Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host Krista Burns here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. We're a webinar, we're a webcast, we're an online show. The terminology is up for debate to some people. Call us whatever you want. We are Encompass Live and we're here live online every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings that's fine. We do record the show every week and it will be posted to our website afterwards and I'll show you where that is at the end of today's show so you can go to see where today's recording is and all of our previous ones. In our recordings we include the video of the show and the presentations that are up there that are used during the show and any websites or links or anything interesting that are mentioned during the show. So you have all of that afterwards. The show and recordings are free and open to anyone to watch so if you do have any friends or colleagues that are might be interested in any of our topics please do share our information with them and have them come and watch some of our shows or watch our recordings. We do a mixture of things here on Encompass Live, book reviews, many training sessions, demos, website tours, basically anything library related and any kind of library anywhere we'll have on the show. We're pretty broad. This library is really our only criteria. We do have Nebraska Library Commission staff that come in and do presentations, some Nebraska-centric things, and we do have guest speakers that come in. And this morning we have a mixture of that. Today we're going to be talking about the new 2016 One Book One Nebraska title, The Meaning of Names and we have some good discussions and information about what's going on around the state and I think I'll just hand over to you Mary Jo and you can do your introductions to yourself, to your health and everybody and take away. Thank you. I'm Mary Jo Ryan and I'm here at the Nebraska Library Commission. I'm the Communications Coordinator and we have a stellar group of people to talk about The Meaning of Names. I'm Molly Fisher. I was Deputy Director of the Humanities Council Humanities. What is it? Nebraska Humanities Council. And I am on the State Library Commission as well as the Center for the Book Board. And I'm Karen Shoemaker, the author of The Meaning of Names and I wear many hats. I'm just going to wear the hat of the author of The Meaning of Names today. I'm Ron Wagner, Director of the Nebraska Library Commission, but today I'm here as a reader and a reader of The Meaning of Names. Great. Well, I'll just go, maybe. Go ahead Triggan. There we go. I'll just go first and just say a little bit about One Book One Nebraska. Most of the people who are watching the show probably know about One Book One Nebraska, but our goal is to have Nebraskans all across the state reading the same book and talking about it. And we do this every year. This is our 12th year. Yeah, 12th year. And this year the book has really captured the attention of a lot of people across Nebraska. We have people reading and talking and book groups and Karen's been out making presentations. So it's been a real great book for the people of Nebraska to talk about. A committee of the Nebraska Center for the Book selected this book from a list of titles nominated by Nebraskans from across the state. And the program is sponsored by the Nebraska Center for the Book, Humanities Nebraska and Nebraska Library Commission. Oh, this is the 12 books I was telling you about. You can see we started our first year with Willa Cathers, Maya Antonea, and this year, The Meaning of Names. And maybe that's what we'll do right now is just move right into the book, because I know that's what people are here to hear about. Karen, would you like to give us just a little idea of what the book's about and your journey perhaps as the writer of the book? Well, the book is about a German American farm family in Central Nebraska during 19 takes place during 1918, and it involves the anti German sentiment of World War One and the flu pandemic of 1918. It is based on the seed of this novel came from family stories and so that it starts with family stories and then branched out to history. I did a lot of research on history of World War One and the flu pandemic. So it encompasses that worldwide history, but comes back to the story of this family, the Vogel family in Stuart, Nebraska. And Molly had mentioned earlier about it also as a story of a doctor up there. So I have to say that it's actually a story of a community as much as it is about a family. So a little bit about what the book is about.  The what the reason I started writing the book is the story and this is not a spoiler alert. There is a baby born at the end of the book.  And so I grew up as listening to family stories about my mother's birth. My grandmother had the whole family had the flu. And the doctor, when he came to the house to deliver my mother, whisk the baby, the baby was born, they whisk her out of the house and took her into town to a widow to take care of her that what they tried to find a widow what they found was a woman with children. But the doctor labeled both my grandmother and my mother a miracle. And that story of how the community came together for this family always intrigued me. So I wanted to tell that story. But when I started to try to tell the story and try to show how the emotions behind that and how intense that experience was, I had to sort of branch out and learn more about what the pandemic was. And it's an effect first on each individual community and then on the world. And once you start looking at the flu pandemic of 1918, you go into World War One, because the virus actually followed troop lines. So it had a major effect on World War One. And from World War One, the anti German sentiment and what's happening in the world. So I just kept researching why it took me eight or nine years to write this book. Really? I would not stop researching. I finally had it put a note on my computer research is not writing. So cutting it back to the core story of the baby at the end. I was curious about your research and your sources. So it's kind of a combination of stories that your family members shared. In the acknowledgments, you mentioned many family members and you said your family is rich in storytelling and listening. So I'm assuming that a lot of those family stories were inspiration for parts of your book. And you mentioned your historical research in terms of war and the flu. Yes, I was curious about because this takes place over 100 years ago or about 100 years ago. But what some of those research sources? Well, the initial research source wasn't I didn't think of it as research is just what we did was told stories. And the character Katie in the book who's eight year old in the book actually grew up and became a nun. And she was my mom's oldest sister. And she spent a lot of time at our house holidays, our house would visit. And I love this woman intensely. She was a talker. But she's done a talk in the book. Not so much. But she was later in life. She probably was when she was younger, because that's something you do. But I didn't have that. But she was such a talker that I joke with my family that we had a tag team listen. And so that's where that kind of came from. But I was it fascinated with stories. I mean, it was a journalist before I became a fiction writer. And so I recorded stories. And I wrote down what she had to say. And the funny thing is when you become interested in a story of an era or any topic at all, people start giving you more stories. You become a kind of magnet. So I had those stories that just came to me before I knew I was going to write about them. And then when I started pulling them together then other people started giving me stories. So my aunts and uncles. I have journals that they wrote and papers they wrote for college to give me, you know, they started here, you can keep this because we're going to die soon. And we need somebody to have it. So my boxes of these things. And then that's true of strangers to they find out that somebody is interested in they have these documents, they want something to happen to them.  They want something to happen. So people would give me information. So I had a lot of source materials that actually came from people writing of that time in that time, not just historical looking back, it's how it looked from that position. So I was really fortunate in that. Yes. And that's where a lot of it came from. Did your family experience anti German settlement? I don't have any family stories of anti German sentiment. I do know in the communities there was that anti German sentiment. I don't have it explained what I have is my grandfather. I knew him as Fred. So he changed his name from Fritz to Fred. So I know that there must have been something that caused him to make that change in his name. And he was drafted. And according to the records of draft, he should have been exempt. I mean, he was almost too old. He was a German. I mean, he was a farmer. He was the breadwinner. He had children. He had all the these checkmarks for exemptions from draft, but he was drafted. And the flu actually kept him home. So that was one of Katie's stories or sister mother assigned her. That was one of her stories. So she didn't talk about it as anti German sentiment. It was just what happened during that time. And it was only after I started researching what the attitude was at that time that I realized this was this was why these things happened. I found out what happened, but it was research that helped me understand why it happened. And did you do library researcher historical societies or anything like that as well? I did. I spent days and days and days long days. As a matter of fact, I got very many parking tickets because I was a historical society. So I read newspapers. They're all unlike the Nebraska newspapers are all unlike films. So I read the newspapers from 1918 1917 and 18. So I read Nebraska papers, but I also read in various sites, you know, the computer is a great thing that I went as much as I could go to sites to research. But there was still I depended a lot on things I can find on the internet about what happened elsewhere. And then I had read I read, you know, I read books on the flu, which I should have brought the list of books, but flew by Gina Kalada. And then there's a great pandemic of 1918 by a man who wrote a really good book, but his name won't come to me. It's available. Actually, I've seen it in libraries when I've traveled. So it's available. But I read a lot about the flu and read about World War One, just historical books because they interested me. So I did. And then there was on hands on kind of research, I went to museums and handle things. If you want to know what a character is feeling, you really need to know literally what they're feeling. So my grandmother would never have known what this bottle felt like. Yeah, because it's plastic shooting. It didn't exist. And so you go and find out what did exist and what they touched. So you sort of go and have it their lives as best you can. Isn't that an amazing thing? Yes, that's pretty cool. It is. Are some of the incidents in the book based upon actual like the young man getting thrown off the train, the priest who gets after the doctor for his beliefs, but also, you know, refuses to look at what might have been your mother. Right. And oh, I mean, there are just several incidents where, well, and I'm sure this actually happened where rumors got started that the Germans dropped something over here to cause the flu. Right. And I'm sure that's true. Right. Yeah. Yes, that's, that is true. Those were taken from newspaper accounts, the things that people were saying. And so, you know, I pulled the things that people talked about. And I took some of the rumors you you pull from those diaries that I said I had, but some were actually published. They were editorials in