I don't know what happened. I hope this works. I was quick trying to do the fix without having to reboot since I was having trouble earlier. I hope this sticks. So just briefly restart everything I was saying again. I'm going to talk today about technical analysis. And my name is Melissa Armo. For those of you that were here, and I just started talking and then I lost connection really quick, technical analysis is reading price action. So that's when I'm looking at what I'm choosing to take a trade. If you can predict where price is going to go in a stock or the overall market beforehand, then you can get in the trade and get the move in the stock or the ETF before it happens. For example, the market, the overall market is a great example because the market's been moving higher. And ever since the election last year in November 2016, the market has almost gone vertical straight up. If you had been long, the spy ETF or the QQQ's ETF, you would have made a lot of money. So how can you see those things in advance before they happen? So what I do is I read charts. So as I was saying, if you have any questions, you can email me at melissa at the stockswush.com or call me at 929-3200 gap. And also you can watch me on Fox. I'm on Fox News and FBN talking about stocks in the market. Anyways, you can make money using advanced technical analysis, but you have to have a foundation for what you're looking to do. So say for example, you look at a chart, Apple, Amazon, any chart, and you say, okay, the stock is in an uptrend. You still have to get a correct entry in it because if you get an entry in something at the wrong placement, even if you get the trend right, the overall trend correct, you may be down money before you're up, which isn't ideal if you're a trader.  Someone's mentioned about sound. Renee, can you hear me? Oh yes, I can hear you. If everyone else can hear me, can you guys just let us know in the questions box, type yes or y if you can hear. Pip just said about sound. I just reset everything when I had to log out and log back in, so I think it should be good. Okay, John said it's fine. Anyways, you have to know where to get in. So the entry is important. When you're looking at a chart to determine price, even if you get the overall direction right. So you say, well, this is a good long or this is a good short. And someone mentioned I do prefer to short, I do prefer to short. We're gonna talk about a short from yesterday. But either way, you can make money going longer short, but you gotta get the direction right and you have to get the entry right. And if you're a day trader, it's critical to get the entry right. So how do I do all of that? I'm looking at the charts and I'm using technical analysis. And that's how you make money. If you get in something before it moves in your direction with a good entry and in the right direction that you take it, that's how you'll make money in the market. So understanding really how to read price is so key in making money because you're not gonna make money in the market if you don't get in correct. And you're not gonna make any money at all actually if you're in the wrong direction either.  And many people do that and then they end up killing the trade and retaking it. And that's just not good at all anyways. So you've gotta set yourself apart from novice traders by really taking trading seriously. And I know everyone says they do take trading seriously, but serious means serious.  You're really gonna get serious about doing it. And I'm very serious about what I do. So I think that if you wanna become an expert in something you've gotta do your homework and you've gotta read the information in real time. And part of getting good at technical analysis also is studying charts outside of the days when you're actually live in a trade. It's easy to say when you look at a chart when you're in a trade, but studying things that happen after you're out, even if the market's open or the market could be flat, but looking at things when you're not actually invested in a trade, sometimes you see things you would never see that when you're in it live, okay? So becoming an expert in technical analysis is a vital ingredient to becoming successful as a professional trader investor. What a current company's value or worth is always reflected in the price right now. So I do not focus on fundamentals at all. Now that's not to say that you may not want to do that. You might want to look at fundamentals, but you can't ignore the technicals. And the technicals are really gonna tell you where something's going. If the technicals and fundamentals match up, then that's even better, okay? If that's something you like to look at. But it's not necessary because it's already built in there. Does that make sense? So price patterns and charts hold the key to making decisions ahead of time and in the moment to profit and profit substantially. And making money in the market involves making timely decisions, very important, okay? To get in something right in the right time based on what the price is telling you. Like I just was saying earlier, if you went along the market around that election time more little more than a year ago, what a great timing to actually go long, all right? So price supersedes everything, even fundamentals.  So you really gotta make time to trade and learn at a higher level if you wanna get good. And this doesn't mean you have to spend, 40 hours a week studying charts, but it does mean that you have to spend enough time studying charts until you get good that you don't have to spend a lot of time on it. I mean, I've been trading now for almost 10 years. I started out at the end of 2008. It's hard to believe it's almost 10 years. Next year is 2018. And at the beginning, I studied charts all the time. Seven days a week. When I was trading, when I wasn't trading, now I don't do that so much anymore, but I will look at stuff. I will sometimes look at stuff at night. I will sometimes look at stuff over the weekend. I do a lot of videos on YouTube if you wanna go there and subscribe. That helps me to go and look at things. I look at the market, you know? So it really does help any time that you spend outside of trading to study and get better. Now at the end of this lecture today after I talk about charts and technical analysis, I'm gonna talk about my class. And so many people say, well, there's so many places out there, Melissa. Why should I come and learn from you or your method? Which I have my own unique method to trade, which I'm gonna talk a little bit about today. The best reason I could say to come and learn from me is that I'm very passionate about what I do and I have a lot of knowledge about my system. So I have a lot of knowledge about looking at charts. I'm very good at reading price and I'm very passionate. So it's a powerful combination to learn from someone that is passionate about the subject that you're wanting to learn about and get better at and also that has a lot of knowledge. And that's one of the reasons why I've started talking on television. Because my passion has come across to open up many, many doors and opportunities for me because I'm very passionate about talking about stocks in the market. And so that's a powerful combination because when you're learning something and you're new and you don't understand everything, then you're gonna have things that you don't get. You're gonna need that extra motivation and that push and having someone that's very passionate about chart reading, which is what I do, the time make my training decisions will help you learn it faster and better. Now let's talk about what is technical analysis. It's really the methods used to analyze securities and make investment decisions. And it falls into two categories which I briefly talked about. Fundamental analysis and technical analysis, okay? Fundamental analysis involves analyzing the characteristics of a company in order to estimate its value. So you could read everything they have to say about all the earnings reports when they come out or you can just look at the stock chart after the earnings report come out and find out. For example, ALTA reports tonight. ULTA, that's the stock ticker symbol for tonight. I'm gonna be watching that. So that is earnings tonight. You could read everything your report says or you could just look at the chart and make a decision determining where it's going, okay? Technical analysis takes a completely different approach. It doesn't care one bit about the value of a company or a commodity. Technicians sometimes called chartists are only interested in price movements in the market and that's me, okay? And that's what I actually focus on, all right?  If you can do that, you won't be more successful. What do I mean? Meaning strength or weakness, okay? So if you can read that something's really strong, you wanna buy it. If you read that something's really weak, you wanna short it.  