 And as I always like to say, when you come on, weenie, weedie, weechie. I know you say that every time. I say that every time. I'm the only person you know that study Latin. You are the only other person I know who speaks Latin. You just have a Roman soldier in your neighborhood you get to practice with. How funny, how funny. And for those who don't speak Latin, which is everybody except me and Melissa, that means I came, I saw, I conquered. Which is a great way to approach the stock market, actually. The Stock Swoosh LLC is an educational firm that empowers traders with a complete and detailed system to become profitable traders. Melissa Armo graduated magna cum laude from Gettysburg College with a BA in philosophy and a minor in Latin and political science in 1994. She was employed for several banks and brokers in New York, Pennsylvania, Florida, Arizona as a mortgage broker for 17 years. She has changed careers from banking to pursue a security trading career in 2008. A self-taught day trader with over 10 years experience. Melissa specializes in a trading strategy to focus on shorting stocks that gap. Melissa also appears frequently as a TV commentator and stock market expert. Watch Melissa on RT America, Chatter TV, CBS, Fox News, and Fox Business News. Okay, Melissa, well you know the drill here. You have until five minutes before the hour. And then we will hand out the next batch of $100,000 in prizes. And you can communicate, ask questions with Melissa in the chat box on the right. So I see here earn many fast shorting stocks. So I'm going to mute myself, Melissa, and you have the floor. Wonderful, thanks so much for having me. Great day to be here. Great day to be inside here in Manhattan. We're getting snow. We've hardly had any snow in the Northeast this year, but it is a cold, chilly day here in New York. And I'm going to talk to you today about shorting, which is actually a great topic. So the market's rallying today. Market's up today. Market was up pretty big in a gap up. And for those who don't know me, I trade gaps. So I've been doing this now for 15 years. And it seems like I've always traded forever, but we live in very interesting times where the market's been very volatile lately. So we're going to talk today about day training. We're going to talk about shorts. We're also going to talk about doing options as punts. But overall, there's been a very interesting last couple of days in the market. And obviously if you've been following the news and following what's happening in the U.S. banking system, we can talk about that a little bit at the end if we have time as well. So welcome, everyone. I'm going to talk today about earning money, fast-shorting stocks. If you have questions, you can email me at Melissa at thestockswitch.com. You can also call me at 929-3200 Gap. I also am on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Skype. And I try to put what I know ahead of time that I'm going to be on TV my hits then on Twitter. So I was on Fox News, interestingly enough, on Fox and Friends on Wednesday morning. And I did talk about the possibility that the market could fall again later that week. That was after the saw-off that we saw on Tuesday and, of course, then the market tanked on Thursday and Friday. So it was good timing that I was on. Of course, there are many, many reasons that the market has been selling off the last few weeks. Despite the rally today, the Fed is going to make a rate decision next week. Many people, one of the reasons we're rallying today is because they think that the Fed, on bad economic data this morning, is not going to raise rates. I do not, that's not my opinion. My opinion is that they will raise rates next week. We're living in times right now where every time anyone says anything, everybody wants to grab hold of it if, in fact, that's your bias. So you can have a short bias or you can have a long bias. And it's important to understand why you would have a particular bias when you put money on, when you risk money, in a trade. So 2022 was a great year to short. I mean, it just was. And if you didn't short, the market is an active trader. Last year, you lost money. You didn't win. It was impossible to. The market fell literally from the beginning of January and most stocks, even big stocks, even huge companies that are not going to go under, they still sold off in the year of 2022. So you've got to know how to short because what if we have another year like that? We could, you know, we very, very well could. So you have to know how to short. You have to know what to short. You have to know when to short. And again, you can do an equity trade as a short where you're taking the trade on margin, which is what I do in my live room today with shorted UAL. You can take a look at that chart. I didn't have time to put that in today. It worked. It fell. Okay. It was a gap down that sold off today in the morning into the open and you can do putts. Okay. Now I was listening to the previous person talk about options. I do the very thing that he was talking about. I absolutely do directional puts. So I will buy a put flat out, buy it. Trading it on momentum. And then I will sell it. So I buy calls and buy puts. I'm doing directional training. I am training based on momentum. And that is what I do. So I have a method that helps me determine in the pre-market whether or not I want to do a trade in a stock or the market as a directional trade. But that is exactly how I trade. So you can buy puts in small accounts. You can open up an options account as little as $2,000. You can buy puts in an account that is not set up as a margin account. So options are a way for people to make money without having to set up an options account, which is a retail trader. You need $25,000 in the US unless you go prop. Okay. And there's many, many prop places out there as well. But we're going to talk about day trades and options today in shorting. I just want to show the results from last year. You know, we had really, really good results in the room last year. Again, like I said, it was a good year to short. So this is an average risk of $2,800 per trade. That's not the cost of the positions that I took. That is the cost where I took the trade, took the size, put the stop in. And if I had lost in some of the trades, which I did in this, in these results, I would have earned roughly $2,800. But that's not the cost of the position. These are day trades of margin. But it was a good year. Okay. And some of the trades we did long, but most of these trades are short. So our totals for last year for 2022 were over $651,000. And again, this is just day trades. I did options as well. I did not put those results in here. The bottom line is that anytime you want to decide to trade, anytime you want to respond to the market, and I don't care how you do it, as a swing trader, an option, whatever, okay? Nothing that you do doesn't come without risk. So people always want to protect themselves. They do this because there's