 time here, so great. We have Melissa Armo coming up right now. Melissa is founder and owner of The Stack Swoosh, and you may have also seen her on TV. She often appears as an expert on as a stock market analysis, discussing the market stocks news and more on the Fox News, Fox Business News, and so many other channels. So great to have you with us here today, Melissa, and you can go ahead and get started. Hi, yes, I can. Got my slide. Oh, there we go. Yeah, I set my share. You go ahead and share your screen. Let me see. Let me know if that works. Yes, we can see your slide. Terrific. Thanks so much for having me today. Raining day here in New York City, good day to trade, markets falling, and we're going to talk about shorts. So what a great day. Anyone that wants to make money today should be short. So it's a good day to talk about shorts. Someone's saying the audio isn't good. Can everybody hear me? Yes, we can hear you, Melissa. Everything is fine from my perspective. Maybe I'll talk a little bit closer to the mic. Is that okay? Yeah, everyone's saying audio is fine, so I think it was just one person there. Anyways, welcome. Again, we've been in this type of market now for 12, 13 months where the market looks like it's going to rally, it looks like it's going to recover, and then all of a sudden it falls off a cliff. I think a lot of people, since the beginning of January, and again, as Melissa said, I do talk on TV, so many people that talk on TV with me have been bullish. Bye, bye, bye. Everybody loves to buy. Personally, I loved a short. Now this doesn't mean that I do not buy. I do buy some stocks. There are some things I like to buy, but right now I don't think it's the proper time or proper placement to go on the market. So we did go along, actually Morgan Stanley, a couple of days ago on earnings. It was a quick in and out, boom, in and out done, that's it. So if you're in something maybe long-term, you long-term investment, eventually I think the market recovers. But right now, again, today's a good example, the market's selling off. You can say, well, we're selling off because the debt is ceiling because of this, because of rates, because of inflation, because Jerome Powell has COVID. I mean, the reality is you can always rationalize or give a reason for why the market's rallying or why it's falling. For me personally though, what I do when I trade is I'm looking at the technicals. And that's how I make the predictions that I make to call the trades that I call or even say things I say on TV about the market. Again, you can always be someone that looks at things as a glass half empty or half empty or half full. But if you're a person that's actively trading, you can actually learn how to short. So you may be invested in the market long-term in your retirement account. Again, in your retirement account, you can only go long unless you buy puts. Okay, but you can only go long stocks. You can only buy stocks straight out in equity or in cash. You may be down for the year. You may be down since last year, but the reality is you can make money actively trading, which I call chunking it out. Yeah, that came out yesterday that he has COVID. Actually, that was yesterday that Jerome Powell has COVID, apparently has mild symptoms. So, you know, luckily, hopefully he ends up being okay. But there's other reasons the market's falling today. All right, so let's get right into it here. We're getting started. Any questions right in the chat room? I can see it. I will answer. If you have any questions as we go along, you can call me at 929-3200-GAAP if you have questions after the webinar today or email me at Melissa at thestockswish.com. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or Skype. I do put my TV hits on YouTube or what I'm going to be on. I try to put it on Twitter as well. Again, you know, if someone asks me what do I think about 2023, I'm going to say look for more volatility. Look for as much volatility this year if not more than we saw last year. Even though everyone was saying, oh, everything's fine, everything's great. You know, we've rallied for the last two weeks to start off the year. That means people are saying, oh, the year is going to be bullish. That doesn't mean anything. If it was that easy to say that the first week of any year, the first month of any year, that the market would be an XYZ trend, whether up or down, no one ever leaves any money training. I mean, look at how we started 2022. We started 2022 actually, making brand new altum highs in the spy. The Q's didn't, the spy did. And then we fell off after that. So it's not that easy. You have to go each individual active day and look at what's happening and analyze it. So if you're here because you want to make money part-time or full-time or you want to be a professional trader, you can learn how to trade. You can make money in the market. You have to look at what's going on every single day. I'm looking what's happening in the pre-market and the post-market and I'm looking, look at what's happening again with the price, which is what we're going to talk about today. So I predicted today the market would drop and fall. We are, we are falling. You can even say this is late because it's 11.05 and we opened an hour and a half ago, but it's still happening nonetheless. Yesterday we opened higher and then fell off a cliff later in the morning as well. So a lot of people want to be professional traders. It's a nice living. You can work from home. Again, I said it's raining today in Manhattan, but I'm inside. I don't have to go out. I don't have to take the subway. I can just work from home. So it is a nice living, but the nicest thing about trading, active trading, day trading is that you have a limited amount of potential to make money. So the only thing stopping you from unlimited potential for making millions of dollars in the market is what? Having the right knowledge and then size. Okay? So you can take big positions when you have more money, but even if you had a lot of money to trade with, if you don't know what to do, you're going to lose it. So everyone says, oh, I need a lot of money. You can take a small amount and build it over time. And then as you get better, you can risk more and you grow your account. You have to start from somewhere. Everybody wants everything yesterday. We live in a me-me-me yesterday. Yesterday, everyone's impatient. You've got to be committed, committed to trading. And again, here we are. It's 2023. I can't even believe it's almost February. It's almost Valentine's Day. The year went so fast already. So even if you think, oh, I can't put in a month or two months or no, if you could have everything you want, the dream life that you desire five years from today, would you do anything you could to create that life? Yes. Okay. Because then you know that you could have it. If you're not willing to take the necessary steps or commit to actually learning how to trade or doing the right things in order to make money in the market, then you're never going to be able to make your dreams come true. But the fact is you can make your dreams come true as a professional trader. And I think it's a great time of the year in order to do that. People start out the beginning of the year with positive affirmations, positive, you know, things that they want to happen for the year. Go for it. Now is the time to go for a January. Now's the time. This is a result from last year for the whole year for the day trades. This is not the options. This is a day trades $651,079 for last year. This is a trade results for the room. Okay. I actually moved last