 Thank you so much for having me, David. Good to see everybody here today. Beautiful afternoon in New York City. It's about two o'clock and today we're gonna talk about gaps. For those of you that don't know me, my name is Melissa Armell and I own the Stock Swoosh and it's a very, very interesting time right now to trade. I have to say that 2022 has been a volatile year and I expect that the second half of 2022 will be very similar. For those of you that are trading right now, you may know that we are in the thick of earnings season. So tonight is a big one. I'm only here for a little bit less than an hour but after four o'clock you can watch tonight, Tesla is going to report earnings. What will it do? I don't know. I'm not in any positions into the earnings in Tesla but I will tell you that Tesla will affect the market and it's probably going to gap. So today we're gonna talk about gaps. We're gonna talk about using technical analysis in gaps. And again, stocks, big stocks like Tesla, Amazon, Apple, Amazon and Apple are out next week. They affect the overall market, okay? And again, if you have any questions, I can see them on the side. You can plop them in the room and I can answer anyone's questions as we go along. For those of you that don't know me, my name is Melissa Armell. Again, if you have questions, you can call me at 929-3200 Gap. You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or Skype and you can email me or call me if you have questions as well. Some of you may have seen me on television. I'm scheduled to be a Newsmax tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern time. You can watch me to discuss inflation. Of course, that is part of the reason why the market has been falling for the first seven months of this year. We are supposedly, some people think we're in a recession. Some people think we're going into a recession. Either way, the cost of goods and services and things that we buy has gone up. And as of right now, there's no end in sight and that has played a big factor in the overall market. In fact, we had a sell-off like about an hour ago or so, I had everything up and I was watching. We had a hard sell-off like it was a new sell-off because Google came out and said, well, they're going to pause hiring for about two weeks. And that created an immediate reaction in the market. And part of it is, again, because they're foreseeing an economic downturn going into the end of the second half of 2022. So for you, if you're here, you obviously are here for a reason. You want to spend your time today listening to me, listening to all the people and trying to find out information that can help you make money. So whether you're thinking about trading or you're currently trading right now, you can make money trading. The problem is that a lot of people do not make money trading. They lose money trading because they look at trading as gambling. Trading is not gambling, okay? So I have a certain criteria that I use each and every day to try to find what stock that I want to trade. Again, it's based off of using gaps and technical analysis and gaps, which we're going to talk about today. But one of the reasons that I think this has been a good year if you've known what to do in the right picks, okay, what stocks specifically to trade is, because we have had selling and I like to short. Now, that doesn't mean that I don't go long. We went long golden stocks, which was an earnings play that we did this week that was out on Monday. But I mean, I do prefer to short, okay? And I think a lot of people really don't that are actively trading are scared to short. I don't know how to short. I don't know what stocks to short or I also don't know when to short. So I wanted to show so far, this is through Friday. I didn't put in the trades we did this week. Today we did IBM, yesterday we did IBM too. But this is results year to date. If you use an average risk of $2,800 per trade, per trade, these are day trades and I do use stops, okay? So when I take a stop, I lose in the train. And if I don't stop, then I play the stop out, play the trade out in the stop. This is year to date results through the end of Friday for last week, the 15th, 391-374. Again, this is an average risk of $2,800 per trade. So these are on margin. So again, we shorted IBM today. We shorted IBM yesterday and we shorted it on margin, okay? You could have bought a put in IBM. I did call put it in as well, but you could have done a put, but these are the day trade results for this year. So again, when people say, well, I've struggled year over year over year trading. Yeah, but you're probably not doing the right thing. You probably aren't looking at things the right way. And one of the things I think that has been difficult for traders this year is what they did last year is not working this year. In other words, last year, the market was extremely bullish. We made many brand new all-time highs last year in 2021. And again, I don't follow fundamentals even though I discussed them on television. I look at technical analysis, which we're gonna talk about today, but really the fundamentals didn't match up with the technicals last year, in my opinion. It was showing that we were having all kinds of supply chain issues and inflation had started even last year. Now it's starting to match up together where you're getting the technicals and you're getting the fundamentals and they're matching up together, which again has made for a lot of good trading so far this year. So if you're here today and you're here to learn something today, the fact is I'm gonna talk to you about gaps. I'm gonna talk to you about daily charts and technical analysis and charts. And I'm mostly gonna talk to you about shorts because a lot of people, again, don't realize that as an active day trader, you can short. And if you're not on the account of margin, you can buy a put. A put is basically a short where you're betting that the stock price is going to drop. So again, many people don't know how to short or they don't know when to short, but you can make money shorting. And in this type of market, it's really been extremely profitable because we've seen big moves, okay? And how do you make money as an individual trader without taking 10,000 shares of something? You get a big move, you get momentum. And we're gonna talk about that too. But overall, you need a system that produces results no matter what you do. And you wanna make money on every single day that you trade and you need a system that produces results in a volatile market, which you could consider this market a volatile market. Now personally, I think that it makes