 OK, let me know if you see my screen. I can see your screen. I'm going to go ahead and let you go. I'm going to get out of the way. It's your turn now. As Jeff said, I'm so happy to be presenting here today. This is my first presentation for 2023. So happy New Year, everyone. It's hard to believe. Tomorrow is the last day of January. This year already, I feel, has gone so fast. And of course, it's been a really good year so far to trade the market. The market is falling today. It is earnings season right now. We have many, many, many, many, many companies that report quarterly earnings. And when they report earnings, they tend to gap. So the one thing that's interesting is that when stocks gap, I look to rate them. And I really prefer to short. So we're going to talk about gaps today. We're going to talk about shorting. And we're going to talk about the market. If you have questions, you can plop it in the room and ask me if you have any questions. Sean's asking about my new apartment. I'm in my new apartment right now. It's fabulous. That's all I have to say about that. So as I'm talking to you right now, I'm looking at Central Park. It really doesn't get any better than this, people. But I've worked very, very, very, very, very, very hard to get to this point. And in fact, I said to some people a couple of days ago in the class, I said, if you could have everything you want in five years from now, or eight years from now, or seven years from now, or three years from now, if you could make all your dreams come true, would you do everything that you needed to do to make that happen? And the thing is, I think many traders are short-sighted in their goals. They want everything now. They want everything yesterday. We have to be committed to our goals and committed to our dreams to be able to make them happen. We can have everything we want right now, right this second, right now, tomorrow. Everyone wants the big trade, the huge trade. It's going to make up all the losses they ever had from the market. And they're going to make millions of dollars in a month or a week. It's just not reality. That's not how life works. But I will tell you from my own personal experience how life works. If you are committed to your own goals, if you are committed to your trading, and if you are committed to your own success, you absolutely can be successful trading the market, and you can be successful as a trader. Again, sometimes things take longer than we think. But if we continue on the path, we go through the ups and downs, you can get there. And again, I think a lot of traders tend to jump around too much as well. They'll do a strategy for a week or a day or a month, and then they'll quit. You can't jump around from thing to thing to thing. If you want to be successful, you have to stay and stick on one thing and get really good at it. So again, about 15 years ago when I started trading, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I learned basics of technical analysis, but I didn't learn how to make money in the market. So I ended up teaching myself with that basic foundation of technical analysis, my own method on gaps, and that is what I started to do, but it took me about three years to figure out my system. And now I've been teaching people how to trade my system for 10 years. So again, if you're committed to your goals, if you're committed to your dreams, you can get there. So keep your eye on the ball. That's the best thing I can say to people. And since we're starting now at 2023, and it's early in the year, you can set goals for yourself between now and the end of the year. So set the timeframe for yourself. Say by the end of this year, I wanna make this much money trading. By the end of this year, I wanna be trading full-time, be able to quit my full-time job, or whatever the case may be. And again, start out with goals that are realistic, okay? And then you can get there. You can get there. So let's get right into it. We're gonna talk to you about shorting for fast profits. And the reason I like to short is exactly the title because you can make money shorting fast. Why? Because panic comes into a stock or the market very, very quickly. Today's a great example of that. The market gap down today, we're selling off. We're probably gonna sell off here into the close. I'm not looking right now, but I know that we're red. And again, we very likely could be down tomorrow morning as well. We have some data out tomorrow morning. It's not till after the open, but we're probably gonna be down tomorrow, gapping down tomorrow in the market since we're falling here into the close. If you have questions, you can email me at melissathestalkswitch.com. You can also call me at 929-3200 gap. And you can follow me on Facebook, YouTube, or Skype. For those of you that don't know me, I appear on Fox News, CBS News, News Nation. And I talk about the market and I talk about economics and I talk about the things that are happening in the world. And that has given me a lot of great experience as well. So although a lot of people left New York City, I did not. Again, one of my dreams was to live in New York. And I do believe that New York City will come back. So I decided to stay in New York. And again, appearing on TV has been one of my dreams as well. So stay true, okay? To your dreams, if this is something that you wanna do, no one said it was gonna be easy, okay? It doesn't have to be crazy hard, but you may have some ups and downs, all right? So can you run a living in the stock market as a professional trader? The answer is yes, but you have to know what to do. That's a big part of it. So it's a new year and that can mean a new you. It can mean a brand new you for trading. You can make more money this year than you made last year trading. So it's time to go for it. Again, commitment is part of it. Learning is part of it. And keeping your eye on the ball. So I have in here last year's results for the day trader run a live day trading run, Monday through Friday. That opens at the morning at nine a.m. and we start trading at 9.30 a.m. This was the results for last year, $651,079. I did move last year, Sean mentioned he follows me, so I took a few weeks off. So I would have made more last year if I hadn't moved, but I did need to take some time off to move. Either way, it was a good year. Now again, like I said, I focused on shorting. So most of these trades, the