 Good morning everybody, Lee Lowell here from smartoptionseller.com. Today is Saturday, April 17th, 2021. As you can see on the screen in front of you, today we will be talking about buying straddles, option straddles, for earnings announcements. It's been getting lots of questions this week especially. We've got Q1 earnings, quarter one earnings here in the U.S. That means companies are going to start announcing their earnings. So I get questions from people all the time emailing me saying, Lee, I want to take advantage of earnings. And typically I know that a stock could go either higher or lower depending on how good or bad the earnings announcements are. Is there a way for me to take advantage of a stock move that can go in either direction? How do I do that? Well, yes, there is a way to do that. And that is called buying an option straddle. What does that mean? Well, that means you're going to buy a put and a call option at the same time for the same expiration in the same amount of contracts. So that way, depending on whichever way the stock moves, you buy a call option as a bull strategy, you buy a put option, that's a bearish strategy. So no matter which way the stock goes, you could potentially make money in either direction. So yes, there is a way to do that, but there's a lot of caveats to that. So what we're going to do today is we're going to talk about buying straddles for earnings announcements. And then after that, we will go into our usual Saturday synopsis, which we like to do every weekend, and take a look at stock charts, take a look at the indexes, see how the market fared over the last week and over the prior few weeks, and see what may be coming down the pike. So let's jump right in and talk about buying option straddles for earnings announcements. So let me just get this right off the bat. In my opinion, buying straddles for earnings announcements is, or trying to take advantage of an earnings announcement can be kind of a crapshoot, right? You never know which way the stock can move after an earnings announcement. And a company could have a great quarter, they could have great numbers, blah, blah, blah, but the stock will fall, right? Everything looks great, but the stock falls. And that's mostly because the stock didn't meet the analyst's estimates for the future, or the future might not look so bright, even though they beat current estimates. It's all about the future. What is the stock going to do for the future? So if a company has really good earnings for the prior quarter but says, you know what, this next quarter coming up might not be so good, the stock could tank. And conversely, if a company has bad earnings for this prior quarter but says, but things are going to be looking really good for the future, the stock might go up. So it could be hit or miss, it could be, you know, a crapshoot. So when people want to take advantage of a move in either direction, what you can do is buy a straddle. And a straddle is buying a call option and a put option at the same time. So you're straddling the stock, okay? If the stock goes up, you could potentially make money on the call option. If the stock drops, you can potentially make money on the put option. And I always say potentially, because it's never a guarantee that you're going to make money on the trade. So let's talk about what are some of the things you can do and some of the details about buying option straddles for earnings. Now, the number one, if you look at my cheat sheet here, you want to use the at-the-money strike prices. What are the at-the-money strike prices? Well, those are the strike prices that are the closest to the current price of the stock. And we'll look at an example. If the stock's at $100 a share, you're going to be buying the 100-strike call option and the 100-strike put option. Those are called the at-the-money strike prices. So those will, because as the stock's at 100, you want to take advantage of a move in either direction. You don't want to buy an out-of-the-money put option and then an in-the-money call option. So if the stock's at 100, you don't buy a $70 put option and a $70 call option because those strike prices don't match up. That would be buying an in-the-money call option and buying an out-of-the-money put option. You don't want to do that. You want both strike prices to be right at the stock price. That's the at-the-money straddle. So let's just say the earnings announcement comes out. Let's say it's Monday and the company announces earnings on a Wednesday of that week. So basically what you want to do is in number two here, you want to buy the straddle with the least amount of time left possible. That minimizes the time value that's left in the straddle. Meaning you're buying an option with very, very little amount of time left to expiration and that straddle will cost the least amount in actual dollar terms. The less time till expiration, the less it's going to cost dollar-wise. So let's just say the company announces it's a Monday and a company announces earnings after the bell on Wednesday. The tip is buy that straddle right before the close on or