 But you have to say to yourself, you know, where do I want to stand as a professional trader going forward? Do I want to keep on continuing to chase the drug the next high? Okay, or do I want to come back down to earth? Welcome to Access to Trader, the number one community for those who are committed to taking control of their trading in order to achieve success, profitability and longevity. Thank you for joining us. Here's Dan Shapiro to help you find your edge, master your process and own your future. Hey guys, happy new year everybody and welcome to the first edition of the Access to Trader.com 2021 update. Hope everybody had a great weekend. Hope everybody is having a great weekend. Hope everybody had a great New Year's Eve. This is the first time in my adult life or even adolescent life that I could remember staying home on New Year's Eve because, you know, again, when you're young and you're, you know, even if you're not young, the point is you want to be around with people, you want to have a good time, blow up some steam, kind of make some memories, but because of the pandemic, you know, again, obviously, this is kind of the right thing to do. And again, I'm not judging if you went out. God bless, you know, you have a good time, you only live once. But again, for me and my family, that was kind of the prudent thing to do. And, you know, it's so, you know, it's so amazing that when you when you go back and you look at the numbers from 2020, which is which is staggering, absolutely staggering. You had the S&P up 15, 16 percent, which is phenomenal. But when you look at the NASDAQ composite, it's basically the the ultimate hold by beer theory, 40, almost 43 and a half percent gain for 2020, which is unbelievable. It really is unbelievable. And the one thing that I will say during the internet craze, and again, I've said this numerous times, we got very, very lucky, I think the market made us right. The more and more I think about it, I think it's I've taken away a little bit, given myself a little bit less credit than I should, I want to congratulate you guys. Okay, if you started in 2020, I don't care if it was by luck, by skill set, the market made you right. The scoreboard is the scoreboard, right? If you started out and you survived 2020, again, at the end of the day, that's all we're trying to do. We're just trying to get it to the next year. I don't care how you got it, right? If you got there by luck, the market made you right again. Congratulations, man. Seriously, congratulations. You made it from your first year of 2020. You made your first year of trading. If you're only trading a couple of years, again, you made it another year. And don't let anybody take that away from you. Don't let the market tell you that, wow, the market made you right. And again, that was my, and I have to admit, that was my mindset for most part of the year. People are getting bailed out by chasing the market, whatever the case may be. And that is all wrong. And that's a subject of a completely different conversation. Your job right now, though, as the calendar turns, your job is not to give it back. And that is the hardest thing to do. Because again, whether you made money accidentally or you made money by your skill set, your process, whatever the case may be, your job right now is to keep it. And that's the hardest part of this business, especially when you're new, when you're involved with an incredibly hyperparabolic market that has no rhyme or reason to be where it is, but it is. And the squalboard is the squalboard. And the most important part going into 2021, especially your first year and especially for your newer traders, the first week is really the most important week. And not because of your profit and loss. It's all about your psychology. And what happens is, you know, a lot of single traders, I mean, single, literally single traders, maybe they were at a friend's house. If you went to a bar, okay, I'm not judging. You know, you're sitting there with your buddy, another trading buddy, and you scream yourself, wow, this trading thing is great. We're going to kill it this year, right? We're going to kill it this year. And maybe you will, maybe you won't. But what you're doing is you're building up expectations. Okay, you're building up anticipation, you're building up all this imagery in your head, that you're almost subconsciously expecting the market to do exactly what it did, if not better, in 2021 and 2020. But quickly, unfortunately, people do see this, the dynamics of the market change right on a snap of a finger. And again, we saw that, especially in the last week or so of the market, we saw all the leaders. And if you've been watching this broadcast, you kind of see the value in this tape for the exception of X amount of stocks has been to the downside. All you know, a lot of the names really got hit this week, really hard as well. And they're setting up to actually a lot of value to the downside in this week. But what happens is as you're getting deeper and deeper in this business in the years go by, your ultimate goal is to detach yourself from any emotional value, right? Your ultimate goal is have that FOMO, right? The fear of missing out being removed, and that being replaced with JOMO, which is basically the joy of missing out. So for example, Friday, I sat there, excuse me, on Thursday, I sat there, that was my last day of the year. And there was some pretty good value, right? There's a really good value, some pretty good pivots. I just sat there and I said, I'm okay with that. My year is done. I did what I had to do. I'm happy that I made it another year. My family's healthy. I'm very content. And that's kind of where you want to be. You want to make sure that you're not trading because the market's