 What's shaking navigation nation? Welcome to this week's video update. Today's Friday, August 31st, another month in the books. I can't believe it's already the end of August, but I got Labor Day weekend coming up. So hope everybody has a great, safe weekend during this long weekend and the market's open backup for trading on Tuesday of next week. So let's jump into the alerts for this week, starting with a couple of closing trades that we started with on Monday, the 27th. The first one was a closing trade in Tesla. And so we only had this trade-on for 10 days, booked a nice profit, over 40% of max profit in just 10 days. And if we take a look at a chart of Tesla, excuse me, after earnings announcement, the price spiked up and then Elon came out with some tweets talking about the company may go private, which theoretically would enhance the price of the stock. So it shot up. And then there was some talk about that not being legit and some legal concerns about him tweeting such things. So it kind of fell back down. And because all this turmoil and headlines and uncertainty, you can see the implied volatility spiked up. It was the Ivy rank and Ivy percentile were hovering around the hundred area for a bit. And so that's when we sold premium. We're taking advantage of other people's uncertainty, of other people's fear. You know, I talked about how Warren Buffett says, be greedy when others are fearful and be fearful when others are greedy. That couldn't be more true than what we just did here. And we were taking advantage of that uncertainty. So we put on that short strangle price, then just kind of consolidated and settled down, implied volatility started contracting, meaning the uncertainty or the fear started coming out of the market and allowed us to book that nice profit. So good trade there in Tesla. Next trade was another closing trade. This one in Ford slash 6E. So this is the Euro. And we closed out of our short strangle, booked over 40% of max profit on this one. And we were out of the trade at that point. Now we ended up entering a new trade in 6E, which I'll get to here in a minute, in a later alert. But the next trade here was a closing adjusting trade in GC. So we actually had two sets of short strangles on in gold. We booked the first one at book 30% of max profit in just 17 days on that one. So that was a nice trade. And then I'll show you later, we ended up taking off the other piece as well. But the next trade was a rolling adjusting trade in EEM. So price had breached our upside break even over our September strangle in EEM. So we needed to roll up our puts because a lot of that value in those puts were gone. So it made sense to roll those up. And then with just 25 days to expiration, we decided just to roll from September out to October. And part of that is, with these undefined risk positions like strangles and straddles, once we get under 21 days, that's when the risk or the gamma really starts to accelerate in these positions. So we wanna either roll or close those. In this case, there's 25 days, but I didn't wanna just roll the puts up, stay in September, and then a few days later have to roll out to October, incur another set of transaction costs. So it just made sense to roll the puts up and roll the whole thing out to October. And so let's take a look at the platform and show you what I got. Sorry, we're looking at EEM. So let's take a look at our friend EEM. And what you'll see here is first, this is the one we just rolled. So we rolled the puts up to 42 and a half. The calls were already at 42 and a half, and we just rolled those out to October. So you can see it's a 42 and a half straddle. You can see prices come down even more into our range. Theta has decayed, we're up some money now on that piece. Total max credit receipt on this was about 11.60, and we wanna capture about 20, 25% of that. So we're looking for about 200, 250 bucks before we close this piece out. And then we've also got the other piece of this, which is an unadjusted strangle, which you can see is pretty centered here, just waiting for some more time to pass before we do anything else on that one. Next trade was an opening adjusting trade in ZW, which is wheat. And so we opened this one up in the November cycle, still have another iron condor in October as well. So here's the November one that we just put on. You can see price is still pretty centered. And then our October one price had moved down real close to the downside break even. And that's when we put on the new one, the new November one centered around it. And now price has moved back up. So we've got a little bit of profit, could use a little bit more up move in wheat and some more time to pass before we do anything else there. Next trade was an opening trade in J&J, Johnson & Johnson. And so what we did here is a couple of things. One, our theta, it says ration, but it's a ratio. Our short delta to theta ratio was around four to one. And so we wanted just to add in some more long delta to help balance that out a little bit. And so we were just looking for either taking off some short delta or adding in some long delta. In this case, we decided to add in a trade, a long bias trade, and we chose J&J, where you can see prices kind of hanging out still well