 trading and investing. Melissa Armos, the CEO and owner of the stockswish.com. Melissa, you have the mic. Trading day of March. So starting out bullish here for the market. We'll see if we can hold this week. And welcome everyone. Thank you for having me. Today I'm going to talk about making money trading volatility. And last week was a very wild week in the market. And pretty much 2020 did start out very bullishly. But then we had a big sell off last week. And unfortunately, the virus scares really probably are not still done in the market. So we will see where we go from here. I am cautiously watching cautiously optimistic. So got a lot of phone calls, got a lot of emails in the last couple of days, people panicking that the market was lower. And unfortunately, two people did die from cases in the US this week, which was horrible, horrible. But the market is trying to hold on today. Now one is volatility. Volatility means you think something is going in one direction, and then it goes in another direction. So volatility isn't straight selling. Okay. Like we did pretty much see last week. Volatility is like today. For example, we're rallying. And then what if we rally another day, which we might, and we rallied on Friday, even though we gap down. So what if we rally three days in a row? And then we start to sell off quickly. That would be volatility. Because if we would rally for three days in a row, people would probably think that we were going to continue higher and that we put in a quote unquote bottom on Friday, which I'm not saying that we have. But volatility overall is something that if you know how to play it, you can make money in the market. And as individual traders, which we all are, again, it doesn't matter if you have a small account or a big account, we're all individuals. We're trading our own funds, or I would think everyone here is trading their own funds. And you have a limitation. You have a fixed risk amount. You only have so much cash that you can risk per train. So you want to try to get it right. And you want to try to get it right way more than you ever get wrong. Okay. So volatility is good to play on if you know what direction to play it, if you know how to play it. And in the market last week, there was many good shorts to be had many, many, many good shorts who could have done puts, which are options trades, which are still shorts. Okay. So what I do is I look for momentum and I look for volatility and I look for it in something called a gap. And that is what we're going to talk about here today. So again, I own my company called the Stock Swish. If you'd like to contact me, you can call me at 993200 gap or follow me on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or Skype or email me at Melissa at thestockswish.com. So we're really still in the beginning part of 2020. And the beginning part of the year is a good time for evaluating your financial goals and career. So if you're thinking about trading as a career, you could do it part time while you're doing your full time job. Okay. A lot of people transition, they start trading maybe one, two, three days a week in the mornings or doing options and then transition. But it's a good time to think about where you at with your job. Do you want to switch careers? Do you enjoy what you do every day? I did mortgages for 17 years and I got to be honest with you towards the end. I really did not like doing that job and I was looking for a new career in the lo and behold, I found out about trading and I found out about day trading and the nice thing about trading, whether you trade options, whether you day trade is that you work for yourself. Okay. And so that's very, very important for me personally. I like being my own boss. Okay. So when you are a professional trader and I say professional, but you basically work for yourself, but you'll be doing it to pay your bills. So you get a lot of freedom from that. A lot of people that are very independent minded entrepreneurs. You know, you don't have to do this full time, but if you want to do it full time, there is an opportunity, but you have to have a specific set strategy in order to trade in order to be successful. And for me at SCAPs and that's what we're going to talk about here today. The other reason that I chose to get involved in the market once I was looking for a new career from mortgages is because of the fact that I liked doing a job where I had unlimited earnings potential and when I was doing mortgages, I did the more mortgages I did, the more money I made. Okay. And with trading, this has been a very, very active year. So, you know, you can have unlimited potential when you're trading to make money in the market. The only thing holding you back really is the risk per trade. So you can risk more if you have one more size, but obviously no matter what, you still need a strategy that has a high wind ratio, which we'll talk about today here as well. Someone is saying that they were in real estate too. Yeah. I live in Manhattan. I never did mortgages in this in New York City, but it's very, very, very stressful and I have a lot of friends obviously that have jobs in New York and working in New York is stressful, but I honestly don't have to live in New York. I love living in this city, but I can live anywhere in the world and do what I do. So, you could be in a foreign country and trade the US stock market and you don't have to be in eastern time zone, although I do find that convenient for me because the market opens at 9 30 and again, I'm in New York same time zone as the market, but you know, we're just looking to trade in the morning most of the days that I'm looking at my trades and even if you wanted to trade all day to four o'clock at four o'clock, the market closes. Okay. So, you have time to do things later in the day. You have weekends off and in that sense, it is a nice career. You know, I don't know if any of you work in retail, but again, real estate was a seven day away, 24 hour day job. Retail. You're working many, many long hours, way more than 40 hours a week and you're working on holidays. You're working on weekends. Okay. So, there are many reasons to trade, but really, I think if you're looking to do this for more money, that's fine, but I found that this was a blessing, blessing for me as a career and it might be for you as well. Trading is a career that can offer you financial freedom, fulfillment and happiness. There's a certain type of pride I get when I call a trade, when I take a trade, when I do a trade that I predict is going to go in a certain direction like last week with the market and it is profitable. Okay. There's a joy, there's a fulfillment and the money is part of that. Okay. But it also really is getting it right. You can have the life you want if you're willing to learn something new and develop the skills to become successful in a new industry. So, one is volatility equals profits for professionals. Okay. Now, if you're, if you have a 401k or retirement plan, you may get upset when you see volatility and you know, on television, people act like