less risk in doing this. Really? There's risk in everything. And if there's a lot of takeaways from what happened with the Silicon Valley Bank failure in the last couple of days, one of the takeaways is, and again, if you get nothing out of my lecture today, you should get this, one of the takeaways is every trade that you take has risk. So you better know what you're doing. And if you don't know what you're doing and you're taking trades haphazardly, free trading room trials or taking advice from people that you don't know, you have no idea who they are or just listening to stuff on TV, you're taking risk for the sake of just taking the risk, okay? Nothing in life that comes without taking chances or risk to win big, but you have to assess the risk. So there's a difference between risk and for risk sake and calculated risk. So what happened with the failure of SVB Bank? They took risk that they should not have taken, okay? They had poor risk management to the bank, went under. Again, there's a lot of reasons for that. And I don't know if we'll have time more at the end to talk about it, but they bought long-term bonds, okay? So at the time, whenever they purchased those long-term bonds, interest rates were going down, okay? The interest rates had been down for a long, long time. However, in 2022, interest rates were rising. Everyone knew that, just like I just told you earlier five minutes ago. People think now, and the market's rallying today, because they think that the Fed is going to stop raising rates next week. That is not what I think, okay? And the reason I'm saying that is because I listen to the Fed when they talk. They want to bring inflation down. This is the only vehicle that they have to do it. Inflation's too high. If they stop raising rates, then inflation's going to stay where it's at, which is way too high and everybody knows that. So again, people are buying the market today because they think something's going to happen, which may or may not happen. So that's not what I call calculated risk, okay? You have to look at something and say, I'm going to do this trade. I'm going to buy something. I'm going to short something because of this. Know why you're doing something, and you have to have definitive reasons for doing that, but you've got to take risks to make money. So one of the reasons I do trade options in the direction of the option where I'm buying it and selling it in its direction is because I'm calculating the risk ahead of time using a rating system that I do, that I use myself in the morning when I rate the gap in the pre-market. Before I even take a trade, before I even trade the market, before the market even opens, I'm assessing the risk. Knowing that there's a possibility that every trade I take could lose, okay? I rate my gaps using a 26-point rating system, and if it rates 20 points or more, then I'm saying the risks are high, that this gap is going to go, this is going to go in my direction, again, whether long or short, but today we're talking about shorts, that it has a high, high level of chance of working, okay? Because no one wins in every trade. No one wins in every trade, and that's also why you have to take athlete risk. What was the other reason for the failure of SVB Bank? When they realized, which they should have done, again, if they had good risk management, which they didn't, if they had good management at all, in 2022, then in fact, the value of the bonds that they bought were going down. And again, if you don't understand bonds, say you buy a bond, and you buy a bond in a cost of $1. So what if you get up tomorrow? That bond in an interest rate environment where interest rates is, I'm talking about long-term bonds now. If the interest rate went down, okay, that bond now that you pay a dollar for tomorrow might be worth $1.25. You can sell that bond. You could sell it then, and you'd make 25 cents. But if an arising interest rate environment for long-term bonds, tomorrow that bond may be worth 75 cents, which is fine if you don't have to sell it. But what happened with SVB Bank is that there was a run on the bank, where people wanted their deposits and people wanted their money out, and then they would have had to cash out the bonds, in which case the value was not there for the bonds because the interest rates had gone up so much. So last year, the banks should have, knowing that interest rates were on the rise, you know, cut their risk back and sold some of the bonds at a loss and taken some of the risk off. They did not do that. And many, many people, and this is one of the reasons that we rallied in January, have been saying for the last two, three months, mostly the end of 2022, that the Fed was going to stop raising rates this year. They've said nothing. Nothing whatsoever at all that has made anyone should have think that if they just listened to them. So what people want and what is happening is not reality. But again, we'll talk about that more later if we have time. But the takeaway is that you have to assess risk, okay? There is time to take risk. If you want to make money, you must. But you can't take risk for risk sake. And many people trade the market. Don't know what they're doing. Take risk for risk sake because they want to make money. I have no idea what they're doing. Don't understand the trade. And they don't calculate the risk. The fact that they could lose and that there's a higher chance of them losing because they don't know what they're doing or the system that they're using. In fact, it doesn't have a high loan ratio and doesn't work, okay? And again, I can see any questions or comments as I'm talking here. So again, another main important point from the last couple of days if you're an active trader, if you're in the market, if you have investments in the market, long-term retirement, whatever, is that you must, for your own personal accounts, if you trade and your savings, your retirement, whatever, you must consider and use proper risk management in your trades. I think a lot of times traders, they have small accounts and they tend to blow them up. They say, what the hell? And they risk too much money. You have to think about what you're doing when you're trading. You don't want to blow up your account. No one should ever risk their whole account or even have their account in any day, in any week, or in any position, okay? And also, the other takeaway that's important from this bank failure was that they had a lot of money and guess what? They went under. So you can have a lot of money and it doesn't necessarily mean that you were going to do well as a trader. You still have to know what to do. You still have to have the right information. You still have to have a strategy that works. You still have to have risk management. You have to have all those things. So many people come to me, and again, I've been trading for 15 years, but teaching people for 10, they say, well, you know, once I have more money, I'll take your class. Once I have more