 Hey, everyone, welcome to this weekend's video update for pro members. Today is Friday, January 22nd. Hope everybody had a good week of trading. Taking a look at the S&P 500, this thing just continues to march higher. I've been talking about ever since after the election, and things kind of pushed up. I thought that we would just continue to see upside, and that certainly happened. And so real quick, just our overall short delta, we're a little bit less than one to one on our short delta versus our theta ratio. So minimal short. So we'll still benefit if this thing does fall apart. But we're going to continue to just keep a little bit so that we can strategically find long positions like we have been, and then just manage our other positions mechanically. And this will continue to do. I'm still not going to load up. I still don't see any reason to load up on any more short delta at this point. I still think this market's going to march higher. At some point, there's going to be some event or something's going to happen that's really going to, we're going to have a big flush lower. And so we do have a little bit of short delta that's going to benefit us on that. And then, and only then, is when we might start changing our perception of, or our assumption of the overall market direction. Until then, we're going to continue to keep managing our premium selling positions and keep continuing to add on little positions here and there, little directional positions as we see fit. As you can see from what we've been doing over the last couple of weeks, we've been adding in some pre-earnings plays, catching some of that momentum of some of these stocks leading it to earnings, and that's been working well. And we'll still continue to look for different opportunities like that. All right, so let's jump into the alerts. Actually, before we do that, one point I want to make on day trading this week. So I'm not going to recap it all here. I did a weekly recap for the day trading. It's posted in the Profits Channel in Discord. If you want to check that out, we had our worst week day trading that we've had since we started streaming live, since we started tracking. So a little painful. I don't like that feeling. I like the feeling of winning a lot better. And this is coming. So last week was one of our best weeks ever. And then this week, one of our worst weeks ever. So it was a little bit painful. But go watch that video if you want to learn more about what was going on. The thing is, usually if I have a bad day or a bad week, a lot of times it has to do with either got my position size a little too big or held on to losers too long or something like that. And there's a couple of situations. On Wednesday, we held on to a couple of runners that were losers that we could have cut quicker. But overall, traded pretty well. We literally just kind of got slapped. We just kind of got bitch slapped this weekend by the markets. That happens. But all in all, we're still doing really great overall. So you got to kind of take that into perspective that sometimes you're going to have situations like this where the market, the price action just does not follow through and do what you're looking for it to do. And so we are one thing I want to mention on that. Couple things. One, our runner strategy class is next Thursday, the 28th. So we'll be posting a link to get signed up to save your spot with that. We're starting next week. So look for that in your email and post it in Discord. It's going to be Thursday, the 28th at 4 p.m. central time. So mark your calendar. And then you'll see more information about that coming next week. And then the second thing is before the market opens, kind of before our live stream for the day trading, we're going to be doing some different mindset concepts. Trading psychology, we're going to start a new series called the Trade Hacker's Mindset. And we're going to be basically the first thing we're going to be doing is we're going to be taking chapters or concepts out of Mark Douglas's book, Trading in the Zone. And we're going to be diving a little bit deep into each one of those concepts. Taking about sometimes 15 minutes, sometimes 30 minutes. Some will be shorter than others. So look for that. We'll be posting details in the community and send out an email about that as well. But we're not going to do it every day. But I'm going to try to do it a couple of days a week. And we'll let you know some more specifics about that. Looking forward to that. All right, let's jump into the alerts, starting with Tuesday the 19th. Remember, the market was closed on Monday for MLK Day. So Tuesday the 19th, our first trade was an opening trade in SPX, which is a weekly double calendar. This one we entered with just three days in the front week, six in the back. With the price move higher, it busted out of our range on Thursday yesterday. We ended up closing it out because I didn't want it to turn into a bigger loss. The market opened up lower this morning. So holding till