When you're looking at charts and you're brand new to reading charts, it's like learning a new language. Sometimes you may not understand everything you're seeing. I use Japanese candlesticks on my charts, which I'll show you. And I have a few moving averages I'll go over to. But all in all, it is very much like learning a new language if you don't understand everything that's happening. And sometimes everything is happening very quickly. And again, like I said, I'm a day trader, so I'm looking at one minute charts. When I'm getting in my trains as a day trader, I'm getting into the one minute chart. And I'm looking at the daily chart to analyze the direction that I'm taking something, long or short. So what do I do? I trade gaps. Now, if you've never heard what a gap is before we're gonna go over that, but that's the strategy I train. But I have a method that I created to determine which way to take the gap. And all to tonight, like I said, has earnings. And typically stocks will gap when they have earnings. They don't have to, but I'm saying most times they do. You don't know if the stock's gonna gap up or down until it actually gaps, all right? So I'm not predicting the gap with my system. I'm predicting the direction the stock will move after it gaps, all right? Makes sense? Understanding how to read price is so critical though to create substantial gains in the market. I really don't think you can make money consistently over any long-term period if you can't read price right. And that's why, like I was saying, looking at the price and the charts is so, so important. You have to look at what you wanna look at in the chart to take the trade. So what is important? It's price. When you're looking to short, or when I'm looking to short, okay? What am I looking for? I'm looking for panic, all right? I'm looking to short panic action. I'm looking to short selling action. So if you get in a stock, I'm just gonna use an example. Say the stock price is trading at 10 bucks. If the stock is moving down and it's selling off and you short it at 10, you know if it's going lower that no matter where it goes, 975, 950, 940, whatever. If you short it at 10 and it's dropping, it's going down, you're gonna make money no matter where it goes. As long as the stock price continues to drop. And the best, best shorts, and this is what I'm saying, the best shorts in the world are what? Our shorting panic, okay? Panic action. What about longs? What are the best longs to do? You wanna buy something that is crazy, crazy strong that people do not want to sell where there is no kind of panic, at least not a panic to sell it, okay? Now, I wanna show this chart here of Amazon because this is the strongest thing right now in the market and such a great example of strength. I mean, the market itself is a good example of strength but Amazon's even better because it's moving ahead faster than the market. Amazon had a beautiful gorgeous scat back in October.  So this is a daily chart here of Amazon. A gap is when the stock closes at one price at night, at four o'clock, that's when the US market closes and opens the next day at a different price. So here you have down here, this is the night of the earnings, it was a Thursday night. The stock closed right over here around 970 something, all right? Then in the morning, the stock gapped up where? Around 1070, I'm sure whatever the exact number was. The stock gapped up a huge amount from four o'clock on Thursday until the next day at 930 in the morning of Friday when the market opened. So it was like a hundred point move almost. So this is showing a lot of what? Strength. So I wait for the gap and then if I see the gap and can predict the stock's gonna get bought which was the case here, you can go long the stock as a swing trade, an option trader, a day trade.  This is a gap up, all right? Just like you can't short every gap down. In fact, Amazon had a gap up a couple of days ago.  This was just a couple of days ago. On Monday, I think it was the 2027. So you can't go long every up gap. This one was good. This one was not good to go long, okay? So the idea is, if you can predict where this gap's gonna go up or down, you can make money taking the trade in the right direction beforehand. And in this case here, this was a good long. And I called an option on it because this is a very expensive stock. So one of the other ways that you can trade and you can day trade options, meaning you can get in and get out the same day even if you take it out for a week or two weeks or whatever, you can get in and out the same day if you're up money and you have a big move in something which was the case in here. Although this did continue the next day, all right? So you wanna buy strength when you're looking to go long and you want to short panic or selling action when you're looking to short, but you gotta read it in the chart. So I created my own method almost 10 years ago in 2008, which I called the Golden Gap 26 point rating system. So that sounds like a lot, but it actually is a lot of things to look at, but that's what helps me get the accuracy rate so defined. So I'm trying to get as many positive trades as I can any day that I trade. And I do sit down to look to trade five days a week. Now that doesn't mean I'm gonna get a good trade five days a week. Sometimes something doesn't meet my criteria either long or short, and I do prefer to short. Now sometimes people ask me, well, why do you prefer to short because stocks tend to drop faster than they tend to rally, that's why. So you will have faster moves in shorts, but it doesn't mean you can't make money going long. You just saw the Amazon, I just talked about the market, you can make money in either direction. You've gotta get the momentum right though when you're doing it. So getting back to what I was saying here, what is a gap? Because this is fundamentally a very important part of what I do. A stock gap, so the opening price today is different from the closing price of the previous days trading. A gap is a break in the price action from one day to the next. So again, my 26 point system is not predicting the gap to happen. I don't know where Ulta will gap tonight, but I'm telling you right now it's gonna. All right, Ulta will gap tonight on the earnings, and I think it's gonna have a significant move. I do not know if the move is up or down, nor do I know if I'm gonna do anything with it at all. I don't know if it's gonna be a good long if it gaps up. I don't know if it's gonna be a good short if it gaps down, but looking at the chart and the price levels, I can tell if it goes to a certain number, it is gonna be a good long, and if it goes a certain number down and gaps down, it's gonna be a good short. And that's the beauty of having my system. And anybody that trades should have a system. By the way, if you're here today listening and you trade the market or do futures anything, anything at all, swing trading even, and you don't have a system that you follow, you must, must get one before 2018, make that your goal because you cannot change what you're doing every single solitary day. And by the way, if I get in something and it doesn't work as a short and I take a stop, all right, I'm not flipping it and going long it. The trade is off and then I have one loss for the day, all right? It's not a good idea to flip flop back and forth. You either have 100% conviction of what you're doing in that direction of the price based on the chart or you don't. You can't change your mind back and forth and I think a lot of traders do that and it really, you never gain a high level of conviction in any direction than for the chart. And I say it's best to always find something that you believe in and have a lot of conviction in to trade because you're risking your money.  Now let's talk here about this one. This was a really good gap from yesterday. This was ADSK. So this stock wasn't an uptrend, actually it still isn't an uptrend, but it looked a lot better a couple days ago. So the stock was up here closed at 130-ish, all right? So today is Thursday, yesterday was Wednesday. So this was Tuesday night. Tuesday night it had earnings, then the stock gap down and open in the morning on Wednesday morning around 114, okay? So clearly you see that the stock was a different price from the close to the open. So you get up in the morning or you could have seen it at night, which I saw it at night because it came out in the evening after four, and you can prep. You can prep ahead of time and rate the gap at night if you want, but I always usually do it in the morning. Anyways, you look at this and you rate it if you take my class and learn my system to determine, hey, is this a short, which it was, or is it a long, okay? This could have held into the prior support in here where it was gapping to. So if you take it across, take it across over here, this has actually got up, okay, that happened back in October in this chart. Again, I'm a chart reader, I'm a chartist, we're looking at, this is technical analysis, 101 here, we're looking at price. The stock had a move here right from this original level where it opened on Wednesday and rallied.  It had a nice move, you know, 15 points plus. So this was a good long here for a longer-term trade or even as a day trade on the day it was green. This day here, it could have held on this prior support and rally, it did not, it was a short, okay, and it was a really good short and it went to something what I call the dream target. Dream target was down in here, low of the data to being 106 something. So do you see how it would have been very challenging for you to make any money going along this stock? The wrong thing to do was go long, the right thing to do was to go short and how do you know that or how would I know that because I have a point system where I'm looking at the daily chart to determine it. But you don't want in this trades like this because this move of this stock was Jimongous, okay? High up in here was 114 and the low of the data I just got done saying was 106. To get a stock that moves like this, even at this price point, it's huge. You only need to do one trade like this a week to make a living trading, but you gotta get it right and you gotta get it in the right direction, okay? Now I coined my system, the point rating system golden gap because to me, it is like finding gold in the market. It's something that has a high ads of working. You never know 100% if a train's gonna work or not until after you take it and after you're out and the profit's booked and it's in your account and it's done, all right? But every trade I go in and I take, I firmly believe it's going to work but I still use stops. I put in hard stops or limit order stops that protect me so that if the trade does not work and it goes over that price number on the chart then I'm out because I look at the price level then on the chart and I say, I don't wanna be in this, it's not right, it's not gonna work if it goes over that level and that's something else you'd learn in my class too. But anyways, what I'm looking for is really what institutions are doing with the stocks and the gap. Are they buying the gap or are they selling the gap? Because golden gaps are made by professional traders, institutions, big banks, investors who