 Well, hello, hello, hello, everybody out there. Lee Lowell here from smartoptionseller.com. Today is Saturday, January 9th, 2021. Welcome to a new year. Welcome, everybody. Glad to be back. Took a couple of weeks off at the end of 2020 and I'm back again today. And today is our first broadcast for 2021. We will be talking about selling put options and how to sell them successfully for 2021. My goal here is to help all investors become more profitable in 2021. And we are going back to basics. And the basics for us is selling put options, great investing strategy. I've got lots of questions on how to sell put options. What strike prices do I choose? What expirations do I choose? What stocks do I choose? How long do I hold on for the trade? Do I have to hold it until expiration? So all of these great questions coming in. So we're going to talk about how to sell put options successfully in 2021. Today, this is what we're going to do. And we're going to continue on after that with our Saturday synopsis. We take a look at the charts, look at individual stocks, look at the stock indexes, see what the market's done and what we see going forward in the near future. So sit back, relax and let's jump right into it. It's all about selling put options today. So we can go to our cheat sheet and look at the selling put options. Now, for those of you that are just beginning, let's just get an understanding of what selling put options is all about and how do we do it and why do we do it? Selling put options is a neutral to directionally bullish strategy, but it's more than that. Selling put options is a way for you to pretty much name your own price for a stock that you want to buy sometime in the future. Okay? Selling put options is a contract between you and the put option buyer. There's two parties, a put option seller and a put option buyer. In this case, we are the put option sellers. And when you sell a put option, what you're doing is you're entering into a contract with somebody else and you're basically saying to this other person, you know what? I'm interested in buying a particular stock at a particular price sometime in the future. And what we're trying to do is buy that particular stock at a much cheaper price than where it's currently trading. So when you sell a put option, someone's gonna pay you money for your guarantee to buy that stock sometime in the future. And it's a great way to earn passive income. Why is that? Because when you contract yourself out to buy a stock cheaper than where it currently is, there's a pretty good chance that the stock is not going to drop down to your buy price. Well, just think of this example. Here's a stock price and it's trading right here. And you're interested in buying the stock down here. How do you do that? Well, you can sell a put option contract and that obligates you to buy the stock down here while it's currently trading up here. So the only way that'll happen is that the stock actually has to drop from here down to your buy level, your intended buy level. Now the only way that you'll end up buying the stock at your price is if the stock actually falls that far. So what happens is in the market, most of the times the stock won't fall that far. So what you end up doing is you collect the money from the put option buyer as passive income, side hustle, side gig, side money, whatever you want to call it. So you're collecting this income from the put option buyer on day one and then all you're doing is waiting to see if the stock drops from here down to here where you want to buy it. And in a lot of cases the stock never drops that far. So in the end, you may not get to buy the stock but you get paid to enter the agreement, to enter the contract. So what people have found out over time is that, hey, I can earn actually a pretty good living just by selling put option contracts and collecting the money. And a lot of the times I won't even ever have to buy the stock. So there's two philosophies here. Look here at the top of my cheat sheet, there's two philosophies. Now you can sell put options just to collect the premiums and gain all this passive income. The second philosophy is you're doing it because you want to actually buy the stock sometime in the future, okay? This is a stock that you want to buy and hold for a long time, collect dividends over the years and get the capital appreciation if the stock moves up over time. So the two philosophies are you're doing it just to collect the premiums. Now this can be a riskier type of strategy when selling put options because a lot of people will get enticed by all this money that they're collecting by selling all these put options. And they'll start to sell put options on very high price risky stocks that have a lot of volatility. And those stocks can actually pay out a lot of money when you sell put options. But there's a reason for that is that's because the stock is very volatile. Means the stock can move up and down in large chunks. Now if you're just selling put options on random stocks that you have no idea what they are you just want to sell the put options because these stocks happen to