Welcome folks we're back has corrections and institutions committee in this afternoon we're going to be dealing with the department of corrections. And we've got some areas that we're going to be looking at a lot of this is background information so that we can start understanding the layout of corrections we can understand start understanding the facilities the capacities of each of the facilities the operating costs for each facility so that is a dovetail so what we talked about this morning. In terms of deferred maintenance and maintenance needs within each of our facilities so it kind of brings it all together for us. And then we're going to transition into the incarcerated population in terms of the average population and then inmate population report which does a deeper dive into folks who are incarcerated and why they are incarcerated what they've been convicted So I'm going to turn it over to Al Cormier to get us started and then and we will start with the facilities, individual facilities and their capacities, and we do have that on our web page that document to bring up. All right, thank you Madam Chair. Good afternoon. Al Cormier, Chief of Operations for the Department of Corrections. Just King Moore is our lead research analyst for the department who has put this information together. And my apologies I know you've gotten a couple different documents around the capacity and we spent some time with with the coven. Quarantine and isolation units and trying to figure out where it's a never evolving model for us as to where we're housing people and, as you know, Madam Chair, the way our facilities are set up it's often a challenge finding adequate space so what you have in front of you is the most current up to date accurate data that that we do have. So what what this shows is facility capacity by our bed type pre coven and also post coven so pre coven. You'll look at the general population the special housing beds and then the segregation beds of each of our facilities special housing can include infirmary beds intake and booking beds are medical unit. And the state facility you'll see the highest in the state. That is our mental health population, or aged and infirm population. Again, the infirmary itself. Northwest has has quite a high number because of the sex vendor programming that that goes on there. And then pre coven correctional facility in St. Johnsburg shows a high number, because the work camp has historically been considered special housing special population because of the criteria to get into either the work camp or the north unit population, which is our be one pending release.  This is pre coven pre coven. So for this includes all of our facilities, including the work camp. We have a total beds within our system of 1579 of the of the 1579 we have 412 beds that are restricted in their use. So maybe you could talk about what it really means for general general population beds how those are different than you're restricted you're restricted or special housing or said units that are not open to general population can you sort of explain what that general population mixes. Absolutely so general population would consist of any living unit where there is not a requirement for programming a mental health need a classification designation that will would require housing in a special unit.  The segregation units would be anywhere where we would house those individuals that would be difficult to manage those that are either behavioral issues. Designate a close custody in a facility that does not have a close custody unit protective custody. If you have beds available that are not being used in special housing, we're in the seg units. Can you put general population folks in there. We would not mix that population. No. Could we do a yes but it operationally it's it just it's not good business. Because of those segregation units just do not have the access to a television access to the wreck yard without utilizing special movement protocols in place. The way those are set up they're set up for single cells in a very restricted environment. So it's the way that that particular units been built. Correct. So the segregation units would be again those those residing within the correctional facilities that don't have a designation for either requiring segregation or or special housing programming. So much more ability to enter a wreck yard that is that is outside. But to library education, a higher population in one unit. So with our supervision stand direct supervision. You know that's one officer to anywhere from 30 to 50 individuals at one time we're in a special housing unit, the numbers are reduced for more focus on one on one interaction. So questions from the committee at all. And the difference there in the housing and the ability so that at any point in time we do have empty beds in our facilities but those empty beds and mostly special housing and said units correct. Correct. So we have folks who are out of state. A little bit over 100 150 or so and that varies. So we do have empty beds. How many 184 today. So we do have empty beds in our system at any point in time but the issue is the folks from out of state could not come in and take one of those beds because they're more restrictive beds. Is that fair to say that is fair to say the other piece of that. Okay, Madam. Madam chair is the historically with our population numbers as high as they have been past year, year and a half. St. Johnsbury and marble Valley often had inmates on the floor. So even with free beds in segregation we would often have our general population beds while there may be 149 available in St. Johnsbury, there could at times be 170 inmates on our population count with inmates sleeping in sled beds on the floor, two people in a one man cell or three in a three person cell. So it's off, you know, so while we have a cap, it's often deceiving as to what our actual number is because you could say, Okay, here's your capacity, but you have 200 more inmates than what your capacity is and it would be inmates residing on the floors and ourselves. Committee members got that. Okay, questions. Okay, let's go to the next page which deals with post COVID. We're going to see some changes overall population is going to be a difference of about 80 beds 90 beds from our general population numbers total. And what you'll see is our segregation units have now been eliminated per se, and have been taken over by a quarantine and isolation bed. So due to the protocols that we put in place for covert mitigation across all of our facilities, the majority of our segregation units are now in intake quarantine or intake isolation, depending on the facility. So any inmate that is lodged at our facilities comes in and is tested for COVID is placed on a 14 day quarantine tested again at day seven and tested again at day 12. So you'll see the change in that those housing numbers based on the changes we've made to each of our facilities and the roles of our facilities to adapt to our COVID protocols. And, and our mitigation. So your population has gone down by about 100. Yes, total. Your general population has. Yeah, your general, your general population has gone down by about 200. We had 1167 general population pre COVID and now there's 996. So I'm assuming those are actual folks, actual people. Is that correct. Where's it population. Yeah, population. January of 20 was around I think it was around 1485. Today we're at the population counts for today. Would that population count include the out of state folks. It would find the breakdown on that right now. All right. No, that's fine. We can wait for his population is 1285. 1285. And that's so you take 184 off of that so 1100 1100 in state right now. So the biggest shift is those seg beds went into quarantine. And an isolation. Your special housing decreased a little bit. One of the biggest decreases there is with St. Johnsbury. And the, as you know, the work camp has special criteria to get in as well as we've changed the, we've reduced the work camp population and then we have to be one population in there. And we've been Can you explain what the B1 is because I think for some folks that to new terminology. So B1 is a classification designation for those that are solely incarcerated because of lack of housing. The only thing preventing them from being released to the community is that they don't have adequate housing available to them. So this is a minimum custody population that is currently housed in North unit in St. Johnsbury. Because of the special designation for work camp eligibility and the eligibility to get into North unit. So we've utilized the term special housing for that but it's a for it can be a little deceiving saying because we can put general population inmates in there. And not that we have at this point but it is an option for us as we look at our covert mitigation again and how we house and should we have a surge in our population so we have changed that and adjust to those numbers. And made those beds, general population beds. And that's one of the questions of the committee. We've got Michelle and then Karen. Yeah, I was just wondering, do you have a number like how many people are at that one be one status right now. Right now there's there's 2026 inmates in St. John's very on that status 19 inmates sorry, currently 19 inmates in St. John's very on that on that be one status. We know the statewide total representative. There are more but we've kind of left because of the open dorm environment in that facility it's not cells. It's more like an army barracks. And as we've come to learn through our work with with COVID that an open environment is not conducive to mitigating social distancing and reducing the spread of the virus so we're trying to minimize the number of people in that unit. That's what's right now. And Karen. Yes, thank you madam chair. I'll thank you for these numbers I appreciate it kind of seeing the differences in them. I'm curious, because I think we're going to see that it's the seg beds that have had the biggest difference. I'm curious what that impact has been with the seg beds going down. The seg beds can be seen as controversial because they're, you know, people are isolated. They're used for disciplinary or safety measures. So curious what the impact has been of having reduced number of seg beds available. That's a great question so while we haven't reduced our need for I mean we have reduced our need for segregation. There are still some we must use it for behavioral issues, self protection. So those, those beds are available to us through the special housing piece right now. So those are, we haven't broken them down in our post covert numbers. So most of the segregation units are restricted housing units have been turned into isolation and quarantine units. We do still have a number of segregation beds available to us for those that may require it based on behavioral issues, or a need for protective But I've got to say overall, I've been very happy with the response of the inmate population and how our staff have handled this modified lockdown status throughout our battle with COVID. Because we have seen pretty significant reduction in the number of disciplinary issues through through the population even given the restrictions and the stress placed on on our population as a result of that. Great. Thank you for I think it's part of what we're seeing as you know some of the silver lining and going through all these challenges. What are some of the ways we can learn and see how we can adapt going forward so I appreciate that insight. Any other questions. So, as we move forward and figuring out how to replace our correctional facilities, because that's going to be whether it's going to be there, if not this year it's it's there in our future. We really have to think how, how do we go forward and in a model of really having more flexible use