Hi, in today's video, I want to try something a little bit different. In the past couple of weeks, I've seen some tremendous growth of this channel, seen a lot of great input from viewers, a lot of feedback, and I've also gotten a lot of questions. So in the same effort to build our community of martial artists and provide a resource for people, I kind of wanted to take a moment to actually answer some of our viewer questions, at least our most common questions. A lot of people have weighed in with a lot of expert knowledge, which I think is fantastic. There's been a high volume of quality comments and feedback, and I think that really contributes to the nature of what we're trying to accomplish here. And I thank you so much for that, because that just helps make this channel better. I also want to apologize if I mispronounce any names. One thing I never really was exposed to was a lot of Japanese terminology. In my training in the American Kempo, the Japanese terms really aren't as common, so I wasn't exposed to that until just recently. So I do apologize ahead of time if I mispronounce names or any particular words. I hope you'll be forgiven on that. I appreciate your patience. So I've been actually getting a lot of questions about my training, my history, my background, also any topics that I can cover, or I will be covering in the future of this channel. So I'm going to go through my bio, because a lot of people are asking me about that, but I'm going to put that in the second half of the video. First I'm going to address some of the more common questions that I've been getting. The first question I get all the time is, what kind of Kempo did I train in? The short story of that is, basically I've trained into quite a few variations of Kempo. I started in 1993 learning the variation of Tracy Kempo, which is an offshoot of Ed Parker Kempo. The Tracy brothers were Ed Parker students.  So I did that for about three of the four years. After that I studied traditional Ed Parker Kempo, both more modern curriculums and also the original 24s. For those of you who know what that is, it was Ed Parker's original curriculum broken up into 24 techniques or technique blocks. I've also have a few years experience in Jeff Speekman's Kempo 5.0. And I found that one really interesting because it's kind of new in its formation. It's a newer version of Kempo, but what I like is he actually addresses a lot of the system's weaknesses, particularly ground fighting. Kempo was a stand-up street fighting art, but when it was formed, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and a lot of grappling that you see today wasn't around. So a lot of Kempo systems kind of had that vulnerability, which is why I think that Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is a great add-on. But Jeff Speekman took the system and he implemented a lot of more modern-day street fighting concepts, tried to revamp the curriculum, expanded it a little bit, and he also addresses quite a bit of the ground fighting techniques. So that was a really unique approach. And after the Jeff Speekman 5.0 system, my instructor started to make his own hybrid and he implemented even more MMA tactics, Muay Thai techniques, a lot more Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. He kind of created a hybrid program for our school. So for several years we did that. So my Kempo is actually kind of ranged in various different versions. And I actually feel fortunate in that because I have a lot of different samples of different flavors of Kempo and put it together. It gives me a much wider picture. So I'm not just stuck in one discipline. I've actually seen a bunch of different versions and I'm very, very fortunate that I've had that experience. I also get the question often, why do I not train in MMA? Technically speaking, MMA simply means mixed martial arts. And that can be a mixture of any art. Technically, Kajukumbo is mixed martial arts. So I do have a mixture of arts. I've got various versions of Kempo mixed with Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. And I'm now training in Sanyama Bushiru, Japanese Jiu-Jitsu. So I do have a mixture. Now as far as the common usage of MMA as in the UFC style, what you see a lot of times now, I did a little bit of it, not formally. But like I said, my instructor brought in a lot of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. He brought in a lot of Muay Thai concepts. So we did that for a while and I got a really good sense of it. And we did that for a few years. I'm not formally trained in it. I haven't gone to a particular school for it, but I have gotten a good taste of it. Now another question, or actually more of a comment I'm getting a lot is, and this one's a little bit more of a personal issue, is some people have comments on my weight. You know what, it's a legitimate question. I have put on a few pounds. I'm not so huge that I can't move or I can't practice, but I have put on a few pounds and I am actually working to correct that. Past few years have been very tough.    Each surgery, while I'd made a full recovery, knocked me out of training for a good six to eight months, anything serious at least for sure. So that was a lot of downtime. Also additionally on a personal note, two years ago my father got sick. He was diagnosed with cancer and that put a tremendous strain on the family. I spent a lot of time being his advocate, fighting hospitals and his medical system and trying to take care of him, as well as working double, triple time just to make ends meet. So unfortunately for a couple of years my training took it back seat. I still taught, you know, I teach part time at a local campus school. I think it's great, I work with young children. And while that kept me kind of in touch with my martial arts, working with children is not the same as my own personal training with martial arts, you know, their stuff is very basic, mostly. You know, we work with a lot of young children, five, six, seven year olds, but at that point, you know, they're still learning coordination. They're still learning discipline. They're still learning the grass root foundation of the system. So that's not the same as me training. Earlier this year in February, my father passed away. And I'll say this right now, this kind of told me two things. One, it's a reminder of our mortality, time is limited, our life is a gift. So if I want to train and get back into shape, I have to make the time to do it. So that was the first lesson. The second lesson is, I have never seen anyone put up a fight stronger than my father did. So that's a huge, huge sense of motivation for me. I saw how hard he fought for the past two years. He cheated death a couple of times. Even up to his last breath, he fought. So I feel I owe it to him to put up the same kind of fight. So I have made myself the promise that I'm making the time to get back in the training. I joined a new school. I'm working out as much as I can. I'm working out of my free time. I've already lost quite a bit of weight. So that's a good goal I'm starting on. And I just wanted to address that, not so much that I'm offended, but I do see it mentioned. And I think it is worth talking about. My goal is to be transparent and honest and open with my viewers. If that is a concern, well, I'm addressing that concern right now. Yes, I'm on a goal to improve myself. This channel has helped me improve myself. And in turn, I'm trying to bring resources and knowledge to help improve everyone else too. I get a lot of questions and requests for covering different arts. And honestly, the answer is yes, I intend to. There's quite a bit out there. I've gotten people ask me to cover Shotokan, cover Kiyokushin Karate, a lot of Kung Fu requests, Krav Maga, a whole bunch of requests. And my answer to you is yes, our goal is to go in depth to a bunch of different arts. We did the different types of jujitsu. I want to expand on that. And right now we're in the process of scripting them out, doing the research, because I want to make sure we bring you the proper information and I want to just throw something together.  So yes, all that is coming. We are working on that. The goal is to bring a whole bunch of different arts to you and a different mixture. And even on a more fun note, we're going to try to bring you some arts that maybe you aren't familiar with, historical arts. Every art that's around today has an ancestral art. And it's kind of fascinating to see which art shares which roots. So I would like to go into depth of that as well. A lot of great viewers on here. And I actually really appreciate everyone's input. So if you have any questions, if you have any arts you want to see me do, please by all means suggest it and we're going to add it to the list. It's all coming. So those are a lot of some of the quicker questions I get quite a bit of. More in depth. People have asked me to talk about my own training, my experience, my kind of biography, if you will. I've touched upon it in a few videos. But for those of you who are still interested, I'll give you another brief overview right now. Basically, I started training in 1993 at the age of 14. I joined the local karate school. That was part of a franchise just for the sake of privacy. I'm going to call him Mr. Richard. He eventually had to close the school due to personal issues, which I'm not going to get into here to respect this privacy. But the school went through quite a few changes. Originally, it was a Tracy Kempo school and it was part of a franchise. There were a few different satellite schools in the same banner. And after having done the mcdojo video, I look back now and kind of like, OK, the school had a few signs of it. But once he broke away from the franchise, he kind of revamped the school. He converted it from Tracy Kempo over to traditional Ed Parker Kempo. And I saw an immediate increase in quality. And the mcdojo aspects of it kind of went wayside. So I'm kind of glad he made that change. So we did a Parker Kempo for a few years. Now, when he switched, I was almost to my black bit level in Tracy Kempo. I was about maybe six months away from it. So when you switch over to Parker, for those of you who aren't aware, it's a completely different system, a completely different curriculum. We started from White Belt again and worked our way up. And eventually, though, he decided that we were close enough to our previous belt that he will train us for the next year. So we got to finish up our Tracy curriculum as well as starting the Ed Parker curriculum. And in 1997, I was able to test and receive my first degree black belt. It was a fantastic experience. It gave me a sense of pride. And I also started teaching at the school. So from that point on, I kept working in the Parker curriculum, trained for a few more years to work up towards my second degree. 