that's bad. If you're an active trader or making a living trading, it may not be bad if you know how to play it. Okay. So, if you're a long-term investor, volatility can seem scary, but if you're an active trader, it's an opportunity. It's an opportunity to make a lot of money and that is really what the tail end of last week was. And so, let's just look here at a chart of the market. So, I trade gaps. What would be some reasons to trade gaps? And not only that, what is a gap? I'm going to go over what a gap is here right now today. So, a gap is the difference between the close and the open. Gaps happen every day in the market. Some are meaningless gaps and some are important gaps. Let's take a look at the one that I thought was very important from last week. So, this was Wednesday. This is the spy. This is the ETF for the S&P. The market closed here around 3-11 and changed Wednesday night at four o'clock and then on Thursday Martin opened down here at 3-05. So, actually, I didn't short here this first day out of the game for any overnights, which was Monday a week ago. Okay. I had a hundred percent conviction on Thursday, though, that the market was going to drop and fall, which it did, and then it fell into Friday. But this is a gap. Market closed here on Wednesday and opened at a different price the next day. In this case here, this is a gap down. You also have gap ups. Where was a gap up today? Market closed here on Friday. Around 296 and changed and gapped up. Opened at a price above where it closed. Opened at around 300. So, this is a gap up and again, this was this morning but we were rallying today. This was a gap down. Closed here, gap down. So, there are gap downs and gap ups. And gaps, okay, signify volatility when they are the good ones. Okay, the good ones, what I call the good ones are the predictable ones. This was predictable here that we're going to drop on Thursday. Okay. So, we took advantage of it. All right. Now, here's another one. This was Amazon. Amazon gap down two on Thursday. Wednesday, Amazon closed in here around 1980. Boom. Gapped down here around 1930 and changed. Fell. Sold off. Closed here around 1880. Opened in the morning around 1810. Okay. This is Amazon. So, Amazon gap down two. This is volatility. Why? Chart was very strong. Chart was holding. People were long Amazon. Amazon was holding here in the 50 period moving average going into Wednesday nights closed. And again, the reasons we gap down last week were based on the coronavirus and the scare and the people that had in the panic. But again, panic creates the volatility. People get scared and they sell. When people are dying, people get scared. When people are getting a virus that there is currently right now, no type of medication that people can take to help them. No vaccine whatsoever at all. People get scared and they panic and selling. Panic creates selling. Selling creates more selling. Okay. And you see how it goes. And for active traders, guess what? We can short selling. We can short selling and you can also buy maybe when you see selling. I did not do that Friday and I didn't go along the market today. Okay. But when you see that something's going to happen, whether it's buying or selling, you can take advantage of it. Again, volatility means something's going in one direction and then it goes in the opposite direction that you think it's going to go. And in the case here of Amazon, this chart was strong. And I don't follow fundamentals. I'm talking about these things because they're of interest and I appear on news, several news channels. But people do love newsy things. For me, I read the gap and I read the price action in the gap. But I know that people are following very closely what's happening in the world right now because it's affecting a lot of stocks and it's affecting the market. And it is creating many of these gaps that we're seeing. Any questions here so far? Okay. So let's talk about another gap here. This was BYND. This was the play of the day in the trading room on Friday. Stop closed here, gap down. Again, closed at one price, open at another price. Okay. And then this felt. This was a short here in the tail. We shorted that. So what is another reason to trade gaps? Profits happen very quickly. And as a day trader, if you had a choice and someone said you could make $1,000 in five minutes or you could make $1,000 in six hours, which would you choose? Well, that's easy. You would prefer to make it fast. You would always prefer to make money faster than quickly. And also the longer you're in the market, the more your position is at risk. And right now because we're in this period, the market's attempting to rally. Is it going to last? Is it going to hold? I honestly don't know. Okay. I was shocked by the sell-off last week from Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Then I knew we were going to drop. But you know, when you're not short, you don't take any action. You just kind of lay low. I actually just got off the phone with somebody earlier today. I said, listen, just lay low right now. You don't have to be trading every day. You don't have to trade any second. You don't, you don't have to trade over all the time. All right. Way to something qualifies. Way to something happens. Because it's a lot better to make money fast when you see the volatility, rather than take a position and hold it because you're always at risk. Okay. People go in the market today. This could fall through tomorrow. This may not fall through tomorrow. All right. But even if you went long today, guess what? It's very iffy in the morning. The money wasn't fast today in the market. All right. Fast is good when you're an active trader. Fast is always good. Fast is always, always good. In fact, if the market goes straight right back up to the high, that would be the best case scenario for the market. The be the best case scenario for the market and the most aggressive thing for the market to do. I don't know if it does it, but fast is good when it comes to making money and when it comes to moves and stocks. Now, why also trade gaps? You can work from home. Okay. Work from home. It's nice. You can work anywhere in the world. So, if you learn how to trade the market, you can be your own boss and work from home. You can set your own schedule and work just a short time a day for a comfortable income, whatever that is. I usually say one risk unit is your goal per day. If you risk 500 in a trade, you should be looking to make 500 in a trade. If you're risking a thousand in a trade, you should be risking a thousand in a trade. Okay. There's a trading strategy I trade and teach. It sets up quickly. Each morning, the strategy is gaps. Gaps not only work fast, but they also offer a good risk to reward payout. This is important because you need a sustainable trading method if you want to be trading, if you want this to be your career. Someone's been saying about the gap down. The gap down in the S&P, there was no gap down this morning. If you're talking about the gap down on Friday, was near key support of moving averages when the bass