year. So I took off for a couple of weeks last year while I moved in November and then at the end of the year for the holidays. So really, if I had not moved last year, I would have traded for an extra two, three weeks on this year and the results would have been even better. But again, I focus on mostly shorts, which we're going to talk about today. But it is empowering yourself to make a decision within your mind that you want to do this and that you're going to do everything you can in order to be successful. Okay. So one of the things I think traders lack is confidence. Traders lack confidence in their ability to trade well or make a decision. Should they go along the market? Should they short the market? What stock should they trade today? Traders lack confidence in their choices of what to trade. And that's very dangerous. Lack of confidence is usually a result of the lack of knowledge. And in general, there's a lack of confidence in traders across the board. And again, that is problematic. So it's time to get confident. Again, the beginning time of the year is the time to do a reset, a reset on yourself, a reset on your attitude, a reset on your finances and your goals for not only your training, but your financial goals for this year. Listen, again, you can say the markets falling because of fears of a recession, companies like Amazon, Microsoft are laying people off. You're not going to change what's happening with interest rates heights, with the Fed, with people being laid off in large companies, with your stock portfolio falling for your investments. You can't change those things. What you can change is choices that you're making about your individual life that you can do yourself or you can choose to earn more money. So you have to take it upon yourself because you're not going to change the outside circumstances of what's happening in life. Right now it's crazy, but we're talking about inflation. The price of eggs in New York is almost $10 for a dozen eggs. I mean, I just, it's like, these are like gold plated eggs or something. I'm like, I mean, how much do I love eggs to buy these eggs? I mean, again, there's nothing you can do. Unless you want to buy chickens. I mean, you know, you have to live within the confines of the world that we live in. So the only solution is what it's actually that you need to find a way to make more money. So the better you get, the better you get at trading, the more money you can make, whether you have a small account, a medium sized account, or a large account. And again, confidence helps. Part of the reason I'm good at what I do is I'm very confident. I'm confident in what I do because I created my own system. And that's what we're going to talk about here today. But information gives you confidence. Then confidence helps you make money. Someone's talked about the bird flu. Yes, that's part of it. It's all of it. It's all of those things. All of those things combined. I mean, we saw prices go up at the end of 2022, non-egg related things, just because of the cost of diesel fuel, you know, which is still high, which is still high. Gasoline oil prices are still way higher than they were even rewind two years ago, three years ago. And how does everything get to you that you buy? Not just eggs, lettuce, tomatoes, everything that you buy and purchase from the store gets to the grocery store in a truck. So you've got to find a way to say, I am not going to let this let me down. I'm going to do something to improve my life, despite the outer circumstances. So alleviate the anxiety of training by learning what to do because there's no way that you can get away from taking risks. You must take risks in order to make money. You want to short the market today? You want to profit? You have to put a train on. You have to have risk money. It could be $100, $500, it could be $1,000. You're not going to make money unless you put a risk on. That's what it is. Life is about risk. Life is about taking chances. You're never going to get ahead in life unless you're willing to take risk. This isn't about risk for risk sake. This is about taking calculated risk. You weigh the options and you weigh the pros and cons. The pros and cons of going long, the pros and cons of training at all. Maybe there's a day that you shouldn't do anything. The pros and cons of going short, the pros and cons of doing whatever it is you're going to do, just like you would do anything in life, like you would buy a car, you would buy a house, or you would move to a different city or state or take a job. You have to alleviate the anxiety of the risk. And how do you do that? With knowledge, which having the right information. Okay, so you can make your trading dreams happen by learning what to do, having a successful strategy, and then follow it, and then the money will follow. So when I started out trading, of course, I wanted to make a lot of money. At the beginning of my career, I didn't know what I was doing. I thought I did, but I didn't. And I lost most of the money that I lost when I was trying to teach myself how to trade at the beginning. Then I realized this was going to take longer than I thought. And then I developed my own system over about three years. But the reality is once I realized that it wasn't as easy as that I thought, that I can't just do XYZ, follow the trend, do whatever, then I realized that there was more to it, that it was more complicated than I thought. And then my goal became not just to make the money, even though that really is what you're trying to do. That's what you're trying to do every single day. That's what I'm trying to do every day is make money. The goal for me got to get good. And then once I got good, then I started to back up on my risk and take more risk in my trades. And that's how I built my own trading career over time to get to the point where I am now, where I'm doing this for 14 years, going on 15 years. And again, at the beginning, I was shown focus on the money. I wasn't focused enough on doing well. If you focus on doing well, the money will come. Okay. And that is, that's what you have to be. That's where you have to be at. Someone's asking about the results for the year. The average risk per train, okay, is about $2,800. Those are in equity trades and day trades. Now the cost of the stocks vary. And again, the cost of the market, we shorted the market today, is vary to the market positions have gone up and down. So it depends if you have an account with four to one margin or 10 to one margin. If you have a retailer prop account, Jim, how much money you would have needed. But the reality is per train with the entry in the stop is around $2,800. Some trades were about 3,000 risk. And so if you're trading a stock, for example, like the spy, okay, you might want to do a putt because the spy now is, you know, $388 or whatever a share. If you're trading something like BBBY, that's obviously a lot different price point. So I trade stocks. I don't do any low float stocks or penny stocks or really anything under a dollar. We're doing, I'd say, an average cost of between $25 on average and like $100. But I will do the market. I will. We did the Qs today. We did the spy today. But again, you could do the market as an option where you don't have to worry about the margin. Okay. Anyways, getting back to what I was saying, that was a good question. Fact is many stocks in any given day have no strategy to trade as a day trade. Why? Many stocks will go with the market. So a lot of things are read today. Why the market's falling? Last week, the market was rallying a lot of things were green. So on any