for good training when you have the volatility, but either way, normal markets, volatile markets, either way, you need to have a system that you use in a regular basis. And my system involves technical analysis. Now, what is technical analysis? I pulled this off of Wikipedia in very basic terms. In finance, technical analysis is an analysis methodology for analyzing and forecasting the direction of prices through the study of past market data, primarily price and volume. So it's looking at past price data to predict future price data, okay? For example, that's what we did today with IBM. So I looked at the IBM today and I looked at the IBM yesterday and I predicted that the stock price would drop, okay? It did. So if you shorted IBM, like I said, today or yesterday, you made money. It's still falling as we speak. If you were going long it, you lost money, okay? This is very simple, but in order to make money as an active trader, you have to get the direction right. And that is where people have been tripped up this year because one day the market looks like it's gonna hold and go higher like yesterday and the next minute it turns around and it starts falling like today and then people say, oh my gosh, I'm gonna short. So they're going long, they're going short, they're killing the longest, they're killing the shorts and ultimately then people aren't making money at all. They're just chopping up their accounts, okay? And that's not what you wanna do, okay? You wanna have conviction in what you wanna do. You wanna believe that something is going to move up, in which case you go long, or you want to believe that something is going to fall and drop and go down if you want to short, okay? So let's take a look here. This is an overall chart. This is from yesterday. I didn't put in today's movement, but this is a chart of the spy. Going back really to the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, you can see here how the market was rallying. Okay, this is 2021, rallied up, made a brand new all-time high to start at the beginning of the year. Again, this is a chart of the spy. Okay, this is a daily. This is back to January. Here was yesterday, we're ready in July. It's hard to believe we're more than halfway through the year. Gosh, it's really crazy that we are almost halfway through the year here. But this is the beginning of the year and this was yesterday. So I mean, just looking at this, you say, okay, we were here and again, what is technical analysis? Technical analysis is looking at the price. So if we're here in January, 479, 478, whatever the previous high was up there and this was yesterday, okay, 392-ish, you say, wow, the price has dropped in the overall market since the beginning of the year. I mean, we can all agree on that, all right? So if you're looking at the technicals, again, this is candlesticks. I'm looking at candlesticks. These are Japanese candlesticks. That's what I use. Down here's the volume. You'd say, all right, well, it looks to me, reading the chart, reading the price action that we have fallen since the beginning of the calendar of the year, 2022, okay? In fact, we haven't made a brand new Altem High at all this year, which is rare. I mean, for those of you that have been traveling for the last several years, I can't even remember the last year that we didn't have a brand new Altem High in the market. And really, since 2016, when Trump was elected in 2016 all the way through up until last year, we had such a bullish market, you know, with the exception of COVID, but we had a great recovery actually after COVID, which was the end of 2020 into 2021. Now here was the IBM that I was talking about. This again is looking at a daily chart of IBM. What happened here the last two days? I was talking about it. Stock price closes is a daily chart, okay? Closed up here before the earnings. Again, you don't know what the earnings are gonna say. I talked about Tesla. I don't know what the earnings are gonna say. Nobody does, okay, except for Elon Musk. But right in here, the stock closed and then gap down here and opened at a price under where it closed, it fell. Then it fell on the live day. And again, then it closed yesterday, then it gap down today and it's falling now. So again, this is technical analysis looking at the price and I'm also looking at the gap. So what is it got? Let's talk about it. The gap is a difference from the price action from one day to the next, from the closed to the open and the open to the close. So this is very, very important. So you're looking at not only the price, but the actual time stamp here, which was four, market always closes at four o'clock Eastern time and always opens at 9.30 Eastern time. So something happened from here to here. Now let's look at a bullish gap, okay? So this is a bearish gap. We open lower. This is a bullish gap. We open higher. So this closed here around 128 change opened up here around 136 and change, okay? Rally, you could have gone along this. This was back in the middle of April, okay? Again, same chart, different day. This you could have gone along, this you could have shorted, okay? So there are bullish gaps and there are bearish gaps. Either way, we're looking at the price. But it is very important to have a system, a system that you follow to trade. And I think again, this is where a lot of people get tripped up too. Buying the dips is not a system. It's not even a strategy as well. It's something that works occasionally in very strong charts or very strong markets, but it doesn't work consistently. It did last year, which is why a lot of people made money trading last year and then are doing that this year and they're losing. A map is something that tells you where you're going to go so you don't get lost. Just like when you're trading, you don't wanna get lost, which is you don't wanna lose money and have no idea what to do. And this is where a lot of people are this year in 2022. They have no idea what to do. They don't have a map. They're driving around endlessly. They're trading blind. They don't know if they should be shorting. They don't know if they should be going long. And then again, like on days yesterday where the market rallies, people are short and then they're down. If they're short, then they kill the short, then we follow the next day and then they kill the short or they kill the long and then they reverse and then of course the end result is that they lose. People are being very wishy-washy right now about their trading because the market has been chopping. But you have to pick a side and a way of looking at something, it's important when you drive and you're