are taking a big shares in something or they're selling big shares in something and creating the gap in the first place. So they're creating the gap and then I'm looking for them to follow it through on the day, all right? And that's how I narrow it down. I like to try to trade one ticker symbol a day. That is really my goal, one a day. That's not to say that I don't ever do two, it's really rare I do three but one a day is what I try to focus on because like I said, you only need one good trade like that ADSK. So I'm looking for gaps that have a high chance of having big volume, momentum. Down in here is the volume bar. You can see it, again, look at this. This is the rest of the volume going back since August and you can see this here. So not only did this have incredible volume it was the biggest bar in the chart. All right, so you don't want to miss days like that. Any questions so far here? Anyways, gaps are created with institutional money. That's what makes the gap in the first place. And so the gaps that happen and play out in stocks are formed by institutional money. You would never have something like Amazon move up overnight, 100 points at that price point if it wasn't getting bopping institutions. You've got to play the directional bias right in the chart of what the price is telling you that you know the money's gonna keep going, that it's gonna push and flow through it just like the market's doing, okay? And people are trying to short this market and people have been making attempts to short the highs in the market and failing every time. And the market's been continuing to make new highs, all right? You can't do that. You can't go against what's really happening of who's in charge of the price. So gaps are an event and they create a sense of urgency. That's an action that's being forced by participants of the stock. They're either forcing the buying action or forcing the panicky selling action which is what I like. But that's why trading gaps are so incredibly powerful. Trading gaps is a powerful and profitable way to trade because you're trading on the side of power money, okay? And that's what you want to do. Kenneth's saying what's the reason for the dive on it? The reason isn't that important. I will tell you it was earnings, okay? But it doesn't necessarily matter. If the stock had dropped down and we're gonna look at that chart a couple more times, the ADSK. But if that stock had done that gap for news or whatever, it wouldn't have mattered because it did it and that's all that matters. Do you know what I'm saying? So it happened. You can research the reason. If that helps you, wanna do the trade. But the bottom line is it was real anyways because you see that it lost 15 points whatever overnight. I mean, that was real and it had volume. It had volume in the pre-market too, all right? So when you're looking at something, you're trying to focus on number one, your main goal, which is to make money. Okay, so number two, how are you gonna do that? You have to be able to predict where somebody's gonna go before it does it. I mean, the long and short of it is that's a simple thing that everyone should be thinking every day when they wanna trade. A, I wanna make money. B, I have to be able to predict where somebody's gonna go before it does it accurately. And you've gotta be able to do it. If you are chasing stuff after the fact, you will have crappy entries. And nine times out of 10, you will be down before the stock goes, even if you get the overall direction right. And it's very difficult to trade with conviction that way. And not only that, it's also very, very difficult for anyone to take any significant monetary risk because say you wanna go into a trade, you wanna risk a thousand bucks.  That's not ideal. That's not the way that I trade. That's not what I'm looking for, okay? You really, really have to be focusing on getting it into the move, getting it right before it goes, shh, and it sells off, or getting it right before it lifts and rallies. You wanna take it right when the money's gonna go, whew. And it goes right into it, okay? And I'm saying on the live day, this isn't the pre and post market. Peter's asking how do you find the stocks that gap? Oh my gosh, so you could find stocks that gap anywhere, anywhere in the world. I mean, anywhere online. You can go to Yahoo Finance and print out the earnings calendar from now to the end of the year. Look at every stock that has earnings tonight. I just told you all to do this. Typically stocks that have earnings gap, okay? As far as finding gaps in the live day, your platform should have a top 20 list in both the Nasdaq and New York Stock exchanges. So 20 picks up and 20 picks down. So you got 40 picks. So you would have those.  You'd have to pay for a scanner, but I think you get enough from the free stuff that you can find out places. Earnings list and on your platform, which it should be included for free if you pay for a platform, that you should have that list. But it is very easy to find gaps and it's not as easy to actually determine which one you're gonna do. Of all the hundreds and thousands of stocks in the day, how would you know to find ADSK that that would move and have a big move like that and work? That's the beauty and the genius in what I do. But remember, I've been doing this for 10 years. But that's why you come and learn from me, like I said. Anyways, getting back to this. Here's the ADSK. So how do you make money using technical analysis? You gotta take the trade. You gotta get in. You gotta get in before the stock sells off, all right? Again, on the live day, I'm focusing to trade between 9.30 and 10. That's the main time section that I'm looking to get into the trade and preferably out. And it doesn't mean that I won't hold something longer than that, which occasionally I do, but, or if it's still going, I'll stay with it. If it's still dropping and I'm shorted, I won't kill it right at 10. But I'm watching, watching, watching as I'm getting into the 10 o'clock period, okay? And I do figure out targets. And when that's something else you learn from me too, but long and short of it is, dream target was 106 for that, for that ADSK. But the real target was 108, which by the way, it went to when it went to in the morning. So anyways, let's look at this. So this was the morning of the ADSK. So it was a one minute chart, 9.30, 9.31. Again, technical analysis, what are you looking at? First of all, you rate the gap in the morning, which is what I do, or you do it at night and you determine, okay, this is a good short today. It rates for the 26 point system. So I'm gonna look to short it if it sets up. Again, you don't know if it's gonna set up or not. You gotta watch it, you gotta wait. Anyways, this open dropped, fell. Rallying back, short entry was here. Boom, you put the stop. Now, look what it did right after.  So this is what you wanna get in this thing here, okay, before this happens. This is all the panic that's coming into it. And again, the reason is not so significant, but this was an earnings gap. Here was the whole thing. So this, again, was a short. This is the daily, this is the one minute. You take it in there. So how do you make money?  Now just listen to what I'm saying.  Okay, you can't see me right now. I'm not on TV this second, but if you could, you'd see it, it's like a ceiling, okay? The stock is like making a ceiling and the stock has a head, like you have a head and it doesn't wanna crack its skull. So it doesn't go over the ceiling of the price because it doesn't wanna die.  So it makes the resistance at that price level. And what happens is it's, again, gaps are created by institutional money. Pressure is on the stock, holding it down. This stock would not have done this unless it had selling pressure on it. So here's the ceiling and here's the head of the stock and it doesn't wanna die so it doesn't go over the ceiling. So instead it falls, okay? So you are shorting the resistance and you are taking the trade because you believe that the stock is gonna keep going down and hold that resistance. And your object is to make money. You gotta get the direction right. You say this is a short. You believe the price is gonna drop underneath the ceiling because it doesn't wanna die and the pressure's on. That's the best way I can describe it. I'm trying to describe this as the best possible way. The pressure is on the stock, an enormous amount of pressure. This stock dropped almost $10. Not quite, but almost eight bucks, whatever it was. I think it even broke 106. So whatever the exact high and low was, it was a crazy move for even a stock like this. So the selling pressure was on. The panic was coming in. It wasn't over when the gap opened. It sold off all day almost, okay? So you wanna take advantage of an opportunity when you see something like that. So anyways, here was the entry. Entry was 111.90. I'm gonna go over three risk units, beginner, intermediate, and advanced. But the entry's the same. It's how much money you wanna actually take of your own personal risk in your account to do the trade. So entry was 111.90. Stop, 112.55. So you put the stop in. If it had gone over there, you would have lost. Time of the day for the entry, 944. Again, looking to get in between 930 and 10 because you wanna get in before it sells off. Share quantity, 250. Again, this is a beginner risk, which is fine, all right? And this was an expensive stock anyways. Risk, 162.50. So if you had lost in the trade, which you wouldn't have, but if you had, you would have lost 162 bucks or thereabouts. Exit though, because it worked, was at the target 108. It went past this. But again, you gotta have areas you're looking at. I'd say no PE targets, but actually you could have traded this stock all day. I always am looking to get in and out of the morning. 