 Welcome back to the Trade Hacker Mindset. In this episode, I wanna give you my 2024 market prediction, my 2024 trading game plan, and my 2024 trading goals. Trading the markets can be difficult to master and seemingly just out of reach. Professional traders have a secret. Trading requires total mental and emotional control. It requires the Trade Hacker Mindset. All right, so welcome to the first episode of 2024. Hope everybody had a good 2023. Let's jump in and the first thing I wanna do is give you my 2024 market prediction. Now last year, I gave my 2023 market prediction and as you can see, by the way, if you're just listening to the podcast, the visual option for this podcast is available on YouTube, but I'll try to do a good job of explaining it if you're just listening by audio only. So I'm looking at the thinkorswim chart and I'm showing the 2023 expected move that we had to start the year. And it had a lower range of about 3000 and upper range of almost 4680. Now, my prediction in 2023 was that we were going to blow through the lower expected move and hit about 2800. Well, obviously we know what happened. It went the other way. It was a bullish year and it went to 4769 is where it closed. It closed above the 2023 expected move. So what's the expected move based on the options pricing? What is the expected move for 2024? Well, if you go to the option chain, you can see 365 days from now on the December 31 option cycle, the expected move for the year is up or down plus or minus 763 points in SPX. So what I wanna do is I wanna plot that on my chart going forward. So I'm going to edit this line and the SPX closed it, call it 4770. So on the upper side, that would put that at 5,533. So it adds 763 to the closing price, okay? So that's the upper edge of the expected move. And the lower edge of the expected move would then be 4770 minus 763. So that would put us at 4,007, 400. As the lower expected move. So I'm going to edit these properties and this is gonna be the 2024 expected move. And this is going to be the 2024 expected move upper line. So I'm gonna plot these here so that I can go back and see if I was right at the end of this year. All right, so on my chart, I'm gonna move this here and we'll move that up there. All right, there we go. So those are set. So from an expectation standpoint, somewhere between a little over 5,500 down to a low of about 4,000. Now last year, I guessed, it was just a guess, right? That we were gonna have a bearish year and we were going to move below the lower expected move line. This year, I have a much more thorough, well thought out idea of what the market's going to do and I'm going to explain why it's going to do that, okay? So let's get to that. So we're closing at 4770 and my prediction is this. I mean, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, all the big banks, they make their predictions, right? And they're always pretty accurate. So I figure it's my duty, it's my responsibility to give you my well thought out version of my prediction of what the market will do in 2024. So here's what I think. I think the first half of the year, right? We are closing 2023 right below all-time highs in SPX. And so I think for the first half of the year, for the first six months, things are going to be pretty calm. Volatility is going to stay pretty subdued and I think we're going to continue to grind higher and blow through all-time highs to the point where we get all the way up to the expected move on the upper edge. So above, you know, 55, 33 in that area is the upper expected move. So I think we get there within the first six months of the year. This, the last half of the year, I think is where the excitement really starts. And so here's, here are the events that I'm predicting are going to happen in 2024 and what that's going to do to the market. So the first thing that I think is going to happen, remember it's an election year. So we've got the big presidential congressional election going on, but I think before the election, what's going to happen in the second half of the year, I don't know exactly when, but I think somewhere in the second half of the year, Biden is going to die of COVID. And it's basically going to be because he wasn't wearing a mask. And so unfortunately, RIP, Joe Biden, Uncle Joe is going to pass away from COVID. And what that means then is Kamala Harris is going to take over. But what's going to happen in the meantime is Hillary Clinton, because she wants to be the first female president in the United States, she's going to send out a tweet challenging Kamala Harris to a UFC cage match. And Kamala is going to accept because she pretty much just thinks she's going to beat Hillary's ass. And it's not going to be a contest. And she wants to be the undisputed first female president. And so that's going to take place. Meanwhile, Trump is in prison, of course, because of all the allegations that he's been accused of. So he's going to appeal the election from prison and he's going to win. And because of that, he's going to become the first president that it was elected while in prison. Okay? So in this time, the market, like I said, the first half is going to go up to the upper expected move. And then when all this chaos starts happening, the market's going to start going down. And so Trump is now the president and he's running the country from prison. Meanwhile, China is going to end up calling us on all of our debt. And they're going to basically essentially take over the United