going to a place or a country or a city or a town you don't know where to do and you need a map and you need a map every day when you trade so that you don't get lost. It's extremely important because you wanna make money when you trade and you really don't have a lot of time to do it. You only have between 9.30 and four. That's it, okay? And if you're doing options for overnight, you still only have the time the option is on. Could be one week, could be two weeks. I don't do leaps. Again, if you have any questions, you can pop them in the chat. But anyways, I developed a system based on gaps. Based on gaps that will help me be like the map where I can pick and play a gap every day through a rating system. I'm looking at 26 points each morning. It's points based on the daily chart. It's based on technical analysis. I'm looking for stocks that are gapping. For example, Tesla. Tesla's gonna gap tonight. I guarantee you it will, but I don't know if it's up or down. But I will be applying my map, which is the 26 points in order to rank the gap in Tesla to determine if I should go long Tesla or if I should short Tesla, okay? And that helps you tell you what to do each day. This is not about 100%. This is about trying to find something that has high odds. You need to put the odds in your favor if you wanna make money trading. And for me, I actually do prefer to short. I prefer to short for as long as I've traded, which is 14 years. But I really have found that this year, 2022, it's just been a fantastic year to short in this market. And one of the things that I love about shorting just so you know is that short moves happen fast. They happen quick. They can happen in several minutes to do quick day trades. They can happen in one to two days in an option like with the IBM. You don't have to wait forever and ever and ever and ever for it to go. There's no emergency. I mean, there is something called panic buying, but that's very, very rare in stocks and extremely rare in the market because there's really no urgency when you say, well, I'm gonna go long this. Maybe I'll go long here or maybe I'll go long here or maybe I'll wait till this point. When you're in a stock and you already own it and then the price drops and you're down, that is an emergency. That is something that happens that creates panic, okay? And panic again is something that you want to take advantage of if in fact you are shorting, okay? So you are actually shorting the panic and again, the moves happen quick, unlike mine, okay? So how do you find good shorts? I'm looking for the best gap. Like I found in IBM, which happened to be earnings now. Let's break it down again. What is a gap? A gap is a break in continuity, interruption, hiatus, a divergence, a difference, a disparity. What is a gap? A gap is a break. It's a break in price action. Gaps happen every day in stocks and they happen every day in the market. And during earnings season right now, there's lots and lots and lots of gaps because stocks mostly gap on earnings. Stocks also gap on news, but they gap usually on earnings as well. Doesn't mean it's a good one. Doesn't mean it's a good one at all. I don't know until I rate it, okay? Now, a stock gaps with the opening price today is different from the closing price to the previous days trading. A gap is a break in the price action from one day to the next, simple. So if a stock closes it, for example, 39.05 and it gaps down to 39.02, theoretically that is a gap down. It's a gap down to three cents. Am I gonna short it? I don't know. I don't know. I'll go through my math. I'll go through my rating system. I'll go through my checklist to determine it, but you might short something that's only down a little just like you might short something that's down a lot, okay? And again, theoretically that's all based on just whatever you think is big or little. And that's really not something that you can determine because it's not something that you can put down on paper, black and white. Now, let's go over Twitter because this was a really nice gap when the news came out on this. Actually, this was two weeks ago now. Yeah, this was the Friday. Actually, now let's go back here. So this was Thursday. Thursday night, it was July 7th. Stock closed here, gap down Thursday night. So it was down Thursday night. It was selling off Thursday night. Here's where it was Thursday night. Then Friday morning, it opened there. So it was down. It was down on whatever reason. News that must might cancel the deal. The stock fell that day. We shorted it. And then at night, after hours, after five o'clock, it was around 5.25 at Friday night. Really weird time for something to be having to move, but it did because Musk came out with a statement and said he was out of the deal and he wanted out of the deal. Well, then the stock fell. So then from Friday night to Monday morning, the stock gap down a second day. So from here, we were up around 38.75. Then we opened around 37.50. Then we closed, snug as a bug in here. This was a down move, but not a big move for Twitter. It broke 37, I forget what the low was, but then we ended up opening here under 35. So this is a good move if you're short. If you're long, you're not making money. But this is a gap from here to here, from here to here. Boom. And again, this is a daily chart. We're looking at a daily chart here of Twitter, going all the way back. Twitter does have earnings out actually Friday. That's earnings Friday. Now, I didn't put in a recent chart of this, but this actually rallied all the way up. Some positive news on this yesterday, but the Twitter earnings are Friday. Again, nobody knows what they're gonna be. Let's take a look at some more. This was several gaps in the spy. So what is it got? It's going back to July. This is the overall market, the S&P, the ETF for the S&P. Market closed here around 410. Gap down here, opened under 410, fell, closed at four. Closed at four, around 400 and changed. Opened down here around 395. The next day at 930, fell. Closed here, again, fell again. So all of this selling, again, was opportunity to take advantage on the panic and the selling. I don't even remember the reason anymore that we were falling. We've fallen for so many different reasons this year. We've fallen because of the war on Russia, Ukraine, inflation, recession, fears, higher interest rates. Again, I don't look at the fundamentals for any other reason other than to talk on TV, but if that helps you, of course you can do that if you want to do that, if that helps you, but really, it's the technicals that I'm looking at when I'm focusing on something to read the price action, to determine