 forget about what the social media hot stock or hot traders doing. Be the best version of yourself. You trade small caps, God bless, but be the best version of yourself. You're an options trader. Welcome to Access a Trader, the number one community for those who are committed to taking control of their trading in order to achieve success, profitability, and longevity. Thank you for joining us. Here's Dan Shapiro to help you find your edge, master your process, and own your future. Hey, guys. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to 2023. Welcome aboard, guys. Good morning. Hope everybody is doing great. Welcome to another edition of theaxisitrader.com weekend update show, the first broadcast for 2023. Before we get started, I want to wish everybody a very, very happy and healthy. Again, health is the most important part. You can have whatever you want. Does every desire meet whatever financial or relationship goal you want, but if you don't have the health to back it up, what is it for, right? So everybody, make sure again, like I've been preaching for years and years and years 2023, be a better friend to yourself. Take care of your health. Take care of your family. You only have one life to live. That's it. As far as I know, you don't get a mulligan. So live your best life and just be happy. You don't need to fight with anybody. You don't need to care about what anybody else is doing. Be the best version of yourself and everything else will take care of itself. So if you are brand new to the broadcast, my name is Dan Shapiro. I've been trading since 1999 in one of the, you know, one of the bigger prop names in the world at that time. Carl and financial owned generic trading. So I'm going on my 24th year. I've been through the internet craze. I've been through a time in my life from 2001 through 2003 that I didn't make a single penny in those two years. I've traded a number of bear markets, including the bear market from last year. And the most important part is I'm here, right? I'm still here. So the most important part out of everything that I just said was if you are watching this broadcast, and this was your first year of trading, congratulations, right? You made it through your first year. I think it's a big, big deal. I don't think a lot of people give themselves enough credit, whether you lost, made or indifferent, the more important part is you got that first year under your belt, right? If this is going on your second year of trading, or your third year of trading, congratulations, you've traded your first bear market. Okay, we'll get to that in a second. I do believe that a trader can't really put into perspective how important their journey is without trading a number of bear markets. The bear market that I traded from 2001-2003 was, I don't want to use the word, but the whole Ben Laden market, right? The whole fear of anxiety, of waking up in the morning of safety, then came the mortgage crisis from 2007-2009, a factual, materialistic, global potential demise of the financial system. That was kind of a big deal. And this last one that we saw from 2022, which out of all the bear markets, well, the several that I traded, this one was the most orderly, and this is the more of the three very, very biased of bears. But there were so many periods of time in 2022, which I'll show you in a second, that the bulls had a really, really good time. It was very organic, right? It was very, very tradable, but the most important part is you did it, right? And give yourself a round of applause. I know this doesn't seem like a big deal, but it is. I've always maintained that first two, three, five year period of your existence is going to build your foundation. It's all about screen time. It's all about, as a t-shirt says, stay patient, right? Don't compare yourself to a trader who's trading for 20 years, if you're only trading for 20 months. Your time will come, right? The screen time is everything. Don't put a lot of pressure on yourself. Don't try to be in the predicting business, right? I'm not in the predicting business. Every single video that I record, I have no idea what's going to happen the next day. I'm prepared for it, right? I'm prepared for it, but I have no idea, right? I have absolutely no idea. I'm wrong a lot. Sometimes, like, for example, last Thursday, going into Thursday's day, the way we closed, right? The way we closed at the low of the channel, I was 2,000% cell bias, and we had a pretty aggressive bounce back day. Again, it's okay to be wrong, right? It's okay. Trust me. Everybody's wrong in this business. It's okay to be wrong theoretically. Just don't be wrong financially. That's being stubborn, that's having an opinion, that's having a bias, that's putting yourself in a situation that the more important part of what you're doing is being right instead of being rational, instead of being solvent. And I think a lot of traders, unfortunately, they go belly up in this business, and that first two to three to five-year channel, because they're trying to be smart. They're trying to outsmart the market. They're trying to show everybody how talented and how brilliant they are. And again, it's the easiest business to get into. It's the easiest business to quit, and it's the hardest business to get back into because it's sold to moralizing mentally and it takes away your money, it takes away everything that you have, your confidence, and your money is gone. You can't get it back until you are ready to go again. So this business is rough. I've never hid the fact that I hated this business. I hate this