 For those Melissa Armo, she has a really, really good, interesting gas strategy that she likes to talk about. And stay tuned. She's going to tell you about it right now. Melissa, how are you doing? Yep. There you are. Perfect. Let me go ahead and make the presenter you. We are running about 8 to 10 minutes late right now. So I don't want you to be too worried about time. It's a suggestion today. So here's your turn. We have to get you a step-and-repeat type background that says Metastock. Because I'm looking at your background. It's just a black screen. We have to get you some fancy charts from Metastock and put them in the back. Are you throwing shade at my background? It is. It looks like you're in a cave. Everybody does these things now on TV where they have their company logo in the background. It's projected somehow. We've got to get you these because you're doing these webinars every day. Every day you're doing them. I'm going to paint one. It's going to look awesome. No, we really need it. Well, we can hear you really well. Melissa, you're coming in great. Actually, Jeff, Kelly from the control room. Actually, Melissa's coming in a little bit soft. I was wondering if there's any way to have her get closer to her microphone or anything. Let me try. Is that any better? Yeah, that's a little bit better. Can you hear me now? It's still just a little soft, but we can hear you clearly now. I have the microphone right next to my keyboard. Can you hear me better? Okay. Yeah, I think we're good now. Sorry about that. Thank you. So much, Jeff. Thanks for having me here at Metastock. It's nice to be here today. And it's a beautiful, beautiful spring day here in Manhattan. And for those who don't know me, my name is Melissa Armo. I own my own company called the Stock Swoosh, and I started trading in 2008. And then I thought, oh, I'm going to figure this out super, super quick. And then all of a sudden, you know, six months go by, a year goes by, and it took me three years to develop my system. And one of the most important things about charts, like Jeff was talking about, is it helps you make trading decisions. So I would never, ever trade if I didn't have charts. I basically would be like trading blind. And, you know, a lot of people out there, they want to look at fundamentals, they want to look at economic data. And that's great if those things help you, combined with the charts, to make good trading decisions. But in this type of environment, right now, 2023, and even in 2021 and 2022, when you're looking at some of the economic data, you know, you're looking at it and you're saying, okay, if you're making decisions based on that, again, looking at the fundamentals and not really looking at what's happening in the price action, you may lose money in trades. Because ultimately, things don't always add up. Occasionally, the fundamentals will add up with the charts and make sense, but not all the time. So sometimes I will short a stock and it may have a great earnings report. Sometimes something will have a bad earnings report and I will actually go along the stock. So they don't always coincide. So I think charts are essential in order to be able to make trading decisions. And we're going to talk about charts today, but mostly we're going to talk about shorting. And we're going to talk about shorting stocks for winning trades. And today's, we actually, this week has been a great week too short. This morning we did Disney. I didn't take a look at where it was right now since I jumped on here, but we did a fast trade in that today. Disney had earnings last night. I did not have time to put that chart in here, but you can take a look at it yourself. It fell. Okay. So we shorted Disney this morning. We got in and out very, very quickly. And I think in this type of environment and this type of market, which has been back and forth since the beginning of 2023, the best thing that you can do if you want to be profitable is to get in and out quick. And again, I'm talking about day trades or even if you want to do options. I do weekly options and I do putts for shorts. Okay. Put is a short in options trade, but I'm doing the weeklies because again, I want to get in and out very, very fast, fast, meaning an option one to two days, maybe three, but that's even a long time. If I'm in something three days, it probably didn't go right the first day. If you have any questions, you can email me at melissathestockswish.com. You can also call me at 929-3200 gap. You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, as well, and Skype. I appear on TV and I try to put what I'm going to be on TV on my Twitter or my Facebook. I appear on Fox News, CBS News, News Nation, which is a new channel that's been taking off as well and Shutter. And so I talk with the economy, I talk about the stock market, but it's been interesting times right now with the Fed raising interest rates as much as they possibly can actually in the last nine months. And a lot of people are under the impression that the Fed is going to back off rates for the remainder of 2023. I happen to think that they are not going to do that. And if we have time, we will discuss why. But, you know, last year, particularly the majority of the year last year in 2022, we really shorted and had so many big shorts. You could have held shorts, you could have held them for longer, but you couldn't have shorted everything last year. Last year, you could have said it was a bearish year for the market. I think it was a bearish year for the market, but there was more shorts that I did in the QQQs and the SPI, which are the ETFs for the overall market than I did probably in any other year that I ever traded. I'm talking about the market specifically, okay, not just individual stocks. It was a great year to short, okay. But you can make money shorting in any market environment, bullish, bearish, or even sideways if you look for individual stocks. Like I just talked about Disney. Another big one we did this week is PayPal. That was really the gap of the week and we're going to talk about that one too. But you have to know what to short, when to short, and obviously you have to be selective. I put in here the stats for last year for our year to date results in the live trading room. I also have 2023 year to date as well, but this is an average risk of about $2,800 per trade. These are trades on margin for the whole year and most of them are shorts, because I mostly do short. Results for the year was $651,079. And again, this is all of 2022. Now I did take some time off last year because I moved. I took about two weeks off, but overall it was a great year. So far this year for 2023, again, we've been doing sometimes the market short, but we've also been doing selective stocks, which we're going to talk about some of those specifically today. And then I also have a gap options newsletter, which is separate from my day trades, which I risk more. So my average risk for my options trades is about $8,000 a trade. Now that's a lot of money. You could risk $1,000 