 What's up navigation traders? Happy Friday. Today is Friday, April 6th. Hope everybody had a great week of trading Volatility is here, and it looks like it's here to stay so always makes our trading a lot more fun a lot more opportunity Before we jump in just want to make a couple quick announcements We are working on several things to enhance your members area one of which is a just kind of a more robust updated Watch list that will be part of your members area So as things change as we add or need to delete possibly Symbols from that it'll always be up to date as opposed to the PDF version that you have now There's a couple couple different tweaks and changes, but we'll also have a little bit more robust individual stock list The each of the each of the strategies has a very specific specific set of symbols So there's very specific symbols that we trade on strangles But some of them we may not trade for iron condors due to the low price of the of the underlying symbols So a lot of the core strategy watch lists are not going to change much But we do want to provide a little bit more robust Stock watch list to choose from for some of your more directional plays So look for that coming We've got a ton of other stuff coming out that we're really excited to share with you and I'll keep you posted on in the coming weeks but let's jump into the alert for the week and Starting with Monday the second So the first trade we did was an opening trade in IWM. So IV percentile Still nice and high at that 96 percentile So we wanted to continue adding new positions selling some premium You can see here IWM Trade is still very centered got a little bit of profit, but not not enough to take off yet So we'll continue to monitor that one Next trade is a rolling adjusting trade in IYR. So we had a short strangle. We rolled that from April to May We just kept kept the strikes exactly the same here. So we didn't change our strikes and You know, this is our typical You know, just a mechanical way to adjust when we get under 21 days to expiration We roll this out. It reduces our risk. It reduces our what's called gamma and That only April only had 18 days to expiration. So we wanted to to roll that out. So if we take a look at IYR now You can see We're still very centered now in in that position got a little bit of profit So just we're about break even on the trade overall Maybe you got a little bit of profit, but just waiting for some more before we before we book that one Assuming it stays in our range Next trade was a rolling adjusting trade in FXI So we had a short straddle. It's originally a strangle had been adjusted into a short straddle And we rolled that from April to May We made a tiny tweak and we just rolled the call down From 50 to 49 to collect some more credit get a little bit closer to price so we now have the minus 50 minus 49 calls puts and calls in May and Then we also have another our other short strangle in May as well. So let's go ahead and take a look at those Those positions here. Here's the here's the full strangle that we have not adjusted yet Got a nice little profit there not enough to take off yet on these strangles We like to get at least 30% of max profit if it comes quick if not, we'd like to wait for 40 or 50 percent and then that That roll from the alert rolling to May looks like this So this has got given us a little bit of long Delta meaning we need this to go up to benefit this piece But that's okay because we've got other short Delta positions that helps offset and balance our portfolio And I'm going to go over where we're at on our Delta here after we go through all the trades to make sure That that makes sense. I get a lot of questions about short Delta and how to hedge and There are a couple really detailed videos that we've we've produced that are in our blog One is how to trade options like a professional The others the other is how to Delta hedge your portfolio So if you look through the blog you can find those videos and that helps you get an idea of how we manage our entire portfolio Using Delta and we beta weight that to SPY Which in thinkorswim, I'll show you how to do that to SPY if you're in tasty works your positioned deltas are automatically Beta weighted to SPY already. So I'll get to that in a minute. Let me get through the rest of these trades And then we'll jump into that Next trade was a rolling adjusting trade in XRT. So we rolled our short straddle again It was once originally a strangle, but we adjusted into a straddle So we adjusted that from April to May kept the strikes the same So still at the 46 strike and then we also have a another piece of that trade in XRT as well So very similar Could use a little bit of up movement and S'more theta decay to to benefit this piece of the trade the 46 straddle Then if we check off that and we check on our other piece We've got a we've got a strangle. So got a little bit of profit just waiting for some more time to pass more theta to decay next trade was a rolling adjusting trade in DIA, so We rolled one of our short call verticals from April to May and then we adjusted our strikes down, right? So remember we've got this We've got this down move in the market. So We want to keep this short delta in our portfolio So we had a big a big profit on this piece of the trade And so we just simply wanted to roll our strikes from 247 to 50 down to 236 239 By doing this, we keep that short delta in our portfolio We extend the time being in this trade and we collect some credit for doing so So if we take a look at our DIA and actually let me go back real quick because we had back to back very similar trade So we had two different Verticals one with four contracts and one with three We're keeping these separate just because we place them on as as different trades So we are keeping their strikes just one point different. So you can see this is at the 247 250 This is at the 248 251 We roll this to 236 239 And we roll this to 237 240. So just one strike different That's really more for just tracking purposes more than anything. We could have rolled all these into one trade But we like I said, we entered as Separate trade so I want to keep them separate for tracking. So if we go to DIA to show you what that looks like First of all, we've got this other iron condor on here that that's pretty centered nothing to do there yet And then the two Short-call verticals the one with four