligation to buy Apple at $30 a share. It's currently at $130. It's a $100 discount. Is that good for you? You hold on for the next two years, someone gives you 30 bucks. I don't know, is it worth it? You have to decide. And so you decide how long do you wanna hold on to the trade? Now, the shorter the expiration, the less money you will receive. That's because there's just less time for Apple to drop to your level. So the more time you give for the stock to make the move, the more money you will receive. So you have to decide how long am I willing to do? Now you can sell, continuously sell these put options over and over and over again if you never end up buying the shares. So if you sold the $100 put for, let's say, April, you know, two months from now and Apple doesn't fall to 100, you walk away with your payment and then you do the trade again for another two months. And if Apple doesn't fall to your level, the trade will expire, you keep the money and then you do another trade again for another two months out in time. So you can do it for a couple months at a clip or you can go long-term and go out one year in time. It's up to you, you need to decide, you look at the option chains and think about, okay, well, how much am I getting paid versus how long do I have to hold the trade for? So there's many different choices. There's many different options pun intended. So you have to look at the option chain and see what these prices are trading for. And follow the steps here, okay? You find the stock that you like, you decide on the level you potentially want to buy it for, you check the option chain and you check the expiration dates and you sell the option. And now at this point, like I said, you have to wait around to see what happens. Well, here's my little risk notice here down at the bottom. If for whatever reason, after a while you're thinking, you know what, I'm not so sure about this stock anymore. It was looking good for a while but now it looks like earnings are bad and I don't know if it's got long-term longevity anymore. I don't know if I wanna potentially buy this stock anymore. Well, you can always get out of an option trade. You don't have to hold until expiration. Buying and selling options, you can buy and sell it will. You can get out one minute later, an hour later, a week later, a month later, doesn't matter. You can always buy and sell your option contracts. So if you are not comfortable with the trade anymore, you can always buy back the put option for whatever it's currently trading in the market. And that could lock you in for a loss or lock you in for a gain. Remember, when you sell the put option, let's just use this Apple option as an example. You sold the option for $1.60 per contract and Apple's fluctuating, moving up and down. All of a sudden, that option contract is worth a dollar per contract now. Well, you figure, you know what? I don't wanna be in this trade anymore. I just wanna buy the option back. You buy the option back for a dollar a contract. You sold it for $1.60, now you're buying it back for a dollar a contract. You can lock yourself in a $0.60 per contract gain. That's $0.60 that you've just made and you're out of the trade. Now, if Apple starts to tank and you're nervous and you don't wanna be in the trading more, now that put option contract could be worth $2.60 now. If you buy it back, that would lock in a dollar per contract loss. That's $100 loss. So you can always get in and out whatever you wanna do. But if you're in for the long haul, then you wait it out until expiration to see if Apple falls to your strike price, okay? The stock has to fall to the strike price for you to actually buy those shares of stock. Now, I've said if you end up buying the shares for $100, that's a $10,000 investment that you have to put up. But before that happens, before you actually end up buying the stock, you don't have to have the $10,000 on hand at all times if you're trading in a margin account. If you're using a margin account, your broker will assess the margin requirement. The margin requirement is just a small bit, a smaller bit of your free cash that has to be held aside while the trade is active. It's typically about 20% of what the full shares would cost you. So if it's $10,000 to buy these shares, your broker may ask you to keep aside $2,000 roughly. $2,000 or less of your free cash aside. You can't use that $2,000 anymore while the trade is active. So that's what's called the margin requirement. So you check with your broker, see how much their margin requirement is. And that's it. That's really all you're doing. So you're just waiting to see what happens until expiration and you may or may not get to buy the stock. But the guaranteed thing is that you will always get paid for your obligations. So we have tons of people. I know tons of people. There's a lot of people out there that just sell put options as their source of income. They're