 What's up Navigation Traders? Happy Friday! Today is March 9th. Welcome to this week's video update. So let's go ahead and jump into the alerts. One quick thing, I sent out a message this week because we are going to be closing our pro membership to new members only. It doesn't affect you all as pro members, but did want to just let you know. I mean, we literally love to service you guys and you know how responsive we are to emails. We personally respond to those things all the time and try to do it as quickly as possible. And so I hope you appreciate that. You know, if you do have any Trader Buddies that are kind of on the fence and wanting to check out, you know, what we're doing for you, just make sure that they know before March 19th to lock in their membership. Because after that, we're going to go to a waiting list. And so if they want to jump in now, make sure you let them know. But we've I've had actually some really good conversations this week. And you know, it's just the power now of our community that we've built and being able to kind of crowdsource different ideas. I've been going back with a couple of different members on several different topics. And the first trade here is actually an example of that in IYR. So this is one that we put on during our live broadcast on Monday morning from our YouTube channel and Facebook. And this is in IYR. Now IYR is not a symbol that I've traded for a while, because it used to be a little bit illiquid that the open interest wasn't there. The bid ask spreads are a little bit too wide. It was really hard to get filled in. But I had one of our one of our members emailed me and said, Hey, what do you what do you think about this? Is there any reason not to trade it? And I took a look and and, you know, the liquidity is there. So if we go to if we go to IYR and take a look, where is it? There it is. So this is the real estate ETF. And so if we go to the trade tab, you'll see, you know, that, you know, at the money options are three cents wide, three or four cents wide. So in the open interest is really good. So this is a this is a trade that we put on because one of our members, Brad, thank you for for the for the email, you know, just kind of pointed this out. So we never, you know, want you to think that we we act like we know everything or can track every single thing. And that's just the power of the navigation community now is sharing these ideas. So really appreciate that. I think as we continue to grow and evolve, it's just going to continue to get better and better for you all as well. So keep up that. You know, we loved it. We loved those suggestions by email. The other thing is before we jump in this alert, sorry, I'm kind of going off track here. But the other topic that I was corresponding with a member or member Dave is his first name. I won't give any last names, but he was talking about, you know, just a kind of a written trading plan that could go along with, you know, to compliment the courses. The ebook, the trade hackers ultimate playbook that does a little bit of that. You know, a lot of our members use that as just kind of a guy. They have it on their desk to reference the different strategies, but but taking it a step further and creating a very simple kind of trading plan for the different strategies. So that's something I'm going to get some more feedback from. And if any of any of you all listening, any of our members have suggestions on what would be helpful from that perspective, let us know. You know, this is one of the projects that we're working on. We've got actually quite a few projects that were continually building and want to make available to you all. But this is kind of jumped to the top of the queue just because I think it is important. And I've had I've had actually several several members ask about it. So any suggestions on that topic, let us know. In any suggestions at all that you think we can do to make navigation trading better for you. That's where we want to take this thing. So thank you all for for your suggestions and topics to this point and keep them coming. Okay, so I why are where we at here. So we put this on earlier this week, prices moved up a little bit. But you can see we're still well within range. So we'll just continue to monitor that. The cool thing I like about adding this symbol as well. Not only is it liquid, but it adds another diversified symbol to our portfolio. You know, so we've got the euro, we've got the S&P, we've got Nat Gas, we've got notes and soybeans and wheat and individual stocks and Dow emerging markets, Mexican ETF, Brazilian ETF, Chinese ETF, gold, small caps. Now now we're adding real estate as a different exposure. So all these different uncorrelated assets are really a powerful way to trade. Because when if something is making a crazy move, you know, others might not be, if something's moving up, something else might be moving down. So just continually adding and booking profits in these different uncorrelated symbols is the name of the game. And so you just keep doing that rinse and repeat and keep it up. And that's how we that's how we've continued to have this consistency. So IYR, you know, just just continuing to wait for some more theta decay and time to pass on that one. Next trade was a rolling adjusting trade in Ford slash ZN, which is the notes. So we rolled our short straddle, which is was originally a strangle that we adjusted into a straddle, kept the same strikes, there's only 17 days to expiration. So as you know, as we teach in the course, once we get under that 21 days to expiration, we like to roll out to the next expiration cycle to kind of reduce that risk. And it improves our profits over time. And so that's what we did. So