very close to the end of the day if you want on Wednesday because the company's going to announce earnings after the close on Wednesday. So if you buy the straddle on Wednesday, that straddle should cost you the least amount of money compared to if you had bought the straddle a couple days prior, whatever. Because each day options lose value. So the longer you wait to buy an option, the cheaper it's going to be dollar terms. It still might not mean that you'll make money, but at least you're putting the least amount of money on the line. And this is what I consider an all or none type of trade. It's either going to move in your favor or it's not. When you buy a straddle, the day before earnings announcements, the stock either moves in the way that you want it to or it doesn't. And if it doesn't move in the direction you need it to, you're going to lose basically all the money you've paid out for that straddle. So it's really an all or none proposition because you're really giving yourself very little time for the stock to move in your favor. So most stocks have weekly expirations that they expire every Friday. So like I said, if the company is announcing earnings on Wednesday, you buy the straddle that expires that Friday. So you'll have about two days for that stock to potentially make a move in your favor. If you buy the straddle on Wednesday, all you have is Thursday and Friday, you'll have two more days of that specific week in order to potentially make money. And if the stock doesn't move in your favor, the whole thing will expire very quickly and those option values will just crash on you and you won't make any money. So it's really an all or none proposition. If you like that kind of gambling mentality, that kind of speculation, you buy the shortest term expiration date which is typically every Friday and you see where within that week the company's announces earnings and then you buy that straddle pretty close to right before they're going to announce earnings. That's just going to help you keep the actual dollar cost small. Now, if you look at number 2A here, if you don't want the all or none proposition and you're thinking, you know what? I know this stock's going to move, you know, they're going to announce earnings. The stock's going to move in some direction. I just don't know yet, but I want to give myself a little more time to be right with the straddle, buying the straddle. So what you can do is buy the straddle that has, you know, 60 days until expiration. It's going to cost more. It will absolutely cost you more in dollar terms because the longer until expiration, the more options cost, right? More time equals more money. But if you want to give yourself a fighting chance to, you know, go with the trend after earnings are announced, you buy the straddle about 60 days before expiration. Okay, and you buy that straddle a couple days before the company announces earnings. So let's say a company announces earnings on Thursday of the week. You can buy the straddle on that Monday for two months out in time. Okay, you don't have to. What happens is as the company gets closer to earnings announcements that week, let's say the volatility of that stock starts to go up. So the option prices, the option implied volatility starts to go up that week. People are buying calls and puts because they want to get in on the action. So you might want to buy that straddle a few days before that flurry of activity starts to come in. You still buy it 60 days out in time, but buy it a few days before the actual earnings announcement. Okay, so that'll allow you to get around all that increased volatility those few days before the actual earnings announcement. And then when the company announces earnings, it'll go up and down, whatever. But over those next two months, those 60 days, the company should show you the trend where it wants to go. Let's say there was bad earnings, so the stock starts to drop. That way, the put option of the straddle that you bought should actually start to increase in value, whereas the call option value will go down in value. So what you can do is you can unload the call option, get rid of the call option. It should still have some value to it. You sell out the call option, and now you ride that put option lower. I mean, you ride that put option as long as the stock is going down, that put option value is going up. So you can ride that put option value. Conversely, if the stock starts to go up after earnings over time, then you can sell out the put option, reclaim whatever values left to it, and then you ride that call option. Hopefully that the stock will move far enough for you to be able to make money on the overall straddle that you bought. So there's your two ways to buy the straddle as an all or none proposition or giving yourself a little more time to find the trend of that stock. Now, number three here is all about knowing your break even levels. I don't know why I have two number threes in there, but know your break even levels. What does that mean? Well, you need to know where the stock has to move to in order for you to break even on the