 What's up, Navigation Traders. Happy Friday. Today is Friday, April 28th. This is the weekly video update. So Sunday night, if you recall last Sunday night, they did the first round of the presidential elections in France. And so we just had a ton of premiums sucked out of the market, which was good for the positions that we already had on. Now it's given us a little bit of a challenge to find new opportunities, but we did find a few. So let's jump in and go through the trades. So our first trade, which is one that we broadcasted as our trade of the week on Navigation Trading Live. If you haven't attended yet, remember every Monday morning, 8.25 a.m. central time before the markets open. We do a live stream from our Facebook page and YouTube channel, so you can tune in there and view our trade of the week, and we give a little bit of a market overview. And if you have any questions or topics that you want me to cover in a little bit more detail, feel free to shoot those over to me and I will do my best to try to cover those. So let's jump in. So our trade of the week that we did on Monday morning was in corn, because after all that premium got sucked out, there wasn't a ton of high implied volatility to choose from. And so when that happens, I like to get A, either a little bit directional or B, look to some of these grain futures or some of these other futures contracts that still give you a really good bang for your buck as far as risk reward goes. So we put on an iron condor in corn. So let's take a look at that. So you can see we're still pretty centered. Already got a decent amount of profit just within this week, but not enough to take off. So we'll continue to monitor corn. Next trade we made was in FXC, which was a closing trade. We took off a strangle and after that announcement came out with the French presidential election, huge contraction in IV, and we're able to book over 60% profit on that trade in FXC. If we take a look at the chart of FXC, you can see what happened. You know, this was on Monday. This was the contraction and volatility that we saw Monday, and we are still well within our range of that strangle. So booked a very nice profit there. Next trade. Let's go to the next page here. Next trade we made was a closing trade in EWW. So this was a straddle that we had actually rolled from April, but with that contraction implied volatility, we're able to take that off for a nice profit as well. So if we looked at the chart here, same kind of situation. Huge contraction in IV. Took that off for profit. Next trade, another closing trade in TLT. Made over 53% of max profit in TLT. That was a strangle that we had on. Same situation across the board. Just that premium just got sucked out of the market, which is excellent. I mean, that's what we're looking for. We want to put these trades on with IV. Wait for that premium to get sucked out and book those profits. So another good trade there. Another closing trade was in EWZ. So we had a strangle on in EWZ. Made over 40% of max profit in just six days. Ideally, we like to get 50% of max profit out of a strangle. But if we get 40% in six days, we're going to take that money and run every time. So that was another good trade. In FXE, we had another strangle on. And so this one moved up out of our range a little bit. So we rolled the puts up and then we rolled the entire thing out to June. So what you'll start seeing is because we've done a lot of additional testing. And with our experience, what we've found is that really holding these positions past 21 days to expiration, if there's three weeks left to expiration, we're really going to start getting more aggressive about rolling them to the next expiration cycle. You're taking a ton of risk off the board. You're still going to have that theta decay. You're going to collect more credit, give yourself more time to be right. So look for that on, especially on naked positions like strangles and straddles. We've really come to the conclusion with all the studies that we've looked at and run and seen that holding those positions in the last few weeks just does not pay off. And so rolling those out to the next expiration cycle when you've got a few weeks left is what we're going to start doing more aggressively. On iron condors and other defined risk trades, we might leave those on a little bit longer because we're kind of defining our risk at order entry. We're not doing a ton of adjustments on those. But on the naked positions, definitely do some more, do some more rolling out to the next month as we get to that two to three weeks out from expiration. So what this looks like in FXC now is this is what we've got. So again, we rolled the puts up, collected more credit and then rolled out to June and collected more credit for that. So we're still very centered now. Just waiting for some of that theta decay to happen for us. Next trade, another closing trade in snap, which is snap chat. Remember, this is one that we put on as a trade of the week a couple weeks ago. Took about 25% of max profit out of that trade, which is what we look for in a straddle. Snap has earnings coming up. Let's see here. When is that earnings announcement? Click on the blue button here. 510. So it's still whatever 12 days away or so. But with that profit, we wanted to get, we were going to get out before earnings anyway, regardless of where we were profit wise. And so the fact that we were able to bank that 25% of max profit and get out, that was another good trade for us. And then EWW closed the strangle for a nice profit, had a big move down and EWW gave us the opportunity to take this one off. This was a spread that we had, we had rolled from April to May. So it was an adjusted strangle. And again, you know, that just proves the staying mechanical, rolling your untested side up and then rolling out to the next expiration cycle, as discussed in our course, how to maximize your profits trading options. It continues to work over and over and over again. You got to let the probabilities play out. And again, it paid off for us. Next trade was in IWM. And this was an adjusting closing trade. So we had an iron condor on in IWM. Obviously, the