this morning would actually have been a better play. But that's in hindsight. So we ended up taking a little loss on that one. Opening trade in Apple. So we did a pre-earnings long straddle in Apple. In this case, we were targeting 20%. Let me pull up a chart. Had a nice little pop in Apple. Just a couple days after we put that on, you can see the price just fired up. And we ended up booking 20% just in a couple days here. So we were out of that one. So nice little pre-earnings trade in Apple. Netflix did an earnings iron duck. Netflix, let's go to a chart of Netflix and FLX. Netflix just exploded after earnings. This was the expected move right here. And Netflix opened right here. We're actually looking to do a post-earnings trade as well. But this was just like a one minute drop. And then it just fired up. We never had a chance to enter. So we didn't want to chase. And this has been kind of chopping around the next couple of days. With our earnings iron duck, you can see prices way up here in the beak. So I'm recording this about 30 minutes before the market closed. So by the time you see this, the market will be closed. And this will have expired. So we just let this expire. Booked beak profit of 116 on that trade. CMG did an opening trade in CMG. And this was kind of what I was talking about, just kind of strategically adding long positions. In this case, we used a call diagonal. And let's take a look at CMG. I'll show you what we did here. So we were just, we got long right here. And again, kind of like, well, Apple was a straddle. But just really quick, this thing just fired up. And we didn't quite get to the 100% profit that we were looking for. But I can't remember what we booked on this. But it was in just a couple of days with such a nice move. We went ahead and just took that money and ran. So nice trade in CMG. Closing trade in UNH. So this was another long call diagonal. We were looking for a little run up leading up to earnings. UNH did not run up. And so we just had to close that out. Took a little loss on the trade on that one. BABA, Iron Condor. So on this one, we closed the put vertical side because price ran higher, breached our upper break even. Still holding that call vertical side. So if we look at BABA, so it's this one here. So you can see price is hanging out right here. It's outside of our range. So we're just looking for a little bit of downside to get back into range. And if it does, we'll close it out. BABA also has earnings on 2-2 before the market. So if we haven't booked, if price hasn't come back into range and closed it out, then we'll definitely close it by the 1st of February. Next trade, closing trade in Apple. That was that pre-earnings long straddle that I just mentioned. We booked over 20% profit. SPX, Weekly Double Calendar. So we opened up another one. This one with eight and 11 days to expiration. So let's take a look at SPX. We still have this one on. Uncheck our duck here. That's another duck. There we go. All right, so it's still pretty well centered. You can see with the market moving higher, we've had a little bit more contraction and implied volatility between that front and back week. So we're seeing a little sag in that, but that doesn't, you know, A, implied volatility can increase next week and that P&L line can still go up even with the expiration sag as you see it there. So hopefully we can book a little profit on this one. Next trade, opening trade into Facebook. This was a pre-earnings long straddle. So in this one, we did a strangle instead of a straddle. So I got a couple of questions about this in the community about why straddle, not a straddle. Couple of things. One, with the price of these options, we reduced the amount of capital needed by widening those strikes out. Straddle's a little bit more expensive. And then secondly, the other thing that, and I've been tracking this for a couple of years now, but the out-of-the-money options, if implied volatility expands, the out-of-the-money options will actually expand quicker than at the money. So you can see this, we're still dead center, but we're up $74. And that's due to a little bit of expansion of the implied volatility of those out-of-the-money options. So if you, like in TOS, you can put implied volatility as one of your columns here, and you can kind of see, and you can actually go to on-demand and watch the think back and see how these react to different implied volatility levels. But the out-of-the-money, so right here, kind of at the 50 delta, those won't expand as much if implied volatility expands versus like 30 or 20 to 40 delta. They actually expand a little bit quicker. So we just did that, we'll still mix it up. I mean, there's nothing wrong with doing a pre-earnings long straddle or long strangle. In this case, part of it was buying power, part of it was just utilizing those out-of-the-money options. And as you can see, if this thing, implied volatility continues to expand and we do get any type of price movement should be able to book