money, I'll trade. Once I have this, once I have that, I don't have enough money, blah, blah, blah. Listen, you can have someone that has $200,000 in a trading account and they can lose it all, okay? Because this bank had millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars, all right? The fact is that they made poor decisions. You can consequently also have, okay, a positive experience and a small account, a small trading account, and make good decisions on good trades, okay, and do well and make money and grow that account. Now, you might be upset that it may take you longer than you wanted to take, but that's life, people. That's life. So obviously, if you have money and you have a lot of money and you know what to do and you have good risk management, that's all the best case scenario, to grow your account, to make money, to trade for a professional trader, trade for a living, whatever you decide to do. But not everybody's in that position. But I hear too many people that are whining and complaining as traders that they don't have enough money to trade. You don't, there's no guarantee if you have a lot of money or you will do well. And you can do well if you have a small account if you use a good strategy and have good risk management, okay. Why didn't I mention my options profits? Because my profits were huge. I didn't, actually, my assistant, Douglas must be on my list, because he said, why didn't I mention my options profits because they were huge from last year? They were. Because my assistant did this and he didn't put them into webinar. That's the truth. The next step of webinar, I want to make sure to put them in there. However, the risk that I take on options is more than I take on day trades. So my guess is that my assistant did not put them in here because I risk an average of $7,000 to $9,000, an average of around $8,000 per options trade. So you would have to have a sizable account to take that risk and to show those results. While there's plenty of people that trade out there that can take that risk, I don't want people to think they have to take that risk. We will talk about some options trades that I did that are in here where I show advanced trader results and beginner results. But again, you could take one contract. I've been trading a long time, so my risk is greater in options, mainly because of the fact that I want to hold the trades overnight and I also want to take bigger positions, but that's, you know, we can talk more about that in detail. How much should you risk for options? How much should you risk for day trades? Should you divvy it up? We can talk about that more in detail when we're at the end, but no, I don't have those results in here, but to be honest with you, we had outstanding results in the options newsletter last year. Why? Because the market fell a lot and we were doing a lot of puts, you know, and it was one of those years, and I don't want to get too off, you know, point here that you literally could have held trades into the date of expiration. That is not something, that is like an anomaly, okay? And why was that last year? Things were having really good follow-through. Actually last week, we were in the market short, and last week was one of those weeks, so if I had trades that were on that expired on Friday, I was already out of the trades that I was up in prior to Friday. Some I held into the last day because they were down and then flipped on Friday and they were positive Friday. Normally I will get out of a trade if it's positive before the last day. I just think that's a good thing to do. Again, I am doing directional trades, but last week was a week where if you stayed in trades that I called the previous week or the Monday of last week that expired on the 10th, you could have made more money holding into the last day of the week. Why? Because we had a big sell-off on Friday. That is an anomaly and not something that I think everyone should do. But the reality is that when you're somebody, if you have a retirement account, or your account has certain restrictions, buying a put is the same thing, really, as shorting. So what I say I'm buying a put for those of you that don't know about options, it's a short. Anyways, I also called options on Friday. Some were in the morning, Friday. Some were Friday afternoon. Those trades went Monday. Why? Because the market gapped down Monday and the stocks that we were in gapped down Monday and then we got out of them on Monday morning. Now the market's rallying. I'm not in any longs in the market because I want to wait and see where we go. I may change my tune and decide to go on the market but not right now. Part of that is the reasons that I mentioned what I've been discussing in this conversation in the last 10, 15 minutes. Let me see if there's any other questions. I'm a smart trader. Thank you. Yeah. I think that, again, I make trading decisions based on technicals but I am talking also about fundamentals because there are different environments where you can't ignore the fundamentals and that's right now. That is right now, that's the environment where we are in that. And I also talk about what's going on in the economy of fundamentals on TV but I make trading decisions based on the technicals and we will look at some charts. Anyways, can you do well during these times when things seem crazy, when one day we're up, one day we're down, one day the whole system's collapsing, one day everything's fine. I mean they came out today, I don't know who said it but somebody came out today and said from the Fed that they are going to insure all deposits, uninsured and insured deposits and why did they say that because I don't want everybody to go out and run out and take all their money out of the banks. They don't want the whole system to collapse and again that's one of the reasons the market is rallying today too. But a lot of people want to trade the market, want to be successful, want to make money and they never get there. They just give up, like I said, they get frustrated but they're really not taking their time. They're really not thinking trades through. They're really not thinking about their risks or really not assessing it. You know, I get it that it costs money to take a class like mine or other people's too but you're really not wasting your time or money doing that because you're setting yourself up to be successful in the future when you take the time to learn and understand something versus just again, like I said, taking risk for the sake of taking risk. So one individual can trade the market successfully as a career if you have a dependable method. Okay, the strenuous structure to trading results must be a strategy where you have a solid foundation that's based on accurately reading price action and technical analysis which is what I do. So I think it's a good time in the year again. It's still very early in the year within halfway through March but it's still the beginning of 2023. You can set your goals. If you have not