 What's up Navigation Traders? Today is Friday, December 21st. Welcome to this week's video update. Before we jump into the alerts for the week, a couple of housekeeping notes. One, in our community, in the Trade Hacker community, we have added our courses. So instead of having to go out of the community, go into the membership area at navigationtrading.com. You can now access the courses from the community. And so over on the left hand side, you'll see this Trading Courses navigation menu item. Just click on that. And then you just have to request to join. Unfortunately, we wanted to have it just as so pro members would just immediately have access. But the way this platform is set up, you actually have to request it. And then our support will approve you right away. So just click on Trading Courses hit request to join. And then you'll have access to all the courses right there in your community. And so what that'll look like, let me go back to this one here. So then you'll have it all here. So Iron Condor Core, Short Strangles, Calendar Spreads, Butterfly Spreads, you know, each of these will drop down and you will be able to view all the videos right here in the community. So hopefully that's helpful. Hopefully that creates a little bit of efficiency. If you need to go back and watch a video on a specific topic, it'll be right here in the community for you. So just wanted to update you on that. What else we got going here? So real quick, Market Hours over the holidays, Monday, December 24th on Christmas Eve, the market closes early at 1pm Eastern, 12pm Central. So we may send out some alerts in the morning if necessary, but volume is going to be really thin. So not looking to do a bunch of trading unless obviously it's warranted with our positions. Tuesday, Christmas market is closed. And then Tuesday, January 1st on New Year's Day, the markets closed too. So just a little FYI there. And then lastly, before we get into the alerts, just wanted to update you on this week's Who Got Caught Being Hot? Helping Other Traders. Our man DR, as he goes by in the community, is our contributor this week. So a lot of great questions, a lot of great helping other traders, answering questions, providing just thoughts and different value in the community. So thank you DR, you got caught being hot. And we're going to give you a little bit of swag. I already sent you the link. So enjoy that and make sure you take your picture with your swag when you get it and post it in the community. All right, so let's jump into the alerts for the week, starting with Monday, which was the 17th, I believe, yes. So we did an opening adjusting trade in FXI. We had a butterfly on there. We just added a put butterfly out in the February cycle. At that point, I had 60 days to expiration. And then we still are holding our other call butterfly as well. So if we take a look, here's the one that we just added pretty close to where we just put it on. And then here's our one in Jan. Let me reset these so I can check the appropriate boxes for you. Here's the one in Jan. So you can see prices moved out of its range. We entered that new one, centered around price here. So just waiting for price to kind of ping pong back and forth. Hopefully that's the goal anyway. Next trade was a rolling adjusting trade in CL, our arch nemesis oil at this point. So we basically just rolled one of our short strangles from February to March. So February had 29 days. March had 58. There was very little value left on our untested side on those calls. So we just wanted to roll them down. And with 29 days to expiration, instead of staying in that cycle and then having to roll again, when we got down to 21 days, we just rolled the entire spread out to March. So now we're holding the inverted 54 calls, 56 puts in March. So let's take a look at that one. We've got two different pieces in here. This is the, what did I say, 54, 56. Yeah, 54 calls, 56 puts. 54 calls, 56 puts. So it's this one here. So you can see a price has kind of, it's moved down a little bit since then. It's a little bit out of our range. So definitely looking for some upside in oil. It's up a tiny, tiny bit today. I posted in the community that oil is actually green. It's something wrong with my screen because it has been doing nothing but going down, down, down. Hopefully we can get a little bounce here. I mean literally if we could get a bounce of just a few dollars, let it consolidate and hang out, roll a couple times, we'd be fine. We just got to stop the bleeding from it continuing to go down. So hopefully that accommodates us here over the next couple of cycles. The next trade was a closing trade in MU. This is Micron Technology. This was a pre-earnings long straddle. Haven't been doing many earnings related trades just because implied volatility has been so high. We'd rather use our capital on our core income premium selling strategies, but we did dip into MU and ended up being a loser. It never, never could get profitable. Well, this was a, we're looking for an expansion in implied volatility, which we got a little bit of, but there wasn't enough of a price movement to make a difference for this one. So if we just take a look at a chart of MU, we got in back on the 12th. So we got in right here and price did move down some and then implied volatility. So we got in after