 Hey everyone, December is in the books, 2021 is in the book. So I want to take a couple of minutes to go over our trade results for the month of December and jump into some statistics for 2021, the full year as well. So starting with the month of December, really nice month, over $4,800 in profits, 24 winning trades, just four losing trades. The four losers, we had an iron condor in natty gas. We were actually up on this, almost getting ready to close it out and then it just fell out of bed. So we ended up taking a loss on that one. So that was unfortunate. A couple of little losses on weekly double calendars and the rest, some nice winners, some max profits on some iron ducks. One right there, one right there, one right there. One right there as well and some other big winners on some weekly double calendar. So really great month, not showing the day trading in December just because there's only a handful of days that I was really focused on our traditional strategies. I've been testing a lot with our navigation trend trading on the day trading and just kind of refining that. So we'll get back to posting our day trades but I ended up in the green. I think it was a little over $2,500 for the month of December total but again, I'm still kind of testing and so I'll get back to reporting on the day trades here going into next year. So the other thing I wanna talk about is I wanted to look at some of the strategies for the year of 2021, starting with, let's look at short strangles, our most profitable strategy, a little over 7,900 in profits on short strangles and we really didn't do too many in the beginning of the year, about mid-year we started doing some of these long duration short strangles on the micro S&P futures and we'll continue to do that but the only loser we had on the short strangles was a little $72.50 loser. So really nice profits on the short strangles. I'm gonna go over these strategies and I'm gonna talk about a little bit of a game plan for 2022. Iron ducks didn't end up as profitable as I would have hoped but I did break it down to show a little bit of segmentation. So I looked at, okay, how would we perform on the S&P? And so that's SPX, SPY and we did a couple on the ES futures. So all the S&P 500, a little over 4,400 on those ducks, NASDAQ profitable, so that's QQQ, almost $1,000 in profit there. Russell a little in the red. Obviously the Russell is, A, it's a little bit more volatile but B, did not have the same price action mostly to the upside as we saw with the S&P and NASDAQ. So that makes sense. Now, will I stop trading the Russell? No, I will not. That A, that's not a huge sample size even though it is a full year. The Russell will continue to be one of the top but we'll be a little bit more selective because it is a little bit more volatile than the S&P. And there's nothing wrong with not trading RUT or IWM as well, but statistically over time it's still performed very well. It was a really good performer for other accounts as well as last year, over the last few years. And so I'm not gonna stop trading it just cause it was red for the year but certainly, and I did a lot more trades in the S&P but certainly the S&P performed a lot better on ducks this year. I also broke out earnings iron ducks. So red on the earnings iron ducks by about a thousand bucks. And then I also broke out stocks, non earnings. So you can see we did some in Amazon and Tesla and CMG and a couple other stocks. And so in the red there, 84% win rate, 83 winners total, 16 losers. So a good win rate. We always set these up with about 84, 85% probability of success. So it's amazing how that always plays out. So really the focus going forward, you know, we'll still continue to primarily focus on the S&P 500 with these ducks but I'm not gonna shy away from doing selective stocks and I'm not gonna shy away from doing selective Russell trades. I probably will not be doing, at least in the alerts portfolio won't be doing earnings iron ducks just because they're so dependent on that one day move. And for based on the size of the alerts portfolio, which is about 60,000, just, you know, I just, I think it's a, you're taking a little bit too much risk. I'm still gonna trade those because I did have a positive return in my other bigger account. And over time there is a positive expected outcome but for the alerts portfolio, I will probably not be doing any earnings ducks in 2022. On the weekly double calendars, these were profitable but just by a little bit, 39 winners, 24 losers, 62% win rate with, which again, the win rate holds true. It's right there. Based on a couple of things that I think hurt the performance. One, I let a couple of losers go too far, you know, that rut minus 740. That's too big of a loss. I let it get out of, let it get out of hand. There's a couple other losers here that were bigger than I should have let them go. That one there and a couple others. But so that would have helped. We will still continue to doing these. If implied volatility gets low, we will go back to our traditional 721 DTE instead of the shorter duration. So we'll be doing some more testing around that but we will continue to do weekly double calendars. And then if you look at just double calendars and double diagonals, so this is primarily on stocks, not our traditional weekly, has had a nice positive outcome there, almost $1,200. And that includes, I was doing some ratio double diagonals earlier in the year, took a decent loss on Facebook there. So we won't be doing any more of those but overall we'll be having a focus on really looking for additional double diagonals, double calendars in 2022. Pre-earnings trades also did well, didn't do very many at all in the beginning of the year and then started jumping into these in June. Didn't have any losers on the pre-earnings trades and a decent performance. So we'll have kind of a renewed focus on doing more of these pre-earnings, double diagonals, double calendars, this was a single calendar. So nice decent