a trade, but this is a mix of calls and puts. Even though I do prefer to do puts, we did a mix of calls and puts last year, but we did the market a lot and we did the market a lot to the downside. So there was a very active year last year for the options newsletter because there were so many opportunities to trade momentum, which we're going to talk about today. Again, we are going to focus today on shorting, but we made over $3 million last year doing options with an average risk of $8,000. Again, you can risk more. You can risk less. You can take one contract and do an option. One of the reasons why people like options specifically is because you don't need a margin account to trade options. I like options because I can hold overnight in an option. And I did that with the PayPal and I got a bigger move holding the PayPal, which was a put. Again, we will talk about that trade in here today, but I got a bigger move by holding it and I don't want to hold margin trades overnight. So this doesn't have actually the last three weeks in here. I have only until April, the middle of April, but I do have the trades we did for May in here, but we were up to April 14th, 185,435 this year for the 2023. So far this year has been on track pretty good. We'll see how we go this month. So far it's been good. We've had a lot of volatility in the market. I see that we're rallying here this afternoon. We did drop off yesterday at one point and the day before. So again, if you're looking to trade the QQQs with a spy every day, you're probably really getting chopped up. While I do do the market ETF some days, I do not focus necessarily every single solitary day on the market. I like to do individual stocks, individual picks, and what I focus on is gaps, and we're going to talk about what a gap is in a minute. And I'm someone saying something about a big city. I can't see that whole comment. I have to scroll up. If you do have questions, you can take a look. Where's my background? That's New York, actually. That's not the background I'm looking at right now. I'm looking at Central Park. So that's a midtown background. I did move. I stayed in New York and I moved from midtown to Central Park. So I'm very, very happy here. It's like living in a completely different city, actually. I can't believe how long I've lived in New York, and I never enjoyed Central Park, but it is absolutely, absolutely gorgeous. And if you've never been to New York, I'll just say this really quickly. You must go to Central Park. You know, it's beautiful right now in the spring. It's going to be beautiful in the summer. I can't wait to the fall. We didn't have much snow this year. I only saw one day of coating of snow in the winter because we had a very light winter this year in New York. But Central Park is absolutely spectacular. And I'm just amazed, actually, that how beautiful it is. It's like 843 acres. And it really is an oasis in the heart of New York City. But anyways, getting back to what I was saying here, nothing in life that is great comes without taking chances or risk. So, you know, for a lot of people, once 2020 hit with COVID, a lot of people then started to reevaluate their life, their career, their life path, their relationships. You know, a lot of people had babies after COVID and then a lot of people got divorced after COVID. So, you know, during the lockdowns, three plus years ago now, here we are, May of 2023, people started evaluating their life and what they want out of life. You know, there's always time for you, no matter how old or young you are, to change what you were doing, to change your circumstances, to better your life, and actually to start a new career and do something different. And so, I was at that point in my life when I was doing mortgages because it became very difficult in 2007 and 2008 because it was hard to get loans approved. I would never want to be doing mortgages right now. Again, getting back to where we are right now with interest rates, interest rates are very high. So, if you go back and you know this, if you've been looking to buy a home, you know, interest rates 12 months ago, 18 months ago were half what they are, less than, more than half of what they are currently. So, again, I would never want to be doing mortgages right now. If I hadn't made the career shift and the career move that I had, you know, 15 years ago, I'd probably be looking to do it now. So, a lot of times you know if you're one of those people that you're not satisfied in your career, you know that even just listening to me today. And it's up to you to make decisions about your life, to get upon yourself to make those decisions. And ultimately, it does very often involve risk because you don't know what the future holds, you don't know what a new job is going to be like. You don't even know when you take a trade if you're going to win or lose, okay? When I take a trade, I try to evaluate what I'm doing based on a rating system that I try to put the odds in my favor per using the rating system that I created, which I'm going to talk about today. But if I wouldn't do that, it would be a 50-50 crap shoot. And unfortunately, that's a many, many, many trader's trade. There's a difference between risk for risk sake and calculated risk. And a lot of people just, again, they're looking at it, well, it could go up, it could go down. It could go up, it could go down. Listen, that's not good enough. 50-50 odds really isn't good enough to make money in any market, let alone this market right now. And what do I mean about this market? This market since the beginning of January 2023 has been sideways. While the range has tightened and widened and tightened and widened, even today while we're rallying, we're still within a range, okay? So whether we break up and out of the range or break lower into the range or stay range bound between now and the end of 2023 remains to be seen. But you have to be very, very picky when you're taking trades and you're risking money and 50-50 odds aren't good enough. Now, I was talking about this in a webinar that I've done ever since this whole bank collapse started, which has been going on now for, I guess, two months. Two months, really. What's one important takeaway from the recent bank collapses? One of the takeaways is that things can happen that are out of your control and that you have to be prepared for that, okay? So what can you do? And again, the great thing about trading, once you've learned how to trade, once you've learned how to make money in the market, is that no one can ever take that information away from you. Once you get good at it and once you know how to do it, no one will ever take that information away from you and the skill set, once you learn the skill set of how to make money in the market. So I have a skill set and I use that skill set every day. I'll always have it forever, forever and ever and ever. And no one can ever take that away from me. So the frustration that people have when they see banks go under and, of course, people lost their jobs or they