States. And so they're going to start invading. And as they start invading, Elon Musk has been planning and plotting this whole situation behind the scenes in his secret SpaceX factory. And he's gotten to the point where he's got enough ships that he's going to be able to take all residents of the United States to Mars. And so as the Chinese are invading, we're all going, it's kind of like Noah's Ark. We're all going to get on Elon's ships and he's going to take us all to Mars to have a nice life on Mars while the Chinese invade the United States. Now, China doesn't know this and Putin doesn't know this either. So in the meantime, Putin has been planning a nuke attack on the United States. And as we are taking off to Mars and lifting off, Putin is going to deploy a nuke. And by mistake, he doesn't know we're gone. So the nuke is going to hit the Chinese that have invaded the United States, killing all the Chinese that have tried to take over. And so therefore we're going to get our country back and we're going to come back from Mars. Some people will stay because they like it up there. It's nice weather, that kind of thing. But some of us will come back and we'll have our country back. But in the meantime, what that's going to do to the market is we've hit the upper expected move. We're going to come all the way down to the lower expected move and beyond. And we're actually going to close at 3000 in the SPX next year. Okay, so like I said, last year, it was just kind of a guess. This year I wanted to put together a more well thought out reason of why the market's going to do what it's going to do. So hope that helps. This is something that I've thought a lot about all year. And with JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs and all the big banks making their predictions, they're usually pretty accurate. But I think my process and my thoughts are a much more accurate and probably more realistic idea of what's going to happen. So hopefully that helps you in your trading. So that's the first piece of my 2024 kind of market prediction. Let's move on now to my 2024, my actual trading game plan. So how am I going to take advantage of all this economic turbulence that we're going to see? Well, in 2023, my two best performing strategies were zero DTE and portfolio margin strategies. So I did a 2023 recap. So if you haven't seen that, you can go back and see what my performance was. Zero DTE was my best performing strategy and portfolio margin was my second best. So no doubt my, I'm going to continue to have a big emphasis on both of those strategies. Zero DTE obviously not holding anything overnight, portfolio margin strategies, a lot of those are going to create hedged type positions that's going to help if we do have some downside as well as continue to book consistent profits in just normal market environments as well. So I don't want to put a percentage to these because for one, portfolio margin, sometimes some of those positions I'm doing for zero buying power. So it's kind of hard to allocate a percentage of my capital to those. It's more of just a situation where as opportunities are created and become available, I'm going to take advantage of those. So I'm not putting a specific percentage to these. And the same thing with zero DTE. You know, obviously we know now and we're continuing to gather more data. Now that zero DTE has been around longer that you know, there are specific market environments where you really want to push more chips on the table. And so I will, I'll be doing that from a zero DTE perspective and a portfolio margin perspective. What's crazy is I went back and looked at my 2023 game plan and from a zero DTE perspective, my strategy focus on zero DTE was just to continue to test and trade zero DTE. Well, what ended up happening is it became my most profitable strategy of the year, which is crazy. And then portfolio margin, I was just starting to test and do some things too. And we didn't actually start our portfolio margin trading group until the first part of May. And then zero DTE and portfolio margin ended up being my two primary profit makers in 2023, which is kind of crazy. So I'll continue to focus on those. Third, and so these are kind of in order. So my third strategy focus will be on option selling hedgehogs. Continue to do that. We had, you know, 55 strangles last year. Only three were losers. Hedgehogs were profitable as well. A little bit less of a lower winning percentage than I think is normal. So I'll continue to trade those as well. On calendar spreads, I'm going to continue to trade some probability based calendar spreads, but the vast majority of my capital allocation on calendar spreads is going to be backtest driven strategies. You know, all the ones that I have in my calendar spread trading plan, I'm going to continue to allocate more capital towards those. But I'll still be doing, I'll still be, as I want more calendar exposure, I'll also be inputting some, you know, individual calendars that adjust into double calendars and TGIFs and things like that. But those will be a smaller part and more of the allocation will be going to the back test driven. Butterfly spreads, we'll continue to trade those primarily time flies will be the strategy that I trade there. Had some, obviously some, some losses on those towards the end of this year, towards the end of 2023, but I've kind of tweaked the structure of those to avoid that situation going forward. So I really look at butterflies as