trade, at least break even if you're going to hold the straddle until expiration. Okay, so the example here is, let's say the stock's at $100 and you buy the $100 straddle. That means you're buying the 100 strike call and the 100 strike put. And let's say that whole straddle costs $10, $10 total, $1,000 investment. And the call option costs $5 per contract and the put option costs $5 per contract. So that's a $10 per contract straddle. Where does the stock need to move to either higher or lower in order to just break even? Well, the stock has to cover whatever the cost of the straddle is. So if the straddle costs $10, the stock either has to move up to $110 a share or it has to move below $90 a share. That's a $10 swing higher or lower above the 100 strike. And if you're going to hold it until expiration, the stock has to move above $110 or below $90 in order to just break even. If it goes farther than that in either direction, then you'll start to make money. So you know where your break evens are. Okay, and the other thing is that are you picking a stock that's even capable of making that kind of move over in the all or none proposition or over two months? So you want to know, does the stock move a lot? You'd have the opportunity to even go up 10% in that short period of time or whatever the distance it needs to go. In this case, with the 100 straddle, it's a 10% move higher or lower. Can a stock make that kind of move? You go back and you look at the stock charts and right here, number four we're talking about is the stock capable of making the required move. You can check the charts. Go back to the prior earnings announcements over let's say a year or so or two years. So that would be four or eight earnings announcements. And you watch the stock, see where the stock moved over that next month or two months. Was it capable of making the move required for the straddle? But in order to see what the straddle costs at that time, you can go to a company or a website called Market Chameleon. Let me open this up. So here's a website called MarketChameleon.com. And I'm sure there's plenty of other sites that can tell you prior earnings announcements, what the straddle was implying, the cost of the straddle tells you how far the stock would need to go in order to break even. So in Market Chameleon, I've opened up the earnings page for Apple. Part of this is a free site, part of it you can pay for. This is just some of the free information. So on the left-hand side is, first of all, you type in the symbol here, Apple, in the box over here. And then you go on the left side and you click on the earnings tab and you click on release dates. This will tell you the upcoming earnings dates for Apple. And Apple has earnings coming out on the end of April. Like April 28th up here in this top portion. This is April 28th, 2021. It's got earnings announcements coming out after the bell. But over here in this column, it'll tell you the prior five or six earnings dates, what happened to the stock? How far did it move right after the earnings? And it'll tell you this column right here implied straddle. I'll tell you that Apple was predicting or the market, the options market was predicting that Apple would move here in October 30th, 2019. Apple was expected to move about 4.9% from where it closed that day and when earnings announced and where did it trade the next day? So this one right here on October 19, 2019, Apple was expected to move about 5% from where it closed the day prior. That's what the straddle was saying. And it only moved higher, Apple moved higher by 2.3%. So if you bought that straddle and you wanted to get out of the trade the next day, you probably would have lost money because Apple didn't move as far as it was being predicted. And then the next one, 4.7%, Apple price went up by 2%. In April 2019, April 30th, 2020 was projected to move 4.4%. Stock dropped by 1.6%. So these past three right here, Apple didn't move as far as it was predicting where the straddle was predicting. And then up here, this one on July 30th, 2020, the straddle was predicting only a small 3.6% move and Apple actually, the price went up 10.5%. So in this case, it actually worked out. Here, it was predicting a 4.8% move. Now that 4.8% move is not saying it's going to move up by 4.8%. It's just saying it can move either higher or lower by 4.8%. And in this case, Apple dropped, this column is telling you what it actually did. Apple price dropped 5.6%. And then the very last earnings announcements in January 2021, Apple was expected to move 6.8% based on the straddle price. But Apple price stock dropped 3.5%. So you can see it's kind of a crapshoot. You know what the straddle is telling you where Apple might go to versus where it actually went to. It's not really meeting the projections. Now, how do you tell how far a straddle, the price might move? Well, you go to the option chain. Let me pull up the option chain for Apple. And here's just, this is just an example. I'm just showing you some numbers here. This is Apple, Apple closed at $134 yesterday on Friday, April 16th. Let's look at the at-the-money