95% of the days I trade, but this did keep going, all right? But you could have taken a second trade in there, even a third. Anyways, your profit would have been huge. 975 bucks you would have made if you had risked only 162. This is a nice way to trade. This is a beautiful, beautiful gap. It worked, all right? In fact, I think it's selling off even now still today. If you did an intermediate risk, same entry, same stop, same time of the day. Share quantity more, 800, risk 520 bucks. Exit same, 108, profit $3,120. So there again, some people don't make $3,000 a week trading or even at their job. So in one day, you could have made this in a half an hour and that is the reason to date trade. The reason to date trade is that you can make a lot of money doing this and you can make a living doing this and you don't have to work a lot of hours. What people find so challenging though about day trading is that there's so much information out there. They do not know what to focus on, but I'm telling you, you have to focus on getting the direction right and you have to focus on reading price and you have to focus on who is in control of what's happening with that price. And that's what I've done. I've created a method to do that, but that's the only way you're ever gonna be able to sustain yourself trading for a long time and you gotta take it seriously. You just have to. And now this is an advanced risk. And again, I've been trading for 10 years. You don't have to risk over $1,000 to trade, but an advanced risk of 2,500 shares, you have to have the buying power to take it. This was a little bit of expensive, although most stocks I would say that I watch are between $20, $25 and 65, but there are occasionally some that are look expensive like this one. Same entry, same exit, you could have made almost 10 grand. And this could have been your whole month, but you would have had to risk 1,625 bucks to do it and you would have had to be okay with the loss if it wouldn't have worked because sometimes I take a trade and they don't work. But I'd say about eight out of every 10 trades I take works. So I have about an 80% win ratio, but you gotta be okay with the two of the loose of out of every 10. So bottom line is your goal as a trader is to be able to predict selling and you short it or buying and you go long it. And how do I do that? I have a rating system I use and I'm looking at gaps. There's tons of places to find gaps. That's not the hard part. The hard part is narrowing it, narrowing it, narrowing it down to that just one that's just gonna pop and explode up that you go long or it's gonna sell off like crazy like this did actually too. So if you'd wanna come and learn from me, what would you do? One, follow the system, you rate the gap. Two, wait for it to set up, easy. If it doesn't set up, you don't take it. I never got to get in the pre-market. Three, take the trade, put in the stock with fixed risk. Gonna call the trades live in my trading room. Four, hold to the target or if you don't want to hold it to the target just hold it until you and as soon as you're up. Just get out as soon as you're green, get out. And you get out with profit. Let me just see here some questions. I gotta watch my time though because I had some computer issues. What's a margin account value to do with the advanced risk? Well, that's what I'm saying. It's a wide range of stock prices that I trade. So I will do things that could be over $100 price point and that's just the reality. I'm not saying every day but even something like Walmart's in the 90s, 97, 98 wherever that's at today. If you wanna be able to do those more expensive ones then yes, we've gotta have the margin to do it. But you can open up a proprietary day trading account instead of a retail account. Retail accounts only give four to one. Prop accounts give 10 to one and some places give 20 to one. So I look around for that. It's not like I'm doing expensive stocks like that though every day but if there's a good gap there I mean, I'm gonna do it. So that's something where I would shop around for different types of accounts that you can get the maximum margin or BP that you can. But even if you did that in the intermediate risk Ken, you could have made, even if you could have only taken a couple hundred shares, 500 shares, 600 shares, 800 shares. You should be able to have the buying power to take that kind of intermediate position and you would have made over three grand. Good questions. Anyways, the point I'm trying to make though all along today that is you gotta be serious about what you're doing. Think like a professional and that's what I do and I use a checklist and it works. So the purpose of my checklist is to find stocks that have a high probability of direction of bias for the entire day. Big moves on the day, early confirmation of my bias, meaning the direction I'm gonna take it between nine, 30 and 10 and then precise entries with follow through on a good risk to reward which is important too and actually that ADSK had a great risk to reward. So one of the reasons that my system works for so many people and I have a successful business now is because I have people that come to me that wanna do everything. They wanna trade options, they don't wanna worry about margin which you don't have to worry about margin if you have an options account. You could have done a put, you could have just bought a put in the ADSK, all right. Also people are using it for swing trading. So swing trading, options, day trading. Personally, I like the day trading the best just because of the fact that you can get in and out so fast but you can get in and out of options fast too. You just gotta watch them and you gotta make sure you throw your order out in between the ask and the bid. So it's a little bit different way to take them but you can use my system for anything that you wanted, any method that you wanna use to trade. It's just the idea, you have to make it work and fit for you. If you can't afford to have a margin encounter and don't wanna go to a prop place then you can do it with options where you don't have to worry about the margin.  It's the best thing you could do is do options for things that are expensive like that and Google is another one too. Anyways, here's the market. I thought this was an interesting clip this is back from beginning of 2016. And so this is like basically a two-year glimpse here of just snap chatted here of the spy of the market rally.  We failed to go lower on that gap down. So we started out the year, this is again two years ago almost now, January 2016 we started with a gap down. We could have collapsed but we didn't. So the market not only did not collapse from that gap down that started off the year, the early 2016 in January, not only did we not collapse, we have gone almost vertical. So not only did we not collapse, failed to follow through in the gap down here. This is the election last year, November 2016. If you went long the bullish gap up in the spiders, look, I'm gonna take this across over here. Low in here was around two, I don't know, 14 or whatever it was and look where we are, over 260. This is an incredible move for the market to have in one year's time. So you see this how powerful trading gaps is, this would have been your entry. All right, this is showing who's in control. Somebody's asking me a couple questions. Do I search mainly for the larger gaps to trade? What do you mean larger? You mean size-wise? No, not necessarily. How do you predict the gap is going to take place? I can predict it's gonna take place but I'm telling you most gaps happen on earnings. I don't predict the gaps to take place, I predict where they're gonna go after the gap. I just scan four gaps. So I don't predict the gap in my system, I predict where it's gonna go after it gaps but I'm telling you a lot of things gap on earnings. I don't focus on large gaps necessarily, no. For a beginner to trade, how do you educational structure for a beginner? Would you recommend starting with a paper trading account? How will I know whether the gap rate is gonna be filled or not? Well, that's what the points tell you. My points tell you that the gap is gonna continue in the direction it's going. So I'm looking to rate the gap if it's gapping up, I'm looking to see if it rates per the 26-point system to go long and the stock gap's down like ADSK. I'm rating it to determine if it's gonna continue in the direction the gap is, which is down, if it's gonna be a short. If it rates per my system, it's gonna continue in the direction that the gap is going. If it doesn't, it doesn't. So as far as the beginner question though, you can trade with a demo if you want but I wouldn't trade for more than a month as a demo because you gotta get the feel of trading live money and you can take small size and then at least you're getting the feel of it. But, you know, your goal is really to make money. So I wouldn't trade on a demo for too long, all right? Anyway, seeing these gaps really helps me have a lot of conviction to do it because otherwise it would be trend trading and we wouldn't never get the risk to reward that some of these gaps pay and some of them have really good risk to reward. It doesn't mean I'm holding every trade to the target but sometimes the gaps just are so good and that ADSK was one of them you just know and Amazon was another one too. So playing gaps helps give me an edge because they have momentum, they have volatility, I'm going with the people that are in control of the institutions because institutions are not necessarily in every stock every day. You have institutions that are long, for example, Amazon but they're not necessarily taking positions on or off every single day. So you don't get the same play in something even like Amazon every day. Even stocks that trade that are stocks you know of that are wildly known companies and that's why trading gaps really does give me an edge. Let me just see if there's another question here I think I missed. Somebody said they can't hear me, I don't know what to say about that. I'm sorry, sometimes stocks open in the gap up but then breaks yesterday's low how to handle that. Sometimes stocks gap up and then they break yesterday's low. I don't understand what your question is, you'd have to give me a chart to look at. Give me an example, give me a ticker symbol, I'll pull one up. Can you use a gap system