we've got two pieces of a trade in ZN. This is the one from the alert we just talked about. So this is the 121 half straddle. So we just need a little bit of up movement in ZN to benefit this. If we take a look at the chart, let's do the continuous contract. You can see, I mean, this thing's just been on a huge slide down with the with interest rates going up, that's going to push notes and bonds down. Now if you know, if we just get a little bit of a pop higher in notes, you know, we'll be able to book this piece and and move on. Now the other piece of the trade that we have on is another full strangle that you can see is very centered. I was actually looking to get filled on this earlier, didn't get filled. So we're going to give it over the weekend. Hopefully we don't have a huge crazy move. But I'd like to probably book this early next week, book a nice profit on that piece. So continue to watch that one. Next trade was in BKNG. So this was a closing trade. So last week we had put this on. And this was a vertical spread a post earnings short put vertical. So what happens if you've watched our earnings course, if you haven't make sure you do that. But in in BKNG, first note is this used to be price line. So this is still price line, they changed their name to booking holdings, change their ticker to BKNG. And so what happened is after earnings, they had this huge pop up. And so what we like to do is after earnings, if they open up above their expected move, which I can't really remember off the top of my head what that expected move was, but it opened up well over it. A lot of times what you see is price kind of stable to grind high or go higher. And that's exactly what happened. We actually took a little bit of heat for a couple days. And then boom, it just ripped higher. And we were able to book a nice profit there. Almost 50% of max profit in just seven days. So nice trade in BKNG. We did a closing adjusting trade in IWM. So we closed out our put vertical, which was part previously part of an iron condor. And then we're still holding a full iron condor. So if we go to IWM, what you'll see here is this the full iron condor that we have, we booked a profit in the other piece. And so we're now just playing the waiting game price still within our range here. Next trade was an opening trade in Oracle. So we did a pre earnings long straddle in Oracle. They announced on March 19. So got about 10 days from now, looking to book a winner 30 to 40% of debit paid. If you are a subscriber to the CML option strategy backtester, you will also see that this has is a huge high probability winner. And so that's that's one of the reasons we put it on. The success has been pretty awesome. And then and not to mention when we got into this trade, you know, on this day here, we had a couple days worth of contraction in implied volatility. So we look at that as a good entry point. Remember, when we're buying a straddle, we want those options to be cheap. And we want them to get more expensive or the IV to expand as you go into earnings. So we're getting a nice move from a price standpoint. And we're starting to get a little bit of an uptick in implied volatility. Let me check on both of these. So we see. So no profit or loss at this point still just you know, if we could get some more, you know, another spike in implied volatility going into the earnings announcement and, you know, a continued move higher or obviously it had to be a major move lower. Now, we started out with price right in this range. But so we'll see what happens there. And we want to be out of that trade before the earnings announcement. Or once we book a profit of you know, 30 to 40% depending on how much time we have left. Next trade was a rolling adjusting trade in Apple. So this is a position that we put on a long put vertical that we put on in Apple to add some short bias to our portfolio. We also looked at this from a standpoint of Apple was actually weaker acting weaker than the rest of the market when we had this big downside and we had a little bit of a pop up. I was looking for a continuation lower in Apple, obviously with the market getting strong again. We didn't get that and Apple got even stronger. Warren Buffett came out and made an announcement that he was taking a large stake in Apple. Damn you, Warren. So got a little pop up there. So we we wanted to roll that keep that short bias in our portfolio, keep that short bias in Apple. But even since we put it on, it's moved a little bit higher against us. So just holding this looking for a little bit of downside movement to benefit that piece. Next trade was a closing adjusting trade in soybeans. So we had an iron condor in there, booked a about a 40% of max profit on this piece. So still working our way nicely in soybeans. Back to we're we're almost profitable. I'll have to go back and add up all our credits and see exactly where we're at. But we're real close to to being profitable. Now we've still got another piece of that trade on, which is this short call vertical. So just need a little bit of down movement to benefit that piece. Next week, we I mean, the the option prices are fairly elevated in the grains right now with this with this big move higher. But so we'll be looking to add another iron condor centered around current price next week in soybeans to continue to collect that credit book profits. And that goes for both soybeans and wheat. So working our way out of those. Next trade was a closing adjusting trade in wheat. So let's go there right now. If we take a look, we've got a we've got this full iron condor, the closing adjusting trade from the alert was this call vertical here price moved up nicely into our into where we needed it to be, excuse