if I wanna go long it or if I wanna short it, okay? And here again is IBM, let's go over it. Stock closed here, gap down, fell. Again, this is a daily chart. You can see this back to the beginning of the year, IBM. Of all the charts that are out there, actually this has held up pretty good. Pretty good in this overall market which we've been trending down. IBM has held up better than some things that we've seen, but on the day, on yesterday, when it gaped down, it was a short and today it was a short too. That I don't know exactly where this is at right at this moment, but it's probably gonna break yesterday's low if it didn't are ready. Any questions here so far? So I thought what we do is in between lecturing just about what a gap is, I'd show you some trades that we did, a week's worth of trades that you can see because I'm looking to trade it, not just the gap in the daily, but really in the one minute chart. When you're taking a trade and you have XYZ amount of money, everybody has a certain limitations that they have to trade with. It doesn't matter if you have a small account or a big account. And again, I showed you the results year to date with an advanced trader risk, but you could risk $100 a trade. You have to think about the amount of money that you have in your account and you must use that amount of money with the margin that you have and you have to stick within those parameters. The whole idea about trading and being successful is to be consistent, meaning you have more winners than losers. Whether you're risking $100 or whether you're risking $1,000, the fact is you still want to win. A lot of people think, well, I need to have this much money and this much money and this much money in order to trade and I can't trade unless I have it. That's not true. You take what you have, you can risk a beginner amount and you can do fine. It's the idea of still growing your account if you have a small account into a big account or if you have a big account growing into an even bigger account. Okay. Any questions here so far? So this was the end of, this was the end of June. This was the week right before July 4th. So again, I like to focus on shorts and I'm always focusing on the chart because we're focusing on the price data. I'm reading the price and predicting the future price movement in the gap when I see the gap in the morning, in the pre-market. So this was safe. Okay. This was going back 627, which was Monday. Here was the gap. So this stock closed up here. Boom. Open in the morning down. We looked at it, rated it, shorted it. Boom. Entry was 2310. 7000 shares is an advanced risk of 2800. Exit at 2275, that's a move. 35 cents is a good move in a stock like this. Here's where it went though. It did continue, it did follow through. Profit was 2450. Now, as far as expectations for what you should expect to make on any given day, I would say turning your money over one to one. So if you risk 500, you're looking to make 500. If you're risking 1,000, you're looking to make 1,000, close enough. But here was the sell off. Again, this was a short and again, you would have needed margin to do this trade. Now I did not call an option in this. You could have done an option in it. I did not call an option in this, but you could have done that if you didn't want to do it on a margin. You can trade options with a cash account. You don't need a margin account for options. You do need a margin account to do equity trades like this, okay? Now here was the trade. So closed here, gapped it down. We shorted it, got the drop, boom, got out. I wanna show you here that this continued. So you could have held it longer. Again, I like to be in and out fast in the morning. Most of the days I'm trying to get in out quick. Today, IBM continued past the point that I get out of it, but the reality is this here you could have held just like you could have held IBM this morning into even this afternoon too. But I think when you're trading, particularly day trading, I'm not talking about options. I'm talking about day trades. You've gotta be flat and out before four o'clock. So again, let's take a look at the gap. This is the one minute, okay? So this is the daily, here's the gap. This was the 27th, here's the one. So I shorted it right here. I put the stop, get the drop, okay? Any questions about that? We're on 627. Now let's go to 628. I did Nike and I took a stop in the first trade in Nike. So again, I use stops. They're limit order stops, which means if I get stopped out past the number, I'm gonna lose. I do use stops because you have to have a cutoff point for the trade. Otherwise a trade can totally, totally, totally go against you and it could go against you pretty big. So here was the Nike, 107.40 was the short. Then we had the stop of 108.70, 2200 shares, risk was 28.60, your risk should be the same or almost the same in every trade you take. We got stopped out. Here's why. So this was the gap. Here's the daily. Stock close your gap down. This ugly, ugly tail happened. Went poof all the way up here. And basically you see that, I mean, again, if you didn't have a stop in, it went, I think it was like 114 or something like that. It was crazy. It went like six, seven points through the stop. Like if you hadn't had a stop in, I mean you would have been down so much. Now it did come back. We did a second trade and I'll go over it, but you don't know. Okay. So anyways, this trade lost. Now I stayed on top of it, but I wanna show you here what happened. This closed here, this gap down, we shortened it. Here was the ugly bar, actually there. Yeah, you can see it was around almost 114. So we got stopped all the way down in here. Anyways, this just again is one of the reasons we put the stops in. The stop is like the insurance. It's the protection. I don't use percentages for anything I do. So just so you know, I don't pick it about percentages and people ask me that, well, how much should you risk if you have an account with 200,000 or 100,000 and what percentage? If you know what you're doing, you could take a $5,000 trading account at a prop broker with 10 to one leverage of 50,000 buying power and you could risk $500, a thousand dollars to trade and that you could risk 10% of your account. But if you have a hundred grand, I don't think you'd want to use $10,000 in a day in trade, you could. It's really about how well you know what you're doing and how many trains you can take as far as getting the wins. So in other words, if you have a high wind ratio system, you can be a little bit more generous with your risk, okay? If you're not, then you can't and you have to tighten up. Many people