pay good premiums. You got to be very careful because sometimes those stocks could go down on you and you may end up having to buy the stock and you may not want to buy that particular stock. So the second philosophy is that you're selling put options on a stock that you have a very strong interest in buying a high quality stock that you want to buy. And if the stock price does fall to your intended level well then good you get to buy the stock and you're happy and you hold that stock and you wait for the stock to go back up in price and you make money over the years. So just remember the two philosophies. Are you selling put options just to collect the premium on stocks that you don't really know much about hoping that they don't fall down to your strike price level or are you buying or you selling put options because you have a real strong interest in buying the stock sometime in the future. So we're going to go over an example on both sides here and see how that works. But the way that we do it at smartopsonseller.com is number two. We only want to concentrate on selling put options on stocks that we have a genuine interest in purchasing sometime in the future at a lower price than where the stock currently trades. Okay, that's how we do it. It's a much more conservative way of selling put options. Okay, so now that we know what selling put option is now remember you're selling a put option you're entering into a contract to potentially buy a stock sometime in the future at your chosen price and you're going to be paid upfront for entering that agreement. So you're making money in the meantime while you wait to see if the stock moves to your buy level. So let's go over the steps again of selling put options successfully. How do we do it? Number one, you have to pick a stock that you're interested in. You have to pick a stock that you would potentially like to buy at a lower price than where it currently trades sometime in the future, right? And the second step is you have to pick a desired buying level. Well, where do you want to buy that stock? Where would you potentially like to buy that stock in the future? If the stock is here, do you want to buy it here? Do you want to buy it here? Do you want to buy it all the way down here? You pick the level in which you have an interest in purchasing that stock. Step number three, you have to pick a desired timeframe. If you trade options, you have to pick an expiration date. All options have an expiration date. So you have to choose a desired timeframe. Do you want to go one week in the future, one month in the future, three months in the future, a year in the future? Stocks have all these different expiration dates. And the longer you go out in expiration, the more money you can collect. So you have to balance out, well, how long do I want to give the trade versus how much money do I want to collect? So we'll look at some examples there. And the fourth step is once you've decided on which strike price, which stock to choose, the expiration date, then you go ahead and sell the put option. You sell that put option contract, you collect your money, and the money shows up into your trading account right away. And lastly, step number five, you monitor the trade until expiration. Okay, so let's go over an example. Let's take a look at our charts here. And let's pick out a stock. And one of the stocks that we really love at SmartOps and Seller is AMD, Advanced Micro Devices. Now, this is not a live recommendation. This is not me telling you what to do. This is just an example for educational informational purposes only. So we look at AMD Advanced Micro Devices, and on this chart, you can also see some things that we've put on the chart. Now, this was part of our Saturday synopsis after this education about how to sell put options. We go over our chart analysis. So AMD is a stock that we love. It's had a nice move up over time. We love it because of the sector that it's in. It makes chips for computers. AMD, great stock. And in this chart, it's making this W pattern that we look at, and we're waiting for it to break out above the resistance line here. But regardless, when you are selling a put option on a stock, it is a neutral to bullish directional strategy. And I mean, you're interested in the stock going higher. That's how you can make money. We will talk about that. Now the put option, when you sell it, you sell it at a price, and that price is called the premium. And that premium can fluctuate over time, depending on which way the stock moves and depending on how much time is left until expiration. So there's a way to actually profit by selling put options besides just trying to buy the stock. When you sell a put option or any option, you can be an option bar, you can be an option seller. And you can make money just by trading options. If you sell an option at one price, you know what? You can buy it back at a cheaper price and lock in your gain that way. It's a great way to earn an income. Options can be bought and sold all the time. You can hold it for an hour, you can hold it for a day, you can hold it for a week, it doesn't matter. If