market's been strong. And so you can see it moved up and past our break even. We now we've had a big move down today in IWM. If we take a look at the chart, last couple days have been down. So it's moved back into our range. And we could actually take this off now for close to break even. I haven't calculated exactly. But if we if we took this off right now, we'd be at about break even. I'm going to go ahead and hold it look for potentially a little bit more down move. We can still use this short delta in our portfolio, which is another reason I don't mind holding on to this and and allowing it to potentially move down and actually get get out of this iron condor overall for a profit if that does happen. Now, obviously, if it if it explodes back higher, you know, we're gonna we're gonna either add another iron condor on to collect some more credit. The problem with doing that is look at where IV is you've got an IV percentile of two IV rank of six, just not attractive to put another iron condor on. If we had higher higher IV right now, I would have already put another one on. It's kind of centered around the current price. But in this case, I'm just gonna hold this this call vertical as it is and and look for potentially a little bit more of a down move before we take that off. Next trade was an opening trade in EWW. So IV spiked up, you know, dropped after the French election announcement and then it spiked back up only got to about 40 the IV percentile. So not above that 50 level that we really want. However, you know, with, you know, with such low IV across the board, it was kind of the best option available and I wanted to add some more positions on. So we've got this strangle on still very centered and we'll continue to wait for theta to decay in that. If we take a look at the charts here, you can see after the announcement applied volatility got crushed and it spiked right back up not quite to 50 but it got to 40 when we put this on and you can see it's now already turned around and gone back down. So it was a good time to put it on in hindsight and so hopefully we'll continue to stay in a bit of a range to profit on that one. Next trade was in Lulu. So this is a trade that I put on today. Now I don't I don't put a lot of trades on on individual stocks, right? I'd much prefer to trade ETFs or futures. But in Lulu and keep in mind Lulu is not on our standard watch list for iron condors, but implied volatility is over 50. If we take a look at the trade tab and look at the options, I mean, look at the open interest. We've got a ton where you know Lulu continues to stay extremely active. So we've got a ton of open interest on both sides. We've got really tight bid ask spreads, you know, three, four cents wide on both the puts and the calls. So you know, and that's what we're looking for. And that's that's what the watch list is comprised of of of stocks that consistently have that liquidity tight bid ask spreads open interest. And when you find a stock that has those components, it's okay to start even if they're not on the watch list, it's okay to trade those. And so that's why we put on this position in Lulu. Not to mention, most stuff has low IV and this one popped up over 50. So made it a good candidate to put on an iron condor. So still pretty centered here. Nothing else to do. We just put this on. So we'll continue to wait on Lulu. Oh, the other thing about stocks, obviously, we want to we want to avoid earnings, but they just announced their earnings a couple weeks ago, two, three, three weeks ago. So we don't have to worry about earnings for quite a while. And again, another reason why I put this on, we typically I'm not going to do these monthly income trades leading into earnings, because you got the rise in implied volatility leading up. But we've got plenty of time to collect some theta and potentially get out of this, we will definitely get out of it before the earnings announcement, but we've got a plenty of time before that happens. And lastly, the last trade we did today was in XLF. And we had a straddle on an XLF book that for over 25% of max profit. And so that was a nice trade as well. So took a ton of positions off, had a really good profitable week trading. If we go back to the platform and take a look at our overall portfolio. So the other positions we have on soybeans. Take a look at that. Still pretty centered there got a little bit of profit not enough to take off yet. So we'll wait on that. EFA, we've got a strangle over here kind of up towards our upside and not enough profit to take off yet looking for a little bit of a down move in EFA and we'll book that profit. If not, we will look to next week, you know, we've only got kind of the point I was talking about, we've only got 21 days to expiration in May. So even if it doesn't breach our break even to the upside, I'm going to look to potentially roll these puts up and move this thing out to June, collect more credit on the on the roll of the puts up and collect more credit on the entire spread being moved out to June. So look for that early next week, regardless of what price does. Now if we get a nice move down, we'll just take this off and close it out. But we'll see what happens. I already went over EWD, FXE, GLD, we've got this iron condor in looking for about 40% of max profit actually had an order in to get out of this but just it never got hit. So I'm going to give it over the weekend. Hopefully gold doesn't fall to the downside if it stays up right where it is or moves up a little bit. We'll book this profit on Monday. IBM, we don't have a position on IBM. IWM already went over that we've got the vertical on Lulu cues. So this one is an iron condor the the price has barely breached our break even I actually had an order in today to close out our put side because most of the value has gone out of the put side but I didn't get filled. And so we'll continue to hold this one over the weekend. Look for either a little bit of a move down if we don't get it. We'll go ahead and take off that put side just like we did an IWM so that we have that that one side vertical and try to try to manage it that way. Mention snap SPY we've also