was expected. How did I get conviction on market was going down. The conviction was on Thursday. We gap down Thursday and we gap down on Friday morning. We rallied on a gap down Friday. Yes, it was into support, but there's about a million support reasons in the market. So you don't, I don't go long support. That's not my strategy. It also isn't a consistent way to trade because the market gap down on Thursday to another support level, which could have helped but didn't, and I knew that it wouldn't. Buying support is not a consistent way to look at charts. Just so you know. And if we have time, I'll pull out some live charts here today and I'll go over a couple of examples. But that is also why, as well, I don't have a hundred percent conviction that the rally today is going to have follow-through and even if it does for three days, is necessarily going to follow through because there's many support levels in this market. This market has been strong and has been rallying and rallying pretty much all of 2019. You could have said at the prior highs was even a support. There's a baby support. There's a mini support. There's a bigger support. There's another support that's below where we were in Friday morning, to be honest with you. If you're just look at the two hundred pair moving average and try to go long every time the market sits on that or any stock, you're going to lose. That's not a way to look at things. Why? Because of the gap. I'm going to go over that in some trades from last week. I'm going to go over all the trades from last week of the day trades if I, if I can here get through this. But anyways, what you have to find is something predictable and reliable. Sets up often, almost daily, if not daily. There are some days around any good trades and has big moves because that's one individual trader. You need a dollar or more you know, preferably. But today's world is just not the same as 25 years ago or even 10 years ago, even five years ago, or even way before the bank bailout. What we think about is a secure job today. Maybe go on tomorrow, like that, okay? We can be great employees, productive, outgoing, hardworking, and it may not even matter to our employer in the end if the company can't keep you on. And this is unfortunate, all right? And you'll see this more and more. Remember, I don't know if anyone remembers. Remember like 20, 30 years ago when people used to get 3% annual raises? That's unheard of now. People don't, people don't get annual raises. People don't get Christmas bonuses either. Remember back in the day where if you did a good job you got a Christmas bonus, I'm sure some people here remember those days. They do not exist, okay? If a company has poor management, they may fail and it's nothing to do with you. You may be a great employee. Or your industry might fail and it has nothing to do with you. Right now, cruise lines are tanking, airlines are tanking, hospitality industry, all of this people don't want to travel right now, okay? And it has nothing to do with them. That's out of their control, out of their control about what's going on with this virus. If you're a skilled person with a great mind, you can do lots of things and you can work for yourself in the market. It may take some time to learn it. It may take some cost, okay? Whether it's paying for a class or depositing money that you would need to trade to risk. But you can create your own job opportunity yourself and your own security by working for yourself. And you can create your own opportunity by taking it upon yourself to learn how to trade the market and not only that, make money trading. So this is another reason why trading is good because you can work for yourself and that is job security because the market will always exist. It may go up and it may go down, but it will always always exist, okay? So one quality strategy in my opinion is all you need to trade the market. You can take different risk amounts by doing swing trades options or day trades, but I do the same thing no matter what I do, okay? And knowing how to use one strategy that you can replicate over and over and just add the size on to it can really change your trading world. I think a lot of people don't have good strategies or don't have one strategy or don't have that one thing that I have a hundred percent conviction in. Like here's like for me, like on Thursday morning I got up, I rated the gap. I have a very keen eye now that I can see right away when something's gonna go, but I still go through my process and I rate it. I knew a hundred percent, a hundred percent the market and everything's gonna fall on Thursday and we pushed back hard into lunch and I held the conviction. So that's where the focus, the focus on one thing that you believe in that you know allows you to take the size, allows you to plop on the risk, allows you to risk several thousand dollars so you can make several thousand dollars or even more, okay? So for me, my strategy is called golden gaps. I showed you examples of gaps, some of the good gaps. Today this rally is this gap up today in the market is not a good gap. I would not go along here. Are we rallying theoretically? Yes. Could you have gone long today, made money today? Yes. Was it the same as Thursday? No. Did I go long today though the market? No I did not. So this isn't quality. There's a difference between looking at a recognizing quality and not quality. So one is a golden gap. A golden gap is a gap that moves in the direction of the gap. Who makes golden gaps? Institutional money makes and creates the gaps. That's what moved the market and flushed it through on Thursday and to Friday, okay? And it was very, very powerful. And today that is not what's happening. You have some bottom feeders happening today. If institutional money was full on into the market here today, guess what? We would be up way, way, way, way, way, way more than we are right now and it's only 219. I know we theoretically have almost two hours left to close but I still think this rally today could have been way, way, way more. If we were going to really see the follow-through and completely wipe away all the losses, lickety-split. We still might, we still could but it's going to take a series of days at this point here today the way the market set up if we would. I don't think institutional money is back in the market today in a big way. How do I know? Because I got up in the morning and I rated the gap. I rated the bullish gap in the market and it said this isn't rate good enough to go long. Okay? Even though theoretically you could have gone long today, it wasn't something that I had a high level of conviction in. Okay? But in the case of a bullish gap like the one in the market today, institutions are buying the stock but I just don't think they're there today. In fact, I was trying to look for something, something or anything to call long today that I found a hundred percent conviction and it was gapping up. I saw nothing but you have day traders who like to buy this stuff. You have retail traders like to buy this stuff. You have people who like