 Hey everyone, Lee Lowell here from smartopsincell.com. Today is Saturday, August 13th, 2022. I'm back, took the last two weeks off, had some time, some vacation time, spent some time with the family. It's good to get away from the daily grind for a while, but I'm back here in the command center ready to go. You know, I'm ready to look for more opportunities. So here we're back for another Saturday synopsis. What do we do here? We look at the charts. I'm here to show you what I'm seeing on the charts, what I've been doing for the last 30 years in this options trading business, and try to show you what I'm seeing. The charts for me is a way to decide when it's time to get in and get out of trades, not only for myself, but also for my newsletter readers been in the business for 30 years. So I try to give you some of that knowledge that I've accumulated. And you know, before we get started, I just wanna make sure that everyone understands that what we do here at the smart options seller, we're mostly concerned with option selling strategy, specifically put option selling. So I understand a lot of people wanna learn more about put option selling. That is our main gig. That's what I've been doing mostly for the last 30 years of selling put options. And why selling put options? Because it's a strategy that allows you to take advantage of not only the inherent qualities of options trading, the selling side of options allows you to have such a huge margin for error. I know I talked to a lot of traders, especially new traders that they just can't seem to find the wins. They're mostly buying options, which does not give you a lot of opportunity for profit. Because if you don't get the direction of the stock rate and you don't get the timing rate, you're going to lose more often than not as an option buyer. On the flip side, an option seller has a lot of room for directional error. So if your assessment on the stock direction isn't right off the bat, it's not totally detrimental to your trading strategy or to your account balance, I should say. So there's a lot of cushion for error, especially the way that we do it. So put selling and especially since the market typically over the long run goes up more than it goes down. I know right now we've been in this downtrend, but in the long run, the market goes up more than it goes down. And that is a great scenario for put option sellers. So we're put option sellers here, we sell put options spreads as well, but I wanna make sure we wanna understand what we're doing. So let me just bring up my website real quick here. Put selling basics, if you have not gotten our free ebook on put selling basics, please go to our website, smartoptionseller.com up here on the header, put selling basics. It'll take you to the page where you can put in your name and email address. We'll send you an email and within that email is the link to download the free guide, okay? So I wanna make sure everyone understands that. I wanna talk about it at the beginning of the video from this point forward. And also our service is what we offer. We have two newsletters, both options selling based newsletters and we have our one-on-one coaching. So if you're just starting out an options training and you need to get a leg up, consider a coaching session with us, okay? And also within this video, this YouTube video, please leave me a comment, give me a thumbs up. Don't forget to subscribe. I'm here to help you. I do these videos for free. I wanna give you some knowledge on how to become a better options trader. So send me your questions, email me or leave comments here, send me your questions. I'm considering doing a secondary video during the week as well. So these Saturday synopsis videos are all about the charts and what I'm seeing on the charts, which are pretty long, usually 30, 35 minutes in length, but I wanna do a secondary mid-week video about an options strategy. I had those, plenty of those on my YouTube video here. If you go back to the archives, you can see some of the other videos. But I wanna get back to doing that because people are asking me about more about strategies. I make shorter ones. So leave me a comment. What are you looking to see? What do you wanna know about options trading? What's your struggles? What are you trying to figure out? What do you need help with? I'm here to help you. So I wanna make these shorter videos to get you on your way. All right, so let's just jump right in. Typically what we do on our Saturdays, the Saturday synopsis, we look at the charts. I show you what I'm seeing out there. I show you which way the market looks like it's going to go. We don't really try to predict so much. We kind of react to what the market is telling us. And then we go from there. So we always start with the SPY, which is the exchange trader front for the S&P 500. I believe the S&P 500 gives you the best overall, broadest view of the market as a whole. And what you'll see on these charts, if you're new with us and just starting to watch these videos of mine, I like to look at the daily charts. And these are daily bar charts. Open, high, low, close bars. Each one of these little lines here is one day's worth of trading. This is about two years worth of trading on my screen. I keep my charts very simple. I have three moving averages, a 20-day, 50-day, 200-day, all simple. And down here