of those beds, because right now. I mean you're always going to have infirmary but beds are not open for the for the general public you're going to have booking beds they're not open for the general public. Do you do special housing if we get into we've got an incarcerated population that's aging, and we've got a lot of medical issues we got medical issues we've got dementia. We've got mobility issues. So do we build beds specifically for a geriatric population if we do that then those beds are offline for the general population. Do we continue doing will have to continue at some point doing something for said you can't have a facility in some ways without some, and I don't want to say you're going to be in segregation but you may have to. Sometimes for an inmate's own safety, they request to be taken out of general population, and to be placed in a safer environment so what does that look like. Those are the questions that we will be asking in terms of how to make the decision in terms of how we go forward with do we do standalone facilities that are not connected to each other do we do something more like a campus style. You have your administrative buildings connected and then you have all the living units separated out over the property. Those are decisions we're going to have to make and in the context of how much it's going to cost and over how long a period of time because you don't put up a correctional facility regardless of it's a transitional unit or transitional facility or regular incarcerated facility, they don't get up in a couple of months. This is a long term process that by starting now, you're not going to see a door opening for at least four or five years. So, more time you put off not making a decision, you're saying to the inmates you're staying where you're staying. A new door is not going to open up to them in a few months or a year or two. It's a long process. So, so does this help in giving a little bit of background in terms of what our facilities, their capacity. So when folks sit see that we've got all these beds and why can't we bring people back from out of state. You've got of the currently right now with post coven. You've got 1490 beds in the system, but almost 500 of those are restricted. So you only have 900 plus. That's available. So that's how you have to look at it. So anything else on this app. Just I know set representative coffee I know you have your hand up but one thing that we have to, we have to take into account is planned maintenance as well and one of the things we're looking at is the door product door control project. So that's going to be completed in Newport is scheduled for this summer in Springfield. And what that does is that that's going to take down one unit, a 50 bed unit for approximately six months. You know, so we're going to be down 50 beds at that point. So that's good here that we had so in Newport we have to open up the gym, the house 50 inmates I think what we're at right now is, we can house those inmates throughout our public throughout our facilities, without having to open a gym, but that is going to be 50 beds that will be down. So we have to take that into account too as we think about, why can't we bring back the out of state population. Again, construction projects are going to hinder our ability to have that that free bed space. So if we didn't have that capacity currently, we'd have 50 inmates shipped down to Mississippi for that and potentially yes. So Sarah I didn't have the participant list up I'm sorry. Okay, it's a quick question I the documents that you were working off of out. I didn't see them on. On our website. On our web page, maybe you have to refresh that because they're going to be super useful as we move forward so thanks. And is it possible to get a breakdown of the B ones. At some point. Get that. Thank you. Okay, anything else before we move to the operations cost piece. So, is that new Matt, or is that you now. Okay, so we have a document for that.  Yeah, so one more question kind of like the earlier when I asked I'm wondering if you happen to know the number of people that you have currently that are incarcerated because they can't make their bail. I don't have that information currently in front of me but I that's something else we can get as well. Okay, thank you. Okay, so


Welcome and thank you for joining today's webinar on the FAQ on Non-Compliant Permanent Digitized Records. Please note this conference is being recorded and audio connections are muted at this time. If you require technical assistance, please open chat with the associated icon at the bottom of your screen and send a message to the event producer. You may submit written questions throughout the conference by selecting all panelists from the drop-down menu in the chat panel. Closed captioning may be turned on by clicking the CC icon at the bottom left of your screen. With that, I'll turn the conference over to Arian Ravan-Baksh, supervisor of the policy and program support team. Thank you, Candice, for that introduction. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our webinar. My name is Arian Ravan-Baksh, and I will be serving as the moderator for today's webinar. First, some housekeeping information. The presentation slides we are using today will be made available on the Digitization Resources page of our website. When we have the recording available, we will be posting a link to it on this webpage as well as on our YouTube channel. A summary of today's webinar and all relevant links will also be shared on our blog Records Express in the coming days. Records Express is where you can also find a series of several posts with additional information about all things digitization. For questions during this presentation today, please use the WebEx chat feature. We will be addressing those questions after the presentation. We will be recording the presentation and speaker remarks, however, we will stop the recording for the question and discussion portion of today's webinar. With all of that out of the way, I'd like to introduce the Director of Records Management Policy and Outreach, Lisa Herlampus. Good afternoon, Lisa. Thank you, Arian, and welcome everybody to today's webinar. We're very excited to have you join us on a conversation that is a very important topic to us, which is related to previously digitized permanent records that may not be in compliance with the standards we recently issued. So the first thing I'll do is I'll take us through our agenda for today. So we'll do a brief introduction slide. I'm going to give a little context as to why this is necessary. And then the bulk of the presentation will be a review of all of the FAQs, all the questions you've asked, and the answers we've arrived at. We're also going to profile another resource related to this topic, which is a decision tree to help you think through the complexity of understanding what do I do if I've digitized records, permanent records, and they don't comply with the standards that were recently issued. So next slide, please. So that's what we're going to talk about. And this who's going to talk. I am so pleased that we have the entire policy and standards team here today. You're going to get to hear from wonderful experts who are quite, have in-depth knowledge on these standards, these questions, and be able to lead us in a really rich conversation. And you can see their names and titles, and you'll get to hear from them very soon. Next slide, please. So this is a webinar is to talk about the answers you've had to questions on what to do with records that have already been digitized, if they do not meet the standards that NARA issued. As a reminder, these are the standards that NARA issued. We pushed these standards out in regulations that happened back in May. And as you can see, I do like this slide, I know it's got a lot of information in it, but it does provide a snapshot of the complexity and the detail that are contained in those digitization standards. Everything from what documentation you have produced relating to a digitization project, to the file formats, the quality management, what to do for metadata. So we've issued a lot of information, and we know that some digitization products will be very close to meeting all of our standards, but they may not have met every piece, and that's what we want to talk about. What do we do about that today? Next slide, please. As the story, I'm just going to repeat a story you've heard me say many times. Why did we issue these digitization standards? Why did we issue them in regulation? Why is NARA going in the direction that we went when it came to how we want to receive, preserve, and archive federal records? Well, came from a lot of different places, but the background you'll find starting in 2014 with the Federal Records Act. It was amended after 15 years, and as part of that amendment, it told the archivists to produce regulations so that we could transfer all electronic records to NARA in a digital form to the greatest extent possible, and we've been since 2014 working on that path, and here we are 10 years later, and we've had memos from OMB and NARA, and we've done tactical work on strategic plans and products that we could issue to help the government get to this vision, and that's where it came from. So we have been moving in this direction for quite some time. Next slide, please. So now, as we've been working to that direction, it was important just to say we heard a lot of questions, and I think that's what we're about to get into. People had questions, you've issued standards, and those standards apply to digitized records that are going to be transferred to NARA. Since they apply to records that are going to be transferred to NARA, what are we going to do if our records don't meet those questions? So we've been answering and having conversations one-on-one. The whole team has been responding to questions we've received, and I'm happy to say we were able to pull those questions together. We heard what you were asking, and we wrote this FAQ. The FAQ was published in November. I hope you had a chance to read it over the holidays and the December time period, if you have or if you hadn't. The link is here on the slide, and I think we're going to drop a link to the FAQ in the webinar. So you can go look at it and thank you, Arian. So you can look at it while we're talking. You can see what we put in writing, and if you have any questions about it, you can talk to us today about it. We're going to cover options for non-compliant digitized records. We're going to talk about accessioning practices, what NARA has done in the past. We're also going to talk about media neutrality. Media neutrality is the concept that we write our schedules not to be specific about what media comes to NARA when we take records in, and yet with our digitization standards, we are being media specific. We are giving a lot of guidance on what we expect for digitized records. So we want to talk about that topic as well. So that's what's coming up, and next slide please. I think now I get to hand it off to your first speaker, Mike Horsley. Over to you, Mike. Thank you, Lisa. I'm Michael Horsley, and I am a senior electronic records policy analyst and responsible for writing the technical standards for the digitization regulations. So non-compliant digitized records are those that do not meet the standards in the regulations. Agencies may have ongoing digitization projects that continue to generate non-compliant digitized records. NARA recognizes that it will take agencies time to implement the digitization standards for permanent records. The FAQ provides answers to questions that apply to any digitization work that does not comply with the digitization standards. You have may also heard of the term previously digitized, so we're using these terms not interchangeably, but we're focusing on it. Next slide please. So