ticker symbols are all here, are shorts. Some of the trades we did were longs, but actually I prefer to short. One of the reasons I prefer to short is because I can get in and out quickly. When you're in and out of a trade fast, then you don't have to worry about market news or data. The Fed rate announcements, all of that stuff. You can book the money very, very quickly. So this is with an average day trade risk. These were trades on margin of $2,800 per trade. You can risk less. You can take a hundred share lots if you want to. How much you risk has to do with the cash size of your account. Everyone says, well, I need a lot of money to trade, especially if I'm gonna trade equities or trade on margin. You can train with small size and still make a profit. You have to know what to do. Some can have a million dollars in the bank, but if you don't actually know what to do, guess what? You're gonna lose that million dollars. So having a lot of money doesn't necessarily equate to you being successful. Okay. You wanna help me feel a little bit later. I'm hearing someone talk, Jeff. I thought they made a, I'm not kind of in the backyard. Yeah, I said. I'm not in the backyard. Hello. Jeff, are you there? Can everybody hear me? Cause I was hearing people talking. I hear the talking stop now. I'm gonna keep going. Hello Melissa. Sorry, we have a mic over here. I'm sorry about that. I'll be quiet now. So empower yourself today to trade the market. And that's what we're gonna talk about. So let's talk about confidence. Trainers lack confidence in their ability to train well. They lack confidence in their choices of what to train. Lack of confidence is usually result of lack of knowledge. In general, there's a lack of confidence in traders across the board. This is something that I think people can work on and can improve on. So it's time to get confident. Confidence in yourself. And not only that, confidence in your ability to train, okay? So what gives you confidence? How are you gonna get there? How are you gonna do it? Information gives you confidence. And then that confidence helps you make money. And again, as a trader, what's the information that I have? What's the information that you have? We have charts. It's live price data. Again, how do I make trading decisions based on technical analysis, which is looking at past price data to make decisions on future price movements in the stocks and the market? I just told you earlier what I thought was gonna happen today, that we would close near the lows, that we would close and drop off today into four o'clock and that we're probably gonna gap down tomorrow morning, okay? So how am I predicting all of that? Well, I'm reading it in the price action, okay? So you don't have access to research reports. You don't know what the Fed is gonna say exactly and Wednesday they're gonna raise rates, but we don't know their statement. We don't know how the market's gonna react to that because we don't know what they're gonna say. We don't have access to that information until it comes out, but when it comes out, we can see the price reaction and then we can make decisions based on that information, based on looking at criteria that I look at in the daily chart. And again, this is what I do in every given day, okay? So you can alleviate anxiety up trading by learning what to do and learning what to do is important, all right? So you can't expect to go into the market, trade blindly, make money without having a system or a strategy or having any idea what to do. So if you wanna make your trading dreams happen, you have to learn a successful strategy first and then the money will come. It's not the backwards way around, okay? And again, what happens with a lot of people and they struggle with this is that they start out with all these high hopes that they wanna make all this money, they end up not knowing what to do lose and then it becomes very difficult for them to move forward and they lose confidence, they lose conviction and then they never really get on the right path. So I'm telling you that getting on the right path is possible and I'm telling you that the student that you do it, the better off you're gonna be, the better off you're gonna make money and then the more confidence you will have. So the fact is that, and this is very, very important, many stocks in any given day have no strategy to trade as a day trade, okay? So you have to know that. Remember, trading is not long-term investing where you trade the trend. Learning what to do saves you money in the long run and on top of that, it saves you time. So even though there's an investment to opening up an account, you have to deposit money in an account to go through the process to actually risk money to trade. There's an investment if you wanna sign up for my class, you must pay me for the information and the time to take the class, that's an investment too. But in the long run, it pays off because it saves you time. As I said earlier, it took me three years to figure out my system. So the idea is that you learn from me without it taking you three years, okay? And for me, there was a process where it was many, many, many, many ups and downs of trading and losing money within that three years. I didn't develop my system trading on a demo. I did it with live cash and that was difficult, but it gave me a feel for really what worked and what didn't work. So that was important for me to really see to get the system down pat and to get the system right. So one strategy is all you need from the market. And again, I said this earlier, people flip-flop back and forth from too many things. Back and forth, back and forth, they wanna do Bitcoin, they wanna do futures, they wanna do options, they wanna do equities. They're doing all kinds of things all over the place. Just stay with one thing. Every day when I get up, I'm looking for a bullseye. I wanna hit that bullseye in and out and done. Like we did IBM last week, we shortened it, it worked. We went in, we took the trade, we got out, we made money, we were done, okay? That's literally how simple it should be for you each and every day. Again, this doesn't mean that every trade that I take wins. Some trades I take lose, but that is part of the mix that I assess in the risk. It's called calculated risk when I'm making a decision whether I wanna take the trade or not. So of all the trades that I take, say I take 10 