I have the 14-day RSI. Just kind of give me an idea of when something is overbought or oversold. And I make up these markings, mostly channel patterns and some other patterns that help us figure out which way a market is going to move and based on previous patterns. Now what you'll see here is these blue channels that we've drawn to try to tell us which way the market is currently in, a trend that it's currently in. And channels is a good visual to help you understand where a market's going. And then if you're bullish, you can buy at the bottom of the channel. And if you wanna take off some positions, you can sell at the top of the channel. So if you've been in the market, you know that we've been in this downtrend since January 1st. Right here is January 1st, 2022. And we've been in this six to seven month downtrend. You can see the dark blue lines is the channel. And every time we've had a rally, it's been knocked back down. But just in the last month or so, last few weeks, we've gotten out of that channel. So before I went away a few weeks ago, which was right around here, I had mentioned, if you go back and watch some of the prior videos that I made, I was enthused by how the market was able to move outside the downtrending channel. So the market's in this downtrend here. And once it gets outside and above the channel, then you can start to have a little hope that maybe the market's starting to turn, maybe it's found the bottom and ready to get going. So before I left on my vacation, this is where we were right here. So just for a couple of days worth of trading, it had gotten up and outside of the downtrending channel, which was a good sign. So I went away for two weeks and I came back and here we are right here. So the market did what it was supposed to do. And before I left, they also made this little, you can see this little uptrending channel right here. This action was starting to move upwards and it just kept going. So if we want to extend the legs, we can go from here and you can see that the market is still now in this other uptrend, which is great. Yesterday, Friday, August 12th, right here, this one, this bar right here, you can see it closed on the high of the day. That little teeny dash mark on the right side of this bar shows you where it closed and it closed right on the high, which is this good, strong thing, which leads me to believe we're gonna have some more momentum come on Monday, some follow through. And where do we think that next follow through could be right up to the 200 day moving average right here, which is around 400 and just under $432 per share on the SPY. And so this is a good sign. Now, will there be some resistance and knock it back down if it comes up and catches the 200 day moving average? Sure, it's possible. We've had a good run. You can see in the RSI, good run, maybe starting to get a little into some overbought area. So there could be some resistance, could be some sideways action, maybe trade down to this lower leg of this new uptrending channel. So maybe come back to maybe the 420 level possibly in the near future and then then start to ramp higher. It'll hit the bottom edge of the channel, bounce and move up and get above the 200 day moving average. So I think that is the more likely scenario here. You have to understand the last six months, there was a lot of news headlines out there. The war on Ukraine was the first thing to really derail the market. I mean, that happened in February, I think, was when the, I'm sorry, this is, back here it was January. This is April over here. This was the big downtrend, but the downtrend started up here. So I'm sorry, on my dates here. So we've been, here's January first, so we've been down since then. So the Ukraine thing started somewhere in February around here. Inflation had been ticking up. COVID was still out there. The US Federal Reserve started raising interest rates. So you had all these news headlines that just was starting to derail the market since January back here. And the real nasty part of it started in April. But there's a point where there's enough selling that the market figures out, okay, we've really taken out all this bad news. We factored it in. And now, since middle of June, the market said, we're done with all that. We're past that. We know inflation's been high. We know interest rates are going up. COVID is still out there, but the world is getting vaccinated. The war on Ukraine is as horrible as it is. It's a tired story. People are looking past it. And we know that the companies that make up the S&P 500 or make up the market in general are adapting to this new normal, adapting to supply chain issues, they're changing their pricing strategy. So the market is adapting to what's happening out there. And when I say the market, it's the collective minds of the millions and millions of people that play in the market every day has decided that we factored all this bad news in and it's just time to turn it around. So I think maybe in the middle of June, that's when things started to realize, the market started to realize, okay, companies are not going out of business. They're still creating products. They're still creating profitable products. So that means their stock prices have to go up. So it may have seen random that why on this date in the middle of June, did the market decide that it was