trade where they're scalping and they're doing that right now in this market because they're finding this market difficult. I'm looking for momentum. We're gonna talk about that a little bit. But I think this Nike is a good example of this because this is momentum. Momentum is what? Big, big move, big move up or big move down. So we took the stop in Nike Air. We shorted it, got back in, entered was 108.20. Boom, shares was 2700, risk was 2970. Boom, exit 106.55. I'll show you this one to 103 and change. It went further. Again, I like to be in and out of the day trades quick but I did make money in the second trade. I did make money in this for the day. So I took the stop, lost on the first, took the second trade, worked and I was still up in the day. But I wanna show you here. It actually, no, I think it went to 102 and changed here. Let's look. No, it went to 103. So anyways, we got back in it. So we took it, got stopped, got back into this sucker, got the drop, got out. But here was the whole day. It did actually, it broke 103 a little bit there, yeah. So you could have made another three and a half bucks on this but I don't like to hold all day. Again, if you don't know what to do, you might think if you get stopped you should flip it and go long. You see if you would have gone long Nike then you would have lost in that too. So you have to pick a side. Either you like it short or you like it long. Again, we went long Goldman, okay? You can't like something short and like something long. It's either a long or short. How are you gonna know what it is? Again, this is my process that I go through in the checklist each morning to determine what to do with it. But the fact is you can't flip flop in trades. And if you're doing that right now, I mean, you're probably getting eaten alive in this market. Anyways, Tuesday we made money. But we took one stop. Second trade worked. Wednesday was the QQQs. Entry was 282.80. Again, this was a short. There's this back 629. Let's look at the gap. Here was the day. This may not look like much at all, but it was a gap. Market close here, gap down, boom. Shorted it, got the drop, got out, done. That's it. 1700 shares, risk was 28.90. Exit 281.48, profit $2,244, done. Again, in and out quick as fast as you can get it. These are the kinds of things you wanna do. And again, I don't scalp. But if you want to scalp, you can. But if you scalp a trade, and you're in and out for 5 cents, 10 cents, 15, 25 cents, and your risk is $2 or something, you're not making even half of your risk when I'm trying to make up one of the risk, okay? And the second thing is that if you stop in a trade full stop, then how are you gonna cover the loss of the stop in full and then also make money and pull ahead? Do you know what I'm saying? So that's why you have to look for a big move, a momentum, you wanna get it. Here was the cues. Okay, so here was the 29th. We shorted it, again, we're looking for momentum. This is it, boom, get the sell off, done, out. Here it is, out, drop, done. You're up, take it, get out. Get in, get out, boom. We're looking for a dollar, $2. It depends on what we're trading, okay? So the idea of actively day trading, whether you're doing day trades or whether you're doing options is, you're chunking it out. You chunk it, chunk it, chunk it. 500, 200, 300, 500, 1,000, 2,000, 1,500, 1,000. That's how you're going to make money. That's how you're gonna build a week together. That's how you build a month together, okay? We ended up doing the market then again. On Thursday the 30th, we did the market again. This was before any season, the market was gapping a lot. Close to your gap down, boom. Shorted it, this was 630. Entry was 280, 55. If you don't want to do this because of the price point, do we put? You could have bought the 280 puts, okay? 1700 shares, risk 29.75. Exit 277.90, again, a dollar, $2.00. Whatever we can get, get in, get out. Profit, 4505, this was a nice trade. Again, momentum. In the case of this, because it is a short, we're looking for what? We're looking for momentum to the downside. The price has to drop. Showing technical analysis, I'm looking at the gap. The market close to your gap down. I see this is happening. Over here, snug as a bug. Whatever time I'm looking at it, 7am, 730, 715 in the morning, I'm looking at the gap happening before the market even opens. And then I'm saying, wait a minute. Is this a longer or is this a short or is this no play at all? Maybe I don't even want to do it. It's nothing. Now, in this case here, I said, no, this is a good short. It's going to fall today. We're going to have selling and it's going to continue in the gap down and sell off and that is what it did. So it went, here's a drop. And actually again, you could have held this longer. Lower the day down in here was like 275.50 and change. But again, fast move, get in and out, done. You could have held it down into here. But you must get out of trades when you get this kind of momentum. You get the flush and then you get out. How do I know? Well, again, I'm reading the gap. But the chart tells me to. I do have targets. I teach targets in the class, but overall no one has to tell you if you're risking $2,800, $2,900 in a train and you're up basically more than 100% of what you have risk. No one has to tell you to get out of it. You know what I'm saying? And actually 278 was a target, but it kept going, almost got to 275. So again, momentum helps you as a trader. You're not making the momentum. Institutional money's making the momentum. I'm looking to trade with institutional money. They bought the whole thing yesterday. They sold IBM today. We'll talk about that more in a little bit. And then Friday, right before the holiday, I closed the room, we were off July 1st. But overall, you can see how you can put together a positive week where if you're looking for one thing a day, which is exactly what I tried to do every single day, one trade a day or one stock, I might do a retake in it like the Nike where it gets stopped and retake it if it sets up, but it's the focus. The focus helps you make money too. You can't be all over the place. Now again, I was talking with this earlier. You can also trade gaps using options. What is the benefit of doing this? Well, you can capture overnight moves. We're gonna go over a couple of options here, trades here, you can do that. Or if you simply don't have a margin account, you don't have enough money to have a margin account. You don't wanna go to a prop place, fine. Again, you can have a cash account and open an options account as a cash account. Now, you may only be able to do one thing at a time, two