had a good start to this year you can set your goals say I want to make this much money between now and the end of the year or I'm going to change my strategy. I'm going to change what I'm doing. Okay, it is your choice what you do. You do not have to fail as a trader. You can be successful. The problem is it takes work. It takes knowledge. Okay, it takes money. It takes all of these things and a lot of people are just too short-sighted. Again, one of the nice things about trading is you can work from home as everyone well knows. I just said, you know, I'm home here today which is nice. It's part-time hours with full-time pay. We traded in the morning. We shorted UAL. We were done and out and we were done before 10 a.m. and so I didn't do any new options today. So fast, fast trading I think is the name of the game for day trades in this type of environment. As far as options goes you need to be a little patient and play them out. Sometimes I've taken trades this year that go right away. Sometimes I take trades that take 24 to 48 hours or a couple of days but as far as day trading goes to be successful in this environment you've got to be in and out quick because there's too many things that can affect your trades but that's the reality. That's, you know, that's that's what it is and that is what you have to do. So you have to decide what you're doing very early in the morning which is what I do and stick on top of it so you can get in and out quick before the Fed talks or this thing, that thing or any economic data comes out later in the morning but it is a drain job if you work for yourself and you work from home and you have unlimited income potential. The idea of starting out with a small account and growing it should, you know should be appealing to people because again, not everybody starts out right away with a lot of money but there's no guarantee if you have a lot of money that you're going to do well. Okay. And it's a misnomer that a lot of people think that people that are rich always make good decisions that are always conservative. That's not true. You just saw a very wealthy bank with very wealthy customers they made risky decisions. Okay. And when they made those decisions at the time they probably didn't think they were risking because we were in a down we were in a low interest rate environment but once the writing was on the law they should have changed course and they didn't and it amounted to the downfall of the bank. Okay. So it's very important to understand what's going on when you're reading price action you can't ignore it and again you can wait you can stop you can not necessarily do a trade every single day. There's times where you just step back and you say you don't want to trade. The strategy has to be there has to be good has to set up right or you can take a day where you say I'm not going to do anything trading is about taking pot shots you don't get paid to the market if you trade every day if it's nothing good you get paid when you're smart and make good decisions and you know what you're doing. That's really the name of the game you've got to know what you're doing. Okay. And again I've been doing one strategy for 15 years so I've become an expert in this and particularly shorting but it's also looking at the quick quick trades that's set up in the one-minute chart but for me I've been reading the institutional money in the market this is part of my gap strategy and if you follow institutional money in the market then you can make money if you are against it it's going to be very difficult for you to make money sometimes you might sometimes you might but overall you're going to lose the key in trading is to have the consistency where you're making money more days than you're losing okay. So think about set your goals at the end of this year where do you want to be how much money do you want to have in your trading account how much risk do you want to have how much money do you want to be making per week how you know do you want to grow your retirement account even like you want to be in a better place a better place you know by December of 2023 then you are now in March okay. So it's good to set goals and then that will help you be patient also so getting back to what I was saying success in the market is about mastering a skill so I have a skill for reading directional bias as one of the reasons that I do directionally trade options and also I have a skill for reading the market very fast and very quickly into the open so the time that I focus on trading is between 9.30 and 10 a.m. and I have found that 80% of the stocks that gap make most of their moves in that quick time in the first half an hour or hour of the day now again you can day trade options if you want you could almost stop options if you want I don't do that I'm looking for a bigger move in options which is why I take a larger position size on options however you could day trade options if you want and they just started just recently spy and queue daily options they never had that before now that's not in that's not in every stock but in the ETFs in the market like the spy for example you could look it up today you could get an expiration date of today what is today the 14th so if I had shorted the market today which I didn't or if I had gone long the market today which I didn't and if you had gone long the market today you would have made money again I did not do that you could have bought calls today that's expired today that's something new that's something new it's something brand new so that actually even helps people with smaller accounts to be more active anyways getting back to what I was saying the big moves happen in the first half hour of the day and I called them golden gaps now I was talking about this earlier this is a rating system I coined the name I termed it golden gap because it's like finding gold in the market where I'm looking for 26 points of the daily chart of a stock or the market the checklist tells me what to look for in the price of the stock and then the points predict the price direction where it's gapping now I don't need 26 points to do it I'm looking for 20 or more that's the cut off 20 is still a lot of things so if I rate a bearish gap down and it ranks 22 points for example then I will short it alright it tells you where the money is flowing where the institutional money is flowing and why does this matter because again you're only going to make money if you're on the right side of things and you need to know what direction something's going to go for the position for profit you've got to have momentum to make money as an individual trader it's just the name of the game you've got to get the timing right in options and you've got to get the direction much money and you've got to get them to move you've got to get a dollar two dollar moves you've got to get these things to move and the faster the better obviously okay now again we were talking about institutional money institutional money is in