open because you are getting value. And if you don't want to trade, you don't have to trade as well. And when you're getting at that point of you're a brand new trader, you're going to the first week. And then all of a sudden, that stock that you bought at 10, that went from 2 to 10 that day, all of a sudden closes at 6. Another day goes by. You bought the stock at 8, that went from 4, and it closes at 3. Another day goes by. It's like a heroin addict, okay? Getting off of an amazing high, right? Think about it. Even if you've never experienced anybody, unfortunately, with a drug habit, what happens when they come off that high? They want another one. And the problem is when you run into a euphoric market, and that's exactly what happened during the dot-com era, and that's exactly what happened in 2020 despite all the pandemic, people are at highs, right? They need that next fix. And maybe, again, maybe that euphoria stretches out, right? You have Bitcoin, I think this morning was like a 30, 31,000, whatever it was, 30, 30. So maybe that extends with the euphoria because, again, people are always chasing the next high. The drug addicts are always chasing the next fix. So if you are a brand new trader, maybe Facebook doesn't work anymore this week, or Apple doesn't work anymore. But look, there's Bitcoin. Maybe it goes another 10,000 points or 10,000 coins, whatever it's called. So you're constantly chasing the next high. The problem is when the momentum ends, and it usually does, it doesn't make a difference at what point. The problem is you're going to be chasing the next high, and that next high doesn't exist. And at that point, you really have to say to yourself, well, everything that I got to this point, look, I got it no matter how I got it, again, via luck or via skill set. But now I have to figure out how not to give it back. And that's the most important part. And people have been asking me for the last two weeks, give some predictions for 20. Why? Why give some predictions, right? The whole goal is to get rid of emotions, get rid of expectations. When you're putting, you know, when you're putting, you know, price target, something, it's like somebody turning around and go, well, I'm giving Tesla a $1,000 price target this year. Okay, maybe it goes, maybe it doesn't. But what you're doing is instead of letting go of emotions, right, you're tacking on to it. Think about that. You know, you're anticipating, and are you going to be very, very disappointed? For example, if you're long at Tesla 700 bucks from Friday, you know, where are you going to be mentally if again, I'm not saying it will or it won't, I'm just using, you know, random, like, where are you going to be when the stock is at 600? Right? Or maybe where are you going to be at 800? Right? Where's your mentality going to be? Is it are you going to keep on feeding the beast and the emotional and the emotional sentiment at 800? Or you're going to start crashing down like a heroin addict that needs their next fix at 630. So that's why, again, putting predictions, putting expectations on yourself is the absolute worst thing in the world. And I know if you've been watching this broadcast for the last, you know, even for the last year, I mean, you can constantly just hear me talking about one day at a time, one trade at a time, of course, there's multi week runners on a lot of names, whether they're smaller cap names, whether they're larger cap names, or even the mega cap names. And again, you can make that argument. They did disappoint despite the 43% in the NASDAQ the last two months or so, they really have underperformed so so you can make that argument as well. But you have to say to yourself, you know, where do I want to stand as a professional trader going forward? Do I want to keep on continuing to chase the drug the next high? Okay, or do I want to come back down to earth and look at everything at face value? I don't need the heroin, I don't need the crack, I don't need the cocaine, I know way too many drug references in this update, I get it. But you kind of get the point, right? Are you constantly chasing that next big thing that's going to make you feel good emotionally? Okay, or are you finally going to come back down to earth and say to yourself, look, I'm looking at the market face value, I want to take advantage of prior traders experiences, whether they're trading 10 years longer than me, five years long from me, 25 years long from me, and kind of take a page out of their book to kind of take a scale back, reassess everything is going on, everything is going on, and look at the market from a, you know, from a logical practical point of view. Instead of Tesla's going to 1000 this year, Bitcoin's going to 50,000 this year, Amazon's going to 5000 this year, and maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. But I tell you from from a lot of experience, the faster you can detach your emotional levels to this market, the better trader you'll be. And that's why I keep on reiterating the point. I've never had a fun day. I've never had an easy day. I've, you know, I have days that I have a, you know, I'm in a good mood that, you know, everything is fine. But I've never experienced that euphoric day that people, especially unfortunately on social media, talk about how fun and easy, you know, and so I don't know what that is. Like, I'm doing this now 21 years. I don't know what that is. And maybe that's a good thing. Okay. Maybe this is why I have discussed in my voice when I have vomit pouring out of my mouth when somebody asked me to give my opinion about this business. And the most important part is kind of going into 2020. We have to put things into perspective from a technical point of view. Because if you don't, unfortunately, a