especially East Coast papers have a lot of them. So that was those kind of things were true that two directions on that you ask about the man on the train and the doctor and their two separate answers to that. So the man on the train actually, the interesting story to me about the man on the train is that when I was doing this research, I knew about how violent anti German sentiment had become all over the country. But I didn't believe it had happened in Nebraska. Because as we talked earlier, it's there were so many Germans in Nebraska that we wouldn't turn on ourselves kind of thing. So when I was researching, I couldn't see it happening in Nebraska. But I saw it in Missouri, there was a man drug off a street car and drug through the streets wrapped in American flag and the people who did it didn't get charged with anything because the judge said he shouldn't have been speaking German in the first place. So I knew that there was really horrible things happening very close to Nebraska, but I didn't see it happening here. And so one day I was going back through the notes I had taken from the newspapers. And I found in my own handwriting the story of this man from the train that I had written it down but didn't let it enter my consciousness in some way. And that that intrigues me that we see what we expect to see. And no matter how close we are to it, we can't see what we don't expect to see. And it wasn't until I saw it a few weeks after writing it down that I thought, Oh my gosh, that's in the Nebraska newspaper. And I had to go back to the newspaper. And then I started seeing it. Then I could see what was happening in Nebraska. And it did happen in Nebraska. So, you know, I stayed true to the, not the facts of Nebraska, but the tenor of the truth in it. And so that man who was thrown off the train, that's a true story. But I don't don't have a grandmother who witnessed it. And it's a it's a dramatization of the kind of things that happened. And some of the quotes are directly to newspaper. So that's very true. So, so that's the answer on the guy on the train and it's several of the other things. But then there's other things that are full clock imagination and the doctor and the priest stem from that. One of the challenges of writing a book about a family that lives on a farm in 1918 in North Central Nebraska without a phone and without access to newspapers is that you have this very closed community. But there's all this stuff going around them that I want the reader to know. So I had to bring in characters who could then inform the readers and interact with these people. And I know there was the doctor. I know there was the priest, etc. But I created them to help dramatize this story. And they weren't really intended to be that big of a part of the story. But as I've said, I just got a crush on the doctor and I kept writing about him. And he just kept saying interesting things. So I kept writing them down. Yeah, they kind of took over, don't they? For the librarians in the group, he was committed to helping start a war library. Yes. And we also appreciated that you mentioned Charlotte Templeton and early head of this agency back at that time. That was our poor mother's is mentioned in the book, Charlotte Templeton.  And there was a lot of that. You know, what my characters say was part of the tenor. I don't have anybody who really said that. I don't know anybody who really said those. But that's what happened in different communities is some communities really wanted the war fund to get books to our soldiers. That didn't turn out so well. No, not so much. And part of it had to do with that that some people were concerned what they would learn. So learning is a bad thing. In some people's minds, I guess, I had another question. Let's see. What about the theme of death, I guess you would say, which starts the book but ends the book in life? And also how that relates to the whole family core. Because, of course, in the book, Gerda loses her older sister. And that nightmare stays with her. But the nightmare also translates to the doctor who dreams about snakes and so forth. So was that kind of a unifying? I'm not sure if this what I will say next has anything to do with what you just asked about me. I didn't really set up to write about death as a theme. But I knew about my grandmother. She died when I was in sixth grade, so I didn't get to know her as a person.  She had 11 of them and she died before any of them died. So she didn't have to bear that burden of losing a child, but I knew she was terrified of it. And so when I was creating this character, I was trying to imagine what that meant to be so afraid of losing a child and why she was afraid of it. And in my research, our genealogy research, my grandmother did lose a sister. And I don't know that she died in childbirth, but she died about nine and a half months after she got married. So in a time when there was no, you just start burying children as soon as you start a come of age. So I knew that that was a fear of hers. And so I wanted to do what was what was motivating her throughout the book. What how did she live her days? And so when she got pregnant, I knew that would be a time when she would be most afraid of it. But the book starts with the death of a woman in childbirth. That was not originally in one of the, it was a late working draft to put that at the beginning. And part of it had to do with when I had one of the readers that I sent it to, she was a young woman. And it wasn't, I had that scene in which Elizabeth dies in childbirth, probably two thirds of the way through the book. And when she came to that, she said, if I had known that before, I would have been terrified with Gerda instead of just when I get here, I was so shocked by it. Because she was a young woman and she didn't realize how dangerous childbirth was to women. And so it sort of set the stage for what was really at stake and how closely, how close mortality was in this moment of life. And so I moved it there so that we could look at ways in which they're so closely tied. So that is okay. Good. I took a good stab at it. So any experience about in all of the many presentations and discussions you've had with people about the book, have there been any surprises in terms of people, of how people have reacted to this book? I imagine they've shared their own stories because they relate to, from family, relate to experiences they've had. I don't know if it's surprised. It's delight how many people do exactly what you just said, which is connected to their own stories and their own families. I know I did. Well, I was surprised because, you know, I kind of felt I was, when you're writing a book, you're in this little world and you think it's never going to really connect with people. And so when it does, it's so delightful. And early on, when I would go to bookstores, I would have people come and they would buy, one person would buy like five or six books because they had that many siblings. And the great thing about it wasn't just they bought a lot of books, but telling about how the book itself became an impetus for people to start talking to one another about things they'd never talked about before. And so I've, that's the surprise and delight is that people talk to one another about their own families, you know. And so that would be the best part about it to me. In talking about their families, do they talk about the relationship with fathers and daughters in relation to this? Or is it more about what happened at that time with their family? I think I can get some of both. A lot of people, Frank Dricki is the grand, is Garrett's father in the book. And he comes off as a bad guy in the book. I mean, he wanted to control, Garrett, he wants to be in control of everything. And he comes off quite negatively. And I've joked several times that when I cross over to the other side, I'm afraid my great grandfather is going to be standing there with his hands on his hips. You made me look really bad. And I don't know that he was bad. I do know it's true that he labeled my grandfather an armatoifle. And but that's interests people. How a negative family story comes down so it's not so much my specific story but they're interested in how these stories trickle down. So people do bring that up quite a bit and then talk about, it's one of the stepping off points for people to talk about their own family. So that's how that one works quite a bit. Though great grandpa Dricki might be mad at me for it. Oh, Ryder's got a lot to atone for. This guy and the other. Well, Malia was interested in the name of the book, the meaning of names. And I think you had some thoughts about that and maybe wanted to read a section that might help illuminate that. Yeah, I'll read a section. And I've not ever read this at a reading because it's kind of disjointed a little bit. So I'm going to try to wing it through reading it. It takes place in the middle of the book or close to the middle. And it's... Gerita has writing with her, writing letters to her sister. And as a result she builds a relationship with the mailman who brings the mail. And this is a scene in which it kind of helps explain where the theme of the title comes from. Early spring was her favorite time of year. A flock of finches littered the calf pen, scavenging for seeds or worms. The jangle of buckles on her boots scattered them as she approached and they disappeared into the trees lining the drive. They came back every year, robins, jays, finches, all the birds, all part of the cycle of seasons. Nothing to get excited about. But still the side of them made her happy, gave her hope. Sentimental nonsense is all it is, she chided herself. Still she felt uplifted by the side of the small birds and the whistle of the metal larks. She walked slowly, watching her feet when she got out onto the lane, taking care not to slip into the muck. And she was almost to the mailboxes before she realized the mail wagon was still there. She looked up and smiled at the man leaning against the backboard of his wagon. Good afternoon Mrs. Vogel. Charlie Burke said with a slow smile, you're a fine sign of spring. She blushed and looked away. You look like a great bird coming down toward me, coming toward me down the lane, Mrs. Vogel. He held a stack of mail out to her. Gerda told herself not to notice the way Charles Burke's smile spread slowly across his face. She told herself the dimple on his chin was no concern of hers. She kept her head tilted down as she looked at the stack of mail in in his hand.  It looked like wings. He spread his hands and arms out at his side in imitation of her. Or maybe it's an angel you remind me of. Gerda felt her cheeks warming and she pressed her lips together to keep from smiling. Bird, she said abruptly. That's what my name means. You know, in German, Vogel means bird. And I'll skip ahead a minute, a page.  