2003, my instructor closed the school due to personal reasons. And I was crushed. One, because I was so close to finishing this Parker curriculum, but two, the school was my second home. You know, I was 10 years into my training and I was loving the material. It was a family. And it's kind of like really kind of threw me for a loop. I didn't know what I was going to do. I knew for one thing I wasn't going to quit, but I didn't know what I was going to do. But before I could give it too much thought, a previous instructor, Fred Murgon had come back to the school and he actually purchased it and reopened it as his own school. Now, one thing I really want to say about Fred Murgon is his teaching is a bit unorthodox, but he is one of the best teachers I have ever seen. He taught me so much how to look at the art, how to dissect an art, how to take it apart, look at the working pieces, choose what works, find out what doesn't work and whatever doesn't work, how to adjust to so it does. So he really taught me how to dissect the art and how to understand it. At this point, you know, I had the speed. I had the techniques. I had the philosophies. I had all of that, but he actually took that and he taught me how to really apply it. So, you know, he told me one day he was, OK, he had me do a technique. I did it. And he goes, looks great. That was fast because he hit the guy 10 times. He goes, but why hit him 10 times when you can hit him once or twice and do the same damage? He had a good point. So he took me back to the beginning and we started again from Wipeout, each technique and he broke it down. He taught me how to analyze his technique, how to make it work, how to apply it effectively and what needs to be changed. You know, nothing set in stone. You know, Kemple's got a lot of pre-choreographed techniques. They're not meant to be performed exactly as it is every time. There are examples of ideas. There's little nuggets of information. There's principles, there's concepts. Once you understand that, you can see everything is interchangeable and you adapt to the situation to defend yourself. So we did that for a few years. I started again, started to work my way back up. I'm like, I'm going to earn this second degree black belt and it's going to mean a lot more to me this time. 2005, right before I got to that point, school closed again. Fred Murgin went and joined the military, which much credit to him. But I found myself in the same position. I have no school. So I actually took some time off and did a lot of independent study. I talked to other Kemple instructors, both locally and around the country. I took the time to get familiar with a lot of the more academic side of the art and I actually spent two years in my garage working out of my own. So I kept training and this gave me a much different insight. Primarily, I learned that every school in Kemple teaches very differently and it exposed me to a lot of different ideas and a lot of different ways of teaching and only reinforced what Fred Murgin taught me that there's no one right way to do it. You have to take it apart and make it work for you. Kemple was meant to be tailored towards his practitioner and adapted for your experience and your needs. And that was definitely an eye-opening experience. In 2007, Fred Murgin came back, reopened to school. It was fantastic. But this time, once again, we had a new curriculum. He was now teaching under the Just Speakman 5.0 banner, which, again, was an incredible experience. With it came a whole new curriculum or at least a revamped version of the previous curriculum, but it addressed a lot more stuff. It included a lot more ground fighting. It put some Muay Thai concepts in there. It was overall, in my opinion, a much better rounded system in terms of ideas. So that was a great experience. So once again, I started from Wipe Out and we worked all the way back up. In 2008, 11 years after receiving my first degree black belt, I finally tested and earned my second degree black belt. It was a major relief and it was a major milestone to know that I persevered for all that time and was able to reach this goal. The goal wasn't the belt itself, but it was the fact I didn't want to stop. So we did that for a few years. I kept on training late 2009. I tested for my third degree black belt. It was a little bit of an abbreviated period between second and third. But that was because of the 11 years I had prior and also around this point in time. That's when Fred Mergan started to bring in a lot of MMA concepts. He really trained hard in MMA and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. He trained his own set of fighters. They fought in local circus. They did fantastic. So we had a lot of that coming to the school. So the curriculum was reborn again. So now we had a hybrid system. We had parts of traditional campo, parts of speaking 5.0. And we had a good chunk of Muay Thai and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu all mixed together. And what was really interesting was and it was probably frustrating for new students. But every time I came in the class, techniques were different. It was always fun walking in the class and saying, we're going to be like, I can see him in deep thought. And he'd be like, we're going to try this technique this way this day. And he would take one of our basic techs and he would totally modify it. And instead of doing, you know, a bunch of the traditional strikes, he did the first two strikes and went to a double leg takedown. And it was so smooth. And the way he implemented it, I was like, well, that's really cool. So like I said, I thank Fred Morgan so much for the art and the knowledge he brought into our system and how to think and how to apply and how to change it. The martial arts are a very, very dynamic thing. There's no set rule. There's no one thing that works for everyone. So it's part of being the artist and part of the discipline is what works for you. And he really helped me identify that and how to how to make it my own. So I thank him very much for that. Unfortunately, in 2015, my instructor closed the school and he decided he wanted to move on with his life and he moved to, he moved out of state. Before he left, he awarded me my fifth degree black belt. He pulled me aside. He said, Dan, he goes, you've been through the thick of it with me for the last 20 some years that I have never given up, that I have constantly persevered through all different styles and that I have taken what he's given me and I've made it my own. So he felt that I had reached level. And from there, you know, I kind of embarked on my new path. Right now, like I said, with this channel, I'm trying to absorb as much martial arts as possible. I'm trying to build a community. I'm trying to learn as much as possible. I am now training in Japanese jiu-jitsu. I want to add that I'm loving it. So many different ideas that I didn't have before. It's meshing well with what I've already learned. And I feel very fortunate to be part of this great new dojo. So I thank you, She-Hand-Wood, for that experience. I'm also looking into Shotokan. I want to kind of train informally in that as well. So as we go, as this channel grows, I want to continue to add to my arts. There's so much to learn. It's impossible to learn at all because it doesn't matter what system you know, how long you've trained in it, how good you are in it, what you expand your knowledge to. There's always a lot more out there that you don't know. There's always a better fighter. There's always a better martial artist. There's always a better way. So the only way you can improve yourself and be the best martial artist you can be is to constantly keep learning. Stay humble, keep an open mind. Always go back to your roots, start fresh. There's nothing wrong with that. Just build. You know, if you learn in your system, it doesn't have to replace what you're learning or what you've already done. Add to it. Build upon it. That makes you unique and that makes your art as strong as it possibly can be. So I hope this answers a lot of questions. Like I said, I wanted to do this video a little bit more informally, kind of in an interest of being transparent and open and honest with all of you. You guys have been fantastic with me. I want to give back to you. So please, by all means, if you want to see any specific topics, if you've got suggestions for different arts, if you don't like types of video I'm doing and you would prefer something else, please leave your feedback below, share this channel, help us grow. The bigger this channel gets, the more we can do with it. I have a lot of aspirations for this channel. I love you guys for the support you've shown me and just keep this thing going from here on out. Thank you very much.


Testing one two let me know if you hear that. Hear me and see me everybody. Good afternoon. I'm right here. And welcome. This is online at Trader Central. Melissa Armel is your host and presenter today. Looks like it's time to begin. Let me round up the percussion section. Drummers are you ready? Okay. And without leading gentlemen it's time to begin. Please put your hands together and welcome our host and presenter today from thestockswush.com. I'm excited to be here. Thank you so much everyone. Thank you for coming and thank you online Trader Central for having me. My name is Melissa Armel and I own a company called the Stockswush and I'm here today to talk about trading the U.S. market and specifically trading the market for a living using one strategy. And I trade the market for a living and I only use one strategy. It's all that I've ever done actually and I've really honed down how to do this one thing. And I think it's very important if you want to trade for a living to be very, very thoughtful and have a plan of action for what you're doing in the market because you're risking money when you trade. Whether you day trade or invest even if it's long term you have to be thoughtful about what you're doing. So welcome. If you'd like more information you can email me after the webinar at Melissa at thestockswush.com and you can also follow me at Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest or Skype. So if you've been thinking about maybe changing careers because you want to make more money maybe you want to start making six figures a year maybe you're not making it or maybe you want to just have something where you have an unlimited income potential. One of the reasons that I decided to day trade is I wanted to have a job where I made over six figures because I had a job at that time. I was doing mortgages and I was making that much and I wanted to be able to have an unlimited potential and at the time that I get out of the mortgage industry it was changing. It was changing a lot and so I felt I needed a career change. So training is one of these things because there's so much money in the market that there really is an unlimited amount of income potential. And if you live in a different country half my clients actually do live outside of the US know that you can trade the US market. If you've never thought about doing it you can think about it. It's possible. You don't have to live in the US to trade in the US. Okay the market is open US Eastern Times zone 934 o'clock Eastern time but I only trade the morning. So depending on where you are you can think about what time that is for you. But the US markets offer a lot of volatility and momentum and that's how you make money as a day trader. Now today's a good example. Okay the market had a lot of volatility in it today and that's going to continue throughout this year. That means opportunity for you to make money. And if you've already are a trader and you've been trading or trying to figure trading out or how to make money in the market maybe you're not being successful doing it and not making money or enough because you don't have a strategy that really can give you the correct risk to reward. Risk to reward means that for every dollar you risk you want to have a payoff that's worth it. For example if you risk a dollar and only make 20 cents that's not a good risk to reward. What if you risked a dollar and made a dollar? Well that's okay. Not great. If you risk a dollar and make $3 that's much much better. Okay so I'm looking for something when I take a trade to risk a dollar and make $3. And if you're one of these people that have been back and forth for the last 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 years trading but not consistently making money that it might be that you just don't have the correct strategy. And a lot of people at this time of the year they're thinking about gosh they owe money in taxes or they're thinking about their goals for the year and how can they make more money in 2016 how can they get ahead. Maybe they looked at how much money they made last year and realized they didn't make enough but they want to make more. And you're thinking about this for your family or where you want to be.  