profit there. And then another big focus for 2022 is these VXX trades. Kind of got away from doing those for whatever reason but in 2022 we are going to have a really big focus on selling volatility on volatility spikes. So you can see we only had a handful of these, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven and four of them were in December but nice profits overall and we'll continue to focus those in 2022. So those are some of our profitable trades. I didn't break down every exact directional trade or other strategy that we only did two or three of but I do want to focus on a couple that did not do so well in 2021. Namely, post earnings trades. And this is a post earnings long call or post earnings short put vertical as I mentioned here. Now, I'm still gonna do these because over time they do have a very nice positive expected outcome. What you'll see here is in May, we kind of loaded up all around the same time and the market tanked and we got absolutely smoked on those. So that made up pretty much the entire year as far as the loss total. So we'll still be trading post earnings trades as post earnings short put verticals, post earning long calls in some cases but we're gonna be a little bit more selective and really the biggest thing is not load up all in one time where we can get smoked if the market reverses on us. Really just be a little bit more one here, one here have one or two on at a time. So that'll be the goal with post earnings trades in 2022. And then another one that didn't do well is the vertigo. Part of this is just the time of entry. You can see we started off doing really well in January. And then we had, again, we had a couple big losses that these are just way too big. These are trades where I left the trade on too long and didn't cut losses. And just those two trades there, 800, 1600, that's $2,400. Well, there's the annual total right there, minus 2,400 on vertigos. I also included long iron condors because I did a few of those. So the risk profile on vertigos and long iron condors is pretty similar. So I kind of grouped those together. We'll still do some of these long iron condors and vertigos would just be A, a little bit more selective and B, make sure we're cutting our losses a lot quicker. One day to expiration at the latest and we put these on with longer duration, we will cut them even sooner, two or three days to expiration. So post-starting trades and vertigos, those were a couple that did not do well. Game plan for 2022. So number one, we're gonna do more short strangles, more premium selling after IV spikes. We didn't do near enough of this. And obviously our short strangles were our most profitable strategy. And so we'll continue to do that. And we'll continue to ladder into our long duration short strangles like we've been doing during the second half of 2021. Iron ducks will continue to do most of our ducks on the S&P 500, SPX, SPY, be a little bit more selective on RUT IWM. And like I said, stay away from earnings ducks. It's just, it's too dependent on a one day move. And with the account size of the alerts portfolio, we'll probably just shy away from those. Double calendars and double diagonals. We'll continue to do our weekly double calendars in SPX RUT with a focus on cutting losers fast. And then more pre-earnings, double calendars and double diagonals. And we're also gonna be doing some more longer duration calendar and double calendar, calendarized trades in stocks and indices. We've been doing some testing around some longer duration stuff. And so we'll be adding some of those in as well. And then I mentioned VXX really have a focus on selling volatility after every IV spike. I've got some, in our VIX course, we talk about this, but I've got some pretty, some additional criteria that we'll be looking at. So we'll look for more of those VXX short trades in 2022. Post earnings trades, like I said, will be a little bit more selective on the entries and we'll hold minimal positions at one time. You know, just one or two as opposed to loading up like we did in May of 2021. And then vertigo and long iron condors, a little bit more selective on entries, focus on cutting losers faster. And then these are not part of the alerts, but we've got our navigation trend trading, which has been uber successful. So I'm gonna continue with the high volume of trades on options on stocks. And then I also have a separate account where I trade just futures on those. So I'll continue to do that. Every day we post the trade opportunities in our Discord channel for those. So we'll continue to keep going on that. And then on day trading, towards the end of the year, got a lot more selective on Mighty 90s and runner. So we'll continue that. And then I'm gonna continue with what I call the navigation trend trading ping pong trades, primarily using futures. And we have not released a class on this yet. So that's gonna be coming out with more specific details and criteria here in the first quarter of 2022. So other things we're doing in 2022, we are going to be updating the calendars course. We are going to be coming out with a couple additional courses, which I won't talk about here, but we've got a couple of really awesome strategies that we'll be looking to roll out in 2022 as well. So really look forward to 2022. 2021 was profitable, but not as profitable as I would have liked. So really look forward to engaging in some of the new things we learned. This is the beautiful thing about trading. I've been trading for 20 plus years. And there are things that I learned in 2021 that are gonna continue to elevate my trading. And so that's the beautiful thing about trading is you're always continuing to learn. You're never going to have it all figured out. And that's good for those who like challenges. If you don't like challenges, well, maybe trading's not for you. But anyway, I wish everybody a great trading year in 2022 and look forward to guiding you along the way with the focus that we have. Talk to you soon.