to buy and support. It doesn't mean it's a good quality trade. I'm looking for something that's going to have a big move right of ways and that you could potentially hold, hold through the overnight if you wanted to like from Thursday to Friday in the puts and in the shorts. So therefore when you have a gap up where institutions are buying they move it up. Okay? Stock trade is higher on the day or the market. In the case of a bearish gap, institutions are selling a shorting the stock. In the case of a golden gap, therefore the stock moves lower in the training day. You could short it or you could buy a put. But anything, anything you could do to put the odds in your favorite gives you an edge. It's about high probability. It's not about getting every longer short. For me, I'm looking at high odds. High odds something's going to happen. And do you see what I'm seeing here? It's like it's not high odds right now. There's a high probability the market's going to go straight back up to the highs. It's not really high odds. I could change my mind in two days, but right now not high odds. Just like last Monday when we gap down, by the way we gap down last Monday, do another support area for somebody that said that earlier what you could have bought and it wouldn't have worked. But anyways, it wasn't high odds one week ago that we would fall. I don't trade the news. And if you make trading decisions based on news, I think you're going to lose way more than you win. While you may have some wins that are big, you still will lose overall. Because you must have more winners and losers to make money. You must have more winners than losing trades to make money. Or you will not make it. Not only will you not make money by the end of the year, you won't be able to make a living out of it. You have to have more winners. Otherwise, how can you rely on paying your bills at the end of the week, at the end of the month? Okay, so for me it's high probability. I'm looking at 26 points. The point ratio is at a 20. That's the cutoff. I've got to see 20 points or more, okay, for me to take it in the direction of the gap. And I'll get this question a lot and say, oh that's a lot of points. It only takes five minutes or less than that to read a gap. If you're brand brand new, it might take you five to ten. But I don't read a thousand things in the morning. I read a handful of things that I'm picking out and qualifying and looking for. So the Golding App System, which is what I do, it's my strategy, is a 26-point rating system. And the purpose is to help you evaluate which gap to trade using a checklist and its high probability. This checklist tells me high probability it's going to go in this direction, in the direction of the gap. Now, how do I find gaps? You can pull this up on any platform. It's a top 20 losers and the top 20 gainers on any given day. Gaps happen in the pre-market and gaps also happen in the post-market. This should be free with any of your platforms. So we got 40 picks total of the downs here and here in both of the New York and the Nasdaq exchange. And then you have the gap uppers, which is the gainers here. Again, you would see these in the morning. Actives are just stocks that are active if you want to look at those as well. But this gives you 40 picks in either direction, which is a lot. Now, how many gaps do I get per week? In earnings season, we get a lot. All right? We get three to five a day in earnings season, or at least quality ones I'm talking about. There are many gaps, but I try to hone down on the quality. And in non-earning season, we may get five a week. Okay? Really try to hone down to find one good pick a day. But a quality gap is one that rates high enough to trade based on the 26-point rating system. Now, when I see a gap like I saw Thursday in the market, when I know the market's going to power trend, whether it's power-turning up or down, I will cost several trades with the market when I know everything's going to go with the market. Thursday was very, very easy to see that everything was going to go with the market to the downside. Even strong stocks sold off Thursday into Friday because of the market. Nothing was going to hang on, okay? Today's a different story. You could look for many, many, many things. Again, you have to find the quality. It is always about the quality. And that's how you also get a good risk-to-reward payout, which is, you know, one-to-one to me. But sometimes you can make three times as much, four times as much, five times as much, especially if you're doing trades where you're holding something overnight, okay? So if you want to hold a trade overnight, like an option trade, then you have the potential to make much, much more because it could do a secondary gap in the direction of the gap, all right? So you could have a gap down and then follow through, follow through with another gap down, which we saw in Boeing from Thursday to Friday, which we saw in the spy and the queues from Thursday to Friday, all right? So when it continues in the next day, as a gap up or a gap down, depending on where, which direction it went, those could be very, very profitable and very, very powerful, okay? Any questions here? So I'm going to go over, I'm going to go over the main pick from each day from last week for day trades. This is not options. I will talk about one option that I called, I think I've won in here, and then I'll show the winners and the losers from last week. These trades are with an advanced risk of approximately $2,500 per trade. Some are a little bit less, but when you're, when you're sizing yourself initially in the morning, some of these trades set up fast, I always do it by an average. So I don't take a thousand shares of everything or 2,000 shares of everything. The difference of risk has to be same over the cash risk. It's a difference between the entry and the stop, and I call the entry and the stop live in the trading room when I call the train, and I also call the exit, okay? I have target exits, which I'll look at based on the chart, and then I also have time of the day exit, which would you look at something also with the market. So this was, this is a stock that's been getting clobbered, okay? As everyone knows, the airlines, like I said earlier, this was last week Monday AAL, okay? So this was a short. So what did it do? It gapped down. Stock closed here, gapped down. I rated the gap in the morning to see that this was fall. Again, this was it one week ago. So entry in this, this is a day trade, was 25.42, stop was 25.65, okay? Then it reset up again with the same position you could have doubled your size and added slightly, slightly above the price of 25.50, okay? What if cost averaged you up? This is an advanced concept, but I'm just going over it here. Again, stock dropped, went down to the target of 25 dollars the whole number, and was a really big trade. This trade was a beautiful move why? It fell. It never really pushed back that much. I always held the conviction this was lower. This is obviously tanked. I mean I don't even know where this is trading at right