These are all very important things to think about. It's still very early in the year. You can set goals for yourself and still achieve them. And the number one thing I think it's a good reason to think about day trading is that really it has the potential to be a career. And I only trade usually between a half an hour an hour a day. So that is a very short time frame to trade to do something for a career. When I did mortgages I would work 7 days a week. 7 days a week and sometimes 10, 12 hours a day. And now I work like 1 5th of that. 1% of that actually. It's amazing. So it's not about quantity, it's about quality in reference to trading. But trading successfully and consistently is really about number one having a specific plan. What trade are you going to take and why? You need a system that you use daily you over and over again so you get good at it and you trade that consistently and you don't deviate and you don't do anything else. And then you need a monetary goal that you want to make each day. 100, 200, 300 thousand dollars.  You got to know what your goals are. And then you need a reason why you're taking every trade that you're taking. Does it fit the criteria? If it doesn't then guess what you don't take it. And then also you need a target or stop placement for when you will get out of a trade. Because you can't risk an unlimited amount in every trade you take. That isn't what I would call a planned action. So if you're here today you may be here to learn more about my strategy and maybe learning about this thing that I do. Well unlock the keys to your success and it's just one thing. It's not overly complicated where you have to learn a million different things or buy all kinds of different indicators or special software. It's very very simple once you learn how to do it. And it's just one strategy. And it's called Golden Gaps. So Golden Gap trading is where the real money moves a momentum to take hold. Why? Because they have momentum. And the market actually gap down today. As I was saying today is an example because the QQQs and the spy indexes gap down today in the market and that had volatility momentum. So you could have rated the gap down to the market. Now I'll show you in a chart in a minute what a gap is if you don't know. I'll explain it to you. But it's something that can offer you a career because gaps happen all the time in the market. All the time, all year long, every day, every week. And then they also have momentum. If a stock moves a dollar and you're short it and you have a thousand shares and you short it at the right place you can make a thousand dollars. If you're buying a stock and you buy it at the right place and it rallies a dollar and you have five thousand shares you can make five thousand dollars. Okay? That's what I mean by momentum. It's momentum in the move. The move the stock makes from the entry point to your exit. Which is something that I call the target. Now what is a golden gap? And this is something that I created and invented and defined. A golden gap is a gap that moves to the direction of the gap. So in reference to a stock gapping down, I'd be looking to short it. Not everyone but it has to meet my criteria. I'll explain to you what this is. It is called a golden gap because institutional money along with professional traders and investors are making the gap and creating the gap and therefore it will follow through. So then I'm looking to short the gap downs. In the case of a bullish gap institutional money is buying the stock. Therefore the stock moves higher in the trading day. It's getting bought by institutions. What do I mean by institutions? Banks, hedge funds, big big money in the market. In the case of a bearish gap institutional money is selling or shorting the stock. Therefore the stock moves lower on the trading day and you would want to be short the stock then. So I named my system the golden gap 26-point rating system because I'm looking for a gap that has a specific criteria. It must meet that criteria for me to do it. It's a 26-point criteria and I'm looking at the daily chart. If I find that criteria it gives me a high odds that that gap, that stock will be something that can go long or short in the day in the direction of the gap and not only that have a large momentum move and I take the position and I'm looking for the target. I don't have to have a perfect score. I don't have to have 26 points but I have to have 20. I have to have 20 or more. Obviously if something rates 24, 25, 23 that's better than 20. So the higher it is the better it is. Do I get more than one of these in the day? Some days yes. Some days you get 5, 6, 10. You can do them all. Personally I like to do one per day but there are days that I do two trades and ultimately it's about high probability because if you are going to do this and you are seriously going to do this for a career then you have to be so careful about what you're doing and I say you don't want to waste your bullets because you can't just take pot shots at stuff and say well it's only $200, well it's only $500 and all of a sudden you're down in two trades a thousand dollars in a day there wasn't anything to do. You don't want to do that. You want to look for the quality because the quality ones are the ones that go and run and have big moves and can make you 5 times the amount you risk or 10. So my system gives you an edge in the market because it hones in and hones in on the probability and 26 points is a lot of detail to tell you this is good, this is good, this is good and it's like you're telling it up and you're totaling it up and it's building the conviction and it really only takes about 5 to 10 minutes to rate one gap or stock pick and for me it takes less than 5 I've been doing this now for 8 years and if you're doing it for a couple of months it'll take you less than 5 minutes too. But the crux of why my system is so great to make money consistently is because the gaps that I am trading, the bearish gaps that gap down I'm shorting and the bullish gaps I'm going long when I take along if something gaps up is made with institutional money and I am more convinced than ever now after trading for 8 years and running a business for 3 and talking to so many people that the only way to consistently make money as a day trader or any long term trader in the US stock market and probably any market that exists is if you have to be with the institutional money whether it's for the day or the long term it depends on the time frame of your position but you will not make money consistently over the course of your life unless you know how to read this and I have become an expert in reading this and the reason is that gaps are actually an event that happens in a chart in a day chart of a stock. It's actually in every chart but I focus on the day chart and the formula I have tells me that an institution is making it and therefore an action is being forced by participants of that stock. This is why it's powerful because if something gaps down it may force people to sell out. For example something happened with China today, futures were down, market opened down in the day and the market sold off into the day. Now you could have rated the market gap today and you might have shorted the market today but that's how you make money. You look for the institutional move in it. Now I'm going to give you an example. You may not understand anything that I'm going to say right now at all but I want you to pretend that you do and ask questions if you don't because I'm going to talk about something very very very very very very important. Something that I got extremely excited about when I saw it because I know how to read institutional money in a chart in the form of price action and candlesticks which I do every day. I'm very good at reading price action but I've recently started to do options. Same strategy but I'm also doing it for options. This is an option chain now it doesn't matter if you don't know how to look at this. I'm going to tell you what you're looking at here so just listen to me okay. This is real this is an option chain. This is this number here is $42,913. It's $42,913 what does that mean? It's $42,913 contracts okay. This is actually if I would equate this to shares is $4.2 million. This is in the spy okay. Spy index. Does everyone see that? Strike price of this is $210. Look do you see that? Cost of the position on this day was $22,338 okay. Now just go with me here. Take your calculators. I want you to take $4,2,913 times you can use the x sign here. You're multiplying it by $22,38 somebody quickly quickly quickly tell me how much that totals here. I don't know why I got plopped that up there. Somebody tell me somebody's got to have a calculator next to them besides me. I exclude to my head but does anyone have a calculator to tell me what does that total what is a total? Come on. Work with me here people. Be interactive. I'm not talking to myself as a lot of you here. I must be talking to myself. No one's answering me. No one as a calculator knows how to figure that out. Take $42,913 times $22,38. I don't I want you to tell me. Rob just said $96 million. Rob, Rob gets a gold star today. What do you think that is? Do you think that that's me and not? Do you think that that's me or you or all of us here? No way. No way. $96 million. That means the cost to take that position. I don't even know if that's exactly right but it's close. It's over $90 million. The point is the cost is a lot. Do you understand me? In fact I'll just figure it out. Exactly. $42,913 times $22,38 Yeah, it's a little over $96 million. You can't see the charts? Trend Trader can't see the charts. Can everyone see my PowerPoint? I have a PowerPoint right now, not the charts. Can everybody see it? Here, I'll click on and off it very quickly for Trend Trader.  I was in this by long before I saw this position. I was already in it long and I've been calling it long before this position. I even saw it. There we go. Anita wrote it in the room. Now what do you think? There's something else about this. I may not have time to tell you today if I do I'll tell you at the end but I want to make my point. My point is that is an institutional position that is in the market long. You have to learn how to read what's happening in institutions in order to trade for a living. What I found most amazing is the fact that I was already in the market long and already saw that before that position was in there. So I saw the money in the chart from rating my gaps in the market before that plopper, that whopper of a position got in there because obviously the money is already in there. It's just another position in there but that gave me the confirmation.  