 Testing, testing, testing. Let me know if everybody can hear me. You have to hit the Start button, yeah. I think I did. It should be at the top of your control box. Yeah, I think I did. I saw it as it goes. Says they're still on hold. We should get a message. It says the broadcast is now starting. If not, I don't get the privilege. I've got to call Larry in the background and have him hit the button. I think it's like 100% sure it's recording because it says stop recording. So if I wanted to stop it, I could stop it. It says on air. I'm so sorry, bud. Let me go up and introduce you. It means my computer's lagging. Good morning, everybody. Apologize for that. Welcome to Traders Corners Stock and Options Special Event. We're currently in a post- Labor Day trading environment and shifting gears for a big increase in volatility. On our panel today, we've handpicked seven professional trading experts of the highest caliber, and they've agreed to share their most consistent and profitable trading strategies with us today in a free online educational forum. In today's Stock and Options Special Event, we're going to learn from a wide range of topics, from how to make money shorting to how to spy super system works. So grab yourself a cup of coffee and settle in. I know I just got one for myself. Today's show is packed with great information. We're going to get started. You may have seen our first presenter on Fox News, Fox Business Network, RT America, Cheddar TV, and CBS News. She's an expert stock market analyst and the founder and owner of an international education company where she teaches people how to successfully trade the market. Her trading methodology is based on one wonderful strategy called Golden Gaps, which pinpoints institutional money in the stock market. Here to present, make money shorting, is Melissa Armo of the Stock Swoosh. Welcome back to Traders Corner, Melissa. Thanks, everyone. I'm jealous that you have coffee. I have had no coffee yet today. I've been desperately, but we will make it through. It is a rainy day here in Manhattan, and I'm coming to you from New York. Welcome, everyone. My name is Melissa Armo, and I own my own company called the Stock Swoosh. So we're in interesting times right now. Today's topic is shorting. I'm going to talk about shorting, how to make money shorting. Actually, I'll tell you what we did today. We shorted Mew. We did Mew. We got in. We got out. It was a nice shorted fell. The market, however, is attempting to rally today. Market gap down today is trying to rally. And Jerome Powell will be speaking today. It will be after 4 o'clock, so you can watch what happens in the after hour tonight. But he is doing a speech tonight after hour, so we'll see where we go between today and tomorrow. The broadcast is now starting. All attendees are in listen-only mode. Oh, there. Can you hear me? I think that the recording just started now. All right, great. Thanks, Rob. I just heard it give a little message. Hopefully, everybody can hear me. Can you hear me? I know I can. And I think it was just the delay on go-to-webinar with it processing. All right, so I don't know if it caught the first part. But I'm here to talk to you about shorting today. So if you have any questions, you can email me at melissa at thestockswish.com. You can also call me at 929-3200 gap. You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or Skype. And as Rob said, I do appear on television talking about stocks, talking about the market, talking about the economy, which has been on tap for pretty much the majority of the year, mostly with interest rates rising. And we're in an environment where interest rates are going to go up at least one more time between now and the end of the year. And again, the Fed share will be speaking today after 4 o'clock. So that will be an interesting time to listen to what he has to say. I do believe that the market is in a very critical area. Yes, we're rallying right now today. However, we've had a really big sell-off for the month of September. If you go back and look and see how September started, we've done almost nothing but sell-off this entire month. And we did short it. So again, I prefer to short. One of the reasons that I prefer to short is that short moves happen fast, quick, and big. Again, we did Mew today. That was the day trade we did this morning. We shorted Mew. You can pull up the chart and look at it. We got in, we got out. We made money and we were done for the rest of the day. And that's how I'm able to talk to you here now today and then have the rest of the afternoon to myself. So a lot of people come to me and they want to learn what to do. But some people are not serious, I think, about their trading. They're kind of doing on the side, but they're not taking it seriously. Even if you're only trading for one hour a week, the fact is you have to take it seriously because you're risking money. You could lose if you don't know what to do. Now, whether you want to become a professional full-time trader or a part-time trader, or again, do it on the side with your regular job, keeping your regular job, you still have to take it seriously and you still need to know what to do. So you have to think like a professional when you're making choices about your trades, okay? So I always get this question, can you make it as professional trader? The answer is yes. And if you can, it's a great lifestyle because you're not working for 40, 50 hours a week. So how can you earn a living doing this? How can you make money? You have to be consistent. I'm sure if you're here and you've traded before, if you've traded even today, sometimes you make money, sometimes you lose. In order to be successful or to do it as a living to rely on it, you have to have the consistency. That means you have to make money in more trades than you lose. And if you don't, you're not gonna be able to get anywhere with it, okay? And you have to kind of prove yourself that you can in fact do it. And you also need a strategy, a strategy that