things at a time or something like that. I've been doing options in the queues, these trades here that I'm discussing in this particular week, the trades that I call in the live daily trading room or run a live room, all of these are trades on margin. I do do options in the market too. That's not these trades. That's not these trades at all, okay? So let's talk about options. I put in here the results here today for options. This is through the end of last week. This doesn't include this week's trades. Now, this is a big number. The reason this is a much bigger number a year to date, and again, these are all the trades, winners and losers through the end of last week. The reason this is such a big number is because my risk is much bigger on my options. I'm risking an average of $8,000 on my options trade. If you cannot do that, then you risk 500. You risk a thousand, you risk what you can. I'm risking a lot more because I'm trading some options that are expensive and I wanna be able to do that. Now, some of the cost of those stocks has changed because some of them are split. Google just split, Amazon split this year. Tesla's still expensive to do. So I upped my options risk since I've started doing these several years ago, so I can trade options that are pricing. Now, some of them, like I said, have changed price points, but I still keep my risk consistent. So again, if you want to look at something and say I wanna risk $500, that's fine. And this is a newsletter. This is not the live room. The trades are actually emailed to you. So I called, they put an IBM. That was emailed out to people yesterday morning in the pre-market before the open. That is not the day trade room. We did do a day trade in IBM too, okay? So if you have the money to be able to risk more than 8,000 per trade, you can do that as well. So we're at 2,359, 755 for the year. That does not include this end of this week. We'll see where we're at. I'm in some things for this week. I'm in some things right now that are up. I'm actually in some things right now too that are down. I'm actually in a Twitter that's down that is totally down that I did that could flip around on the earnings on Friday. If it doesn't, then that trade will go bust for me. But if I have a trade and it never goes right for me, I will hold it into the last day. Twitter earnings are Friday. I'm in the putts, so it's rallied in the last couple of days. I'm totally down in it, but I'm not gonna kill it because it could go right for me on Friday. Any questions? Any more questions about options? So, oh, here's the chart. Here, here was the Twitter. So again, we did a couple in this. This was a nice call in here. I called the 37s, which went really nicely here and dropped. And we did the 35s and they worked. I could have got out of the other one. I did, I didn't, and then I held it and it flipped. This had a big move yesterday on news so the trial's gonna move forward early so that was positive for Twitter. Tessa reacted negative to that news yesterday. Again, but this has earnings out this week. This could fall. We'll see what happens. As far as options, the way that I make the picks, okay, if you wanna take the class is through the rating system that I teach in the class. As far as pressing the button on your platform, everybody trades at a different broker. I'm not gonna teach you how to execute on the platform if that's what you mean. I would teach you how to rate Twitter as a gap down to see if this is gonna rate to fall. That's what you learn in the class. Then you can do it as a put or you can do it as a day trade or you can even do it as a swing trade. So that's what you learn in the class. How to take the stock, what to take, what direction, how to find the picks to do the options. As far as execution, we're just buying puts and then we're selling them or buying calls and we're selling them. As far as how to actually transact, actually do that on your platform, I don't teach people because everybody trades at a different place and the broker will teach you how to do that for free. I'm not sure if that answers your question or not, John. But I don't do any fancy dance, the options where you have to know all kinds of other things to do. All right, let's look at what this one was. This was a really nice call. So at 7.50 in the morning on July 8th, I called the 37 puts in Twitter and they were up into the close before the news came out that he killed the deal. But they weren't up a lot, they weren't up a lot at all. They were dirt cheap though, cost was a buck, 80 contracts, risk was 8,000, sold it for 20. You could have made $25,600, which was a 320% return in investment. What if you took 10, what if you spent $1,000? You could have made $3,200. Everybody made money that did this trade. Nobody got out on Friday, it was only up 20 some cents at the most and everybody got the move and the move was the overnight move. So one of the nice things about doing options and one of the beautiful things about doing them in this type of market, which is again, volatile, is capturing overnight moves and you have the protection that if something goes against you, I just told you about the one I'm in right now. If it goes against me, I can't lose any more than I have at risk. It could go all the way up to 100. I can't lose any more than I risked. It's not the same in swing trades, okay? So it's like the protection as far as the position size. If you risk a thousand, you can't lose more than a thousand and then obviously your goal is to make money. So this was a nice trade that I called Friday that went immediately on Monday morning, okay? And I saw it in the gap. Again, technical analysis is predicting the future price movement of a stock based on the past movement of the stock and that is what you come and learn from me in the class and that is what is important because if you went long Twitter here, you lost. Okay, so you have to know whether or not you're going to go long or short. And again, it call is a long, you put as a short, that is what we did here. And I'm usually doing the weeklies. Oh, here's the chart again. So again, this is something I'm in right now. I'm down in, we'll see how this turns out. I have until Friday, the earnings are Friday. I thought I'd be out of this by now. I'm not, I'm not going to kill it because I'm down in it. We'll see where it goes. That could work in my favor, but options trading is a nice thing to do during the summer months. Why? Because again, you could just take the risk you could put a sell order if it hits and you're out of it. You could out of it if it doesn't hit, you don't get out of it. You're in it. So