implied volatility contracted. So implied volatility did come up a little bit. Price did come down, but just not enough before earnings. And we want to be out of these before earnings because that implied volatility got crushed, although it didn't get crushed as much as it normally would after an earnings announcement just because of the overall market volatility. But anyway, ended up booking that one as a small loser in MU. Next trade was an opening trade in ZB. So he sold some premium in the bonds, IV percentile for TLT was up at 77 at that point. It's pretty close to where we put it on now. Bonds have been fairly strong over the last few weeks with the market going down, having that inverse correlation. You can see this is pretty close to where we put it on, pretty dead centered within our strangle there. So just waiting for some time to pass in ZB. Next trade was another rolling adjusting trade in CL. So very same thing that we did with our other one. We just adjusted our calls down and with 28 days to expiration, we went ahead and rolled out to the next expiration cycle. So now we're in this one, we're holding the 53 calls, 63 and a half puts. So if we go back to oil and take a look at that one, let's go ahead and reset this. I really don't know why TOS does that. It makes you reset to uncheck and check these boxes sometimes. But pretty similar scenario here. So here's our adjusted inverted strangle, just looking for some upside to benefit that oil trade. So hopefully we get some of that cyclicality in the next couple of cycles here. Next trade was a rolling adjusting trade in ES. So this is our long put vertical that we've just continued to keep on for that short delta exposure. We're over 50% of max profit on that piece of the trade. So we just wanted to roll our strikes closer. And we went ahead and rolled out from January to Feb, out there with 58 days to expiration. So if we take a look at that now, ES has gone down a little bit even since then, we're almost at another 50% of max profit again after we've rolled. So we'll look at that next week. And if prices continue lower, we'll continue to rinse and repeat, do the same thing. We are in February, so we're not going to roll out in time again. So we would stay in February, which currently has 56 days to expiration. We would just simply roll our strikes closer, lock in that credit, and then just continue to manage that as needed. Next trade was a closing trade in EEM. So we closed our short strangle, booked around 50% of max profit on that piece of the trade. We had several adjustments on that EEM trade. So we ended up just booking a small profit overall, but we, out of EEM, implied volatility is still nice and high. And so I'll get to the EWZ trade here in a minute, but we could have, we were looking at both re-entering in EEM, which if we take a look at that, you know, implied volatility up at that IV percentile in that mid 70 range. And then EWZ is a little bit lower, but I just liked the risk reward and the amount of, and the capital usage a little bit better on EWZ. So we went ahead and sold premium in EWZ, which, which I'll get to here in alert here in a second, but we're out of EEM. So we booked that one. If we go to our closed trades real quick, just want to show you, we were in that EEM trade going back to August. So we had quite a few different adjustments and roles, but again, just by staying mechanical, collecting those credits along the way, adjusting, just as we teach, we were able to come out of a, out of profit after the move went significantly against us right out of the gate. So good little learning lesson trade in EEM. Let's go back to the alerts here. And getting back to, okay, next trade was a rolling adjusting trade in DIA. So we've got a couple sets of short call verticals in DIA, which we've continued to roll for that short Delta exposure and just doing that again. So here in January, we rolled out to February and adjusted our strikes down to compensate for the market moving in our favor, going down. We're well over 50% of max profit on that piece of the trade. So we just wanted to extend that duration, keep that short Delta in our overall portfolio and continue to manage as needed. By the way, so we are, we took off our NVIDIA short call vertical today. So overall, we're actually slightly long Delta in the market. We're, we're basically at Delta neutral. We went ahead and booked profits in our NVIDIA trade. And so now we are just slightly long. So any rally in the market, we're going to be looking to add some short Delta, but that's where we're at right now. So maybe we can get a little Santa Claus rally and that'll benefit us. So we'll see what happens. Suresh posted in the community today that there won't be a Santa Claus rally. And he posted a little video of some Santa Claus dress up people getting in a fight in New York City. It's pretty funny. So if you haven't seen that in the community, go check that out. All right, moving. Oh, let's look at the platform. So DIA, so we've got two sets of short call verticals. Here is our one that was already out in February. It's already over 50% of max profit. We just did so many trades and so many roles today. I don't like to do them all at one time. I like to spread that out over time. So we're letting this one ride over the weekend, even though it