charge of stocks and the market at all times even if you think it's not it is okay this is what confuses people in a market that I would define if you technically if you said to me I would say sideways that's how I would I would describe 2023 if I was on Fox News right now and Neal Kavuta said to me Melissa what would you say I'd say Neal we're still in uptrend actually we never broke the uptrend per way I look at charts even last year but I'd say Neal we were sideways the last few last few weeks we were sideways since January I did not look at the rally in January it's some crazy well a lot of that is going to depend on what institutional money decides to do in the next coming days alright which is going to have to do with the Fed but anyways getting back to what I was saying I'm looking to play the move quick in and out quick fast into the open bang bang boom and again I get in and out chunk it out chunk it out chunk it out if the option comes the same day okay if the option goes the same day I didn't do an option UAL but if I had I would have been out of it today I look at something and I'd assess if I'm going to hold it or not for the options I called Friday you could have technically got out of the morning ones by the end of Friday's close I thought that we were going to be down this week so I held them but I called late trades Friday afternoon which you would have had to hold into Monday and obviously then that worked out the best time of the day to trade is in the morning into the open that's when the big profits come in that's when you get the momentum so here's a chart here of the spy just to show you well here it is this is January and now so this is exactly how I would describe the market sideways up and down boot and there that's it that was through not this doesn't count today but today we're right around here wherever so we're sideways this here so everyone's screaming oh my god we're this that and the other thing blah blah blah we got very very very very very take it to the right to where we open we almost broke where the where we open on the year I mean we were dangerously close to that actually I think we did I think we did in the pre-market because we were down more we were down more on Monday morning before we open I'll have to go back and look at that if we have time and it was success on large profits come from quality not quantity you only need one trade a day to make money that's it and again the more plays the more impact shots it's about finding quality quality quality quality so if you come and you want to learn my method you will learn a high probability of directional bias for the entire day how to find a gap that is going to trend in that direction hopefully for the most part of the day big moves on the day again that's all point of momentum in a short you want a big fat red bar in a long like today if you want on the market you want a big fat green bar and then early confirmation of my bias and then move between 9 30 and 10 and then precise where you're going to get the good follow through and then the good risk to reward someone saying about options have the largest spreads are the open how do you deal with that you don't have to take it right on the open sometimes I wait 5 10 minutes or something so if you get in something at 9 35 or 9 10 I mean 9 40 10 minutes after the open you're not going to miss the trade if it's going to go and again we're talking about trading options for a big move so this isn't like you shouldn't fret yourself over 25 cents or 30 cents or 15 cents do you understand that's not the whole point the idea of momentum is not scalping it is that you're going to get a big move and everybody gets a different price sometimes I'm focused on something else and I do pay up but if it goes my direction I still make money anyways and I know that I'm in if I can't watch what I'm doing or if I'm on TV or something else that day or if I'm in a day trade well okay you don't want to take it like I have no idea what UAL is doing right now but you should not do an option in UAL right now we're open for two hours it fell hard this morning it'll be too late you know what I mean so you try to take the trades when you get them on the newsletter you can wait 5 10 minutes the spreads tighten up that's just right at the gate same thing with day trades actually same thing with day trades anyways here was a day trade we did this obviously again if this is you know you say okay what happened here this was back on the 8th so this is JPM biggest bank of the world actually biggest bank of the United States closed here gap down fell off a cliff everyone says well do you always have the best exits no I do my best I make money I sometimes have great exits but I I had a good exit today in UAL I kept going I had a good exit and this I thought it kept going I tried to make money I looked for the perfect pick the perfect gap the perfect entry I do the best I can with exits I try to make money but sometimes you can't predict how far something's going to go and what you don't want to do is be up money and something that doesn't have a reverse against you and you lose so the entry in this was 135 35 this was again on the night this was Thursday last week when all the Scuttlebutts started to hit the fan 4,000 shares which is a big risk this is 3,000 risk exit was 131.70 this is 14,600 this is a day trade this is a trade on margin you could have bought it as a putt if you didn't have the margin to take this position size or you take less of a position size okay now less of a position size oh here's a bigger chart event less of a position size you could have taken 2,000 shares okay risk 1,500 and made over 7,300 that's your whole week you know I mean this is this was a great trade so you know the bottom line is that when you're looking for something and you're and you're in it okay and you're doing it the whole point the whole idea of it is that you want to get the money move you want to get the flush like if you're in a short you want to get you want to get the flush down the sell off again if you're in a long you want to get the push up okay and so that's the whole idea of capturing the money move I don't know why I think this was 3, 9 why would I even mess with individual stock shares when I have options that's a great question I'll tell you exactly why because when I go to bed and when the market closes at 4 o'clock I know every single day where I am with my day trades I do not every day with options so I like the certainty of doing day trades I also like the fact that I get the fast move in the day trades I don't know where I'm at so the activity is the day trades where I'm in and out quick as far as options sometimes like I said you have to wait so you may not you may take a trade one day and not book money in one day in an option because you have to wait for it to go could take a day could take two could take three whereas day trades I'm in and out fast every day I also know where I'm at sometimes I go to bed at 9 in