when digitizing records, agencies end up with two versions. The source records in paper or analog form and the digital records. Both versions are federal records as defined in the regulations. Source records are the records from which a digitized version or digitized record is created. The source records should be the record copy that was in use in the course of agency business. Digitized records are the records created by converting paper or other media formats to digital forms that are of sufficient authenticity, reliability, usability, and have the integrity to replace the source records. Because both versions are federal records, each version must be covered by a disposition authority, either an agency record schedule or a general record schedule known as a GRS. Next slide. So if agencies validate that they have digitized permanent records according to NARA's digitization standards, then agencies can transfer the digitized records to NARA under the existing permanent record schedule and destroy the source records under GRS 4.5 item 10 provided the records do not fall under any of the exclusions. GRS 4.5 digitizing records covers the disposition of source records that have been digitized and documentation related to digitization projects and processes. I now turn the presentation over to John. Thanks, Mike. Hello, I'm John Martinez. As Lisa said, I'm supervisor of the policy and standards team. And as you saw on the slide, we've got the whole team here today. You just heard Mike, who's one of the senior electronic records policy analysts on the team. The other senior policy analysts who are going to speak as well are going to be Kevin Divorsi and Mason and Andy Potter all coming up. So for my section, I'm going to talk about questions relating to digitized records that do not meet the standards and the regulations. And specifically, the three or four paths we discuss, common paths options that are discussed in the FAQ. Next slide, please. So under that sort of umbrella of what if digitized records do not meet the standards, the first option, first path addressed here is to submit a new record schedule. In this case, it would be to submit a new record schedule to supersede the disposition instructions and the existing record schedule. So in this case, an agency would submit a new schedule with a specific instruction allowing the agency to transfer the previously digitized records to NARA and to destroy the source records. Although the records that were digitized earlier may not, likely will not meet the current standards, NARA may upon review determine that the digitized records could effectively serve as archival records. And the process, the purpose of the process of submitting a new schedule is to determine if NARA can accept the previously digitized records as permanent and to determine if we can schedule the source records as temporary. Going through the process allows agencies, NARA, and the public to have confidence in the processes used to digitize the permanent records and to clearly understand what records NARA will be accepting at the time of transfer. And it gives the public an opportunity, obviously to review the proposed record schedule by the federal register process. Related to this, in previous discussions we've had this and other venues, I think at the last bridge meeting in particular, we were asked if NARA is going to expedite the scheduling process in this kind of scenario for these types of schedules. And the answer is no. Is there going to be a fast track? No, there's not going to be a special track for these. But we also wanted to emphasize that the goal on these, when we talk about submitting a new record schedule, the goal is to update the disposition instructions, not a complete reevaluation of whether or not the records are permanent. Next slide, please. So the next option here discusses re-digitizing and validating the source records according to the standards of the regulation. And in part, this option acknowledges that past digitization efforts were made with different goals and assumptions about the status of the records. But digitizing records for easier access or to manage business processes is different from digitizing records to preserve them as part of the nation's history in the National Archives. Agencies may decide, may decide to re-digitize records for several reasons, such as meeting litigation or access requirements or obtain higher quality images that meet agency business purposes. And it may be necessary because it's the same quality management and intellectual control processes and requirements for archival preservation could be needed for, could also meet these purposes. By choosing this option, agencies can then destroy the source records according to GRS 4.5 and then transfer the newly digitized records to NARA as permanent. And the previously digitized records would likely then be considered temporary records based on an apical GRS or other agency records schedule. Next slide, please. So this third option would be to transfer the born digital records. So this acknowledges that most records printed in the last 30 years or so were created on computers. It's rare today to have paper records that are handwritten or done with a typewriter. Usually the digital records were then printed out as part of an agency's business processes and such as getting a handwritten signature. If the agency is able to access the born digital records that were printed out to create the paper records, if they can be used for the same purposes, if the born digital records can be used for the same purposes as those printout paper records, then the agency should consider transferring those born digital records to the National Archives holdings. If going on that path, you should consider that, must ensure that digital records then are equivalent to the paper records that they're going to carry the same context, content and structure needed to understand the records. And in addition, the transfer of born digital permanent records then a born digital permanent electronic records would have to meet in our existing guidance on transferring permanent records including file formats, metadata requirements and file lists. And in this option, where the born digital records can be used for the same purposes as a paper, they would be permanent. Both the printed records and previously digitized records would likely then be considered temporary records and could be disposed of according to an apical GRS or other agency records schedule. Next slide please. So the next one addresses what about sending the source records to NARA instead of the digitized records? So agencies can send the source records, the original analog records to NARA before the M2307 deadline of June 30th, 2024. This would allow agencies to transfer the source records as permanent records. The digitized records, if there are any, could be destroyed as temporary records then under an apical GRS or agency records schedule. And sending source records to NARA would include in the case of sending the source records to NARA to a federal record center before the deadline of June 30th. In that option, agencies would only pay for the cost of storage and services. Once the permanent records have been transferred to NARA to the National Archives through the annual move process, NARA would then assume responsibility for providing access to the records, including any future digitization of them. And then in the case of transferring source records as a direct offer to the National Archives holdings before the June 30th deadline, if your agency cannot send records to NARA before that deadline, there is another aspect of this where you could submit an exception. If approved, an agency may continue sending source records to federal record centers or continue transferring source records as direct offers with an approved exception. Information about the exception process is outlined in NARA Bolton 2020-01. I think I've got the link on the slide there. However, the goal remains for the federal government to transition to digital records. Exceptions are typically limited and should be part of an overall business case or agency strategy to transition to digital records. And the 2020-01 addresses that. It talks about what agencies should consider, sort of what to include in exception requests. It gives an outline of what's expected to be submitted. If your agency cannot send records, source records to NARA before the deadline, and if an exception is not approved, then the first three options I've talked about so far, those would still remain as options for the agency to manage your non-compliant scanned records. Next slide, please. And the first one I talked about, how NARA would go through a process of determining whether to accept previously digitized records in a new schedule. And the process for that, in that case, when an agency records officer submits a new record schedule to supersede an existing distribution authority with new distribution instructions, NARA then will review this new schedule. And in terms of process, we may, we will request specific data from the agency regarding processes, validation methods, technical specifications, and metadata standards that were used for your agency's digitization process. As part of that, NARA may follow up for clarification with further questions, if needed. Then NARA will do a larger assessment of the agency's digitization processes to inform the appraisal, the review, and decision on the schedule. If NARA determines the digitized records are acceptable for permanent preservation, NARA will recommend approval of the schedule. If NARA determines the digitized records are not acceptable, NARA will return the schedule without action. If NARA can't accept the previously digitized records, again, the other options, the three or four options discussed here would still remain available to the agency. And as part of that, the agency would need to take additional action to appropriately manage and transfer the permanent records. So those are sort of the main, like I said, the main three or four options that are discussed in the FAQ. Lisa mentioned the beginning, and I mentioned in passing here, we wanted to talk a little bit about some media neutrality topics. I'm going to pass it now to Andy Potter, who's going to take the next section. John, pretty much see the next slide, please. Yeah, I just wanted to actually quickly look at a policy known as media neutral. NARA in 2007 published a regulations which established the media neutral approach, which was essentially where agencies could provide a notification that they were digitizing records, and then there would be a note, essentially disposition instruction on the schedule would be pen and ink changed, and those records could come in as digital records. The amendments that happened in 2012 to the Federal Records Act essentially created a situation where we began the shift from essentially that was could accommodate media neutral more towards a media specific environment. In other words, the establishment of the standards for the reproduction of records, source records into digital records. So now, as was mentioned earlier in the presentation, agencies can transfer their digitized records either under a media neutral schedule or the schedule that controlled the source records. And once it's digitized to these standards, then those records, the source records are then under the general record schedule 4.5 as long as it meets the requirements in that schedule. So basically that shift is where media neutral schedules can be used as long as they're in compliance with established standards in any schedule. Next slide, please. Part of the following on the heels of the regulation came policy and procedure process. And that was spelled out in NARA Holotin 2010-04, which established and refined a notification requirement and also included a NARA form 13171, which