me, moved back down nicely into it. And so we were able to get out of that one. So still just playing the waiting game on this one and we'll continue to monitor and manage as needed. Next trade was a rolling adjusting trade in the cues. A lot of a lot of adjustment trades this week, you know, based on where we are in the expiration cycles, you know, rolling adjusting is are is obviously just something that we do as a necessity. We love to just open and close trades more often, obviously, which we've done a lot of as well. But this week, the it was a lot of rolling and adjusting trades. So this was a two back to back alerts. So the last two alerts of today of the week, we're in the QQQ. So we're holding these call spreads, which previously were iron condors. Now with this big move, you know, big move up in the market that we've seen over the last couple days, we are we're wanting to continue to keep these positions on in the way of keeping short delta in our portfolio. So let's take a look at these. So we rolled these from March to April. And we, you know, we kept our we kept these separate. I mean, we could have rolled this all into six contracts, using the same strikes, but I want to keep them separate for tracking purposes. So we just separated them by one strike. So the first one is we've got the short 173 call along 76 calls. So that's what you're seeing here on the graph. So again, just looking for some more downside, we will also potentially add another iron condor to this piece to just neutralize it, add a little bit of credit and continue to manage our way out of this trade. And then the other one, the second alert was a the same thing we rolled from March to April and we adjusted our strikes to the 172 175. So very similar looking graph, you know, just looking for that downside movement to benefit these trades. The the thought process when you do these is a, you know, if you were looking at at QQQ, do you want to be long or short this? I mean, to me, you know, having this, you know, extended run here and looking for a little bit of a pullback is is beneficial for me from just from a pure one trade, you know, if you're looking at QQQ and a silo, I think that makes sense. But more importantly, as you know, the way that we trade looking at our entire portfolio and keeping that short delta bias for, you know, for situations, you know, like this downside move that we had here, you know, we benefited a lot from having that short delta here. And, you know, the implied volatility is still high, right? That, you know, the market is not, they're definitely not, you know, we've had a little bit of contraction the last couple of days because because of this up move. But with implied volatility still as high as it is with the option prices still pumped up from where they have been the last year, which is what this indicator tells us. It says that we're not out of the woods yet, you know, in my mind. So this is my opinion. But, you know, when you have that elevated implied volatility and the market's going higher, you know, that that's saying that the market doesn't necessarily think that this thing is just going to grind higher like it did for most of 2017. So I'm hoping that we continue to keep some, you know, some two-sided action in the market and based on the elevated implied volatility, I would say that's a good assumption. Not obviously guaranteed. Nothing is in this, in this market. You know, maybe we continue to grind higher and continue to rip new hires, new highs every day like we basically like we saw in 2017. But I don't see that happening. So that's where we're at. And that's why we continue to roll these positions because that's that's kind of the assumption that we're taking and we need that short bias in our portfolio. So it's kind of killing two birds with one stone. Because if, and not to keep, you know, beating a dead horse here, but you know, the other piece is if I didn't want that assumption, if I didn't have that assumption, if I didn't want this directional short bias in my portfolio, then I would have just closed these, taken a loss and moved on and redeployed that capital into something else. But that's why we continue to roll, you know, we in the in the wheat trade, for example, that I just went over where we closed out this call vertical, you know, I don't have a short bias in wheat. You know, I actually have more of a long bias. You know, I think this thing may turn around next week and kind of stay neutral to higher. And so on that one, you know, I just wanted to book that loss. We'll continue to add sell premium and iron condors in that to get back. But if I had a, you know, a strong bias that I thought that wheat was going to continue lower, then I would have, I would have kept that on or rolled it to the next cycle. Instead, I just closed it. So hopefully that helps with the thought process of when to roll, when to just cut your losses and go. But that's, that's how we work. And then always looking at it from a, not just each trade in a silo, but looking at it from an entire portfolio perspective of how it affects, you know, the rest of the delta in your portfolio. I've got several other questions this week from members about where do I learn more about, you know, beta weighting the spy delta to beta weighting your portfolio delta to SPY, which is what we do. And there's in our blog, go check out some of those videos in our blog. Specifically, you can look at how to trade options like a professional. It's one of our blog posts from quite a while back. You just scan through our blog. You'll find it. But that, that kind of goes over the process of how we look at the, all of our trades as a portfolio, how we beta weight those delta to SPY