What does your name mean, Mr. Burke? Burke? I don't really know. It's just a name, an American name. Gerda's smile froze on her face. How quickly the tenor of a moment can change. Of course, Gerda thought, American names were enough in themselves. Only immigrants had names with two meanings. To be an American, your name was just your name and that was enough for America. Wow. So that's the title, original working title of the book was This Is Now because I'm a teacher as well and I was kind of pedantically pounding the theme in that it's not just history, it's something that continues. The things that are happening then, happen now, and these are people who have flirtations and who have the same concerns any one of us have in a lot of ways. But this is now, when I took the book to a pitch conference, how to pitch the book to publishers, they said, This Is Now is a stupid title, so get rid of it. So I got rid of it and went to the book. I followed the lead of my poet friends that they looked to the poem to help you see what the name title of the poem is and I went back to the book and opened it up and oddly it was to that page that, and I thought, well there you have it right there. So that's where the title and the theme of the title came from. And the bird imagery, especially in that scene, you see it in other places, that was not it never intentional. I never put that together intentionally. It's just that I live in Nebraska and those kinds of experience, the sounds of birds in the spring and the like are and the wind. So we all know wind in Nebraska is always present. I think that that passage that you just read also points out another thing about the book, which are the amazing descriptions of place. You know, that I think is kind of overlooked because the story is so powerful, but there's all these descriptions of the place that are so good. And part of it, maybe, I don't know, is it because it still looks like that or you grew up there? I mean I don't know, I guess I'm asking that question. How do you immerse yourself in that place to get those descriptions so true? Well part of it, the land is still very much like that, but you know I'm going to back away from that statement. It's not very much like that. If you go up into this area, you'll see that most of these pastures that I would have been familiar with have become cornfields and so we're much more plowed community, but that really didn't start. That kind of mass planting of Nebraska started more in the 80s when farms really took off, that family farms were disappearing and the fields got bigger, but I grew up in the 60s and 70s and I spent a lot of, both my grandparents had farms in Holt County and I spent time there and I'm an introvert and so I love just being by myself walking through the field. So I spent a lot of time just being in that landscape and I loved it. I mean I've traveled quite a bit, but I still think Nebraska is just really one of the most beautiful places. When it's beautiful, it's just, there's no manage for it. So I loved the place, so it makes it easy to describe it as something beautiful because that's how I see it, is something beautiful and so I have a lot of sense memory from my own youth about what those things were like and I think that it's true of any story or a lot of stories. Sometimes you could, any story, some stories can be any place and some stories only occur there and this may have happened a lot of places, but the land actually had an effect on these characters and so bringing that into the story so that you could feel, I wanted, you know, you would feel that isolation, you would feel that sense of reprieve that Gerta Felt and that scene where she comes out in spring in that sense of you can breathe again. I think that's a big part of what the characters' lives were like and what the story needed. That actually leads into a question that somebody from the audience just has asked just now. While you were talking, they wanted you to talk about the cover, the looming clouds, is that, well I don't know if that was something you had any decision-making in or is that clouds of war, the pandemic or Nebraska? Actually this is one of the things that I can say without any reserve that this is an absolutely gorgeous cover. I didn't have anything to do with it, so I can say that Mark Cull, the publisher and cover designer, did a great, great job. I love this because it feels to me what the book is about. He really got what the book was about, was that sense of ominous, we all know that storm coming at us, so it could be the, it could refer to the pandemic, the flu, or any number of things that are coming at you. When I talked to the publishers about the cover, I was told up front that authors have no voice in the cover. This is something that's decided, so when we send it to you, say yes or or too bad. So I was very happy when we sent this to me, but because I know them, I teach with one of the publishers at the University of Nebraska's MFA in writing program, so I teach with her, so I had a little bit of an in that I could at least interject what I thought would be on it, and I talked about the cover. One idea that I had for the cover was a kind of Dr. Chavago snowy planes kind of thing with the train moving across it, and so we did think about that sort of thing because it showed the, showed a lot of what the themes of the book, that isolation, the cold, that civilization via the train, so I had a lot of reasons why I thought that would be great, but we couldn't find a really good train picture, and I said well if I can't have a train, then I want it to be the sky. I think that it needs to be the sky to be a Nebraska story, and so they sent me a number of, they did let me have some input because they had no idea really what Nebraska would look like in 1918, and if you get a magnifying glass out, you can see that we, we don't have the right fence posts for 1918, and I think somewhere in the back you can see some veils on one of the scenes, or in one of them, you can see that, so I, but I was just that picky, so they had to actually, I had to make a case that you can't have around veils in the picture, because it wasn't right, and I was a little iffy about the road, because roads, even Highway 20, was just a dirt road, and I'm pretty sure it didn't have this much of a foundation, so, but I was that picky, and they said, oh just stop, and I agree, I think it's a great picture, so, and it does definitely, for those of us that are from or have driven across the state, it just screams Nebraska, I mean, I see that, oh yeah, of course, I think I've been there probably, and I like that the way the questioner, whoever it was, said, what are those clouds, because you do wonder, I mean, obviously there, it could be a winter storm, maybe fall, looking at the picture again, but you know, there's also, like you say, the forces coming in, the flu, the attitudes towards our community, what community means. I will tell you a funny story about Mark, who designed the cover, he's an engineer, and I love Mark, so if he hears this, I want to, this is sincerely, I like him a lot, but he's a nerd about some things, and what he did with this, he manipulated the clouds for a while to make them form, just subtly, the symbol for the virus, the flu virus, and they looked at it and said, no, that's too obvious, let people decide for themselves what those clouds mean, so actually the question was really good, because Mark did want it to be the flu, and I think that was him just messing with it, actually the actual clouds of Nebraska were enough without them. I think you did a good job with isolation, too, because I, you know, they were, she was only 150 miles from her family, but it was, she hadn't been to see them in a number of years, and a world away, world away, yeah, the other thing, their prosperity versus the struggle that she and her husband and family were, other thing I was going to say is that I think that this is such a timely book, because we live in world today where names make such a difference, and people are judged by their names, so often. Yeah, there were, there's a lot of different connections that you can see that we're struggling with as a community and as a country, as a world today, and that's why I said that the working title is This Is Now, because I wanted, that's one of the things I knew was happening. When I was doing research on the book, I came upon that sauerkraut became Liberty Cabbage, and hamburgers became ground beef patties. I found that in a Nebraska newspaper, so that's a story that really came from our history, and the summer I found that information was the summer we were all eating freedom fries. Right, and so, I mean, it's, the parallels are so close, and it's true that the names, so it's, yes, yes is the answer in so many words. There are so many connections, and I think that's also part of why it resonates with people. It's a safer way to look at it for one thing. It's easier to understand what's happening if we're a distance from it, and then apply it to what we're suffering now, and so I think that's one of the reasons why it, it feels timely, but removed enough to understand. And for this reason, I think it'd be such a great book for young adults to read. I don't know if you've heard, I know adults are reading this book, and I just didn't know if you'd heard whether younger people are, as well, you know, high school students. I have had a couple of teachers who have high school teachers. I've gone to visit high schools here in Lincoln, southwest high school, and she brought in teachers from other high schools, so I met a lot of high school teachers and librarians, and they're talking about it with students and using paragraphs from it to go try to explain the history as well as language writing coherently, I guess, and writing descriptions. So I know high school students are. One, I mentioned this earlier about a teacher, a high school teacher in Illinois had sent me a note saying that she read the entire book out loud to her senior class, and I love that idea that somebody sat down and read the book to kids. I don't know if the kids would have read it, but they had to sit and listen to it, so. Yeah, we thought it would be an awfully nice thing if someone would read out loud to us, which is why it's such a great thing. Your book is now on audible.com. The iTunes and Amazon, you can go and listen to me read. It should be great. So, but yeah, I think that as a high, it is a way of bringing history and just it has all the historical aspects so that the history they're learning in history classes can come alive. That's how I learn is through stories and many people learn through stories, so. Absolutely. And it's a pretty simple story. It's a small book and you know it is only as complex as you make it, and so I think that for high school students, if I had just made Katie a bigger character, then I could call it a YA book. Yeah, that's it. It's all in the way you do it. If there's anyone in our audience that has a question for Karen, I know that some of you have microphones and all you have to do is ask Krista to unmute your microphone. I can do that. Or you can just type the question right into the question box. We do have one other question. Also that first one came from, we have some of our staff here watching the show elsewhere. Someone else knows, this is your first book of fiction, or if you've got other ones, or if you have plans for others. I have made it through the years of writing this one. I have a short story collection that came out in 2002 called Night Sounds and Other Stories. I believe that's at a brosca. So you guys have been good to me for a long time. You've been good to me. It's a mutual admiration society. So I have that short story collection. I have a couple of novels that I've written. Some are just, they will probably stay in a desk for one. I'm hoping, I keep hoping I'm going to finish. I said I would have it at the end of last year, but I didn't. But I have a book that I'm sure I will finish in the next year called The Last Living Waitress of the Home Cafe. And it's historical only in that it takes place before the internet. And it's about a, again, it's a community story based on a young girl who grows up in a small town in Nebraska. Oddly enough, I can't get out of Nebraska. But she leaves home and ends up in a girly magazine. And it's the effects of that kind of thing on this community, interfamily, and the likes. So it's more than that, but that's as good a spiel as I have. That sounds like a very interesting story. I keep thinking the title, just I have to keep writing until I get a book to go with the title. It is a great title, yes. Well, Karen, is there anything else you'd like to share with us about, I know you've been going around doing presentations for club groups and presentations in libraries and museums. Have you learned anything new about Nebraska? I don't know. I don't know. I learned something all the time from people. I've learned that Nebraska is really, really a big state. Yes, it is. And some roads