 Hi everyone, Lee Lowell here, smartopsincell.com. How's everyone doing today? It is Saturday, July 24th, 2021, moving on. Get through summer, but what's going on in the stock market here and here with another edition of our Saturday Synopsis. We like to take a look at the charts, the indexes, individual stocks, see what's been happening and get a glimpse of what may be moving forward. So as we do, we always look at the S&P 500 as represented by the SPY, the exchange-traded fund, which just gives you a great overview of the whole market in general. And so what's been happening? I know I took last weekend off, but the market is bullish. All-time new highs for all three main indexes, the Dow, S&P 500, and the NASDAQ. Let's take a look at what happened. So as we've been discussing, and I've been bullish and I've been telling you stay bullish because the charts are telling us things are bullish. The price action is bullish. We've been bullish since the end of the pandemic, coronavirus pandemic back in March of 2020, just been going up since. US stock market is rocking. And so my goal here is to try to help you become a better trader by reading the charts, seeing what the charts tell you. This is called technical analysis, chart analysis. And this is what I do. This is how I base all my trades on, what I base my trades on. I look at the charts and I see what kind of patterns are developing. I look at moving averages, look at support and resistance levels. And it really doesn't have to get much more complicated than that and that's what I do. So I always tell you what's on my charts. I have daily price bars here. These are open, high, low, closed bars. These little dash marks, let me open this up a little bit. Each vertical line you see here is one day's worth of trading. I don't use candlesticks. Candlesticks is another way of looking at charts. I have nothing against it. I just was never really taught or I wasn't showing how to use candlesticks. I've always been shown how to look at these open, high, low, closed bars. And by that, I mean each bar shows you the high of the bar is the high of the day. I should say the top of the bar is the high of the day. The bottom of the bar is the low of the day and there's two little dash marks. Kinda hard to see. The left little dash mark tells you where the market opened that day or the stock. And the little dash mark on the right hand side of the bar tells you where the stock closed for the day. And that's what I use. So this is a daily bar chart and we can look at one minute charts. This is a one minute chart when it loads up here. Let's keep that going. Okay, so each one of these bars is one minute's worth of trading. That's for super hyperactive traders who like to trade on one minute time frames. We can also move out to a monthly chart. Okay, so that shows us what the market or the stock has done well over a long period of the past. But we always look at daily charts. I look at daily charts. And on my charts, I have three moving averages. I have a blue, 20 day simple moving average. I have a red, 50 day simple and a 200 day simple moving average. And down at the bottom here, I have the RSI indicator. RSI is an overbought, oversold indicator. I use the 80 level and the 20 level. You can set those levels wherever you want to default to 75 and 25. And those levels will tell you pretty much if a stock or index is hitting overbought territory or oversold territory or if it's like somewhere in the middle or in between. And just because a stock or an index hits an overbought area on the RSI doesn't necessarily mean that a turnaround is imminent. Or if it hits a oversold, it doesn't mean a bullish turnaround is imminent. Okay, you can see here, this is the RSI hitting oversold levels right in February of 2020, right before the huge down move in the market. So it's oversold here. If you had bought here, you would have lost some money. Okay, so it's just telling you that, okay, the market could be getting a little oversold here. It's just take notice. It doesn't mean that it's imminent, but something could happen over here, overbought, coincided with the little top here. So if you sold, you would have been good, but look what happened. It's gone back up over time. So these are just indications of at the moment, things are a little overbought, oversold, but it doesn't mean that it's going to stay that way forever, okay? So these are things I look at and I look at price patterns. I usually like to leave these price patterns that I have on the chart so you can see over time what things have done. So that's all I do. I look for patterns. I look for support and resistance. I look at the overbought, oversold. I look at moving average. Now, what I've been saying and what I'm teaching is that a market or a stock that is in a certain direction will tend to stay in that direction until something comes along and turns it into a different direction, right? And I always use the physics example. An object in motion will tend to stay in that motion until something forces it in another direction. Same with the stock market. Obviously, things have been going up since March 2020 and there really hasn't been anything to derail that to knock it back down into a full-blown bear market, okay? So along those lines, if you want to get involved in the move and if you're trying to