surely could have been adjusted by rolling these strikes closer today, you know, depending on your overall portfolio, but we're just holding for now. The alert that I just mentioned is this one. So we rolled out to February and then it's already moved down some since then. So price is hanging out right here. Got a little bit of profit just looking for some more potential downside to benefit that piece. Next trade was a closing adjusting trade in IWM. So we had an iron condor. We closed out the call vertical side because price breached our downside break even. So we just closed the untested side and we're still holding that put vertical side. So if we take a look at IWM, this is that put vertical side as prices move down, it's busted out of our range. So still holding this, you know, I like just kind of as a visual trader. This gives you a good idea on toss. You've got this gray area, which represents the one standard deviation move. And you can see there's still a probability of price going back into range based on this, right? So for that case, we are at a negative theta position with price out here. However, you know, there's still a probability that price could move back into range. And so we're going to hold that for now. Of course, if price continues lower, we may just close that out. It'll close out that, you know, this is now a long delta position. And so, you know, we could close this out to kind of rebalance or acquire that balance in our portfolio by removing that that long delta. But for now, we're holding it. And we also have this other iron condor, which you can see is dead centered here. So we'll just continue to manage these as needed and play the game. Next was opening adjusting trade. And so that's the the iron condor that I just showed you. So we closed out the untested side of that one. And then we added a new centered one around price, which is pretty close to where we put it on. Next trade was a rolling adjusting trade in QQQ. So very similar to DIA, we've got a couple of short call verticals. Same thing, roll this one from January to Feb adjusted our strikes down. We were well over 50% of max profit on that piece of the trade. And so just wanted to lock that in and make the adjustment QQQs. So also similar to DIA, we've got this other one that's, you know, way up here. And then here is the, here's the current one that we just rolled. So already moved down since then in our favor. So just continue to hold those for that short delta exposure. Next trade was opening trade in EWZ. So that's the one I mentioned earlier. So we went ahead and sold some premium in EWZ. And that's pretty dead center right where we put it on. We've got a tiny bit of profit, just waiting for some theta to decay there. Did rolling adjusting trade in XLK. So this is another short delta position. This is a long put vertical in this case. And in this case, we, we just stayed in January with 29 days to expiration, not because we wanted to, but because there are no February monthly options yet. And so we just simply stayed in January and rolled our strikes down to lock in that credit and to keep that short delta exposure in our overall portfolio. So if we look at XLK, here's what that looks like. It's moved down a tiny bit since we did the roll, but not much. So just continuing to hold that for that short delta exposure. I did, I messaged toss. Let me actually bring that up. I messaged toss and I said, hopefully you can see this. I can't really make the print much bigger. So I said, Hey, when will the FEB monthly options be available in XRT and EWW? And this includes XLK as well. And here's what they said, the exchanges and market makers will offer the next option dates on a rolling basis. I've seen several spiders that for whatever reason are missing the FEB monthly. When I reached out and asked, they said, as more than likely has something to do with the spiders themselves and honestly didn't know, I'm sorry. So thank you for that brilliant insight, thinkorswim and the spiders. So I can't recall ever seeing a situation where the monthly options weren't available at this point. So I mean, we've got the January, but, and then it goes, there's a couple of weeklies, but the problem is, if you look at these weeklies, they are really illiquid. The bid ask spreads are much wider. There's some strikes that don't have any open interest. And so I'm not interested in getting into those options. So it's a case where we just stayed in January and we're going to wait for the February ones to open. And once they do, we may not roll right away, but depending on the situation of the trade, you know, eventually we may roll out to February, but we'll just see what happens there. All right. Next trade is in Apple. So this is one we did today on Friday. This was a long put vertical that we're holding for that short Delta exposure. We were well over 50% of max profit on this piece of the trade and similar to XLK, we just wanted to roll that to extend duration. So we rolled that from Jan to Feb and rolled down our strikes. So let's take a look at Apple. Here's what that one looks like. It's gone down a little bit since our roll even today. So looking good there, but just again, holding this for that short Delta exposure, take a look at a chart of Apple. I mean, it's just been on a slide to the downside with very