are better than maintained than others. But I've really enjoyed going around and to libraries. I spend a lot of time visiting libraries. I've been going to book clubs since the book was, I don't know if you said this earlier, it was the Omaha Reads selection in 2014. And at that point, a lot of, because of the public libraries, Omaha's public library promotion, I spent a lot of time in Omaha going to different book clubs and visiting book clubs in Lincoln and Omaha area. And what the biggest surprise is how many book clubs there are in this, in this town, in this state. Yeah. They're alive and well. People are reading, getting together and reading books and have been regularly. So I visited, I'm 60 to 70 book clubs since the book came out. So the big surprise, I learned that people love books and want to talk about them. And I'm really delighted about that because there's always this fear that the people are only watching movies or something. But I have found that people are reading books and talking about them and I do love that. In these book clubs have you had any of them, because they're small groups, have you had anybody say, well I didn't like this little thing that happened? Why did you make that happen to her? I'm mad at you about that. No, fortunately most people are really kind, especially when you're one on one. They might be saying that behind my back, but they're very kind to my face. I did have a few people ask me if I chickened out at the end and kept them alive because I couldn't bear to kill them off. And I said no, I kept them because they did live and so there was that kind of thing. There are, I want to know who else survived because I don't know if I, if you say in here, I've missed it, but like the male man and there's several, several people, everybody seems to have it for me. You're starting to care about those characters there, Molly. Well, the doctor avoids them. Yes, that's always an amazing thing that people, some people got it and some people didn't. But you know, I'm not sure if, because one of my books has to do with some of these characters, I'm reading a book or reading. I'm reading many books, but I'm also trying to write, too. And one is that Last Living Waitress at the Home Cafe and the other is sort of, it's not a follow-up, it's not a sequel, but there are people from it, from this book, move into the other. And so I know about what happens to some of them, because I've been working on it. Well, we better have that sequel here. I wish I wrote faster, because I want to know what happens to them, too. Well, this is a pretty good segue, I think, into, let's see if I can get this slide to advance. Oh, there we go. I just wanted to point out that all across Nebraska, we do have people engaging with this book all the way through 2016. We're halfway through right now. And our book club kits are actually booked through, and it says March 2016, but that is wrong. It's actually March 2017. We've got book club kits booked into next year, because people are really excited about this book. I just want to remind you that if you go to onebook.nebraska.gov and check out news and events, you can see where Karen's going to be in the next few months, where she'll be visiting libraries and book clubs, and you can also see any kind of press about things that are going on, how do you do with the book. And you can borrow, oh, excuse me, you can join the conversation on Facebook. We have, and Chris, if you will send me to my Facebook page, it's down. Oh, yeah, that'll work, too. Yeah, that's even better. You can see that we've got a lot going on. We are trying to keep track of Karen on Facebook and share a variety of different things. This is just a trailer, which starts automatically, sorry, about the show that we're watching right now, which I see 511 people reached with the trailer. Interestingly, only 107 of them looked at the trailer. So I don't know how it does those statistics. I don't either. I don't understand these statistics at all, but hey, it's all interesting. So do join us on Facebook, like us, please, and that way you'll get our posts. And also, just let us know what you're thinking and let us know what you're reading and what your book group is reading and what they think about. Look. And Chris, I'm sorry you'll have to send me. Oh, it's like that. There we go. Okay. And I would want to suggest that all of you consider scheduling a book cover or talk in the library. You know you can book a program with Karen through the Humanities Nebraska Speaker's Bureau, which is a terrific resource in our state. They are helping to sponsor one book on Nebraska, and they can make it very easy and inexpensive for you to have Karen come to your town soon. You do have to schedule it with Karen, so you make sure it works for her. I'd also like to suggest to librarians specifically that are watching this show that you offer to appear on your local radio and TV talk shows and talk about One Book One Nebraska and talk about the books that are resonating in your community. We also have a video that you'll be able to show of Karen speaking and we hope to make that available on YouTube, and that way you can screen that for your board, maybe, or another group that you have in your library. And then any other ideas you have for programming, we're open to hearing about them, and so please let us know what you're doing in your communities. And a reminder that Karen will be back with us here in Lincoln on October 29th. We'll have the Celebration of Nebraska books at the Nebraska History Museum, which is here in Lincoln on Centennial Mall North. It's a fabulous event. We have a great time. It starts at 2.30, ends around 6.30, so you don't have to give up your whole Saturday to it, but it's a lot of fun. We have a program from Karen on One Book One Nebraska. We'll be honoring our Nebraska Book Award winners for this year, and they usually provide about a, is that about a five minute, five to ten minute reading? So if you have favorite Nebraska authors, you just might get to hear them read as well. We will actually announce the winners of the Mildred Bennett and the Jane Geske Award and what book we're going to be talking about next year on One Book One Nebraska. So we have a little reception and book signings. It's really a lot of fun, so join us if you can here in Lincoln on October 29th. Oh, and I was supposed to show you this slide when I was talking about all that. And for more information, you can always contact me. You can contact tessa.tary at Nebraska.gov as well. You can call me. You can go to our One Book One Nebraska website or our Facebook page. Other thoughts or things you'd like to share for the good of the group? Any last questions from the audience? Maybe have any last-minute questions while you've got us all here. Type in your questions, ask what you want to. Has anybody already had events at their libraries that they want to talk about? I don't know if anybody's already done things. Well, there have been quite a few events, but I don't know if any of the people in our audience have been involved in any of the events. Karen's been even busy. It's been a busy six months. It has been. And then some. I will say one of the things about the presentation, if you've been to one presentation, they're not always the same thing because I I put it over to the audience. So whatever presentation I make it's your group. Their interest is what we talk about. So it's always a little bit different each presentation. So that's it's important to to know that you don't have to listen to me say the same thing, though I will tell a lot of the same stories because I am my Aunt Katie's daughter. Talk, talk, talk to you listening. I love it. Yeah, we're actually looking forward to the October 29th event because we haven't been back to the History Museum, the Nebraska History Museum for several years. We've been doing that event here in the Library Commission. So we're going back to the Nebraska History Museum and they've just been remodeled and we have kind of a new exciting space to work in and so Karen will be there and it'll be very nice. It'll be a good event. And it's always fun to hear who won the Nebraska Book Awards. Yes, and I'm always happy when they talk about it. Yeah, to talk about it exactly. I love that. It doesn't look like anybody has any desperately urgent questions. Okay, well they can always they can always check in with us like there's an email address up there. They can always check in and they have additional questions and contact Karen if you're interested in working with the Humanities Grant to bring her to your town. Thank you very much. All right. All right, then I guess that will wrap it up for this week's show. This week's Encompass Live. And Mary-Joseph, do you have the keyboard if you could help me? Oh my gosh, I'm sorry. No, it's okay. Just type in Encompass Live. So thank you very much everyone for attending everyone our audience and thank you very much Karen for being here with us today. It was great to be able to talk to you everything. What? It didn't work. Sorry. You want the other slideshow down there on that PowerPoint? I know you want to talk about what's coming up and I can't get you there. Put a space in. Ah, there you go. It matters the space. Okay. Anyways, talk about Ted too. Technology. So thank you very much Karen and Mary-Jo and Molly and Rod and everyone for being here with us this morning. This is great. The show has been recorded and it will be available on our website and as you can see when you do figure out how to search for it, luckily so far in the world nothing has been called Encompass Live but us. So if you just google it, you don't have to put Nebraska in here, our website's the first result. So the recording for today we posted here on our website. These are upcoming shows and this is where recording will be over here. Here's last week's. We had our Esports and Vermont libraries. Recording will be here on the YouTube page. This PowerPoint presentation I'll put up and I've already been collecting some of the links that we were talking about, the one book page, Center for the Book, all those are on there. So when that is ready I will let everyone know and I'll be posted up there. This afternoon most likely, okay, usually I get it up by the afternoon, you'll all be getting an email letting you know. So I hope you'll join us for our next week's show which is Innovating Accessed Information in Libraries Without Borders Idea Box. Libraries Without Borders is a non-profit organization that is doing a lot of work in foreign countries but also in the United States, low-income areas, places that need this kind of need more help with getting books and computers and things and they have this thing called the Idea Box. Places that don't have library service like Southern County and they have this Project the Idea Box. It describes a portable library and multimedia center toolkit. You just unpack this thing and it has computers and books and movies and it's just kind of like a mini-traveling library and they've been doing it in foreign countries and here in the United States and we're going to have someone from the group is going to be on with us. There it is, Paloma Pradry. I'm not exactly sure how to pronounce her name, I'll find out before next week. From Libraries Above Borders we'll be with us on the show next week so definitely do sign up for that show and any of other future ones here. We've got our July dates, August dates are starting to get filled, the calendar will be filled out as I confirm more things so definitely sign up for anything. Also, Encompass Live is also on Facebook as well so you can please give us a like over there. We post reminders of when our shows are coming up. Your reminder that I automatically sent up this morning to log in on the fly to our shows.  Other than that, that wraps up for this morning's show. Thank you very much everyone. Thank you Chris. See you next week on Encompass Live. Bye bye.