given day, unless you can correctly read the market, right, you're going to have a hard time trying to do the same stock every day or the same bucket of stocks on any single day or week. So remember, trading is not long-term investing where you trade the trend. I'm not trading the trend. Okay. I am looking at what's happening and what's happening in the gap. So one strategy is really all you need to be successful. And for me, my strategy is in gaps. Now, I plot this in here. This is, this was last night. I should have put today's chart in here, but I'll show you where we open today. This is a daily chart of the QQQs. Now, what do I focus on gaps? What is a gap? A gap is a difference to the close and the open. Let's take a look at it. We're going to go all the way back here to December. Okay. So this is back second week of December. A gap is a difference between the close and the open. So this closed here, open here. A gap is a difference in price. It's a price break. So the market closed here. Again, this is a QQQs. This is a daily. You can see a gap where on the daily. So we closed here and then we open lower. That's a gap down. Then we closed here. Then we open at a lower price again. That's a gap down. So you could have shorted the market here, as you say, could have shorted the market here too. Now, let's look at the gap up. Again, sometimes I do do gap ups. I said earlier we did the Morgan Stanley. This is a bullish gap where the price closes here and gaps up. Now today we're talking about shorts because I do prefer it to short. The reason I prefer to short is because I have a niche shorting because most traders, most active traders, retail traders, day traders, even swing traders prefer to go long. So I've made a whole career over 15 years shorting because that's given me a niche because I've become an expert in shorting. So times like now, times like last year are really good times if you know how to short, if you're in my group. But anyways, I do want to talk about bullish gaps because every once in a while I do go long. A bullish gap is where the price opens up higher than the close. This was back here. This was in September. Okay. So I'm usually looking for one to one. Someone's asking, Tom is asking about turning a trade over profit wise. If I'm doing an option, that's a return on investment. I'm usually looking for 50 to 100%. If I'm doing a day trade, I'm usually looking to turn it over one amount. So if I'm risking $2,800, $3,000, I'm looking to turn over that amount. Okay. So let's talk here again. What is a gap? What is a gap? A stock gap is on the opening price today. It's different than the closing price of yesterday's trading. A gap is a break in price action from one day to the next. Simple. So I only, only, only, only, only do gaps. Okay. So again, if I'm entering a short in the market today, I'm entering a why? Because it was a gap down and it was a good gap down. It was not a gap down that I thought was going to flip. However, it was a little choppy this morning in the first 45 minutes of the day. It took a little bit later to break. We actually were trying to rally today. And that is what makes people so confused about the market because they want to buy gaps for gap bills. They want to buy every dip that did not work in 2022. And I can tell you right now, that's not going to work in 2023. Yes, I do use stops. If you want to, as far as doing options, Mindy's asking about options. I, I do do options, but I also do equity trades on margin. But if I'm doing an option, I'm buying a put and selling it. And yeah, I may not own the stock on the opposite side of it. That's correct. So you have to have an account where you could do that, Mindy. Let's look at here. What is a gap? This is Tesla. Everybody in the world now in the last couple of days has been doing what? Buying it? Here was a beautiful sell off in December. Again, you could look at all the fundamentals. You could say Elon Musk, Twitter, Tesla, boom. But the fact is, I'm looking at the technical analysis of what's going on here. You had a couple of nice shorts in this though at the end of last year. And here was the beginning of this year. We did this one too. So Tesla closed here, gap down, fell, fell off a cliff. Then it rallied with the rest of the market in the last two weeks. Even today was trying to rally. Even yesterday was trying to rally. And now everyone's like, oh my God, Tesla's down too much. It's down too far. It's not going to zero. It's let's buy the dip. It's going to go up. It's going to rally. It's going to go to 200. This is a good place. It can't go any lower. First of all, that mindset that something can't go any lower, it means nothing. Like, can you imagine going into a boardroom company at a bank and convincing a bank to buy a stock because you were trying to tell that head of that bank or that company that that Tesla wasn't going any lower? That's absurd. Of course it can go lower. Okay. Of course it can go lower. So, you know, I mean, again, this is one of the reasons why people kept buying the market even last year in the summer of last year before we fell up into the fall. They said, oh, this is this is it. We can't go any lower. Recessions over or whatever. No, things can always go lower until they get to what zero. It can't go any lower at zero. I wouldn't buy it at zero. But when it said zero, then it can't go any lower. As far as me prefer to trade, I don't prefer to trade necessarily the cues or the or the spy. No, I just there's been opportunities. Wherever there's the opportunity isn't going to do it. There's been a lot of opportunities in the market in the last 12 to 13 months. You know, but I mean, I generally look at the market every day. The market gaps most days. Do I play the market every day? No. Do I prefer to do the market? No. If the gap is good, though, I'll do it. And we just had a lot of nice gaps in the market. That's all. So my focus is on gaps and specifically bearish gaps. That's what you saw in the market today. And again, that's what you saw in some of these other stocks we're talking about, Microsoft, Tesla. Right now, everyone wants to short everything since 2022. Is that the right thing to do? No. Why? Because in reality, the market is still bullish. Now, this may shock you because I just told you that I'm short the market and that the market has been falling for the last 13 months. But the fact is the market is still an uptrend. This is a contrarian opinion. And I didn't get into a full detail of this the last time I was on Fox News. It was the end of last year. But the reality is I am telling you that in my opinion, stocks whoosh information, the market is actually still in an uptrend. It is still in an uptrend. It is still bullish. Now you may disagree with me. You can have your opinion. Many people do because they look at percentages. I do not make trading decisions based on percentages. People say, oh, we're down 20% off the highs. Therefore, we're in a downtrend. No. So don't be surprised if and when the market wants to recover, it goes like gangbusters. Why? Because we're actually never broke the downtrend. Now, might we break the downtrend this year? Yeah, we might. We might. We might break the uptrend, I mean, and go into a downtrend this year. We're not there yet. We're not there yet, but we could. And the crazy thing is, like I said, that's why people are saying, oh my God, we can't go any lower. Of course we can because we're actually still in an uptrend. People are saying oil went lower than zero. Yeah. Well, the oil is volatile. But again, oil has been strong. You could say Russia, Ukraine, whatever. Oil's