business because what it put me through that first five years of that darkest time of my life, think about it, try going two years from 2001 to 2003 after the internet craze from 99 to 2001. Try to go two years without making any money, and then you're trying to rationalize every single day while the depression is kicking in while the walls are closing in on you. Why can't you replicate those results? And you realize you don't know how to trade. You never did know how to trade. It becomes very, very depressing, and it was the most darkest time in my life as I never hid the fact I had periods of suicidal thoughts. Thank God that God gave me the strength to kind of move on, but the most important part is I will never have love for this business because it just exactly would have put me through. So the idea that you need to be in love with this to be very, very effective is nonsense. I think it's complete BS, but it's a job. It's a job, it's a very, very serious job. This channel is not designed for the investor that's looking out to Dan, where do you think Amazon is going to be in five years? Okay, high. I don't know. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But the point is we're not in the guessing business. We're not in the forecasting business. I see every single year all the time. What do you think the S&P is going to be? I couldn't tell you where the S&P is going to be on Monday, on Tuesday, let alone where it's going to be a year from now. And I don't think a lot of traders, when they went to sleep, when they went to sleep in December of 2021, had an inkling in their mind that this was going to happen. And these were the final stats going into for 2022. The S&P lost a staggering 19.5%. Just let that sink in. Let that sink in. The Dow dropped about 9%. And this is the big one. This is the big one, all the growth stories, all the high flyers, all the PEs, there were 10,000. And when the bubble popped, and the bubble popped, and Wall Street stopped paying for potential, NASDAQ lost 33%. And these are staggering numbers. These are not numbers that you can debate or have a subjective conversation. This is exactly what happened. We traded a bear market in 2022. When you look at 33% of the NASDAQ, it's very, very hard to spin it. It is what it is. And the common denominator for where we are right now, and you can see here where we are right now, we closed the same way we closed. Here we go. Let me just show you guys. So here is December. Here is December, here is, here we go. Here is the first trading day, right? The first trading day of 2022 was January the 5th. And we closed below the 50-day moving average. If you are brand new to this channel, number one, please subscribe. Again, we try to give an incredibly unbiased opinion of what we think is going to happen tomorrow, not the next day, not the following day, not the following year, tomorrow. And what happened was we closed below the 50-day moving average on January the 5th. And this started pretty much an eight-month cycle, right? With periods of pretty good strength in between. This is kind of what I've said in the past year. This has been the most bullish bear market of all time, because you did have periods of really, really good strength. Like here was a time in March that we had a month rally. Think about it, a month rally in a bear market is a lot. And then we lost the 50-day moving average again. And here we are, right? Here we are kind of present day, right? Here we are present day. And you can see, and here we are, let me just go back to present day. And so you can see 80% of the market in 2022 was traded below the 50-day moving average, like I said, with sporadic runs to the upside. And we've been saying all along, the market's not going to go straight down. The market's not going to be violent every single day. But the overall theme that 80% of the time, we are going to try and sell buys. And this is kind of the latest example here. Here we are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. Out of the 12 days, we have four days of upside, right? Out of the 12 days, we're below the 50-day moving average. We have four days of upside. So you can do the math. You kind of correlates exactly what I said. And the most important part going into this year, I know new traders are excited, right? I know you're excited. If you're in this business, especially only a couple of years that you probably spent the last couple of days partying, right? You've been partying with your friends, maybe some of your trader buddies, and you're sitting there, and I've done it. I've done it. You're sitting there in a night club or a bar or hell, even a house party, whatever the case may be, and you're drunk, and you're drinking, you're having a good time. Raise your glasses, guys. This is the year we kill it, right? This is the year we kill it. You come back the first trading day, you're excited, everything is great, and then the next thing you know of 15 minutes into the day, you realize that nothing has changed, just the date on the calendar and the year in the calendar, and you're still doing exactly the same thing you did from the previous week, and it becomes very, very demoralizing. And unfortunately, most traders kind of shut down mentally for that first week, and it becomes a really big, you know, big jab to the gut, right? A big reality check of that, hey, you haven't done anything different, right? You haven't done anything necessary to kind of progress your development. You're still doing the same thing. You're still waking up five minutes prior to the close and