within the range down slightly since we put it on. And then if we look at a chart, because I get a lot of questions, well, why did you choose J&J? You know, what are you looking at exactly? And there's nothing magic to it. There's no magic indicator that's gonna predict market direction for you, even though there's a lot of garbage out there that says they have one. All we're looking at is really price action. So you can see Johnson and Johnson had a big spike up, boom, boom, boom, four days in a row. And then it's just kind of pulled back and consolidated. And what we look at is a lot of times when that happens, when you have a significant spike and then a pullback or consolidation, a lot of times you get a continuation in that direction. And that's all we're looking at. A, adding some long bias to the portfolio to help balance out our short deltas. And B, J&J was a good candidate because of this pattern right here. So that's it. Next trade was an opening trade in 6E. I mentioned we closed out our previous position in an earlier alert, and then Ivy percentile spiked up a little bit, hit the 58 level when we put this on. And so we re-entered a new position in the Euro. So if we take a look, you can see price is still very centered. Plaid Volatile has gone up even a little bit more. So we're slightly down on the trade, but still well within our range here. So just waiting for some more time to pass in the Euro. And we had a closing trade in GC gold. So I mentioned in an earlier alert, we closed out one of our sets of short strangles. And then in this one, we closed out the remaining one. So we're completely out of gold now, booked 30% of max profit in the first one, and then booked another 35% of max profit in this trade in just 15 days, booked a total profit of 760 bucks. And Ivy percentile is down below that 50 level. If we take a look at the chart, get an idea of exactly where that is at this point. I think it's about 44, yeah, Ivy percentile is at 44. So if we get a pop back up higher above that 50 level, next week we may look to re-enter in gold, but we are completely out of it at this point. Next trade was a closing adjusting trade in Ford slash ES. So we had an iron condor on in the S&P, S&P Ford slash ES. So we price breached the upside breakeven. And so we closed out the untested side or the put vertical side. And so I'll show you what we have there. I was emailing one of our members because they had a question about this because sometimes we will adjust right when it hits the breakeven point. And sometimes we will give it a little bit more room before we make the adjustment. And so his question was, and Jeff, if you're listening, he was questioning, how do I know when to be more aggressive with making that adjustment or give it more time? And this is just kind of one of those little nuances about trading that you only kind of understand once you've been trading for a while. And the analogy I used to Jeff was, it's kind of like, so I've got kids, right? And so anyone with kids, hopefully this will hit home for you. We know that as much as we like to think that our kids are just beautiful angels of heaven, sometimes they act out, right? Sometimes they don't act like they're supposed to. And so the analogy I used was, if it's getting closer to bedtime and they start doing stuff that they're not supposed to, I'm gonna have a much quicker fuse to say, go to your room, just go to bed, right? Whereas if it's mid-morning, I've got a little bit longer fuse, I might be a little bit more lenient. A, I'm fresher, I'm, you know, it's mid-morning, I'm not getting tired. And it's a long time to bedtime, so I'm not gonna tell them to go to bed. So I'm gonna, I'll probably have a little bit longer fuse with them as far as even if they're not doing what they're supposed to, I might be a little bit more lenient. And it's the same way with iron condors. Just think of these iron condors as your little children. And if price moves out of its range, that iron condor is being bad, right? It's not acting like it's supposed to. But the difference is, is how much time do you have to expiration? So if it's getting close to expiration and that price is getting near or, you know, breaching that breakeven point, I'm gonna be a lot more aggressive in making that adjustment sooner. Whereas if there's a longer time until expiration and there's still some premium left in that untested side, I'm gonna be a little bit more lenient, give it a little bit more time to potentially come back into our range, okay? So hopefully that helps. If you have kids, hopefully that hits home a little bit for you. But that's kind of how we treat those adjustments both on iron condors and short strangles and straddles. Next trade was a, and our last trade today was a rolling adjusting trade in EWZ. So this is the Brazilian ETF. And so we rolled our adjusted short strangle in EWZ from September to October. And we kept the strikes exactly the same. So this is a point where we're right at 21 days to expiration. So we wanted to roll out to collect more credit and extend duration on this trade. So now we hold the same strikes, the 34 puts and the 35 calls, but just in October, as opposed to September. So let's take a look at EWZ. And so this is the, let me