And it just continues to confirm as every year I train and the more people I teach how special what I know is. And you don't even need to look at that and understand that. You just learned my rating system and day trade based on the 26 point rating system and do it and make money. But I'm telling you that was an amazing thing I saw in there because it gave me confirmation of everything I know which is in my rating system which I see every day in the gaps. You've got to learn what to look at. Everyone's looking at the same thing.  Why do some people make a lot of money and some people lose? And we're all looking at the same thing because if I didn't go over what I know about this which I did tell you a little bit but there's more to it but the bottom line is you might have looked at that had no clue. You might have been like la la la la or you might not even looked at it, okay? The point is we're all could look at the same thing but we all don't interpret it the same way. We all don't interpret it the same way. The interpretation which is my 26 point rating system is what tells me that this is good. Go long, it's short, it's silent. Do it. Don't do it. Maybe there's not a good one because if something rates at 15 points and I'm not doing it at all, okay? Does this make sense? Is anything I'm saying even remotely make sense? You need real visible for profits but how do you get that? You gotta see the trade and you have to see the momentum of the trade before it happens because if you see it after the fact then it's too late. Then it doesn't matter anymore, okay? And that's one of the things that's so amazing about my ability to see this with the market because the fact is the market's been up and down and squiggly and gap down today, okay? And you gotta know how to read it. Now let's go talk about some specific stocks because each day I get up in the morning and I'm looking for a chart. Now for those of you that don't know what a gap is, this is Mew. This was over the holiday week. Mew had earnings. The stock closed one night and then opened the next day at a different price. That's all that a gap is. Now how do you find Mew? On a scanner in your platform or you could buy a scanner? But actually I just used my platform. So I saw the Mew and I saw the Mew gapping down. Then I get up in the morning and I rate the Mew. This is a day chart of Mew. This did not have a big move in the day. It went to the first target and it was done and luckily I got out. But it actually did not have a monster move. But I knew what the target was. But this was the day before the Christmas Eve. That was one of the reasons. It was low volume in the market, the week of the Christmas holiday and last week. So you had to take dinky targets and things. But it is getting into earnings season now in the next two weeks. So things will start to really get underway and get play in them. But this was still a good gap and it was a short. And I shorted the tail. This taily thing I shorted and got out at the target. So what did I do? Here's a one minute chart. I took the trade. I shorted the stock. It dropped. I'm out. And that's it. I literally was in the train and out of the train in less than half an hour. That's it. My day is done. Okay? The price of the short was $13.74. Stop was over $13.86. And yes, I do use stops. Risk is 12 cents. On 7,000 shares, I risked $840. Okay? Exit is $13.57. So what does this mean? Profit is $1,332.16 in the trade. Risk to reward is $1.59 times the amount risk made in profit. So this was one where I made more than one risk unit. But I had to get out because it went to the target. Here's the money I made in this trade. Now let's go back and look at it. So again, I'm a day trader. I look at the daily chart. I determine mu is a gap that rates more than 20 points. So I can take it in the direction of the gap as a short. I wait for the setup. I wait for the open. It opens at 9.30. Okay? I wait for the setup and I teach us in the class. I take the short, put in the stop, boom. And I know where the targets are in the amount. And that's it. Okay? So you get a couple ones like this a week. You're making $1,300, $800, $2,000, whatever your risk depends on how much you make for the sizing. Okay? But this is how you pull together real money that you can use to pay your bills. I mean, honestly, $1,000 a day is $5,000 a week. I don't know how much money you need to pay yourself or earn a living, but the reality is that that's a good amount of money to make. Even if you made $500 a day, that ends up being $2,500 a week. That's a good amount of money to earn a living. Okay? So one quality strategy is important because that's all you need. You only need one strategy. You only need one trade. You only need one stop. You only need one entry. You only need one target. You only need one. And sometimes you only need one really good trade a week in order to actually put you over the edge with your numbers. For example, what if mu, okay, it didn't This is a good example here. I'm just gonna go back. Dream target on this for the day was $13. Okay? Price of the entry. Let's just say I had made gotten this to the dream target. It didn't do it. I had the exit signs. It bounced at the first target. But let's just say this had gone the full amount. So 75 cents times 7,000 shares that would have made $52.50 the day before Christmas Eve. It didn't do it. I had a good day, but really all you need is one like this to go even in a week's time to go to the big number and you see how good it is then because I only risked $800 some dollars and if it had gone to the target of $13, the dream target then it would have made over five grand. And I wouldn't even know how to take another trade through the rest of the week. So you know, this is all about the focus, the focus, the focus, the focus. Alright? Now does anyone have any questions about anything? I'm talking about it all so far. Anything at all? Alright, I'm gonna keep going. Ask me questions in here. I can see everyone's questions in the room. So what do you need to get started? You need the money from my class. My class is $39.99. If you want to learn my method, that's what it costs. I'll go over this at the end. You also need a positive attitude that you believe you can do it and be successful even if you failed in the past. I know this sounds like something like well obviously everyone has to be positive. No, no, no, no, no, no. You really have to be positive. Sometimes what has happened is if you've been trying to do this for a long time and I don't know if some of you have been not but if you've been beat over the head by the market and your attitude is really crappy you've got to get that on right. And I'm telling you it matters. It's important. You need a live trading account to take equity day trades and stocks. If you want to do it live, you need an account. And you need a time between 9.30 and 10 a.m. in the morning to trade because I'm usually getting in the positions every day between 9.30 and 10. If something doesn't set up by 10 I'm not doing it. You also need a computer with an internet connection. Everything is online but you've got to have a computer and an internet connection and a live account. Okay? We have a question here. How do I determine my targets? Anita, I teach that in the class. It would be more than a one hour discussion here and I only have a half an hour left. But you can determine targets beforehand. I do two things. One, I figure out and calculate the targets before 9.30 before the stock even sets up and trains out. I'm estimating the open based on the gap. I figure out all my targets before the open. And then I also have what I call exit signs. Okay? If something doesn't go to the first target or even past the first target, I have an exit sign that may tell me take the whole thing off. That's it for the day. Or take at least half off Melissa so that if the rest trails I'm breaking even or up a little. Okay? You have to have both. I have targets and exit signs. How fast of a connection do you need for the internet? Well, I have Phaios and I have the highest speed I can have in it. But I mean, you don't have to have that. I would be careful in a wireless. Could you do it? Yes. I don't know what the delay is. It could be a couple seconds but I don't think it's going to make that much of a difference even if you have wireless. I have a hard computer internet connection but you'd have to test it out, I guess. I don't really know. I know people are trading with me that have wireless and someone on computers into the wall. So, my class is two full days. But you can practice on a demo for a week before you open the live account. Then you can open the live account. Then you begin trading small lots. And then after one to two weeks of doing it with small lots you can increase your size. Gradually increasing your size each week you should get to the point of reactively trading and making money. And then you can have some commodities. What's a comma day? A thousand dollars or more. Anything with a comma in the number of the profit is what I call a comma day. I think it's fine for people to trade actually and risk a hundred dollars at the beginning. If you can prove that you can make a hundred dollars a day, just listen to me which is five hundred dollars a week. Say you trade for a month and you make two grand. For those of you that have been trading and losing two grand in one month is amazing. If you've never traded before it's still an extra two thousand dollars and then it'll prove to you that number one you can do it. You can make money in the market. And number two that all you have to do is increase your risk and therefore you'll make more. So the next month you can risk two hundred or you can make two hundred a day. Two hundred a day and all of a sudden you're making four thousand a month. Four thousand a month is almost fifty grand a year. So you really have to be thoughtful about getting good. It's all about getting good. It's not just about the money. It's about getting good because the money can come because as soon as you prove that you know what you're doing and you're good you can up it. I mean this has gotten to the point where I'm risking what I'm risking which is a thousand thousand between fifteen hundred of my days. But you know you really can't just go into this and say whatever. You have to have a thoughtful plan of action. You can up and up an account with any retail broker or proprietary day trading place. Either way any place you open an account you have to be able to actively day trade. You can email me and I can refer you to some places. So where do you see yourself in maybe one year, five years? If you did not make the money you wanted to in twenty fifteen you might want to think about trading. Even if you love your career.  