later Simon Michelle from FIG for you. Simon, welcome to you. Really settling in first on North America, just some of those catalysts for the overnight moves. What would you put them down to? Yeah, look really interesting. We're certainly seeing a bit of caution on the back of investors and they're just sort of sitting on the sidelines at the moment. Good demand for bonds. You're seeing that reflected with weaker equity markets as well. Look, a lot happening in the next 24 hours. We've got obviously the Comey testimony happening over the US. You've got an ECB meeting we're likely to hear from Mario Draghi. Not expecting a lot of change there but you know, will they adjust their bond buying program and the UK election. So I think there's a lot for investors to sort of take on and I think you're seeing a little bit of sitting on the sidelines at the moment. Now, alongside that reports that China might well be wanting to add to its UST holdings. Where does this come from? Yeah, look absolutely. Second largest holder of US Treasury holdings behind Japan, sorry, non US holder. They sold down a lot of their holdings last year which was quite a significant change in their flow over recent times. Normally, they've just been increasing their holdings of US Treasuries and we've seen in the first quarter of this year they've been increasing again. They're up 29 billion. So what that sense of the market is, you know, indicates that, you know, the economy is obviously stabilizing. They're not having to use so much of that money to prop up the one and I would also suggest you know, some of the capital controls they've implemented to try and stop external flows of Chinese currency may be working as well. So I've seen a significant reversal of that move we saw last year where they sold down a lot of holdings. Okay, let's just put it into context on today's release. The GDP print now, $8 street high, but those credit spreads tracked via the eye tracks figure haven't really moved much at all. Look, they haven't really moved much at all. They did move up a little bit last week. You know, they moved up from about sort of 81 up to about where are they now, 87. But interestingly, I think, you know, if you have a look at our yields there, you know, our 10 year down at 2.36%. That's almost 60 basis points below the peak for this year. And interestingly, you've seen that year on year growth figure move from 2.4 at the December quarter to 1.7 released today. So, you know, 70 basis points down there. So, you know, you can see that correlation as those longer term yields have drifted lower in anticipation of this low growth figure coming through. Yeah, so there's a little bit of help in the form of that inevitably though. So be grateful for small mercies, I guess. That's true. Simon, thank you very much. Talk to you soon. Thanks, guys. Simon Michele from Fig There.


Good morning, everybody. Lee Lowell here, smartoptionsower.com. Today is Saturday, March 6, 2021. Hi, here I am down here. How's everyone doing today? Hey, listen, today we're going to talk about what to do in a down market sell-off if you have sold short naked put options. Got questions this week, emails asking about how to repair, fix. What do I do if I've sold a naked put option? What's happening now? You know, the market's selling off, the put options going up in value. I'm not sure what to do. Help me out. Give me some suggestions. What should I do? So today we're going to talk about how to either repair, fix, hold, whatever. What to do in the scenario where the stock market goes down, which we haven't seen in a while, and this week we had a down market. So people that have sold naked put options are sort of getting into a little bit of a tizzy because the market's moving against them. So let's talk about what to do and how to do it when you have sold a naked put option and the market sells off. And that's what will be the topic for today. And then after that, obviously we will do our Saturday synopsis. I'll take a look at the stock charts, the indexes, see what happened over this past week. And we know if you do follow the markets, you know, we had a pretty good down week, so we will take a look at that. So let's jump right in and take a look at what to do if you sold a naked put option in a down trending market. So let's open up the charts here and just take a quick look at let's take a look at the NASDAQ real quick because that hit hit the brunt of the selling this week. So obviously you can see we've had a good move down here. Let's stretch this out a little bit. So the last couple days this week, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, we had these three bars. These are daily bars each day's one day's worth each bar is one day's worth of trading. So obviously we've had a good down move this week and people have been selling put options, which were great in a neutral to bullish market. As you know, since the pandemic last March, we had nothing but up. Okay. And in an up market, selling put options is a great strategy because as market moves up, put option values go down. And that's what you want when you sell a put option. You want the value of that put option to go down so you can buy it back at a cheaper price. For those of you that really aren't familiar with selling naked put options. It's a strategy that will work in an uptrending and neutral market. Why is that? Because as an option seller, each day that passes, that option value goes down in price. And if you've sold something at a high price, your goal is to buy it back at a low price. That's what you do sell high then buy low in that order. And when you sell a put option, that's what you're doing. You're selling it high market goes up. And then you buy that put option back cheaper because as the market goes up put option values go down. So that's what we want to establish right off the bat. But if the stock market goes down put option values go up. So if you've sold a put option here and then the market tanks that put option values now up here, meaning you're holding something with a paper loss at the moment. So that's why people are getting upset this past week because the value of the put options that they've sold have gone up in value. So they're not sure do I buy it back and lock in a loss or how can I fix it? What do I do? So let's take a step back here and understand what put option selling is all about. When you sell a put option, there's two things that you're doing it for. It's number one, to collect the cash. When you sell a put option, you're collecting money from the put option buyer. Number one, but you have to understand and realize why are you actually selling the put option in the first place? And your reasoning should be is because you want to gain the opportunity to buy that stock cheaper than where it currently is. When you sell a put option contract, you are obligating yourself to buy that specific stock, potentially buy that specific stock at the strike price by the expiration date. Only if the stock drops to the strike price level. So let's take a look at, let's use Apple as an example. And I'll run through some scenarios on how you can repair, fix, replace a naked put option that you sold that you now are worried about. So let's take Apple here and let's, you know, Apple's been moving up nicely since last March, about a year ago. It topped out about $145 a share towards the end of January.  So Apple's hit an all-time high. It's come back. So let's just say somewhere along the recent path, you know, Apple's at $130 and you want to sell a put option. You actually have sold a put option on Apple for, let's say, the $120 strike. When it was up at $140, you're thinking, wow, you know what? I'd like to buy Apple for $120 a share potentially. It's trading at $140. How can I potentially buy Apple for $120? That's a $20 discount. Well, you could have or you probably did sell an Apple $120 put option. And when you sold that $120 put option, you're basically putting yourself on the hook to potentially buy Apple for $120 a share. And the only way that contract would come to fruition is if Apple actually fell below $120, then you would be forced to buy the shares at $120. Now, if Apple's trading all the way down at $100, you would still have to buy those shares at $120. So you'd be looking at a $20 loss at that point. Now, when Apple was trading at $145, you thought, hey, it'd be a pretty good idea to buy Apple for $120 because it's up at $145. Sure, I'd like to buy it at $120, but now if Apple's trading down to $100, maybe you're not so happy buying it at $120 anymore. So that's the risk. That's what happens when you sell a put option. You're potentially obligating yourself to buy the stock at whatever strike price you've sold. And the risk, of course, is that the stock keeps dropping. That's the same risk that anybody has if they bought stock is that the stock keeps going down. So there's no free lunch here. Even though you're getting paid money to do this trade, the stock can still drop on you. That's the ultimate risk. But anyway, so let's just say you've sold a put option on Apple because you really want to potentially buy Apple. That's your thing. You want to be long shares of Apple. You didn't want to buy it at $145, so you decided, OK, I'm going to sell $120 put option. I'll give myself a $25 discount from its current price. And so you sold the put option and you got some cash for it. Well, now that Apple's trading near $120, the value of that put option that you've sold has gone up in value. So you're not sure what to do. So let's take a quick look at my cheat sheet here and we can discuss what are your choices? What are your options for repairing, fixing, replacing, whatever you want to call a naked put option that you've sold? So there's a few things that you can do. Number one, you really have to make sure, do you still like the stock? Do you still want that stock? My rule is whenever I teach people how to sell options, put options. The thing is I tell them you have to make sure that this is a stock that you would potentially like to own sometime in the future because you never know. You may get assigned the shares and you have to buy the stock. You get assigned on the put option and you have to buy the stock. So your number one rule is you make sure you sell put options only on stocks that you'd be comfortable owning. You don't want to sell put options just to collect the income on random stocks that you know nothing about because before you know it, the stock is tanked. You'd have to buy the shares of a stock that you don't even know anything about. So that's not the way that we would want to do it. Yes, collecting the cash by selling put options is a great income generator, but you have to be very selective. You have to choose stocks that you know something about that are quality stocks and that if it comes down to you having to buy the shares, you're okay buying the shares. So you can hold for the long haul and hopefully the stock will go back up in price. But anyway, so that's your first rule. Do you still want or like the stock? If you do still like the stock, then your first choice is you can hold the trade. You sold a put option and you can hold out. Let's go back to our Apple chart here. Stock was at $145. You sold $120 put. Apple's still at $121. You know, who's to say that Apple's still going to keep going down? Apple could rally back up and your put option could go back down in value and you could end up with a profitable trade. If Apple finishes below $120 at expiration, are you still good buying Apple at $120? That's up to you.  