now, this AL, but this was a week ago. This is tanked, tanked, tanked in the last week. So you theoretically could have done this. Again, I used my rating system to qualify this as a short. You theoretically could have done a put in this. You could have done a swing trade in this, okay? From this initial day a week ago, you could have day traded it here where I called in the live run, or you could have done an overnight because the stock has fallen every day. Now the entry, though, for the overnight would have been here on Monday. That would have been a solid good entry which you could still be in it and you could would still be up in it. If you had done a put even at this price point okay or a swing trade, but this was a good day trade. A lot of size here, but a lot of volume in it. Oh it's at 1825. Look at that. Holy crap. Look at that. So $7 down. So you can use my system for overnights, long-term moves, and you can use it for day trading. I do it for both. I do it for both, but this is a good example of something that has collapsed. Tuesday was EXAS. Again, this was a day trade, okay? Stock close to your gap down, fell. Entry in this one was 8830. Shares 2500. Stock was 8930. It was about buck, okay? Which is really good for this price point because this one wasn't cheap. Risk was 2500. Exit at 8725. Profit was 2625. A nice solid day, and I want to point out this ended up going to like some ridiculous number. This was Tuesday. I think it went to 84 on that day. I like to trade in the morning. I like to be done in the morning. I like to be done fast, but this continued. I think this went $3 through the initial $87 and change exit that I had for this for the morning. So you can often retake these or trade them longer the day if you want. I prefer to focus on day trades for the morning trades, but you could have done this and held it and you could have done it again, okay? Again, I haven't looked at where this is at today, but this was a good gap last Tuesday. I think that was earnings. Where's the AAL was the newest gap? Wednesday was tall. This was an earnings gap, okay? So, stock close to your gap down, open, fell, boom. Entry in this one was 3960. Shares 2500. Stop was 4065. Risk was 2625. Exit 3912. $39 whole number out. This one continued as well. Again, I like to trade in the morning. I like to trade fast. The faster I can make money, the happier I am, but this one continued. This one went down to 38 and might have even broken 38 even on the day. It was a late bloomer as far as the sell-off, but it was a good solid short. Solid short in the morning if you didn't get out. Solid short of his day. What did that all day? Okay, now Thursday, Thursday there was a lot of trades on Thursday. I'm only showing you Boeing right here, but I will go over all the ticker symbols I did Thursday. Thursday was a wild day. I called a lot of options on Thursday. They were all puts and they all worked. The day trade run was very active and I was aggressive and I'm going to go all of those trades in a second here, but Boeing was, without a doubt, the best short on Thursday, whether you did it as a put, whether it is a day trade. I've been talking about Boeing lower since December of 2019. I mentioned it on Fox News and I remember because the other panelists that I was on with thought that Boeing was going to rally. I was right. Boeing was lower. It was lower than initially in January. Had the pushback here. This is a daily chart of Boeing. Had the pushback here in February and fell off a cliff. This was the first thing to go. Boeing is weak. I don't know where this is today, but this is still lower. I can tell without even looking at the chart today. I don't even care if it's rallying today. This is lower, okay? But all the trades I called from last week worked and I don't know what I'm going to call any more, but the reality is that this was, without a shout of a doubt, the best short on Thursday. So this was the entry for the day trade. $297.59. This is a kind of a big stock, but it's an expensive stock. Stock was $310. Again, your wish should be the same in almost every trade. This fell off a planet. This was on Thursday. Dream target $290, even $285. It did get through all those numbers on a Friday. In fact, it went through $280. It was just a huge move for the stock and the stock can move. If you're familiar with the stock, it can move. Again, you can say, well, is this effective by this thing, that thing, whatever. I called this stock short in December before anybody knew about the coronavirus in the US. I just, you know, look at the technicals and I've been reading the gaps in this and just waiting, waiting to short this. So this was a huge profit. This was a day trade. So this, in this case here, was a huge, huge risk to reward. It was a three times the amount, $75.40. Now again, what if you can't take a thousand shares? A hundred shares of this was a good trade. Two hundred shares of this was a good trade. Two hundred shares of this, the stock moves $7. You're going to make $1,400 plus with 200 shares. You don't have to take a lot of size if you can't afford to and if you don't want to, but you've got to get it right, okay? What if you can't get in the opening bell price? First of all, I don't get in on the open at $9.30, so I don't worry about that. Aren't you at the mercy of the market makers? You probably get a price way lower than the opening get price was only the floor you can get. I don't get in any trades at all at $9.30 am Eastern time. None, okay? When you're in an option, you choose the price that you want to take it. If you want to take it, many trades I'll call before the open, but you can't take options trades before the open. I'd wait the first five minutes of the day for it to flush out and you put or you can put an order out to see if you get filled and then move it into the open. We never take any trades at $9.30 in any of your trades, but I'm not trading things that don't have volume. So no, it's nothing to do with that. I'm trading momentum. This is nothing to do with the market makers at all. You don't know what those market makers are doing and nobody does. If I'm trading momentum and if Boeing's going to sell off, it's going to sell off. Whether I take the trade at $9.35 or $9.40 or $9.45, I'm always waiting for a setup. So I don't just short randomly even at $9.31. I don't only short at $9.31. I may not take a trade till $9.45. I may not take a trade till $9.40, $9.52. I try to get in within the first half hour of the day. If it's an option, I try to get in the first 5, 10, 15 minutes because they can move rather quickly, but I'm trading momentum. So you're never going to get in at the high of the day in a short and you're never going to get in at the low of the day in the long. I wait for it to set up. That's something that I teach in the class, but I don't just take trades into the open. I don't take anything into the open at all. The stock has to prove itself. Theoretically, the market on Friday might have continued lower. It didn't, but I didn't know that on Friday in the pre-market. I did know we