contracts. We'll look at that one first You can see, you know, we had after we after we rolled the trade. We did have a little pop-up in price So it's not quite in our range But now with this big move down today, it's coming back and almost back into our range So just continue to need a little bit more down movement in price to benefit that and then very similar for the one with three contracts Oops wrong one. So just need a little bit of more a little more down movement to benefit that piece Okay, next trade There's an opening trade in the tenure notes for ZN so looking at the implied volatility remember, you've got to use the ETF TLT to get a decent reading on the implied volatility indicator and that popped up to 77 on the percentile And so I mentioned that you could as alternate trades You can do a strangle or an iron condor in TLT the notes the bonds All of those kind of are very highly correlated symbols. I like to do that. I like to do the ZN It's a very efficient use of capital because it is a futures contract ZB is a little bit bigger So if you wanted a bigger position, you could use ZB if you wanted to use a an ETF You could also use TLT in this case. I just prefer using ZN Because it's kind of right in the middle gives you a good bang for the buck So if we take a look at that position Ford slash ZN kind of spread this out a little bit better so you can get a better idea of where it's at It's still very centered. I got a little bit of profit there, but not enough to take off So just waiting for some more time to pass there Next position was in EWZ. So we sold some more premium in EWZ open up a new trade a short strangle One of the other questions I get a lot is, you know, can I do an iron condor? The reason that we use naked positions strangles straddles in some of these lower price symbols I mean remember this is only a forty some dollar ETF so when you buy the wings to define your risk You're collecting much less credit, okay? So with these lower price symbols sometimes it you're just not collecting enough credit to make it worth the trade To make it worth the risk and the transaction cost now tasty works Is has worked to make that a little bit better because the transaction costs are much less of a factor because of their competitive zero closing cost But you know if you're in thinkorswim or some other broker. I would I typically do not trade Iron condors and symbols this low if you were gonna go a little bit closer to the money like a butterfly Then it can make sense to define your risk But if you're doing a kind of a wide, you know 20 delta where you're selling 20 delta on each side I like to do strangles because that way it gives you a good bang for your buck And you're not You're not limited on that on the credit like you would be on an iron condor so you can see here we did three contracts and Collected, you know, three hundred and twenty one dollars is our max profit if we would have bought the wings You know, we may have only collected a hundred or hundred and fifty on three contracts. So that that's kind of the difference Anyway, this one's still very centered nothing to do there. So we'll continue to monitor that Next trade was a closing adjusting trade in Ford slash ES the S&P 500 futures and so this was a an iron condor And with the down moving price price came through and breached our downside break-even point So we closed out the untested side just like we teach in our course Still holding on to the put vertical side And then we've also got our long put vertical and ES Which is just that that short delta trade a totally separate trade from the iron condor So if we take a look at ES Here is here's our short call vertical Excuse me. Here's our long put vertical that we have on for our short delta directional position So just looking for some more downside to benefit that piece And then our uh, here's the long Excuse me. Here's the short put vertical from that iron condor So prices bounce back up. It's in our range. And so still just continuing to hold this If the market does continue higher At some point we'll take that off If it does keep going To the downside we may either just close it because we do want to keep short delta But we'll see when that when that time comes And then the other piece that we have Is we've got another full iron condor, which is another alert Coming up, but I'll just go ahead and hit on it now We've got this full iron condor very centered nothing else to do on that piece Next trade was a closing adjusting trade in zs, which is soybeans And so we closed the call vertical side of our iron condor Because uh, very slimmer similar to the s&p's price breached our downside break even so we just closed the untested side Still holding that that put vertical and then we've got another full iron condor In soybeans. So if we take a look here This is our short put vertical with the up move in soybeans over the last couple days prices come back into range If we get a little bit of more up move into next week, we'll go ahead and close that out And end up booking a nice profit in that piece of the trade And then we've got this other iron condor here Where you can see we're down a little bit now the market's closed in soybeans So this may not be quite an accurate reading. I think the profit line would be pretty close to the zero line If if the market was open, so just can Excuse me So we'll continue to monitor soybeans as well Market's going to close here in about 20 seconds So you'll hear a closing bell here shortly Next trade was a rolling adjusting trade in apple So we've got this long put vertical in apple in apple And we just simply rolled this from April to May And we adjusted our strikes from 180 170 down to 175 165 And by doing this as you can see it's we're buying it because it's a long put vertical But because this is negative that basically means we collected a credit to do this trade So as price moved down, we're just kind of rolling it down Rolling it out giving us a little bit more time In the trade and to continue to keep that short delta It gets the apples down about two and a half percent today So it's come all the way back down back into our range So just looking for some continued downside in apple if we take a look at the chart You can see here if we just get a you know move down to 160 or so You know that's going to that's going to give us a nice little You know in a nice little profit position there