certified that transition. And the process had NARA reviewing the notification form and agencies could then transfer permanent electronic records instead of the paper records. Again, as part of the shift in the landscape, Holotin 2010-04 has been revoked formally. We no longer have a form 13171. And if you have any questions regarding any previously submitted NA13171 forms, agencies should contact their appraisal archivist. And with that, I will hand it over to my colleague, Anne Mason. Thanks, Andy. If we can go to the next slide, please. So now what if agencies have already destroyed the source records and only had the digitized versions that aren't compliant with the regulations? So if you have destroyed source records without the authority to do so, via an agency's record schedule or the GRS, it may be an unauthorized destruction and it should be reported as such. You can find more information about reporting requirements on our unauthorized disposition webpage, as well as an email there to contact the team that deals with those. And next slide, please. So now we're going to talk about, is there anything that agencies can do to make previously digitized records comply with the standards? The regulations have numerous requirements covering everything from records management to metadata to quality management. And if a digitization process didn't meet these requirements when the initial digitization was done, trying to retroactively take actions to fix it are generally not feasible. So as an example, if assessing the performance of scanning equipment was not done as part of the original digitization process, there really is no way to do that assessment post digitization. And there possibly is one exception. And if we go to the next slide, we're going to talk about metadata. So should agencies update metadata on previously digitized records to comply with the standards? Depending on the metadata, it may be possible to update or add metadata, although caution should be used that you're not overriding existing metadata or unintentionally deleting or altering what you don't want to alter. If agencies want to explore whether updating the metadata would work, we suggest they contact NARA to determine if doing so will be enough to meet the regulation requirement. We'd hate to see resources committed to updating the metadata only for agencies to discover later that there was something else about the digitization process that would make those records unsuitable for being the archival record. And if updating the metadata is not possible or will not be enough to bring the images into compliance, then there's the four options John talked about earlier with submitting a new record schedule, re-digitize, transfer born digital records or submit before the deadline to submit these source records before the deadline. And next slide please. And so should agencies convert bitonal images to grayscale or otherwise alter the images to comply with the regulation? So as stated in the regulations, agencies may not alter the technical parameters such as color mode or resolution. Upsampling or interpolating an image to change it from say black or white to grayscale or from 200 PPI to 300 PPI doesn't work. I actually experimented with this several years ago, I was kind of interested to see what would happen.  And in one instance, a small basement window on a house actually disappeared and was bricked over when I tried to upsample the image. So that image that was sent, you know, no longer accurate representation of the building. So imaging editing software may attempt to do this for you, but kind of the bottom line is you cannot add information that was never in the image in the first place. And with that, I will turn it over to the next speaker. Thank you, Ann. Can we go to the next slide, please? So I'm Kevin Divorsi and the question is what about previously digitized film records are other media not yet covered by the digitization standards? And so we've released 36 CFR, 1236 E, which covers all paper and printed photographic records, but we have not released yet standards for other special media types. We are currently working on a regulation that covers film and other types of records that are captured using transmissive digitization techniques. And that is going through an internal review at NARA and we plan on posting that for agency review on the Federal Register during 2024. If you have specific questions about digitization of these record types, you can contact us at rmstandards.nara.gov. And if you've already digitized film records or other special media records not covered, John has gone through the process for what you should do in that case. If you have not started yet, it's probably a good idea to wait for us to publish those standards. So can we go to the next slide, please? So what other guidance or resources related to digitized records are available? And as it was mentioned, we've pulled together a lot of resources relating to digitization and it's available on our website. And once you get these slides, these are live links that you can go to. Relating to this conversation about previously digitized records, we've called out three things of particular interest. One being a decision tree of the steps that you follow, but then also the two FAQs for the GRS 4.5 and 5.2. And now I'm going to turn it over to Andy who's going to talk about the decision tree that you see here. Thank you, Kevin. If we can look at the next slide. So just really briefly, I wanted to point to the decision tree that was developed as we put together this FAQ. And I should step back for a moment and thank Tommy Lee, Records Officer over at Air Force, who when he took a look at our first draft of the FAQ came back with a proposed decision tree based on his understanding of the FAQ and we took that and worked through it. I really want to thank Tommy for that, giving us the impetus to develop this product. You see the link there, the link is also included on the web page with the FAQ. I don't have the whole, it would be difficult to display the entire decision tree here, but basically it walks you through some decision points around previously digitized or non-compliant permanent records and then what steps, what options are available. And really it's all based on what we've been talking about here with the FAQ. So hopefully that will be useful to folks as they work through some of this stuff. Next slide, please. And with that I will ask questions. I see we have a lot of questions. I'll hand it back to Ari as we navigate through the question portion of our presentation. Thank you. Thank you Andy and thank you all the presenters. At this point we'll do a housekeeping change. We'll pause for a moment to stop the webinar, stop the recording of this webinar before we address the questions. Absolutely, so we have to Q&A, the recording will now be turned off.


self-taught day trader with over 10 years experience, Melissa's specialty is trading strategy focused on shorting stocks that gap. Melissa also appeared frequently as a stock market expert, watched Melissa on RT America, Cheddar TV, CBS, Fox News, and Fox Business News. Okay, Melissa. Well, great to have you on, a first-time speaker with us. The game is that you have until five minutes before the hour. We will post a link to your products in the chat box on the right at the end, and then we'll go out and hand out more of our $100,000 in prizes. So with that, I shall mute myself and you have the floor. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me today. I'm very excited today. And really this entire year of 2022 has been a very exciting time to train. You know this for those of you that are here. If you have been actively trading this year, we've had tremendous volatility and really that has made for lots of opportunity for active traders. So what do I do? What I do is gaps, but today specifically we're going to talk about trading on the side of institutional money and how doing that can mean that you have profits. Today is a good day to talk even about this because what is happening right now as we speak, the market closes at four o'clock Eastern time. I suspect we will close down on the day and we were up at one point actually this morning in the pre-market and at one point on the day and we've been filing. So it's been a wild ride for traders this year. Whereas last year in 2021, you could have bought virtually anything, weak stocks, strong stocks, the overall market by that I mean the QQQs of the S&P or the SPI, which is ETF for the S&P and made money. You could have bought every dip in the market. You could have bought weak stuff, strong stuff and made money. That is not the case this year. First of all, that's not how I've ever traded. I started trading in 2008 and it took me about three years to develop my own system which I've been doing ever since. But overall my philosophy is that it doesn't matter what type of market it is. You really should know how to trade no matter what in any type of market environment in a controlled market, in a bullish market, in a bearish market, in a volatile market and the type of market we're in right now expected to continue for most of 2022. I don't think this changes anytime soon. And I have found that people are not doing well this year that are reaching out to me and they're looking for different strategies, different trading systems, different subscriptions for ideas for trade ideas because they overall are not seeing the same things right now this year since the beginning of January that are not working that they did last year. So if you have any questions you can plop it in the chat. I can see the chat on the side and I'm going to get started here and again today we're going to talk about institutional money. Now if you want to talk to me I do answer the phone.  I try to reach you in phone calls within 24 to 48 hours. I might be trading on TV or like I'm talking in a webinar today. My phone number is 929-3200 Gap and you can also email me at Melissa at thestockswush.com. You can follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest or Skype. And also you can watch me on many other channels where I've been talking about the market. The irony is when I watch some of the shows that I appear on, if I'm not on that particular day and I notice how people are saying buy the dip, buy the dip, buy the dip, they've been saying this all year and they've been wrong. I have not been saying that. We are going to talk about that a little bit here. But the time for opportunity really is now. Why? Because if you know how to capitalize on the moves we're having in the market you can really make bank. Today again is a great example and if we have time I'll go look at the charts at the end. I can't flip back and forth without stopping the share. We'll see where we stop here with a lecture day if I have time to look at where we close right before four. But again, I believe we're going to close down today.  