little pullback. So continuing to work in our favor after it was working against us for so long. So almost back to even on that one, which is good. Next trade was a closing trade in GC. So in the gold futures, we had a short strangle on. We were only in this trade for 11 days booked a profit of over 30% of max profit in just 11 days. So we're out of gold. If we take a look at GLD, the implied volatility percentile implied volatility really contracted today, which gave us the opportunity to get out of there. So the IV percentile is right at 50. So if it pops back up next week, we'll look to potentially sell some more premium in either GLD or in the gold futures forward slash GC. So we are out of gold at this point. Good trade there. Next trade was an opening adjusting trade in IYR. So this is the real estate ETF. We had a kind of a tight iron condor in IYR and price moved out of its range slightly. And so we haven't adjusted that, that current one, but all we did was we added another one. And so, and we did it out in the next expiration cycle in February. So here's our January one. You can see prices come out of there. We haven't, we haven't closed the untested side yet. We're going to give it a little bit more time, a little bit more room to run. And so what we did is we just added the February one and we did that with four, four options just to keep that a little bit different than the five here. So that's what this one looks like here. Because we were further out in time, we could go a little bit wider. You know, as I, as I mentioned, to collect a good credit on our January one, we did this one a little bit tighter. So our short strikes were closer to the current price since then implied volatility has gone up and we're going out further in time. So we were able to collect a better credit, which allowed us to get wider on this one. And so we're just, we're just playing the waiting game there in IYR. Next trade was a closing adjusting trade in SPY. So we had an iron condor and price as in the rest of the market has moved down, came through our break even. So we closed out the untested side. We were still holding this put vertical side. And so in this alert, we closed it out. And the reason we did it a couple of reasons. One, it was way out of our range. So the probability of it getting back between now and expiration was pretty slim. And so we went ahead and closed it out. And by doing so, it also removed some of that long delta in our overall portfolio, which helped kind of balance that back out a little bit. So we are now out of that iron condor. We still have another full iron condor in SPY. And you can see with this move, it's slightly out of range here. We're going to give it over the weekend again, you know, if it bounces back in, great. We'll hold on. If not, we'll close out the untested side and then potentially add a new centered iron condor around the current price. But that's where we're at on SPY. And you can see on the chart, I mean, again, you know, just major sell off this last couple of weeks here, which has been great. Unfortunately, it's taken away all of our short delta. But that's okay. I'd rather see this because down markets mean higher implied volatility, which means more opportunity. So just continuing to play the game as needed. We definitely could use a little bounce here though. You know, so we'll see what happens. Okay, next trade. And the last trade is a closing trade in Nvidia. So we had a short call vertical. We got to about 50% of max profit. We went ahead and rolled that to extend duration. Got another 50% of max profit on after the roll. And then today, we went ahead and booked that booked over $500 of profit on that trade. So nice trade in Nvidia and if we just want to take a look at the charts here, NVDA, you can see we got in after it, you know, it fell down, bounced back up. We'd like to enter after a little bit of a pullback, took a little bit of heat, but then it rolled over and treated us nicely and we booked a nice profit there. So good trade in Nvidia. Alright, so that's all the alerts. Let's take a look at some of the other positions that I didn't mention. Natty gas is actually after that big, painful move that it made, it has reversed and really come back into range and has been treating us nicely this week. So if we take a look at our two positions here, we've got this inverted strangle, where price is sitting right here, pretty dead centered. And, you know, we're not going to do anything yet. I mean, we're collecting that positive theta every day, we're getting that positive time decay, and it's pretty centered, even though it's, you know, getting to the point where almost 50% of max profit, we've got 38 days to expiration. You know, so if we're not going to roll out to March yet, the March options have, let's take a look, the March options have 60 some days to export, yeah, 66. So, you know, maybe at the end of next week, we might consider rolling to go ahead and lock that in. But right now we're just going to hold it at least for another week and just let that time decay happen. And then our other piece is the four strike straddle, unbelievably came down and actually is lower than the four strike. And so we're just the same thing here, just continue to play that waiting game, letting more theta decay as we get closer to expiration