you buy an option here and sell it here, you've just made money. You can do it in reverse the way we do it. You can sell the option first, and then you can buy it back cheaper as the second part of the transaction and lock in your gain that way. So that's something that we also do at Smart Option Seller, we're getting off topic here. So AMD is a stock that we like. Hey, let's just pretend that we want to sell a put option on AMD because we're interested in potentially buying AMD stock sometime in the future. So if you're not interested in buying AMD at its current price of $94.5 and you say to yourself, you know what, I want to buy AMD but I don't want to buy it at its current price. I want to buy it at a cheaper price. I want to get a good deal, I want to buy AMD cheap. So what can I do? Well, like I said, number one, you pick the stock. Okay, we've decided on AMD. Now you pick the level in where you would potentially want to buy AMD sometime in the future. Now you're thinking, okay, I'm a technical analyst. I like the upward sloping 200 day moving average trading a little over $71 a share, 200 day moving average. I like to try to buy AMD at $70 a share. That seems like a pretty good deal to me. It's at $94.5 now. Hey, I want to buy it at 70. It's a $24.5 discount to its current price. You know, how could I buy AMD at $70 while it's currently trading at $94.5? Well, you can sell a put option at a $70 strike price. That's what you do. The level where you potentially want to buy the stock is called the strike price, $70. The other thing you can do is you can just sit there and wait and put in a limit order with your broker and say, hey, I want to buy AMD at $70 sometime in the future. Now that day may never come. AMD may never fall back down to $70. You never know, but by selling a put option, you're getting money to wait for AMD to potentially fall back down to $70. It may never fall down to $70, but at least you're getting compensated. You're selling this put option. You're gaining the premium. You're gaining the instant income. It's like selling someone an insurance policy. They have to pay you the premium. So what can we get for selling a $70 put option? Is it worth our time to even sell a $70 put option? Well, in this case, you have to look at an option chain and you have to see how much the options are trading for. Now, this is an option chain in Interactive Brokers, IB, for short. Many people trade through Interactive Brokers. They are a broker. They are a stock and options broker. You can trade futures contracts as well through them. This is one of their options chains. Call options on the left, put options on the right. And we have the, this is for AMD. Okay, we got all our tabs up here. You can put up as many stocks as you want and you can look at all their options. So AMD and down here, these are all the expiration dates for AMD. And if you click the down arrow, you can see all the other expiration dates, AMD trades all the way out to January 20th, 2023. So you can go out, out as far as time as you, as that's listed here, January 2023. Two years from now, you can trade AMD options. So you have to decide yourself, you know, what do I want to do? How much time do I want to give myself? So right here, we default, we just happen to open up the chain on the March 19, 2021 options contracts. 69 days in the future. So you got a 69 day option. Well, how much will someone pay me to buy the $70 put option from me? Now, you always have to look at the bid and ask comms. This will tell you how much each option contract trades or the strike prices are here in the middle. These are the areas which you have to choose. You have to choose one of these strike prices. You can't just say, I want to buy AMD for, you know, $72.89. It has to coincide with one of these strike prices that the exchanges choose, that the options clear incorporation decides, I believe these are the strikes that will be listed. Okay, so you're interested in potentially buying AMD for $70 a share. It's currently trading. Last price was $94.67. How can I buy AMD for $70? Well, you sell a put option at the $70 strike price. Example only, remember. And here for the March contracts for the March expiration, March 19, 2021, AMD went out on the close yesterday on Friday, January 8th, 2021. $1 bid at 115 cent offer. Okay, you got the bid price. You got the ask price. So we always like to try to sell something in between. Okay, so let's just pretend we want to sell a AMD $70 put option for $1, $1.7 per contract. Okay, these things trade in pennies so you can pick any price in between. Excuse me. So let's just say we want to sell AMD for $1.7 per contract. What does that mean? Well, each option contract consists of a hundred shares of stock. So you have to know that in the event that you buy, that you get to buy these AMD shares of stock at $70 a share, you have to buy a hundred shares of the stock. One option contract, which is the minimum amount you can trade consists of a hundred shares of stock. So you have to know, hey, if I buy these hundred shares at $70 a share, I have to pay out $7,000 at that time. But before