for forex or forex options? Gaps only happen once a week in forex because it only has one closed and open. So you'd only be able to do it once a week. Okay, let me get caught up here and then I'll answer the rest of the questions. And if the person that asked about the chart example if you want to give me a ticker symbol for that. Anyways, I'm looking at riskiness. It's a percentage of return based on an R concept. I did not create this but I'm looking to risk pretty much the same amount every time I take a trade. And you should do that too. And that's why you stops because I don't want to have an unlimited risk. So people say well trading is risky in a sense it is because you're risking money and you could lose it but in a sense it's not because you protect yourself. It's like the insurance you put the stop in. A lot of people don't trade with stops. I have always traded with stops and I always will unless I decide to run a hedge fund. The bottom line is that I want to know I have a fixed risk. It doesn't mean sometimes I don't get filled a little bit through it but I know I'm gonna get out. It's not unlimited. So you take an amount, $500, $300, $1,000, $200 whatever you say and that determines the quantity of the share size that you take and the difference between the entry and the stop. And you don't know what that is until it sets up or when I call it in the room, all right. But that's where you have to figure yourself out are you in the beginner? Are you in the intermediate? Are you in the advanced? Now this Walmart was an option trade I call it was a really, really good one too. The stock apt up. This was in earnings. You could have gone long on as a day trade or you could have done as an option both. Again, a little pricey here but you could have done the option, all right. So the option trade in this was what? One to eight. So 1.8 risks to reward. So if you had risks, for example, $525 in the Walmart you could have made what? $975 in the day. So as a day trade, you could have done the same trade as a day trade. You could have done as an option trade. Again, that's the beauty. I called the 100 calls of would you believe that the stock, I called it out of the week would you believe the stock almost went up there? High of the day on that day was 99 something. So I read in the morning when I saw the gap and I rated the gap that the stock was gonna make a move like that that it would go to that number. It would go to it. And that's what did it headed straight for that number. When you're doing an option trade, you play it into the momentum and that's when you're doing day trades too. When I trade, I'm playing it into the momentum here. And that's how you make money. I mean, that's the only way you can make money. And the ADSK was a great one. It was six times. Oh, but I think I'm up with time. Sorry. Listen, if anybody has any questions you can email me. Here's the information about my class. It's December 16th and 17th. Email me at melissathestockswitch.com. I'm running a special for a one year free in the trading room if you sign up for this class through next Friday. Sorry, I know I ran over. If you have questions, email me. Sorry. All right. Well, thank you.


And defense has been a, you know, a continuing topic so far early in the season.  I mean, we've been hitting shots all year for like shooting over 50% or 47%. And we still didn't play defense. So I want to say just because we were making shots, we played defense tonight. I just thought that the sense of urgency was there. Guys know it was in respect of this team and we knew they can get out on us, which they did there a couple of spurts throughout the game, but we stayed poised. You know, in the league now, teams can run off, hit a couple of threes, time the threes and get back into the game. So I think we did a good job of keeping them in front of us. And we was able to get a win. Kevin, you pass Vince, all-time leading scorers today and did the math. If you play 70 games at this pace, you'll end up top 10 all-time leading scorers. Just what does it mean for you to even be in that list? It means a lot. I mean, I love to score the ball. I mean, that's the name of the game. That's why we play basketball as the put points on the board. And to shift the game and be mentioned with the grace. And, you know, so to pass somebody, I looked up two as a kid. My first NBA jersey was Vince Carter's when he was in Toronto.  And I'm grateful that for all my teammates along the way to help me throughout these years, my coaches as well, everybody just chipped in and helped make me the player that I am today. So I just got to keep going.


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Welcome. Welcome to Transformation Talk. Tairu Asan, I'm the director of Brightline and as you know, Brightline is a project management institute initiative dedicated to helping organizations bridge the gap between strategy design and strategy delivery. We are really privileged today to have with us David Franklin and David is the chief technology and operations officer at Empower and Vision. Brightline actually has built a solid partnership with Empower over the past few years and Empower actually believes that there is a better way. So it is an organization that empowers other organizations to effectively deliver their strategies and see results happen. Now let's turn and talk a little bit more about David before setting the stage. David is one of the brightest and also most creative IT professional that you will ever meet. He's a disruptor. We're talking about IT and we add disruption. So it is the kind where you may want to have actually you want to have him on your team. He is always looking to challenge existing ideas, systems and technologies and always also striving to develop something new, more efficient, more meaningful. We wouldn't want that. Of course he's begun as a self-made IT programmer and software engineer and he later extended his business and management experience with a Bachelor of Science in Management from upper Iowa University and also professional development certificate in executive leadership from the University of Wisconsin Madison. Welcome David. We are really, really happy to have you with us. Good morning. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. Glad to be here. Wonderful. And our topic today, as you've seen, it is about modern strategy execution, digitizing your strategy. And as we know, the world is our world actually is continuing to digitally transform and that involves the strategic plans. And as we're doing that, what we see for many organizations, these plans are either lost in spreadsheets or sometimes they're just sitting collecting dust on the binders and you may all have maybe experienced it or have seen it. People design, but the design actually doesn't become reality and the plan is just collecting dust. And the questions that we beg or the questions that we're wondering and that will be what we'll try to explore, how can you effectively execute your strategy and to see results happen, not just talk, not just plans, but actually that the plans becomes reality and they are not just stuck in manuals. Of course, as you're looking at it, there's also a call for us to prioritize to digitize strategy delivery so that you, your teams can successfully implement as well as measure because measurement is important, measuring the goals and the objectives. So in the talk that we'll have today, which will be more like a conversation with David, we'll discuss the common barriers that you may encounter when you try to digitize your strategy and what solutions you can use to overcome these challenges, these barriers, not only now, but also in the future. David will share with us some tips and also what tools we can use to evaluate the technologies that we have, that we may want to have for strategy implementation. So as I mentioned, it would be a conversation. We want it to be an engaging conversation. So this is why we'll be asking you if you have questions and so on to use the Q&A sections, if you have comment, to use the comment section, but we want you to get the best out of David and to get the information that you may need so that we can move away from organization designing, organization thinking, but organization not delivering, not getting the results. So let's get it started. David, just as a way of getting things started here, how has your career and technology led you to your current passion and expertise in modern strategy execution? Yes, good question. I think for me it's really been a confluence of different events. As you mentioned in the very flattering introduction, I started my world or started my career in the programming space, developing solutions that solve business problems, often custom in-house solutions. And I saw very early on as an individual contributor, as a developer, developing those solutions that those solutions were solving business problems, but they weren't necessarily helping the business transform. They were processing transactions. They were fighting fires. They were dealing with day-to-day needs. And you become acutely aware of how those everyday fires can ultimately impact long-term plans, because we always used to look at it from the standpoint of, are we working on planned work or projects? Or are we working on unplanned work that we weren't expecting to do, and is that unplanned work getting in our way? Along the way, I got fortunate enough to be able to elevate into a position of leadership. And at that time, I was really responsible for thinking of technology. I usually think of it as a business within a business. Our customers are, of course, the business is customers because we're delivering solutions that enable capabilities for the business. But really, our customers are the individual users and the associates from that business as well. And I realized that I needed to align the strategy that IT had in order to make sure that we deliver the capabilities that the business needed, not just after it asked for them, but actually starting to anticipate the technologies that they would need