potentially being one of my, one of my best performing strategies in 2024. And then iron ducks will continue to layer into those as opportunity arises. And then directional futures. So this is something I've talked about in our live streams and on the community platform. This isn't something that I plan to put out exact trades on by any means because it's day trading. And it'll be just situations where on days when a either I feel like day trading or I'm in front of my computer anyway and I'm kind of waiting for some other positions to play out. And I feel like trading futures, I'll continue to do that. So again, it's not gonna be something I'm gonna be posting my trades on, but I will be putting out this year a directional futures trading course just to show you how I'm thinking about it and how I'm doing it. There's a lot of discretion involved. And there's a lot of different factors that come into that. And so that's gonna be something that I'll continue to do from time to time, but it's certainly not going to be one of my primary core strategies like the ones above. And then lastly, I just noted with a question mark, NTT, earnings trades, other trades. I don't have any plans to revamp my NTT. You know, I didn't trade those this year and I don't plan to trade those in 2024 on a consistent basis, at least not at this point. It may change. I may decide I wanna start doing it and I'll talk about why I might get to that. And then earnings trades on stocks, on their quarterly earnings, I didn't trade any of those in 2023 and I don't really have any plans to focus on that. But you never know. And then on the other, like I said, zero DTE and portfolio margin kind of came about last year and they weren't even a big part of my trading plan going into 2023, so who knows? There may be some other things that I kind of focus on and come up with to make part of my plan. But for now, these are kind of in order my priority of what I plan to focus on as far as strategies in 2024. All right, 2024 goals. All right, so first, I did this in 2023 starting in like April and I'm gonna continue to do it in 2024 and that is every month I'm going to put out to my community my trade plan. That includes exact strategies, the way I'll manage them, the way that I will my position sizing and all the things that go into planning and trading and I do it one month at a time. And so if I decide to tweak anything within a strategy, it's going to be at the end of the month and it's gonna be implemented for the following month. So that's really created a really nice discipline when it comes to my trading that kind of helps me with my discipline and my focus and not getting caught up in emotions or what other people are doing. And so I'm gonna continue to do that each month for both zero DTE and calendar spreads. And then of course, I'm gonna put out my plan but then I need to actually follow my plan with minimizing deviations from that plan. So I'm gonna continue to focus on really just being very strict and stringent about following that plan. And continue to have a, I do this and then I get off of this and that is having a focus on risk first and profit second. Sometimes I forget and I start to focus more on the profit as opposed to the risk and I had some pretty decent even though my returns were really good in 2023 I had some decent drawdowns. So I really wanna focus on minimizing those drawdowns and just allowing the profits to play out which I'm good at a lot of times but those shiny objects kind of get to me and my ADD and squirrel, that kind of thing come into play. So try to continue to focus on that. Next, I'm going to expand my automated strategies. So I have automated, well, I should say semi-automated a lot of my zero DTE strategies started doing that a couple of months ago and I'm gonna continue to expand that. I'd also like to expand my automated strategies into calendars and butterflies. So right now I'm using trade steward that connects to thinkorswim. There's gonna be some changes there. They're looking at implementing automation with other brokers. Of course, my account's gonna be switched over to Schwab from TD Ameritrade at some point in 2024. So we'll see what happens there but I want to, I'm gonna continue to expand that and one of the reasons that I wanna do that is not because I want to have everything traded by a bot and go golfing every day it's because it's going to free up a lot of mental capital and what that's going to do is a couple of things. I wanna continue to have a more balanced life. I kinda got a little bit lazy from a workout perspective in 2023. I wanna get back into working out at least five times per week and that automated trading is gonna help me be able to feel like I can get away from my screen more than I did when I was trading zero DTE in 2023. I'm pretty good about this but I wanna continue to read at least one book per month and these are typically books that make me better either financially or mentally or autobiographies of people, different things like that. So that's on my list to kinda continue to keep that balanced life. Do some traveling. I've got a couple of trips on the books already and I wanna take at least five trips throughout 2024. This is also, I got away from being super consistent with my podcast and freeing up the mental capital, using more automation is also going to free up my time and my mental capital to put out more content to the community. So one of the things is get back on track of doing a podcast every