You are making money. Okay. When a lot of people thought that we were going to move higher this thing, that thing, the other thing. I don't make decisions based on fundamentals. I make decisions based on technical analysis. We will discuss that today as well. But if you're not going to trade now and if you're not going to make money trading now then when? Again, the type of market environment we had last year was very, very rare. By rare what do I mean? If you take look at 10 years in the market you might be able to trade like that one of those years or 12 of years of the market. You might be able to trade like that one of those years. It was not a normal year last year. And to be honest with you, I specifically thought it was very strange. Every time we came out with economic data, this is since the COVID drop off which is exactly, exactly two years from now. It is March of 2022. Two years ago. I remember it very well. I live in New York City. I live in Manhattan. I never left even in COVID. It was two years ago right this weekend when the whole world shut down and specifically New York. It was a disaster. And we had that bounce right after that steep sell off with terrible economic data over and over and over again and the market kept getting bought. It wasn't going to last. It wasn't going to last. And now you're seeing that right now like I said since the beginning of this year. But today hopefully you will walk away. You will learn something. You can write questions in the room as we go along and I'll answer them as well. So let's talk about trading on the side of institutional money. What do I mean by institutional money? Big, big money. Power money. Power money in the market. Lots and lots and lots of money. Hedge funds. Big institutional traders. Big banks. Okay. They have trading debts. They train. Not retail traders. I'm talking about huge massive, massive positions. Hedge funds. Okay. Power money that can move a stock or the market. You've got to trade with this power of money. You don't need to wait for pullbacks. And many times if you do, you will miss the move. You've got to learn what to trade. And as I said earlier, I trade gaps. We will discuss what a gap is, but it's really momentum. Okay. It's gap trading is really momentum trading. If you buy a stock and it's going up, you're going to make money. If you short a stock and it's dropping, the price is dropping, you will make money in the drop. Shorting. Okay. I clipped this year from two to a little bit after two today. This is the daily chart of the QQQs. Again, momentum. Let's go all the way back to the beginning of the year. January 3rd. Here we go. This is a daily chart of the QQs. So the QQQs have not made at any new highs at all this year in 2022. And yet people bought the pullback, people bought the pullback, people bought the pullback, bought the pullback, bought the pullback, bought it, bought it, bought it, bought it, bought it. People are along right now buying the pullback. Okay. That has failed the entire year of 2022. So how do you make money in the market? How do you make money consistently? How do you make money month-over-month, week-over-week, day-over-day, year-over-year? You have to do something that consistently works. Okay. And what I'm saying to you is buying the pullback does not consistently work. I'm clipping a chart here just to the market. I could have pulled up a million different things. I'm just talking about this specifically. So say you're someone that's been losing the last week, the last month, the last six months, the last six years, you need to change what you are doing. You cannot continue doing the same actions and expect any different results. You're going to continue to lose if you're doing the same thing. If you want different results in your trading, you've got to change. Change is required. And not only that, it's necessary. Okay. And you have to take actionable steps to do something about that if you want to actually make money, if you're losing.  You don't know how to trade. Well, then you've got to learn. Okay. You've got to learn how to trade before you actually do it. Otherwise, how are you going to get the results that you want? Okay. But it is so important for people to change what they're doing. And the sooner the better. And I find, again, I've been teaching people now for 10 years. And I have a lot of experience doing that as well now. Besides trading, I find that for traders specifically, it is very difficult for them to get out of a rut. If they've been doing something for a long time, it's so hard, even if they're losing, for them to change what they're doing. But there's nothing scary about change. Change can be wonderful. Change can be great. You should not be afraid to change. And very often, it can really totally improve what you're doing, improve your life and improve your trading results. Getting back to what I was saying about buying the dip doesn't work. I want to show you a chart of the SPI, because the SPI did make brand new all-time highs at the beginning of this year. This chart looks different than the Qs. But we are still trending down. So we made a brand new all-time high right at the beginning of the first week of the year. This was the SPI. This is the ETF for the S&P. Then we fell, fell, fell, fell, fell, fell, fell, fell, falling today. Again, I clip this today like around one o'clock, either way, we're trending down today. Another great example, we're buying the dip doesn't work. And yet many, many, many traders continue to do it. And again, I'm going to go back to my example of 2021. And even late 2020, buying the dip did work many times in the market. The market seemed to make endless all-time highs all of 2020. And as I was saying, that was highly unusual. And really, quite frankly, looking back didn't make much sense. But sometimes the market doesn't make sense. Sometimes we will have good data, the market will fall. Sometimes you have a bad economic report or a bad earnings report in a stock and it will rally. So you can't always look at the fundamentals to make trading decisions and that's why I look at charts. That's why I have these charts in here today. They are daily charts. But one of the cornerstones to everlasting trading success is consistency. Without this, it's hard to stay in the market for any length of time. And again, if you've been training for a long time, you know this. In order to be consistent, a person needs proper focus on what counts. And for me, it's the price action. And if you've been somebody that has been trying to be successful for years, but the successes always eluded you, you've got to take a step back and ask yourself why. Probably you're not doing a strategy that works consistently. And you really need to understand why you're doing it. Or at the very least, follow someone that does have a good system, even if you don't understand it. But I find really when people learn something, they trade much, much better. And it will help them break those habits, those bad habits that they've had if they've had bad habits in the past. But it is important if you're going to trade, particularly in this type of market, that you know what you're doing. Because like I said, the volatility that we're seeing right now, so far this year, I do not think it changes anytime soon. So becoming a successful trader investor really requires becoming a specialist and defining where the institutions, again, getting back to the power of money, are buying or selling a stock. Because again, if you can get in before the big move happens, whether it's up or down, that's how you're going to make money. And I pinpoint this in gaps. And again, I'm going to discuss this with you and explain to you what a gap is. But it's all in the chart. It's called advanced technical analysis, where I'm looking at past price data to predict future price data. And that is what I do. I predict what's going to happen in the future by reading the gaps. So I look at the past prices on a daily chart, and I predict what will happen in the future. That is a skill. It's a skill that I've developed over the course of 13 years of trading. It is something that you can learn. Can you learn it in a day? Can you learn it in a weekend? In my class, maybe they say, when you take a class, you retain the 80% of the information right after the class, but you'll learn enough to be able to take it forward to start to trade on your own. And then you ask me questions after the fact. Some people do the class and right out of the game, they learn it so well, they're starting right out of the gate on the Monday after the weekend class and do great. But I think it is so important for people, if they're losing money to change what they're doing. And again, part of it is being honest with yourself.  I traded my partner in Manhattan. No one's checking over me to see if I'm doing the right things or not, to see if I'm sizing myself right or not. No one's checking over you.  You have to be responsible for yourself. This is an individual thing that you're doing. You have to have an entrepreneurial spirit if you want to trade. And if you want to trade and work for yourself, you have to have that independent streak that has to be part of what you want, part of what you desire, part of your passion to work for yourself or make money for yourself or make extra money for yourself. If you have a job and you want to trade on the side, that's fine too. But again, it's the passion of doing that. It drives you forward to invest or trade in the market and you do it within the time that you have available during the week.  So it's not like a tip toe. Okay. Not like a baby stuff. It's big money. Okay. Let's take a look at this chart here. Again, we're looking at the daily. These are all in the daily. This is a stock chart of Boeing. Again, very good example here. Going back to the beginning of the year, here was Boeing, Boeing actually, unlike the market, did rally at the beginning part of the year. It was nowhere near the highs. If you know this stock, the last time I knew high was several years ago way, way, way before COVID that started to drop off. Anyways, what is happening here in Boeing? Just let's just look at here at the beginning of March. This is today. Let's take it up. March 1 was here. How did we start out in March? Boom, boom, boom. Price over here was what? Around 204. Got the drop down in here. We fell from 204. This is beginning in March. And again, I don't know where we're closing this today. This point down here was well below 170, 166 and change. So what is happening here? Institutional money has been selling, selling Boeing. Okay. It's not getting bought. The red bars here depict selling, the green bars depict buying. There's a lot of red bars here. And we're talking about the month of March here for this chart. Okay. So again, institutional money is selling or shorting, okay, pushing the stock price down in Boeing. And you could say for whatever reason, this thing, that thing, the news, Russia, whatever, the fact is no new money is buying in here. Therefore, if you were going long, you'd be losing. Okay. Okay. Any questions here so far? Let's look at PayPal, institutional money. Again, this is what we're discussing. Let's go back to the beginning of February. Stock price in here, end of January, take it over, was well over 170. Stock had earnings, again, whatever they said, who knows, who cares. On the earnings, the stock price down under 140 fell for cliff today. And again, I don't know where this is going to close today. The price is well below $100 a share. So this is just in the last couple of weeks. So look where this stock was before the earnings. Look where it is now today. It's almost lost half its value actually. So again, institutional money is dumping, dumping their positions in PayPal. This is a short. We did many, many, many, many, shorts in PayPal. We day traded this. We did puts in this. A put is an option where it's basically a short. You can take it overnight. You could have done a swing trade in PayPal to the downside, would have been a short. Okay. Again, institutional money, control stocks, even when you think it's not there, it is. And in the case of both of these, it's being pushed down, sold off, dumped. Actually, down here is the volume. You can see the huge, massive volume on this particular day on this day here that was February 2nd. Okay. And again, here, we'll talk about the market. Just like example, I'm just going to go back to Friday. Friday was a day and I'm going to go over what a gap is a minute, but we closed your gapped up Friday morning, fell off a cliff, gapped on today fell. But I will point out that we were up in the futures last night. We were actually up at one point this morning. Okay.  