based on the new capabilities that were available in the world. We needed to align and deliver those technologies in a way so that the business strategy could succeed. And I was fortunate to work with an organization that really valued strategic planning and really valued getting the voice and understanding and hearing the voice of everybody throughout the organization on that strategy and helping to contribute it wasn't the typical stereotype of the top down, somebody descending down the mountaintop with the strategy carved in stone and saying, here it is, here's what we're going to do. They actually cared about what we had to say, the people who are boots on the ground executing every day. And between those things, the problem solving, the understanding that you had to focus on the long-term versus just here and now that ultimately led into our developing event power and vision. And I think it's just a tremendous tool. All these tools are really great for organizations to be able to use and start to digitize something that has historically been underserved when it comes to digitization. Excellent. And as we move on, of course, we want to hear from the audience here because we at Brightline have been saying strategy design is as important as strategy delivery. We'd like to hear in a poll that we just released now from participants, what is the importance that they're giving to it in terms of resource allocation. So I'll ask my colleague to show the poll so that we can hear from the audience. So we'll ask you to select one answer from the poll there. So we are asking basically, my organization invests the same or more resources into a strategy delivery as it does into strategy design. So if you could answer given the different choices or it's moving, this is great. Shout out to all people answering. We have over 70% participation. So this is exciting. It's stabilizing. 75% participation. 13 seconds to go. 80%. This is great. This is great. So I think the data is coming out here. David, like we're seeing about 48% are saying that they actually agree. So which is meaning that the people are putting the money where the talk is. And we have about 30, 35% that are saying either they disagree or strongly disagree. And then 5% who may not know the answer to that question. This will serve us and this is an important data to keep in mind. It will serve us as a segue as we move as we move to the other part of the discussion. Now, of course, I mean, people talk, but making sure that people work with talk is not always something that you see. And I would like to hear from you when you think about that guiding principle that strategy design is as important as strategy delivery. How does empower and vision align with that guiding principle and regard the importance of actually not just talk, but actually do? Yeah. So I mean, we really have valued the partnership that we've had with Brightline over the last few years. And I think we think we will always talk about a few things around our organization. We talk about communication, we talk about alignment, we talk about transparency as three things you really need to have from the top to the bottom in the organization to successfully deliver a strategy that you've designed. And certainly, we think that those align very well with the pillars that Brightline has put out, accountability, mobilizing the right resources, leveraging insights that you learn, deciding, being bold, causing action, favoring execution or favoring decisions rather and owning the decisions that you make. But obviously the most important is really acknowledging that strategy delivery is just as important as design. And what we're resonated with us is a study that I believe Brightline released in 2019 that indicated that every 20 seconds a million dollars was wasted globally due to poor elimination of strategy, which is a staggering sum when you really think about it. And it points to a couple things. And strategy is hard. It's hard to focus on that when there's near-term issues that you have to deal with. But we basically have tried to take through and create our system where it allows and enables people to do those hard things easier to be able to adapt to react to the input that you're seeing and not maybe bury that strategy up on a scale. If you think about it, if you talk about it, if you're acting about it and reacting to it on a daily basis, that will result in that delivery that is so important. That statistic actually is something I like because when we were saying every 20 seconds 1 million is wasted and we were extrapolating to a year, it was about 2 trillion. And when we were looking at 2 trillion, that was more than the GDP of Brazil. It's more, I mean, just about the GDP of Brazil, but more than the GDP of Canada or the GDP of Australia. And when we're looking in Africa, for example, it was more than the GDP of the seventh largest economy. So I mean, it just seemed to us that it was unacceptable and organization needed to be something to address it. Now, we're talking about modern strategy execution. How is that that notion of modern strategy execution connected with a guiding principle around strategy delivery? I think first we need to ask ourselves, would you rather have a really great strategy that you don't execute well or a good strategy that you execute very well? And I think most people would choose to execute very well, you know, just a good strategy. And I think that's very hard to do in today's world without digitization, especially as we've seen over the last few years where our workforce is just becoming more dispersed. We're starting to see disruptions come into the industry from technical giants that are out there, the Amazons and the Googles of the world. And we need to be able to respond and make decisions really very quickly as business leaders with a high degree of certainty. And I think the old way, you know, what we saw a lot of times was there'd be a lot of effort put into developing that strategy. We've talked about it a little earlier in this webinar even, but that everybody comes back to the office that gets lost on a skeleton, a binder in an Excel spreadsheet, it gets stuck. And maybe you look at it every quarter and we ask ourselves, how are we doing against our strategy? We're looking at metrics, which are obviously very important to an organization. But we're not, at that point in time, arming ourselves with the information that we can have to be able to make decisions fast enough to respond to the changing world around us. Because every quarter, by the time you're looking at that information, it's a lagging indicator. It's already happened. There was a decision or an opportunity to make a decision that you couldn't realize because you weren't looking at it on the regular. So when we talk about modern strategy execution, I think it all starts with taking your strategy and elevating it up into some way, some type of platform, platform or some way or paper form where you can make that visible to everybody and consistently evaluate how you are doing against that strategy. Look at leading indicators and leading metrics that support the objectives that you have. Understand how that ties into all the resources you have available. And ultimately, again, make those decisions faster with a greater degree of certainty that helps your business achieve all that it's potentially capable of instead of leaving things on the table. Awesome. And when we talked about that, one thing that comes to my mind really is one of the guiding principles that says check ongoing initiatives before committing to new one. Because when you don't have that visibility and when you don't look at how things are performing, you have that propension of just wanting to start new. Because the new is what is kind of exciting. But we're all right. Sometimes you don't want to even look at it, right? Sometimes, I mean, you have a dashboard that is shown that everything is green. But when in reality, you have umbers or you have all set of reds and creating that or digitizing the strategy and making it also visible, accessible and also live, right? That created context where you can react because no longer the cycle where you do one year, right?  And we're seeing the change that are happening there. Now, I think the business case for digitizing the strategy is a business case that people would make and people could see value in it. What I would like to hear from you as you've been in the trench and you've been doing that, what are some of the common barrier that you're seeing when it comes to digitizing strategy? Yeah, I think we've seen, there's a lot of things that come into play. We've seen four things that have seemed to stand out amongst some of the others and I'll list them off and then I'll go back and explain a little bit more what I mean. But the four areas that potentially are barriers are certainly in the leadership area of an organization, the culture of an organization, whether or not their culture is aligned to allow strategy implementation to really occur, whether or not there is a person or person who are really responsible for the governance of that strategy of an organization. So is there a champion and ultimately perceived, perceived a cost or the perceived time that it may take to do something that has historically not been a cost center within an organization? So from a leadership standpoint, you really need to recognize the importance of making sure that you create the space within your organization to be successful. A lot of leaders, it's funny how much money we'll spend, you mentioned always working on the new before committing to or always wanting to do new things before finishing up on the old initiative. Amazing how much money we want to spend and put into all those new ideas while not necessarily focused on the things that we're already started. Realizing that those probably would, it's money lost or time that's lost. And if you don't have the culture where you allow your team to contribute, then it's going to be very difficult to be successful within a strategy as it is.  