you can use, that you can replicate in the market each and every single solitary day. So today, new gap down. You had earnings last night, a gap down today and we shorted it, we got in and out. We also did the spy this week. Now, let's go over what has it got. Again, this is a daily chart of the spy. So what happened here? This is the close of the US market, four o'clock Eastern time. This is the ETF for the S&P. The spy felt this was last week. Remember when the Fed had their meeting? Closed here, gap down here, fell off a cliff, okay? We shorted the market here. This was Wednesday, this was Thursday of last week. Okay, this was the 21st. So what is a gap? A gap is a difference between the close and the open. So this gap down, then we shorted it and we also bought puts. Okay, we're gonna talk about options today and we're also gonna talk about day trades. But in today's markets, people think they can short everything. And again, if the market turns bearish, that's exactly what people are gonna try to do. But you can't short everything. Okay, you can't short every gap down. You can't go long every gap up. Also, gap fills don't work. That's a misnomer. People get sucked into doing gap thinking that that could work. If it was that easy to play something as a gap fill, no one would ever lose money. It doesn't work consistently as something to do. Yes, sometimes gaps reverse, but that does not mean it's something that works more than it doesn't. Okay, sometimes anything works. Okay, just the luck of the draw on things. That's not a consistent way to make money in the market. You need to have something that's reliable. But for me, it is gaps. And I use a set method to rate the gaps to determine what exactly I'm doing, what exactly I wanna trade today. And I go with the highest rated gap, which is why we did the Mew today, okay? So what I do is a system that I invented myself. It was 2008, 2009. I figured out this system. It took me about three years until I figured the whole thing out. And now I teach my class once a month. I teach people how to do it. But I trade every day money through Friday. I do options and I do day trades. And one of the reasons my class is so special is that I did not create my business or my class or anything to teach anyone. I did it for myself. And then I ended up realizing that I had a voice, which is one of the reasons why I started to appear on TV because I'm good at talking. I like talking, it's fun to do. And then of course I'm also trading for a very short time every morning. So I have the time to do it. I have the time to do lectures like this right now because I'm not engaged in any specific trade right now at the moment. So having a strategy to focus on daily is very important. You also shouldn't have any distractions. And what do I mean by that? I mean, if you've got CNBC on 24-7 while you're trading, you may hear somebody say something that may scare you out of a trade. It's better just to trade and look at the price data, look at the charts, look at the price action. That's gonna be better for you. If you listen to even the economic news, you're gonna say, wait a minute, wait a minute, we had a good number, but we're falling. This makes no sense. The data doesn't always add up to be exactly what you think. So again, if it was that easy, okay, in order to just short something if we have bad data or buy something on good data or news, okay, like earnings for example, then again, no one would ever lose money in the market, okay? So the basic general analysis of what I do is not just gaps, but it's really momentum trading. And that's how I'm getting really, really large moves in stocks. So this is something that a lot of traders say, yeah, yeah, momentum, momentum, but they really are scared of momentum, don't understand momentum, or really don't know how to trade it. So I think one of the reasons people don't trade momentum is they just don't understand it, but I do trade momentum. The momentum comes in and again, and then I play it. And again, that's how I can get large moves in stocks. And whether you have a beginner account or a small account or a large account, you can make money if you're trading momentum. Gotta get the direction right, but of course that's always the case. I'm seeing some chats in the room. If anyone has any questions when we're going along, I will see it and answer them as we're going along today. Anyways, this was a chart of Netflix. We shorted this. We did a put in this here. We got the move down. And again, you say, oh my God, it was really, really late. No, it wasn't. It was not. And you could see it wasn't late because it continued to fall. So again, the momentum in Netflix here for the play, wherever you did it, was to the downside. Momentum was a short and we bought putts. A put is a short, okay? Again, what is a gap? A gap is a difference between the close and the open. So Netflix closed here at four o'clock Eastern time, gap down here and open here at 930 a.m. Eastern time. So this is a gap. It was a gap down. Then it fell, boom. Again, that was the, that was the second week of September actually. So a couple of weeks ago. So what is a gap? A stock gap from the opening price today is different than the closing price of yesterday's trading. A gap is a break in price action from one day to the next. Now the market gaps almost every single solitary day. Again, I don't trade the market every day, but I look at the market every day and I might trade the market if it's gaffling and if it's a good gap or what I call a golden gap. So what is a golden gap? It's a gap that rates per my 26 point system, 20 points or more. I take it in the direction of the gap. I do the ratings in the pre-market or you could do them in the post-market. But I do mine in the pre-market. So the market may gap tonight because Powell's talking. I don't know where it goes or what it does, but he's talking after hours, which is really unusual, but he is, okay. So the fact is that I'm always trying to find the best trade I can, the highest