What's your pain point? Because if Apple keeps dropping, let's say to $120, $100, you still have to buy it for $120 a share. Are you comfortable holding on to a $20 paper loss at that moment in time? Any stock could go down. You could have just bought the shares of Apple and the stock has gone down and you'd be holding a paper loss. It's no different when you sell a put option. You have to decide, okay, do I still like the stock and am I okay buying it at the current price at $120, which is my strike price? If you're not okay with that, then let's look at what else we can do. The second thing you can do is you can turn the trade into a credit spread. By doing that, you would buy another put option on Apple at a lower strike price than the one that you've sold to turn it into a spread. By doing that, that will completely cap your risk. When you sell a naked put option, your risk is all the way to the stock dropping to zero. Apple could fall all the way to zero. You'd still have to buy it for $120 a share. So you have $120 per share of risk with selling a naked put. But you can repair that or replace it by turning it into a credit spread. So you've sold the 120 put. You can look to buy the 100 put at that point. You'd have a $20 maximum risk. You got the 120 that you sold and you buy the 100 put. That's a $20 cap on your risk, $20 per share. So you can always do that. And the thing is you'd want to try to keep that spread to an overall credit. Let's just say let's go to our option chain here in Interactive Brokers. And let's make sure we've got Apple here. Okay, so we've got the Apple chain. Here's the put options here. Let's just say we're looking at April 2021 put options. And let's just say you sold, let's take a look here. Let's say you sold the 110 puts for $3 per contract when Apple was still on its high. So it's currently worth about $2 per contract. Let's just say you sold it for $3 per contract before the drop. But now it's worth $2. You've got a little bit of a gain built up. You don't want to get out of the trade yet, but you're worried that Apple could keep falling. Well, if you want, you can go down and buy a $100 put option for about $0.85 a contract. Okay, by doing that, so you sold the 110 put for $3, now you're buying the 100 put for $0.85. So that's, you've got a $2.15 credit still built into the trade. You sold something for $3, you're buying something else for $0.85. So that's $2.15 credit that you still hold in the trade. But now you've capped your risk to $10 per share. So you sold the 110 puts, you've bought the 100 puts, that's $10 difference, that's $10 wide. So that means you've got $10 per share, maximum risk. If Apple craps out and goes to zero, you can't lose more than $10 per share minus the $2.15 credit that you have remaining in your trade. So that's the thing you can do, you can turn it into a credit spread. If you're worried about the stock dropping on you, you can buy a lower strike put option within the same month of the trade for the put option that you originally sold. So there's your second thing, you can turn it into a credit spread by buying a cheaper lower strike price put option in the same month and try to keep it to an overall credit. That way, if Apple goes back up in price and the whole spread, if everything expires out of the money, you'll retain that $2.15 overall credit. The other thing you can do, obviously, tip number three here, is just close out the trade and take the loss. If you've sold put options on stocks that are dubious and you don't really know anything about and the stock starts dropping, get out, just buy the option back. Most likely you have to buy it back for a loss, but the trade will be over and you won't have to worry about it anymore. You won't have to sweat it out anymore. Losses are part of trading. So if you don't like to trade anymore, the stock's going down, you just don't feel good about the stock. Buy back the option and take the loss. If the stock starts dropping very close to expiration, hey, if you buy the option back, you may still lock in a gain. All that time, the option was decaying in value. So you've got some gain built up. Buying it back, you may be able to salvage a small gain. So look to do that. The last thing is the preferred method, which is rolling the trade down and out. This is my number one repair strategy for fixing a short naked put option. I could have put this as the number one, but I wanted to show you the other choices first. But rolling the trade is the preferred method when you have sold a put option that's starting to go against you. So let's go back and take a look at the Apple trade here. So when Apple was at 145 near the highs, you sold a or someone sold $120 put. And now Apple's come off and this $120 put has gone up in value. And you're thinking, you know what, $120, now that Apple's come down there, I don't know if I want to buy it at $120 anymore. What can I do? Well, rolling the trade can help you not only lower your strike price, but it can still help you retain an overall credit in the trade. So let's take a look at how that works and see what happens. So let's just say, for example, you...let's go out to... So the $120 put for April expires in 41 days. The $120 put is worth about $5.05 per contract. Let's just say you sold that for $3 per contract and now it's worth $5.05. So you've got a $2.05 per contract paper loss built up. And you know what? You're not feeling comfortable with Apple at $120. You think it's going to keep going down. What can you do? Well, rolling the trade allows you to do that. What does that mean? Well, you would have to go out to a further expiration date and look for a lower strike put option than $120 that's trading for the same amount, roughly $5.05 a contract. So manual labor here, go to the next expiration date, which is in March, find a lower strike put option that's worth at least $5.05 per contract. Okay, so in May, we can have the $1.15 puts worth about $5.35 a contract. So that's a little bit more than what you'd have to pay back to buy the April option, right? And you're thinking, well, $115, that gives you $5, another $5 of downside cushion. Apple's at $121 right now. Now you don't have to buy the stock until it gets down to $115 per share. So let's go back to the chart. So your strike price is at $120. Now you've just lowered your risk in the trade by $5 per share. You wouldn't be on the hook to buy Apple until it falls to $115, if it ever falls to $115. So you've just lowered your risk in the trade by $5 and yet you're still going to retain the full value of the credit. Let's go back and look. So the April option, the $120 puts are worth, let's wait for our prices to populate here, about $505 a contract. So you'd have to buy this option back.  So you're buying back the 120 puts for $505 per contract and in May, you're going to sell a new put option for the $115 strike for roughly $5.35 per contract. So you've closed out the original. You're reselling a new one and even gaining a little bit more money. You're getting $5.35. You had to buy the other one back for $5.05. So you're getting an extra $0.30 credit and you've lowered your risk in the trade by $5. So if you think, well, $115, that's not enough wiggle room for me. I want to get an even lower strike price. Well, next thing you do is you go out to the next expiration date. Now you're looking at June. What put option can you sell for at least $5.05 per contract at a lower strike price? So now it looks like the $112.5 strike is worth $5.45 a contract. So now you can lower your risk in the trade by another $2.5 down to $112.5. Is that enough buffer for you? Is that enough cushion? Now you just keep going further out in expiration. Let's look at July here for a second. So the July, let's see which put options are worth at least. So now we are at the $110. These are worth about $5.40 per contract. Right in the middle looking for fair value between the bid and ask. It's worth $5.40 a contract. So now you're thinking, okay, $110, I could live with that. That'll lower your risk in the trade by $10. At first it was the $120. Now you don't have to potentially buy Apple until it gets down to $110. You just lowered your risk another $10 a share. Plus you're going to get even more money. You can get $5.40 for this one. So let's go back to the chart. Take a look. Okay. So Apple's around $121 in change. Now you're all the way down here. You're below the 200-day moving average. It could be a really good support area. So now you've potentially lowered your potential buy price of Apple to $110 per share now. So now you've just given yourself an extra $10 of downside buffer. But the only, I'm not going to call it a downside, the only other thing to that is now you've lengthened the trade out to July. So now you have to wait until July to see what happens with Apple. Your first trade was in April. That expires next month. And Apple could end up going back up and you'd be out of the trade next month. Now by selling the July $110, but now you have to wait it out until July to see what happens. You know, Apple could certainly go back up and everything will work out for you. But until that time, you don't know. So rolling the trade is all about giving yourself