time your trades, you want to wait until the price action comes back to, in this case, a 20-day or 50-day moving average. And that's what we do. Once the stock starts to move up and we decide, okay, but we want to get in on that stock or the index, we typically would try to wait for a pullback to either the 20-day or 50-day. Now, in a strong uptrending market, the price action will typically bounce off the 20- or 50-day moving average. So if you're itching to get into a stock because you're bullish on it, you can get in at any time, obviously, but if you want to try to time your trades a little better, you can always wait for a pullback to the 50-day or 20-day. You can see it has bounced off the 20-day or 50-day for most of the time, has fallen below it for a day or two at most, but then it resumes its uptrend. So where are we in the market? What's happening? The S&P 500 has made all-time new highs just yesterday, Friday, July 23rd, 2021, all-time new highs, okay? So we'll go out to the monthly chart and we'll see where it's gone over decades. And here we are. This is all-time new high. This is great news for any bullish investors. The market is strong and it's going to stay strong. We're in the midst of earning season here in the US and stocks are doing pretty good. The earnings are good and the outlooks for future are good. That's very important. The forward outlook for a company is probably the best driver of whether a stock is going to go up or down because if it met expectations or beat expectations for the past quarter, that's good, but investors want to know what's happening forward. And if a company, their earnings announcement says things are looking good for the future, then the stock price is going to go up. Stock prices will follow the earnings. If a company is putting out good earnings quarter after quarter after quarter, the stock has nowhere to go but up. That's just how it works, okay? And so companies are doing well. Even though we had the pandemic, it was very short-lived and things have started to turn around. Now, yes, I understand there's chatter out there about inflation and companies can't get their supplies and employment is costing them a lot more these days. So some of that will be passed on to the consumer and some of it will be absorbed by the company. It's a balancing act, but people are more flush with cash now. The government's giving out money. People are getting back to work. They have more money to spend. That's what drives the economy and prices keep going up. So for now, the market looks great. The market looks strong. Here in the U.S. coronavirus, the coronavirus variant is definitely spreading around the world here in the U.S. as well. We're trying to get people vaccinated. Almost half of the U.S. is fully vaccinated. But I don't think that's gonna be something that stops this nice uprun in the market. I mean, people are always saying, well, the next bear mark is gonna happen because all these bad things. Well, bad things have happened over decades, but yet stocks keep going up. Stock prices keep going up because companies keep putting out good products and they sell those products and they make money on those products and that's what drives the stock market higher. That's what makes stock prices go up. So you follow your moving averages and you wait to see for it to derail or something to push it in another direction. So the general index, the S&P 500, looking good. Now I just wanna compare this to, so we have the, this is the SPY. This is the S&P 500 futures contract. Okay, the E-minis also all-time new high here. That's the E-minis. And so let's take a look at the Dow Jones industrial average finally broke above 35,000 for the very first time ever. You can see on the chart here, I had this resistance line here. So the Dow definitely has been bumping up against resistance here. Once it breaks through this blue resistance line, it's gonna be off to the races. So come Monday next week, we wanna see if the Dow could blast through this resistance and then really make, move on to more all-time new highs or will it get knocked back down for a little period of time? Someone could say, well, this is a triple top. You got one top here, another top, another top. Triple tops are typically bearish sometimes, not all the time. It all depends on how strong the market is. If it wants to blast through, then it's fair game. It's just gonna keep going up. But it could get knocked back down. Doesn't mean a new bear market is starting. It just means, okay, we have to gear up more energy to try to blast it through. So the Dow hitting all-time new highs, but definitely bumping up against resistance here. Let's take a look at the NASDAQ. NASDAQ, of course, has been strong. Now we like to take, here's the NASDAQ composite. So we had looked at this bullish W pattern, had the resistance line here, had blasted through it, pulled back. You see how it pulled back right back to the resistance line? So that's what happens. Prior resistance now becomes new support level, okay? So this blue line had been holding the NASDAQ back from getting through it. But once it blasted through it, now this old resistance line becomes support. You can see how it bounced right off of that support line. It's almost magical sometimes, how it does that. Last week, so we had last Thursday, Friday