quality trade that has the highest odds of working because I feel if I take something that rates high, I have higher odds of making money and getting a large move and a less chance that I'm going to lose. Now I do put stops into my trades. So I have a limit order when I put a stop in, I put a stop in the Mew, the Mew didn't stop, the Mew went on to work. If I had stopped in the Mew, I would have lost, but I would have lost a fixed amount versus unlimited amount, okay. So stops are important if people should use stops because if you don't use stops, then again, you have an unlimited risk. But every single thing that I'm looking to do is based on institutional money. So I'm looking for institutional money in a chart. It could be buying or it could be selling, okay. So what is institutional money? It's big money, hedge funds, banks that are invested in stocks, they're buying stocks, they're shorting stocks, they're selling to positions. And again, what happened in the market in the last week, we sold off. People dumped their long positions in the market and that is what we shorted, okay. So if you're following institutional money, it is very easy to make money trading. If you're going against it, it is very, very difficult because you're not gonna, you can have a training room filled with a thousand people and it's not gonna move against what's happening in the institutional money. I'm looking for gaps that are created and made with institutional money and it makes it so much easier to trade. And again, that's how you're getting the big move. So I'm not trading penny stocks, I'm not trading ultra cheap stocks, I'm not doing any of that kind of things. We're doing companies, things you know, places. Oh yeah, I bought a so and so there or whatever. It's things that you recognize. Companies with volume, you will get filled in position, you will get filled out of position. You could do them as day trades, you could do them as options and calls or puts, okay. Somebody's answering a question. Most of the times will be wiped out by algos with moves. I don't know what, what do you mean most of the time you're gonna be wiped out by what? I didn't understand that question. Most of the time you're wiped out. I don't know what you mean by wiped out at all. There are machines that are in the market in every single thing that we trade, but there's also people trading. And don't forget, people program machines. Let me go here, question. Stop losses for fed time. Stop losses. I still don't know what you mean. Do I trade, do I day trade at two o'clock when the fed isn't making an announcement? No. So you're mentioning about the fed. The fed meeting last week, we were already in trades. And I was in the right direction. So we were in puts and the market fell. I'm not day trading during the fed announcements because the fed has meetings once a month. And when that happens, the market can be volatile. It could go up and then reverse and go down. If that's what you mean by stopping, I'm day trading in the morning. I'm flat and out of my day trades, usually by 9, 45, 10 a.m., 10, 15 in the morning. I might be in options, but you gotta follow through whatever you're doing with the options trades. My stop in an option is the amount that I have risk. So if you risk $1,000 in an option and it goes against you for five minutes with a fed meeting and then goes in your direction for the rest of the day into the close, you're up money. So I'm not sure what you mean. If you're day trading during fed announcements or fed meetings, that is a bad decision, in my opinion. I would not do that going forward, whoever said that. Just stop doing that. I don't have a problem with algorithms trading. I don't have a problem with anything when I'm trading in the morning. Okay, we were talking about institutional money. Here was Adobe. This was another earnings trade. Stock closed here, gap down, open, rallied, dropped. We shorted it and we got in and got out. We also did a put. Didn't really go till here. Again, this was the day, this also gap down here. This was the day the market gap down. This was after the fed. So the put went really here. The put was up a little bit here but took a couple of days to really get going in the momentum. Again, this was selling that happened in Adobe. What does selling look like? What does institutional money look like? What does buying look like? Do you want to go long something? It was on Schwab's new network yesterday with Nicole Petalini's. They wanted me to talk about things I wanted to go long. Tough to think about that right now. It's really, really, I didn't post the clip yet on my YouTube but hard to think about what to go long because the market could be lower between now and the end of 2023. I think the best thing to do is to wait for earnings season which starts in two weeks to see really what stocks and how they perform and what they say. Target already came out that they're closing stores. One is uptown in New York, they've had too much theft. I don't know why they're not doing anything about the theft but it's a problem nationwide and so you're gonna have a lot of retailers that are going to say things prior to the earnings in the fall and during their earnings calls that are gonna affect the stocks and again could make for some nice place. So I'm not predicting XYZ is gonna gap. I'm waiting for the gap. Then I see it, then I rate it and then I make the determination what I'm gonna do that I wait to the open, okay? I'm never trading in the pre-market and you can't trade options in the pre-market. But the nice thing about options is the spies and the queues, you can do the daily options. If you wanted to day trade the options that I'm doing is the weeklies, you could get in and out in the day and pay less money because they have weekly expirations or daily expirations now for the spy and the queues since the beginning of this year. But power looks like money. Big, big, big, big, big money. This was one of the biggest trades that I called in the last week, the