in other words, say you buy something to cost a buck. You can say, I don't have time to sit here all day with this thing. I don't know what this is going to do. Put a sell order at a buck 50, 50% is good. If it fills, you'll be out. If not, it'll cancel the order. It's a day in order. It's a cancel. And by four, you'll, you won't be, you'll still be in it. If it doesn't hit at 150 or you could put a sell order two. And if it's two, you'll be out. You'll make a hundred percent. Okay. So you don't have to babysit options. And that's the point. So some people like that better. Now again, what would I teach in the class? How do I pick which gap to trade? That's the important thing. I use a checklist. A checklist uses technical analysis to find the best gap. Checklists are important. You wouldn't want to get in an airplane and have a pilot that didn't go through the checklist and check everything's in working order. You need to have things working order before you get up into the air and take off. Anyone that does surgery, you have a doctor, a nurse, they're going to perform surgery on you. There's a checklist. Did they take this pill, this pill, this medication? Did you take the blood pressure? All these things, we have everything to get organized. You have to go through a checklist when you train. So many people don't take trading enough seriously. They act like it's gambling and it's not gambling. Checklists are very important. They're important all the time in many, many things and many, many types of different, many, many types of different careers. And it's certainly important in a market that actually people are finding tricky because they think the market's going up and then it doesn't. Then they think the market's going down and then we don't want to fall through the downside. Like we haven't broken the low from June 17th, June 16th at low, we haven't broken that yet. Will we? Nobody knows. We didn't break it yet. So people are trying to decide what to do. I mean, this is the chop. This is all the last couple of weeks. Pretty much like a month of that. Yeah, today's July 20th. So I'm looking for institutional money when I'm deciding to take a position like going Longgold and like shorting IBM. What are the big money position players doing? What are hedge funds doing? What are big traders doing? What are big banks doing? We did this one here too. This was UAL. You can see here talking about momentum, what I mean. This is momentum, what to the downside? This close here gap down. This fell. Actually, I think this is earnings tomorrow morning. I think this is earnings tomorrow morning. You can look it up. Anyways, it opened here Brent 40, fell, dropped down in here to 36 and change. Again, I don't know what this does in the earnings tomorrow, but this is momentum, what? To the downside. What is going on here? Selling. Moment of the downside. Here's another gap down. Close to your gap down, fell. Here's momentum to the upside. That's a grain bar. Could it go along that? Okay. You need momentum to make money trading. IBM, here's momentum, falling. Here's momentum here, down. Talked about this one. This was a rally. Could have gone long, could have done a call. So we're looking for momentum. So you find the gap, then you read the price action. You're like, okay, I only wanna do this if it's gonna have a big move because that's the only way you're gonna make money. Momentum traders take positions and stocks and it's just a patient that the stock will have an explosive move. We gotta get it big. That's the other reason why people are finding this market tricky. It's not having an explosive move every day. Like we have a big move like yesterday and then it doesn't go anywhere, okay? This enormous move in stocks in one direction is what we're looking for and we really want it fast. I say it fast in a couple of minutes or 24 to 48 hours in an option, particularly. Momentum trading is one of the most profitable ways to make money trading. And if you're not gonna get a fast move, you're stuck in something and it's just pointless. If you wanna make money in trades, you need momentum. Otherwise, it's not cost effective because say you take an option, I don't do leaves. I mean, what's the point of being a leaf? You're in it and you're just waiting. Your money's stuck in the trade. You're waiting for it to go. It's just you're wasting your time. You're wasting your money. Again, the idea of chunking it out is to get in, get out, get in, get out, get in, get out. Okay, this is called chunking it out. That's why no one should be holding anything to a piggy target. Like again, I showed you a bunch of trades I could have made more. It doesn't matter. The job is done when you take the trade and you get the momentum, get out. It is very difficult to pick the low of a day in a short. It is very difficult to pick the high of a day in a long. Actually, yesterday with Goldman was pretty easy to get out at the high of the day because it's simply rallied all day and power trended but that's rare. That's rare. Anyways, trading should be really, it should be theoretically easy most of the time. You can have a hard day once in a while, hard day once in a while but you're supposed to have it be easy once you know what to do most of the time but it's not easy for most people. Why? Because they get tripped up. They don't have a system. No, this isn't my baby. I don't have a baby. That's funny. I love this picture though. It's really cute. I don't know that baby or whose baby that is. Anyways, my system is called the golden gap. It's about high probability. That's how you're gonna make money. You've got to have the odds in your favor. Anything that could put the odds in your favor to trade will give you an edge. The 26 point golden gap rating system gives you an edge. It reads the price of the gap and using technical analysis in an advanced level, pin points, which not to trade that day and in what direction. The high probability is in equality and detail in the rating system. 