looking at the high list of the day, the hot stock list. You're still trading the same stocks that 99% of all retail traders are saying, and again, I've said this for many, many years, if you're trading the same stocks as everybody else, well, why are you expecting different results, right? Everybody piles in at the same time, the same denominators. The traders are still trading on these little one-minute intervals, which is incredible to me. Again, for all you guys who don't know, we trade on the 60-minute channels, and the most important part is you're still doing the same thing, repeating the same thing over and over and over again, and now you're expecting different results just because it's a brand new year, and I've been there, right? I've absolutely been there, and the key to this business is find your edge. I know it's a very broad generic statement, but you're not going to find your edge trading the same type of stocks, the same type of way of everybody else. You're just not. That's why it's called retail. That's why when you open up a chessboard, the pawns are the first one to die, right? It's not the king and the queen. It's the pawns, and unfortunately, retail is part of the pawns. So if you're looking at the hot stock, again, maybe you'll make money, right? Maybe you won't, but it's not an edge. It's just something that you are doing for the day, like betting draft kings, like betting on sporting events. Maybe you won, maybe you lose, but it's very, very tough to sustain an edge over the markets. Again, I don't have all the answers. I've seen a lot of the questions. I don't have all the answers every single year. The only thing I'm trying to do is just develop, right? Just develop in ways mentally, technically, right? This year, towards the end of the year, I found, well, and I haven't found, we've been using it for a long time, but I personally have been starting just to start trading a lot of rejections off the daily and 60-minute channels who've been working pretty well. I know a lot of you guys have been doing it for years, but this is my development, right? This is my personal journey. And again, you know, I'm not trying to be the best trader in the world. Hell, I hate myself more than anybody on the planet. Nobody loads themselves more than I do, but this is why I'm grounded. This is why I look at the market in reality. I look at the market, at the market that I have, not the market that I want. Again, everybody wants a bull market, right? I want a rabid bull market. I want a market that every single night you could just take over nights and they just gap up every single night, right? Isn't that what the internet craze was? You know, all my friends, to this day, to this day, from anybody who started in 99 and 2000, they will not acknowledge that we had no idea what we were doing. Again, I traded with one of the best traders of all time, Meyer Hoffman, one of my mentors, Ron Shear, one of my mentors at Generic Trading. You could Google them. They got bought out by the Royal Bank of Canada. There was 12 pages for that book, Flash Boys and the Royal Bank of Canada acquired Generic Trading in Carlin Financial years back. And they portrayed us as thugs. It was almost like a scene out of the Sopranos, which we weren't, okay? But I've been around for a very, very long time. So I'm not trying to be the greatest trader in the world. I'm just trying to be less shitty every single day. That's it. I'm just trying to take away things that I know I shouldn't do every single day and try not to do it. I'll never be perfect. I make a lot of mistakes. I'll continue to make a lot of mistakes. But that's where human beings are. But the most important part is, as like you, we made it, right? We made it to another year. So it's another year under our belts. Another year of screen time. There's another year of watching news events. There's another year of being the best version that you can be. And that's the only thing you can ask for. You will never in a million years. And this is why the whole alert service thing is ridiculous. There's no way you will ever emulate another trader's results. There's absolutely no way. You don't have the same account size. You don't have the same history. You don't have the same mental makeup. You don't have the same financial lifestyle. So how can you possibly emulate another trader's results? Guys, forget about what the social media hot stock or hot traders doing. Be the best version of yourself. You trade small caps. God bless. But be the best version of yourself. You're an options trader. If you're an E-mini trader, if you trade technology, the high-baton name just like me, be the best version of yourself. Because without the best version of yourself, you're never living up to your potential. And the worst thing possible you can do in this business is go from style to style, process to process, trader to trader. And you'll die out before your potential even comes close. So the best piece of advice going into this year is, again, just relax. Stay patient. I don't know if you can see my shirt. Stay patient. That's me, by the way. Stay patient. Let everything come to you. When your time comes, everything will click. Don't put a lot of pressure on yourself. Don't put yourself in a situation that you are doing something outside of your comfort zone. Don't deviate from your process, whether you found one or not, or still looking. Never deviate and let the market tell you you're wrong technically. Don't have an opinion of what you think is going to happen because the market changes on a dime. The