time to turn around and go back higher? No one knows that answer. It's just the collective activities of the millions, if not billions of people that play in the market every day. And the institutions that have that control a lot of the money, the big money funds, hedge funds, insurance companies, mutual funds, college endowment funds, they control a good part of the money flow. And they're deciding along with everyone else, it's time to get back in. Prices have come down enough. It's time to get back in. Sometimes you just can't understand it. It's just the market moves the way it wants to move. So you have to respect what it does. And so now the market is on this new uptrend. And I believe we have seen the end of the bear market. You know, I'm saying that, I think we've seen the end of it. You know, we may have some more pullbacks. August and September usually have not been great months seasonality-wise for the stock market. But that's just seasonal thing. That's not because there's, you know, some other nasty news headline out there. That's just a seasonal thing. So we may see some pullback in the rest of August or maybe part of September, but it's not gonna derail the whole, this whole up move. That's my opinion. But I still follow and respect what the market is showing me. Now it has come up a decent amount since the middle of June. So there may be some hesitation here. There may be some pullback. There may be some sideways trading. The market has to gather itself. Whenever it makes a big move down or a big move up, it has to gather itself for a little while, trade sideways for a bit, come down to maybe the bottom leg of this uptrending channel, and then move higher. That's my assessment. But I still play with what I see in front of me. But I'm enthusiastic because I'm long. I'm bullish for the long run. In the long run, years and years and years. My retirement accounts depend on it. I buy stocks and I hold things for the long run as well. So I want the market to go up. But on the way down, if you've been watching my videos, I've been telling you personally, I've been buying, nibbling bits and pieces on the way down because I know eventually the market's gonna turn around. I don't go all in. I buy little bits and pieces when it comes down and hits the bottom leg of the channel. The last purchases I made for the SPY were between 370 and 380 back in early July. And now it's starting to go back up. And other various stocks too. So you have to play, I play for the long run. Can't tell you what to do, but I play for the long run. But what the market is showing us now is that it's created a new uptrend. It's gotten out of this downtrend and it's created its new uptrend. So you can kind of see it's gonna bounce along this channel. That's the way I'm seeing it. So in our newsletter now, where we sell put options and put options spreads, which is more of a bullishly oriented strategy, we've been pretty light this year. Well, here's January. So this year, while the market's been going down, our positions have been lighter because why try to get into bullish plays when the market's telling you what's going down? So you have to look at the market as a whole and see which direction it's going in. And now that the market's starting to go back up, we're gonna probably get a little more aggressive and make some more trades than we had been the last six, seven months. That's just the way we do it. All right, so that's the SPY. Let's look at the Qs, the triple Qs. Same thing, here's January. Just this nasty downtrend. If you've been in tech stocks, you know it hasn't been fun. Hasn't been fun. Nasdaq's typically made up these high-flying tech stocks, but they've all come roaring back in the last month and a half or so, almost two months now. You can see we can draw it on the Qs as well. You can draw your trend lines. It popped out of the downtrending channel and now it's forming this new uptrending channel. The lines don't have to be exact. It's more of drawing the line along the tops and along the bottoms of the lines. You can see here, you just draw some lines just to see which way the market is trending. And once the market gets into a trend, it will stay in that trend until something major comes along and knocks it back down. So what happened was back before January, 2022, let's go back to the SPY because I already have it marked up. You can see we were in this nice uptrend for a nice long period of time and then January, 2022, it got derailed and started this new trend, but now this trend has emerged. So here's the new trend, okay? So if you're a shorter-term trader, timing is much more important. You really have to be good on your technical analysis to know when it's time to get in. If you're a long-term trader like me, like long-term I'm talking years and years, your timing doesn't matter so much because you're gonna hold for a long period of time. So does it matter if you bought here or here? Not so much if you're gonna hold for years on end, but if you're in a one-week trade or a two-week trade, buying here could be devastating because two weeks later, you're down here and you may get stopped out of your trade. So short-term trading is really hard. Our timeframe is one to three months. And in about one to three months, we can typically get pretty good results from the way that we look at the charts and make