got an iron condor on here. No profit or loss hanging out towards our upside need a little bit of a down move here to book that profit. So we'll continue to hold that one. TLT see do we have a position on TLT? No, we don't we took that one off. Yeah, so nothing in there. XLF we already took off and XRT we still got two strangles on in here. So we've got the one that we already adjusted the one with five contracts. And so we need a little bit of a down move in XRT. Again, this is in May. Early next week, we'll be looking to if this if we don't get a nice move down to book this profit, we'll go ahead and roll this one out to June. And then the strangle we have on with four contracts. We'll look to aggressively manage this and book those profits next week. Just looking for a little bit more profit. We're at about 40% of max profit. I want 50 on this one because we've been in it for a for a decent amount of time. So look for those next week. One other thing I wanted to show you if we take a look at our overall portfolio. So these are all the positions that we have on in with navigation alerts. And you can see we had a really good day today over $600. This is the open P&L on the overall portfolio. Keep in mind this doesn't take into account all the profits that we booked. This is just the current open P&L. And we I have this beta weighted to the spy. So you can see the delta of our portfolio where we've got short delta of about 370. And so that's that's, I like that, you know, that's that's perfect. I like to keep my this is something that I'm actually going to do a full couple, maybe one or two videos on to get a little bit more specific. But the amount because I get this question a lot, how much short delta should I have in my portfolio? Right? When we're selling premium, we want to have short delta, because as the market moves up, that's going to contract that volatility. So that's going to help our premium selling, right? With that implied volatility contraction, what we want. But the down moves are what can hurt your positions. Okay, so we want to keep that short delta on for kind of a for protection, basically. And, and the amount of delta is kind of subjective, right? You, you need to figure out for your portfolio, and in your comfort level, how much short delta you want to have on. But for me, what I like to do is a since we're really still hovering at all time highs in the market, I like to have a little bit extra short delta on. And, and the way that I compare that is I look at the amount of theta that we have on. So I kind of look at it as a delta theta ratio. And, and I like to have, you know, at market highs like this, if I really have a short bias in the market, I like to have maybe four or five times the theta amount in delta. And remember, this is beta weighted to the spy. So, you know, four or five times is fine. Three, four or five times, the amount of theta is good for delta. If we, if we had a huge down move in the market, and, and we were looking and, you know, we had the assumption that maybe it wasn't going to move down as much, then this, this ratio might be one to one, or even less. Okay, so that's kind of the ratio that I look for having about a one to one to one to five theta to delta ratio. Okay, the other thing I wanted to point out is, because I get this question a lot, well, how much, how much can I expect to make from the navigation alerts? Right? And, you know, that's just an impossible question to answer. I don't know that everyone's going to put on every single alert. You need to do the number of contracts that fits your portfolio size. I do a relatively, I do relatively small positions in these navigate with these navigation alerts, because I want to make sure that people who have a small account can participate. And if you have a larger account, all you have to do is multiply the number of contracts that you want to do, right? So, so but what you can see here is on theta, it's at 92, right? So if we bring up our little calculator here, and, and say, okay, that's our daily theta. So if price and volatility stayed exactly where it is, we're collecting about $92 a day. Okay, so if you take 92 times 30, 30 days in a month, that equals so, so this portfolio, so, you know, that's $2,700 a month. Okay, some of you might that might be great. Some of you might say, well, that's that's not enough. And if you have larger account, then you can multiply that out depending on what your theta is. Now, the other thing to make sure you understand because I'm all about creating realistic expectations, okay, you are not going to keep all 2760 per month of that theta, right, we're going to have adjustments, positions are going to move against us, all those things that happen in trading on a daily basis. Okay, but as a realistic expectation, over time, you should expect to be able to keep about 25 to 35% of your monthly theta. Okay, not every single month, but on average, over periods of time. So if we take 2760 times, let's say 30, 30%, okay, that equals $828. So a portfolio like this could should average about $828 a month over time for you. Okay, again, I trade a pretty significant sized account. Okay, so my in some of my other counts, my theta is much larger than $91. Okay, but again, with these alerts, I want to make sure that everybody can participate. So I'm doing some, some, you know, one, two, three contracts at a time, which is very reasonable for somebody with a small account. But you need to you need to make sure you understand that based on your account size. So I hope that was helpful. I just want to I want to kind of give you a little bit more behind the scenes of the thought process of why we do what we do and how and the realistic expectations that you can have, you know, especially if you're wanting to become a full time trader, that can help you figure out what that realistic expectation of income is going to be for your account and for the trades that you put on. So hope this was helpful. If you have any questions, let me know if you have any topics you want me to cover on Monday morning for the live broadcast. Let me know that as well. Have a great weekend and we'll talk to you soon.