straddle for April 30th options, April 30th, 2021. So the at-the-money straddle would be the 134 puts and the one, let me move myself here, 135 calls. The 135 calls finished around $3.85 a contract. And the 134 puts closed around $3.70, $3.70 per contract. You add those together. That's how you find out what the straddle costs. Take the call price and the put price, you add them together. So that's roughly $3.80, $3.70. That's probably, you know, $500, I'm sorry, $7.50 a contract, let's say per straddle. All right? So $750, it would cost you $7.50 per contract, $7.50. What is that telling you? Well, that's telling you Apple would have to move, you know, higher or lower by $7.50 a contract in order to break even. Well, what's the implied percentage? Well, what's $7.50 as a percentage of where Apple is today? That's roughly, that's maybe 6%, 6% or so. A 10% move would be $13.50. So that's probably, yeah, it's probably about a 6%-ish move. So that implied straddle is telling you Apple is predicting a 6% or so move. Higher or lower than $1.34, $134. So if Apple was releasing earnings, if you were to buy this straddle, it's implying that Apple will move roughly 6% higher or lower than $134 per share. Okay? So you have to understand, you know, can Apple make that move? Is Apple capable of moving 6% or so after it releases earnings? You know, Apple, let me see what Mark the Chameleon is saying. So for the next earnings, it's not projecting, it's not giving the projection. I think if you, oh, implied straddle right here, you can see, it's a little blocked off here, but right here, you can see the implied straddle is about 5.6%. And what do the, where do these numbers come from? Well, this comes from the at the money closest to expiration straddle. I didn't show you the closest expiration straddle. That's next Friday on, it's that April 23rd. Okay? So you go back and you look at the at the money straddle on any day that you're looking at, the most closest to expiration. And that's what's considered the most important barometer of the, you know, the percentage of the implied straddle and what it would cost. So I showed you what the April 30th expiration would be for Apple. And that's close to that 6% number. So this is 5.6%. So anyway, you got to look at some numbers. You got to see if, you know, what has Apple done in the past or whatever stock you're looking at, is it capable of making that kind of move? And, but if you want the all or none type of trade, you buy the straddle, the closest expiration on that current weekly Friday, and you buy it, you know, close to the closing day, right before they're going to announce earnings. If they announce earnings in the morning, then you buy the straddle at the end of the prior day because you want to minimize that time decay. If you buy, you know, if you buy that straddle that a couple of days prior, you're still going to pay for more time value. So you want to keep the time very short right before you buy that straddle if you're in the all or none scenario. If you want to take that longer term approach and you want to buy a straddle two months out in time, then you buy that straddle a couple days before the earnings announcements. If you're taking that longer term view, okay, that'll minimize that jump in volatility that I talked about those last few days before the earnings announcement. And then you ride it out. If you're doing the two month straddle buy, then you wait to see which way the stock starts to move. And then you get rid of the leg that's not working for you. So there's a couple of ways to play it. Okay. And what is the what does it look like on a profit and loss chart? I've shown this. I had another video showing how to trade straddles and I'll put that on the screen at the end of this video in this YouTube video. But you can go to a website and I've showed this before optioncreator.com and you go up to the top here and you can click on the drop down here and you can pick any one of these strategies. But I've defaulted. I've already put in the long straddle. Now we don't want to sell straddles because that implies unlimited loss potential. We're only talking about buying or long straddles because that entails unlimited profit opportunity. Okay. That's what you want. So in this scenario, we've got a stock price at $100 and we're looking to buy the straddle. In this case, we only put five days to expiration. We're doing the all or none scenario here. Okay. And each leg costs $5. So this is a $10 straddle costs $10 for contract. That's $1,000. And this chart will tell you what your P&L, your profit loss will look like if held until expiration. If you held it for five days. Now, if this chart is showing you down at the bottom are the stock prices of the stock and on the side is your potential profit and loss. Now, obviously you can see as the stock either declines in price or goes up in price. Your unlimited profit potential, you have unlimited profit potential as long as the stock keeps moving in that direction, one way or the other. If the stock doesn't go anywhere, if the stock stays right at $100 on expiration date, you're