as we get closer to that 21 days to expiration, we will potentially cannot, you know, book this credit rollout for another credit and continue to play that game with Natty gas. So hopefully, I mean, it'd be great if Nat gas just kind of settled down right in here and just kind of bounced around in this range. I mean, that would be optimal. Of course, the market doesn't always do what you want it to. So we'll see what happens and play the game as necessary. Oops. Let's go back here. Bonds, I mentioned wheat. We've got an iron condor in wheat still. And we're pretty close to a point of booking that one. We may look to add to this and go out this one's in February with 35. Next week at the end of the week, when March gets kind of under that 60 60 day point, we may add to this, add some more credit into our wheat trade. Apple, I mentioned DIA, EWW. I mentioned that one. No, I didn't. Okay. So we've got this adjusted strangle. So this is kind of in the same situation with that whole February option issue. We've got January with 28 days goes right to March. So there's no February monthly. Same thing with these weeklies. They're just not very liquid. So, you know, I mean, look at how wide these bid ask spreads are. So I'm not interested in going to the weeklies. We're going to wait for those February monthlies to come out or, you know, if we get to a point, we're almost, we're almost to back to profit in EWW after it had that huge move against us. And we've, we've, we had to roll. So we're pretty close to profit. So we may just book a profit or if those February options come out, then we will potentially roll to February and extend duration. I'd really like to roll because the implied volatility is nice and high. Of course, we could always reopen a new position anyway, but we'll just wait to see what happens and play it accordingly. I mentioned EWZ Facebook. We've got this adjusted strangle here. What a, what a move Facebook has seen to the downside over the last few days. We were up here at the upper end of our range and now we're down here at the lower end of our range. So just playing the game here. We'll, we'll probably roll this out. Once we get closer to expiration, if prices do continue lower, if it bounces back into range, then we'd be basically out of profit or, or right at break even. So we'll just wait for more, more decay, but we'll see what happens in Facebook over the next couple weeks. FXI, I mentioned IWM, I mentioned IYR, LULU. This is one we put on for some short Delta. It's coming around. It's actually positive today, even if, even though the market's down, barely holding on to positive. And so just waiting for a little bit more before we do anything there. We want, we'll probably wait till we get at least 50% of max profit on this one. And then we'll decide if we want to roll to extend duration or if we would, or if we just want to book it. Or if we just want to book it, we'll see. Just since I've been talking, Netflix has dropped. It's about 11, 15, 11, 14 AM. So we've got another half, half a day left in the market. So it's not over, but wow, Netflix is, is falling like a rock. So we're at a point here where we can almost take this one off for a nice profit, but we're going to hold that. Again, we need that short Delta exposure. So more than likely on LULU and Netflix, we would probably continue to hold in the way of rolling to extend that duration. QQQ's I mentioned, SMH. So we've got a short strangle on here. Price has breached the short strike here. If we take a look at just the calls, you know, we've got a little bit of premium in there yet. So haven't rolled down our calls, but just kind of holding on to that. We'll wait over the weekend before we do anything in SMH. Obviously, if it bounces back up, we'll just continue to wait before we book any profit. I mentioned FX, SPY, I mentioned XLK, XRT, another victim of the no options in February issue. Now, the reality is if we look at how much values in these calls, you know, we've got, you know, we've got 30 bucks left of premium. So it wouldn't be, you know, it wouldn't be abnormal just to not be doing anything anyway. But, you know, I do want to roll down these calls because if the market does continue lower, those calls aren't really helping us. You know, most of that profit is already out of there. So once we get those FEB options, then we will definitely do that, you know, roll out to FEB and roll our calls down. If next week we still don't have the FEB options, we'll just simply roll the calls down and stay in January and do what's necessary there. The other thing is we may add another piece to this. So applied volatility nice and high at the 98 level, you know, add another short strangle kind of centered around the current price. So that is where we are with all of our alerts. That's where we're at with all of our positions. Everybody have a great weekend, have a merry Christmas. And we will talk to you next week. Like I said, we'll do, we'll probably do some alerts early on Monday morning when the market opens. It's closed in the afternoon. And then it's closed on Christmas day, which is Tuesday. So short week of trading next week. Everybody have a great holiday, spend some time with your family, get away from trading, reset and look to come back strong later in the week. Talk to you later everybody.