actually been one of some of the oil stocks we trade is actually strong. But the market is still in an uptrend. So the one thing I need you to keep in mind is that you shouldn't trade without a strategy. So if you're trading right now, if you're risking money, don't trade without a strategy. I know people like to go to all these free chat rooms in the Reddit chat rooms. When you're doing that, people are giving trade ideas. You don't know why Mr. Smith or ABC person is doing whatever they're doing. So don't trade without a strategy yourself. Okay. You really should know why you're risking money. Don't take ideas from strangers. Get to know someone first. Even some of you here know me. Some of you here, I'm new to you. Some of you, I'm a stranger. You never heard of me before. Today's the first day you're ever listening to me. You've been listening to me now for 20 minutes. Get to know someone first. That doesn't mean you have to get to know someone for 10 years. Okay. Even though I have people following me for that long, I've had the stocks which business for 10 years now. Get to know someone a little bit. You can watch my videos on YouTube. I have thousands of them in that time. You can get to know me. Get to know someone. Don't take ideas from strangers. You're going to regret it. See if what the person is saying resonates at all with anything that resonates with you and you'll know. Trust your gut. Trust your instinct because there's a lot of people out there that are teaching different things. Some of them work and some of them do not. So you've got to get to know someone. If you're going to go and you're going to pay them for a class, get to know them a little bit. Again, it doesn't mean it has to take weeks and weeks and months and years to get to know someone. Get to know them somewhat. One of the reasons I have a YouTube channel is, and I have so many videos which I've kept up for so many years that I have on there, is for people to be able to go back and watch them. You're not going to learn my strategy watching all my videos, but you can get to know me. You can even see the progress that I've made individually as a trader from even videos I did of trades that I did even 8, 10 years ago. You know. And then the other thing I want to say to keep in mind is don't short everything. Don't short everything. It's just you can't short everything. You can't short everything everywhere. Again, you're going to get burned if you do that. Okay. And so that's really something that I think people towards the end of last year wanted to short the world. December was a month where there was a lot of opportunities to short, not just in stocks but the market too. So then when February came around, then people were tricked again. It's really one of these things is that people just are trying to look so far out. Don't look too far out. If you're an active trader, don't look too far out. My YouTube channel is a stockswish. Look to what's happening right now today. Look to what's happening right now between now and four o'clock or even tomorrow. Okay. Don't try to predict where are we going to be in June? What's the next rate hike in three weeks? Whatever. Just do the trades I'm doing on the daily. Okay. The trades I'm looking at, yeah, I'm looking at a bigger picture. But the fact is I'm doing options at the Winkleys. That's it. I'm just looking at the Winkleys. And when I'm doing a day trade, I'm looking at charts on minutes. I'm in and out of the one minute chart. Okay. So the reality is it's a lot easier to predict where somebody's going to go in a short time frame than where somebody's going to go in a long time frame. Okay. So again, you're looking at it. You're saying, oh my gosh, where are we going to be if I buy Tesla now? Will Tesla be at $150 by June 1st? Who knows? Who cares? Train Tesla today if you see a trade in it or whatever. I'm just using that as an example. It could be anything at all. You train for whatever you're doing so that you can make money on that particular day or that particular week. And one of the reasons, like I said, that I like to short and I prefer to short is because short moves happen fast today in yesterday's good examples of this. And you have less chance for hiccups on the day if you're in and out of trades very, very fast. You have economic data that always comes out in the afternoon when the Fed talks. You also have other data that can come out at 10, 1030. So when you're in a trade and you can get out of it in the first half hour of the day quickly, you don't have to worry necessarily about economic news messing up your trade. Now today was a day where I thought it was warranted to hold a short longer because I thought the market was going to continue, pull everything down and possibly, possibly power trend on the day. What do I mean by power trend? Close at the lows, fall all day, have a big red bar kind of like we did yesterday. But again, the benefits of shorting or what? That I have an itch because most people that train prefer to go long. I don't understand why that is. I've never really got that except for the fact that people can comprehend the idea of buying something low and selling high. But it's just as easy to comprehend the idea of shorting something at $5 and having to drop down to $4 and making a dollar. And if you had a thousand shares of something, then you'd make what? $1,000. It's not difficult to understand shorts. For some reason people are afraid of shorting or they don't know how to short or they just are not as excited about shorting as going long. But again, if you decide you want to come and learn from me how to short and create this as your niche, you will have to know that you're in the minority of people that trade the market that are retail traders. It will always be the case. Always, always, always forever and ever and ever. And again, I don't know why that's true, but I know that it is true. People just prefer to go long. So I think deciding to train and short and make a niche for shorting will benefit you with a long run if you learn how to do it well. I run a live training room. Someone's asking about trade ideas. I run a live room. You'd have to come and be there to get the train. As far as options that I have a newsletter that's emailed to you. The options newsletter is emailed to you directly. Anyways, this was 15 minute of the QQQs going back. This is today is the 19th. So this was yesterday morning. Okay. Here you see where we had to sell off. So this is 10am, 1030, boom, and then we never look back. Okay. So then we were even selling off last night. So this again is what a big fat red bar depicts selling. So you could say this is selling and you have shorting and you have panic. He said, well, how do you know it's panic Melissa? Well, let's say at one point yesterday we're up where 284 and change were almost up to 285 by the end of the nine to four o'clock. Where were we 277 and change? That's pretty big. That's a pretty big move to the downside, even for the QQQs. That was a panicky action. This was a panicky bar. And again, we broke the low of the day in this bar and it still happened early enough around the 10am area. So again, one of them looking for, I'm looking for institutional money. I say, what do you mean by institutional money, Melissa? I mean big traders, banks, big position and hedge funds. Are they going along the market now? No. How do I know? Because we would be near the highs. We will be anywhere near the highs and we're not. So the market is not being bought with institutional money right now. Will some time at some point might it be? Yes. Could it