hoping that the stock doesn't fall to the strike price. They're not really so interested in buying the stock. They just want to make the income. They want to keep selling put options to generate all this income. Now, that is a way to make money, yes. But you have to be careful with that. You don't want to sell put options on just any random stocks because they're paying you money. You want to make sure that you're selling put options on stocks that you potentially want to buy. Because if you're just selling random put options on random stocks, you may have to buy a stock that you're not really interested in and that stock could go down and then you're not happy. So just stick with the quality stocks, stick with stocks that you like. And then there you go. That's how you sell put options. It's a very easy process. We do it all the time. That's what we do in the smart option seller newsletter. I pick the stocks. I pick the put option strikes. I tell everybody, here's what you do. You sell the put option strike and we collect the money. Now, let's take a quick look at something that we've done recently at the smart option seller newsletter. Let me show you, pull up one of the emails and I'll show you the chart and why we did it. And we did a put option sell. We sold a put option on Micron. And here's, you know, if you're part of the smart option seller newsletter, this is what the alert, this is what we call alerts. This is what the alert looks like. I send you an email as soon as I see the trade develop and we're selling, this was on January 27, 2021. We've already entered and closed out of this trade already because it moved greatly in our favor. So we sold the put option, bought it back at a cheaper price and we locked in our game. But here's the original sell order. Now, remember, the sell order comes first. We're not buying this thing, we're selling it. And so what we did is we sold a Micron 55 strike put option for March 19, 2021. We try to sell it for 25 cents per contract or higher. And this is the email that everybody gets. Now, why would I want to sell a Micron put option? Well, selling put options is more of a neutral to bullish type of strategy, okay? So when I'm seeing, you know, this is Micron, daily chart of Micron, so Micron's in this beautiful uptrend. It's been bouncing off the 20 day moving average. So on January 27th, I decided that here when Micron was in a nice uptrend, I wanted to wait for it to pull back to one of the moving average lines. So on January 27th, this bar right here, let's open this up a little so we can see. So on this bar right here, this is a one day bar. This is actually January 27th. This is the actual day that we got into the trade. We want, I thought Micron was gonna bounce and start to move back up, which we actually nailed the bottom. This is the day of January 27th. This is the day we got into the trade. We sold the put option and the stock went up, put option price went down, and that allowed us not much later to actually buy the put option back and lock in again. So that's how we do it. Now, sometimes I use, let me edit the studies here, I use a 40 day moving average on the chart as well. So I've got the blue 20 day, I've got the red 50 day, and sometimes I'll put in a 40 day period moving average. Some people follow the 40 day and you can see Micron bounce right off the 40 period of 40 day moving average. And that's why we get into the trade. So when I'm looking at the charts, I'm looking first, nice strong uptrending stocks that are pulling back to one of the moving averages and then we jump in. As long as the stock shows me that, it's ready to move back up. So that's how you do it. We get into the trade, we sell the put option, and when the stock rallies, we buy the put option back to lock in again. We don't buy the stock, we just make money off the put option. So that's how you do it, okay? So selling put options, once again, here's your cheat sheet. This is what you do. Just remember, multiple streams of income. We like multiple streams of income. Selling put options is a stream of income. Just make sure you stay within your comfort zone, pick a quality stock, and you either get to buy the stock or you don't, but either way, guarantee that you will be paid the put option premium. So there you go, there's your lesson for today. Let's move into our Saturday synopsis. Saturday synopsis, some people like this. I take a look at the stock indexes, stock charts, see what's going on over the past week and what may be going forward for next week. So let's take a look at the indexes. We always start with the SPY, Exchange Traded Fund for the S&P 500. We've been bullish, I've been bullish, the market's been bullish. The thing just keeps ticking higher. The indexes just keeps ticking higher. Now, there are individual stocks that aren't following along as well as the indexes. The indexes are made up of many different stocks. So it's just been in