a nice profit. We're trying to target about 20% profit here. So debit paid 12.28, so we're looking for about 240 bucks of profit on that one. Spy vertigo, so we did a closing trade on our spy vertigo. Price was hanging out right at our breakeven. I think we scratched this one or minus 30 bucks or something on it. So we were starting to see a real big sag in that P&L line as we were approaching expiration. So we just closed that out, took a small loss on that one. CMG, there's that long-call diagonal that we booked a profit on, booked over 50% in just a couple of days. SPX, there's that weekly double calendar that we closed out that I already mentioned. Facebook, I kinda jumped ahead, but on Facebook, we had a long-call diagonal. We closed out half of it. So let's go back to Facebook here. So we had two contracts on here and we just closed out one. You can see, at this point, we've got $178 in buying power and risk and we're up 136, so we're up over 70%. So we booked one of them just to lock in some profit. We're gonna hold this one into next week. We'll definitely take this off before earnings. Earnings announcement is 127 after the market, so we'll definitely be out of this by 127. We're gonna see if we can get a little more upside on Facebook to book a little bit more profit. And you can see how these, if you move through time with a theoretical calendar, you can see how that P&L line will just continue to increase, so it doesn't take much more of a move higher to book a really significant profit on these trades. So I really like these diagonals for directional plays. I have gotten a couple of questions about, what's the difference between doing a vertical and a diagonal as far as for directional play? And the way that we like to set these up, and you can go back and review that in the Directional Strategies course, but we like to enter these right around about that 20 delta in the front week and then one strike difference in the back week. And by doing that, price will start right here. So it is actually slightly negative theta, but if price stayed right here, it's not like it's going to just minimize. I mean, if you look at the way that price moves, you can be close to expiration and still not be at a loss if price is exactly where you put it on. So obviously if it moves against you, you're gonna start seeing more theta decay and a decline in profit, but if it stays where it's at or moves higher, there's really not much of a theta decay component to it. And based on the buying power, buying capital required versus what you can make, there's a really good risk to reward on these. The benefit of a vertical is you've got a higher probability of profit. You've got positive theta, a higher pop. So there's benefits to one versus the other. And so we'll continue to do both, but I really like these for these directional plays because the low amount of risk and the nice profit potential as well. So we will continue to do both. Next trade, rolling dusting trade in SMH. So we've got this short strangle in SMH. Price had breached our upper break even, so we needed to roll up our puts. So let me show you that. So what we did is we just, you can see the other one's still here. So we had the 190-235 strangle and we just rolled our puts up to 230, which is right at about that 30 delta, just like we teach in our course. So you can see price is hanging out right here. Now we do have a more narrow range, but we've got a higher max profit, collected credit for that roll. So we'll continue to manage this just like we teach in the strangles course. BABA opening trade, along called diagonal in BABA. So another one of these that we added in, and this is kind of another pre-earnings play. So leading up to earnings, there's our half of our iron condor already showed. So this is it. So we just put this one on today. So this is a good example of kind of what I was just trying to explain with you on the Facebook one. So price is right here. So if we put our price slice right on the break even, you can see theta's actually a little bit positive. Now if you move lower, you can see theta starts to go down and eventually gets a little bit negative, but still not real negative. It's not like buying a strangle or a straddle where that theta component is really working against you. It's very minimal. And on this trade, we're risking $260. That's our buying power. That's our max risk. It's 260 bucks. So very low capital requirements is to find risk. You can do it in an IRA. You can do it in a small account and you can scale it up to as large as you want to. So we just did a couple of contracts here, but you can see, BABA announces earnings on 2-2 before the market. So we want to be out of this by 2-1. So if we move our theoretical calendar to 2-1, you know, just before earnings, you can see that if price makes just a decent move up, I mean, we can book over 100% profit pretty easily. Let me go back to today's date and let's change this calendar to the right date. Let's change it to 2-1, which