queues. So I'm gonna show you a beginner risk and advanced risk for that because I always get to see people say, I don't have enough money to risk this much money. If you have a trading account, you have enough money. You can do a beginner risk. You can make money with one contract and an option. So again, I think people often say that it's an excuse. I think people make excuses for the reasons for their own failure. Stop making excuses for your own failure. Stop making excuses for why you're not successful. Do it, do it, do it, do it. Do what you need to do to be successful. You wanna get in shape, go in a diet, start exercising. You wanna make money training, sign up for a class like mine and do it. As much money as you have in your trading account, that's what you can risk and that's that. Stop making excuses for yourself. I can't even believe that it is almost the holidays. I'm already getting all these emails, pottery bar and everything, all the places I like to shop. Holiday, holiday, Christmas, I'm like, wait a minute. It's Christmas, it's Monday was September 25th. Christmas is less than three months away. Time keeps ticking, time keeps going. If you have goals and things you wanna do for yourself, do not wait. Stop making excuses for yourself. Everybody does it. It's one of these things where you just have to pull up your boots from straps and say, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna be successful. And between now and the end of the year, the holidays, I'm gonna be at a completely different place in my trading, a completely different place with my finances. I'm gonna be where I need to be. Because again, interest rates are going up. I looked it up the other day, 8.05%, 30 year fixed mortgage, 700 FICO. So if you have a 700 FICO, you're gonna pay almost three times what your interest rates were two years ago. That's how much it's gone up if you wanna buy a house. That's crazy. That's completely insane. There's nothing you can do about these things. This is the way the world. So you can do something about your personal finances and you can do something about your trading and you can do something about your own life. Because you're not gonna change what happens with other things outside of yourself, whether it's credit card interest rates, again, whether it's high inflation, the cost of food and oil, oil's going up. Again, we were looking at that as a long, talk about longs the other day. So things constantly, constantly are in flux outside of your control, but your trading is within inside of your control. It is. So let's talk about the QQQs. We did the 370, this was a good call because we were early on it. I called this on Monday, three o'clock in the afternoon. I don't usually call trades that late, but I saw where we were going for the week. I called the 370 Qs in the last week here. Was that the eighth, no, yeah, the 18th was here. So here. So this was Monday, it was a week and a half ago. Today's what, Thursday. So this was last Monday, closed here, gapped down, rallied, fell, fell off a cliff, boom. So this was a really big trade because we did it here. Did it basically at the strike, see the 370s, and see where it went. I don't have Friday's day in here, but we kept going on Friday. So the cost of this was $2.60. 35 contracts is a higher risk, it's an advanced risk. You can risk more. Sold 1150, it went further on Friday, by the way. Profit was $31,150 in this trade that you would have done on Monday, and so did Thursday. A 342% return on investment. Now a beginner risk would have been what? I'm using $1,000, $1,040. You could have gotten four contracts. You could have done one. You could have made 35.60, risking $1,000 on a trade that you would have done on Monday and exited Thursday. So I don't wanna hear people say, oh, I need all this money, no you don't. This trade was just a trade you would have done, and you would have let it go to its natural conclusion. You could have been in this the last day, and we were down farther on the 22nd, which was Friday, however I exited on Thursday. I don't always think it's a good idea to hold things into the last day. There's occasions where I will, where I'm so far through the strike that I might, or if I'm down, I could be completely down in the trade to hold it to the expiration. But I don't really think that's in general a good idea to always hold until the very last day. Let me go back and ask a question here. Allerance is $30 per options trades. Okay, a bunch of different questions. You can risk, you could have done one contract. Monica's asking here, you could have done one contract which would have been across $260. So that would have been within your risk of $350. The options trades are sent in a newsletter through the timestamp. So you get the trade live to your email. I do have targets on the letter. I don't have that in here. That's for members. But I have targets in the letter. They're chart targets. Or you can, if you can't watch the trade, like some people are working, well then you're just gonna have to put a sell order at 50% or 100% or something if you can't watch it. But I do put chart targets, again going here to the chart, because I'm watching stuff and there are other people that are with me that are watching. The day trade, my live room, like today where I called the Mew, I called the exact entry, the exact stop and the exact exit that you could have done with me. Mew was a day trade though. So my live trading room is day trades. This options I'm doing differently because I don't have an options room. I have an options newsletter. The person that was saying they're risking $30 per trade, I think you should be trading on a demo. That's my professional advice. I think the person's name was Cy, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it correctly. If you can't risk at least $100 a trade, I think just save your money, move on a demo and practice on a demo until you can afford to take a class, open a trading account with at least $2,000, which is the minimum for