Great. Now, of course, you've listed them and people will say, David, we know it or David, we sing that. I mean, in my organization, leadership is a challenge or in my organization, the governance is a challenge or in my organization, actually, every resource allocation is a challenge or I mean the culture. But what people also want is how do I tackle them? How do I, what tips I can use, what approach I can use so that I could actually go through these challenges and deliver their strategies. So maybe there are four that you listed, there may be more, but for these four, maybe you can take two or four and say what exactly you would expect from a culture perspective or what exactly you would expect from a leadership perspective. Yeah, that's a good point. So from a leadership perspective, perhaps the first thing, obviously, is recognize the importance of the behaviors that you model every day and how you talk about what you care about. You have to lead the effort to communicate strategy and you have to lead the effort to make sure that everyone understands from the top of the organization all the way down how the work that they do ultimately supports the organization's strategy. Does the worker on the line who's installing the widgets or turning the wrenches, do they understand that the work that they do, how that contributes to the objectives of their team, to the objectives of their department and ultimately to the objectives of the strategy or are they just there to collect a paycheck and do what they need to do, push that button and get the piece moved on. So you have to make sure that you're communicating that all the way down to the organization. So there's some ownership stakes that everybody feels so that they can feel empowered that they're important because those are often the most important workers that you have. I would say listening is also another key characteristic as a leader in order to create that culture. You have to listen and you have to be willing to hear other opinions and hear what people who might be closer to the problem have to say about it. And don't expect everything to be communicated up to you. A lot of leaders I've talked to a lot of people I've known in the past have really been expecting a report out. They always want to report out from everybody. Tell me how things are going. But you need to tell them how things are going. Keep people informed. If communication has to be a two-way street. From a cultural standpoint, some of those same leadership and the cultural problems kind of cross each other in terms of solutions. But certainly from a culture you can help shift behaviors. You can recognize successes and make sure that those are public that people can see. You can talk about failures in a constructive way and learn from them and determine what we can do to defend those in the future and make collaboration and make those discussions safe to have throughout your organization. And I think cost is probably the last of it. But champions, I talked about carving out that role, really dedicate some time and some space for somebody within your organization to help follow up on the strategic initiatives that you're executing. Because if your eyes aren't on it all the time, if there's not somebody at least who's paying attention, then it's easy to forget about it. Put it on the back burner and get distracted with something else. So you have to be purposeful about governance. That role has to be important. They're probably going to be somebody who is not have direct authority over everybody in the organization, but they're certainly going to have to have influence to let people know when they might be falling behind on a task or when something hasn't been updated in a while. But carving out that role within the organization of somebody or a group that is responsible for strategy delivery is really crucial, I believe. Excellent. And I just want to maybe double click on the leadership. Because of course, as you were mentioning, sometimes the leaders tend to be sitting in the ivory tower and not necessarily having a view regarding what is going on. And I like the point that you mentioned, I mean, collecting information, asking information, but because the leaders sometimes would get the individual information. So at least at the end, telling the bigger picture so that everybody, there is that transparency and so on. But too often the leaders feel like they need to get all the answers as well, or they need to provide all the answers. And sometimes just acknowledging that I don't know and I will find out or I'll go and find where I can get that answer would be quite interesting. Now, if we go to the culture part, the culture part, you will hear Peter Drucker say culture is strategy for breakfast. And we added that also culture with the structure within the organizations. Are there cultural elements as you digitizing the strategy? Are there cultural elements there that are also more conducive for strategy to happen? I heard you talking about the openness, but is there something beyond that? Yeah, that's a good question. I think, so obviously openness starts with it, but we talk about collaboration nowadays and a willingness to maybe share ownership. Sometimes in the past in my career, I've seen managers of teams or departments that are very focused on credit, maybe taking credit for the success of what's happening or maybe being very protective of their area and wanting to make sure that nobody else kind of messes with me. And so it's not, I would say that that's really important culturally too, is making sure that you as everybody who's a manager or director or leader within your organization is collaborative with each other and not trying to guard their own kingdom or be an empire builder. They have to do and collaborate openly and honestly with each other and ultimately share the credit of the success with everybody who has a hand in it. It's interesting you mentioned a lot of leaders needing to be able to provide the answers. I have found very specifically through my career that the more higher I get within an organization, the less answers I feel like I really know. And I have to rely on my team who has those answers and you have to be willing to do that and admit that I suppose right up front that you're not somebody who has every answer. Great. And on the resource part, we were saying dedicate and mobilize the right resources. And that one is something that I find quite interesting because I mean the organizations we go in, we have our retreat. It seemed like we want to conquer the world. And then you come back and then the resource allocation is not as efficient. Let's say we say we want to do this and then we're not willing to invest in it. And then we say this is priority, but then you say the initiative is a priority, but you're not giving it the resources. You're kind of starving it. And without that, I mean without the resources things will not happen. I'm seeing a comment from Chandra Muhabir. He's saying psychological safety is important. So basically creating that safe environment. And then let's move on to the next one then. Of course, we're talking about technology. And this one, for someone who is starting, for someone who maybe is going for the first time through the digitalization, digitalization of the strategy and so on, is there. Sometimes I don't necessarily like that word checklist, but maybe a prompt, if I could, for the lack of a better word checklist, where people could look at which features, what features of your organization should consider when researching strategy execution technology. So when you're looking for technology that you may use, what should we should you be looking at or looking for? Yeah, that's a great question. I think that I think that one of the things we want to make sure is when you're looking for technology for strategy execution or strategy delivery is what's that solution built with strategy delivery in mind. We've seen a lot of tools that have come into the public consciousness recently or in recent years that are what I would consider more of a task management tool. It's not necessarily designed to connect the activity that those tasks are achieving to an overall strategy. And sometimes we're looking at the wrong tools in that standpoint. So just look and make sure that it was built for strategy, that it was built to connect those day-to-day tasks to the overall organization's mission and vision. Is it straightforward and easy to use? Because when you introduce technology into an organization, one of the first things after you talk about how much does it cost is how easy it is to use and how are people actually going to leverage the platform. So definitely look for ease of use and design for any platform that you choose to introduce your people. Can you effectively execute your strategy in 30 minutes or less per day, for example, if you're using the platform or is it really going to take a lot of time for people to learn something new? Visibility is key because the software gives you a high level view in real time, which is sometimes an overused term real time. But can you see updates as they happen? Can you see the metrics that get updated as they happen? Can you see a view where that all rolls up to your overall strategy, giving you that one vision of truth? Does it provide leading indicators that are a heat map of your overall strategy and help you know without spending a lot of time deep diving into every single area, just to let you know at a glance where things are in the red, for example, and where you need to focus your attention and your resources in the near term to fix something that might be going off track. You know, software is important. Of course, we think the technology company, but you also would want to look for and determine whether or not the organization you're working with has the comprehensive support services to make sure that they can be your partner throughout your journey. Are they giving you software and an online guide and saying, you know, go nuts, good luck, you know, hopefully you figure out how to use it, or are they willing to partner with you along the way and make sure that you have every resource that you need to be successful? And does it align people for cross functional collaboration on that, that living plan? Because once you start to execute something, I forget who was the stroke will figure that it, but you know, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. You know, does it allow you to make changes or once you put it in, are you stuck? So you want to be able to change very easily and adapt and be flexible. So I would say that that's a big key focus area as well. Absolutely. And actually, they go on to say after say no plan survives first contact with the enemy and then they say the first thing you must do is to plan.  