our trades. So the queues are going up as well. Let's look at the Dow Jones. We can use the Diamonds, the DIA, that's the ETF for the Dow Jones. Here's January, it was in the Dow and Trend as well. Not as steep as the S&P 500 and the NASAC, but you can see the uptrend here. Here was the Dow and Trend, moved up and outside of the Dow and Trend. So once again, you can draw a new trend lines here. All right? So possibly we may see some pullback to the bottom edge of the line here, the bottom edge of the channel. The Dow almost tagged the 200-day moving average right here. Here's the 200-day. And that's a very important moving average. Let's look what the NASAC's doing. So here's the 200-day for the NASAC. So it's got a little more room to go. Could go up a little and then zigzag back down to the bottom and then go. That's what I would like to see. Give us maybe another opportunity. If it sells off to the bottom edge of the channel, that could be the opportunity to go long. So I'm gonna be looking at that very closely for our trades and our newsletters. All right, so let's look at some individual stocks. All-time favorite of a lot of people. Apple has got this V channel, V pattern right here. So I guess before I left, I started to draw this new channel here, the uptrending channel was in the downtrending channel. Here's back in January. Took a little while for Apple to sell off, but it did sell off and came right down to the 130 level and had this V-shaped bounce. And here we are. Here's Apple's all-time high above, just above 180. We're starting to get there. We're starting to move back up. Look where Apple went from 130 all the way up to 172 at the end of this week. $40, $42. That's a nice move in just about two months time. Went down, went up. So Apple's looking good. People get enthusiastic about buying stock again. Amazon, doing its thing, had the support. You can see, I don't remember when I drew this line, but it had to be a few weeks ago, 100, just above 100. It came down once, twice, three, four, five, six, almost seven times. It tried to get through the 100 level, couldn't do it, and the bears just gave up. And look at this nice move up to $143. But it's coming upon the 200-day moving average. So there might be some consolidation here, maybe a little pullback, possibly, and then continue on. The stock market is made to go up over in the long run, in the long run, because these are real companies. These aren't just blips on a screen. These aren't just numbers on a screen that nobody cares about. These are actual companies creating actual products that people actually pay for with real money. And if companies are creating more products that people buy and their earnings are increasing each quarter, the stock price has to go up. That's what the stock market is and does. Yes, prices come down sometimes, sometimes farther than a lot of people may think, and they think it's the end of the world, and every business is gonna go out of business. It's not how it works. You just have to, as hard as it is to buy when stocks are coming down, that's always the best time that you should be buying. When we look in hindsight and you say to yourself, ah, I wish I had bought here, but when it's happening in real time, before it's hindsight, so if we were here, back in end of May, and you saw the market coming down, would you wanna step in with your own money and buy as it's happening? A lot of people just say, no, I'm just gonna wait for the market to balance and then I'll get in. Well, you know, did you buy? Okay, so it went up a little and then came back down. You say, I'm not ready to buy it. And then it starts to go up. So in real time, it's hard to step in. But when you look in hindsight, you always kick yourself. You just have to remember, the market is real companies and eventually it's gonna turn around. So that's why I nibble on the way down until the bottom reveals itself. And I believe the bottom has revealed itself for the time being. So I'm happy that I bought on the way down. I bought higher as well, but I've also bought lower. So that helps average out my trades to a better dollar cost basis. So let's look at, so that's Amazon. Tesla is a very interesting stock company, of course. For a while, we had 700 was the pivot point. It was going up and below. We drew the triangle congestion pattern and then after its earnings, it just, it blew up, it got above 900. So Tesla's still kind of consolidating. It's around $900. It certainly moved up to 600, so it went up 300 bucks. Tesla seems to be a permeable type of company. People always wanna be bullish, Tesla. I don't have the opinion. We don't really make trades on Tesla because it is quite volatile. But I do like to sell way, way, way out of the money puts on Tesla. That seems to be a decent strategy for me personally. I'll sell weekly, one-week options, put options way out of the money down here, depending on what price you get. That's a personal strategy that I use just for the fun of it. You can get some money off of that. But playing at the money strikes short-term, that could be risky. We stay away from that. But Tesla, people love Tesla. I don't have an opinion right now. I mean, it's gone up. It's got some resistance right here at the 200-day moving average. Like I said with the rest of the market, it may see some resistance, may see some sideways