So what's just, just go back to last 24, 48 hours. What is all this selling, selling, boom, boom, selling again tomorrow is Tuesday. I don't know where we gap in the morning, but I look for the gap when I get up in the morning in the pre market and I read it using my system to determine and predict the direction it will go to take a trade tomorrow. Okay. Or I might be ready in options for tomorrow that I might still be in, which we can talk about later. But the point is again, this is what? This is selling, selling shorts. Boom. And this is accused. We talked about this earlier. Remember when I said this does not look like the spy. So spy has been slightly stronger than the accused this year for whatever reason it doesn't matter. Um, these are everyday charts. I'm describing to you the institutional money. There's nothing special about these charts. If you pull up this chart of the QQQs or this chart of PayPal, you can pull up this chart, any platform you have anywhere you go to freestockcharts.com. I'm verbally describing to you what's happening here in the gap. And that is what I'm going to talk about a little bit. I'm describing institutional money to you. Your chart is going to look just like this. You may not see it this way. That's the whole point what I was getting back to you earlier in reference to the market and doing things that do not work. Many people have been looking at the market in a certain vision. If you lined up 100 traders, every one of them would tell you something different that's going to happen tomorrow morning when they get up or today into the clothes or whatever. Who's going to be right? The one that predicts it correctly. The one that gets in the trade before it happens. The one that predicts what's going to happen before it happens. How do you make money? You get in before the move happens. After the fact, it's too late. So everyone has a different viewpoint of this. I'm showing you describing this just talking out loud.  I hope that answers your question. If not, let me know. But there is a level of, there's a level of commitment. Getting back to what I was saying when you see institutional money. I don't care if it's up or down. There's a level of commitment that comes in like saying you were running a hedge fund and you had two million dollars. You're not going to come in and buy a stock like Boeing, for example, and spend two million dollars by a huge position and then quick sell it in an hour or a day. Okay. There is a level of commitment that comes in with institutional money based on many, many other factors and reasons that we don't have any, we're not privy to. So again, there's a level of commitment and that is something that I think traders forget as well. You didn't see that level of commitment in some of the Reddit stocks. Why? They had big spikes up and immediately flat lines sold off and flat line. You're seeing that now many things people are still long. There was no big institutional money behind some of those moves. They had the move and it was done. There was no commitment. All of the stocks we trained, we're looking for commitment. The commitment could be up, the commitment could be down. Okay. But commitment is funded by big money and that makes it very easy as one individual to train. And how do you make more money then? You plop on the size. No, this isn't, this is a, this is my platform here, but I'm saying if you want a free, free platform, you can go to freestockcharts.com and you can make them look like mine. This is Orbus. So commitment has a plan of action. They're making decisions. These hedge funds based on research reports, based on news, based on a lot of information that you don't know. And again, you're not getting the same news information that these places are. Big banks have information we don't have. Okay. And we never will. But we can see what's happening in the charts. And again, you can have an account at any broker as long as you have live data. Everybody's going to see the same price. Okay. So if you learn how to read the footprints of big position players before the momentum occurs, you can take the position in the right direction and get out after the move happens for profit. But you have to understand how to trade with the side of power. You need to know how to find it again before it comes in. It's very important to find it because this power has the ability to pay you. Try to find the best entry I can in my positions. Where I get out varies because you have more flexibility if you're in something pretty early to hold it if you want to or get out quick because you have a good, good entry and you've got to be in the right direction. But that's the case in anything you do. Knowing how to read what institutional money looks like is essentially becoming a successful trader and you can win big trading on the side of power. And again, particularly in these markets, why? Volatility doesn't necessarily mean selling.  Friday morning, the market got bought up in the pre-market. It fell in the day, but buying came in the pre-market from Thursday night into Friday morning. Volatility is something that happens that's unexpected, unexpected, and that is what creates a volatility. Could be buying, could be selling. But getting back to what I was saying, institutional money is in charge of the market and stock at all times, even if you think it's not it is. A bank flow of money going a certain direction is what moves the market stocks, creates momentum and sets the trend in charts. Getting back to what I was saying. I'm going to talk about gaps in a minute here, but it's really momentum, momentum trading. That is what I'm doing. When you're looking for institutional money or really reading the side of the power in a stock, you want to be in the side of the power in order for you to make money trading. Institutional money is in charge of the market and stocks at all times. And that is the thing right now. It's not there in certain things that people are long. It is not there. Again, these aren't any special charts. I'm telling you in reading it that it's not there. Reading price is a skill set.  My father's a golfer. He's a really good golfer. He's been golfing forever. He's a good golfer. The more you read price, the better you get. I'm reading price, though, in a very specific way based on the gap. Now let's talk about what is a gap. This chart is Netflix. This was back at the end of January. Stock had earnings. Stock closed your gap down. What is a gap? A gap is a difference in the close and the open. Netflix, before the earnings, was up here. Take it over. It was roughly around 500 and changed. Close at four o'clock at night. The U.S. market has a close and open. Closes every night at four o'clock. Opens at the morning at 9.30. Boom. Open after the earnings. This fellow overnight, I don't have that data here. I'm showing the close and I'm showing the open. I'm showing the gap. It opened here around three something. It was under 400. So this is a gap down. A gap is a difference in the close and the open. This closed here. Gapped down here. What about this guy over here? Closed here. Gapped up. Closed here again. Whatever price this was around 370-ish. Open up. Four o'clock, 9.30. Here it is. Rally. You could have gone long that day and made money. I could have shorted here and made money. Now, can you go along every gap up? No. Can you short every gap down? No. No, you can't. Friday was a good example of that going back to the market. The market gapped up Friday morning.  You went long. You lost. So you have to find the good ones. The ones that what? The institutional money is going to grab it, grab hold of, and take it. Take it in the direction of the gap.  And again, as I've been defining this, it's a skill set. It's something that you learn. And think of it like a sport. Again, if you're good at a sport, you know. You didn't get good the first day you learned it. You got good by practice over and over. And from teaching people for a long time, I find that people skip around a lot. They do thing after thing after thing after thing after thing. They'll do futures. They'll do options. They'll do Bitcoin. They'll do this thing. They'll buy the dip. They'll whatever. They will never stick with anything. And so therefore, they never get good at it. And they will never stay with anything. And therefore, they never really get good at anything. And they never become an expert. And they don't make money in the market. How did I end up sticking on this thing? I learned very early on the sticking with one thing was important. And I realized also I only needed one trade a day actually to make money when I started trading. And I also go to the short side first, even though I do belong. I go to the short side first and I learned that that has given me an edge because many traders do not know how to store it. And it will always be that way. Why? People are more comfortable going long. They understand the process and the whole concept of buying low and selling high. So they prefer to go long than short. So the fact that I know how to short and I'm an expert in shorting actually gives me an edge. I do go long though. We went long. We did calls in XOM and CVX or oil charts. I have one of them in here and they worked. They worked. So I will go long. But because I became an expert in shorting, I realized then how to read longs after that as well. But many traders fail because they skip around from thing to thing to thing. And they never really get good at any one specific thing. One thing is all you need. You duplicate it, add size, do it, you know, as an option, do as a day trade, do as a swing train. One strategy is all you need. And that's another thing that traders don't do either. So again, if you have any takeaway today, tip of the day here is, soxial tip of the day, stick with one thing, get good at it, duplicate it, add size. That's how you move forward. If you never get good at something, well then how are you ever going to make any real money? Anyway, it's getting back to what I was saying. My strategy is based on gaps, but I called it the golden gap once I figured it out because it's like finding gold in the market. And some of the calls I've made this year actually have been like finding gold. They've been amazing calls. Even the people that are some of them were on my options newsletter, subscription list. I know some people killed trades last week that they did not believe in. They didn't have conviction in and they regretted it since some of them jumped in late.  And I like I said, don't think it's going to end anytime soon. Let's get back to what we were discussing. What is a gap? Here's Amazon. We did this one too. Stock closed here, gap down, fell. Close to a certain price. This was the first week of March. Take it over here to the right. Was already under $3,000. Gap down, boom. I do not date trade Amazon. I'll do this as an option. It is still expensive doing that, but this stock can rock and roll. Just looking here from this gap down, again, take it over. It was roughly around 2930-ish. Here's the momentum. Here's the selling. Here's an institutional selling right in here. This was this day here.  