trades, two we're gonna lose. I know that from assessing my system. And eight should be your expectation we'll win. So I have about a 77, 78% win ratio of my system that you wanna take the trade and you take the risk and you put in a stop. So looking for the bullseye is your goal and your aim. The faster again you can make money, the faster you can be done every day, the better off you're gonna be. Let's go over here, a very basic definition though of gaps, I've been talking about gaps. I'm gonna explain to you what a gap is. This is a chart of the QQQs. Now what happened back in here? And again, let's just go over what a gap is. A gap is a difference between the close and the open. So this was the market. It closed here at one price at four o'clock and open at a different price here at 9.30. So what happened on this particular day? The market gap down and fell, okay? This red bar depicts selling. It also is a gap down. Now I'm gonna show you another gap. Again, I prefer to short, okay? But this was a long where you could have gone long where the market and the QQQs closed at one price at four and open at a higher price. That is a gap up, okay? So this is a bullish gap and this is a bearish gap. Can you short of a bearish gap? No, can you go longer a bullish gap? No, can you short of a bullish gap? No, can you go longer a bearish gap? No, so I have a criteria that I utilize every single morning to determine if I look at the gap down, can I short it? Will it fall through? Will it go lower or is it gonna flip? And again, many traders think that gap fills work, they don't. While sometimes something will do what you wanna say, fail the gap. That does not work consistently, okay? So the success of myself and my traders and the people in my group comes from the consistency in the system. It's looking at the criteria and doing the same thing and looking for those same things. It's no one to look for, which many people don't, okay? I do all of my work in my pre-work in the pre-market in my analysis. So tomorrow morning I'm gonna get up in the morning, there's a bunch of earnings that are out, stocks reporting, IBM is reporting them, I mean, not IBM, UPS is reporting tomorrow morning, okay? I'm gonna get up, I don't know where UPS is gonna gap, I'm not in that trade right now, but I'm gonna analyze it, I'm gonna see if it's gapping, I'm gonna see if it's gapping down or up, okay? And then I'm gonna analyze it to determine if in fact I wanna trade it and if in fact I wanna short it, okay? And any questions in here, let me know if you wanna plop them in the room. So again, let's continue talking here about what is a gap. A stock gap for the opening price today is different than the closing price of yesterday's trading. A gap is a break in price action from one day to the next, simple, okay? But again, how do you know which gaps to do? How do you know what charts to do? How do you know what stock to do? Many, many I'm getting given days, anything goes with the market. So you can't always do Tesla every day or Apple every day or Microsoft every day because they're not gonna work. And many days they're gonna go, what, with the market? And again, a lot of days the market has been tricky, not just in the last month, but really in the last year, it's tripped people up. A lot of people do not expect the market to fall the way it did in 2022. And then by the end of the year, everyone was shorting, shorting, shorting, shorting, shorting everything. We had a very bearish month in December and everyone was to go long. Now everyone's saying, oh, it's it, we're high, we made the low of the year, do. Again, it's about assessing the gap even in the QQQs, even in the spot, which I'm saying that's what I mean by the market, it's the market ETFs. It's about assessing what it's doing on that particular day in the gap, okay? So this was Tesla just back here from December. We did this a lot. We did this a lot in the month of December. One, it worked. Two, it got sold off and it fell, okay? So institutional money was dumping Tesla during the month of December. You could even go back to say that was happening in September. Again, here was a gap. Again, this is back 2022 where Tesla closed your gap down, fell. I don't remember when it came out that he was buying Twitter and all that scuttle, but you could say there's many, many reasons that this was happening, but at the end of the day, again, the fundamentals don't matter to me. It matters when I see the gap. So this was a good gap here. You can see it. Again, this is a daily chart. So my focus is on gaps and specifically on bearish gaps. And my specialty is that right now, everyone wants to short everything since 2022. Is that the right thing to do? No, again, like I said, because in reality, the market is still in an uptrend. So in my analysis, I'm telling you, despite the fact that we've been shorting and sometimes we've shorted the market, the reality is that the market is actually still in an uptrend. It never went in a downtrend. Not according to me about how I determine trend analysis. So might we go in a downtrend this year? Maybe. I don't make trend decisions based on percentages. Like many people do on television, I do not. So I don't say, oh, it's 20% down there for it's in a downtrend. No, okay. And so the market actually held the uptrend. Even in 2022, even with the selling, I will go long in uptrends. I will go short in uptrends. I will short stocks in downtrends and I will go long stocks in downtrends. It has nothing to do with that. When you're an active trader, which is exactly what I am, I'm trading the weekly options. I'm trading the daily trades in and out between 9.30 and four and particularly just in the first few minutes of the day. So I'm not looking to long-term invest in any of these things. I'm looking to get in and out, chunk it out with money, with profit. So if you kind of learn from me, you're gonna be an active trader which you're chunking it, chunking it, chunking it. You're chunking it in and out. $1,000 here, $2,000 there, or $500 here. That is what you need to do where you're trading on an active basis, not long-term investing, or really not even worried about what the long-term trend is, okay? Any questions here so far? So getting back to what I was saying, keep in mind, don't trade without a strategy. Don't take ideas from strangers. Get to know someone first. So some of you here obviously