26 points is an enormous amount of detail. Huge, okay, a lot. And it takes about five to 10 minutes to rate one gap if you're new. It doesn't take forever. It takes less than five minutes once you become experienced with the system. Again, I've been doing this for a long time, but I do take my time. Part of the problem which people is they gamble when they trade. They think it's a 50-50 crap shoot. You can't look at it like that. And if that's how you look at it, then you're basically better off just going to Las Vegas or Atlantic City or something like that and gambling. So the philosophy behind my system is to find stocks to trade that have never won a high probability of directional bias for the entire day. Two, big moves of the day. Three, early confirmation of my bias in the move and four, precise entries with follow-through and a good risk to reward. And that's what we're looking for. And again, in this type of market, you really need to have something like that because otherwise you're flip-flopping around both directions and you're never making any money. Now, this was a recent option we did in the Qs. I just want to show you. It was Tuesday, June 28th. I called it. It was a 292 puts. These weren't cheap. $5.75 for one. Risk of an advanced trader risk of 86.25 sold at 16 was a 178% return in investment. This was a nice trade. So the 292s, Tuesday, the 28th was here. See it? So we just talked about momentum. This is momentum. Get the flush, boom. Get the drop out. You could have got out here. You could have got out here. You could have got out here. Again, it dropped. It fell. Exploration date was the eighth. You're not holding it to the eighth. You are getting the move out. Get the drop, get out. Again, that was a put. Okay? It was selling. And that was some nice follow-through actually to the downside. Oh, here's the chart in the market. So I've gotten these moves. We got this move. We got this move. We got this move. I'll see where we go this week. But time is money. It's money and I think for a lot of people, not everybody wants to sit and trade for six and a half hours a day. My day trades a minute out in the first half an hour by 10. The options, I'm in them. I watch. You can put a sell order if you don't want to watch. But for people that are getting chopped up, they're losing money this year. You don't want to give all your harder and money away to the market and mistakes. You shouldn't have a 50-50 gambling mentality. You've got to invest in some type of education and some type of system. Whether it's mine or someone else's. If you're trading blind and looking at the same stock going longer, short, the same thing, you're getting chopped up and you're not going to get anywhere with it. I do think that education is important. I'm saying that because I learned from my own mistakes at the beginning. If I could have found someone to teach me my own gap method, I would have paid someone and saved a lot of money from my own mistakes in the market. But unfortunately, a lot of people that trade gaps don't know what they're doing and do them wrong. And so I had to create my own system. So it is important. You will come and pay me to learn my system, but you learn a lot. And then you don't have to go through the process that I did to come up with your own system yourself or you create your own system. But for me, it took me over three years to do it and a lot of money. I think it's important for people to save their money to trade and you're better off having a good system, knowing what to do, taking a class like mine and trading with small risk to build your account. Otherwise, you're going to lose whatever money you have if you don't know what to do. And I think it's important to get clear with your financial goals. And if you're not on path this year to make your financial goals we're halfway, more than halfway through the year then you've got to either take a step back or reevaluate to decide what you want to do and then move forward, okay? So I always say to people, how much do you want to do this? This is an investment. I think once people get bitten by the market bug and they want to make money, though there's no stopping them, they're going to do it. They're going to continue. It's about how much do they want to throw themselves into a full throttle and whether or not they want to do it now. You still have plenty of time to trade. It's earnings user right now. It's a great time to be trading. So it's a busy time to trade now and then the fall of this year. But it is important to think about how you're going to spend your money whether it's risking trades or in education. If you want to come and learn my class it's a complete system on how to trade gaps. It is a 26 point professional bearish gap rating system. The purpose of the system is to help you evaluate which gap to trade each morning using a checklist. And since there are so many stocks each day that gap using a system is significant to your success and the market gaps every day as well too. My class is called the Golden Gap course. It is a full two day course and how to strategically find pick and play stocks that are professional bearish gaps. The class is online. I teach it once a month. So the class is this weekend. Again, people are already signed up. The deadline is Friday, today is Wednesday. If you'd want to sign up you'd have to contact me or if you have questions you must contact me for forms. The class is July 23rd and 24th. The class is $69.99 US dollars. The class is online. I am doing a special this week which is a Christmas in July special that's going on through Friday which is $1000 off the class. So if you decide you want to sign up you can pay $59.99 by Friday. That's the deadline for this class. And again, it's Saturday and Sunday, 9 to 5. Class is online. Does anyone have any questions about anything at all? Tesla's tonight. Again, I'm going to be gone but you can watch that at four o'clock or right after the bell and see where that goes. You know what? I haven't heard from him. Someone's asking about the UPS driver. I have a guy in the options newsletter that trains while he's, I didn't say he was UPS driver. I don't know, I didn't say that. He didn't tell me what company he works for. He is a driver. I don't know if he works for UPS or not. And he may not want to tell me that because he's really trading in his truck but he didn't say he was working for UPS just so you know. But he is driving a truck and trading options. He's not doing the daily trades. I haven't heard from him. I should reach out to him. Usually when people have questions or they're having problems they will reach out to me. If I don't hear from someone then they're usually doing well. It's only when they have a question that you people usually reach out to me. I don't know what company he works for but I know that he's doing only options and that he is working full time and doing them somehow. So he must be doing them on his wifi. Any questions from anyone? Listen, if you like a trial for the rest of the week you can email me and come in Thursday Friday. I do not know what we're gonna do. I have no idea. I told you Twitter is Friday morning. Again, I don't know what these things are going to do but we will see. Thank you so much for having me.