You could do this and still keep your regular job. And it's a good thing you could do even after you retire. Okay? And if you really want to make several hundred thousand dollars a year as a day trader. The idea of getting to the point where you invest the money in a class in your life to really learn it and get good. To be able to know that you'll be at that point. Whether it's one year or five years out to make several hundred thousand dollars a year. It's worth it. The problem is that many, many people do not have this scope of thought in their mind to think out that far. We live in a me, me, me, now, now society. Everyone wants everything now. I know this because I was like this when I was trading. I was like this years ago. And I'm still like this every once in a while now. Where I want to have no patience and I want to take the trade right away and then it doesn't set up or whatever. And I give up on it and go on to something else. But at the end of the day, you have to look at this as something new you're learning. You don't know anything about it. And you have to be patient with yourself and give yourself a chance. Okay? Let me see. I have some questions here. You have never traded stocks only options for six months. Will it be difficult to make the transition? No. I don't think it will be difficult to make the transition Anita. You can use the 26 point rating system to choose what stock to take the option in. So you would do the class. You could still keep doing options. You would do the option pick of the stock of the option based on my rating system. Keep doing the options, but also then you can begin to do the day trades too. Okay? Mike is asking me what percentage of trades are profitable of my trades. Again, I usually do one a day. Every once in a while I'll do two a day. I would say to be conservative, my win ratio is between 70 and 80%. I actually don't lose on that many trades. I don't take that many trades.  If you're doing exactly what I'm doing, you will be profitable and make money. I do not over-trade. I'm not even what people would consider active. The broker is not making a million dollars off of my commissions except for the size that I'm taking. I'm not in and out, in and out, in and out, in and out, in and out. That's the kind of thing that really adds up and can really eat into your account of the cost of trading. I take one position and put the stop.  If I get stopped out, I may take another trade that day or be done. I just don't take that many trades. So if you're taking less trades, you're losing less just as a result of that. And then if your winners make more than one R, you're up.  But it really is about relying on yourself and getting to a point where you realize that your life is your own creation and that you can do this. And that's what I'm saying to think positive about it. Sometimes what happens is hard knocks have hit upon people and they're not positive at all and then they've lost faith and hope that they can do anything. I'm telling you, you've got to open up your eyes with possibilities at seeing you could create something new for yourself and your life, even if it's a brand new career. Nobody thinks that they're going to not be at their job forever. If you like your job and you're making a lot of good money, you want to say, well, I'll just stay here forever. But that doesn't always happen. It doesn't always play out that way. And that's why I think it's a good idea to learn something like this just to have something else extra to lean on to make money. And if you don't have the pressure of doing this as a full-time career right now, you can learn it while you're making the move and transitioning. So again, the system I use, I created, it's just a checklist. You go through it in the morning and check everything off in the boxes and do it. And the philosophy behind the system is that I'm looking for analyzing the daily chart, a large time frame to make the trend decisions on the directional bias for the gap. I'm shorting down gaps and I'm buying up gaps. You cannot short every down gap and you cannot buy every up gap. I rate them based on the criteria of the 26 point system. All large traders of every kind look at large time frames to make decisions, particularly institutional traders. So to make entry decisions and exit decisions based on a small-time frame, on the one-minute chart is how I take my actual entries and that has a high degree of focus and accuracy. So I use the daily chart to make the decision for the stock pick. That allows for the accuracy and the directional bias of what the institution is doing. And then I use the one-minute chart to take the entry and put the stop. This allows for me to take size in the trade, which is how I'm getting a good risk to reward with accuracy. And then out, at the number, the target or an exit sign. Now let's go over all this. I'm showing you because it's actually a long. I don't do longs every single solitary day, but this was a good bullish gap. This is back in the beginning of December, December 4th. The stock closed here the night before and then gapped up. Stock gapped up $10 over night and rallied $10 over day. It was a beautiful, beautiful gap. Anyways, this was a good long. So here's the one-minute chart of Ulta. You could have gone long the stock as an intraday-day trade. I actually didn't as an option trade. So Anita was asking about options. I did it as an option trade. So I had 20 contracts. Strike price was 185. Total profit I made was almost $4,800. Okay. Made $4,750. It was a 4.8 time the amount risk was made in profit. So here's the money I made in this trade. Now this was an option. It was basically 2,000 shares. So this is a way to do it where actually you don't have to have the buying power to do this in something like this. Because of 2,000 shares of Ulta, you would have needed over 360-some thousand in buying power and then if you wanted to do anything else in the day, you would have needed even more. Okay. So this was a good long as an option. And you could have gone long this as an option and you also could have day-traded the stock long. So here, Anita, you could have done the option and you could have day-traded it long. So let's look and see what happened. Well, what if you wanted to actually go long it? Two. Or on top of the other one. So if you wanted to, you could have gone long it as a day-tree. The price of the entry was 176.50. The stock was a dollar. Now that's actually really good for the strike price or the cost of the stock. So you would have had to risk $1,000 just to take 1,000 shares of this. But if you had, you could have made 8,500. You would have had to hold it all the target. The target was 185. That's why I had the strike price at that. Anyways, the risk to reward is 8.5 times the amount risk made in profit. So you could have gone long this stock. This is a day-tree now. Okay. You would have gone long in here. Here's the long entry. Put the stock in. You would have had to write it up to 185. Okay. So you could have done two things in this. You could have actually done the option, which is what I did. You could have gone long the day-trade stock, which I didn't do what you could have. What have you done both? Crazy. But if you had risked $2,000 and did both the trades here that you could have done, based on what? Based on the 26-point golden gap rating system, that's how you would have known. I only did one of these. I did the option, but I could have done both. I did a short this day. Two, besides the long. But either way, you could have done both in this. So the reality is, if you had done just one, again, one, one, one, one strategy, two trades and one strategy, one stock, one direction, you could have made over $13,000 in one day in this. I could have done it. I shorted something in the morning that did the option. I should have been three things that day. Some days you just get a lot of things to do. But either way that is incredible. And it was right there. Handed it to me. And I made the money in the option. I just didn't do the day trade because I was in a short. But this was a great, great gap. This was a bullish gap. The stock got bought on the day. This stock would never have rallied and made this kind of move. You see the big green bar, unless it was being bought by institutions. You don't get a move like that in anything that's not institutional buying. It's being traded well as a bullish stock to go long. Anita is asking about an account size. It depends on the broker you go to. If you go to a retail broker and you want to day trade actively, you're going to need $25,000.  I don't know what type of place you want to go. You can open up an account with a retail brokerage place and not put up $25,000 and just do the options. You can probably open it up with, you know, 500 bucks. You have to call different places and find out. Again, I can refer you to some you can trade it whatever place you want. I ended up doing BKS on the day I shorted this and then here's the option that I did in the Alta. So I made over $6,100 on this day. And I could have done the Alta, other Alta too. So is this enough to make money for living? The answer is yes. I mean some people don't make $6,000 in a month. $6,000 a month is $72 grand a year and I made it in a day. I think I got out of that Alta trade like around the lunchtime. It was somewhere between 11 and 12, 12, 30 or whatever time I got out of it. And I did the quick short in the morning and got out of the short in the morning where I was up the $1,300 in the BKS. And this I think even went further. So again, it is about the quality, the quality, the quality, the quality, the quality. You need the focus. You've got to know what to look for. Now, everyone's talking about the market. Last week, the market actually got up. It had a beautiful gap up. This was the 30th No, it was the 29th. I'm sorry. It was December 29th. Here's where the QQQ's closed. Here's where they open. Should the market gap up? You could have rated the market. You could have done the spy or the QQQ's this day. And actually a lot of stocks rallied this day with the market and gaped up. You rate the gap, determine if it's a good long and if it is, you go long it. You could have gone long aggressively this right out of the open. This was a beautiful trade. And it went up to the target. And it was a nice, nice move. It's a golden gap. They're rated 20 points or more per my 26-point rating system. Why? It got bought. It got bought with institutional money. You could have entered the stock at $1,1325. You're going long now. Shop is $1,1290. Risk is $0.35. It's the difference between the entry and the stop. This is where you're getting your sizing for the correct risk to reward. So, if you wanted to take $3,000 shares and risk $1,000 bucks, $1,050, if you did that, you could have exited this at $1,1425. This was the target. This really was the final target on the day. And it was a dollar. Again, the idea of momentum. You're looking for momentum, momentum, momentum, okay? Total profit $3,000. Risk to reward three times the amount risk was made in profit. So, this is a good one. Because you risked $1,000 and made $3,000. What if you risked $500? You would have made $1,500. You made three times the amount your risk, no matter what you risked. If you had risked $200, you would have made $600. If you risked $1,000, you would have made $3,000. It's the idea that it is the risk to reward. You risked $0.35, you made a buck. Okay? And this is how you figure it out. And again, it's $3,000 enough to make a living. Yes, it is. And even if you divide that by three, it certainly certainly is. So, the Golden Gap Strategy that I teach on trade, it consistently directs you to the power source and the stop. So, it determines the correct directional bias. Because that's how you make money. And not only the correct directional bias, but whether or not you're going to get any momentum. Because the way that you get the moves, like a dollar, or even $10 an alt-tut, is momentum. It's money. It's serious, serious money that's either selling the stock or buying the stock that moves it up. Okay? So, the Golden Gap Strategy uses a rating system, which pinpoints opportunity for you to enter before the big move happens. And that's what you want to do. Now, people are asking how much do you risk? Well, it depends how much you want to make. But if your goal is to maybe make six figures a year, if you think that's what you want to do, you need to have at least a $250, $300 risk unit. If you're really good, you could have it be $200. Okay? And if you want to make $200, $250 grand a year, that risk unit needs to be at least around $500 or more. Okay? But this is very reasonable. But you have to prove that you can do it through learning at first. Because even if you can make $50 grand, that's a good amount of money if you're only trading for half an hour. Just to break it out, because I think you have to back it off with what your goals are. And this is how you do it. You're like, well, how much do I actually risk? And how much do my goals be? Because remember you have to have the plan of action. If your goal is to make $100,000 a year, you really are trying to make $500 a day. $500 a day is your goal or $2,500 a week? This is how you got to look at it. What if your goal is to make $78,000 a year? Then you're trying to make $300 a day, $1,500 a week. What does this mean? It means if you're up $300 and the trade starts backing against you and you made your goal for the day, take it. Take it! If your goal for the day is $1,000 and the immune starts backing up against you and you hit the first target, take it!  