have been following me, you do know me already. Love you do not. I always suggest if people go to my YouTube, subscribe to my YouTube, watch some of the videos, watch me on television, get to know me first. Part of hiring someone and deciding that you wanna learn from them is actually seen. Okay, is what this person's saying make it any sense? And then establishing the trust level to that person where you're understanding what you think that they're doing, that this is a concept that you can learn from them that maybe you wanna trade it. Again, don't short everything. It's very important to know that. You can't even do that even if the market turns. Even if the market would go bearish, you can't short everything. You can't short everything even though it's not gonna downtrend. You can't short everything in Tesla. Look how Tesla flipped around as well, okay? How do I know what stocks are gapping? Well, finding gaps is easy, Brian. That's not the process I go through. It's not about finding them. You can find gaps in any scanner. That's something that Jeff can talk to you about. I'm sure he has some type of setup for a scanner to find gaps. Finding gaps is easy. All you have to do is get a scanner if you want that. It's qualifying them to find the good ones, the good ones. Because again, there could be thousands of things that gap every day. It doesn't mean they're all good because they're not, okay? Finding them is easy. Qualifying them and determining which ones are gonna work and which ones are gonna work big and go in the direction of the gap and figure out the direction they're gonna go. That's where the analysis comes in. That's where the learning process is. Finding them is easy. And Jeff can talk to you about that when we're done. So anyways, the question is again, what do you do? When you've got the market in the sideways range, again, it's still an uptrend, but we're basing out sideways. What are you gonna do? You have to focus on specific stocks that do not need the market so that if the market falls, you don't care. If the market rallies, you don't care either, okay? Because if you need the market for your trade, you know, good luck, all right? While I'm very good at reading the market and I get it right a lot, I don't get it right every day. I gotta write today. But you know, this is one of these things that you have to look at what's really going on in the overall chart and say, I'm gonna do something specific. I wanna do something like, and again, I'm gonna go back to IBM's example. IBM didn't need the market. It fell, it went, boom, that's it, okay? You don't wanna have to worry about the market or being able to read the market or the trend of the market in order to make money as an active trader every day because it's gonna be challenging to you. And for many people, that is exactly one of the reasons that trading is challenging for them. They need the market and their trades and they can't read the market right. So let's get back to shorting. Shorting is happening fast, quick and less chance for hiccups as the day goes on. Again, many of the economic news comes out either in the pre-market, so we already see it, already got the information, already see it. I'm accounting for that in the gap when I do the rating and then later, I'm already in it and I'm already out by the time the Fed talks or anything else after 10 o'clock. So the idea of not having the hiccup of the data to mess up my trade is important as well. So why do I like to short? Well, one of the benefits of shorting is I have an inch. So for those of you again that have a volume and you know that I short, you know I've been doing this for 15 years. Again, I don't know why traders prefer to go long but it will always be the case that more traders prefer to go long than ever short. Why? Because they understand the concept of buying low and selling high because people like to trade their IRA and they can link along with their IRA but you can buy a put. You could buy a put. So you can do that. And again, you have to talk to your broker about it wherever you have your IRA but you can't outright short equities in an IRA. As far as shorting, I have an inch to do this so that gives me an edge for other retail traders that are out there because I know what I'm doing with this. Finding an edge will help you put you and set you apart from other people that are trading. That will help you make money. It's capitalizing on the moves. And for me specifically, it's also capitalizing on the moves, getting in really quickly. So when I take a trade in the morning and I short, I'm getting in the one minute chart. I'm getting in very, very, very, very fast and I have to know what I'm looking at before the market opens in the pre-market. Now here's the chart of the QQQs. This was back on the 17th when we fell. Again, the pre-market, we were up, then we flipped, then we dropped. So this is a 15 minute of the market where you can see where we actually fell off a cliff here. What are the red bars here in the chart depicting selling? So again, fast moves can happen quick. Why panic? There's no panic if I say, oh, this is a good buy. You're like, well, maybe I'll think about it buying that stock. Maybe I'll think about that one. Maybe I'll think about it. Maybe I'll think about it. If you were ready long something, then all of a sudden we're down. You will panic. You absolutely will. And then you'll be forced to make a decision like everybody else is that's in the stock. So again, panic is very rare to the upside. Panic buying is something that's very, very rare. You do have panic selling that comes in in stocks and that comes in a lot on a regular basis. So what am I looking for? I'm looking for institutional money. Are they selling? Are they buying? Are they buying the stock? Are they selling the stock? Are they shorting the stock? I'm looking to trade with institutional money, which is big footprints in the market, or stocks, big positions. And again, we're trading big stocks with volume, no penny stocks, no cheapy things, okay? So this one here we did, it was a long, again, it was a bullish gap up. It wasn't earnings. Stock was here, gap up, rallied. This was Morgan Stanley. We did it back in here. It was the middle of January a couple of weeks ago. What happened? We did calls in this and we also went long it, okay? And it worked. So again, this got bought with institutional money. You