that day occurs, someone will give you money. And if you sell the contract for $1.7 per contract, you multiply that by a hundred because there's a hundred shares, you'll gain $107. Someone will pay you $107 today for your agreement to potentially buy a hundred shares of AMD at $70 a share in March, 19, 2021. So you have 69 days to see what happens. Will AMD fall all the way down to $70 and force you to buy the shares at $70? We don't know. You don't know what's gonna happen. AMD could fall down to 50 and pop back up to a hundred. You don't know what's gonna happen. But what you have to be sure is that you're okay with buying AMD at $70 a share sometime in the future. And if you're good with that, then you sell the $70 put option for somewhere in between the bid and ask price. And we've chosen $1.7 as our midpoint. And most of the time, you can get filled somewhere in between the bid and ask. So what you would do is you would place a trade with your broker to sell one contract or however many contracts you want. Remember, one contract consists of a hundred shares of stock. You sell a contract at $1.7 per contract. And when that trade executes, if that trade executes, someone will give you $107. And that $107 will be deposited into your trading account right as soon as you execute the trade. So now you have $107 basically just for, you know, placing the trade. And now you are, I'll say you're on the hook to potentially buy a hundred shares of AMD at a $70 a share. So at a minimum, you know, you may have to come up with $7,000 at the end of the trade to purchase your hundred shares. Are you happy with that? Will you be happy with that? Well, if AMD is at $94.5 now, hey, you're getting a $24 discount, I'm happy with that. We go back to the, we can look at the chart again and we see, you know, AMD hasn't been at $70 since last July, okay? And you think AMD is a great company. You think it's just gonna keep going up over time, right? May go up over $100, $110. It just, it's got a great looking chart. It's moving up, you know, AMD is making a lot of chips for a lot of computers and you think it's got long-term potential. So buying it at $70 would seem like a pretty good deal if AMD can fall that far in that timeframe. And if it does, it could always go back up again. It can drop to 70 and go back up again. So you have to make a decision ahead of time. Am I okay buying AMD for $70 a share if that's what happens? Now, if AMD never falls down to $70 by the time the expiration rolls around, well, then you don't, you never get to buy the shares. You just can't because if AMD is trading up here, no one's gonna sell the shares to you at $70 because they can sell them for $94.5. But your consolation prize is that you've collected $107 for every contract that you've sold, okay? So you have to decide, is it worth it for me to sell a $70, put option contract and collect $107? And that's your consolation prize. Now, if AMD does fall down to $70, you get to keep the $107 and now you get to buy your 100 shares at $70 a share. Now, remember, you will have to have that $7,000 ready to go in your account at that moment in time. So make sure you stay within your comfort zone. Don't sell more put option contracts than the amount of shares you're willing to buy. Now, if you sell 10 option contracts, that's a potential 1,000 share purchase. That's a $70,000 investment. You have $70,000 to buy those 1,000 shares. Now, you will also get, if you sell 10 contracts, you'll get $1,070. So someone's paying you for 10 contracts, that's over $1,000, but you're on the hook to buy 1,000 shares now. So you have to play with the number of contracts that's within your risk parameters and that fits in with your portfolio size. Size, so don't go overboard and say, I'm gonna sell as many contracts as I can because I just wanna make this money. Well, your broker's gonna say, uh-uh, we have to make sure that your account could handle that. And what do I mean by that? Well, your account has to have a certain amount of funds ready and available at all time. Your broker's gonna make sure that you have some skin in the game, meaning that you need to have some money in your account in order to sell put option. So at a minimum, we will talk about what's called the margin requirement. The margin requirement is the amount of money that you initially have to have in your account in order to sell a put option contract. Now, we know that, you know, if it comes down to it, you'll have to pay at least $7,000 to buy your 100 shares of AMD at $70, but your broker's not gonna require you to have all $7,000 ready to go on hand from day one, which is a nice thing. They don't require you to keep the $7,000 on hand. They require you to have a fraction of that amount. And that fraction of amount is what's called the margin requirement. And how much is the margin requirement? It's typically anywhere from 10% to 20% of that $7,000. So it could be anywhere from $700 to $1,400. Your broker will say, you know what? If you wanna sell this AMD $70 put option, you need to have about $1,400 in your account in order to sell that put option. You're like, great, I