see things happen, like interest rates going up and then it affects things they want to buy or when they want to borrow, like whether it's a car loan, whether it's a mortgage, they feel like things are out of their control. While there may be things that are out of your control that you cannot control, okay, the outer circumstances of life, you can control the things within your own world. The choices you make, the decisions you make, what you want to do for a living and also where you want to invest your money, where you want to risk your money, whether or not you want to trade for a living, where you have your money deposited and all of these things. So you can't feel like you're a victim to all these circumstances that happen outside of yourself because then you're going to move forward in life feeling like a constant victim and that mentality is far too prevalent right now in society today. And you can't really move forward and become an evolve and become the wonderful, fabulous person that you want to be if you feel like you're a victim. Sometimes it's harder than you think to make a career change or even to learn how to trade. Sometimes it costs money, it very often does. Like I just moved, like I told you, it costs a lot of money to boot. I didn't really sit down and figure out how much I've spent since I moved. I'll probably sit down and do that over the summer once I'm completely finally done and packed. Was it worth all the hard work for me to move? Yes. Whatever I spent, whatever amount of time it is, it was because my life is so much better now just moving, you know, up in a different environment in a different neighborhood. So risk, spending money, time investment, working hard, all these things that are for you in the long run if you're willing to commit yourself to do it. And what I've found, again, in the 11 years that I've had the stocks which I've been teaching people how to trade my method is a lot of people that trade fail because they lack commitment and they lack commitment simply because they always want the quick buck. They always want the quick buck. They want to make all the money they ever lost trading right now, right now, right now, this week, this day, that's what they want. They have no long range plan really to get good at it and proceed and use something that they can do for the rest of their life in the market. So I think, you know, it's the commitment that's important. It's the long range plan that you're going to have. And then you have to have the type of mentality where you are in charge of your own life. You are not a victim. You can change your own circumstances. And not only that, you can become wealthy if you really want to put your mind to it. It may not happen as fast as you want it to, but it can happen. And as long as you know that you understand that, every single day will be a joy to get up knowing that you're one step closer to fulfilling your actual dreams. If your dreams are actually to become a professional or successful trader if you're doing it part-time. So as I was saying again, can you do well during these times? Absolutely you can, because there's volatility. We've seen that just in the last couple of hours we've seen volatility. Market was down, then it was up. We've seen that. You can capitalize on the volatility in the market if you know how to trade it. Anyways, a lot of people work hard and they just never get anywhere where they want in life. A lot of people think they're helping themselves but they're really wasting time. The fact is don't waste your time. You've got to be smart about it. If someone told you you could get to the top of the ladder, the top of the mountain super duper quick even if it would cost you a lot of hard money, wouldn't you rather do that and save time than have it take you years and years and years and years and years. So I think again a lot of people want to put off till tomorrow what they can do today and if you're not happy with what you're doing with your trading or you don't have a trading strategy or you're not happy with what you're doing for a living and you want to change careers, don't waste time. Think about the future now and move forward. Anyways any questions or comments you can plop it in the room just looking over here to the side. Anyways one individual can trade the market successfully as a career if you have a dependable method. So I just follow one system which is gaps which I will explain to you in a minute and again I'm even following one directional bias most of the time. I'd say a short more than 90% of my trades are shorts. Again they could be puts and options but the central structure to trading results must be a strategy with a solid foundation that's based on accurately reading price action and I use technical advanced analysis so what do you need you need charts to do that because what is technical analysis technical analysis is looking at past price data in order to predict future price data. So it is an important time to set goals for yourself again in two weeks from now it's Memorial Day. So it's the start of the summer everybody is off you can take a long weekend and set your goals for where you want to be between now and 1231 between now and the end of 2023 put a plan in place how much money do you want to make trading how much money do you want to make in the market how much money do you want to make a week alright and think about what I said today about this concept of empower yourself to trade the market successfully and not being a victim to other things that are happening and I say this not to be negative I say this to be realistic that we could go into a recession probably at the start of a recession right now but we could go into a full blown recession within the latter part of 2023 despite what the Fed said the last conference I believe that we absolutely could and if they keep raising interest rates that becomes more and more likely it doesn't mean that times have to be bad for you again what am I focusing on focusing on shorting okay so we shorted PayPal fell off a cliff you can take advantage of these downside moves and stocks and downward moves in the market by learning how to short so you can actually make money on the shorting side of things even if we say for example crash you know in the market you may not like that for your IRA retirement account but you can chunk it out as a trader as an active trader by taking advantage of the downside moves and again one nice thing about day training is you can work from home I'm working from home now Jeff's probably working from home it's convenient if you can work from home right now people are doing that more and more ever since COVID and people are now just doing it even though they have the option to go back to work so you can trade and actually do another job at the same time if you want and then the nice thing about trading is you can make your own hours and again day trading for me I traded the morning I'm in and out and done quick we were in and out of Disney this morning in a couple of minutes