an options account. If you're only risking $30 a trade, you really can't afford to lose at all and you're not gonna be able to do, like I don't know what you're doing with that even. You can't even buy one contract if the market costs a buck and that's cheap for an option in the queues or the spy. And these are really, I mean, look at the price of the market. The spy's over $400. These are cheap comparatively. Again, I'm doing some margin trades in the queues and the spy but the cost of these options per the cost of what the market's trading at is cheap, because if you went to go long in your IRA right now and you had to go long in the queues and pay what it costs, it's a lot of money, okay? For the person that said they're risking $30, I would hold your money, save your pennies, learn how to trade, save your money to open up a larger account till you get up to $2,000, it can risk at least $100, $150 per trade and then I would trade in a demo and practice. You can still get the feel of it, you can still do the charts, you need to have more money. What my statement earlier was not towards you, my statement is for people that are actively trading that are risking at least $1,000 a day or $500 a day and are trading every day and they're trading and losing and winning and losing and losing and losing and losing and they just make excuses about doing it. And I just like, you don't understand how many people I talk to. Again, I'm on national television, I come do the webinars like here with Rob, I have a YouTube channel, I speak to so many people and I've had the business now for a long time too, 11 years. I can read people very easily what's going on in their heads and if you have an individual situation, email me. I will tell you my honest opinion, you may or may not like it. You have plenty of time to work and save money to open a trading account properly. Trading is not something that everyone should be doing if they don't have enough money to open an account. That's a different story and one of the problems is, and I'll say this right now, there are places out there that are allowing people to trade and open accounts with next to no money and they lose it and they blow up their accounts and that's just doing a disservice to the customer in my opinion. It's kind of like the way they used to charge fees. Now fees have gone away for the most part, brokerage fees since Ameritrade, Schwab's consolidated. This is going on for the last couple of years, but anyways, I mean, they used to rate people with fees back in the day where people would actually like, I remember when I first started, I didn't want to get too off target. I would like be down for the day, come back for the day, have a fabulous day, like be down, come back or I would like be down, come back, make money and then I would end up getting up the next day and my fees aid into my profits or I was down then even being breaking with my fees because I used to pay fees on my trades. All the ECNs, the broker fees was ridiculous. Of course, that's all gone away now. So times have changed. It's cheap to trade, but you gotta have money to risk and I think $2,000 is a minimum in my opinion. Okay, so let's get back to this here. I know we started a little late, but I gotta watch my time. Institutional money is always in charge. So you gotta be aware of it and you have to pay attention to it and you can't trade against it and you have to learn how to find it. So I'm capturing the institutional money that happens in the market. Again, we got the market lower in the last month, really. Actually, if you look back in August, with the exception of the last week of August, August was a month for the market to sell off as well. So a big flow of money going in a certain direction is what moves the market stocks, creates momentum and sets the trend in charts. When you're looking for institutional money, you're really reading the side of the power in stock. You wanna be in the side of the power in order for you to make money trading. Institutional money is in charge of the market in stocks at all times. Even if you think it isn't, it is. This is another trade that we did. This was Oracle. This was the middle of the month. Oracle closed here, got down. Oracle had earnings. We did a put. Again, you could have bought the put, got in, got out. Volume is down here. Again, this is buying options, a put is a short. It's a cheaper way to take the trade rather than trade this on margin. Because in order to do a day trade, you would need a margin account. Now that means you need 25,000 or more to retail broker in the U.S. or you can open up a prop account with probably about five grand someplace. They're gonna give you 10 to one margin or retail place, you're gonna get four to one margin or you open up an options account and then you can take a trade and buy a put, okay? So again, it's a cheaper way to do it when this is kind of expensive for people. Again, if you wanna do 2,000 shares of this if it's over $110. Let me see some questions here. $260 is a lot. That's more than 25% of your trading account. How is that sustainable? I thought you said you were risking $350. I thought you said you were risking $350. Maybe I read that wrong, Monica. So I don't know if I read that wrong or not. What's the logic for the put? That's where I'm doing the rating. I get up in the morning and I rate the gap. If this gap rates 20 points or more, I know it's gonna drop. Therefore, I short it. How I short it is up to me. I can buy a put, which I did. I could short as a day trade. You could do both. Again, depends on the type of account you have, what you can do. If you have a small account, I would do the options. I am, how do I differentiate if it reverses or not by the rating? The rating system. The rating system tells me if it's under 20 points, I'm not going to go along it but I'm also not going to short it. So the rating system tells me and again, it's a system you can learn that's applicable that you can learn and do yourself. And that's what you learn