have $1,400 in my account. I wanna sell that put option. Now, just because you have $1,400 in your account, that's not the end of it. What happens if AMD falls down to $70 by the expiration? Well, you have to come up with the full $7,000. So even though your broker's saying, well, you know, we only need you to have $1,400 now, but if it comes down to it, we're gonna need that other $5,600 at expiration to pay for those shares in full. So just remember what you're playing with here. Remember that, you know, pick a stock at a price that you're willing to buy and that you can afford to buy it down the road. Now, if AMD never falls down to $70, you'll never have to pay the $7,000 to buy the shares because you won't get to buy the shares. So all you'll need is your $1,400 sitting in your account at all times. So that's the thing, you try to gauge, okay, you know, what are the chances of AMD falling down to $70? I'll need $1,400 in my account. If it drops down to 70, I'll need $7,000. So you have to temper, you know, how much money will I need in my account? How many contracts can I sell? Can I do this on other stocks at the same time? Let's say you have five different stocks that you wanna sell put options on all at the same time. Well, you have to balance out how much money do I have in my account? What's the margin requirement on each trade? So make sure you understand the margin requirement, how much it's gonna take to sell these put-ups. Now, don't confuse margin requirement with buying on margin. When you buy on margin with your broker, you're actually taking out a loan with them and they're gonna charge you interest. That's not what happens when you sell a put option. The margin requirement is just the funds in your account, part of the funds in your account are being held aside that are not able to be used anymore. So if you have the $1,400 of AMD as the margin requirement, $1,400 of your cash balance is gonna be held aside. Your broker's gonna say, you know what? You can't use those $1,400 anymore, but you have the access to the rest of your funds to sell other put options if you want to or buy stocks, whatever you wanna do. So remember, stay within your comfort zone, only sell the amount of contracts that you're willing to do and know how much margin requirement you're going to have. So let's go back to our cheat sheet here. So you're gonna monitor the trade until expiration. So you're gonna see whether the stock actually falls to your price or not and whether you're gonna have to pay for the stock in full. Now, there's only two things that could happen at expiration. When expiration rolls around, there's two scenarios. Either the stock is still above the strike price and if that case, the option would just expire as worthless and you just keep your $107 in this case for AMD and you move on and you can do the trade again. You sell another put option for another two months down the road, three months down the road, whatever. The second scenario is that the stock actually falls below the strike price. So let's just say AMD finishes at $69 a share at expiration. Well, that's below your $70 strike price. Your broker will say, okay, here you go. You get to buy your 100 shares at $70. It costs $7,000. Now AMD is at 69. Now you have 100 shares. Now you're just waiting for AMD to go back up in price. So those are your two scenarios. Now what happens if during the trade, you're thinking, okay, what happens if AMD drops all the way down to $40? Now I'm still on the hook to buy it for $70. What do I do? I mean, I don't want to buy AMD at 70 if the stock drops to 40. Well, just remember, that could happen with any stock. When you invest in the stock market, that's the risk you're taking is that stocks can fall in price. Stocks can fall on you. So you have to remember going in, what are my risks? And what's my stop-out points? If AMD drops, am I gonna hold forever or am I gonna get out? Do you have a stop loss in place? So you have to have a risk management plan in place. I can't tell you what that is because everybody's different. If AMD falls 10%, do you want to get out? If AMD falls 20%, do you want to get out? That's up to you. But whatever you decide, have a plan. Now you can always buy the option back at either a profit or loss sometime in the future. Let's say you sold that AMD contract for $1.07 a contract. And over time, as it looks like AMD is not gonna drop to 70, that option price fluctuates. The option price doesn't stay at $1.07 throughout the life of the contract. It goes up, it can go up, it can go down. Most likely it's gonna start to go down as time moves on. And if AMD stock goes up, the option price will go down even faster. So let's say you sold the option at $1.07, all of a sudden now it's worth 50 cents a contract. Well, you know what? You can turn around and buy that option back at 50 cents and you can lock in a 57 cent per contract win. And so you sold it at $1.07, you buy it back at 50 cents. That's a 57 cents difference in between. Buy it back, that closes out the trade. Trade is done. You're not on the hook to buy the shares anymore. And you just made