going to lose your full investment, which is, let me get out of the way here, your $10 shares minus $10 per contract. You will lose the full $10 per contract if the stock finishes right at $100 a share on expiration day. If it goes lower, as it goes lower in price, here's your break even $90 and $110 just like I told you, the stock has to move above $110 or below $90 in order to start making money. If the stock starts dropping, you'll make money. If the stock starts going up above $110, you make money in an unlimited reward potential. So the key is, can the stock make the move? Will the stock make the move? If you're going for the all or none, you really don't have a lot of time for the stock to make the move. If you buy the straddle on a Wednesday for that Friday expiration, you only have two days to be right. Maybe the stock won't make the move in two days. So if you buy the longer 60-day straddle, you're giving the stock an opportunity to move in a direction that will help your break even. At the same time, that 60-day straddle costs more. Let's go back and look at the option chain real quick. So here's an April 23 straddle for Apple. Let's look at the at-the-money straddle cost, let's say $1.80 for the put and $1.95 for the call. So that's $3.75 per straddle, $3.75. One week later, these April 30, I told you it costs about $7.50. So it's almost double, right? It's almost double, one week more in time. So if you go out two months, let's say to June, the at-the-money straddle, which will be now the $1.35 strike. So that straddle costs roughly $13 per straddle, $13. So the more time you give, the more expensive it's going to be. But at least you're giving yourself an opportunity for the stock to move above a break even. Okay, if you bought this straddle for $13, Apple has to either go up above $147 or below $121. So $13 either way. So you have to decide, do I want to spend less money and give myself less time? Or do I want to spend more money and give myself more time? Because I know Apple's going to make a move. It might just take it a little bit longer to make the move, okay? So let's go back to the cheat sheet. You have to figure out which way do you want it. Do you want an all or none proposition? Or do you want to give yourself more time? And then lastly, let's talk about what happens if you're either making money or losing money on the trade. Let's say the stock starts to move right away, right away, and you're making money. Well, make sure you take some profit. Take some money off the table. You don't have to wait until expiration. You can sell out at any time you want. So when do you get out? Well, if the stock has given you a 50% profit, maybe a 100% profit. Maybe Apple or whatever stock took off after earnings and you got this money built up. Take the money off the table. Is a 50% profit good for you? 100%, whatever. 10% might even be good enough for you. Make sure you take some money off the table. And on the downside, if the stock doesn't move well in that all or none proposition, you're probably going to lose all of it very quickly. That's the all or none. If you have the two month expiration, if the stock's not really moving for you, maybe you can get out of the whole trade. You'll only lose a small part of the straddle. You might lose 5% or 10% of whatever the investment was. If the stock's not moving, you can get out. Or you can hold whatever. It's up to you. But the quicker you take the loss, the longer you can stay in the game. If you have the profit, take the money off the table. So there you go. There's your lesson on option buying straddles for earnings. You can make money in either direction, but the stock has to make the move. And you have to make sure that you're paying as little money as possible if you want that all or none proposition. So let's move on to the next phase of our Saturday synopsis here. Let's take a look at the charts, see what's happened in the market, and kind of get a gauge for what's coming down for the next week. So we always jump right into the SPY, the exchange traded fund for the S&P 500. What's been happening in the market over the last week? Well, we've been hitting all time new highs again. All the indexes, the S&P 500, the Dow Jones Industrial, and the NASDAQ. All making new highs this week. It's been a good week for bulls. I like the action. I'm bullish for the long run. If you've been watching my videos, you know I've been bullish for a long time. The market is telling us it wants to be bullish. How is the market telling us? Just look at the stock charts. Look at the stock charts. You see the nice upward moving stocks. That's telling you the market wants to keep going higher until it tells us it's not going higher anymore. So let's take a look at the SPY. Blow this up a little bit. Take a look. These are daily bar charts. Each bar, each line here is one day's worth of trading. Look at this movement higher. Now, I will say I think we might be getting a little ahead of ourselves. As you're doing your technical analysis, which is chart reading, you want to see where the stock price is moving compared to what