is when we want to be out of this trade. And so you can see, here's the expected move, way up here, okay? So I'm going to move the price slice over to the expected move. And so let's move this calendar up to 2-1 because we want to be out by 2-1. Let's just change that to 2-2, 2-1. And so here's the expected move that price could move higher to between now and then. Well, even if it stayed inside the expected move, I mean, we're looking at a $350 profit and it hasn't even exceeded the expected move. I'm just picking a random spot here. You know, it can stay with inside the expected move and still book well over 100%. Remember, our capital here at risk is 260. And if we book anything over 260, that's over 100% return on capital. And so that's why I like these very minimal theta decay, good risk to reward. And when you work it into a strategic thing like a pre-earnings play on some of these, especially on these tech stocks where a lot of times you get some of this upside momentum leading into earnings, it all works together and works well. So that's all we're doing here. Next trade, SPX opening trade, Iron Duck. So today, Friday, we opened up an Iron Duck in SPX when the market was a little bit lower. And so let's take a look at that. We did this one with 14 days to expiration. And so you can see the price is hanging out right here pretty close to where we put it on. If price runs higher, we got a beak profit of 135. It comes back into the duck head. We've got a max profit of 635. We also have an Iron Duck here that expires on January 30th. And so you can see this one is pretty far up the beak. If price stays right here or goes higher, we'll just close this out and book that beak profit early. There's no reason to wait all the way to expiration. We've got a beak profit on this of 150 bucks, so we'll just take that. So those are all the alerts. Let's take a look at some of these other positions. We've got a long put vertical in ES. Price is just inside the range here, looking for some downside to benefit that. Natty gas, we've got the short strangle that we've been managing. You can see price is hanging out right here in the lower end of the range. We're up about $200 and some dollars since we did our last roll. Certainly could use some upside movement in Natty gas. It's been on the pretty much a downhill slide this week. So if we can get a little bit of a bounce, we've got some time on this one. We've got 32 days. I'd love to see by the time we get down to 21 days, if we can get a bounce, we might be able to just close this out and book a profit after all adjustments and rolls. Bonds, kind of a similar thing. Price is hanging out in the lower end of the bond short strangle. If we could catch a little bounce here before we get down to 21 days, this expiration will probably just close this out and we will be profitable in bonds. Apple, we've got this long put vertical. Price is at a range, just looking for some more downside to get back into range. Baba, already mentioned that one. Baidu, we've got an iron condor in Baidu. You can see price is hanging out right here, still well within range. Could use a little bit of downside to get back into center and just some more time to pass, some more theta decay. John Deere, another short delta play. Price is just outside the range of this vertical. DIA, same thing. Price is just outside the range. Need some downside to get back in. I mentioned Facebook. IWM, same thing. This is a short, a long put vertical. Price is just outside the range, looking for some downside to get back in there. Netflix, I mentioned. Excuse me. QQQ, another vertical just outside the range. I mentioned SMAH, SPX, Tesla, did I mention Tesla? So Tesla is an iron duck. This one actually expires today. So right before the close, we'll be taking this one off. We got about 20 minutes until the market closes. We can let this one expire. In fact, maybe we'll just let it expire. It's well enough into the beak that we're not gonna get assigned. We'll just book beak profit in this case, $139. If it's anywhere close to this range, if it's anywhere close to in between the short and the long strike, you've gotta close it out because you'll get assigned. And you won't have any of the other options left for protection, so you'll be basically short, 100 shares of Tesla naked. Of course, if Tesla rips higher over the weekend, you're gonna get hosed on that. So that's what you don't want to happen. So we're gonna go ahead and just let this expire unless here in the next 20 minutes, price really starts to run lower and is giving us any chance of assignment. We'll close it out, but otherwise we'll just let it expire. Toss doesn't charge any exercise or assignment fees, so we won't get charged any kind of commission to just let that close. And then XLK, another vertical spread just outside the range that needs a little downside to benefit. So those are all the alerts. Those are all the positions. Everybody have a fantastic weekend. If you have any questions, let me know.