this nice, slow uptrend up. I've got the 20-day blue line and I'm gonna get rid of the 40-day because that kind of clutters the chart a little bit. Let me take that off here and stick with our typical 20-day, 50-day, 200-day moving average. And the S&P 500 has just been kind of chugging along the 20-day moving average. Had this little pullback here, it was about two weeks ago or so, bounced right off the 50-day moving average and started to move up again. Simple technical analysis people, when you have stocks moving greatly in a nice upward direction, pullbacks should be contained by either the 20-day or 50-day moving average. And if stocks are in a downtrend, they will be contained by the 50-day and 20-day. Let's take a quick look at a stock like Kellogg here. So Kellogg is a stock that's in a downtrend. And when it is moving down and it goes back higher, it will usually get rejected by the 20-day or the 50-day. You can see it sort of hugs these moving average lines. So the moving averages work on the way up and work on the way down, depending on if you're bullish or bearish for a stock. So let's go back to the SPY here. So it's just, it's continuing to move up. There's really nothing to derail this thing. I mean, I know people are calling for stocks hitting a top, stocks are getting overbought. Their valuations are getting very high. But, you know, people have been saying that for years and years and years. If stock, remember, remember, these are actual companies. These aren't just blips on the scene. These are actual companies creating actual products, putting out actual earnings. And if the earnings keep going up quarter after quarter after quarter, the stock price is going to keep going up as well. So sometimes stocks can get ahead of themselves. Yes, sometimes stocks could go up greatly and gravity eventually will pull it back down. But if you have solid companies with solid fundamentals that will slowly continue to move up over time. I mean, you may have thought that this was the top here right before the pandemic. Now due to the pandemic, of course it fell. But, you know, some people might have said, okay, well, we hit here in June, the stock can't go up anymore. It pulled back, but then it kept going. And you might think, well, this is the top for good. Well, yeah, pulled back and then it went up and then it pulled back and then it kept going up. So over time, stocks continue to go up. It's just how the stock market works. It's the best place to put your money for any kind of return. It's just, that's it. The stock market goes up over time. The stock market is made up of companies that create products and services that people want to buy. And if people are keep paying for these things, the company keeps making more money. So that's just the reason why the stock price keeps going up. So calling, trying to call tops is very hard to do. And you're just gonna keep missing out on the moves. Now, I'm not gonna say that the market won't pull back. There, of course there's gonna be periods where the market pulls back and periods where the market pulls back a lot stronger. But if the pandemic, a worldwide pandemic couldn't hold the stock market down for longer than this, I don't, I can't see any other thing holding the stock market down for long periods of time either. Yes, we may get another catastrophe of some sort around the world, drop the stock market. But what happened here? All the central banks around the world stepped in and backstopped everything. You think that won't happen again? Of course it will happen again. So I like to stay long. It's just the way to make money long-term in the market. So the SAP 500 looks good. Let's take a look at the NASDAQ, which has really been the leader since the bottom of the pandemic. Let's see if my chart should be populating here for a second. Come on, it's not pulling up. What's going on here? Seems that everything seems to have been frozen here. What's happening here? Let's take a, let's take a, let me change my, no, no, I don't wanna do that. Okay, so something's, okay, here we go. Let's pull up the NASDAQ. Let's get that in here. No, I got nothing. I'm not really sure what's happening. Why is that happening? All right, well, stocks aren't working at the moment. If I change the internet connection, it's gonna knock me offline here, so I don't wanna ruin the recording. Well, let's see if any other stock, give me a quick second here. Let's see what's happening. I've got, okay, okay, here we go. Come on, people. All right, let's take a look at the Dow real quick. The Dow, strong too. We had this little pullback about two weeks ago, fell below the 50-day moving average, but quickly bounced back. That's what stocks do. When stocks are in a nice uptrend, they pull back to one of the moving average lines and keeps going up. Dow, all-time new highs, once again. Things look good for the Dow. Let's try the NASDAQ here, see if it populates, okay, we're