yourself $57. And you can do it that way. You can buy and sell the options at any time. Now, let's just say AMD started to fall and the option price went up to $2 a contract. You sold it for $1.07, now that option's worth $2. You could still buy it back, but you're gonna lock in a 93 cent per contract loss, which is 93 actual dollars. So you can buy the option back at a price higher, that'll lock in a loss. You can buy the option back at a price that's lower from where you originally sold it, you lock in a gain. Or you just wait it out, it's up to you. The other thing you can do is you can roll the option forward. This is another defense mechanism. You can roll the option forward, which means you buy back the option that you sold, you buy back the original option that you sold. And now you resell a new put option at a farther expiration date at a lower strike price to help contain some of the losses. Now let's go back and look at some of these option prices here. And I said earlier, the longer the expiration date, the more money you will receive. Let's go out to, let's say, September, 2021, nine months from now and 251 days until expiration. How much can you get for the $70 put option? Well, in the original example, you got $107, $107. Now someone's willing to pay you maybe at least $500 for that option contract. You see the, you got the bid 480 bid at 525 and offer, you can sell something in the middle for $5 a contract. That's $500, someone will pay you now versus the 107. But you've gone farther out in time. So you have to hold the trade longer. The longer the trades is in existence, the more the stock can fluctuate either higher or lower. You know, AMD, if they come out with a bad earnings announcements or something, AMD stock could drop. So the more time you give a stock to move around, the more it can drop on you. Now, you know, that's up to you to decide. So the longer the expiration date, the more money you get. Well, in that case, you can also go down further out of the, it's called out of the money. You can go down to the 50 strike price if you want. Okay, in that case, you can probably still get at least $107, but now you get to buy the stock potentially at $50 a share. So let's go back to our chart here and look at AMD. So at first you wanted to buy it at 70. Now with the new strike price, now you could potentially buy it at 50. That's all the way down here. You just gave yourself $20 more cushion, $20 more buffer to potentially buy those shares of stock and you're still getting paid that same $107, maybe even more. So you have to decide. You know, you weigh, you know, what does it do? I want more time. Do I want more money? You know, what's the deal? What should I do? Only you can decide that. Okay, so, you know, that's pretty much in a nutshell what selling put options is all about and how you can do it successfully in 2021. Choose a stock that you're interested in, choose a price that you're interested in buying the stock, choose the strike price, choose the expiration date, collect the money. Now, as you see that AMD's been going up over time, what happens is that most of the time the option expires worthless. What that means is you just get to keep the whole $107 that you were paid on day one and then now that the option expires, you do another put option sell contract and you collect another $107. Two months later that expires, you do it again, collect another $107 and you're doing this on many different stocks. So you're collecting all this income. This is a great side hustle, great side gig. You're collecting all this money on all these stocks that hey, you may end up buying their stocks that you want but most likely you won't end up buying because you're gonna choose a strike price that's below the current price of the stock and most of the time the stock won't fall that far. So you're collecting all this money and you're making a nice side hustle. Maybe every once in a while you'll get to buy the shares of stock and you know what? The way that the market goes up over time, that stock will go back up and you'll just hold on for capital appreciation. So it's a great way to collect passive income, stay within your comfort zone, know what your boundaries are, know how much money you have in your account, know what the margin requirements are and before you know it, you're gonna be making a decent amount of money by selling put options. All right, so there you go. There's your lesson on how to sell put options successfully in 2021. Let's move on to our Saturday synopsis. Let's take a quick look at the charts, see what's been happening. I know it's been a few weeks since I've gone over this. Let's see where the market's been since I think the middle of December was my last broadcast and see where the market may be going in the future. So we like to take a look at the S&P 500 based off the SPY Exchange Traded Fund for the S&P 500. And so what's been happening since the middle of December when I was last year? Well, obviously we know the stock market has continued to go up over time. We've hit all time new highs so far this year which is a great thing. It's first week