and Monday, we had this nice little few days pullback, which was great. You need that normal ebb and flow, but it was a great opportunity to get into bullish trades. If you're a believer in the bull market and you understand that prices will pull back at times, it made for a great entry right here. In our smart options seller newsletter, we sold some new put option spreads on the QQQ, which I'll bring up in a minute. But you can see how it bounced right on this now support line. It was first resistance and now it's support and it just took off, made all time new highs. Let's bring up the QQQ, the triple Qs, because that's what we use just like the SPY, this is exchange traded fund for the NASDAQ, made all time new highs again. So you can see same resistance line as the NASDAQ composite. So the QQQ and the NASDAQ composite, basically the same thing, they have the same pattern, same stocks. So it had the resistance and it didn't pull back as well as the composite did. The Qs pulled back to just under the 20 day moving average line. So it's going to bounce typically off, one of the moving averages, it bounced right off the 20 day and has gone up greatly from here. So let's take a look at the NASDAQ futures, the e-mini futures. They all move the same way. So here's the futures contract, looks a lot like the triple Qs, it bounced right off the 20 day moving average. The stronger the market is in a certain trend, it'll typically bounce off the 20 day moving average first or the 50 day. Now you can see we had some pullbacks, let me take, lower this out here. So we had some pullbacks but it keeps going up, okay? So it fell below the 50 day for a little period of time. But companies are doing well. So that just means the stock prices have to go up. So if you're looking for entries, maybe wait for a pullback, see if it's going to bounce and then you can get in again. There's always going to be a time when a market's going to make a new high. And some people say, well, I don't want to buy it too high, I'm going to wait for a pullback. Well, if that's the case, then you wait, watch it come down to either the 20 day or 50 day and then get in. But some people will say, oh, well, it's falling through, I'm not getting in now, I'm going to wait for another drop and then it goes up without you. So at some point you have to dip your toes and get in. You can buy a couple of shares, you don't have to spend a lot of money just to get your feet wet. But that's how the market works. Let's take a look at, so we had the SPY, the triple Q's, the Dow, all making all time new highs. The market looks strong. There's really nothing to push it back in another direction. So let's take a look at some individual stocks, like we typically do. We look at more of the popular stocks, the biggies. We always start typically with Apple. I talk about Apple all the time. Apple finally, finally blasted out to all time new highs. I draw these patterns on here. This is congestion pattern when stock starts to get in a real tight range and then finally blasts out. Then it went down into this little downtrend, made a W pattern and just kind of meandered. And finally it bounced off the, had a couple bounces right off the 200 day moving average. This is the biggie. The 200 day moving average is a very critical area of support. One, two, three. We had three bounces and the sellers just couldn't push it down anymore. And finally it went from 125 all the way up to 150. So it rallied $25 in a pretty short period of time. It's about a little over maybe five or six weeks just to go up 25 bucks and made all time new highs, had a little pullback last week and bounce, right? And bounce almost right off the 20 day moving average. So Apple's looking pretty good here. Earnings coming out next week for a lot of these biggies. Earnings for Apple next week. So we wanna see what happens with Apple. Let's take a look at AMD. AMD also has earnings next week. AMD was a good, we had a good little bounce right here, right on the, this was actually on the 200 day moving average. It had this bounce right here. So last week, Thursday, Friday, Monday, we had the little pullback. And if you're looking for an entry, there was your entry right here, 200 day moving average. We sold some put options in our newsletter. It's a bullish trade and we nailed it right here on the pullback. So AMD, although the chart does look kind of ugly, let's, we can extend this line. I'm gonna draw, extend this channel a little bit. So we had this long channel that AMD has been in. Try to get this right on. So AMD sort of been in this 75 to 95 range for a long period of time. Will it keep going and blast up through here to get to all time new highs? It's yet to be seen, but it's looking it's in the right direction. But earnings will be pretty powerful this week to see what happens with their earnings on early next week. So let's take a look at what else we got. So that's AMD and Apple and Amazon, Amazon. We look at Amazon had this long channel been bouncing around in this channel for a long time, finally blasted through it recently. And it came back down to the support line now and it fell below it for a day or so, but has now bounced back up, found its footing right on the 20 day moving average. So Amazon also has earnings coming out this week. We'll see what it does for that