from me in the class. It's not like when you watch on TV or talk about me on TV, when you watch Kramer. Kramer says, oh, I like this, I like that. Do do do do do. Kramer is not gonna tell, you can't learn from Kramer why he likes XYZ stock so that you can do it yourself and come up with the same conclusion as Kramer Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday for Friday. So that's the difference. So you come, you learn my system, you can do it yourself. And I do it myself. And then I just call the trade. What do you mean a higher price? Sometimes I do at the money, sometimes I do below the money in a put so I don't know what you mean by higher price. Let's see if there's something else. For the person who's asking about 25% of your trading account, listen. If someone has 10 grand in an account and they're gonna risk $2,500 in a trade, I think that's too much. If someone has 100 grand in an account and they're gonna ask to risk $25,000 in a trade, that's crazy to me. If you only have $1,000 in a trading account, which is what I think you're saying, whoever said that, and $250 is 25% of your account, I still think you should cut it back to risk 100, 150. But if you wanna do one trade and be a one trade at a time for 250, that would be the max, that would be the max. And again, if you know what you're doing, you can still make money and do well. But I was saying earlier, $2,000, which is a minimum to open up an options account is what I think is normal. Listen, I am here to talk to you about what I do. I am here to tell you a little bit about myself and what I do. If you're trading, you need an education. If you wanna pay for it, you're gonna keep losing. Period, end of story. Whether you sign up for my class or somebody else's today of all the speakers that Rob's having, you will not make it and you will not make money if you don't learn what to do. Now, you got two choices. You either pay someone like me or you go figure out your own system, which is exactly what I did. I actually did both. I paid someone for a class. I paid the more money than I charged for mine and that was 15 years ago. And I did not learn from that person how to make money in the market. I didn't hate that person. I learned a basic information about technical analysis, which I took to devise my own system, but it took me three years and it took me a lot of money and very few people could spend the time or money to do what I did. You can try to create your own system. It will take you a long time. And the markets are different now. And then they were when I started 15 years ago. Very, very different. Because some of us talk about algorithms. That's not the reason the markets are different. Although there are more machines in the market now than there were 15 years ago. Trade, it's just different. There's more participants in the market. Again, I just got done telling you trading is free. It's basically free. Before you needed XYZ amount of money and you had to pay commissions for the people that are saying that they have $1,000 in account. You wouldn't be able to trade 15 years ago because they would charge you $200 for your platform. And five cents a share. I mean, it's just you, it would be unaffordable. It's an open market now. I just told you also they have daily husband option aspirations that has added volume into the market too. So it's a free for all, for anybody that wants to trade. But you still need to know what to do. And you need to know what to do now more than ever. Now more than ever. Because of the fact that there's so many people in the market. So again, it's getting real with yourself and grounded about where you are is I don't wanna do a disservice to people. People need to understand the reality which is that you need an education and you also need money to trade. And my statement earlier was that there's so many people that come to these lectures that I've been doing now for years that really, I had a man I talked to on the phone a couple of weeks ago. He's been following me for eight years. Eight years. Eight. I'm just like, he hasn't gone to class yet. I don't know, I don't know who he's waiting for. He probably will never do my class. I will retire before he does my class because I will not be doing this forever. So I mean, it's just sort of like, I just, it's one of these things where it's, everybody's in a different financial situation. I get it. But if you're holding yourself back from being successful and you have the money to trade and you're actively trading and you're just scared, you got no excuses as far as I'm concerned. Let me see the questions here. In simple terms, in simple terms, there's nothing in simple terms. What is my recommendation? You mean going long or going short? Or what do you mean? I told you I'd prefer to short. That's what we're talking about today. All right, let's get back to the lecture here. Good discussion there today. Good discussion, it's a reality check for some people. And again, we're talking in generalality is here about trading. But if you feel like you need more money to train, then do something about it. I don't know, go out and get a second job. Go out and get a part-time job. Go out and do whatever you need to do. I've done those things at different points of my life. You know, everybody has to do what they have to do. And that's exactly what probably people are going to have to do, if in fact we do go into recession in 2024, which if nothing changes, if the Fed stays on course, it's probably gonna go into recession. I think we're in a mild recession now. I was on Fox and Charles Payne pointed the question at me live on air on Labor Day, and I said, I thought about it afterwards. The next time I'm on Fox, I'll say I think we're in a mild recession. And I think we could go into a full blown recession and a deeper recession in 2024, if nothing changes. So if the Fed reverses course, we won't. If somebody different wins, Biden doesn't win reelection, we could switch gears. But even that is a year and a half away. You