happen this year possibly? Again, trying to look too far off or predict what's going to happen in the future too far into the year is a pointless endeavor and isn't going to make you any money. If you're someone that's looking to invest long term, there are companies and stocks that are never going to go out of business that you could just buy if you're perfectly willing to hold them in a downtrend for as long as you want to hold them till they flip around. But I have found that people, they convince themselves that they can do this, but they're lied to themselves that they can because they really can't. And if you're an active trader and you position on an option that has an expiration date or even a day trade or even a swing trade, it's going to be very difficult for you to buy something and hold it while you're down for weeks and weeks and months. You might think that you can do that, but trust me, I know people's psychology of this and they cannot. So this was one thing that we did go long and I just want to point this out because this was institutional money buying the stock. Of all the banks that have had earnings in the last couple of days, this was the only one that I felt convinced to buy. The stock list here gapped up rallying. We did calls on this. We went long in the day trade room. We did everything. It was a beautiful gap. Again, people like to say gaps do gap fills. That does not work consistently. My method consistently works. What do I mean? I mean you're going to have more winners and losers. I think that's the only way you can make it in this game. I don't have every trade that I take is not a winner, but more trades that I take win than lose. I have some trades that lose. That's why I use a stop. Otherwise, I risk my whole account every day with no stops and that would be completely irresponsible. So you have to account for the fact that some trades even with me will lose. The idea of trading is to have more winners than losers and part of that also means plopping it on and plunking it down when you get the good moves. Today is an example of that. Or even yesterday and part of it also means pulling back and taking it easy when there's not a time to do it or there isn't anything good or nothing rates per the criteria that you should take a break and maybe not do any trades that day. Serge is asking me about shorting psychology. Just the idea of panic. The simple idea about panic about the fact that there's no sense of urgency and panic to go long something. If I said, oh, Apple's going to have the good earnings and it's going to gap up and it's going to rally whenever they are the next couple of weeks. I think it's the beginning of February, the end of January, Apple. You're like, well, maybe I'll think about buying it. Well, let me think about a little bit. Well, there's no emergency. There's no panic. Panic buying is very rare. It was something actually, I did a trade. This is a couple of years ago. I want to say it was 2019. BYND. Does anyone remember BYND when it came out and then it had that huge massive spike up beyond me? That was the only thing that I can think about the top of my head that really had panic buying. It just ripped. I mean, that was a great play. That was a couple of years ago. But for the most part, you don't have panic buying. Okay. Panic selling is something that you actually do have because people are in trades and they're scared. Oh my God, I'm down. I'm almost down. I'm not up as much as I was. And then they panic. So it's the fears of psychology against that whoever asked that questions. If I hold the trade overnight, it's an option. That's it. Well, this here just really quickly. Again, we're focusing on shorts today, but I just want to show you. This is the gap. Okay. So this was right in here. So the stock closed at four o'clock, whatever this exact number was, 91.50, whatever it was, gapped up, boom. And it gapped up here. I think it was around 95 or something like that. And then it spiked up and ran up. My target was 98. It ran up to 99. And then actually if the market would not have fallen, this would have kept going. It would have gotten to 100. But now the market's kind of messed this up here for the rest of the week. But actually this is strong. So at one point at four, this was here and then it was here. Okay. And then again, talking about institutional money to the downside, Tesla. Great example. Again, you can give all kinds of fundamental reasons why you could say this has been falling, but it is falling. People have been buying it the last week. I think that is a no-no. But again, people are going to do that because they think Tesla's not going out of business. That's true. But that doesn't mean it's not going to drop off anymore. And again, with the market, very difficult for anything to hang on. So don't make trading hard. Trade with the power, not against it. With the power, with the power. What's the power today? The power today is to the downside. Who's in control today? The bears. The bears are in control. The bulls are not in control today. Who was in control yesterday? The bears, not the bulls. Okay. And this is what confuses people because they can say, well, the bulls were controlled last week. Melissa, no, they weren't. No, they weren't. A rally is different from control. You understand what I'm saying? Anyways, I'm looking for institutional money. Learn to spot institutional money and trade with it. It's going to make your life a whole lot easier. A lot easier to make money. A lot easier to take size. A lot easier to grow your account. And a lot easier to suffer through the days where you do have a crack trade, where something doesn't work right, where you don't get the follow-through, maybe. And again, if you have win, win, win, win, win, wash, talking about your emotions, talking about your confidence, it's going to be better for you. How do you get confident? One, learning what to do, but also making money. If you're losing, losing, losing, losing, losing all the time, then have one winning day. Your confidence is in the toilet. And it's so hard to get your confidence up, especially if your account is reflecting losses, which you've seen a lot for people in 2022, specifically for people that are day traders. Someone's talking about MS. I can bring that up and look at where that is today, if you want me to look at that, if we have time here when we're done. As far as closing the gap, it depends how much the market falls off here in the next 24 to 48 hours, but I would say off the cuff without looking at the chart right now. No, no, I don't think it's going to do that at all. But again, if the market completely tanks, it could, why? Well, Netflix has earnings out tonight. Netflix is going to gap. Am I going to short Netflix? Am I going to go long Netflix? I have no idea. I don't have an inside scoop, but the director is at Netflix, the CEO, to find out what they're going to say tonight. But I know the stock is going to gap. I'm just laying out a scenario here. Let's say Netflix bombs tonight, then everything could fall off a cliff tomorrow. So you have to be aware of that. Again, nothing's going to hang on if the market bombs. Whether or not we bomb or not is a crap shoot right now going into tonight, because we're selling off today. Yes, that's true. But if Netflix has good earnings, and if Netflix is up tonight, then we could reverse liquidity split tomorrow like that. Again, I'm not in Netflix. I'm not in a trade in that. It doesn't make sense to take a trade like that into the earnings. So you have to wait. But off the cuff, if the market doesn't bomb, I would say MS