more downside buffer and lengthening the trade. Okay. So you have to make the trade up. If you want more downside, do you want to give yourself and how much money is each of these new options worth? So remember, the trick here is that when you roll the trade, you want to keep, try to keep an overall credit. And by that I mean, whatever you have to buy, your original put option back for, you want to resell the new put option for at least that same amount. You can retain the same amount of money in the trade, right? If you're buying something back for $5, try to resell the new put option for $5 as well. So you retain that credit. And the good thing is that you've lowered your risk in the trade by $10 in this case. You first traded the 120, now you've got the 110. So you've given yourself another $10 a buffer that if you do have to buy Apple, well now you can buy it for $10 cheaper than your original trade. So that's some of the things that you can do to help repair, fix, replace a naked put option that you sold in a down trending market. Rolling the trade is your best option. As long as you still feel comfortable with the stock, you know, Apple's a great stock. So you're thinking, you know what, I really like Apple. I just want to lower my potential buy in level. So you roll the trade and that's how you do it. So here you go. Here's your four, your four methods to what you can do when you have a naked put that you sold, that is currently going against you. Just remember, even though the put option is going up in value against you, you just have to remember, where is your buy in level? You know, if Apple finishes at $121 on expiration day in April if you held the original trade, the trade's going to expire worthless, right? Option values move up and down just like the stock does. But over time that option value is still decaying away. So just because Apple dropped and the put option went up in value, that put option value will still start to decay. If Apple stays flat and stays above $120, that option is going to expire worthless. So you have to live through a little pain at first. You know, you have to deal with a little stress to see where Apple eventually ends up. If Apple stays above $120, that put option will expire worthless. So you have to sweat it out for a little bit. If not, then you roll the trade, okay? You don't want to sweat it out anymore. You're getting too nervous. You roll the trade. So rolling the trade is your best method for helping repair replace a naked put option that you're concerned about. All right, so that's your little lesson today. Let's move on to our Saturday synopsis. Let's take a look at the charts, look at the indexes, see what happened this past week in the market and what may happen moving forward. For those of you that follow the market, you know that we had a pretty good down week, mostly for the NASDAQ. A lot of the tech stocks were getting hit pretty hard this week. I think the reasoning that most people are giving is that interest rates are starting to tick back up this past week because the economy, at least here in the U.S., seems to be getting better. People are worried about inflation. If inflation creeps in, the interest rates will have to be raised to counteract inflation. So people start to get nervous, and obviously the hottest stocks are the first ones to get sold off. So we've seen in the NASDAQ this week, those stocks got hit pretty hard. Let's take a look at the SPY, which is the exchange traded front for the SP500 and see what happened. Now the SP500 and the Dow industrials did better or lost less this week than the NASDAQ. So here's our little... This week we can see a pretty good down move. We traded well below the 50-day moving average on Thursday and Friday this week, but you can see where Friday ended up. Open this up a little more. The little dash mark on the right-hand side of the bar is up here. It finished above the 50-day moving average. Closing prices are very, very important in terms of looking at technical analysis, looking at stock charts. You always want to see where a chart or stock finishes for the day. I mean, it could trade all the way down here intraday during the day, but where it finishes is a very important indicator. And the SP500 finished above the 50-day moving average, which is a very, very good thing. We spent all this time down here and it powered higher by the end of the day, got back up above the 50-day moving average. 50-day still trending upwards, 20-day still trending upwards. Got a little curl at the top here, but for the most part still trending upwards and obviously the 200-day still trending upwards. So I'm feeling pretty good about the SP500. It finished above the 50-day, finished stronger, I should say, by the end of the week than where it had been earlier in the day. So that's a positive sign. Let's see if the 50-day can hold come Monday and then give it a move back up. Now, we've been talking about momentum. Obviously, the stock indexes have this bullish momentum and we've been looking at pullbacks to the 50-day moving average being the area that will help contain or support the uptrend. Now, obviously Thursday and Friday, we had a lot of movement below the 50-day moving average intraday during the day, but once again, finished above the 50-day moving average. So that's very important. Let's take a look at the Dow industrials. The Dow is actually pretty strong. Let me blow this out a little bit. So you can see here Thursday and Friday, these last two bars are the last two days worth of trading. Thursday and Friday this week only spent a little bit of time below the 50-day moving average, more on Thursday than Friday. And look at Friday, you can see the dash mark on the right side of the last bar finished above both the 50-day and the 20-day. So that's very positive for the Dow. The Dow is looking good. We've been talking how the dips have been contained by the 50-day or 20-day moving average. So the Dow still looks pretty good. Finished strong. I think that momentum can carry over to next week. So now let's take a look at the NASAC, the weakest of the three. And let's take a look here. Blow this up, pull it down a little bit so we can see better. Now, obviously, we had a huge move Wednesday, Thursday, Friday this week. These three bars right here, a lot of selling in the NASDAQ. Lots of selling well below the 50-day moving average. There's a lot of damage that's done here. As we talk about, the market takes the stairs up and then takes the elevator down. The down moves are always a lot faster and more furious than the up moves. That's just how the market works. Everybody's in for the long haul and when things start to get a little rocky, everybody jumps out at the same time. So that's why we call it the elevator down. There's a lot of damage here, but the good thing is that you can see the dash mark right here on the right side of the bar means it regained all of what it lost intraday and it recovered a lot of what was lost on Thursday. So that's a good sign for the NASDAQ. When it was trading down here around noon time yesterday, everybody's getting nervous, a lot of people are selling out and then things start to rally. That's what happens. Things just turn on a dime like that. So we had a good rally into the close end of the day, still well below the 50-day moving average. So the NASDAQ has some work to do. There's big moves like that. You will see a consolidation. You'll probably see some sideways trading. And we had three good days, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Three good days here have down moved. It has to digest that big sell-off. There's not going to be...  So it's going to have some back and forth. You're going to have some meandering. You're going to have some flatlining here. Moving sideways a little bit, just taking in, digesting the down move, and then hopefully we'll get the move back up. I still think the economies are starting to get better. Vaccines are rolling out from coronavirus. Interest rates are starting to move up a little bit, yes. But they're still extremely low. Do you want to put all your money back into sitting in a money market account that is still only paying 0.2% versus stocks which typically have a 7% to 10% return per year historically for the S&P 500. Companies are still making products. They're still having good earnings. People will still buy their stuff. So earnings are what drive stock prices. Yeah, we're going to have sell-offs talked about this last week. We're going to have sell-offs. But eventually the market will find its way back up again. It's scary while you're in it, yes. And if you have short-term trades on, you do have to follow your plan. I got ticked out of a couple trades this week on the big down move. It's just part of the process. And then when I see things bottoming and starting to move back up, I'll get back up again. That's just how it works. You take the good with the bad. But overall, we know the stock market goes up over time. You just have to learn to live with the sell-offs and manage your trades best as you can. Those look good. The NASX got some work to do. The Dow and S&P 500 a little bit stronger. Let's take a look at some individual stocks. We were just talking about Apple in our naked put example. Let's take a look at Apple and see what's happening. Apple has been down. It's below both the 50-day and 20-day. The 20-day has now crossed below the 50-day moving average. You don't really want to see crossovers like that. Apple, there's some damage that's been done to Apple. You can see it really hasn't gone anywhere in a while. It went up down sideways up. Now it's back down. It's back down right in the middle of this apex of the triangle from where it broke out. Apple is just now consolidating in this range here. I'm long Apple, but I'm long for the long haul. I'd like to see Apple really start to move itself higher again, but there's been some soft. There's been a little damage here. Apple will probably maybe even trade a little lower. Might even hit the 200-day moving average, but for me, I'm taking a long-term approach here. I know Apple will eventually go back up again, but if you're on short-term trades, if you're trying to buy call options on short-term expirations, it hasn't been easy for you because Apple is going down. My assessment is Apple will go up eventually in the long-run short-term. It looks like it's probably just