were down. I knew all the trades, all the puts were going to be up a lot, but the reality is that I did watch the market on Friday morning. And the market on Friday morning, you wouldn't have shorted in the morning and you wouldn't have gone long in the morning because it gapped down, but you maybe could have shorted the market on Friday morning if you'd watched it, but it never set up. I didn't know that till I watched it. So part of it is trading live and also seeing something live. So that's why I don't take anything in the open. Nobody can tell anything, you know, when something's moving that fast on the open when we're in the volatility land that we are. I don't use a gap full strategy. To be honest with you, it does not exist. That to me is nothing. I know people call it a strategy. It doesn't work consistently in the market. For every 10 trades you take like that, that you would take, you might make money in two and lose on the other eight. It doesn't have a high wind ratio. It doesn't work. Have you ever heard someone from Goldman Sachs saying that they bought a stock to fill a gap? No. I'm looking for institutional money so institutions don't do gap fills. So think like a professional trader. Think like you're going to go work for Goldman. That's how you have to think. That strategy doesn't work. There is no such thing. There is no strategy called a gap fill strategy in my world. It doesn't work and you'll have to unlearn those habits if you're used to doing that. Okay? Again, if we have time at the end, I'll probably pull up some charts to show you what I mean for that. Friday was one boom and done BYND. This is the stock that I'm not surprised at all that fell this was in earnings. This is nothing to do with the market. And again, the market rallied on Friday. BYND fell. This was a nice trade too. This is the only one I really like Friday so I'm glad we got it. I do prefer to short for day trades as well. Entry 90-10, shares 1200, stop 92-30, risk was 2640. Boom. Exit 85-20. There's a great exit on this. This was a really good exit on this then. I went back and looked at close. It flipped. So, so happy we got out of this in the morning. Nice trade, big profit, great trade. Really good move. Got it at the right time into the rally. Again, not shorting this on the open. It went boom, rally, set up, don't drop and we got it. And again, this is a daily chart of BYND. Stock closed here, gap down. This was in earnings. It said nothing to do with the market, but this was a nice short. I wouldn't be surprised if this is lower. In fact, I have 100% conviction that this probably is lower too, even though today this capped up. I would not go long this year today. Some people probably will because again it capped up and it could say it capped up to support. And I'm not even relative to 50% moving average and I still wouldn't buy it there. All right. So anyways, here was a week. This was Monday. This was Tuesday. This was Wednesday. Now there was a lot of trades in here and go over. We aggressively did the SPY, short and got stopped. We aggressively did the Q's, short and got stopped. And aggressively did Microsoft and got stopped. Aggressively did AAL and got stopped. This is all Thursday morning. I mean, these happened like that by the way. AAL then retook it, was break even. CCL then we did and worked. SPY then did a second time retake, worked. Q's ended a second time. Really big trade here worked. Did BA quick, scouted it, got out, and then the big one in the BA that was a big drop. So all in all, this was a really crazy day on Thursday because I did a lot of trades. Not normal, but I did aggressively go after. I attacked everything out of the gate in the first five minutes on Friday in anticipation of the fall. It took a little bit longer than I thought. I took my stops. I went back into everything except for the Microsoft, but if I had that would have worked that did fall too. But then we ended up doing the bowing. So Thursday was a crazy day. And then we just did the one again on Friday. So normally I do one tick or symbol a day, but every once in a while I'll be in attack mode when I know that something's going to fall. But I do still put stops in. So you've got to put the stop in and take the stop because you want to make sure that it's going to hold. And if these trains hadn't held up, I wouldn't have gone back into them, okay? But total for the week was really good. So average risk was $2,500 a train. Good week. $2,6005.81. It's a nice week. So Thursday was a crazy day. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday were easy peasies. So it was a nice week. But anyways, I think you should look for most days to make one amount and focus on one tick or symbol. This week we have some big ones. Targets tomorrow morning. KSS is tomorrow morning. I don't know what they do, but I will be watching those are the two top ones for me for Tuesday. So again, they're in the morning so I can't look at them at night. There are gaps out tonight. There are earnings. Nothing that I'm enthralled with. Okay, but we do have retail here now in the month of March. And the ones I'll be watching are the target and KSS tomorrow. Now this, this was one I called, okay, this was early in the week. Monday, I did have conviction that Facebook would drop. This has nothing to do with the market. And I sent the trade out at 1035 and I said if Facebook breaks 201, it's valid. Meaning you can do the Facebook puts. I thought this was a great exit on this because I didn't really anticipate the market falling all week. So this was just a take in and get out. This trade ended up going much, much further. The stock fell all the way down. I don't even know what the low was last week. 198, 197, 196, I don't know. This was just a trade. Just a trade on a Monday that I thought was a good solid option trade and a put. Just take it and get out. Okay, but this ended up collapsing into the week as well if you held it. But know that if you hold something, in my opinion, whether it's a day trade all day into four or whether it's an overnight trade, you really gotta have a hundred percent conviction that it's gonna continue. I felt that way Thursday into Friday with the market. But I wasn't sure that we would fall like we did this last week on Facebook. But I knew Facebook would fall the day that it did a Monday. Okay, so I thought this was a good solid trade. So anyways, my philosophy is to analyze a large time frame to make the trend decision on directional bias for the gap. This doesn't necessarily mean the trend of the actual chart. All large traders of every kind look at large time frames to make decisions, particularly institutional traders. And that's how you have to think about you can't think like a retail trader. Are you gonna lose? To make entry decisions and exit decisions, I'm also looking at a minutia one minute. Why? Because I'm only taking several thousand shares. I'm not taking several million shares. Okay, so I'm trying to find a high degree of accuracy and focus on what I'm doing on a one minute. So those are the trades I'm taking on the