trading before probably maybe trying to make a run for its all-time highs above 1200 here. We'll see. Let's look at Disney, because Disney, I talk about quite a bit. I had been buying Disney down around the prior support area of 130. It just knocked through that. I don't, sometimes I buy things that don't work out also, but I hold. I hold Disney for the long run. Came down here. I don't think I bought anymore. I think 130 was enough for me, came through, and then I'm just kind of waiting. I probably should have bought some more. But now it's on its way back up. It has this nice little bottom here. Had decent earnings just this past week. That's where we got the gap and go here. So trading around $121.50. I may start to look at some more potential trades on Disney. I may sell some put options, strike prices down here. So that's what I do. But Disney's starting to turn around. We look at these stalwart companies. Nike, another company, was sort of had this downtrending channel. It looks like it may be starting to get out of it. Let's open it up a little more. We've got the 50-day moving average, which is this line, and the 20-day moving average, which is this line right here. As now, the price action has moved above both of those, which is a good sign. When you have a downtrending moving average lines, and the price action of the stock can move above both of those, that's a good sign because eventually, they'll probably start, the moving averages themselves will start to turn higher. You can see the 20-day moving average has already started to slope higher now. That means there's been some bullish action. So Nike could be a next company that starts on its next leg higher. So I may have to start to look at Nike a little more closely now that maybe it's found the bottom here. Let's go back, let's look at the monthly chart on Nike. Had a nasty fall. Pretty good, right? From 180 all-time high down to, it hit 100. And so maybe it found the bottom here. I'm gonna start looking at some Nike shares. All right, let's take a look at some other stuff. Walmart, another one we always look at. Walmart, there was a couple weeks ago where Target and Walmart had a nasty drop. So what was the date here? Let me move myself for a second here. This big gap right here was, what day was that? Yep, July 26th, so that was the day that I left. That's when Target, I think Target came out with their earnings, we'll look at Target real quick. So it went from 132 on this day, dropped all the way back down to 120. If you've been watching my prior videos, I told you I nibbled on some shares around 120 because when it fell from this last nasty move, it got way oversold here on the RSI. Way oversold. So I nibbled on some shares around 120, popped back up to 132, dropped again. I missed that because I was away on vacation. So maybe some of you bought some at 120 and now it's back up to 132. So that's good. Let's look at Target real quick because I think that was the reason why it dropped. Target right here, so it was this little section right here, Target had a gap down. This right here on this day was the 26th right here where the cursor is. And then it went from 157 down to 150 and then it just has rallied since, right? Up to 172. So Target and Walmart took that gap and stride, faked everyone out and has turned around and moved both. Here's Walmart again. Look at this, look at this air pocket right here. That was, oh man, that was a good opportunity to buy at 120 right there. All right, let's look at Coca-Cola, the other stalwart that I talk about quite a bit. It's a boring stock. It's a slow moving boring stock but it's paid handsomely over the years. Great dividend, dividend aristocrat. I mean, it's just, it's, this was the pandemic down move but it just has this years and decades just upwards. It's slow and boring but sometimes slow and boring wins the race. You can, we can see that maybe it's starting to make this congestion pattern right here. Congestion patterns, what they do is the ranges, the daily ranges get tighter and tighter, smaller and smaller, gearing up for a powerful movie they're higher or lower outside of the congestion pattern. My guess is that it's gonna blast, it's gonna go up. And try to take out this all-time high here of around $67 a share. Let's make sure that's the all-time high. You know, split adjusted of course. Yep, so I'm thinking pretty soon Coke's gonna be blasting outside of this and my guess is probably to the upside because of the rest of the market is probably gonna start going up as well. So if you're looking for a company and I'm not making personal recommendations here but keep Coca-Cola on your watch list. I'll move this over here for now. What else? Let's take a look at our list of stocks. See if there's anything else of note. Intel still down in the dumps. Oh, AMD forgot, I always talk about AMD. You know, AMD has been my go-to. You know, look at the chip stocks, the computer chip stocks have been getting hurt pretty bad. You know, here's the end of 21 and into 2022 just been in this downtrend. But I like what I'm seeing over here getting outside of the downtrending channel starting to pop out. So maybe AMD's gotten back up to this $100, this prior $100 level, which was support for a long time until it went through it. But I like the action right here. AMD could be ready to start moving up. Nvidia, same