an option straight it's down then all of a sudden the next day which we can talk about more at length again at the end of doing both but I like doing both okay and you also capture overnight moves with options but you get the flexibility being in and out quick in as far as the day trades and if I pay a certain price for something in a short if I enter a short at 135 35 whether this trade gets to 131 70 in five minutes or five hours I'm making you know this money whereas with an option you have time expiration even on the day even on the day and you'll see that now more in the dailies that they're that they're allowing in the market but like if you take a trade like say you got in this trade at 942 and it goes here at 330 you get out with money and I'm just making this up as an option the value is less and again I don't want to get into a whole big long talk about options but you have time value with options that you lose every hour actually every hour and every day and it's getting back to what I was saying what if there's no gaps of rate over 20 points you wait for the ones that are good it's about high odds high odds the stop loss is the stop loss is the risk the stop loss is the risk so if this trade gets stopped out Peter's asking about the stop loss that's how much you're going to lose you know if you get dinged down a little bit more but you're going to be out you're going to be out you know we could talk about the whole SBB class like they had zero risk management so they should have said well if the bonds go down XYZ percentage and value we will cash them out you know they didn't even do that like do you know what I mean everybody needs a stop loss you need to have a place we can cut it you do not want to blow up your account and again you think people with small accounts blow up their accounts guess what people with big accounts blow up their accounts I've heard horror stories I've heard it all just don't do that it's well within your control you don't have to do crazy things you can do normal things and you know you shouldn't have to you shouldn't be afraid of trading options in directional bias with momentum you gotta think about what you're doing alright getting back to the next one here snap snap snap was the eight so this was one we did it was a short stock list here gap down fell boom okay it was 11.30 and it was 11.02 it's 28 cents but still big size in this lots of volume great trade you're in and out this is a stock that does not move like $1.02 I mean it had this move over here this was a really big move for that day but I was happy with the profit I was happy with the money we got in and out quick and done this actually ended up continuing though it did continue further it did it did and I think it fell even the next day because in the market fell that day in the night but we did a fast day and out of that now again you could have risked $1,500 on this I made $16.80 that's a day $500 a day $1,000 a day $1,500 a day I'm trying to turn what I made what I risk over one for the day trade so if I risk $3,000 I'm trying to make $3,000 if I risk $2,000 I'm trying to make $2,000 okay with options if I risk $8,000 I'm happy with 50% or 80% go ahead I'm sorry John did you say something are we going to say something John can everybody hear me oh there's Jeff hi Jeff Jeff's on after me anyways we'll talk about Google is another one we did we did an ad in this again this was do-do-do-do-do okay oh Jeff's testing I thought that was I thought that was John anyways we did a play in Google here where it fell I didn't look at my time here this was another nice trade And again, this was one where you're looking for the flush, okay? So again, this was Google, stock close here, gap down. We did this actually in the 14th. These dates are wrong at the top here. I don't know why these dates are on here, but this trade was right in here. So this was a gap down that we shorted and we got in and out in the tail, okay? And again, if you took less of a risk, 1450, for example, you could have made 2140. So here was the day we did it. It wasn't March 1st. It was this day. Anyways, getting back to talking about large institutional money, that's how you're going to make a lot of money. That's how you're going to get the big moves. They move stocks. I'm talking about hedge funds and again, banks, remember, this is the whole thing. Banks invest money in bonds, in stocks, in the market. And gaps are created with large institutional money. That's what makes a gap in the first place. The professional gaps that happen and play out in stocks are formed by one thing in one thing, only large institutional money. Therefore, you need a way that will help you pick the correct direction to play the gap. And that's what I do in the morning when I do the rating system. I go through the whole thing and then I make a determination if I'm going to do that gap, if I'm going to short it. But gaps are an event and they create a sense of urgency. Thus, an action is being forced by participants of the stock. This is why gap trading is incredibly powerful. Trading gaps is a powerful and profitable way to train because you're trading on the side of power. And again, you can do this as state trades or you can do this as options or you can make decisions based on your long-term investments determining what's happening with the market. Because what if, again, the Fed decides to keep increasing rates? We could go into a recession. So all the people that saw the fall-off in the retirement accounts in the beginning of 2022, which were nowhere near those highs, were nowhere near the highs in the market, nowhere near that. And we're more than 14 months out from that. What if we go into a recession in the second part of the year? Then people's retirement accounts are going to take another hit. So the only way that we're going to move back up is what? Institutional money will buy into the market. So I look and analyze a large timeframe to make trend decisions and directional decisions in the bias for the gap. I veer to the short side because you can get fast moves into the downside fast. It's called panic. How do we sell off last week like we did? Panic. You can say it was panic because of rates. You could say it was panic because of economic collapse of the banking sector. You can say this, say that. Actually, that's one of the reasons we're also up today. I forgot to say this earlier. Moody's had downgraded US banks and now they're back to stable this morning. So initially they were downgraded and now they're back to stable. So again, there's a lot of reasons we're up today, but I don't have 100% conviction it's going to fall through. In my invite, I might change my tune next week. You have to wait and see, all right? And again, trading is something where you do need to be active. You have to read what's happening every day. Every day I get up and I read the price action. Every day I get up and I read the daily chart. I read the gap and I'm doing all of this in the morning