Okay? Exit sign, first target, goal for the day, out! Alright? You're not always trying to get these huge home runs. Now, Alta was one. And sometimes you get them and I just say the market just gives it to you, they just plop them in your lap. You'll know! Because it will just run or sell off hard if you're in a short. But if your goal is in, you take the money. And if you're doing this for a living, you must take the money. You must chunk it out. You must book it. And so we say it's never over the fat lady sings. You could be up on a train and it could go against you and then you're down. You've got to cash out. Okay? And if this is something that you're using to pay your jobs then you have to cash out when you're up. But again, you need to make quality trades where you are up. Many, many times I take a trade them up as soon as I take it. Sometimes people take trades and they are down before they work out. That is not the way that I train. I think it's a difficult way to train. I don't think it's a good way to train. Alright? But the idea of even doing this part time where you could make $39,000 a year only making $150 a day is very, very reasonable and not a crazy dream number. For your first couple months trading or something, this is great. And to be able to make $130,000 a year is extremely good too. Because you're not even working that hard. So again, where do you start? You take my class to learn my method. It's the only place you're going to be able to do it. I'm the only place and anywhere I've invented my own system. It's a 26-point rating system I use to rate gaps. It's called the Golden Gap. Then you practice on a demo for a week. Then you open an account for options like I said you're less than $1,000. If you want to do the equity day trading you can open up a proper firm account with $2,500. An actively day trade. You do not need special software scanning software. You only need a live-loving charts, a live level two with real-time reports for stocks. So you can rate the gaps and then take the actual position. Any broker will have this on their equity platform when you open a live account. So every brokerage account, proper retail, will have moving charts on the platform at a live level two. Once you know how to do this thing, once you know how to make money, you can really set your own course because you could work for yourself. You could work at a trading desk. You could get a job at a bank.  There's just so many things that you could do. So many if you learn how to do this correctly. But it's just one of these things where it's never over the fat lady sings because you have got to book the money when you're up. You have to be thoughtful about what you're doing. You could have a career that you've been doing for years and all of a sudden it collapses and that's really what happened with me with my mortgage job. So I'm talking about an experience. Thinking ahead about what you want to do for your life and yourself to have extra money saving, to earn extra money this calendar year in 2016, to get ahead, to not feel like you're always living paycheck to paycheck is not a bad idea. But if you want to do it for living, this is here. You just have to learn it. Self-reliance is very important and if personal freedom is one of your goals then day trading. It's something that can offer you that because you can work from home. So the more often you make money on a consistent basis, the more confidence you will build in yourself and the more conviction you will have in your own ability to trade well. A lot of people don't have confidence in themselves if they've lost money in the market but it may just be that you don't know what you're doing and you have to learn what you're doing and it's not even you. One of the most valuable things that you learn during the Golden Gap course is to have conviction in the Golden Gap strategy. This conviction will help you produce positive trades and results and staying positive might be a challenge for some traders but it is a requirement This is a requirement for success for anyone who wants to earn a high-paying income in really any field. So I teach my class, it's called the Golden Gap System. The Golden Gap course teaches a 26-point professional bearish gap rating system. The purpose of the system is to help you evaluate which gap to trade each morning using a checklist and I just go through all the points every morning. Okay? The class teaches a strategy on how to trade only gaps and that's all that I do. I teach you how to pick the best one to do every day, the highest rated one and more than one if you want to do them. The course also teaches students how to play the stock on the day when you enter an exit and the course teaches you tactical analysis on an advanced level which is how I'm seeing the things that I am like in the market. So it's a complete system. Where are the targets? How do you do the entries? How do you size yourself? How do you pick the stock? How do you rate the gap? Support and resistance. Okay? So the class is online. It's a full two-day course on how to strategically find pick-and-play stocks that are professional bearish gaps. Retakes are free. The class is online and you can do it from anywhere in the world. If you sign up once you can retake it anytime in the future for free. Dates are January 9th and 10th. From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern time, cost of the class is $39.99. If you're interested, email me at Melissa at thestockswish.com. Now I'm offering another class. This is just about the stock market. It's January 13th. Okay? I'm only doing this. I did do one in December. I'm doing another one in January but I won't be doing this again this year. So if you want to do this class it's a one-time only done thing at the beginning of the year to review the market for 2016. It's from noon to four. Clash of this class is $9.99. I'm going to go over the US stock market for 2016 along with the trade calls and the option calls for the long-term market and the trades I'm already in. You can do them. And the people that did the class in December did the trades with me. I was already in them though. But if you sign up for the GAP class this weekend you will get that class for free. This is a huge savings. So if you do the GAP class this weekend you will get the stock market class for free. Okay? This is a really good deal. Denline to sign up is January 8th. Savings is $999. You do the class Saturday and Sunday to learn the golden GAP system to day trade. You do the stock market class which is the following Wednesday next week on the 13th from 12 to 4 and you get that for free. And then you get the option calls I'm giving in the market and you can do them. Now I also teach a trends class which talks about longer-term trends. This is until February. This is February 9th and 10th from 12 to 4. This talks about reading long-term trends and stock charts. This isn't really for day trading but it's good if you're doing swing trading for example. Clash of this class is $9.99. And if you want to sign up for both the golden GAP and the trends class you get a discount. If you sign up and pay for both you do the golden GAP class in January and then you do the trends course in February and you get the stock market class for free. This is a savings of almost $1,500 and the cost for this combo is $44.99. This is everything here at once and you can learn how to day trade the gaps. Then you get the longer-term trends and you get the option call and the market outlook for 2016. So I'm offering this to everybody in the beginning of the year. Now Mike has a question. Are any of the honest firms honest? Of course there's honest prop firms out there. That's like somebody asked me something else the other day about honesty and reference to educators. There's honest people that exist in the world. Don't be so cynical that you don't think there's any honest prop firms or educators or mentors. At the same time you can't be naive and believe everything you hear. You know how you make a correct decision for yourself? You listen to your intuition. You listen to your gut and you ask the right questions to the place that you're considering trading with or get referrals from the prop firm to find out. Talk to people that have traded there. Okay? And at the end of the day the decision is yours. You can't believe everything that's out there. You've got to listen to your gut. You do your due diligence. That's all that you can do. Some people, one answer is they're never going to get from me. Same thing with the prop firms. There are good places. There are good teachers. There are good mentors. There are good prop firms. It is possible to make money in the market. This goes back to what I was saying about having a certain right attitude. I always believed that I could make money in the market. I think part of it had to do with the first, I think I told this story a long time ago in some webinar, the first week I ever traded I made $5,000 in one trade. I knew it was possible after that. There was nothing after that and it was in a gap. There was nothing that anyone could tell me that would ever change my thought processes after that. Now I lost money after that because I didn't know what I was doing yet. It was the first week I traded. But I knew that it could be done. So your belief system has to match that it's possible to find good prop firms and good people to learn from and that you can do it. I can tell you right now if you don't believe you can do it, you won't. And if you believe that you will, you have a chance. It's up to you. Will you do the work necessary? Will you follow the dictum that I teach you, letter for letter or will you make it up and not follow anything? I mean I have a system for a reason. I took my look into the market myself and lost money that I figured this out. It took me three years. You do, you kind of my class, you pay me for the information, you're in the room, take the trades I take and don't take any others. Do what I say in the class and don't deviate. It's really not that difficult. Everyone wants to reinvent the wheel. Don't do that to yourself. There's no reason. Okay? So you can learn how to trade and you can work from home. It's possible. Now does anyone have any questions? Mike had the question about the prop firm.  