can see the price here were closed the night before at four o'clock. It was around 91 and change. And then it gapped up here and up in over 96, okay? So this is a nice gap up. So my system allows me to develop the all of the information that I have that I look at in the morning to see that this is not gonna fall, that this is not gonna drop, that this is not gonna fill the gap, that it's gonna get bought and it's gonna move up. And it did. And it ran all the way up and went all the way up to 99. So it was a nice trade. So we went long this, okay? So institutional money bought MS. Again, we talked about Tesla. Institutions were selling MS. They, I mean, not Tesla. They've been selling Tesla. Again, stock closed here, gap down, fell off a cliff. Again, December, the month of December specifically there were many gaps in Tesla. Many of them we did. Here was one even in the beginning of 2023 that we shorted that red bar with Tesla closed here, gap down, fell, okay? So institutions were selling Tesla. Institutional money was selling Tesla, we're shorting it. What's institutional money? It's big hedge funds, big professional traders, banks, big money in the market. So when you can find that power, it's very easy to make money if you can trade with it. You don't wanna trade against it. Again, if you trade against it, you're gonna get hurt. You're gonna lose. And you don't wanna lose. You wanna make money. That's the whole point, okay? So if you can learn to spot institutional money and trade with it, it's gonna make your trading life so much easier. You're gonna be able to make money on a regular basis and then you're also gonna get the big moves, okay? So if you have a thousand shares of something and it drops $2 and you're short, how much are you gonna make? $2,000, okay? So it's the same concept. Add the size, get the right entry, get the move. We want big moves, $1, $2, $3, $4. So we're capturing these moves in a very, very specific entry in the one-minute chart but I'm looking at the daily to make the decision, okay? The 15-minute chart which gapped up. Well, I'm just showing you. I'm just, I didn't do anything here. I'm showing you this. I did not short this because this gapped up. I'm just showing you here the panic that came in and stepped in here and how it reversed. I did not short this day, this trade. In the 17th, we gapped up. So I just said I don't short gap ups, okay? I was showing you the panic, the sell-off that happened there in the 17th and how fast it can come in because we were up and we were green, okay? But no, I did not short the market on that day. So a big flow of money going in a certain direction is what moves the market, stocks, creates momentum and then sets the trend in charts. When you're looking for institutional money, you're really reading the side of power in a stock. You wanna be in the side of power in order for you to make money trading. Institutional money is in charge of the market and stocks at all times. Even if you think it's not, it is, okay? So this is what trips people up and they say, oh my gosh, and again, we don't know what the Fed's gonna say on Wednesday. Whatever they say, I'm not gonna be surprised. If the market goes gangbusters to the upside Wednesday, I won't be surprised. If the market falls off a cliff on Wednesday, I won't be surprised. So I mean, so many people say, oh, the market's rigged. If you think the market's rigged, you have no business trading it because basically you're up against a system where you're gonna lose all the time. So you have to know that there is a way that you can actually trade it successfully, consistently because if you don't believe that, you'll have to change your attitude about that right out of the jump, okay? So no one's rigged against you. The system is what it is. That's why you have to count for the fact that some trades will lose, okay? But the reality is that so many people get so upset because they say, oh, I thought this was gonna go one way and then it went another way. No, you didn't read it right. You didn't read it right in the first place, that's why, okay? So it's about finding the footprints of power. It's very important to find this power because the power has the ability to pay you and then whether you have a large risk or a small risk or small account or a large account, if you get the momentum and you get the big move, you can make money. And that's how you grow a small account into a big account. And that's how you grow a big account into an even bigger account. So for me, it's about one strategy to trade that focuses on spotting the institution of money and one focus, which is on gaps. Now, we did do this. I have this in here, but this is a call. We went long Tesla last week. I said on Thursday, I mean, on Friday to get out of this before the end of the day. I said that before the market even opened. Did I know it was gonna go to 180? No, but I knew it was gonna have the move on Friday. And then I also knew that going into the weekend is not a good idea to hold something like this. It ended up going way more than I thought. Sometimes that happens. But I called the 155 calls on Thursday. It took until Friday to make the move. So it popped on Friday. And again, this wasn't long. Technically, could you still be in this? Yes, do I think anyone still should be in this? No, okay. Again, when you take a trade, you take the trade, you get in, you get out. Sometimes an option to take 24 to 48 hours. Sometimes they go the same debt. This could have gone on Thursday. The day that I called it, I sent the trade out at 8.27 in the morning. So I have an options newsletter. I sent this trade out in Tessa. And this was the result. $8, I didn't think that was crazy expensive for this. You could have done a higher strike. And again, one contract would have made you $1,700. You could have had a better exit than this. I didn't hold it all the way up to 180, just so you know. But the return in investment was 213% if you had a good exit on this in the afternoon, even before it ran all the way up into the clothes. And if you risk 10 contracts and risk 8,000, which is an advanced trade or risk, you could have made 17 grand in one trade. This is what makes it valuable to trade and why it's important and here's the bar. So here was Tessa. This closed here, gapped up. I called the trade in this day, then it ran up on Friday, boom. So how am I trading options? I'm not