single week as well as, it's not on here, but as well as creating more content, more interaction with the community, more details around specific strategies and nuances of trading and putting out more videos and things like that, just to continue to help grow the community's market awareness and things like that, some more nuanced type stuff. So I look forward to that and I don't have it on here but the other thing that automation might be able to do as well is something that I've wanted to do but I just don't have the capacity to do that and that's more one-on-one interaction with members, whether that's coaching, kind of a formal coaching program for folks or a small group or individual or things like that. I don't know what that looks like and I don't know that that's gonna come to fruition in 2024, which is why I didn't put it on my list but depending on how automation goes and how my strategies evolve throughout the year, that could be another potential benefit of that as well. Next, I've been doing this but I wanna continue to remove some of my profits at least each quarter. Sometimes I did it at the end of the quarter, sometimes I would do it within the quarter so I'll continue to extract money out of my trading account. I think from a mental standpoint, that's a pretty underrated thing. I think a lot of us are focused on just building the account, building the account, building the account and when you take money out of the account and actually use that money to spend or do something with your family or something like that, it creates a different mindset around your trading and I think that taking money out of my account actually allows my account to grow bigger. Seems a little counterintuitive if you're just getting started and you're just trying to build your account but even if you're just trying to build your account, I would highly suggest consistently taking money out of your account. It makes it real. It takes it away from just being a number on your screen and it becomes actual money that you're using for actual living. Remember, we're trading to live, we're not just living the trade and so we'll continue to take money out of the accounts at least each quarter. The other thing is I want to, I donate to different charities and things right now but I talk to my wife and I wanna start giving away 10% of my trading profits. I think we get caught up in just excess and more and more and more build wealth, build wealth, profits, profits, profits but we are very fortunate to have the situation where we can create profits in a way that most people can't and so I think giving away 10% of those trading profits is just something that I feel like is a responsibility that I should be doing and I feel good about helping people. So I'm gonna plan to give away 10% of my profits in 2024 and then the lastly, I've talked about this a lot that I think having financial goals when it comes to trading is counterproductive. If you have a daily goal or a weekly profit goal or a monthly profit goal I think that works against you. At least it does for me and what I mean by that is when I've had a financial goal with trading it has caused me to make trading decisions that were outside of what I should have done. In other words, I was trading my P&L as opposed to trading the setups or following my rules and things like that so I would break the rules because I was trying to hit those numbers as opposed to just trading what the market would give me and so I've gravitated away from setting any financial goals but I do think having a minimum expected performance for me at least is okay and I've actually talked about this with Jared Tindler in doing some mental coaching and I think we're gonna talk about it more on our next coaching session but if I have my mental side right then there are ways to set financial goals that will not be detrimental to my trading performance and so we'll see how that goes but so my only financial goal for 2024 is that I think I would be disappointed if I don't at least double my account. So if I don't achieve 100% return on my and this goes across my three accounts that I trade for the community if I didn't have a 100% return I think I would consider that a disappointing year. Let's just put it that way and so if I do better than that, great. If I don't do that as good, there's probably a reason. I probably veered from my plan, did something that I shouldn't have, that kind of thing. So I think from a minimum expected performance standpoint I would like to double my account at least 100% return. That is my 2024 goals and game plan. I hope you guys follow my market prediction. That's the most important thing about this obviously. Very realistic, take it to heart. Make sure you trade around those predictions. That's the way to do it. Anyway, had a great 2023. Look forward to 2024. Excited to see just the brain trust of our community and what we've continued to build. Very appreciative of everyone in the community and those who kind of participate and contribute. It's created a situation that I didn't... I've always continued to become a better trader myself because of my community, but it really took it to another level in 2023 with a couple of the mastermind groups and the portfolio margin groups and the trade plan presentations from a lot of our members and it's just been awesome. So kudos to you guys. Keep it up. We just continue to make each other better and that's what it's all about. So happy new year. Look forward to 2024.