stock. Okay, we've got lots of biggies coming up this week. Let's take a look. What other stocks are of note? Okay, Tesla, yep, we always look at Tesla. Tesla has had an ugly chart for a while. It just keeps bouncing around, bouncing around. It has this pretty strong support at 550. So it's been in this congestion pattern right here. So it's gonna pop pretty strongly, either down or up through it. I think Tesla has earnings coming up soon, right? So we'll have to see what happens there. I think it's next week. So it's probably just, you know, congesting for their earnings announcement, but Tesla's been all over the map, but it seems to have support right here. What other stocks? Microsoft's been very strong, very strong head, and then this nice uptrending channel has blasted above this uptrending tower. So it's definitely getting up to some, I wouldn't say imminent pullback, but it's definitely getting to some overbought level. So this is what we call, we have some divergence here where the stock had made new highs, right? It made a new high here, made another new high, but the RSI started to come down a little, hasn't made another new high in the RSI. So that's sometimes what's called a divergence where the price action is going up, but the RSI is not following. The RSI is actually moving in the opposite direction. So that could be foretelling us that, you know, Microsoft may be getting a little overbought here, maybe just going up a little bit too far too fast might need a little pullback to the 20 day or 50 day moving average. So we'll see, but Microsoft has been very strong. Let's take a quick look at Oracle because that powered up pretty good too recently. Oracle had this massive spike. It went from, you know, 77 and a half dollars over $90. Had this nice little move here and then had this big pullback yesterday. Not really sure why the pullback yesterday probably could have been a little bit overbought. People taking some profits, but Oracle's been looking pretty good. I like Oracle as a company. I think it's got definitely more upside to go. But if you're trying to time your trades, trying to time your bullish trades, you know, you wait for a pullback to one of the moving averages if you want to get in on the bullish side. What other stocks we'd like to take a look at? Let me go through my list here and we'll see. Now on this list, you'll see these green highlights here. You can't really see the numbers, but that's just showing you new 52 week highs, okay, or new all time highs. So there's just got a lot of green here, a lot of numbers that are doing well, companies doing well on the upside. Intel had earnings the other day and the market did not like it. Intel was starting to make a nice move up, but has since been in this downtrend and it got knocked down for a couple of dollars the other day, yesterday, Friday. So Intel, this chart looks pretty ugly. I wouldn't do anything with Intel. It's just not looking so good. So I want to show you a stock in a downtrend where you can see, we looked at Clorox before just to show you what a downtrending stock looks like. So Clorox had been doing real well right in early days of the pandemic because everyone was trying to buy all the Clorox wipes they can get their hands on. And then all of a sudden something came around and knocked it in the other direction. So once you see a stock gets knocked down a number of days, you realize, okay, this bullish move is over and now we got some kind of downtrending and it's moving down, had this spike, but then it just got knocked back down again. So it's staying within this downtrending channel or what will knock it out? Well, we've got some movement here that maybe the downside's over. It had popped up through if you just visualize this line extending further it has moved above it. So it looks like it might be trying to form a little base here may start to have a little uptrend. Now you can draw a very early, you can draw a very early uptrend channel here maybe, okay, on Clorox. So it's yet to be seen might want to give it some more time to see if it starts to move higher. If it does, then Clorox may have turned the corner and start to move higher. So it takes time. You have to learn how to, you know, spot these patterns, spot these movements and see what could happen. Now we saw here, this was starting a possible little bit of an uptrend but it got knocked back down here. Same thing, but it's gotten above this downtrending line. So this may be more of a legit beginning of an uptrend yet to be seen. I don't think I would play Clorox yet to the upside but I'm keeping an eye on it. So that's what you wanna do when you look at, you know, a possible trend change. Let's see what other stocks we're looking at here. Netflix, earnings had come out this past week at, you know, not so great. So Netflix continues to stay in this long-term channel, just bouncing from top to bottom. So not much happening on Netflix. If you're a seller of iron condors, which is selling a call option credit spread and a put option credit spread, you've probably been doing pretty well because Netflix has been staying in this range. You can sell some call option spreads using out-of-the-money strikes and selling put options spreads using out-of-the-money strikes. As long as Netflix stays in this range, you're gonna make money on those iron