Does anyone else have any other questions for me? How's everybody doing? If you would like a trial of the trading room email me at Melissa at thestockswish.com. I'll give you a one week trial. The class is this weekend, January 9th and 10th from 9am to 5pm eastern time. You cannot join the live trading room unless you have taken the golden gap class. If you sign up for the class this week though and do the class this week you will get the stock market class for free which is next week. I'm only doing that one more time this year so that's a nice incentive. And there Kathy has my email in the room. Good questions. Good participation from everyone. Again you can get the picks using the rating system to use this for options only or you can do it for options in day trading. You will learn in the class how to take the day trading entry positions. But it is based on institutional money. It is so powerful people. It is so powerful that it makes exciting because if you can get to the point where you were doing this extremely well you can make millions of dollars in the market. I'm on my way. And quite frankly the trades that I'm in in the long term market calls I have for the market may make me a million dollars in just those trades. We'll have to see. It's their long term trades out though. Have a great night everyone. Email me if you have any questions. Thank you for coming. You're welcome. Thank you so much everyone. Thank you for your time.


Please give a round of applause to Irvin. Thank you Wow, that's a warm welcome Thank you guys Very happy to be here today on this very early morning and Let's go right into it in the tools of destruction I'm gonna be very honest with you as a UX designer. I haven't been focusing on the end user Lately well, that's not necessarily The end user that we're talking about usually, but how about ourselves as the end user as a product designer? Let's check if this works Yes Okay, so us ourselves as the end user One moment guys Okay All right. We're good So I think we UX designers are craftmen by nature, right? and I think one of the things that I got inspired with a lot was the simple thing the simple things that And give me a moment of delight as a designer that I thought like hey, that is super interesting because Me as a UX designer, I would have never taught or an inexperienced UX designer Would never have thought about this take the Japanese toothpick for instance Did you know that it has several functions, right? So if you break it it indicates that it has been used But you can also use it to leverage from the table to not touch the dirty table But how does it translate to UX in context when it comes to industrial design or How UX is being practiced in governments or in academic setting or during your education or in the agency world and I think I'm always been very interested in UX in a product setting because Here you have the chance to iterate on a project and to make the product ever better Moving forward to iteration and I think in the agency world a Lot of interesting work is being done But at one point you have to sort of hand it over and you cannot iterate upon it So that's why I think UX in the context of product is very interesting so UX as an individual is something that you can practice and Goes very well, but the moment you have to start doing it with someone else things change And maybe with someone on top of that it changes even more, right and The bigger the group becomes the more complex it becomes because everyone has their own contribution to it different backgrounds different People come from different countries different experiences different skill sets and one of the other people are not necessarily designers It becomes even more complex, right? So I like to approach this a little bit from UX as an individual versus UX as a collective So I want to focus a little bit more on the how instead of the what because the what is pretty Easy and I think the moment we start talking about the what and UX in the future it becomes all speculation and I think The how is more interested and I think that is exactly where a lot of companies struggle How do we bring UX into practice or design into practice in general in a very efficient way? So I go to this trust three topics the current state some tools and a little bit about the future, right? And I stumbled upon this very interesting report of design front here Where we talk about the design maturity within companies and it turns out we have five levels of maturity within companies. It's Based on a survey with more than 2,000 people over 24 countries in the world And I found it very fascinating to see where we at, right? so Level one are the producers Then you have the connectors and then we have the architects the scientists and the visionaries and You see that only five percent of the companies are in the top or in the level five where design is so incubated in in the company That it actually has effect and It actually shows a lot of returns that comes to design because they really believe in it, right? That versus the level one the producers You can call them production monkeys sometimes, right? It becomes very difficult where there is not a lot of structure There's not a lot of processes, but you're trying to deliver good work and I think This is very interesting these numbers here are the amount of designers within companies, right? And you see that on the lower levels. There are actually more designers and when you look at the visionaries They actually have less designers. So that means they work more efficient in a way Then the younger companies, right? and I can say that where I work and money smart that we are basically Moving from a level three as architects to become scientists But it's a very difficult Jump to make as a company. I think design systems is one of those tools That can bring you from level three from an architect to become vision or a scientist, right? This is very interesting as well because you see that The leading industries are actually the transportation and automotive and the delivery industry and You see that there is a lot of room for improvement in industries like banking financial services and insurance and it happened to be the industry where I'm at now So that it made a lot of sense for me to focus on design system where I talk a little bit about in a bit so UX in the concept of product we can call it product design and I think we can always say that product design always addresses user needs and meet business objectives and We can do this through optimization or innovation optimization is more You have more frequent releases Smaller changes faster cycles and innovation is the the harder part where you need sometimes different types of tools and different types of UX tools and Different type of research tools So let's talk a little bit about the tools These tools that you see here once we're considered UX tools, right? Photoshop illustrator fireworks, I guess I have even used flash or in design and I think what we see in the industry right now is that there is a lot of UX tools out there and Very interesting tools that do a lot prototyping user interfaces, etc but there is always this struggle point and That is actually the handoff point, right and That comes a lot has a lot to do with with the communication we have with our developers as product designers, right? And I think sometimes that relationship is not established enough How many times do you have designed something? that starts with a scribble you design and When you see the end result live being deployed on your website, it's a little bit of like oh, okay Did I design that I guess so So it's very interesting if you look at the five levels of the companies and the maturity state of design within companies Is that in how we design products is mostly we work from an abstract point of view to a more concrete point of view, right? and That always follows it starts with like the strategy and you scope that strategy out and You structure it and you build a skeleton and you put a nice visual layer on top of it And that's how you basically produce components or or designs or UX designs or interfaces or whatever and I think if you put the five levels of the industries next to it based on the report and level one to five you see that actually a lot of those level level five companies or level one companies actually Do the opposite they struggle at the surveys level and having more problem when it comes to Being more strategic about their product And I think we can move down from a design system can actually help a group within an organization like that To move away from the surface level of design more towards a strategic point Towards a strategic way of doing things and incorporated and building products Whereas the traditional model worked very well for an individual But I think that setting is very different when you do it with a group and I know sometimes designer questions about the downside of design systems because I will lose my creativity This is one example that I I run into in Twitter, which I found pretty hilarious but Think of it, right? if you do an audit of your Current experience and you're not and you see the gaps and you want to improve there, right? And you see that you have 167 unique colors and 183 double styles Then you maybe it is time to make a little bit of a change And maybe we should use or work towards something more More structured or scalable or systematic So what I'm talking about is basically how we match the design with the actual code and vice versa And for that you need to answer a lot of questions We took a little group Winner team where a few developers and UX designers And we tried to answer all of these because we wanted to start from scratch because we wanted to build something that was Available for everyone and could scale But that means that you have to define and redefine everything and a lot of these questions You cannot leave them unopened or open. Sorry and That's basically The four pillars of a design system is basically that it should be an agnostic system. At least that's what I think utilities that you have to create and That you have to translate into code with design tokens and there you can build components with and This is how it looked from a model, right? So The HTML structure of a design of components are accompanied with documentation documentation design documentation code documentation usability documentation and At one point maybe you can even have design principles The book on your way when you're mature, right? And then we have the playbook. So how to use this system a lot of times This is translated in the word governance, but I find governance a little bit less Democratic in a way and I think a design system should allow the design team to actually play around With user experiences and it should not be a block or it should be an enabler, right? And once you have