market trades fluently. And the next thing you know, you're stuck with a bias and you're upside down in the trade. You don't want to be that trader. You want to be around. The best type of business and the best type of environment is the person who stays in business and thrives in whatever environment as well. If you are just a long biased trader, again, again, look at those stats that we showed, right? Look at those stats that we showed. It's very, very tough considering we've been talking about what happens generally underneath the 50-day moving average. What happens generally when the market's below, bearish action and 2022 has proved it. Is it possible the bull start reclaiming channels start moving their way up? Absolutely. Again, there's nothing more that I would love than a bull market. It's just so much easier to navigate than a bear market. There's much more liquidity. There's much more market participants. Everybody's in a much better mood, right? Food tastes better. The air smells fresher. Everybody's just a better overall human being, but unfortunately life is not fair. Trading is not fair. And again, just like 2022, we start the year two weeks in below the 50-day moving average. And the way I like to approach every single day, I look at the macro, I look at the big picture. Where are we? We already know. This is how I kind of prepare for my day. Where are we? We're below the 50-day moving average. So I know 80% of the time we're going to be below because again, that's the data that shows us going into 2023 from 2022. So I already know that there's a bearish sentiment. Yes. We rallied the last couple of days. Yeah, absolutely. We rallied a number of times in 2022. It doesn't change the fact that we were still 33% down in the NASDAQ. So I look at the overall environment. I know we're to the downside, but I know now the Q's are building a little bit of channel here. I also know that 10-day is the next supply zone and the next supply zone on the Q's is 267. Everybody see that? That's 267. So for the bulls to have a chance to prolong this dead cab bounce, we're going to need to reclaim. The Q's are going to need to reclaim this 267 on a close. If we can reclaim this 267 on a close, I know going into the next trading day, I know that again, if you believe that stocks trade from supply to supply and demand to demand, I know that if we can reclaim the 267 level on the Q's, we will rally to at least attempt the rally into this 273 level, which is the next supply zone. This is the next measured potential. So when you see me, for example, tweeting something on Twitter saying, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, has room measured potential to this area, this is what I mean, the next supply zone. So if the Q's can reclaim 267 on the close, then yeah, we do have a very, very strong shot of a move back to 273. And if the Q's can reclaim 275, then we go back to the 50-day moving average of 278. And obviously, that's what every bull wants. We want to remount, to reclaim whatever you want to call it. We want the bulls ultimately to close at 278 because if that's the case, they reclaim the 50-day moving average and that starts a higher channel and it starts moving up the higher prices. Unfortunately, we're not at that point yet. We're just going day-to-day, trade by trade, one day at a time, one trade at a time. But there's a flip side to this as well. We know that again, we're again in downside bias, and we know that 267 is going to be a big area to the upside, but we also know the opposite. And that's the whole point of trading both sides of the market, putting yourself in a position that you're prepared for both sides, and that's what we do. We have an opinion for the next day. We have a sentiment for the next day, but we also have to be conscious there's a top of the channel that we need to build, and there's a bottom of the channel that we need to build as well. So 267 is to the upside, but look at the base that's putting into the downside as well. Everybody see that, right? On December the 29th, the low here is 262.25, right? The low from Friday was 62.29. So there's your channel, right? And the longer it builds in that channel on both sides, the higher probability it'll break that channel, confirm that channel, and start moving higher. So going into this week, the only thing that matters to me, okay? Not to anybody else, not to any other trader. Only thing that matters to me is 267 to the upside and 262 to the downside. If we start reclaiming 267, I think we go higher. If we start reclaiming 262, then I believe that ultimately we were going to get down to the bottom range here of 254. That's it. Everything else doesn't matter. Everything else is noise. Everything else is opinion. Everything else is subjective. Everything else is, and by the way, if you're still arguing with somebody on a symbol on social media, you're really doing it wrong, right? Nobody cares, guys. At the end of the day, nobody cares. Nobody cares about my opinion. Nobody cares about your opinion. It's all about price action. The cues are either going to reclaim 267 to the up, or break down below 262 and test this 254 channel, or nothing is happening. We don't care where Apple is going to be three years from now, right? I don't at least. So the most important part is be the best version of yourself. Put yourself in a situation that you feel comfortable in your own skin. You don't need to poll 2,000 people on Twitter. What do they think about Tesla going into the new year, right? It's all in the charts, and that's the greatest kept secret. That's