is going to hold on. It's just a good long. That's one of the things I said. You could actually just buy that as a swing trade, actually. It's just a nice chart. It's just a nice chart. Anyways, let's talk about institutional money. A big flow of money going a certain direction is what moves the market, sucks and creates momentum and sets the trend in charts. When you're looking for institutional money, you're really reading the sign of power in a stock. You want to be in the side of power in order for you to make money trading. Institutional money is in charge in the market in stocks at all times, at all times, even if you think it's not, it is. Telsa is going to be a great example of this. Don't be surprised if this bombs again too. I have to look at when the earnings are on that. But I'm looking all the time for big, big footprints of big position players in the market. We never trade things that don't have volume. You're not going to get the moves in it. So we need volume. We need momentum. And then I'm looking at the gap. So I'm looking at the gap in the morning in the pre-market and I'm reading it. Now, here was a trade we did in Tesla. This is to start out the year. We did the 110 puts that I called in January. This is a newsletter that gets emailed out. Now, at 907, you can't take a trade. You can't do an option at 907. You can't do options until after they open. We did the Tesla puts. So what would you do? You would buy a put. So the letter has a strike symbol, expiration date, and type. This was a nice trade. Boom. In, out. This was, you know, medium price, I'd say. I did it close to the, close to the strike. Cost was 625, 12 contracts, the $7,500 risk. You could have made 3,600. Again, 50% close enough, good enough. In, out. And again, if you did 2,250, you could have made $600. This is a nice trade. Again, I'm doing the weeklies. It depends what I'm doing it as far as how tight I'm calling it. Let's take a look at the gap Thursday the 5th. Oops, let me go to the chart here. Thursday the 5th was here. So again, this may not look like much. Close to your gap down. Boom. And then the next day, there it was. See it? So again, you take the trade and then you're up as soon as you get up in the morning. See that? Anyways, gaps have huge opportunity because they spot power money. Power money is something that a lot of people get confused about. And again, the sell-off today is probably confusing a lot of people because of the fact that we rallied for the first two weeks of the year. And a lot of people, again, even people on TV with money managers, they're swearing to God that the market's going to have a recovery this year. It's too soon to say that, but people bought up in the market this year thinking that if you're an active trader, you don't care where the market's going to be six months from now or 12 months from now. You do if you're looking at your retirement, maybe if you're 65. But I mean, if you're under the age of 60, you shouldn't even be worried about that right now. And if you're an active trader, then you're looking to make money today, today, this week, tomorrow. I'm not worried about what's going to happen in the next rate hike. I'm worried about what's going to happen today between now and four o'clock, whether or not I should get out of my puts. I'm worried about what's going to happen tonight with Netflix then if I stay in puts tomorrow. So you have to look at something and you qualify it, you qualify it and rate it in the moment that you're actually in it. Gaps are in that and create a sense of urgency. That's an action that's being forced by participants at the stock. What's happening today is selling. That is why gap trading is incredibly powerful. Trading gaps is a powerful and profitable way to train because you're trading the side of power of money. And in the case of today, we're seeing selling. A good chart, a nice chart I said was MS. How can you trade and not worry? Well, I shouldn't say worry. You put a stop in. You put a stop in if you're doing day trade. That takes the worrisome off you because you have a fixed risk. And as far as an option, you can't lose more than you have in a contract. Now, again, what I can say to people is you have to pick and choose what you're going to hold. Like for example, there's times to hold trains to bigger targets and there's times to basically get out of them. Someone's asking about losing trade. I'll tell you right now. I shorted Wells Fargo on Friday. I was actually up in it. I screwed up my exit. I lost in the train. I did a short in that. I was up. I think all but one person got out of it. I just didn't react fast enough. I did a short on Friday and Wells Fargo was a great trade. It was up money. And then it reversed and I lost in it and I didn't get out. That was a losing trade for me. But actually it was a positive trade and I should have got out. I wanted it to go further. I thought it would go further and it didn't. So I got snopped. That was on Friday. When I went back and looked at how that flipped though, I was shocked. But again, JPM reversed. The sector was against that on Friday and so was the market. Otherwise, that would have kept going. So there was a losing trade. Anyways, you have to find gaps and if you come to me, you can learn how to tell which ones are the good ones, which ones are going to work. This was another really nice move to the downside, which is again a short. GS Goldman fell. This was the 17th Tuesday after the holiday closed here, gap down, fell off a cliff. You could have shorted this. Okay. This was a nice move to the downside. Was I watching it? Yeah, I was watching it. I just didn't react fast enough. I was tired. I was tired actually. I moved like I said two months ago. I'm still unpacking. So it's been a lot to work and move and unpack and get situated. Again, it's just been a lot for me, but I was watching it. I had ample opportunity to do it. But sometimes, you know, you're just, you're there. You're watching it. And if you don't react like that, boom, that's, you know, that's what it is. Anyways, getting back to what I was saying, the benefits of shorting or what the psychology behind it is that you can get big moves. You also are going to have a niche because most people don't like to short. Don't know how to short. So you're going to have a benefit at being able to learn how to do something that a lot of people don't know how to do. And you will have opportunities to short in a bullish market and a bearish market. I've been shorting, like I said, since I started trading 15 years ago. And the market was bullish for most of the time that I have traded and including even now. Again, the market for the most of the life of the market stays in enough trend. Even if we end up falling off at some point this year or even next year and go into a downtrend, which we're not yet, it won't last long. Okay. The downturns in the market don't tend to last that long because a lot of money that is invested in the market is long, is long positions and is retirement positions. Okay. Something about percentages someone's asking me, biggest percent losers, not necessarily. If something is at opening at a lower price, it doesn't mean that I'm necessarily going to do it. It could be down 15 cents and I could do it. I said that earlier. I don't make decisions based on percentages. Again, if it was that easy, no one would ever lose if you could say, well, it's down 25%. Therefore, I'm going to short it. If it's up 25%, there, I'm going to go along it. It's not that easy. There's an analysis that's involved with it. Again, you have to use your brain. Don't