indicators you may have on the chart. Now, I always tell you what I have. A 20-day simple moving average, a 50-day simple moving average, and a 200-day simple moving average, and the 14-day RSI indicator down here. This is an overbought, oversold indicator. These horizontal dark lines gives you the overbought or oversold levels. And the line here, ping-pongs between overbought, oversold, or neutral areas. Here's the price action of the S&P 500. Getting a little ahead of itself because it's creating a lot of space between or from the moving averages. As you can see here, it hugs the lines. It hugs the moving averages. It goes up and it comes down. Well, it's really gone up pretty good over the last two weeks. We probably need a little breather, maybe a little sideways action, a little downwards action, and let the moving averages catch up to the price action. We want those normal ebbs and flows. But we still want to see the trajectory higher. But we can have the ebbs and flows. We don't want the market to get too ahead of itself because then you have that really crash elevator down moves, which scares a lot of people. We don't want that to happen. We like the normal ebbs and flows. So although the market's going up and we're all happy about that, it looks like it might be getting a little ahead of itself. We maybe do for a pullback to wait for the moving averages to catch up to it a little bit. Doesn't mean I'm bearish. Doesn't mean the next bear market is happening. Doesn't mean the next crash is happening. It just means we need a little normal ebb and flow. We need a little sideways downwards action, let the moving averages catch up, and then we can take the next move higher. That's how a beautiful uptrending market happens. Look at these moves. It goes up, hits the line, goes up, comes down and meets the 20-day. Goes up, comes down and meets the 50-day. So we had a little larger pullback here. Goes up again, comes down, comes down through the 50-day, but regains its footing, meets the 50-day again, and then goes up. So we want to see, we're going to see some kind of pullback. Now here on the RSI, we may be getting a little bit too overbought levels, a little too much steam might want to have a pullback. So that's what I'm seeing. Things are still looking good here in the United States. Vaccines have been rolling out. People are getting vaccinated. Economies coming back. People are getting jobs back. People are making money. The government is putting out stimulus money. It gives people more money in their pocket. They're paying their bills. They're buying more products. They're going out to dinners. They're shopping, which is good for companies. Companies can make money, and that just keeps their stock prices going higher. So that's what we like to see. Things are good. I don't see anything really to derail the bullish action. Yep, we're bullish, but we want to see some pullback here and there. Let's take a look at the Dow Jones industrial average. Also making all-time new highs as well. Right here. These just last couple of weeks. All-time new highs. Nice, slow, up-trending market. This is good. Goes up, pulls back to either the 50-day or 20-day, and keeps going up. When you have a nice up-trending market, a lot of people follow the 20-day, 50-day, 200-day. And when it pulls back to one of those averages, it will typically bounce in a nice up-trending market. So if you've missed the most current move, wait for the pullback to the 20-day or 50-day to help time your entry if you want to get long. So in most bullish markets, the stock or the index will pull back to the 20-day or 50-day. That can help you time your entry. Other people can use other moving averages. This is what I use. Some people will have a 10-day, a 40-day. I use a 20, 50, and 200-day moving averages in the RSI. People can use Bollinger bands, Stochastics, Fibonacci numbers. It's whatever works for you. It's the 30-day. Over the 30 years I've been in the business, this is what works for me. So that's the Dow. Dow looking good. Things are looking strong. Let's look at the NASDAQ. Now, the NASDAQ composite itself almost hit all-time new highs. So here's the previous all-time high. This is where we finished yesterday, April 16th. So the NASDAQ composite didn't hit all-time new highs. But the QQQ, which is the tracking stock, the NASDAQ made new all-time highs. See, here's where we ended this week. Here was the prior all-time high. And the NASDAQ futures also made all-time new highs. So I'm convinced that the NASDAQ has made all-time new highs, even though the composite index has it. QQQ and the futures have made all-time new highs. So I like where things are going. We're bullish. We really see nothing really to derail the bullishness. We can have the normal ebbs and flows. We look at price patterns. The NASDAQ had this nasty pullback, but then it made the sideways action. When a stock has a pullback, it starts to make some sideways action. That means it's looking for a bottom. Looking for a bottom. We talked about this W pattern. The W pattern here had the flat top. That was the resistance. The NASDAQ broke