condors. That's what people like to do on a range trading type of stock. You know, just some ideas that are out there. What else? Nike still had that, you know, had that, you know, that air, hit that air pocket here and went higher and it's still going higher. You can see that on the RSI was well overbought here on the spike up. Had a little dip, but it's continuing to go up. So people like Nike doing pretty well. I don't really have any thoughts. Looks pretty strong, but also, you know, it's overbought, but sometimes the market will just keep going up whether it's telling you it's overbought or not. So take it with a grain of salt. Let's see, let's see. Cisco, Cisco is Procter and Gamble. Disney, the pharmaceuticals look good. Eli Lilly's going up. Bristol Myers is going up. I like the pharmaceuticals because we had a position on the XLV, which is the healthcare exchange-traded fund. Healthcare will always be around. People are going to need healthcare, you know, medicines, hospitals, just things to help keep people alive. The healthcare will always be a good industry. You know, you got Bristol Myers, you got Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, you got all these companies that are pumping out products and drugs to help people with their health. And so we like to trade the XLV, bullish on that, sold some put spreads on that, doing well. It looks strong. I mean, it's been, it was been hugging the moving average lines. And I like how it just kind of, it comes sideways to meet the moving averages and then starts to move up again. So the price action looks good on the XLV. I like that. What else do we have? Going through my list. PayPal, PayPal's been strong. PayPal hit, did we hit just about all-time new highs for PayPal? PayPal and Square, they're both doing well. These are the payment providers, online payment providers. Payment processors, I should say. Square's looking good. Probably wants to try to take out its all-time highs. Coca-Cola, I like Coca-Cola as well. I've got some shares of Coca-Cola looking good. And I think Coke had earnings the other day. You know, it's a slow mover. It's got great dividend, you know, long-term portfolios. I like Coke to be in my long-term portfolio. Just, you know, slowly moves up. It's a slow mover, pays a good dividend, but Coke looks strong here. Same thing with Pepsi, Coke and Pepsi, Coke and Pepsi. Look at Pepsi, all-time new highs. Let's just double check, hit the monthly chart. Yep, look at that, all-time new highs are Pepsi looking good at $157 a share. And maybe getting into a little overbought area, but, you know, I'm not too concerned about a little bit of a pullback normal. Ebb and flow might pull back to the 20-day or 50-day. Doesn't mean a new bear market starting. It's just, you know, people taking some profits, getting ready for the next bullish move higher. So Pepsi looking strong. What else? Google, I don't really keep track of Google too much because it just keeps going up. I mean, what can you say? Just going up all-time new highs here. Google, it's definitely strong. And let me see, I don't really like to check the meme stocks much anymore. GameStop, AMC not doing all that much. Here's the Bitcoin stocks. Riot and Mara are just kind of hanging around. That's because Bitcoin's still hanging around that $30,000 mark. Not much happening there. It's kind of stuck in a $30,000 to $35,000 range. So Riot and Mara also kind of just hanging around as well. All right, so I think that's about it here for the market assessment. Let's go back to the SPY. Market looks good. All-time new highs. I mean, there's really nothing to derail this thing. It's just, the market looks good. Earnings are still coming out. As long as earnings are still coming out to the good and companies are giving good guidance for the future, stocks are going to keep going up. That's just how the stock market works. So don't be afraid of pullbacks. That last pullback last Thursday, Friday and Monday this week, that was a gift to everybody to possibly get long. Look at the SPY bounce right on the 50-day moving average. So like I've been saying, stocks that are in a nice uptrend will typically fall back and bounce off either the 20-day or 50-day. So use that as your guidance if you want to potentially time your trades better, okay? All right, so that's it. I like the market. I'm staying long, staying strong. Things look good. So let's take a quick look at our website, smartoptionseller.com. Please download our free Put Selling Basics guide. We sell Put Options out. What we do, go to our website, smartoptionseller.com. Click on the Put Selling Basics link. You can put your name and email address at the bottom and we will send you a free copy. If you'd like to know a little bit more about what we do, click on our services tab. We've got two newsletters and our one-on-one coaching. If anyone needs help getting to that next level, that's what we do. We can help you and our newsletters. All right, so that's it for me today. That's it for the market assessment. I hope this video has been helpful. Don't forget to subscribe, hit that red subscribe button. Give me a thumbs up. Leave a comment if you wish. Email me, love hearing from you, okay? Well, that's all for me today. I hope everyone has a great weekend and a great week ahead. This is Lee Lowell signing off.