and continue to manage that way. So hopefully that's helpful. I just, we get a lot of questions about that. So I want to make sure and reiterate that from time to time. All right. So those are all the alerts. Let's check out some of the other positions we have. Again, I love where we're positioned from not only how many, you know, short, short deltas we have compared to our different positions, but all the diversified symbols that I went through last time. You know, we've got the euro. We take a look at the analyze tab here. We've got this adjusted strangle, basically back to, almost back to profits here. Just need a little bit more time to pass. You know, if we do get a major move one direction or another, we'll probably add another piece to this, collect more credit. We've got some time left in this, you know, still 28 days to expiration. So, you know, within another, probably not next week, but the following week, we would look to roll that or close it out for a profit depending on where we're at. ES, so S&P 500 futures, we've got two different positions on here. One is this long put vertical, which we're holding again to keep that short delta bias in our portfolio. Obviously, with the big move up, we're at a point now where next week we'll be rolling this. There's seven days to expiration, so once we get into the week of expiration, we start to do these rolls. We already did QQQ today. We'll do ES next week. And then we've also got this iron condor in ES, which is kind of hanging out still well within the range. Just leaving a little bit of down movement, some contraction in IV before we do anything there. Natty gas, got this iron condor. No profit or loss yet. Just waiting for some more IV contraction and time to pass there. I already mentioned notes. Soybeans, I already mentioned that. Apple, I mentioned DIA, kind of the same position as ES and the QQs, so we'll look to roll these next week. Got seven days to expiration in these ones as well. So just continuing to roll those. We may add another iron condor in DIA to again collect some more credit and kind of neutralize that. In EEM, this is one that we also put on to kind of keep some of that short directional bias. You know, we did have a nice profit in this at one point now with the move up. We'll be looking to roll this because again I like that short bias. And EEM is a good underlying to keep that in. Kind of diversifies out of the U.S. equities that we have. EWW, our Mexican ETF, our adjusted strangle here. So almost back to profit after adjustments and rolls there. So we'll continue to monitor that one. EWZ, we've got this strangle here. Got some profit in there. Not quite enough to take off yet. So we look into hopefully books and profits and EWZ next week. FXI, we've got two pieces. So we've got one piece with three contracts. All this has already been rolled out to April and we've got some profit here. But we we have after adjustments and rolls were basically at about break even if you're looking at both of these together. Even though we're showing profits here but after adjustments and rolls, we're right at about even. So want to get some more profit in here before we book those. And with FXI, if we look at the chart, implied volatility is still nice and high. So still a position that we want to continue to have until implied volatility does contract below the level that we like which is around the 50 level. GLD, we have had a nice contraction in implied volatility. Just haven't been in this trade long enough to to have enough profit to book yet. So we'll continue to hold on this one until we we get some more profit. IWM, already went over that one, IYR, Oracle, Q's, SPY. We've got an iron condor and SPY. Just need a little bit of downside movement to benefit that. A little bit more time to pass. XLE, we've got a strangle on here. So almost to the point of where we can book profits in XLE. So we'll let that set over the weekend and hopefully get a little bit more theta decay into early next week and book that one. XLV, so this is one that we've been playing ping-pong with and it's worked out nicely. So we had a couple different iron condors on here. Price bounced around here. We took off the untested side. It bounced back in. We took off that one and now this is one where price was way out here. It bounced all the way back into our range which is nice. So we're actually at profit on this piece of the iron condor as well. So we'll book that early next week and then we've got this other iron condor here. So price is now kind of hanging out in the upper end of the range. So if we can book the other one and then we get a little down movement in price here, that would be ideal and we'll be out of the trade for profits overall and actually profits on all three of the different iron condors that we've traded in this since we've been in the XLV trade. And lastly XRT. So this was originally a strangle, now a straddle. So getting some good profit here. Not quite back to the place where I want to book profits but hopefully next week, in the next two weeks, we will. And if we look at the chart, the implied volatility, nice contraction today but still decent enough to stay in. If we still get some continued contraction, that'll put our profit, that'll push our profits up on the trade and we'll look to book that as we see fit. So hope all that's helpful. Got a little long winded in this one but I really hope it's helpful in helping you understand the thought process that we go through on these trades. If you guys have any questions or like I said any suggestions to make this better to help everybody make more money, make it easier and more productive, let us know. We love you guys. Have a good weekend. Talk to you later.