in the pre-market. But then I'm honing it down in the one minute and taking trading decisions on quick and fast on the one minute chart. Now, someone had asked about options. So this was one that we did. This was the spy puts. Yeah, this was last week. This is one you could have held into the last day, which I did not, but you could have been made more money. So we did the 400 strikes in the spy, which I sent Tuesday morning at 1007. Again, you take it when you get in and I got out of this once I was up. But you could have held this into the last day and that was an anomaly. The cost was cheap. Again, they got price as the week went on. $1.75 should have 4.75. You could have made $15,000 on a risk of 87.50. So this is a substantial risk you can slice it in two. You can buy one contract, which would be $175, but the whole point is you would have made 171% return in investment. This is not an exit, that's a best exit and it wasn't the exit Friday. And again, I think you need to chunk it out when you take trades too. Even if you want to hold stuff, don't hold everything, okay? $1.75 was six contracts, profits 1800, 171% return investment again. So this was the seven. So this is the morning in the day at 10 o'clock in the morning that I called the trade. So closed here, gap down, fell for cliff, okay? You could have got out here, you could have got out here. Now we did continue here and we did continue here. And again, this was, like I was saying, this was the tent. So here's where I called the 400 putts. We fell into the stride, into it, but look where we went. Take it over. I don't remember what Friday's low was, but it was like, it was under 385, 383 something or whatever. So you could have made more if you held it the last day, but like I said, that was an anomaly. Then we also did the tussles. This went crazy birds too. $2.35 was the cost for 35 contracts, which was 82.25, sold at $6.75, profit was 15,400. Return of investment was 187%. We did the 185 tussles. Again, you could have about one, could have about one for and spent $235. All right, and it still was a great trade. This was not the Friday exit. This was crazy, oh shoot, I didn't put Friday in here. I know Friday, it was down at 165 and change on Friday. I know that it was. It was insane. So again, I had called the 185s. It was $20 plus through the strike on Friday. But again, I didn't hold it till there. Spies and index, yes. I can rate anything and read the directional bias. Anything that's gapping that has a daily chart. So the answer is yes. Whether it's an ETF or whether it's a stock, it doesn't matter. I rate the gap based on the daily chart. So anything that trades, I could do that. Again, I always get this question about forex. Forex only has one close and open a week, so it doesn't pay to trade, to trade that or read that. The reality is that the gap happens after the close and then the next day before the open. So I need that close and that open to see the gap. That's where the gap is formulated in itself. Do I play the gap in the direction to fill the gap? No, I do not. I do not play that and that does not work consistently to make money. The reality is that sometimes that works. Where did that work? I'm gonna go back here and just show you from spy. If you went long yesterday to fill this gap, you made money. Did I think that would work? No. Did I know that it might happen? Yes. Was this a good trade? No. In my opinion, okay. So the reality is that sometimes buying gap fills works or shorting gaps fills works. Does it consistently work to make money? Why? No. It's going against what's actually happening. And again, I'm seeing them short here in time. If we have time, I'll go into more detail. But gap fills don't work consistently. And what tends to happen is people think they do. They play them, then they lose money and say, I don't wanna do gaps anymore. This is too hard. I don't understand them. You have to understand what you're looking at, okay? So many times I won't do something. Like I won't do anything in something that I think will reverse. I won't play it. I don't know if that makes any sense. There's days where you do nothing where something doesn't rate over 20 points and then you won't do it at all. But again, getting back to trading, it's about having a trained eye, a trained eye of learning what to do, okay? So if you train your eye to look at the right thing that's getting bought with institutional money or getting sold off with institutional money, you're gonna do well. And again, I tend to focus on the short side. Precision counts, accuracy counts, good money management counts. We talked about that at the beginning in reference to SBB because of the fallout. Because again, you can see how a huge institution can collapse with poor money management. So of course it would happen to any individual, okay? It can happen to anyone with any size account, any size money anywhere. You have to have good money management. And being successful in the market takes detail. Any certain level of precision detail matters. It can make a difference in you making a lot of money or it can make a difference in you losing and you wanna be successful. Without a good strategy, you'll never make a dime in the market. You just won't. And if you're taking potshots following other people and not knowing what they're doing, you'll win some, you'll lose some, but you're never really gonna get anywhere. There is a commitment level to trading and being successful. When I started out, it took me three years to develop my strategy. I never thought it would take that long, but it was well worth it. And once I started and I was into it, I was all in, okay? Now I get this question, how much money do you need? Again, with a margin account, you need buying power, you can go to a proper retail trader. If you wanna do options, you can open an options account with $2,000, which you have to assess your risk per trade then on the contracts you're doing based on that size of a small account. If you wanna take my class, you will learn my method. Where do you open up a trading account? Anywhere you want. You've gotta have charts. You have to apply data. You have to pre and post market data. You have to have a one minute chart. You know, Jeff's coming up. He can talk to you about that. He can talk to you about his charts. There are plenty of places to go to get quality, quality, quality charts. And at the end of the day, if you don't have live data, it's gonna be difficult for you to make decisions, particularly, particularly in this type of market where things are moving so fast. I mean, one minute you can be up and the next minute you're not, you know? So you've gotta make sure that you book money and profits when you're up as well. But again, it's focusing on the right information, focusing on what to do and needing a plan of action for booking the money. And again, like I said, it's a nice thing to do for extra money, particularly in this type of environment. Because when you have an