doing any tricky option strategies. I'm trading the momentum and trading the gap. We're doing calls and puts on the options letter. For the day trades, I prefer to short, okay. How did I know what would gap up the next day? What stock and what are you talking about, Sean? I don't know what chart that was about. What stock are you talking about? And any other questions here? So again, this was a nice option and you could have gone long that on the day on Friday. But that got bought on Friday, on Thursday, again, by institutional money. Will it follow through? Not if the market falls, but that remains to be seen but everybody should be out of that trade anyways, okay. So it's about spotting power of money and then you get in and then you get out. Tessa, I called Tessa on Thursday. I didn't know what Tessa would do on the earnings. I didn't call the trade until Thursday, but on Thursday I did see it and I rated it and I saw it was gonna run up. So we did it and that's that. On this day, I didn't know what it was gonna do. It could attend. You don't take a trade, you don't guess where it's gonna gap. I'm not guessing the gap. I'm seeing the gap. Then I used my system to rate it in the pre-market or the post-market. Like I just got done talking about UPS. UPS is gonna do something. I hope, okay. I don't know where it's gonna gap. I'm not gonna get any trades in that. I'm not gonna take any trades in that until I see it. Then I'm gonna rate it. Then I'm gonna determine if I'm gonna short it or go long or do nothing in it. It may be a flop, okay. Netflix was a flop. I didn't trade that. It was not a good gap up and hardly went anywhere and then it put it off. So I don't predict the gap itself. I wait to see the gap. Then I rate it using my point system, okay. Does that make sense, Sean? Anyways, gaps are created with large institutional money. That's what makes the gap in the first place. So gaps are an event. They create a sense of urgency. Hurry, hurry, hurry. Buy it, sell it, short it, dump it, get it. Tessa was a bot, okay. Thus an action is being forced by participants of the stock. This is why gap trading is incredibly powerful. Trading gaps is a powerful and profitable way to trade because you're trading on the side of power and money and that is important. So I developed a system where I find gaps and I rate them using a checklist. They have to be qualified. You can't just, again, do everything in the direction of the gap or vice versa. And this is what confuses people about gaps and then they tend to shy away from them but really they're very profitable if you know how to trade them. Very profitable. Again, to be able to make a 200 some percent return and investment in 24 hours is a great options trade. Many people are scalping options, making pennies. No, we're near that type of ROI. So I have a checklist where I go over it and I evaluate it, okay. Now, like I said, I do prefer to short. This was Goldman Sachs, okay. This was a couple, this was two weeks ago, whenever it was, this is a one minute chart. Again, why do I like to short? Because you see this here? Again, a stock at this price that fell off a cliff. This is one of the things in here when you look at this. Again, fast moves happen, quick, quick, quick. You could have got in, got out. You could have got in, got out. You could have got in, got out. There was a million plays in this in this particular day to the downside. And again, they went fast, fast and big. Two, four, five, six hours in a day. To be able to have something that moves this big, you wanna be able to get in it and again, get out. And again, whether you do it as an option or where you do it as a day trade, that's up to you. If you don't have a margin account, you can't afford a margin account, then you do it as an option, okay. Or you sign up for the options newsletter. Was the cost of the option on Friday higher for Tesla than Thursday? Yes, because it already opened, it opened up on Friday. Yes, look, this was higher the next day. So the answer is yes. So getting back to the benefits of shorting, okay. There's just so many. Again, I do go long, I do make money doing calls, I do make money going long sometimes, like I did with the MS, but I prefer to short because of the fact that it gives me a niche. Many traders don't know how to short correctly. Again, we've had a lot of opportunities in the market in 2022, too short, we will have more this year. Today was another example of one. And it's something that if you just go to the long side, you are not gonna benefit from all the sell-offs that stocks have or the market has and the fast moves you can get to the downside. So again, even if you like to go long, if you don't know how to short, you're really missing out on a lot of opportunity that the market has to give in stocks as well. I think I answered the question somebody asked me about the cost of the option Friday. Yes, it was more expensive, but that's why you take the trade of the day that I call it. I called the trade at 8.30 in the AM. That means you take it into the open in Tesla. You don't take it the next day. Whoever asked that, Hernandez. I don't know why you'd wait till Friday. You wanna get the best price you can, if you can. All right, so I'm calling the trains early. So if you didn't make money in 2022, you didn't know how to short. I mean, this is a chart of the market here from last year. So we started out the market in 2022. We made brand new all-time highs in the spine. We did it in the Qs, but we did it at the beginning of the year in January. First day of the year, then we gap down, then we fell off a cliff. And again, there were many times that the market tried to recover last year and failed to do it. And it was a difficult people for people that went long last year because they kept thinking the market was gonna make moves up to the high and it failed to do it. July was a rough month for people. Really, people just thought for sure the market was gonna make a recovery. And even at this point, I mean, again, we're looking at five and look at 1,000 charts here. We weren't, I mean, it wasn't possible to think we could have recovered last year by the summer to the end of the year, but we didn't do it. We just didn't do it, okay. Again, this year remains to be seen, but we played as we see it. I'm not worried about predicting six months from now, six years from now. Who cares? You gotta make