but it is a full-time pay with part-time hours which is really really nice and again trading has a limited income potential because the only thing that prevents you from making you know three million dollars a year versus one million dollars a year or a hundred thousand dollars a year you can risk per trade you obviously have to know how to train you obviously have to have a system that has more winners and losers but once you know what to do and you apply the system then of course you can risk more and therefore then guess what you will make more now let's talk a little bit about charts so do you know the right way to read a chart if you do not you should not be trading at all charts are vital charts are important when we're done here Jeff can talk about that a little bit when when we're done you know you're trading blind if you don't have charts basically you don't even know what the price of something is I mean you could go into Google and you could look it up and you could say boom boom boom what's the price of the QQQs right now but you know you can't make any decisions to predict where somebody is going to go just seeing that you need the past price data to be able to predict the future price data and it's very very important and again if you don't have that information you're basically trading blind how can you make decisions okay so for me it is all about institutional money I'm looking at the big footprints of institutional money in the market I'm looking at what big hedge funds professional traders even banks that invest money in the market are doing what are they doing are they buying a stock are they selling a stock are they shorting a stock again we're going to look at paypal what happened to paypal here's the chart of paypal this is a daily chart paypal fell off a cliff now the reason you could say what is the reason the reason was it had earnings but again what those earnings said I did not read up about nor do I care but paypal the night before here see where this candlestick is right in here closed here like around 75 and change boom open in the morning here under 70 dollars and fell and tanked okay so again this red bar here depicts what selling and we had shorts okay so we shorted this I called a put in this and we also did a day trading this here and then we also did one here so we actually did paypal two days in a row so from the previous day okay before the stock even fell at before the earnings the stock was around 75 and again within one two three days it was all the way down at 62 and change so talking about institutional money how would you make money in paypal you would have had to then shorting paypal in order to make money now people always say well how do you trade options I do not do complicated option strategies I'm trading options using the exact same strategy that I use to make my day trade picks or any pick of anything I do it's based on the gap and it's based on momentum paypal is a great example of this because it had huge momentum huge momentum on the day after okay so I'm buying calls and selling them or I'm buying puts in the case of paypal and selling them for options so I'm trading momentum okay I'm not trading for a couple of pennies when I do options I'm trading for dollars and the momentum should come in fairly quickly same thing with my day trades I'm trading momentum for the day trades I'm in and out quickly I'm in and out fast as fast as I can and again if I get in and out fast in the morning the first half an hour of the day then I don't have to worry about a fed meeting or fed minutes or anything else like that that happens now how did I know paypal was going to go how how did I predict that again I look at the chart and I have a system I developed using a rating system which looks at the gap and then I determine how many points it has to determine if it's going to continue in the direction of the gap that is a system I teach in my monthly class now let's go over what a gap is this is a gap in paypal so paypal first of all a gap is the difference between the close and the open so this US stock market closes every day at 4 o'clock and opens every day the next day at 9.30 a.m. so this paypal here was a gap down so there are gap downs there are gap ups what is a gap up again the day before in here paypal closed at one price and opened at a higher price so this was a bullish gap this was a bearish gap actually the day after the paypal earnings it had a bullish gap but it failed and it fell off the cliff that was day 2 what is today the 11th that was the 10th so again I look at the gap where do you see the gap you see the gap when it's happening it could happen at night it could happen in the morning in other words I didn't short paypal here or here or here or here I didn't know this was going to gap here I did not know that at all so I wait and then when I see it I use a system that I developed over 3 years plus where I will rate the gap in the daily chart and determine if it's going to keep going down which is exactly what paypal did or if it's going to go up and a lot of people that trade gaps do something called a gap fill now I personally do not trade gap fills some people do I find that they do not have a consistent way to make money to work so I don't do gap fills while sometimes you might be able to make money doing a gap fill it's not something that I found is consistent so again getting back to the odds how to make money to market if you need high odds you need to have things working in your favor you need to have gains and losses so in the case of paypal here the odds were that it was going to sell off and that is exactly what it did now here was the play of the day that we did which was also the gap of the week which was in paypal this was not the first day actually this was the second day the second day we had such a big trade because I had such a tight entry so entry was 6505 and again this is a trade on margin you would need a margin account to do this trade 6,000 shares it even kept going after that I'll go back and show you the chart this was yesterday, May 10 profit was $9,900 now this is actually a very reasonably priced stock I think as far as the price point at $65 a share again if you have a retail account you understand margin if you don't you can always email me afterwards or ask me questions now about what is a margin account you can trade options without a margin account which is one reason why people like to do options you could have done a put in this if you didn't want to do a margin trade we actually did both but I want to show you here again this was day 2 this trade in here was day 2 and I just want to show you here this ended up breaking 63 going all the way down here didn't quite get down to 62 it shried but a really really really really big sell-off in the paypal and just a great example shorting but also momentum and how momentum can really come in and just grab hold of a stock and it can either push it up or it can either pull it down and again we're talking today about shorting and the reason I