lot of you guys who have had that big, big run, and again, I congratulate you. I applaud you. This is what you want to do for a living, whether it's part-time, full-time, whatever the case may be, good for you. Okay. Nobody could take that away from you. Now your job is to not give it back. Okay. Get better. Well, as we say, there's no such thing as a great trader. There's just a trader who's less shittier than the previous year. And that's exactly our goal. We want to be less shittier than the previous year. And once you get to that point of detaching yourself from emotion and looking at things from face value, that's when you start seeing very, very consistent results because you'll be emotionally removed from what you're seeing on the scoreboard and concentrating on your very specific skill set, whether you're trading Bitcoin or small caps or mid caps or pivots or beta, whatever the case may be. But put yourself in a position of strength that you're not going to rely on anybody else this year. And the most important part is look at the market from a realistic point of view, not the market that you want to have. So going into, again, if you look at the technicals, again, nothing is really telling you one way or another. But again, for all you guys who've been actively trading this market now for the last week, you saw, I mean, you see these really aggressive pulls down. I mean, like even Amazon, Amazon that had so much promise this week and had a great pivot. There was 100 points on the pivot, but the problem is it gave it up and you start looking at all the names that, you know, a lot of these retail e-commerce names, you know, you start looking at Shopify. I mean, it got hit pretty aggressively. Zoom that benefited the most out of any stock during this pandemic. And again, we had some serious pivots all week from this 66 level to this 49 level. Now this thing's getting down to this 323, 308 level. There's a lot of names that look really, really crappy. Look at Best Buy. Again, a lot of retail names that had big runs. They're all giving it up. Now again, does that change the fact that they had those big runs? No, but again, the real, the realistic part about it is now they're very, very close to breaking on down. But again, as much as there's really good, still really good setups for this week. And again, you could turn around and say, look, maybe Netflix finally runs back to this 553 level of broke out very, very aggressively on Friday. Again, still a good looking setup. Micron, right? Had a really, really good breakout on Friday. It took out a range that started all the way back on December. So you had a month of distribution. This looks good as well. Again, very, very overextended. Maybe it's not something specifically for me. But again, you could see there's very, very good value there. And again, names, more traditional names like Coke, right? Coke breaking out. Names like Las Vegas Sands that are very, very close of breaking out. So you could see there's still a lot of good value in the markets. But when you turn around and you start looking at the high flyers and you say to yourself, well, there's definitely going to be a market for everybody, the two lowest of the world. Peloton, again, maybe a couple of bucks away, but you have to assume a Zoom came in, right? And docus coming in. All these other ones, you know, Peloton starts breaking down the slobblen. You can see how it got rejected off the five. Maybe you could get a big move down as well. So I think we're in a very unique situation, especially going into the first year of the week, that there's actually going to be value for everybody. If you're a short seller, again, look at the names that had big runs. You could see where the value is to the downside. If you believe the market's going to hell in a hand basket, right? You have value for a week. If you are trading on the long side this week, plenty of value as well. Look at a stock, for example. Again, maybe it's not a stock that I would trade, but look at a stock like Comcast, right? CMCSA, right? There's a lot of value. There's a lot of really good-looking charts. So all you have to do this weekend is do your diligence, put in the work, a lot of good value to the downside, a lot of good value to the upside. Do I expect another 43% rally in the Nasdaq 100? No, I don't. I think if we can get a 10-15% move is considered good. I know that sounds crazy. Only 15% for the year, right? But the S&P 500 for 2020 was up 15%. Would you be satisfied and happy with a 6% rise for 2021? If the answer is no, then again, you're still looking at this market through euphoric rose-colored glasses. And I think if you want to kind of duplicate your efficiency, that's the way to kind of describe it, duplicate your consistency and your approach for 2021, you have to scale back expectations. You have to look at the market for one day at a time. See what the market is telling you. See what the government is saying. Stimulus checks, no stimulus checks. There they're coming. What was it? I think 2000, right? If you made money in 2021, that's great. Congratulate yourself. If you're still getting your feet wet as a new trader and you're still there for the first two, three years, it's okay as well. Your time will come. It will click. The most important part is again, be proactive in your approach. Try to eliminate the noise as far as opinions, emotional baggage. The faster you can embrace technical analysis, the smoother transition from aspiring trader to professional trader you will be. So guys, I want to wish everybody a very happy, safe, healthy, prosperous 2021. May God continue to bless you and your families. And with God's willing, I will see you all on Monday. Okay, guys, take it easy and have a great, great weekend.