of January, 2021, the market has gone up. So where we left it off here is that we drew the W pattern. This is a pattern that we've been talking a lot about the W pattern, bullish pattern. We draw the resistance line at the top of the W and we wait for the stock to move out, to move up. So S&P 500 is making W pattern, this nice little triangle, little congestion pattern and then just kept going. So the thing about stocks is that you want to trade with the momentum. You wanna pick stocks that have the momentum, okay? We all know we wanna buy stocks on the cheap and we wanna try to pick bottoms when stocks are moving down because we think they're gonna turn around and go higher. You know what? It's better to stay with stocks that are in a nice trend, has the momentum. You'll make more money in the long run by sticking to stocks that have the momentum already behind them, trust me. And you wanna look at your moving averages. We got the 20-day moving average, the 50-day moving average and the 200-day moving average. You will notice stocks that are up trending will typically bounce on a pullback off either the 20-day or the 50-day. Now you can see the S&P 500 has been hugging the 20-day moving average pretty good. Look, since the last March coronavirus, as this market moved up, it pretty much hugged the 20-day moving average. So if a stock's gonna pull back, if you're looking for an entry point, you wanna wait for the stock to pull back to either the 20-day or 50-day. Now you wanna make sure the moving average lines are up trending. So the stock market looks good. I am bullish for 2021. I think we've got full steam ahead. I've talked about this for months on end now. There's really nothing to hold this thing back. Coronavirus, yes, around the world is still increasing, but the vaccines are rolling out. People are going to get vaccinated, hopefully by the summer, maybe late spring. Everyone will be vaccinated and we can get on back to a normal routine, get the economies moving again. And so the market looks to the brighter days. They see the light at the end of the tunnel here. So the market is going up. And there's no other way to get it to return on your money other than the stock market, in my opinion. Okay, that's just my opinion. So let's see what else is happening. So that's the S&P 500. Let's take a look at the Dow Jones industrial average. Also all time new highs right here. This is where we finished this week. All time new highs. Let's open this up a little, get a little bit better view. We were watching this has sort of the W pattern here. Here was the resistance line back in late October, November and the Dow Jones has just been going up as well. Full steam ahead. That's the only way I'm seeing it. Let's take a look at the NASDAQ. The NASDAQ had been the strongest of all three since the pandemic. We leave these patterns on the chart so you can see how they develop over time. It was making this ascending triangle, flat top here. You can also see part of the W pattern here. Okay, I'm not drawing it out, but here's the W. Once it gets through the resistance line, it typically will keep going in the same direction. Okay, and if you wanna wait for a pullback for your entry, wait for a pullback until it comes back down to the 20 day moving average. It's been hugging the 20 day moving average. That's what stocks do. Stocks that are in a good momentum uptrend will typically bounce either the 20 day or 50 day moving average. So you can feel confident that if you're waiting for a pullback, you're waiting for an entry, keep an eye on the 20 day and 50 day moving average. So the markets, the general markets, the indexes, and you wanna trade, make sure the indexes are moving up as well. If you're looking for individual stocks, trade with what the general market is doing as well. If the general market's going up, it's a good chance that your individual stock will be going up as well. So let's take a look at some individual stocks, see what's been happening. We always look at some of our favorites. Apple talked about Apple for a long time, had had been congesting in this triangle pattern. Now I was just, no, I was long Apple, I am long Apple, just letting everyone know this upfront as we're talking about it. Been waiting for this Apple to finally get out of this congestion pattern, and there you can see, beginning December, started to move up, hugging the 20 day moving average line as well. Has pulled back, pulled back. So if someone's waiting for an entry, okay, here was your latest entry, 20 day moving average, starting to move up again. So for you Apple buyers, if you've been waiting for an entry, I'm not gonna tell you what to do, but here was an entry point just this week. Let's take a look at Tesla. Okay, now talk about stock that's just been insane. Everybody's been following Tesla. I think now Elon Musk is the richest person on the planet now, due to the fact that Tesla stock has just gone ballistic. The last chart pattern we had on here was the triangle congestion pattern. And look what's happened since, it's just blasted higher. Your last chance to get in was here when it met with