like to short is because you get fast moves in shorts any questions here about paypal as I'm talking now I do have an options newsletter which I did send out this trade anyone to write before the open I sent out the $70 strike puts in paypal and ended up opening underneath the strike so you could have actually done a lower strike in paypal than $70 but this ended up being a really really huge trade why? because again of the cost of the option which I'm going to show you in a minute and the fact that it fell off the planet so it was profitable the first day if you got it and got out it was profitable here you'd still be up if you did this trade actually today because I call this on Tuesday and the morning on the 9th and it doesn't expire until Friday although I don't know why anybody would still be in this this cost of the paypal was $2.25 an advanced trader risk of 40 contracts it was $9,000 this is I sold it yesterday yesterday but again you could still be in it I don't even know what this was priced at today but I know this was still a good trade today this probably was worth at least over 6 still this morning profit was $17,000 return and investment 189% on the paypal option now if you could have taken one contract of paypal you could have spent $225 you still could have almost doubled your money in the paypal even with one contract and again you could have an options account as a cash account so if you did a beginner risk I just have here $1,125 again that's in the first day out the second day and again paypal still could be lower today or tomorrow but I don't really think it makes a lot of sense for people to hold paypal where something's up this much money well over 100% into the last day of expiration if you are up okay so paypal again was the gap of the week it was the short of the week it was the option of the week it was a day trade of the week so I mean ultimately when you're in something and you really really really really really really love it you can take it as a day trade take it as a swing trade take it as an option do multiple options in it do multiple day trades in it okay and again that was a short so I used my day trading strategy my gap rating strategy my option strategy to trade paypal alright my option strategy it's all about the gap you just do not need a general overall broad based view to make money trading again you don't have to read tons of books and you don't have to do tons of different strategies tons of people do that and lots of information but they just don't know how to make money the most important thing for you is making money if you do not know how to make money you are going to have a hard time having longevity in this business because you're doing this and you're investing your time you're sitting down every day and you're doing an account and you're paying for classes and you're spending time in webinars like today all day you want to spend your time wisely you want to make money otherwise you may as well just go out and go for a walk in the park you know there's plenty of other things to do to enrich our lives if we're not going to be successful so I try to condense the amount of time that I trade into a very very short period of time to make the most money that I can in the shortest possible time that I can because I value my time and I feel like my time is very important just like I'm sure you do so anyway getting back to the whole concept of the philosophy of trading and shorting I'm looking for institutional money I'm looking for institutional money in the price patterns and gaps and if you know how to do this you don't need to do anything else because this will make you money now I did start talking about this earlier because I said where do you want to be by the end of this year I think it's important to write your goals down I think it's important to know where you're headed not slounder not be wishy washy about your goals but I think it's important also like I said to say to yourself you want to be in a better place a better place with your trading a better place financially in December of 2023 than you are right now in May of 2023 but success in the market is about mastering a skill and that is how you make large consistent profits large moves happen in the first 30 minutes of each day in gaps and that is the time of the day that I'm usually getting in and again you can't short every gap down you can't go long every gap up just like you can't do gap fills all the time really nearly either I devised a rating system to rate the gaps I called it the golden gap and this is the method that I use each morning and I apply to certain stocks that I'm seeing that are gapping or the overall market if I get the rating of 20 points or more using a 26 point rating system then I will take the trade in the direction of the gap so my whole system is based on a rating system which looks at charts okay I am looking at 26 points on the daily chart of a stock the rating system is a checklist okay this is what you learn in my class if you come and take my class the checklist tells you what to look for in the price of the stock the points predict price direction gapping so again I'm only doing gaps I'm mostly doing shorts I'm mostly getting in right away in the first 30 minutes of the day or I'm not even trading it and I'm doing options and day trades in both the gaps okay anyways the points tell you where the money is flowing so why does this matter because you want to know what direction to take the position to profit the only way you're going to make money going long is if the stock is rally the only way you're going to make money shorting is if the stock is falling it really doesn't make sense any other way so again you can scalp for tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny pennies if you want to or you can look at something and you can actually look at it and say well let's just go through the whole thing and try to see if we can get a really big move in something because again if you have a large large move you can take one contract and make almost 200% of your money so the whole idea is to take a good size position small, medium or large whatever you can afford and make the most bang for your buck and make it as fast as you can so golden gaps have 80% of their move for the first 30 minutes of the day now PayPal was an exception to that because it continued actually into the close and the following day the same thing that was again like I said a very good gap but I call this the money move where I'm trying to get in and out very very quickly again I don't know where Disney is trading right now but we did that this morning we captured probably 80% of the move of that in the morning when we did it and got in and out we played the game the move in the early quick and we're in and out and done and then you can have the rest of your day to yourself to do whatever you want to do whether it's to go into another job or whether it is to be with your family or something like that but to make money as a trader in this market you have to