back in action. Look how strong this thing is. I mean, this thing's getting going up greatly. Pull back right to the 20-day moving average. Looked like that was Thursday, probably. Bounced right off the 20-day moving average on Thursday. Had all-time new highs again. Finished a little lower towards the end of the week, but it's bouncing, looks pretty good. RSI, it's not anywhere near overbought territory. I use this sometimes to tell me if things look a little overbought or oversold. It's not an overwhelming indicator for me, but it's around 60, not a big deal. So, market looks strong, market looks good. Let's take a quick look at some stocks here. Let's take a look at some individual stocks that we like to take a look at. Apple, we talked about Apple earlier in the recording with the put selling. Apple, as I've been saying, I'm Long Apple. I did not like how it dropped below the 50-day moving average here this week, but if Friday ended up on a higher note than it did Thursday, let's open this up a little bit. Okay, so each day, each bar is one day. So, drop below the 50-day. Hopefully, it will find its footing and come back up. Apple's in a nice strong uptrend. This is probably just a normal pullback, okay? I would like to see it start to move back up again. Let's take a look at Amazon. Now, we usually take a look at the more popular stocks that are out there that everyone seems to be involved with Amazon. Still stuck in this wide channel, still stuck in the triangle congestion pattern. So, Amazon's been really tight in this range for months on end now. So, it just doesn't, can't figure out where it wants to go. So, it will stay in this range until something pushes it out. At this point, the next something will probably be its next earnings announcement in a couple months from now. So, unless there's some other catalyst to really push it out, there's nothing that will do it. So, maybe if it reaches the apex of this congestion pattern, then it may finally get its groove on and go higher or lower. I'm banking on the higher side, but for now, Amazon is just tight in this range. Let's take a look at Tesla. Tesla, once again. Now, I've had these congestion patterns. This one was right before earnings announcement popped, initially out of earnings and then fell out of earnings and then it created this other congestion pattern that I drew not that long ago and it actually fell below, outside, down below the congestion pattern, but caught the 50-day moving average. So, the key here is, will Tesla bounce off the 50-day moving average and start to move higher again? You know, $900 a share. You know, it may have found a top for a little while, but here it is, sitting on the 50-day moving average, bounce right off of it. We'll see how Tesla wants to go next week. We know Tesla is a very beloved company. It could stay up here, but you have to see how it tests this 50-day moving average and see where it goes from there. What other stocks do we look at? Google, of course. We look at Google. Google's been good. Had its earnings here, gapped up and continues to move higher. Google's strong, had good earnings. So, Google wants to keep going up. We'll see. We always talk about filling the gaps. That would mean the stock has to come back down to about this level to fill this gap. That's what's called filling the gap. Who knows? Google could just keep going up from here. What else? AMD is one stock we always look at. We always like to talk about AMD because I love the company. We sell put options on AMD. We actually have an active position, an active put sell position on AMD. So, AMD had the W pattern. Just couldn't really crack above the resistance line for too long. Now it's sort of in this downtrending channel. I drew this channel the last week. So, hit the bottom, hit the top of the channel. Now it looks like it may come back to the bottom here of the channel. AMD just kind of meandering around, not really going anywhere. And same thing with put selling. Put selling works even if a stock meanders. Stock doesn't have to go up to be a profitable put sell. It could go sideways. So, that's AMD. I already showed you Micron. What else do we have? Netflix, take a look at Netflix. Netflix is still in this wide channel. Sideways channel, it's called. Goes down to the bottom, goes near the top, goes down to the bottom, near the top, bottom. It moved back above, couldn't crack through it. Couldn't find the momentum. It's coming back down, bouncing off the 20 day. Looks like it wants to maybe tag the 50 day next week and we'll see. But it's definitely staying in this channel. Let's take a look at what do we got? I want to show you Caterpillar because this was a stock that we traded in our spreads newsletter. Once again, I saw the bounce here and when we sell put options spreads, it's the same thing we're looking for as selling individual put options. We're looking for bounces in the market. Now, in our