one. Using the daily chart though allows me to make the decision for the stock pick, allowing for accuracy in the direction. And using the one minute chart allows for good risk to reward, which is obviously what we all want. Okay, but the only difference between making twenty-six grand a week or twenty-six hundred dollars a week, which is good for many many people, since a lot of people lose. And twenty-six hundred dollars a week or twenty-five hundred dollars a week is ten grand a month. Many people would love to make ten thousand dollars a month trading. Many people are losing that much and more. Okay, many retail traders lose. Why? Because they don't have a strategy or they're doing something that they think is a strategy and it's really not. Okay, but you can risk more once you get a good strategy and you understand it and you're doing it and you're replicating it, you could step your risk up. Okay, then you can risk more. So I have a trader, she's been, she's been with me for a little, a couple of years, but she's had a huge start to the year. I've had a huge start to the year too. I've made a lot of good calls this year. She's decided to double her size. Now she decided to do that on her own. Okay, she was risking about twenty-five hundred a trade in the options trades. Now she decided to risk five thousand. Okay, she's got the money to do it. She feels like she can. She's quadrupled her account like within the first two months of the year, so she stepped up her risk. You need to know when that point is when you can double your risk. Okay, you can take it easy. You can just up it a little bit, but I think that when you go from quarter to quarter to quarter, it's good to look at your risk not every week or every month, but from quarter to quarter. So I said, look at it, give yourself three months. See how you're doing. If you're making money the first three months, you're doing well, you grew your account. Second quarter, you can increase it. Doing good second quarter. Third quarter, increase it. Okay, I know everyone makes a lot, wants to make a lot of money right away, but really most of the reason that people want to make a lot of money right away is because they've been losing for years and then they want to make all the money back that they ever lost in the market. That's, that should not be your single goal. Your goal should be to move forward and start making money, period, because if you're going to make money from down until the end of time, what do you care about the whatever money you lost? Whatever money you lost in the however many years you've been trying to attempt to do this and failing, who cares how long it takes you to make it back. The fact that if you can move forward and make money and you learn something good and you know something good, you have the rest of your life to make all the money in the world and more. So your goal should not be to try to make it back. What you lost last year, what you lost paying for a class, you didn't learn anything. What you lost for the last 10 years, you shouldn't think about going back. When you're thinking about going back, then you're going back. When you think about moving forward, then you're moving forward. And that's how you have to look at it. And it's really not as hard as you think. It's the mindset, it's the mentality of people that that corrupts. And once the the corruption bug and the loser bug gets in you, it is really hard to kill it. A lot of people to trade. I'm a losing mentality in the market. I have a winning mentality. That's just I think of the way that I was raised as a as a child. I have great parents and I was raised to be a winner. And I was raised to be a fighter. So when I also am down, when I first take trades when I'm down right away, it's like a Wednesday morning before I took all the great trades that I took on Thursday. It didn't bother me. It doesn't faze me. I just go bow like that. Okay? So you really if you want to do this, you have to have a winning mentality. You may not right now. You can you can gain that over time. You can you can learn how to have a winning mentality. But don't work against yourself. That's the best thing I could say. Anyways, training with size is important. If you want to make a lot, if you're small, you have small accounts, you have $5,000 in a prop account, a prop account, take a $200 R, risk $200 per trade. Take 200 shares. Okay? So again, it's about the move. If you get a dollar moving something and you have 8,000 shares, you can make $8,000. Okay? It's it's about the size, but first you have to learn it and then you plop on the size. You have to have the cash to be able to do that. The amount you choose to risk must be in accordance with your individual risk parameters which you set yourself. So I teach a class once a month. The class is called the Golden Gap course. It teaches a strategy on how to trade gaps. The course teaches a 26 point rating system to find the best stock to trade each day. The course also teaches students how to play the stock on the day. The course teaches students chart analysis and technical analysis on an advanced level. It's the checklist. It's the points. It's how I knew of Thursday morning. And I actually re-rated the market four different times on Thursday morning because we were moving that much. From the time I rolled out a bet at 5 a.m. Eastern time on Thursday which we were down until the open. I re-rated the market four times because when things are moving like that sometimes it's what you have to do it. But gaps are very useful tools. Many people don't know how to use gaps to their advantage and they do things like someone mentioned to hear gap fills which don't work. Then sometimes people lose money in gaps and then get scared because they move a lot, but that movement can be profitable if you know how to trade it. Okay? So let's say about 80% of the gaps I trade have follow-through for swing and court trades. I showed you these charts here from last week. You can pull them up yourself and see where they went. But the reality is that I like to day trade for the fast moves. Even options when I do them I like to do them pretty quickly. But I mean get in and get out within the same day or 24 hours or two days. Like I just I want to get out of something when I'm up. The money isn't yours until the fat lady sings and it's in your bank account. So you can say oh everything looks great and everything looks fabulous and then all of a sudden somebody dies from a virus and your fabulous chart and your fabulous trader upside down and not only are you not up, you're down. So you have to take profits. That is an integral part of trading and being an active trader. You're not a long-term investor if you are an active trader. You are a person that goes in and you chunk it out. That chunking it out sometimes is small, sometimes it's medium, sometimes it's big. But if you have the mentality that you want to pull money out of the market, you're not holding it, holding it, holding it forever because you will eventually give it back. You will lose. Things don't keep going forever