get momentum and you have to get the direction right and you need to be able to be in a position that doesn't need the market to get your move if you're in something and you need the market's help to get the move there whether it's up or down you're gonna struggle with that which many people are this year because the market isn't giving right what do I mean it's choppy so it fakes up then it goes lower it's higher it's choppy choppy choppy and that has been very frustrating for a lot of people who need trades with you overall market so again looking for specific individual stocks is the best thing now this is an overall chart of the SPI just taking a look at this here this is back from March until May you can see here how we've been sideways you can see here where we rally and we don't go anywhere up okay and then we drop off then we do it again then we drop off okay so this has pretty much been par for the course for the majority of 2023 and again the Fed has been creating havoc in the market and the market just waits breathlessly every single time there's an FOMC meeting to see what the Fed's gonna say if you listen to the last Fed meeting which was last week I mean it was as if Jerome Powell didn't even know what he was saying it was the most convoluted meeting that I ever saw him give where I mean you kind of just scratch your head and say wow these people are in charge because he really didn't have the answers he didn't have any answers and he really struggled in that press conference in a way that I have never seen him struggle before they have no cure for inflation the only thing that they have that they have an idea to do is to continue to raise interest rates and since inflation is still too high I believe that's exactly what they're gonna continue doing because I don't know how to do anything else and in his speech last week if you didn't listen to it you should go find it on YouTube and listen to it I mean again they have no clue what they're doing they have no answers to the problems so why people would think all of these problems are gonna go away and everything's gonna be beautiful in the market and it's just gonna scream higher at all not just now at any time in 2023 I mean I don't know why people think that they're in charge really don't know what they're doing at this point which you say okay well then what do you want to do again if you're actively trading you're in and out quickly and you're making money consistently on a daily basis if you have an IRA or something like that then you need to sit down with a financial counselor and make some decisions but you really should have done that 12 months ago or 18 months ago when the market started selling off at the beginning of 2022 but success and large profits come from quality not quantity in place one trade one trade a day that's all I can do boom today we did Disney yesterday we did PayPal one in and out quick the more plays you have then the more potential there is for losses so quality is key you don't want to lose money okay you want to make money now why do I trade gaps why do they work so well why do they pay so well because gaps like I said are created with large institutional money that's what makes the gap but again I prefer to short because short moves down word moves happen very very fast and quickly panic comes into a stock for the market and the moves happen quick so I like to be in and out of my trades quick but you can still make money going long gaps too but the professional gaps that happen and play out in stocks are formed by one thing and one thing only large institutional money therefore you need a way that will help you pick the correct direction to play the gap and then confirm that the large money will flow with it and again this is what I focus on so the philosophy behind my 26 point rating system is to find stocks to trade that have number one a high probability of directional bias for the entire day two big moves on the day three early confirmation of my bias preferably in the first half hour of the day and then precise entries with follow through and a good risk to reward which is what I want now here is the month of May I was off for three days since beginning of May we did CVS the third again one trade then we did AMD I like that that day too that was the third we did the fourth spy we did the fourth Apple we did on the fifth Apple was the one long that was last Friday I was off Monday PayPal we did on the ninth we did the queues that lost yesterday on the tenth and I did the huge PayPal and today we did Disney so May has been off to a very good month we've only had one loser so far this month in May and again these are day trades these are day trades on margin with an average risk of $2,800 per trade on five three we did CVS I'm going to show you this gap here this was back last week again what is a gap a gap is a difference between the close and the open so what happened here CVS closed the night before around 72 and change boom open in the morning so this is four o'clock this is 9 30 at 9 30 AM CVS open here around 71 and 30 30 ish and then it fell boom so we got in got out done shorted it so this was five three this was a gap this was a short down here's the volume so this was a nice trade so entry was 70 10 shares of 2000 with an average risk of 2800 we didn't add because I really really liked it we took more of it when it pushed back add in plopped it on average price was 70 30 we got in got out I got out too soon in this I actually could have held this longer but again I prefer to get out of my trades fast this kept going I just want to show you here where this went this came all the way down and broke 69 so I like to get in and out quick but you can hold trades if you want to you really really can then we did the spy on the fourth okay again this was last Thursday a week ago spy closer gap down fell okay so this was five four we shorted the spot so you could have done a bought in the spy if you didn't want to do a margin trade or you could have done it on margin entry was 406 30 shares was 2200 risk 28 60 all of your trade should be the same or equal in risk if that is not something that you're doing that's something you should just right away okay because your results are going to be all over the place you'll never know if what you're doing is right if the amount of money they're risking each trade varies too much it's got to be close to the same in each single train to compare apples to apples to the trades that you're doing exit was 404 15 this was a really good train this was 4730 dollars profit this was on five four again this particular day again in and out drop I don't remember why we got I think we had economic data something no no that was the follow-through from the method I'm seeing minutes we had this was Wednesday we sold off an FMC and then Thursday was the gap down and we fell that was last week and again this is the spy then we did Peloton on that same day this was a little tiny tiny one here stock close your gap down again some things we did were cheap this