and with the rolls and everything We'd we'd be able to book a nice profit But we'll continue to keep this on is just another short delta piece to our portfolio And then next trade was a closing trade in xle So we had a short strangle on an xle We went ahead and closed this book to profit of over 50 percent Of max profit in xle so that was a nice trade If we take a look at the chart of xle What you'll see is that you know it played very nice for us Just kind of stayed in a nice steady trading range Had a little bit of a down movement a little bit of contraction in implied volatility Which gave us the opportunity to to book that one One thing I wanted to point out about xle is that was in april So if we take a look at the april options we've we've only got 14 days now And so we and we took this off yesterday So it had 15 days which is which is under that 21 days where we typically like to roll Out to the next expiration cycle Now why did I give this one a little bit more time? The reason is is because we had a little bit of profit not the 50 percent that we wanted It wasn't testing either of our break evens The the theta the implied volatility just had not contracted at all So is still holding a ton of premium and so that's why I wanted to give it a few extra days Because we weren't being tested There was really no reason that that we needed to roll that yet we could have And collect a little bit more credit But instead we just held waited for some implied volatility to contract And and when the market had that couple days of an up move You know the premium got sucked out a little bit gave us that 50 percent of max profit and we were able to take that off So those are just some of the the little tiny nuances that that you only can get from from actually Producing trades. It's it's hard to Provide those type of details in the course, but anyway, I just wanted to give you a little bit more Inside on on why we gave that one a few more days as opposed to rolling it right at that 21 days to expiration Next trade was an opening adjusting trade in es So this is where we added another iron condor in the s&p. I already went over that one on the analyze tab And then we did another opening adjusting trade in wheat So if we take a look at wheat We've got If go to the analyze tab here, you see we've got this iron condor still very centered nothing to do there yet And then we did another opening trade. So we opened up quite a few positions this week And this one was in tesla. So this was when we had the uh, the couple up days in the market We wanted to add some more short delta. So we bought a long put vertical And as I stated, it's purely it really a directional play to add some short delta to the portfolio And if we look at take a look at tesla on the chart What we're looking at is okay, we had this huge up move the last couple days And looking for an opportunity in an etf or a stock and I just chose tesla because Because we we were kind of selling into strength right after we had a couple big moves I'm hoping that kind of reverses And and goes down a little bit and we needed short delta somewhere and so tesla is just it's as good as any It's not specific like I think that tesla is going to crash or you know, there's some issues specifically with the company It's just looking at it from a pure short delta play To blend into the rest of our portfolio And it was as good of an option as any Next trade was a and lastly it was a closing adjusting trade that we did today in wheat. So we had a An iron condor on booked Almost 50 of max profit on this piece of the trade and then we still have that other iron condor That I just showed you from a from a couple alerts previously So that's all the alerts Let's go back to the platform and take a look at some of our other positions I I love our mix of positions. We've got such a good diversified portfolio a good number of positions on right now We've got oil. We've got the s and p 500. We've got nat gas We've got uh notes, which is a Uh, you know an interest rate play. We've got soybeans. We've got wheat We've got apple. We've got the dow. We've got the mexican etf. We've got the brazilian etf the chinese large cap etf gold small caps with iwm iwr is real estate the cues primarily technology We've got tesla xlk, which is also technology xlu, which is utilities and xrt, which is retail So if we go through some of these that we haven't looked at first being oil So a big move down at oil. We we had a nice little profit in oil, but uh prices come down So we're about it even right now So we would use a little pop-up in oil to benefit that piece a little bit more contraction in implied volatility If we take a look at the charts of oil What you'll see is implied volatility Did contract and then popped its head back up a little bit today with the down move But we'll still continue to monitor that Whenever es natty gas so in that gas we've got an iron condor on here Which I was trying to get filled. We're almost close to to booking a profit in that one Uh, but we'll leave this over the weekend and hopefully get a little bit more theta decay potentially add another piece to this Uh early into next week depending on where everything is Whenever notes whenever soybeans whenever wheat Apple I went over that one dia already went over that one EWW the mexican etf got a strangle on here still well within our range got a little bit of profit not enough to take off yet EWZ kind of a similar story pretty centered Not enough profit to take off there yet FXI already went over that one We've got two pieces on there GLD the gold etf Got a got an iron condor just waiting for a little bit more Time to pass theta to decay could use a little bit more up move in gold to benefit that one whenever IWM whenever I IYR The cues so we've got a couple a couple pieces in cues So we've got a short call a couple short call verticals That were originally part of an iron condor and we're just holding on for some short delta You can see we've got profit in both of these But just continue to hold these for potential a little bit more downside and then we'll either close or roll those out Again, just like dia these are just one strikes apart to keep You know to keep for tracking purposes But very very similar positions in the cues I already mentioned tesla XLK this is another short delta piece we have on just a A long put vertical and by the way, I got a couple