know, otherwise that's probably where we're headed. So anyways, we did square. Square close here, gap down, rallying, dropped. Okay. So we had a big sell-off here in the square. Again, that was a gap down. So remember, institutional money is in charge all the time. What do I focus on gaps? This was the biggest trade that we did last week. It was the spy. This was another option. I did this really early. I was in this Friday, the Friday before the big sell-off, which was the 15th. I call this around 1104, 442. The spy felt pretty good here. So this close here, gap down, did the 442s. It was an insane trade. Actually, here was the 22nd. So you see, you could have even been in this even the last day. I got out of it. But anyways, it cost $1.25. So in this case, someone was asking the lady with $1,000, you could have bought one contract for $125. This was a ridiculous trade. $61,250 with a risk of 87.50, a 700% return on investment. Why? Because I got the move. I got in early. I called the direction right. We got the momentum. Selling happened in the market. 10 contracts with a risk of 12.50, you would have made 87.50. If for someone has, for example, five grand in their account, or more, 10 grand, you could have taken this and look, you could have almost doubled your account. So these trades happened trading with me. We also did the 440s. I did this on Monday. I called this before the market opened and that was Monday here. First it rallied, then it dropped, then it reversed in the Fed announcement that it fell off a cliff, then we fell down. This was 471% return on investment. Again, cost $1.40 for one, that is cheap. Do one, do two. I'm trading with a lot of risk here. 39,600 with 60 contracts, but here's the risk. Again, I'm using an average of 1,000. You could have made almost six grand, risking 1,260 and that's a phenomenal trade. These are trades that are based on institutional money moves and momentum. They spot the power of money. Again, I'm not predicting the gap. I'm playing it and we're getting the direction right and then we're getting a big move, but it's the rating system that tells me how to do it. It's the checklist that tells me what to look for. This is what you will learn from me if you take my class, which is a paid class, okay? But there is one thing and one thing only that can move the direction of a stock, it's money. Not a little bit of money, but a lot of money or what I call power of money. Power of money is in charge. Power of money is in charge of the stock's direction. Trends are set and moved by the power of money people, of which was a lot of in the market. And again, the nice thing about gaps is they happen almost every single day. They happen on a regular basis. You cannot take every gap in the opposite direction of the gap and there are people that do that. And they lose, for every trade that they win, they lose in 10 more that they don't. If it was that easy to just look at something like that or just buy support or short resistance, no one would ever lose and it's not. And that's why I said it's tricky. And if you've been trading the last year, you know that. Here is the Oracle trade I talked about. 9.19, we did this, this was earnings, we did the 1.12. This was an easy one because it went bing, bam, boom the same day. It was a nice short, lots of volume, good trade, 150% return on investment. This cost 90 cents. Here, this would have been one good risk, 90 bucks. Anyways, this was a good one. So we're not doing the most expensive options we're doing in our Davidia. And that, that will you be priced out of. But think intellectually about what you're doing. I mean, it just, it makes sense. You're like, okay, yeah, momentum, I get it. Selling, I get it, shorting, I get it. Here's a picture of the market. This is back from, I don't have the last two weeks. If you looked at this, you said, oh my God, we're higher, we're higher, we're gonna make new highs. Woo, if you look at the summer and then all of a sudden here, now you're like, oh crap, see it's totally different. But we were already short. So, you know, this is the genius in coming and learning how to understand and read price action. It's price action in the gap. But this is what you're gonna learn from me in the class. It is a class, it's an online class. The subscription service, you can sign up for the options subscription service. You do not need to do the class. I have a six month subscription, a 12 month subscription. It's on the website. The options newsletter, if you wanna sign up for that, it's you get those to your emails. You don't have to do a class. If you wanna do the class, you do the class. The only way to get in the lab trading room is if you do the class, but I do have an options newsletter, yes. Right wing hack because I said we're in a mild recession. Well, I guess we can disagree. We can disagree. That comment though just goes to show you how negative people are about politics and the economy right now. Because I think you'd be hard pressed even in again, I live in Manhattan. I live in New York, which is very progressive. You'd be hard pressed to find anybody in this city that wouldn't agree with me that we're in a very high inflationary environment and there's a lot of pressure on people right now in businesses, even in a city like New York, which is probably one of the most Democrat cities in the country. So, we live in times right now. Again, sometimes they come out, the consumer confidence data says everything's fine. Everything's great and the market sells off. You say, well, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. But as a consumer, you know that not everything's great. You know that if you go out and shop and I'm a person that I shop for myself, I buy food and I buy other things too. So, I see what the prices of things are. So, it's one of these things where you kind of have to look at things in reality. Whether you like it or whether you don't like it, you can make money on things. And if you're so much in a closed box about your opinions