thing. You know, you can kind of see the uptrending channel starting to emerge here. Another chip stock, Nvidia. So maybe we've got some upward movement coming. Micron, Micron, Micron another. This is Micron starting to move back up from the lows. So maybe the chip stocks are starting to come back. Let's see what else we have. Apple, Amazon, Netflix starting to look good. We did a quick, quick Netflix put spread. We sold a put spread on Netflix. It was only like a three week trade worked out for us. We got in down at the lows as it was starting to come out of the bottom here and look how Netflix has really, it's gone up from like $150 to $560 up to almost 250, 249 just yesterday, 250 the other day. It's got a lot of ground to make up but could be on its way, Netflix. Verizon is another stock that I talk about as well. Still not giving me the signal to get in yet. Still moving down. Look at this nastiness right here from 50 down to 44. One of these days we'll get into Verizon but not yet. You gotta look at what the chart's telling you. Cisco starting to move up from the bottom. Disney we looked at. So the healthcare stocks, Lily, Bristol Myers, Pfizer, Merck. Oh, well let's look at, let me show you something that we've done. GlaxoSmithKline, GSK, let me show you GSK. Well it's not GlaxoSmithKline anymore, it's just GSK. Healthcare industry, nasty move down. There was some word that their Zantac medicine, heartburn medicine may have caused some problems, maybe some litigation. They took it off the shelves but enough to knock it down into some oversold area. We're taking a spec trade here in one of our newsletters selling some puts on it at farther out of the money. We're selling some puts, not I can't reveal what we've done but it's not fair to the paying customers but we've sold some put options out of the money taking advantage of this drop on GSK. So that's some of the things we look for. Kellogg doing well, what other stocks? PayPal and Square starting their move, starting their ascent. Here's PayPal, it's got the nice rounded bottom here. Out of the channel, finally he's out of the channel. Started to move up, so maybe PayPal has turned the corner. Here's Square, you know the online payment sector. I love the sector as well. It really got hit hard. I mean harder than I thought but looks like maybe it's turned the corner with the rest of the market. So keep an eye on those things. Costco, oh McDonald's is just still doing well. Pepsi along with Coca-Cola doing well. Here's our Warren Buffett. We follow Warren Buffett because if you wanna talk about slow and steady and boring, here's the guy's worth, you know, a hundred something million dollars. He's all about the slow and steady. And here you can see had a nice move down. You can see the uptrend, okay. I have my Warren Buffett report that I wrote. It's on our website detailing a strategy to piggyback Warren Buffett for pennies on the dollar. Well, let me just bring that up real quick. If you go to the more tab and you click on shop, it's gonna bring up this report that I wrote. The secret to buying Warren Buffett for pennies on the dollar is not free but you know, it's cheap enough that maybe you wanna take a look at it. It's another option straightening strategy. All right, so let's try to wrap this up here. Twitter, you know, I don't, with Elon Musk, who knows how that thing's gonna turn out. Facebook, Metta, still down the dumps, IBM. So all right, Google, Google's starting to move up. You can see, you can draw the sideways channel here, connect some of the tops, right? You got like the bottom area here. So it was in this channel and looked like it just started to break out. Just starting to break above the channel. This could be the move. Could take it up to the 200-day moving average. So you wanna look for patterns. You know, patterns repeat based on human behavior and they typically repeat over and over again because human behavior doesn't really change. So look for this breakout pattern right here. Probably could keep going. Okay, so that's Google and the rest of these kind of junk, some junk companies. We look at Clorox still down below the 200-day moving average. Colgate sideways action and that's about it. All right, everyone, so we're hitting 35 minutes here. I wanna wrap this up. Let's go back to the SPY, kind of the V shape. But, you know, did good. Last two weeks, nice. May have the time to take a little rest here, getting a little overbought, coming up upon the 200-day moving average, coming up upon the top of this new channel. So it may come back a little sideways action. Look for it to maybe tag the lower edge here, which is not that far. Maybe 420, I'll pull back, and then hopefully the next leg higher. All right, that's all for me today. I hope this has been helpful. Please don't forget to go to our website, get the free e-book, leave me a comment here, send me an email, tell me what strategies or things you wanna learn about. I'll try to make some shorter, you know, maybe under 10-minute videos during the week if I get enough interest. And we'll just go from there. I'm trying to give you some of the knowledge that I've gained over the last 30 years. All right, that's all for me today. I hope everyone has a good weekend and a good trading week ahead. I will see everyone back here next Saturday. This is Lee Lowell signing off.