through it, and now this resistance becomes support. So once it blasted through this resistance line, it was off to the races. Let's see if I had it on the triple Qs. I had the congestion pattern here. We know congestion patterns means the stock is storing up a lot of energy for a blast-off, either higher or lower. In this case, the blast-off was higher. So the NASDAQ is moving up. The Dow is moving up. The S&P 500 is moving up. Everything looks bullish. Is there anything that can derail the market? Anything. In a normal functioning market, I don't really see anything to derail the market. We will have earnings. Earnings are starting to be announced. As long as the earnings are decent and the future is projected to be decent, stock prices will continue to go up. A world war breaking out, or some other new kind of pandemic, these are the things that can derail the market. In the short run, I really don't see anything on the horizon, but those things come out of nowhere. There's no way to predict that. So we stay long until the market tells us otherwise. And I'm bullish. So let's take a look at a couple of individual stock charts. See what we like. We look at some of the more popular stocks. I get requests all the time from people to look at certain charts. And I can't indulge everybody. If I did, I'd be spending all day looking at charts, emailing people back. So we look at some of the more popular stocks. Let's start with Apple. We always look at Apple. Apple has been, you know, I'm long Apple just, you know, for transparency's sake. So I want Apple to go up. Apple's been sort of, you know, not really going anywhere. It's been in this range for a long time now. I got long Apple back here. After this run up, I try to get long on this little pullback here. And it's just been ping-ponging back and forth. Has the W pattern here, we talked about this last week, made this W pattern. Now the W pattern is somewhat of a bullish pattern. And if it got through this resistance line, then it would be, should continue to go higher. Well, Apple actually has finally broken through here. Finally broken through. And I'm hoping that Apple can get up to its prior all-time highs around $145 a share. Apple announces earnings towards the end of April. So we'll see what happens. If the future doesn't look bright, if Apple comes out and says, you know what, the future not looking so good, it's going to get knocked back down. Apple says things are looking good. People are buying products again. We've got new launches, new products. It's going to keep going up. So ombos for Apple hope it keeps going up. But I like how it moved out of the W pattern and above this resistance line. So let's see if it's catching its breath here a little bit. Let's see if the next move is higher. Let's take a look at Amazon. Amazon's finally starting to get its mojo back a little bit. Has had a nice run over the last two weeks. So it's sort of getting closer to the top of this long channel here. Let's see what Amazon wants to do. We could be having a little bit of a bull flag here. Bull flag is when it has a nice move up, has a little bit of a congestion and then it getting ready for the next move higher. So let's see if Amazon could keep going. Let's take a look at Tesla. Tesla looks like maybe it's getting its mojo back. Had numerous congestion patterns here. All these little triangles were the congestion patterns. But Tesla has had this nice down move. Had the sideways action. Here is the resistance line just this week. It finally popped above the resistance line and finally popped above the 50 day moving average. That's a good sign. That's a good sign. So maybe Tesla will find its support here. Here's the support, around $710 a share roughly. And we want to see it stay above $710 and continue to move higher for all you Tesla fans. So this is very constructive right here. These last two weeks, very constructive, has moved above both moving averages, moved above this resistance line. So Tesla could be getting ready to embark on the next bull run higher. What other stocks do we like to take a look at? Walmart is one that I think I've shown recently. Walmart. Okay. So here we go with Walmart has this nice. This is an ascending triangle. Let's get rid of this one here. And let me redraw this. So I'll let you see what I'm looking at here. So an ascending triangle is when you have all these, these higher lows, you connect the lows. And then you have this resistance line up top here. Okay. So looks like Walmart. If it can get above the resistance line, which is roughly $141 per share. It's above the 20 day above the 50 day. And it just has to pop above this, this line right here. So if it can get above 141 for a couple of days in a row, it looks like Walmart can get above maybe tag. It's all time highs near $155 a share. So you want to wait to see where Walmart opens up. You want to give it some couple of days above the resistance line before maybe getting long. And then hopefully it'll keep running higher. But this is a very constructive chart right here. It just has to get above this little resistance area right