not a secret at all. It's all in the chart. So let me give you guys a specific number, right? Specific. Usually on social media, we always kind of save the specific numbers for access to Trader. But let me show you guys exactly what I'm looking for going into Tuesday, right? So here's a chart on Tesla, right? The same way we just talked about the cues, I'm going to give you a symbol. But obviously, this is my favorite stock. I traded both ways. It's been a phenomenal trader since the breakdown of the 50-day moving average. Big ranges, breakdown, big ranges, breakdown. Have we rallied off some levels in the past? Absolutely. As a matter of fact, we're three days into this kind of reversal. And as you can see here, on Friday, it stopped right at the linear regression line. You see this linear regression line? How it stopped perfectly. So I know there's a channel building in Tesla. And the longer it stays in that channel, it will give us a trade, whether it's going to be the upside to the downside, still to be determined. But this is kind of what I look for, okay? Right? So you see the top of the channel's highs, right? Top of the channel's highs was 124.50, right? That was Friday's highs, right? 124.50. The low for the last couple of days has been the five-day moving average support of 117.50. Everybody see that guys, right? So you have 9, you have 24.50 to the upside, and you have 17.50 to the downside. So what's going to happen? If Tesla can start building, and the word building just means price action developing over Friday's channel. So building doesn't mean, well, then it traded 124.60 and then it died. No, it just traded it. It has to build. And what it built is basically buyers and sellers have to establish a new base over Friday's channel for at least three to five minutes, right? Volume and price action has to take place above Friday's channels. If they can do so, and here's kind of when we talk about measured potential again, if they can do so, so the next measured potential, if they start building off that 124.50, 125 is 129, right? We're not saying Tesla's going to go back to 145, 176, 200, again, baby steps. We're just trying to win our interval. We're not trying to guess the closing price. So we have 124.50 to 125 to the upside with measured potential here at 129. And to the downside, right? To the downside, if Tesla starts confirming the five-day moving average, which is the shortest term sent on whoever has control of the five, as usually has control of short-term price action, if the bears start building, right, the price action continues to take place below 17.5, 17, right? The measured potential is this lower channel of last week's lows of 108. So you have measured potential of 129 to the upside of a 124.50, 125 build, and you have a measured potential of 108, initial measure potential of 108 if we start building below 17.5. Obviously, the value is to the downside because you have only five points to the upside and you have not only 11, you know, nine, 10 points to the downside, but then if it starts building, then you have $100 price potential as well. So every single day, that's all I do, right? So the idea that I'm trying to predict the market or anybody's trying to be right is ridiculous. I'm looking at price action, okay? I'm looking at a channel development to the upside. I'm looking for the channel development to the downside and whichever side confirms, that's the channel where I'm trading. Again, I'll give you one more, right? Give you one more, like look at AMD, right? AMD is a little bit tighter than Tesla, but you have the same thing brewing, right? Look how tight it's starting to get here in the last couple of days. The upside channel of AMD, right? The high here is 65.20. Friday's high was 64.80, right? 64.80 and 65.20. The bottom here, it stopped twice at 63. You see that? Thursday it stopped at 63.06. Friday it stopped at 63.14. So the top of the channel here is 65.20, right? It needs to build for a possible move back to 67. And if it starts building below 63, it should have a move all the way back down to 60. That's all we do. We're not trying to guess. We're just putting ourselves in a position to let the market tell us which way the wind is going to blow. And we're going with the tidal wave, not against it. And that's it, guys. That's it. I wish I could make it more. I wish I could sound smarter or have a better, broader indicators of what we're trying to look for or an opinion of what's going to happen three months from now. We don't. We're stupid. I'm an idiot. I'm the king of the idiots. I let the price action dictate to us what's going to happen next. And matter of fact, guys, just a quick last piece of business before I let you go on for your day. Today and tomorrow is the last day that you can take advantage of the holiday sale, the holiday trial. If this interests you, right? If trading channels interest you or you're always interested in trading pivots, I think I gave you just a little bit of a microcosmic view of exactly what this PS60 theory is, what it's not. But most important, seeing it in real time with the moving parts is a really, really pretty cool thing. So that's it, everybody. I hope everybody has an incredible long weekend. I wish everybody nothing but health and happiness and all your wishes and desires. I hope you are looking for, if it's not with pivots and it's not with me, I really hope you find what you're looking for and just be, again, the best version of yourself that you can be. Happy 2023, everybody. God bless and I will see you all on Tuesday. Take care.