uncheck, let me reset this so I can check on the correct boxes. And you can see these are zeroed out. So these are the ones we got out of in September. And we just rolled that into October, which would be these ones here. So you can see we collected some more credit. Got price right here within the range. Now we're just waiting for some more time to pass some theta two to K to benefit that piece. And then we've got another piece of this trade, which is another strangle. We haven't made any adjustments to this one. You can see price is dead centered, got a little bit of profit just waiting for some more time to pass in that piece as well. So those are all the alerts for the week. Let's take a look at some of the other positions. We've got Ford slash CL, which is oil. And you can see we've got an adjusted strangle here. You can see price is still well within our range, just waiting for some more time to pass here. We've adjusted and added and closed several times in oil going back a couple months. And so we're actually up on this trade several thousand dollars, but we're just continuing to manage the trade until we completely close it out. And if we take a look at where implied volatility is in oil, if we go to the charts, you can see it's still at 56. So this is a trade that we wanna have that short premium on in. And so we're just continuing to hold on to our CL trade. Yes, I mentioned that as an adjustment we just did. So we've got two sets of short call verticals. You can see this one has kind of moved out of our range. So looking for some more downside to benefit that piece. And then this is the short call vertical from the iron condor. I just mentioned that we adjusted. And you can see price is, has pulled back into our range a little bit, but just looking for a little bit more downside before we do anything with that. If it does move down nicely, we'll probably close that out depending on where we're at with our short delta or we may roll it. If we get closer to expiration, we'll have to see where that's at. We've also got a long put vertical in ES. You can see it's moved well out of our range, but just kind of holding it. We've got a lot of time left. And so we're seeing if we can get some downside before we do anything in that one. Wheat, I mentioned, apple. Apple's been a little thorn in our side, hasn't it? So we originally put this on for short delta exposure because the price has just been super strong and apples moved all the way up here. You can see we're basically at a max loss on this trade. And so there's really no reason to do anything. I've gotten a couple of questions about this from members. And the reason is is we're almost at max loss. So if we take this off, we're just locking in that max loss. And if it continues going higher, we can't really get hurt much more, right? But what could happen is if by some miracle, apple actually dropped, then we could get back some of that loss. And so that's why we're just holding this. We've got 21 days to expiration. No need to rush in and do anything at this point. Once we get closer, we'll either close it out or potentially roll it depending on where we're at with our other short delta positions. Next trade was Baidu. By the way, I wanna address that too because I get people who seem to kind of freak out about these losing positions. Is there anything I can do? I feel like I need to be doing something to adjust this to make it better. No, there's nothing you can do. When we have these short bias, these short delta positions on to help balance out our portfolio and give us that short exposure that we want, think of those as hedges, right? So you're not gonna win every single trade and especially if you're using positions to kind of hedge your overall portfolio, we're booking winners, our profits are growing in our account overall, even though we have some of these short bias positions that are a bit underwater at this point. So it's really hard I think for especially newer traders to see these losing positions and they just emotionally, when they see this losing position on your board every single day on your platform, you wanna get rid of it, but the reality is this is trading. You're gonna have these positions that lose but as long as your profits in your account keep growing, that's what really matters. And so just think of it as a hedge and sometimes you're gonna lose on your hedge to benefit your overall portfolio. Now, of course, hindsight is 2020, looking back I mean with how strong the market's been, do we wish we wouldn't have had as much short delta? Yeah, sure, but the market could have crashed too. It could have tanked and then you wish you would have had more short delta on. You know, if we look at, sorry I'm kind of jumping off track here but I think this is important. If we look at the ES, we had a period, was it last week? Oh, right here. So kind of from the 8th of August down to the 15th of August, I had members telling me, what can I do to get more short delta on? I think this market's going lower, I think it's going lower. And so it's interesting how when the market's going down and you don't have enough short delta on, you wish you had more. But when it rips higher, like we've seen the last couple of weeks, then you freak out about your