established that and you put that in the center Then whatever output and if that output is going to change talk about code Maybe today we use view code Maybe in the future we want to develop an iOS app or an Android app or we switch to react The system in the middle still stands And we know that design software and tools Will change, right? They for instance sketch sketches at this point almost considered like a legacy tool We moved away from sketch to Figma because Figma is an interesting tool that actually Allows and is aligned with that scope of an agnostic system, right? An implementation of the system as a tool and that means yes You have to focus on utilities to even build components, right? You have to redefine all the small and nitty-gritty stuff like Spacings typography scales color and all these things and it is a bit painful in the beginning It demands a lot of talk sometimes a lot of technical talk but also a lot of logic talk somehow and Those you need to translate into sort of design tokens design tokens that will house these values and Make them scalable and once those are planted in the right way across all of your product across all different Markets, maybe it's very easy to make changes To your product and your existing user experience, right? So here's an example of it will result eventually in a set of components that are defined and For instance the tool Figma Allows you to integrate your own Design system in that sense, right? And in the beginning you don't have a different or a new or a refreshed user experience but it is sometimes feels a little bit like a spring cleaning when you start implementing your design system on your new platforms and Maybe it's not a drastic change, but it feels like a little bit of a Marie Kondo update and refresh and you know what you can do later with it, right because In the black circle, you see how a component was structured previously, which was not very flexible And on the right side we structure it in a way that it is more aligned with our core translation of a design which is the HTML and CMS CSS and For instance view code or react code can follow that structure and this allows you to do very interesting stuff because Now you can do on a component level with the same values and the same design if you change parameters you can change a lot of things and you can experiment a lot of things and You try out different things and I can imagine if you would do that on a page level Where you have different personas now we can control what we show to who What if you have an X amount of personas and you want to give them different experiences or you want to offer Different products or you want to show them different content that is now possible It is not a blocker anymore, right? and So we are now able to address the user needs, right? So what about the business objectives and I think as an organization you need to put a little bit of effort and a little bit of guts in to putting resources in developing such thing as a design system because it's not an easy thing and often it comes with a replatforming and some hard decisions need to be made but If the leadership has a little bit of a longer term vision, they know at the end it's going to benefit them, right? and Just now I mentioned that It might not seems like a whole different website refresh or an experience refresh But I think now that you have defined all the values and the and the technical part behind the designs You definitely will increase your speed and page loads etc, right and it doesn't really matter at this point because You see that only 24% of the users based on a Google report Care about how attracted the website actually looks for them. It's more about the speed that the that it loads So that's already a win and I think what you see here is the formula to convince your leadership to invest in a design system Because if you do a calculation of an X amount of systems that you have maybe have multiple systems and You are planning for an X amount of releases over an X amount of time With an X amount of people working on it It will always translate in an X amount of time and money right and that you can compare to your new Calculation basically on your new systems, right? Probably it's one system that you're working on and that will definitely translate in a win in time and money I cannot give you the exact number, but I Can give you a percentage and it's quite unbelievable that we can our time to market can be way faster We haven't we can see an increase of 92% For some products our core products and there's like other products that are connected to the design system for instance our checkout service that have an increase of 86% which is Quite a lot so the eventual the goal is to Deliver products and time will always be a constraint, right? But at least you save a lot of time Because a lot of things are defined and you can focus on the problems that really matter, right? Problems that really tackle all the layers of a minimum viable product instead of stagnating just at the bottom so if you look at all of this and then you see that Iteration and innovation and experimentation is something that the scientists do at level five and I think when once you put your system in place in all of this in the center Then basically what you do is you put all your people in the center as well because now people who are the people I'm talking about designers researchers content strategists can now actually focus on their profession and leverage their skills instead of being blocked by technical limitations or All these kind of things, right? So when we talk about the future You have to talk about the past because Systematic design and scalable design and reusable design is super old, right? Like a 1570 Palladio introduced the architecture book Where you can build whole cities basically with reusable components and on the right you see for instance, how he describes a Circle staircase that you have to use in small locations in The blueprint in a house for instance, right? but everything was documented and there were design principles and Even if you look at all the software like a lot of graphic designers probably have used like in design. There's a lot of Functionality in there that you can reuse a lot of elements for your own back then maybe it was not shared Maybe we were not talking about multiplayer design like these days But it was already very efficient so The future is learning from the past and I think if we stitch the people and and the practices and the platforms We can actually eventually benefit our users So the whole company can basically become accountable for the consumer experience, right? And it can spread out of just the product department or the tech department So UX can be closer to a CX etc So if you look at the scale of one to five We are definitely ready to go from three to four because we want to enjoy the fruits that we have created, right with experimentation That's why it has the name scientists. Of course. You are able now to do crazy experiments to really Try new things out to address user needs Is the ultimate aim level five hundred percent sure but to get there only a small percentage from everywhere in the world Reach that level and most of the times now it are other big Giants, right? They don't level five so If you want to know more about our journey, please come talk to us We will sharing our design system what we have now so far with our design guidelines and An agnostic system and our how we approach view code and we hope to launch and share it that soon with you all It's still in development So thank you So we're gonna go to questions and I think one of the questions that was asked a lot just now was where can I get the slides?  So so don't worry. You don't have to take pictures of every single slide Okay And there is another very active debate on menti.com about whether the lights are bright or they're not Who put in that question? Okay, let's let's take a quick vote who here thinks that the lights are too dim. Oh Thought too bright Who who is okay who is okay with the current lights, please raise your hand Okay, so I'm really sorry to those who who said that they wanted like brighter lights But it looks like most people are kind of okay with this So, you know, we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna stick with the current state of lighting, okay? So on to the questions that we have Let's see okay question for a Frim once you decide to use figma or envision you are then locked into the ecosystem Do you think that this might be not so practical for the future? Is there anyone from envision here Okay, sorry So no, I Don't think you are We use we start using figma because it has a Less to do with being locked in to an ecosystem and I think still things still exist in sketch But it's just that the documentation etc of those Components and stuff. It's very nice reflected within figma and it's it's a very easy learning curve talking about design software, I think Initially, I was aiming for something like UX pin because I think UX pin is an extremely strong tool and You can do high fidelity prototyping and you even have the ability to to add logic to interactions but What we realized a lot of our designers found it too much of a learning curve and a bit intimidating Yes, it is a tool that is closer and merges the design The design with code as a working space But I think this point We move to figma and I think one thing that figma is doing good I don't try to be a promoter here But they listen to their users which are the UX designers and I think that community is It's very thriving. Yeah So sorry in vision Next question that was uploaded a lot. How do you convince developers to embrace the design system? A common pushback is that they don't have time to build the whole system So I think to embrace them is To start developing it together I think What I hear a lot from developers is that they most of the time they already have some kind of system or multiple systems and I think that a lot of these The need from them is that it has been driven by design But it's owned together, right? I think it's a design system is always a shared ownership and What we see here is that now there's a design system in place that the designers are working way more closer to developers And especially front-end developers. I think when you start integrating your system on platforms Back-end developers in a way are a little bit of a different breed and front-end developers So it's a lot of repetition and Education needed But they instantly will see the benefit and it's very easy to get them on board Okay One more question on the design which is When should you start working on the design system in the initial part or towards the end when the designs have been finalized? So we we all were already a business online in that sense, right? So we introduce a design system and it's either you do a big bang approach or you launch it in phases Right and I think what we did was we just take the current snapshot of the experience to set everything in place And that's what I meant with you already will see a little uplift in the experience a little bit of house cleaning sprint cleaning But now everything is in place and now it's time to look at the real design changes or the product improvements you want to introduce Okay, great Thank you. Thank you so much Irvin and if we just wanted to present a quick token of appreciation Thank you very much