try to take a shortcut and squish it. I know lots of people want to do that. That's one of the reasons why, again, there will always be people out there that say people, that try to make claims that you could take $500 and open up a trading account with $500 and make $100 grand in 90 days. That's crazy. There will always be people that believe those kinds of crazy claims, though. Can you make a half a million dollars a year at day trading? Yes. Can you do that risk in $3,000 a trade? Yes. Are you going to have to know what to do with that? Yes. Are you going to have to have a good size account? The answer is yes. I've been trading for almost 15 years. Would you be happy if you made $50 grand a year, though, or $75 or $100 if you lost money last year? The answer is yes. So start out with something normal that you can afford and move forward from there, because the reality is that you're only going to get forward if you start making progress. Again, it's 10 steps forward and two steps back. And if you didn't make money in 2022, you missed out a huge opportunity to short what? The market, the spy, the cues, and lots of stops to how to ample opportunity to short. Tesla was one of them as well. Okay. What do you mean? The mitigate the inherent risks in shorting? If you do a put and you risk $5,000, you can't lose more than $5,000. That's an overnight short. If you're day trading and you take a trade on margin, you will exit that trade before four o'clock, whether it hits a stop or not. And you can put in a limit order stop at a set risk amount, whatever you risk. It doesn't matter if you're short or long, a day trade, you must exit that by four o'clock. If I'm in a day training, it hasn't stopped me. I'm not holding it overnight on cash or two to one margin. So there's no, there's, it's not any more risky to short than go long, unless you're just shorting something and you're doing it on cash or on two to one margin in your account as a swing trade, but you could say the same thing about going long, that it's just as much risk. You understand what I'm saying? Does that make sense? So again, that's a misnomer that shorting is riskier than going long. That's not true. That's not true. That's not true. So anyways, my system is called the golden gap. The golden gap is a 26 point rating system. I teach this class once a month. The class is January 28th and 29th for January. If you want to learn, if you want to come with me and learn what I do, again, you will trade better if you know what to do. You will have less anxiety if you know what to do. You will be able to take more size if you know what to do. And if you learn how to have a niche in something that most people don't do, you will definitely have an edge and you will be able to do better going forward because trying to go with the crowd of people is only going to mean buying every dip, losing. Most people lose in the market. That's just a fact. So you got to put yourself above the rest and be different. And success requires a plan, a 26 point checklist. This is what I created. This is the meat potatoes of what I teach in the class. This is what should come and you'd pay me for my time and my information to learn my system. While you can do it yourself, it also benefits you being in the live trading room. I call the trades live. Call the trades of the market live today. Now we're going to go through one week of trades. This was back in December. We're going to try to get through this here before we're done, before we're done. Get out before the end of the day. Yes, you should get out before the end of the day in a day train. I hear too, I've heard so many terrible, terrible stories of people saying, well, I'm down in this trade. I'm going to hold it until tomorrow. Then they went from four to one margin to two to one margin. And then it's upside down. If a trade doesn't work today as a day trade, what makes you think it's going to work tomorrow? Be willing to take the stops. Be willing to take some losses. Nobody likes it. I'm not saying you have to jump up and down. Yeah, I lost today. No, that isn't good. Do you think it was happy on Friday? Do you think it was happy? First of all, I was pissed at myself on Friday because I was up money at Wells Fargo. I don't think I'm going to have time to show you that chart. I'll do a video and put it on my YouTube. I was annoyed with myself. I know better. I didn't get out. But the reality is the move, the reversal happened because the market reversed Friday and that's life. Sometimes you're going to lose them a trade and you have to accept that. It's like, you know, you have to live within the confines of the system. You live in the United States. Guess what? You are going to pay taxes. This is living within the confines of the system. You know, there's a price you got to pay for it and the price is that some trades are going to lose, you know, but you have to accept that. Friday, I shouldn't have lost though. That really was a winning trade. I was upset with myself, but I'm making the ground up for it today. Anyways, let's go back and look at some of the things we did. This was 12, 12, boom. So we did this here in Tesla. Stack post here, gap down. We shorted it again. Here's the gap. So this is the daily entry was 175, 20 ex was 171 65. So I was asking, what's your goal? I'm trying to flip it around one. So again, if I'm risking 2900, I'm trying to make at least that in this case here, I could have held this and made more. You see where this went. Okay. I could have held it into the close there on that day. I didn't. I didn't. I tried to be in and out quick in the morning. That was a good solid trade. Then this was a long, I just want to show you here, 12, 13, we did go long. This really didn't have the stamina that I thought that it would, but I did go along this. I actually made money on something on here that actually ended up reversing, but I got in and out of it really quick. It's kind of ironic, but we did go along that day. This was CVX. This is something else I also like to the upside. Then on 12, 14, we didn't do any trades. Why? Nothing met my criteria with the rating system. 12, 15, we did the QQQs. Again, if you don't want to do the cost of this on margin, you could do it as a put. We did do some puts in the market last year. 12, 15 was here, closed here, gapped down. This was a very, very nice move to the downside. Okay. Really nice move to the downside. That was Thursday. Then Friday, 12, 16, we did the market again. This was a huge straight one. Big move, almost $3 plopped on the size. Let it ride. Similar to today, this was in the 16th. This may not even look like much, but actually it was a really nice gapped down. The market close here, gapped down, fell. Rallyed, and we took it, we shorted it, got the drop. I also did the spy on that day too, which was another huge trade. Why? Big move. One of the reasons I like trading the market, someone brought this up, is because the market has big moves. Again, we want momentum. How are you going to make money as an active trader? Size and momentum. This close here, gapped down, fell. On this one particular week. Again, this is an average risk of between $20,000 and $3,000 a trade. This weekend, we made over 23 grand. If you made half that and risk half that, could you live with that for a week over 10,000 for one profits and one week? Yes. Again, you have to be able to understand some days, you're going to have huge days. Some days, you're going to have medium days. Some days, you're going to have baby days. Some days, you may not trade. Some days, you may have a loss, like I did on Friday. You