the 20 day moving average, this was December 23rd or so, right before the holidays. And it was at low 600s, now it's moving towards 900. You know, what can I say? I'm not a buyer here. I just can't believe what I'm seeing, but if I was going to get in on the bullish side, at this point, I'd have to wait for some kind of pullback where the 20 day moves up, the stock price moves down and somewhere they'll converge in the middle. So that would be my opinion if I was to get long on Tesla, it's just insane. So Tesla, Apple, Amazon, we look at the biggies because these are the stocks that most people have an interest in. Amazon still kind of trading in this congestion pattern, trying to break out here, but it fell right back in. We've got this broader channel. You can see the resistance support line. So it's still trading in this congestion pattern. Amazon cannot figure out where it wants to go next. One of these days it's gonna start moving higher. I can't see it moving lower just because Amazon is just such a monster. I can't see it selling off here. But until that day happens, keep an eye on it. The congestion is getting tight again and it's gonna move one of these days. Let's see what other stocks we have here that people are interested. Netflix will take a look at Netflix still trading in this large channel, still meandering, not much happening with Netflix. So I can't make a call either way. I mean, eventually I think it's gonna go higher, but for now it's just in this congestion pattern. Let's take a look at PayPal. It's in a great industry. The online payment sector, PayPal is just great. Once again, hugging the 20 day moving average line, great momentum behind it. If you were looking to be bullish PayPal, looking for an entry, here is your chance when it met 20 day moving average just the other day. So you have to look at these patterns. Technical analysis is all looking patterns. When you are an options trader, you have to focus on the stocks as well. You have to focus on what the stock is doing. So look at the patterns. What else do we have? Microsoft, yeah, Microsoft is another biggie still in this channel, had the triangle here, blasted above, but it's now kind of moved back a little bit. So Microsoft still kind of meandering in this channel, not really going anywhere. I know people getting frustrated with that. But if you're selling options, sideways movement is just as good. Selling options takes advantage of time decay. And when stocks don't move anywhere, those option prices just get cheaper and cheaper. And you can always buy it back and lock in again. So selling options works in sideways channels as well. What else we got? Walmart is moving up nicely. I'm not really seeing anything major here. Nothing to get too excited about. What else? Let me go through my list here. Am I seeing any other stocks that people really like? Nike is another great stock. I love Nike. I had this on the chart a long time ago. We had this triangle congestion pattern. Once it breaks out in that direction, it tends to keep moving. It's been hugging the 20-day moving average line very closely. If you're looking to get entry into bullish Nike, here's your opportunity bouncing off the 20-day moving average. So you've got to keep an eye on these things, people. This is how it's done in technical analysis. All right, so this video's getting quite long here over 40 minutes, so this is much longer than I usually like to do. Okay, so that's it for your Saturday synopsis. Once again, market for next week. I'm bullish. I see the market going higher. There's really nothing to hold it back now. So that's my opinion, that's my assessment. And so that'll do it here. Now once again, we talked about selling put options today. Let's take a look at our website, smartoptionseller.com. We have our put selling basics free guide on how to sell put options. Please download it. It's free. Go to our website, putsellingbasis. All you have to do is put in your name and email address down here and we'll send you a free copy. It's a great way to earn income. It's a great side hustle, side gig. Learn how to do it. Our website, we're here to help. Send us emails, our services. We have two newsletters, smartoptionseller newsletter that's all about selling put options just what we talked about. Our vertical spread trader. It's about selling put option credit spreads, different kind of strategies still taking advantage of selling put options. And our one-on-one coaching. If you need help, you wanna get a little start. You take your education to the next level. Consider our one-on-one coaching. All right, that's it for me today. If you liked this video, please give me a thumbs up in the YouTube channel here. Don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel. I put these videos out every Saturday. Subscribe, we'll be glad to have you. And send me an email, okay? We will always answer your questions. No personal investment advice. Can't answer questions on personal investment advice. All right, so that's it for me today. Hope everyone has a great weekend and I will see you next Saturday. This is Lee Lowell signing off.