short delta positions because they're losing. The goal is to, you know, what we like to do is to stay in that ratio of our short delta to theta ratio being anywhere from one to one to five to one. So right now we're about three to one, which is pretty good. It's right where we want to be. So for every $100 of theta, of every $100 of daily theta decay, we have about $300 of short delta, okay? So that's how we like to manage that. And you can't, you know, the markets move around, right? I mean, things can change very quickly. So you don't want to tweak and manage that short delta piece too much. And that's why we have that range, just kind of one to one to five to one. And we've been trading like this for years and it's always served us really well. So that's why, that's kind of another level of why we do it. Of course, when things aren't going your way, you wish you had more or less, but that's hindsight. You can't trade in hindsight. All right, back on track. Back to Baidu. This is another piece that we put on for some more short delta exposure. You can see prices just outside of its range. So just looking for a little bit more downside to benefit that piece. DIA, this is a couple of short call vertical spreads that we have on that were previously part of Iron Condors and we've rolled for a couple of cycles just to keep that short delta exposure. You can see with the stocks moving up, prices moved a little bit out of our range. Just looking for some downside to benefit that piece. EEM, I mentioned EEM, EWW. So EWW, we've got two pieces on and let me look at the September one first. So remember, we've got 21 days left to expiration in September. And so one of the questions you might have is, well, why did you roll the EEM one but you haven't rolled the EWW? And part of that is we like to spread out our trades over time because EWW is the Mexican ETF. It's an emerging market ETF. EEM is the emerging market index ETF and so it has some exposure to EWW. So these aren't 100% correlated by any means but there's still some similarities. They're both emerging market type ETFs. And so we don't wanna do all of our trades on the exact same day. So what I'm gonna do here is early next week we will probably roll this September one out to October or if we do get a down move kind of in that 49 range, we may just close this piece off because we still do have this exposure out here in October, this short strangle here. So just kind of depends on where we're at with everything whether we roll that or close it out but look for that early next week probably on Tuesday or Wednesday. Next piece, EWZ, I already mentioned that, FXI. So this is the Chinese large cap ETF. So we've got a couple pieces on here. Let's look at the put side first. We've got two butterflies. One's a put butterfly and one is a call butterfly. Remember we do that to help with not only keeping them straight but just to when we make adjustments it makes it a lot easier. So the puts, you can see prices come back down into our range. If we get a little bit more downside down to that 41 level especially we would just close this piece out and book a profit on that piece. We're still down on this trade overall. We've got this call butterfly which we made an adjustment to by simply just rolling the calls, rolling the body we'd like to call it of the butterfly down right around that 41 level. And so this is kind of confusing especially to newer traders because if you look at the graph you see this thing is down below the zero line. And so what we wanna do is we're just continuing to manage this because we're collecting that positive theta every day. If you look at the 42.25 slice you can see about $6 a day in positive theta decay. And so what we'll probably end up doing with this is as we get closer to expiration depending on where price and everything is ideally we want it to move down closer to that 41 level and then we may close it or roll it out or who knows what depends on what happens at that point but at this point we're just holding. There's nothing else to do at this point except for hold. And so we'll continue to manage that as needed. IWM so we've got a couple pieces on here. We've got a short call vertical which was previously part of an iron condor just hoping for some more downside to benefit that piece. And then we've got a full iron condor where price is kind of hanging out near the upper end of the range. And if it continues higher then we'll adjust this by closing out our put vertical side. But for now, if we get a little bit of downside and move back into range hopefully we can still book a profit in that one. I mentioned J and J, QQQ. We've got a couple of short call verticals here. Also part of previously part of iron condors just looking for some downside to benefit that. And we'll continue to manage that as needed. And then same with XLK. This was originally put on as a short delta piece and with the up move in the technology stocks you can see price has kind of moved out of our range here but just looking for some downside to benefit that one. So those are all the alerts and those are all our positions. Again, Labor Day weekend. We'll start trading again on Tuesday. Everybody have a safe holiday and we'll catch you next week. Talk to you then.