going to meander here, especially with this crossover. I'd like to see Apple go up. If the rest of the market could find its footing, Apple will continue to go back up over time, but for now it looks like it wants to just kind of meander around here. Let's take a look at Amazon. Let's take a look at the most popular stocks, because that's what people like to hear about. Amazon had some selling this week, definitely. We're starting to see some movement here. It's been stuck in this wide channel, had the NAS pop below, up below the triangle pop below the 200-day moving average. This is very important. Falling below a 200-day moving average is a big deal. The only thing holding Amazon at this point is the lower bar of the channel. If the channel holds, Amazon will go back up. It should go back up. But the rest of the market itself, the general indexes have to be strong come Monday morning. If not, Amazon could drop through here, and we could probably see the selling accelerate. Good thing is that you can see ... Let's open this up a little. I'm going to go to the other side of the last bar here, finished near the highs. That's good. Rallied all the way back from the lows intraday. That's a good sign, but you've got to use this bottom of the channel as the last line of resort. The way that Amazon's been moving, most likely it's going to tick back higher. If you can get the indexes to tick back higher, Amazon should move up as well. This could be potentially ... These are no guarantees. If you're willing to step in a little, this could be a good bounce point. This is not a recommendation, but these are the things that you have to look for when you're looking at charts. Let's take a look at Tesla. Tesla got hit pretty good too, and it's on its way down. We've been drawing these triangles. First congestion here, second congestion here, and then last week we drew this little one. Tesla has fallen out and down below this most recent congestion pattern. We originally drew this one here, and he gave it a little time. If you had bought some longer-term straddles or put options, those should be paying off now, because Tesla has really fallen off the cliff here. It's fallen below both the 50-day and 20-day average curling over and crossed down below the 50-day. It hasn't touched the 200-day moving average yet. The good thing for Tesla is that on the RSI indicator, which is down here, it's getting to a sold-off level. 25 or below is considered oversold. I got the indicator set at 20, so if it falls below 20, that means it's really oversold. There's been some good damage that's been done to Tesla. It hasn't come back to the last breakout point yet, maybe $425 a share. But what we need is the overall market to get its footing, and then Tesla itself will tick back up, but it's come off a decent way. You know, it has to digest the down moves. It's not going to just all of a sudden rally back up to $900 in one day. It has to digest the move, so you'll get some more congestion here, most likely it's footing and hopefully it can move back up. But Tesla, some good damage over the last couple weeks. What else we got? Google? I think Google was strong this week. Yeah, Google's still doing alright. It didn't get hit like the other NASDAQ stocks. Google actually had it was up $63 a share yesterday, Friday, March 5th. So Google's looking pretty good. I do want to show you two stocks. Costco had earnings come out the other day. Good earnings too, but yet the stock sold off. Look how just this huge waterfall down. I mean, big move down. Costco, what's wrong with Costco? Everybody shops in Costco, great company. I mean, this is surprising to me, especially during the pandemic, these stores where people have to buy all their stuff from, Costco's one of those stores. It's hard for me to understand why there's so much selling involved here. Costco's come all the way back to really the breakout point from last March. We can sort of draw a little bit of a triangle pattern here to see what happened.  The biggest thing for me is here on the RSI indicator closed at 1806. That is well, well, well oversold. Falling below 20 is a well oversold stock. If I had any interest in Costco whatsoever and I may look for some action on Monday, I never like to try to fish here. I mean, you know, everyone likes to do it every once in a while, so I may try to take a small position. Costco really oversold, especially on the RSI doesn't necessarily mean it's going to bounce all of a sudden and go all the way back up. It just means the selling is probably overdone here. Let's put the let's put the let's put the volume on here just to see what the volume look like. So I don't typically look at volume as an indicator, but sometimes when there's huge, huge volume at an either a top or a bottom it could mean a turning point. So look at the volume spike yesterday on Costco. That this burst in volume could mean that was just everyone was just puking and getting out and that's the capitulation point. Okay. I mean the the average volume is down here, but yesterday huge volume on the huge down move. So that could that could be a signal that the selling is over in Costco. So, you know, just take that as you would it's not it's not a recommendation it's just something that I that I noticed. So Costco here I may look to step in by a little on Monday. Same thing with Walmart not as not as oversold as Costco, but Walmart's been getting hit too. Both averages 20 and 50 there are trending down. It's kind of like the waterfall sell off, but it's it's a little low on the RSA not an oversold territory. Let's take a look at let's take a look at the volume for Walmart. You know, there was no spike. So there's no capitulation yet Walmart could keep dropping. So I'm not as enthused about trying to bottom pick Walmart as I would be Costco. That's just me some of the indicators. This isn't as oversold as Costco and the volume didn't capitulate like Costco. So Walmart even though it's come down a decent ways, there could be more selling just, you know, based on what I'm seeing on the charts. What other stocks do we like to look at? Let's take a look at let's take a look at Twitter. Twitter has been doing pretty well except for this week. You know, it's come down made this nice new high and then kind of gave most of it back trying to close this gap here. So Twitter is off a little bit AMD we always like to take a look at AMD AMD still in this channel here tried to break below it but came back trading right on the 200 day moving average so AMD make a break time right here. I think it's going to bounce and possibly move back towards this down trending channel line. Still like AMD for the long run we've got puts that we've sold in our service on AMD, you know, well down here so we still have a lot of cushion AMD has definitely sold off in this down trending channel. So that is the move for now but probably is going to tick back up somewhere up here that's just the way it should trade finding support on the 200 day moving average AMD. What else we got let's look at Microsoft Microsoft same thing had the down move this week down back below the resistance line here hugging the 50 day moving average so Microsoft so doing okay didn't get hit as hard as all the others but still had a little bit of a sell off this week but still looking pretty decent. What other stocks do we like to take a look at PayPal we had looked at last week PayPal got hit to now below both the 20 day and 50 day had that cascading downward move just like the rest of the Nasdaq stocks I like PayPal for the long run we haven't done anything on PayPal yet but it is a possibility has come down here not oversold yet so we'll see if we need the overall general market indexes to move back up next week and we'll have all these other stocks going up. What else we got Oracle had a pretty massive up move yesterday over $4 a share Oracle hitting looks like all time highs let's take a quick look at Oracle all time yeah look at that all time highs looking good strong for Oracle I think that's about it that's about it most of the stocks that we like to take a look at GameStop we'll just take a look at that as well because that's still out there actually was up this week GameStop trading at $137 a share had the big up move had the big down move and then had the spike so now it's kind of congesting and now looks like it's breaking out to the upside again a little I don't know what's going on with GameStop I'm not trading it if I was doing anything maybe I'd sell some way way out of the money puts but I'm out for now play it as you will. Alright so that's it let's take a look at the SPY one more time get the last look here SPY good thing is that it finished above the 50 day moving average and we're hoping that on Monday these indexes continue where they left off and start to move higher so we can get back into this upward momentum so if you're gonna trade this week you know stay small look to see if the support is holding and just remember what we learned about repairing the naked put option sales okay so that's it for your Saturday synopsis let's take a quick look at our website you know the drill smartoptionseller.com talking all about selling put options that's what we do download your free put selling basics guide come to this page put selling basics put in your name and email address we'll send you a free copy learn all about how to sell put options our services tab we have two newsletters our smart option selling newsletters vertical spread trader we sell put option credit spreads like we talked about with the apple example you can trade credit spreads right off the bat as well and our one on one coaching if you need some help alright hope this has given you some value give me a thumbs up in the youtube channel here don't forget to subscribe if you are not subscribed yet hit that red subscribe button leave me a comment send me an email love hearing from you I will always answer today wishing everyone a great weekend and a great week ahead I'll see you next Saturday this is Lee Lowell signing off


A multifunctional self-assembled brain tumor on a chip model has been developed to screen features such as BBB crossing capabilities and apoptotic efficacy against GBM cells, allowing for more accurate selection of valid candidate drugs and nanomedicines. This article was authored by Attilio Marino, Matteo Buccaglini, Alessio Carmignani, and others.