money right now. That's the name of the game as a trader. If you don't make money today, this week, this month, you're not gonna be in this game for long, all right? So what happens six months from now? It's like try to predict, okay, who's gonna win the presidential election in 2024? You don't even know who's running. How can you have, it's like, you don't even know who wins the nomination on either side, let alone who's gonna win the race. So don't just think about things that are out of your control that have no relevance at all and you don't even need that information. Just do what you know today to make money today to be successful right now to improve the quality of your life and your trading today. That's what you need to live in your own little bubble, okay, just like me. So I teach a system, it's called the Golden Gap. The Golden Gap 26 point rating system pinpoints the direction of power of money by rating price, okay. So I'm looking at price, I'm reading price. That's what I do in the pre-market and as I've been talking about all day, many traders go long, many traders don't know how to trade gaps so they shy away from them and shorting. If you wanna go with the crowd of traders, you're not gonna be successful because more people are not than are and it's just the way that trading is set up. That's why you have a lot of people that are very wealthy in reference to trading and investments in the market and then you have a lot of people that lose. It's a zero sum game. When you make money, you're taking it away from somebody else. Could be your next door neighbor. This isn't Mr. Mr. Nice Guy, okay. You're not knitting sweaters and selling them in street quarter for 1999 and then you get something, they get something. This is you go into the market, it's the smartest person that wins. It's the most aggressive, the most intelligent, the richest people that get it and you gotta understand that if you're with institutional money, if you're with that big money, those are the people that have the insider information. Those are the people that are paying 500 grand for a research report, which you're never gonna do. That they know X, Y, Z that the Fed's gonna say and this, that thing and the other thing and you darn well know that they probably know what the Fed's gonna say. So look for what's gonna happen in the next 24 to 48 hours in the market. I will say that. So many saying about ES and NQ. I don't look at those, I don't trade those at all. No. So I trade the market. Sometimes I trade the Dow, which is the diamonds ETF. And we've been talking about this. You must have an edge. Okay, this is you. You will be a lot happier if you have an edge and you're gonna be a lot happier if you're making money, okay? So success requires a plan, a plan of action to get there. So my plan of action is my 26 point rating system. I think Sean mentioned this earlier. Hopefully Sean one day will learn it. So I go through, I rate the gap. I'm looking for 20 points or more, that's the cut off. If I get it, I take it in the direction of the gap. And again, checklist work. If you fly a plane, if you perform surgery, if you're a surgeon, if you're a nurse, everyone has checklists that have professional jobs. If you're doing your, if you have an accountant, a CPA, and they're doing your tax return, they go through the checklist, boom, boom, boom. The checklist helps you keep on track to get the job done right, okay? So it is a plan of action. It's not, let's trade on the fly. That's not gonna get you what you need. You shouldn't be risking money on the fly. You shouldn't be trading anything on the fly. You shouldn't be taking blind ideas from strangers at webinars like this. You're listening to what I have to say here now to see if anything I say resonates with you. You can't just take blind trading ideas from people that you don't even know that are strangers. You don't know why they're taking them. You don't know if it's a strategy. You don't know if it's no strategy. You have to have some thought process and the decisions that you're making, okay? Don't risk money for risk sake. Everyone that puts money into the market should have a plan of action and a checklist. On a professional level, all high income career field specialists have checklists. And again, that is a good idea. That's where you want to be. So I'm just gonna go through one week of trades here. I could have put last weeks in. I just didn't have time. This is one week of golden gaps that we did in December, the last week of the year. And again, I closed the room for Christmas and New Year's, but we made $23,445. This was day trades. And again, we had a winning week last week as well. But this was Tesla in December. I talked about the fact that we were doing this a lot. This was a really nice gap. We shorted it at 175, 20, got out. Boom, 170, 165. Here was the gap. Stock closed here, gap down, fell. Again, the red bar to picks the selling, and we shorted this. With a $2,900 risk, you could have made $35,50. You could have taken 500 shares. The idea is to get the momentum. The idea is to get Tesla. The idea is to know this is gonna fall before it falls. Again, I'm not predicting the gap, but I get up in the morning and I see the gap and I rate the gap and I know it's gonna work. And then we do it. And we do it into the open. We did go along this one here. I'm showing you, we went long CVS for a little tiny, tiny bit. This was on the 13th. Again, looking at this, it's kind of funny because it really didn't go up that much in here, but we pulled money out of it. It closed here, gapped up, and that doesn't look like much of anything at all, but it was not much to do that day. And we went long. So you could have risked $3,000. I mean, 1675. We went out really quick. Sometimes I've made a amount of trades in five minutes. Six minutes, 10 minutes. As fast as I can get in and get out, I can. But this was one that we went long. And then on 12, 14, no gaps met my criteria. We didn't do anything. That's another important thing. Follow the rules. Don't trade when somebody doesn't meet your criteria. On the 15th, we did the QQQs. They had a beautiful gap here. Again, December was a nice month to short the market. And again, when I said the market, it could be the Qs. It could be the spy. It could be the diamonds. Again, we did the Qs. We shorted it at 280 to 10, got out of 280, 45, boom. If you risked $2,800, it