environment where you are in levels of inflation, everyone's paying more for everything, you either get a raise at your job or find a way to make extra money on the side. A lot of people don't have time for a part-time job. But the nice thing about trading is options. You can put the trade on, put a seller in, watch it a couple of times of the day. You don't have to sit and stare at the screen for six and a half hours. And in reference to day trades, you gotta have one hour in the morning to come and trade in the room and that should not be a big deal, okay? But the right risk to reward trades is what you need for results. And again, everyone wants to do well. We want job security. We want security in our deposits and banks. We wanna know that things are gonna be okay. So you have to calm down, think correctly, stick your feet in the mud and say you're gonna learn this, you're gonna do it. If it takes a little bit longer than you think and costs a little bit more money than you think, as long as you get there, you're gonna be fine. Again, stability counts. Stability is important. And knowledge is the key to stability and understanding what to do, making correct decisions. So empower yourself today if you'd like to come, if you'd like to trade with me, if you'd like to learn more information. I teach my class, again, it's a 26 point checklist where I go through and I teach everything I know that's how I'm able to predict the moves in stock and make accurate predictions in the market. And again, my class is once a month. The class for next weekend is March 25th and 26th. This is the class for March. Not this weekend, but the following weekend. It's a system where you will learn how to enter the stocks, how to exit the stocks to 26 points. And again, this is the meat and potatoes of what I do, how I day trade and how I do options. It's a class on how to find, pick and play professional bearish gaps. So the class tuition is $69.99. If you're interested, you can email me to sign up. I am doing a special that's going on through the 17th, which is this Friday for the combo. If you sign up for the combo, which is $74.99, you get the golden gap course and the trends course, which is the 28th. And that will get you, if you sign up by Friday, the trading room free for one year and the afternoon newsletter free for one year, which is invaluable. You get all the trades then for one year, which takes you into March of 2024, which is hard to believe, but it's a long time. And then you learn it and you take the class and you do it. Here's some testimonials. I'm gonna look and see if there's any other questions. Any other questions from anyone about anything? Let me see. I'm brilliant, thank you. Anyways, one quick thing I think, I'll have a few minutes here. I'll just leave this with everyone. Again, it's so important to have the right knowledge to make decisions in life, okay? If you have the right knowledge to make decisions, you're gonna do well. If you don't, it's a 50-50 crapshoot, not just in your trades, but in anything in life, okay? So, you know, last week, there was some scuttle butt before the bank went under and some people did get their money out of SVB before it collapsed. Again, no one knew that the Fed was gonna come in, take over the bank, and then all of a sudden, backstop all insured and uninsured depositors, over 250,000, no one knew that was gonna happen. But can you imagine the panic that was happening with people when they were trying to think that they lost all their money? The reality was that there were so many companies that couldn't make payroll and had accounts with so much money at that bank that the Fed decided to step in. And now, in order to avoid panic in the banking system, the Fed has said that people don't have to worry about that no matter what now. Now, who knows what that means, who knows if they're gonna change the rules, who knows what's gonna happen in the next week or so. Again, a lot of this will have to do with next week in the Fed. But when there's downturns in the economy, and if we go under recession, which is not good for anyone, it's not good for individuals, it's not good for businesses, it's not good for anyone at all. It's not good for the value of the dollar. But the fact is that, say we would, it's out of your control. If it's gonna happen, it's out of your control. Whatever the Fed does next week is out of your control. But the decisions that you make about your life are in your control. You may not wanna make them. You may not wanna make the decision to have to change jobs or have to change your spending or have to put something on a credit card or pay more on a credit card because the interest rates are up. You may not want to have to pay for a class to learn how to trade because you think I should be able to figure this out on your own. But it could take you a long time and you might lose money until you do. You may not, things may not happen exactly as you want or exactly as fast as you want. But the reality is you still can make it happen for yourself in the way that you desire. If you buckle under and don't complain, don't lie and understand that you're gonna take the bull by the horns and you're gonna be independent and you're not gonna allow these outside circumstances of the world to detrimentally affect your life. Because if you get to that point where you will think independently like that, you're gonna be so powerful and have so much more at any given point in time. And you're also gonna have a certain piece of mind that you may not have right now where you feel like all these outer circumstances are out of your control and you have no control and you feel like a victim. You are not a victim. You can trade the market even with a small amount of money. Let me just say. Is there a point during a gap situation or circumstance that would indicate to you the trade response to the... Yeah, that's the whole point of the rating system that I do in the morning in the pre-market errand. That's where I'm looking at the gap and determining whether or not it's gonna move up or whether or not it's gonna move down. But again, I veer to the short side. Any other last minute questions here? Something else I was gonna say and I forgot. Anyways, it's good to diversify. That's another takeaway from SVB. They were too heavily in bonds. So you may say, well, I'm swing trading. Well, maybe you should day trade too. Because you can capture fast moves in the market and swing trades, again, may be affected by a lot of volatility about what's going on. Same thing with your retirement accounts. Diversify how you're choosing to take positions in the market. Don't put all your eggs in one basket, okay? Thanks so much for having me, everybody. Yes, you can understand how to rate the gaps yourself once you do the class, Doug. And you can email me at melissathestockswish.com for questions. I do that, that's what I teach in the class, Peter. I teach the class how I pick them. And I do pick them myself. It's all me.