and ever and ever. And the market's a good example of that I think in the last week. A lot of technical indicators. I'll go back and look at a few charts. I just have a couple of things. I just have the moving averages and the candlesticks. That's it. I don't, I don't, I don't use any of those fancy dancey things that people use. I look at the price. That's my best indicator and it's your best indicator too is the price and for me it's the price in the gap. But trading can be a great career if you want to make it yours. It doesn't mean it's going to happen overnight. I wouldn't quit your day job today. I wouldn't quit your day job until you're making enough money trading in order to do that, to support yourself. So you have to kind of wean your way into it. It's like if you've ever gone in a diet you have to say oh gosh how am I going to do this? Well you kind of wean your way into it. You chip away at it. Well I'm going to, I'm going to go into it for two days and it might take a break. I'm going to eat a little bit less for the next week and then then I'll dive into it the next week. Or an exercise routine, anything. I mean you have to kind of like just wean your way into it where you get in the habit of it. Okay of doing it and learning and understanding what you're doing and getting into the right mindset. Like wow I really can do this. This is possible. I think I can do this. Wow all of a sudden. Okay and and it's convincing yourself. Okay you have to convince yourself. So many people are shut down in themselves. I just I'm as long as I teach people which have had the business since I don't know what is it. 2008 I've had the business. I'm just uh no not 2008. 2012. I I'm just I'm I'm amazed. I'm amazed and I'm amazed how people lack such confidence. I'm I'm if I could sell my confidence like a perfume and you could buy and spray it all over yourself I'd be a billionaire. I don't know how to do it. But I tell you right now people lack confidence. I don't know why. I mean I credit my parents because they they they raised me right but I tell you you gotta have confidence if you want to train. You gotta have confidence if you want to go out there in this world to be successful. You gotta have confidence if you want to make money in the market but quite frankly you have to have confidence if you want to go out in the street and do anything at all. Okay the world is very competitive. Social media has made it more so. So no matter what you do any job any career that you have you have to be confident in your own abilities and we all each have unique abilities. We all have things that we're good at. You don't you don't you don't have to be good of everything. Just find your niche that one thing you're good at and build on your own confidence with that. Okay but a career in trading offers a limited potential for growth and success and I teach the class like I said once a month. Next class is March 21st and 22nd. So what else do you need to succeed? I've kind of been talking about this besides my class I call it the four C's. One is clarity. What to do? Is there anything to trade or not? Or is there nothing to trade? What should I do today? Okay the checklist tells me because I go through the checklist. If I find any stock that reach 20 points or more I know that I can do it. If I don't then I know that we won't do anything. That I won't take any trades. That's okay. So it's very very clear. Also tune you need confidence. Again if you don't have a if you're not a high confident person if you if you lack confidence you've got to start reading books. Go to seminars. Get some new friends. Hang around some people that are confident. Work on this. You can work on this okay. You can build your confidence over time. But for people I find what helps your confidence of reference of trading is green. If you make 50 days 50 dollars a day for 30 days your confidence is going to improve. You may say well it's not a lot of money by the end of the month it's not as much as I want and I can't support myself on that. Yeah but you were green every day 50 dollars and then you say wow I can actually make money. It may not be as much as you want but it's the idea of the green. When people are losing when they're losing losing losing losing losing losing losing big amounts and losing small amounts over time which add up to big amounts their confidence gets shattered. So you need to rebuild it okay. And for me it's conviction. So Thursday and Friday were nice days. I didn't have any conviction the market would sell off on Monday but when I saw it on Thursday when I saw the gap down I had 100% conviction and I never wavered. Even with the aggressive stops I took on the day trades all the puts went but even with with what has aggressive as I was I never wavered. I have that ability but I've been doing this a long long time and also don't forget I teach it. And when you teach something it really becomes part of you and I think that has made me better over over the number of years as well. You also need commitment again commitment to trading commitment to doing this for a career commitment to making the money commitment to being successful commitment to winning not a commitment to losing a commitment to winning okay. There's a big difference winning. So my class is the golden gap course it's a complete system to use to trade all the pieces of puzzle that you need and again I teach a class once a month. So it's a full and two-day course on how to strategically fine pick and play stocks at our professional bearish gaps. Actually the bullish class is next week which I forgot to put in here. I only do the bullish class once a year. The bullish class is March 9th, 10th and 11th during the week Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. The bearish class is March 21st and 22nd classes online. Class of the class is the same. It's 69.99 US dollars so seven grand and again this is in a month and the bullish class is next week. If you'd like a trial to the rim for the rest of this week again I'm going to be watching Target and calls tomorrow morning. You can email me and Melissa at thestockswish.com for a trial but you've got to get in the right path this year. If you're interested in anything I said today email me or if you have questions. Empower yourself to trade and not only that think about what I said about having a strategy because it's very very important and also think about what I said about having the right level of confidence. Let me see if I can pull up a chart here. I don't know if this will work on this this thing here. I don't think it's going to work because I don't think this zoom thing I can flip back and forth. Does anyone have any questions? For the person that wanted to know about something email me separately at Melissa at thestockswish.com but again just briefly I don't use any other fancy indicators. I have price, I have candlesticks, and I'm moving averages and that's it. Any last minute questions here? Thank you so much David for having me. Thank you Anka. Thank you all the ladies here today too and good luck this week everybody.