 Another day another grind higher. What's up trade hackers today's Thursday, December 19th Welcome to today's update Take a look at the S&P 500 Looking at the expected move for the week. We are budding up right up against that upper end We've got about an hour left in the market today on Thursday S&Ps up about nine points. And so just continuing that march higher. So What does one do on a death march like this? Well earnings we do some earnings trades So there's been some there's some posts today after the bell. We've got KMX. Let's take a look at KMX decent implied volatility and so we did attempt to put on a trade in KMX actually I Got filled on just a few contracts. This wasn't an official Navigation alert just because the liquidity is not quite there I want to make sure the alerts that we send out to members are absolutely Super liquid and really good trading opportunities. This was just kind of an okay one But I took a few contracts in my personal account didn't even get filled on all of them I wasn't gonna chase it But I've got a big buffer to the downside if price moves down and of course if price rips higher We'll make a little bit as well. So that's what we're playing in KMX. The other earnings was Nike Kind of a similar thing just put on an iron duck with a potential max profit going down and no risk to the upside So we'll see what happens in both of those like I said the market's still open as I'm recording this So I'm not sure what those are going to report yet. The other thing that we are looking at tomorrow Friday is the last day of trading for our Shopify Let me change this date back to today. So here's our Shopify reverse iron duck You can see we've got prices hanging out right here. So we got a really good profit Gonna hold this into tomorrow See if we can squeak out a couple more shekels and then close this one out Hopefully for a nice profit other than that we've got a we've also got an iron condor in gold That profit is ready to be harvested just giving it a little bit more time See if we can squeak out a little bit more on that one In fact, I'd like to just add this add to this now the trading cycle here It's still got 40 days until expiration So don't necessarily want to go out to the next expiration, but might look to do that if we go out to the Further expiration what do we have here like 60? Yeah 68 days to expiration on that cycle It's a little bit more than then we like but Studies actually show when implied volatility is low selling premium out further Actually is a little bit more beneficial So we might look at doing that tomorrow adding one in that in that March cycle in those longer dated options I know we did the same thing in bonds earlier this week When we sold some premium in bonds, so that's probably what we'll do I mean the the implied volatility in GLD is not great if we look at gold Ivy percentile at 27 But it's one of the higher ones on the board, right? We've got bonds We've got that gas and then really gold is next so it's not optimal I mean we like to sell premium when implied volatility is really high when either the Ivy percentile or Ivy rank is over this 50 level But we also want to stay active and what we do is we just keep our position sizes smaller and Continue to stay in the game until we get some more opportunities. So that's what we're gonna do in Gold and then lastly we added it in rut our UT We closed out of a weekly double calendar prices. I mean rut's just been strong, man Grinding higher. So we were hoping for just a tiny little pullback, but didn't happen So we went ahead and took a loss on that one and then re-entered a new one So we're in a new fresh weekly double calendar in rut The last thing I want to touch on is the VIX if we take a look at the VIX. Let's go to a one-year chart You can see it's at about 12.7 right now. So really at the at the lower end of its range You know, I mean this is this is pretty darn low compared, you know over the last year and So what does that mean? Well nothing. I mean, you know, the VIX can stay low for a long long time. And so Strategies using the VIX. We're actually working on a course right now. It's going to be Haven't decided what to call the strategy yet is it's basically to protect your portfolio from Spikes in the VIX. You can't just buy calls in the VIX. I mean, that's a losing strategy through and through Selling puts is, you know, there's just no premium in here But we've got a strategy that I think you guys are really going to like because here's the problem going back to the S&P 500 You know, what do you what do you do in a situation like this where you get these extended moves higher? You know, and who who knows how long this can go on? Well, when you have short delta positions using verticals and things like that I mean that becomes a significant drag on your portfolio performance And so one of the things that we're going to be rolling out is a strategy that we're utilizing in the VIX and we've been testing it for Months now, but I just want to make sure I've got the criteria correct before we release it to everybody But I think you're really going to like it because it's going to give you that protection from Spikes in the VIX which are correlated with Down moves in the market So you're going to be able to be protected on that downside without having the drag Of carrying all that short delta in your portfolio. So I'm excited to release that that's going to be some time in early 2020 I've also been in talks with a developer About a trade tracker. So tracking your roles tracking your different options trades, which the broker does not do for you Whether it's tasty works or toss they don't they don't track that for you So then of course we've got our trade tracker spreadsheet, which is kind of a nice little tool to do that with But this one is going to be kind of that spreadsheet on steroids. So it's going to it's going to be pretty cool More to come on that front. Everybody. Have a good night. We will talk to you tomorrow