Gapped down, boom. See where this went. Broke 2700. Look at this. This is all the money in the world for you to make. If you were long, you lost. Okay. So again, we played this. This was institutional selling. I didn't do this today, but you could have actually. You could have done this today. And I don't know where this closed today. I took this early. I'm sure this kept going. But this is expensive to do. Anyways, this is a gap. And this is a gap. And this is a gap, too. Okay. I talked about this. What is a gap? What also did we talk about? Institution of money. What happened here really since the end of February? This is getting bought. So many traders want to get tricky, tricky, tricky, tricky, tricky. They want to short it. They want to short this thing. I guarantee you, traders, short this today. It's going to keep going. I don't know where this opens tomorrow, but again, people shorted this today. So foolish. Foolish with a capital F. It's one of the strongest things in the market right now. It's stronger than the market, actually, right now, this. So what is a gap? Closed here. Stock closed here. Gapped up. This is Chevron. Take our simple CVX. Closed here. Gapped up. Rallying. Closed here. Gapped up. Rallying. We did 160 calls. We did 170 calls. We did a bunch of different ones in here. It worked. So again, a call is an option where you're buying the momentum here is up. These are getting bought. Again, why? You could say this thing, that thing, oil, Ukraine, whatever. It doesn't matter. I'm reading the gap and I'm predicting when I get up in the morning and I see this here up. Actually, we did this here. Let's talk about this one. This is the one I called the 160s. This closed here. This capped up. I said, oh, this is going to keep going and we entered it and we went long and then it took off like a rocket the next day. So this is buying. So you can get in here. You can get in here. Boom. That's the money. You take it, get out. Take it, get out. How do you make money in the market? As a trader, you're in, you're out. You chunk it, chunk it out. Take the trade, get the move, get out. Again, momentum, momentum, momentum. And again, here's the volume down here. I guarantee you, trader, short of this today. I think this is going to fall and they're going to get, I'll look at this tomorrow actually. I'll look at this all week. That's not going to happen. Any questions here so far? So how do you find gaps? A million places. It's really not hard to find them. It's not hard to find them. They're all over the place. The market gap is almost every single day.  I look at it. Stocks gap on earnings. A gap on news. Stocks gap in sectors. Again, financial data. All kinds of things. So it's really not hard to find them. It's hard to find the good ones. The good ones. That's what takes the know-how. But gaps are a secret ingredient in charts that many people overlook and they don't understand them and they hold a lot of significance, which is the reason that I focus on them. Gaps make the trend, set the trend and continue the trend in stocks in the market. They set the trend because they're a definitive and demonstrative change and show price in what is called an event. Gaps are a real show of the power of money. Again, what happened in CVX? Power of money is buying that. Institutional money is buying that. There's no way this chart would one day be here. Forget about the price point. Just don't even forget about that. That it one day would be 135 and the next day it would be at almost 175. That was in a week. It was in a week. So gaps are a real show of the power of money. Gaps either continue the trend or in fact change the trend. If you follow the gap, we will be following the power of money. And again, gaps happen in the market on a regular basis. However, some gaps are better than others and some gaps are nothing gaps. So I don't trade them. And then some do the opposite. Some do the opposite and I don't do that either. But the most important gaps in the market are gaps that signify a change in direction or a bigger move in the same direction. That's what you want to do. Understanding which gaps are meaningful and which gaps are not meaningful in the market will help you to know what to do and when a change is occurring. That is how you know when the power of money will flow with you to pay you. And again, we go long and we go short, but I do go to the short side first. So my whole system is based on rating the gap in the pre-market or you can do in the post-market. You know, I usually like to do my stuff in the morning. I'm a morning person. Again, I live in Eastern Time Zone in New York, but I have a checklist. If you wanted to come and learn from me, that is what you'd learn. My gaps when I decide to do something has to be qualified. It's called calculated risk. How do you make money in the market? You have to risk your own money. This is not gambling. I'm not going to go long and short the same stock the same day. That's gambling. You don't have a conviction editing if you're doing that.  They're doing that in Apple. They're doing it in Boeing. They're doing it in the overall market. Okay? Not all gaps though are created with institutional money, but checklist tells me what to look for in the price of the stock. Okay? It is calculated risk. I am determining that based on this, it is going to go up or it is going to go down. It is not a 50-50 for me. Now, does that mean that every trade I take wins? No. No, it does not. Some trades I take lose. That's why I have to size myself, position sizing. Okay? And I do use stops for day trade. I do not use stops for options. The stop is the risk, but I do have a lot of winning trades, more winning trades and losing trades, and that's the only way that you can really ever get anywhere with this. While it is true that some trades have big percentages of returns on investment that is not, should not be your expectation, a normal trade is one to one. If you're risking 500 and you're up 480, that's out. Get out. Again, it is about chunking it out. While you could risk 500 and make 2000, that should not be your daily expectation. Talk about that Amazon. There's a gentleman that's been with me for a very short period of time. He's been doing very well. I guess he just has a lot of confidence in me, because he didn't even do the class yet. He's on the options newsletter. He was up a lot of money in Amazon. He did make money in it, but he got piggy. He got piggy with it, and then he had, he didn't have a good exit. I said, you should have got out of this. And he got out of it with money, but he was up even more two days before. So, you know, you cannot be piggy with your trading. Active trading is you're in, get the move, get out. You're in, get the move, get out. You're in, get the move, get out. And that's what you do. You do a different thing every day. You know, you do a couple of things one day, nothing the next day for doing options. If you're doing day trades, you do a different thing. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Okay. It's active.  Don't forget to book the money when you're in stuff and you're up. Any questions here? But anyways, it's about power of money. And that's the whole thing. And it's not a little bit of money. It's a lot of money. Power of money is in charge. It's in charge of the stock at all time. And a lot of people talk negatively about hedge funds. And you've seen that in the last year even on TV. But it's the reason that one individual can be successful in the market, me and you. Because the fact is unless you're going to start a hedge fund, you're not going to be able to move a stock. It's just not going to happen. And so this is really, a lot of this is common sense. A lot of what I do is really based on common sense. And again, I try to teach that when we're in the class, following power of money is really how you're going to make money in the market and reading the price. And a lot of times what happens is when fundamental information comes out or news, it's too late. Oftentimes you see the market reacting to something like even today, I don't know why we sold off today. I don't care. I'm sure I'll watch the news tonight to talk about it tonight or tomorrow morning. This is always the case when it happens, but it is very important for you to focus on the right thing. It is very important for you to not act like trading this gambling because it is not. And trading momentum, like I said, makes it easier. If you have 1000 shares of something, you can get a dollar drop, $2 drop, you can be sure it's something to make money, and you don't have to take some ridiculous position. I do not trade penny stocks or little tiny little stocks or cheap stocks or low float stocks. We do stocks that are companies that you know of that you've heard of, Facebook, PayPal, all of the things that we're talking about here. And once you understand what to do, it makes it a lot easier to press the button because the money is going to come and you understand the stop and you understand momentum. So again, what is a gap and why gaps? A gap is a difference between the close and the open. They happen every day. It happens every day in the ETFs of the market and usually the QQQs and the spy trade the same direction on any given day. Okay, usually they're both gapping up or they're both gapping down. Sometimes I look at the diamonds, which is ETF for the Dow, but I focus mostly on the QQs and the spy. We did talk about this. This is a Netflix. Again, this fell today as well. This close to your gap down here fell. This was earnings. Again, sometimes things gap for earnings. Sometimes things gap with new international news. Sometimes things gap because of a CEO got fired or quit. This was Facebook. We did this one too. This was back at the end of January into the beginning of February. This was earnings as well. This stock is another one that has taken a tumble this year. This is way before the Russia-Ukraine situation as well. Stock was up here around 320, gap down here in the morning and open here well below 240. This was back February 3rd. Fell, fell, fell. We did a bunch of trades in this. What? To the downside, we did puts. We shorted it as a day trade. It fell. This sold off. We talked about this here. This was the overall market. This was the high of the year. This is falling. Anyways, every day I looked to try to find one pick. I go through my checklist and that's how I do it. Let's talk about a couple of trades we did. Three, two. Now this was a day trade. This doesn't even look like much, but it was a nice trade. This was Zoom. Stock close to your gap down, fell. This tally thing here, we did. We got in and we got out of the drop. Boom. Done.  We did this as a quick day trade. We were in and out. Now, what is it? It was a day trade option. On a day trade, an equity trade, you need margin. You have to have a margin account. So the entry here was 117.50. Oh, I forgot the eight here. Sorry about that. Initial position size was 800 shares. Risk was 3,440. You can risk half. So you could have taken 400 shares and was 1500 bucks. You have to have margin or equity to take a position size, whatever it is, 800, 500 or 100. Again, you open up an account in a broker that gives you something called buying power and margin. If you don't understand that, you can Google it, look it up or you call your broker and find out. In order to day trade, you have to be able to get in and out. We were in and out of our trades quick. This was on the same day as you see here, this bounce. So we got in and out fast. I'll show you the one minute chart in a minute. I added to this same price. Added, doubled up, loved it, loved it, loved it, knew it was going to drop, got the drop. Exit 114.75. Again, this is almost a $3 drop. What happened here? It got sold off. This is selling. So we shorted it, got the selling, got the bounce, got out, boom, profit, 4,400. Again, you could have halved this. You could have doubled that, you could have taken 400 shares. You could have added here, had 800 shares total, and you could have made 2,200. Now let's look at the one minute. So this was the day, March 2nd. So again, we're on the zoom. Okay. Here is the selling to do. It actually came all the way down almost to 114. You can see here where this was in the morning. So this is a day trade, and we enter the trade on the one minute. I put the stop in, I get the sell off, then I get out. I am calling these trades live in the day trade room. Okay. So again, this may not look like much here. Oops. But this is a profit, a nice profitable trade. Again, it is pinpointing and finding that little tiny little gap in there, and seeing that was going to go down. Okay. I did not look at zoom today and see what that did. I'm sure this fell as well with the market. The only thing I was talking about, I put this one in here because it was a decent trade. It wasn't some huge trade, but I put it in here.  