could have made $3,300. If you risked 1,000, if you risked 500, whatever you want to risk, again, while you say, well, this is pricing, fine. You could have bought a put. Could have bought the 280 puts, okay? Do what works for you. So this closed here, gap down, fell, boom. This was on the 15th. Again, how do you make money? Short it. We shorted that. Then we also did the Qs on the 16th. We did the Qs here. Entry was 276, exit was 27310, almost pulled $3 out of it. It kept going. This day kept going. So I didn't get a lower-the-day exit in this, and I didn't get a lower-the-day exit in this. I didn't get out quick. I didn't get out quick. Okay, that's my moja. But if you want to hold things, I think it's a lot easier to do them as an option. But this was a nice strain because we almost got $3 out of it. With 2300 shares, you could have made $6,600. And again, there are $6,670. If you don't want to take this trade on margin because of the cost, okay, you could have bought a put. You could have bought, like, for example, the 275 put. So if I'm calling this entry in the room, you could buy the 275 puts, okay? And I'm just giving you ideas here. And then you can get in and out of the put as a dang trade, all right? We also did the spy. Again, close to your gap down, fell. Another nice one here, pulled, just a beautiful move. 385.25, shorted it, exited it, 381.50, in and out. We did the market quite a bit, actually in the month of December. Prop of $8,250. Again, this is pricey if you're on margin. If you don't have the cash size account, take less size or buy a put. You could have bought the 385 puts. Easy, okay? Again, it's the idea of getting the direction right, of getting the pick, of picking the right stock or tickle symbol. Again, this is an ETF in the market of the S&P, but it's the idea of knowing that it's gonna go down, getting it aggressively, getting out of it with profit, and then getting the momentum and the move, okay? Which is what I really focus on doing every single solitary day. But for me, it's about the time that I spend trading versus the analysis. So in the pre-market, I'm working, working, working hard, and I'm spending all this time figuring out when I get up and very little time trading. So the more time I spend figuring out what to do, the more money I usually make, and I don't have to spend that much time trading. Whereas many people, the opposite. They spend very little time preparing in the morning what to trade and a long day trading and stressing themselves out of what to trade. I'm the opposite, okay? The more time you spend preparing and figuring out what you wanna do, focusing on the chart, focusing on the gap, making the pre-market decisions, the more money you're gonna make in the day, the easier it's gonna be for you to trade in the day and the best chance you're gonna have for success because you're not gonna be all over the place stressing yourself out, trying to make last minute decisions, chomping at the bit, again, not being prepared with what you're doing. So when you go to trade, you really should have a high winning strategy, number one, good money management, number two, and a good mentor to follow. If you have these things, then you're gonna make it. Again, how long it takes you to make it is up to you. I do my best to help people teach them, review stuff with them, but again, this is an individual thing. You have to be an independent minded person if you wanna trade, because again, this isn't giving money to somebody and investing it for you. This is you wanna do it, but it's fun. It's fun to trade, the room is fun. I try to make it as fun and enjoyable as I can. Making money is fun, okay? And the faster we can make it, the better. So for me, it's all about the fast trades and really chunking it out, which is about income generation, which a lot of people need. We're in a situation right now. Some people think we're gonna go into recession. Some people think inflation is curbing off. Whatever you think, things cost more now than they did 12 months ago or 24 months ago. Times have changed, okay? So you have to think about yourself. You have to make do. Either you're gonna spend less or you're gonna make more money. So you can make more money by getting a second job or you can curb your whole life situation and spend less. I don't like that idea. So the idea is to earn more. How are you gonna do it? You can trade the market. And the nice thing about trading is you can do it part-time while you're working and delve into it to transition to doing it full-time if you want to. So empower yourself to trade the market. And that is my best advice to you. Empower yourself. Think positive. It's the beginning of a new year. If there's any time to do it, it's now. So I teach a class once a month. It's called the Golden Gap course. It's a 26-point rating system to find the best stock to trade each day. I focus to the short sign. The course also teaches you how to enter and exit the stock on the day. The course teaches price analysis and technical analysis on an advanced level. So it's a two-day class. I just did a January class this weekend. The next class is at the end of February. And I do it once a month. Class is online. It teaches you how to find, pick, and play stocks that are professional bearish gaps. So if you're interested in the next class, it's February 25th and 26th, nine to five, starting Sunday. Class tuition is $69.99. Class is online. You can be anywhere in the world to take it. And I'm doing a special till February 1st. If you wanna sign up for the February class, okay? You can receive the trading win free to the end of 2023. This expires Wednesday, February 1st. So you have today, tomorrow, to decide. And if you have questions, you can email me. If you're interested, you can email me. And I'd be happy to answer any questions for you. Anyone of any questions I wanna go over with right now before Jeff pops on here. I think I answered Brian's. Sean, do you have any other questions? Where are we gonna close here today? Are we gonna close down, like I said, an hour ago? Listen, if anyone has any questions, you can email me at melissathestockswitch.com. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much, Jeff, for having me. Happy New Year. Have a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful week. All right, thank you very much for coming, Melissa. It was good to have you. Thank you.