was a cheap one here I did not do an option in this we entered at 755 and we made 10 cents on it 1200 dollars you could have squeezed a little bit more out of that I think the low was 730 something but again once you get to a certain price point this is actually like a big move for Peloton 50 cents 40 cents is actually like a big move for Peloton at this price point does anyone remember we were talking about COVID when Peloton was all the way up rallying rallying rallying you couldn't even get a Peloton you were on backward even buying one during COVID the stock has done nothing but tank actually in the last three years since then and like so many other companies I mean who knows what will happen to Peloton like Bed Bath and Beyond has gone out of business declared bankruptcy so many things have been victims since COVID as well any questions here so far any questions from anyone okay so how do I use my 26 point rating system I wait for the good ones which means I'm looking for high odds so I have a 26 point rating system I apply go through in the morning I spent about an hour every day doing it before the open I make a list of what I want to trade and watch in the pre-market if it rates 20 points or more then I will take the gap in the direction of the gap if it doesn't I don't do it at all so that's it that's pretty easy and it's about learning the points understanding what to look at and again that is critical and that's the meat and potatoes of what I do and what people come and learn in my class so the whole philosophy behind the golden gap points is what looking for momentum before the momentum comes in because it's too late afterwards okay like if you want to go short PayPal now you're not going to make anywhere near the amount of money that we made the last two days the entry in the PayPal was five nine or five ten okay I'm not saying that PayPal doesn't fall again I'm saying the good entry was to capture it right away as out of the game on five nine and then again five ten because again it's capturing the momentum getting the momentum getting in before the institutions take hold of the stock before they push it down or push it up how do I quantify risk and options I don't know what you mean by quantify I choose amount of risk and I risk the same in every trade as far as cash cash if that's what you mean so if you have an account with ten thousand dollars and it's say for example a cash options account then maybe you want to risk a thousand dollars to trade then you can be in more than one thing at one time I don't know what you mean by quantify as far as my picks how I'm making the picks if that's what you mean I'm rating the gap the same way that I'm making the trades for the day in trades I'm rate the gap using my golden gap twenty six point rating system and if I rate it and it rates good like we've done trades in the market for example then I say I can take this as a put or I can take this as a call because it rates over twenty points and then I do it so I am doing some things as day trades and options together like PayPal or I'm doing some things only as an option or only as a day trade for example but the method that I used to make the pick is the rating system for both if that answers your question as far as your risk goes it depends on your cash and the reason I risk more in options is because I want to hold overnight but also many stocks that I've been trading over the last umpteen years were very very expensive when I started trading options I mean we were doing Amazon's back in the day when Amazon cost you know fifty dollars you know for one contract now things have the stocks have split so much that nothing is at that price point not even Tesla anymore but you might pay ten dollars for one contract in Tesla which equates to what a thousand dollars for one so again if you want to get nine you know contracts then you're going to spend if you pay ten dollars for one contract so I've allowed myself to risk more because back in the day when I started doing these I was taking things were more expensive now that's not necessary you know and again they've made options so so doable for so many people so many different uh various price points that they have daily options and no QQQs in the spy I'm not doing this I am not using those but you could basically day trade options if I call it short on the spy you could buy a put that's the expiration called in here on the day that we did it you could have done the spy expiration option on that day there's daily expiration now QQQs in the spy that's something new this year I'm not doing that but you could you could depending on the size of your account you could do that okay so there's so many ways to take advantage of it the system I use for both any method that I trade any way I take the trade is based on my golden gap rating system that tells me that the stock is going to fall and that tells me that I want to short it however I decide to short it is up to me if it's a put or an equity trade and then you can you can decide that yourself you can decide that yourself as well how you want to do it and again the options newsletter like the emails that I send out that's a subscription service that you can sign up for if you just want to get the options trades and you don't want to learn my method in the class but I do think learning is important I do think taking the class is important it's just a matter of what what works for you you know obviously you're going to do a lot better if you understand what you're doing and you learn first and then trade but so many people just want to trade and so I have people the options newsletter that have never done the class but I do think that the people that have done the class trade better than people that don't in my opinion of the 11 years I've had the business now this was AMD this was a gap that we did here this was a short stock close here gap down fell boom again that was last week I called on May 3rd I called the 82 puts that actually don't even expire until this Friday but I got in and out cost was cheap $1.50 boom dropped fell good out made a dollar on it good trade made six grand if you risk a thousand fifty you could have made seven hundred dollars again this is getting in the trade and out of the trade the same day but doing it as an option okay we also did a day trade in that too so again there's many many many many many many opportunities to do day trades and options in the same stock you just have to look for them but getting back to what I was saying here gaps are to bend and they create a sense of urgency that's an action that's being forced by participants at the stock this is why gap trading is incredibly powerful trading gaps is a powerful and profitable way to train because you're trading on the side of power you're trading on the side of power who's in charge who's in charge who do you think's in charge the big banks or the small banks who do you think's in charge the Fed or the government who do you think's in charge you know what I'm saying like just think about