have to be able to be consistent with what you're doing, though, to have more winners and losers. So it makes up the ground for you that you can move forward. On my program is what you've been looking for. Then email me, whoever said that, at MelissaTheStockSwitch.com. Jeremy, the AIM. What in trading the market? You're asking again about margin. Oh, I have an options newsletter. I do options and day trades, Jeremy. Whatever works for you. If you don't want to do the day trades in the rum, in the market, in the QQQs and the spy, you can do them in options. I do do both. I'm telling you, I do both. So it's whatever works for you. So you can open up an options account with $2,000. Now you can't risk $2,000 in a trade. I do not own any charting system and I don't have any affiliation with a broker. You're on your own for that. I would talk to, well, 365 about that. Talk to Marisa. I'm sure she can refer you to a million different people to talk to, to get hooked up with them. I teach my class. I teach a method. Okay. Talk to Marisa about that or she can talk to you when she's done. Anyways, getting back to what I was saying, the time that I spend analyzing what I'm doing, okay, is far more than the time that I actually spent trading because sometimes I'm in and out in a trade in five to 10 minutes. So I get up early. I analyze what I'm doing. I look at everything. I study, study, study. I got up early this morning. I live in an Eastern time zone, which is the same hours as the market. But you have to do the analysis before you get into the trade so that you can go after it quickly, make as much money as you can. Again, it's about chunking it out. And you're doing this for the purpose of making money. I have to stress that, but you will not make the money that you want to make unless you learn what to do. So it is about empowering yourself how to trade. So I teach a class, which I've been talking about on and off throughout this program today. It's called the Golden Gap. It teaches you a 26 point rating system to find the best stock to trade each day. The course also teaches you how to enter and exit the stock on the day. The course teaches price analysis and technical analysis on an advanced level. If that's something that you're interested in doing, I teach an online class once a month. It's a two day class. It's full on nine to five. We have a one hour break for lunch. And in that class, I teach you how to strategically find pick-and-play stocks at our professional bearish gaps. And again, like I said, we did the market today. The class for January is January 28th and 29th and 90 am to 5pm. Class tuition is $69.99. US dollars class is online. I am doing a webinar special for earning season for those of you that participated today and came. It is going on through Sunday, Sunday, this Sunday, January 22nd. If you sign up for the earning season special, we will receive the trading room free to the end of 2023. This is huge. So you would have got the trades today. People already have signed up for this class and they already are making money and they already got the trades so far we've done this year. If you pay for the class, you are doing that class in January. If you can't do the class in January, you do the class in February, Sylvia. You can email me for upcoming dates. I do have the dates for February already. No, I do not trade futures. I'm just going to, I'm going to take this, I think I, I'm going to pull up the market right now. I'm going to stop this and then pull up the charts in the market just so I can talk about what's happening here quickly since I do have a few minutes. The only reason I think that people want to do futures is because they want to open up small accounts. That is probably what I'm estimating that reason people want to do futures for. Listen, I like doing stocks. Why? Stocks can have big moves. Tels is a great example that I could say Apple. I could say 25 different things. Stocks make big moves and you can trade them and the price points vary. Why we've been talking about the ETF and the spy, you know, I just, there's no benefit to doing futures unless it's just that you want to have open up an account with a small account with high leverage. Learn how to do options. Learn how to do it right. Trade on margin. Take less, take less size. You get big moves in stocks, which is why trading stocks is beneficial. The problem is you got to know how to do it. Okay. My email is melissa at the stockswush.com. Let's just look at what's going on in here now really quickly and then any other questions here last minute. So again, I'll just show you here what we did today. So we looked at Amazon today. I called to put in this. This is dropping nicely. That's shaping up. Also called the market today. And again, you could be out of this. Some people get out of this early and then we also do the QQQs today. This was another nice one in here. And again, I thought about doing this late yesterday at three o'clock into the overnight. I didn't. I said, let me just be conservative a little bit this week because this market has been so wackadoo since the beginning of the year, but we fell. We fell today. It's set up nicely. The gap was good. Again, we tried to recover to the day. We didn't. So where can we go here? We could fall off a cliff today. We've got four hours left. That's a long time. The market could fall off a cliff in five minutes or we could wait to see what happens with Netflix. Could Netflix reverse this whole market? Absolutely. So again, Netflix is a market stock. It's earning season. Like I said, there's a lot of big stocks that are reporting. We had the banks. The banks reported, but I will say this. While Goldman got down and fell off a cliff, a lot of banks got down and reversed, but they were down. They were down. The only bank that had really good earnings was this. So again, someone was asking earlier about shorting this. There's really no play here to short this. If you're shorting this of all the beautiful things in the market to short, you're almost like desperate for a trade. Like you can't put any up at any tick or simple. If you want to short something, this is the worst thing you could short. Yes, it's falling with the market. There's no play here that makes any sense. This could rip right around in a second because it's just too strong. The only reason this is falling today is because of the market. It's the only reason to gap down. This is way too strong. There's much, much, much, much, much, much, much higher quality shorts to do if you want to do a play, much better plays to do. And again, I would not go long this right in here today. Again, saying that it's closing the gap makes no sense. It just doesn't make any sense. It makes no sense. You could have said that same thing surge in here. You could have said it was going to close the gap on this day and fall down in here and then you would have, you would have lost. The only reason this is doing this is because of the market. You could have said this here on this day here that I went long it. That doesn't work. Sometimes it does work. Sometimes anything works. Sometimes I can cross a busy street in New York City and not get hit by a car when the light is red. I shouldn't do that though. Sometimes you can make it across. You shouldn't do it. You should always wait for the light. It doesn't mean that you should do it. You could have said the same thing here. All right, Melissa, I'm going to have to get you wrapped up. Do you have any closing thoughts? No, just email me if you have any questions. Okay. All right, great. Well, thank you so much for being with us.