about things, you will miss out on an opportunity to get a bearish move in the market, to get a sell-off in the market. If you're so ingrained that you think that things are going well, everything's great, the market's gonna rally, it's gonna make new highs, and you can't get off of that bias. So, when you're training, you need to look at actually what's happening each and every single solitary day in the gap and read it. You may or may not agree with it, but if you wanna make money, then you have to look honestly, it's what's happening and make decisions based on that. Anyways, my class is called the Golden Gap. Corsh, it's a 26-point rating system. It pinpoints the direction of power and money by reading price. And again, that's extremely, extremely important because that's how I'm gonna make the decisions in the morning. I'm looking at the pre-market data. I'm looking at the post-market data. And you need conviction to make money. Having a system gives you conviction and you need an edge. For me, the edge is not just the fast rates, but it's also shorting. Shorting gives me an edge. Most retail traders, most traders want to go long, okay? And I think the whole thing is that once you get out of this, by the dip kind of mentality, you're gonna see things a whole lot different. While that worked in 2021 and the market was extremely, extremely, extremely bullish, you could have bought strong stocks. You could have bought weak stocks. You could have made money going along the market, going along virtually anything in 2021 because the market power trended. That did not work in 2022 and it actually didn't work in 2023. So I drew this, this is a really crude pie chart here, but I drew this. You look at the amount of time you spend preparing to trade versus actually trading, okay? So this is the time I spend prepping to trade and the time I spend trading. So I spend a lot of time in the morning preparing, looking at my charts, doing the rating system, getting ready, trying to decide what to trade. And then I trade. A lot of people are not even making decisions what they're trading till 10 o'clock or later. I think I have a few minutes here. We're gonna quickly go over last week's trades. These are the day trades. Again, we went over some options. These are the day trades. 918, we shorted the, we shorted NVIDIA. It lost. I just wanna go over this here. 918, NVIDIA closed your gap down. We shorted it, got stopped. I did two trades in NVIDIA, got stopped here. 918, and then we did a spy trade on 918 that worked. Shorted this tail. So lost on Monday. Then on, oh, we did a little cues into the close here in that tail. That was the 18th. Then on the 19th, we shorted the market. We shorted the spy. Again, I've been in puts, but we also did this as a day trade here. Market close here, gap down, fell. So I shorted the spy. Then on the 19th, we did a little trade in the square. We talked about that. 920, no trades. 921 did the spy, which was here. Close here, gap down. This was a day after the Fed announcement. And then 922, there were no trades. So that was one week of totals for the day trades. And again, I do options too. But I like the day trades because we're running out of the trades quick. So if you're looking for a high-winning strategy, good money management and a mentor to follow, I teach my class once a month. The class is about gaps. You're gonna learn how to find, pick, and play professional bearish gaps. And the fact is that when you trade, you can trade from home. If you are not making money trading, then I think you need to step back and think about what you're doing, maybe take a break, maybe change what you're doing. You don't wanna lose money. I think the fall is gonna be tricky for a lot of people. Again, I'm not making any predictions now. I'm not saying we rally, I'm not saying we drop. I'm saying that I think it's gonna be tricky and you have to be focused. And I think that's extremely, extremely important. But when you trade, you need to have 100% conviction that what you're doing is a right choice because if you don't, you could lose money. You need to know that. And that's why some of the people were mentioning their account balances. I would wait, I would save money. You can practice on a demo. You can still read charts. You'll still learn something. So empower yourself to trade the market. If you're interested in my class, the class is this weekend. I know this is last minute, but I already had it planned. I already have people signed up. The Golden Gap course teaches a 26 point rating system to find the best stock to trade each day. The course also teaches you how to enter and exit the stock on the day. The course teaches price analysis and technical analysis on an advanced level. It's a full two-day course on how to strategically find, pick, and play stocks that are professional bearish gaps. If your class is online, you could be anywhere in the world and take it. You must take the class in order to join the live room. Someone's asking about the subscription service. The options newsletter is a subscription service for six months and 12 months. So 12 months is $69.99 and the six month subscription is $49.99. I do not have trials for the newsletter or any shorter time period in six months, but it is a good time to trade options with me because earning season starts in a couple of weeks. The special I'm doing for this class ends tomorrow, the class of September 30th and October 1st, the class tuition is $69.99, class is nine to five Eastern time. I live in New York as I said. If you sign up by tomorrow, which is a deadline, you will get the trading room and the options newsletter free through the end of this year and the market report free through the end of this year. Again, class is $69.99 and everyone pays the same. If you're interested, you must email me forms to sign up. Let me see if I got all the questions. Everybody there? I think you got them too. And if anyone would like to ask further questions, I did put Melissa's email in the chat box.