here, right below 140. It's kind of hovering. If it can get above it, it looks pretty good for Walmart. Let's take a look at AMD because we looked at AMD last week. We looked at the three stocks I was bullish on. It was Apple, the QQQ and AMD. But obviously Apple and the triple Qs have all gone up this week. AMD, we're watching and waiting. We weren't getting into a bullish trade yet. We are watching and waiting. We saw the W pattern last week. Let me blow this up a little. So here we were last week. AMD was touching upon the downward sloping 50-day moving average. So this is where we closed last Friday right around here. I said, don't get bullish yet. You want to wait for AMD to get above this resistance line right here around $86, $87 a share. Well, this last week started out getting hit to the downside, but ended up the week back to where it was last Friday almost. Now it's hitting upon the upper channel right here, this blue line here, upper channel. Here's the 50-day moving average. So AMD is still kind of hovering right around the 50-day moving average right at the top of the channel. We don't want to see it get knocked back down. We're hoping for strong action, but it has to get above $86, $87 in order for me to say, okay, now I'm seriously looking at a bullish position in AMD. I have to wait till it gets above here. If I try to buy it now and it gets knocked back down, I'll lose my money. So I'm waiting on AMD. So that's what we'd like to see. You've got to look for the price patterns. You've got to look for your timing, see where the support and resistance is, and look where it is compared to the moving averages. Let's take a quick look at a few other charts and then we will call it a day. What other stocks are showing some interest? Netflix, we look at Netflix. Netflix is still within this long channel, still kind of ping-ponging back and forth. It's hovering above the 50-day and 20-day moving average and the 200-day, that's good. So maybe it's storing up some energy here. Maybe it's getting ready for the next leg higher. We're all on bullish, so hopefully these stocks will get going. See what other stocks are interesting here. Just kind of go through my list. Oracle has been a great stock. It just been, you know, it hugs the moving averages. Here's, we got into some trades on Oracle as well, sold some put options, bullish trades, and Oracle's just been making new all-time highs. Let me make sure this is an all-time new high. Look at a monthly chart, yep. So Oracle hit all-time new highs this week. Looking good, but could be getting ahead of itself. Here's just an example. Stock price starts to go vertical like that. It's getting kind of ahead of itself. RSI hitting definitely overbought areas. Doesn't mean it's going to reverse right away. It just means, okay, we've maybe hit a top here. We've maybe hit a top. Let's take a breather overbought near the 80 level on the RSI. Price is going vertical. It may need a little bit of a pullback. So watch the price action compared to the moving averages and watch the RSI. Okay, if you've been long, maybe take a little bit of money off the table. Or tighten up your stops if you have some stops in place. So these are the things we look for. Some of the healthcare stocks looking good. We play the XLV, which is the healthcare ETF. We liked it. We got in healthcare as it was coming off, hitting the support near the 50-day, 20-day moving average, and it's just gone up. So you want to watch the charts. And then the pullback to the 20-day or 50-day. And then you get long. So we liked healthcare right here. Anything else of note? Anything else of note? Game stop. People are still in game stop. It's in this congestion pattern still hanging around $150 a share. So we've got a congestion pattern. It's storing up all this energy. Maybe it's going to go higher or lower soon. But I'm out of it. For your synopsis here, the market looks strong. The indexes are going up. We need the normal ebbs and flows. It might be getting ahead of itself. So be prepared. We might have a little bit of a pullback, but that's okay. It doesn't mean the next leg is going to occur. The next down leg is going to turn into a full-on bear market. People always get nervous, but that doesn't always happen. Normal ebbs and flows. Lastly, let's take a look at our website. SmartOptionSeller.com. If it would load up for me here. We have our services tab. Over here we have our SmartOptionSeller newsletter. Vertical Spread Trader newsletter. These are all about selling put option and put option spreads. And our one-on-one coaching sessions. If you need help getting to that next level, consider a one-on-one coaching session. Okay, that's it for me today. I hope this content has been helpful, useful to you. Give me a thumbs up. If you get to subscribe, hit that red subscribe button in the YouTube video. Leave me a comment. Send me an email. I always love hearing from you. I try to help. I'm here to help. Let me know what you're thinking. Okay, that's all for me today. I hope everyone has a great weekend. And I will see you all next Saturday. This is Lee Lowell, signing off.