It flipped. I'm going to show you the one minute. We actually shorted this here, this closed here, this gap down, dropped. We got in out. It flipped on the day. Crazy. Then it gap down the next day. Then it fall off a planet. This was an easier day to do it as a day trade, but we got in and out with money there because it was profitable. It was 228. But anyways, the crazy thing about this was that this flipped on that day, but we were way out of this before that even happened. Again, here's the day. We entered at $198.50, $1500 shares, risk was $2,700, exit $196.90. Again, that is a move. A $0.50, $0.60, in, out, in, out. Take a get out. Again, this is not an exact science. If you're risking $2,700, you're up $2,400 starts to bounce out. Again, you're trying to make one-to-one or as close to that, but this is not an exact science. We actually did have a low of the day exit in this. That is not the case in all my trades, but we did on that one. But again, you could have done this so many different times in the last week too. This was the first week in March. Here's one minute. Stack was here, gap down. Again, this is the day before. This is the day we did it. Again, $2.28, we got in, got the drop out. Boom, done. You're in and out. Sometimes we're running out of trades in five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, three minutes. Okay. Day trading is active. You're in and you're out. That's the whole thing about doing it. We're looking for the institution of money. Where does it flow? We're trying to play the move. We're playing momentum. We're in and we're out of it. Now what I'm doing, options, I may hold for a longer move, but still it's not like I'm doing the weekly options. If it has a move in the day, I'm out. Or if I take a couple of things and I think the market's going to go in a certain direction, I may hold half the things, get out of half the things, but it's the whole idea of booking money. We did talk about returns. You should be looking for one-to-one when you're taking a trade. Now let's talk about options. We were talking about day trades there. Day trades, you need margin. If you want to open up an options account, you can open up a cash account and you don't need margin. Again, talk to your broker about that. But everything I'm doing with options is based on the gap too. So we did Facebook. We did Facebook here, 113. See this red bar here?  We were in it. I called the trade. I'll show you in a minute. Then a gap down. Then a gap down. This thing here, it was money. May not even look like anything. I called the 330 puts on 113 and Facebook that expired January 21st. Now this is an options newsletter. The trades are emailed to you. Now this is in part of the live room. This is a subscription service. This is an advanced trader risk or beginner risk, whatever you want to use. Cost was 380. Three contracts. Risk was 1140. Sold at 12. Profit 2460. Return investment 216%. That's a beautiful trade. I'm going to go back and show you. So 330. Take it over. Drop. Say where it dropped. So that was right at the money. Actually, it was a little bit into it there from the time that that opened. And then again, here's the drop. This may not even look like much, but it was profitable because it kept going down. The price of these has really gone up at the money though, since that was way back January for puts. But that was a nice trade. We did Netflix too. We did this as well on the 13th. 13th. Let's find the 13th here. 13th of January here. So this closed here. This cap down. Let's see the ones I called 520s. Now I put this in here for a reason. Again, your risk should be the same or equal to the same. If you're risking 1200, one contract costs 1350 could have done one.  Now the trade before the close before the earnings, which would have been the day before which would have been the 20th, you would have made 1050 nice trade solid trade 78%. I showed the close here because I wanted you to show how it the very last day, which I never hold the last day unless I'm down in the trade, which I was and I was up in the straight. If you held the last day, this is how much money you would have made. It would have been absurd percentage. Here's why I didn't hold it because I didn't know what the earnings were going to do. So trade was called here. It went. It was up, up, up. The trade was up. The earnings were that night. Anyways, this one here closed. All right. If you had stayed in it to the last day, again, it was the 520s. It was around 400. So that's why this was an enormous trade if you held it through, but you would have been risking not just the risk of the trade, you would have been risking the profit. But this shows you again, the power of the gap, you could have gotten out of half a position if you took two, okay? Or if you took four, you could have got out of two, book two held two. So this just shows you again, the power of the gap, the power of institutional money. But again, trading isn't gambling. And when you're up in something, you're going into the earnings and the very last day and you're ready up in it, you know, the normal thing to do, the conservative thing to deal with be to book profits. Let's talk about the spy called a trade in the spy here. I called the 471 puts, cross was 340, number of contracts, three again, you should be close to equal or similar, shoulder 24. I will show you where this went. If you risked 1,020, you could have made 6180. Return investment, 606. This was the same day that I called that. This was the drop here again. We got this whole thing. That's the money right in there. Again, another one where you could have held into the last day and actually made more money. I didn't, I didn't do that. And I don't think that, like I said, with Netflix is the right thing to do. This was a very, very profitable trade of over 600% return investment on the 20th on the day before. But again, how do you do it? Here's 470 drops down in here again, take it over here. It was well through 450. It dropped 20 some points through the strike. So I mean, we were talking about institutional money, we've been talking about momentum. The momentum here was capturing this at the very, very, very right time to get the selling, which was all the profit and all the money to get a trade that was ends up being 600% return investment. So that was a nice one. Any questions here by anyone, but success or failure, like I said, has to do with the quality of your system and trading should be fun. It should not be stressful. A lot of people, you know, want to go with the crowd, but if you want to trade effectively, you can't go with the crowd because many traders lose. And if you've been attempting to do this for years, you're aware of that. You really have to have an edge if you want to be successful doing that. And for me, it's gaps, but it's really predicting where the stock is going to go momentum wise with a pair of money before it doesn't. And then once you know how to do it, you just duplicate it over and over with size, but it is important to chunk it out. It is important to book money and it's important to be consistent. You have to be consistent with what you do with the strategy. You have to be consistent with the amount of money that you risk. And all of these things are important. You can't risk $1,000 in a trade and $5,000 in another trade. What if the one trade you risk $5,000 loses? You could have two trades, one winner, one loser and be upside down. So you see why consistency is important no matter what. So what do I do? My class is called the Golden Gap Course that I teach people. It's my method. And this is the meat and potatoes of everything that I do. The 26 points looks to find the best stock to trade each day. The course also teaches you how to enter and exit the stock of the day. The course teaches price analysis and technical analysis on an advanced level. It teaches one solid strategy to trade gaps effectively by reading the side of power in charts. It teaches supporting resistance to take positions in the right direction. It teaches a more proficient and advanced way to read charts focusing on technical analysis and gaps. And it teaches how to get conviction in your trading and the market as a source of wealth by trading with the side of power for consistent profit. And in these times, like I was saying, such good trading this year, such good trading this year. You know, I know that people sometimes have to make sacrifices in order to do this. Block time out of your weekend to do the class. Pay the money for the class. Block time out of your life during the week to trade in the morning. You have to make sacrifices if you want to get somewhere. It's like anything that you want to do that is a big goal in life, you have to be willing to make sacrifices, but it's not something that should have to take you forever and ever and ever to do it. You know, once you learn it and do it and start doing it and start making money, also your confidence goes up. You have conviction. You understand. And I think when the money comes fast, that helps people too, because people are so used to losing and the convenience of working from home is just a benefit. And this is way before COVID. Way before COVID, it was always nice to trade actually from home. And I've always enjoyed that for the last number of years that I've been doing this, but a lot of people now are working from home. They're regular jobs. So they have time to trade. They have time to learn. And they want to do it and make extra money on the side. So I say, empower yourself to train. If you want to do it, success is within your grasp. If you'd like to take my class, if you'd like more information, the class is online. I teach it once a month. The next class is March 26 and 27th. It is a full two-day course on how to strategically find pick and play stocks at our professional bearish gaps. I am an expert in shorting. That has proven to be the case in this particular market. The class is online. Like I said, class tuition is $69.99. If you're interested, you cannot sign up through the website. You must email me for the sign up forms at Melissa at thestockswitch.com. And it is important to book money. Think about what I said. Think about how much money you're risking in the market. And think about what classes you want to do. I'm doing a webinar special for this event where I'm giving the trading room free to the end of 2022. If you sign up for the class this week by Friday the 18th. So again, the class is not this weekend. It's next weekend. If you sign up by this week Friday, you would also get the trading room free to the end of the year. I do call the live day trades in the room, stops, entries, targets. I do not call options in the room. The options, newsletters are emailed to you in live time that is a separate subscription. I have two options for this. Six months for $49.99, which is still a long time. And a lot of newsletters, 12 months for $69.99 for the annual subscription. That's not a class. The trades are just emailed to you. But you can ask me questions, even if you're on the newsletter. People do communicate to me and you can call me as well. But the live trading room is for equity trades, not an options room. If you're interested in options, there's an options newsletter. There are no trials for this. If you would like a trial to the trading room, you can email me and I will give you a trial to the live trading room if you would like for the rest of this week, which is Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. If you want to be in the room to see what we do, you can email me at MelissaBestockSwish.com for the trial and I can send it to you this evening. Check it out for any questions. All right, Melissa.