questions on this this week as well from members Why are you Buying long put verticals As opposed to selling call verticals when implied volatility is as high as it is And then here's the reason is Think about this typically when stocks go down implied volatility goes up, right? So if we're putting on a short position in an ETF like XLK for for example If we get a down move In the in the stock, which is what the position is anticipating You know, we're looking for down movement to benefit that position Well, if if stocks go down implied volatility is going to go up So that's going to slightly benefit a long put vertical More than it is a short call vertical Either one is is is completely fine We're just we like to we like to get every little edge that we can and if the implied volatility Benefits that slightly, you know, that that's why we're doing the long put verticals and some of these as opposed to short call verticals So hopefully that makes sense XLU we've got this short strangle here still very centered nothing to do there and then I already went over XRT Which we've got these two pieces on one a short strangle centered and the other the 46 46 straddle Just waiting on that one. So those are all our positions. Let's go over to the monitor tab I want to kind of give you guys an update on our short delta situation so Here's all our positions. I like to break these down by the expiration So you can see most of our positions are in May Which currently has 42 days to expiration So perfect time to be entering new stuff, which is partly partly why we entered a bunch of new opening positions this week And then and so all those are in may you can see some of the futures based on how their expiration cycles work are out in june So we're all in may and june and so what you'll see is In thinkorswim you check this box and you can say I want to beta weight All my positions now if I if I uncheck that and I don't have them beta weighted Then we're excuse me Then we're looking at all these different positions from s and p's to soybeans to wheat to you know all these different Etfs and stocks and futures And you don't and and each of the deltas is relative specific to that underlying symbol So you're kind of comparing apples to oranges to pineapples to bananas And so what we like to do when we beta weight our portfolio to spy Basically what we're doing is we're trying to get a little bit better idea of comparing apples to apples So if we look at our delta if we beta weighted to beta weighted to spy You can see if you add up all these ones in may we've got a short delta of just 24 And then in june we've got a positive delta of 53. So we're actually slightly Um long delta Now remember The s and p 500 is down over 2 percent today S and p's are down 58 the dow is down over 560 points. So when we started the day we had about Uh, we were short over a hundred delta Beta weighted to spy So Now we're actually a little bit long delta and that's just the nature of the game when you have these Range bound positions like iron condors and strangles and straddles and and things like that Your delta is going to constantly be changing based on where the market is So we had this big move down today. So it sucked up a lot of our short delta You can see we benefited because we we were up over 300 in the portfolio today But now we're now we're in a position where you know if the market does keep going down You know, we're going to have we're actually a little bit long delta. We're very delta neutral I mean, you're never going to be exactly delta neutral For very long But that that's kind of how we how we manage those so You know, if we get a little bit of a pop up in stocks We may look to add a little bit more short delta Now if the other piece of that is if stocks do move up next week We're automatically going to gain some short delta because of the nature of our positions So that's the whole game is you're you're you're just tweaking and managing and and monitoring your your overall delta position in your portfolio Just to make sure you don't get too short biased or you don't get too long biased Uh, as you guys know if you've been following us for very long You know that we like to have a little bit of a short delta position in our portfolio because If the market does, you know, have a major move down, you know The velocity of a down move like we saw in february Like we've seen a couple days In in march and like we're even like we're seeing today The velocity of a down move a lot of times is is more than that of an up move Now we've got some with the market being as volatile as it is We're we're getting some big big moves to the upside as well When that happens, it's typically sucking the premium out of our positions and that's when you'll see us Closing a lot of positions as they as they become profitable for us So I hope that helps, uh, you know looking looking into next week We will, uh, you know, we'll continue to to manage our portfolio And if we need to add some short delta or, you know, re you know, add some new positions to get that You know to keep that balance in our portfolio. We will go ahead and do that I anticipate, you know, and this is this is just kind of market awareness You know, I do anticipate the market continuing low or breaking through those february lows And so, you know, we do want to have some short delta I don't like adding short positions after we've already had big down moves But uh, but we may but we may have to to keep that balance in our portfolio where we want it So I hope that's helpful kind of walking through our thought process walking through our different positions Of course, if you guys have any questions Let us know we're really excited about, um, you know continued trading in the next week Implied high implied volatility is always a much more fun time to be trading so much more opportunity You saw our results from from uh, the month of march where our profits were Higher than typical and that's because when we put on positions when implied volatility is high We're collecting more credit our max profit is higher And so it's just a just a fun time to be trading so Welcome everybody who just came on board and you know, we're we're continuing to uh Manage these positions and I hope you are enjoying learning what we're what we're doing here because it's such a powerful way of trading Everybody have a great weekend. We'll talk to you next week