it okay so you know who's in charge you must play with the people that are in charge if you try to play against them you are going to lose it is a losing losing proposition and you have to get on the side of things that are working in your favor you have to be smart there's no other way to put it okay so the whole philosophy behind the golden gap system is to analyze a large time frame to make the trend decision on the directional bias for the gap all large traders of every kind look at large time frames to make decisions particularly institutional traders and then you're using the daily chart to make the decision for the stock pit which allows you accuracy in the direction so again you must have charts you can talk to Jeff about the charts you've got to have charts otherwise you're just trading blind and you're going to lose you can't make trading decisions in this type of market based on fundamentals even if you wanted to do that you're not Warren Buffett and you don't have billions of billions of dollars to weigh on downturns by stocks and let them drop off a planet before they go back up around again you won't be able to withstand that many many people can even people that are wealthy don't want to see their positions go down to a certain percentage and then take losses and wait for the downturns and so I caution people for that this is not long term investing this is day trading this is active chunking and out trading you're doing it out and we're using the one minute chart which allows for good risk rewards and accuracy this was another good one we did this was Boeing again this has been falling too we did a trade in this it fell in here boom I'm going to show you the options we did on the fourth I called it was just good timing on this for me just really good timing I called it a little bit after the open the 190 puts and BA and it fell like the second that I sent out the trade it fell cost was cheap for BA sold it for a 70 this is in and out in one day 109% again you can day trade options but again you could have held this but when you're up this kind of money you cannot miss a round not in this type of market not in any type of market in my opinion why would you when you take a trade you have to use the money to take it and you don't have this money back on your account and the profit until you get out so the nice thing is when you book the profit say you risk 1125 of $1,225 then the next day you get up in the morning you've got that money in your account and you've got that money back in your account so you don't really want to be holding stuff that long anyways here's the day we did it that was just it was just like perfect timing boom and then fell off the planet now I didn't necessarily know that it was going to go to 195 that day I thought it was going to go down that day it ended up going really really really big that day here's the BA that was last week anyways it's important to get a trained die this is what I teach in the class a quality strategy which is golden gaps having how to have a good risk to reward you got to get the right entry and without a good strategy you're never going to make a dime in the market you're just never going to get there you need to learn what to do in order to be successful you need a trading account again you can talk to Jeff about scanners and software and charts and getting all of that you have to decide if you want a margin account or a cash account for options that's up to you you can ask me questions but it is about focusing on the right information and you must have a plan for booking money that's the whole purpose of doing this it's fun when you make money it is not fun when you lose and if you're losing money trading then you should stop what you're doing because it doesn't work you know a lot of people want to blame themselves and say I have a discipline problem I have this I have that chances are the strategy you're using just doesn't work if you don't have a good strategy you're just not going to be successful so anyways we talked about working from home getting the right risk to reward and we did touch on this earlier about today's economy and really you know making decisions to be independent and basically work for yourself then you really are in charge of what you want to do and I do think it's important to focus on success have goals set those goals and empower yourself any questions here just watching my time a little bit here I'm going to talk about the class and the class dates so I teach a class it's called the golden gap rating system and I teach my class once a month it's a checklist and again I teach this class because I think it's important for people to know what to do now I call the trains live like the disney trade in the live trading room you can go to my youtube and watch some videos of the room on there and other videos I've done in the class you are eligible to join the live room in the class you will learn a 26-point professional bearish gap rating system the purpose of the system is to help you evaluate which gap to trade each morning using a checklist it's a class on how to find pick and play professional bearish gaps and the class from May is May 20th to 21st not this weekend but the fine weekend it's 9 to 5 class tuition is $69.99 if you're interested email me I'm currently running a special already had this going on if you're interested in the combo it's $74.99 you get the trends and the golden gap and the special is if you sign up by tomorrow you get the trading room free through the end of 2024 that's the rest of this year 2023 and all of next year this is huge this allows you it's an earnings season special I've been running all week and I'm running it through tomorrow if you want to sign up for this you must email me for the sign up forms it's a good offer this means you don't have to rush to rush to make the money back for the class you can take your time in the room take small size follow along learn and trade and it's a good offer any questions here last minute you might have thought already but there was a question about how you quantify risk in an options trade yeah I don't know I didn't know what the question meant by that maybe you can explain what they meant what did they mean I don't know what quantify risk the only way I could say the way we quantify a risk in an options trade is if I was buying something my maximum risk is going to be what I paid for yeah so let's pay it for it right in the worst case I don't know if that's what he's asking I didn't understand that question because whatever amount you're risking you have to look at the size of your cash in your account and all your trades risk should be close to equal that's how I quantify it other than that how I'm choosing the trade if a person meant that it's based on my rating system other than those two explanations I'm not sure how to answer that question or what that person meant perfect well I thought you meant a great job thank you for coming in thanks chef it was nice to see you and I will see you soon alright for sure