spreads newsletter, do the same thing. I'm looking for bounces. We got into a trade on, I think February, February 5th or February 4th, bounced right off the 20 day moving average Caterpillar. Looking good. So, stocks are, you know, when you're in a nice up trend like this, look for a pullback to the moving average line if you're looking for an entry. I want to talk about Walmart. Walmart came out with earnings this week. Didn't do so well, unfortunately. Had a, you know, an $8 drop kind of sitting right near the 20 day moving average. Will Walmart be down for good? I don't think so. The largest physical retailer on the planet and I think the largest employer in the private sector, Walmart, can't keep Walmart down for long. Walmart's had a great stock for the long run. Sideways for a long period of time and then just started moving up. I mean, Walmart's a monster. So they had some, not the greatest of earnings but they're the biggest retailer on the market. They sell every product on earth, basically. And so they had a little pullback. You know, this could be a support line for them. We'll see what happens. If it gets through the 200 day moving average then we may have a drop a little bit further possibly down to near $120 level where the last area support was but could find support here and maybe bounce back. All right, so that's pretty much it for individual stocks. You know, some people want to talk about GameStop. This story's done, this story's over. GameStop went up, came back down, it's trading $40 a share now. You know, that was a good two week flip. Fun thing to watch in the market. You know, I hope you made some money on it if you were involved. Same thing with AMC, same story, up and then down. You know, that story is over with the Robin Hood, Wall Street Reddit thing. There was hearings in Congress this week about it. So what else do we have? And so now we have the Bitcoin stock. Now Bitcoin, Bitcoin's hitting $57,000 a coin now. I mean, this week was just tremendous. We talked about these stocks last week. Riot is a Bitcoin mining company. If Bitcoin itself goes up, Riot stock goes up as well. I mean, it's just powered higher. Will it drop? It'll only drop if Bitcoin drops. If Bitcoin keeps going up, Riot's going to keep going up as well. So we've been looking at some of these stocks. All right, so that's it here for your Saturday synopsis. We take a quick look back at the SPY just to kind of get an idea. We like to take a look at the indexes because it's great for passive investing to just follow the market. SAP 500, once again, it looks strong. It may have some pullbacks, but there's nothing to derail it, I don't think, for a massive move down. There's, you know, what is there out there? Yes, coronavirus is still around. The vaccines are out. Everyone's, or not everyone, but the vaccine rollout is out. People are getting vaccinated. I'm bullish. I really don't see anything to derail this market. Pullbacks will happen. That could be a good timing point for you. All right, so that's it for the Saturday synopsis. Let's, once again, take a look at, let's go to our website here. PutSellingBase at smartoptionseller.com, seller.com, or put your download, or put your name and email address in here for your free guide. Okay, we'll send you a free guide. Learn how to sell, put options. Also, our service is right here. Two newsletters talked about smart option seller, that's the one where we sell individual put options. I showed you the Micron trade. I do all the heavy lifting. I pick the stock, pick the strike price, pick the expiration date, sell point. Now people can use my picks. People in my service will say, you know what, I like the way Lee picks stocks. He seems to be able to tell when these stocks are going up. I'm gonna buy the stock itself. I'm gonna buy call options and sell put options because they trust me. So we stick to selling put options. That's what the newsletter is, vertical spread trader. That's our put options spread newsletter. We sell those put options spreads. And once again, our one-on-one coaching. If you wanna get a handle on how to do this, if you need some help, if you're just a beginner, consider our one-on-one coaching. We've been helping a lot of students. So that's what we do, smartoptionseller.com. Okay, everyone, thanks for watching today. I hope this video has given you some good information on selling put options. In the bottom right hand corner of this video is the red subscribe button. Please hit the subscribe button so you will always be notified. Turn on the notifications. You'll know when I put out another video. Give me a thumbs up if you think this was helpful to you. Leave me a comment. I always try to answer these comments. Send me an email if you have questions. I always try to answer your emails. Okay, well, that's it for me today. I hope everyone has a great weekend and I will see everyone next week. This is Lee Lowell signing off.