We're getting questions coming from the Q&A. So I encourage people to continue to ask. I will start taking the questions. But before going to the first one on the adoption part, because you were saying you need to look at the ease of use and so on. For so many technology, David, the challenge is not necessarily the technology. The challenge is people using the technology. I was at the web summit last year and there was an organization presenting and they said 84 percent of digital transformations, the ones that were failing, for 84 percent, it was due to the lack of adoption. Meaning the solution is brought in, but the employees and sometimes it could be even the leaders are not using it. How in their pros that you use, you kind of soften it so that actually from a get go, you have that, at least people are owning it and using it. Yeah, I think that it starts out with, I mean, that's a good point. I mean, it does start out with being easy to use. It's got to fill value right off the bat. So somebody has to understand why they should use a tool and what they're going to get from it. How is it going to make them more successful and make the organization more successful? And so it kind of goes along with that comprehensive services statement that I meant. What we do is we try to not only teach people how to use the tool, but we teach them why. When can you use it and how can you use it to improve your meeting? How can you use it? Yeah, so for example. Great, great. Let's go to a question by Nadia. Nadia says there is a lot of talk about strategy design and execution in a practical sense, but not so much about the actual practical practice too and don't of actual strategies like digitization, example, data availability, onboarding, tool fatigue, integration, et cetera, et cetera. It looks like Nadia has had a lot of experience with that. What are the practical things necessary to digitize strategy? Well, I think you want to know where, you know, as a business, you need to know where your focus areas need to be. Keep it simple. Don't try to boil the ocean. Might be one thing I would say.  What does success look like? Define that. But how are you going to measure it? Where is the measurement data going to come from? You know, any tool is only as good as the data that gets into it. Of course, a lot of tools are going to have ability to integrate with other transactional systems where that data might come from, which is great. But if you don't know upfront not only what your target goal is and what you're, how you're going to measure it, then that wouldn't, wouldn't lead to success in implementing that tool or being able to actually digitize your strategy because you're going to have information which is not either accurate or misleading. Excellent. So let's move on and let bring Brittany in, Brittany Ray. And the question here is, can we start small with digitizing strategy? Is it easy to scale solutions across our organization as we grow? Yeah, that's great. I mean, a lot of times we'll see people do that. They'll start with a department that might be a little bit more, not necessarily trying to, again, put the idea of not boiling the ocean, start with a department that can implement a new way to practice strategy implementation in that department, realize some success and then use that department's lessons learned either in adoption or in culture or in governance and then roll that out to the broader organization. It's definitely, definitely a great way to start out with that process instead of trying to get everybody involved. Once find the coalition of the willing and make sure that they have the time that they can dedicate to it and improve it out first. Excellent. And we get one question from Marcus, Marcus Finch-Skal. He said, employee and stakeholder are the key for any transformation. The Brightland Transformation Compass entails inside out employee transformation, a set of tools to make the transformation personal for your employee to connect the aspiration to the North Star and to your customers. The question is how did you implement this important component and could you give examples? So basically, if you take the Brightland Transformation Compass, there are five blocks and one of the blocks is about inside out employee transformation. So do you have any insight to share if you ever use it? The best example I can think of for something like this is not so much in the delivery of the strategy, but in the initial design, making sure that you get the involvement of many or the involvement of all depending on the size of your organization. The business, the leaders of the business, the executive team is going to have some ideas on the direction that they want to go and the ultimate goals. But as we've talked about previously today, they're not going to necessarily have all the answers. So involving as many people within the leadership team as possible to say, to see the goals of the business and say to them, okay, you know where we need to go, what do you need? What resources do you need? How are we going to get there? What does your department look like? Maybe what do your people look like? What are the goals that they have that would help contribute not only to their personal growth and development, but ultimately making that strategy successful as well. So if you start to involve everybody within the organization up front, I think that becomes much easier to make sure that that inside-out turn transformation can occur. And I just want to call out also that in the compass itself, toward the end of the compass, we give two examples of a company who have done that. We give the example with Santa Clara Medical Center. And we also give the example of a very signed organization that have used, I mean, the principle that I'm the transformation compass and applying it. We also, for people, because we were questioning about the practical path as well, we did some, what about 10 case studies of organizations and some of them are Saudi telecom company, I mean, still case. You have also the American Red Cross, you have a civil children. We did a few examples where we were showing practically what organizations have done. Because, of course, I'm a firm believer that there is, sometimes you come into talk, there is the talk, this is good, this is what you need to do, but sometimes people also want these positive examples, or sometimes even the learnings from the failures so that organization can learn and be better at it. And one of the examples of still case, for example, they did have what they call strategy gems, meaning that they got period during the year where everybody within the organization discussed the strategy. Everybody kind of, again, any challenge that they have, any question that they have, any way they can enhance and improve and so on. So people feel really engaged. It's not just the organization say, okay, we're going here, but it's also bringing the people with them, seeing what are their aspiration of the individuals and then creating the conduct that will allow the organization to deliver it. Because I'm a firm believer at the perspective that if you take care of your employees, if you do take care of them, really, but take off your business and they'll take off your organization and they'll help you actually get the return that you're looking for. And it could be a financial return, but it could also be social return and so on. So the impact that you're trying to drive. So very, very timely questions and great point about Marcus, really appreciate that. Now, I know, I mean, we can take more questions as well if the department have questions. Let look at maybe next steps, because we are in the workshop where we are in the talk today and people may wonder what happened next, right? So the question for you, David, is how do you bring the idea of modern strategy execution back to your organizations?  Because one thing that I see some organizations, especially the known, some that may claim not to be native IT organizations, digital organizations may have challenges. So how do people take it back? And so that people can start taking action and see the benefit. I think I think the first, especially if you're in an organization that maybe those who answered the poll early on about that they didn't think their organization dedicated is not as many resources to deliver as they did the development, the strategy design. You know, I think the first thing is to start asking some some questions of yourself as a leadership team, you know, what what do you do every day or what are you doing today to influence tomorrow? Are we as an organization doing what we said we were going to do? Are we evaluating how that's going? Are we responding to and changing based on that evaluation and how frequently does that occur? So some self introspection and some analysis might be a good first step to lead towards ultimately deciding what sort of changes do you want to make within your organization to ultimately take advantage of the opportunity to be more successful. If you were 10% more effective in a specific business line, what does that mean to your organization? Does it mean 10% more revenue? Does it mean 10% less cost? You know, start defining some areas that if you were looking at things in a different way, what potential results are out there? What are you leaving on the table? And ultimately, small steps, small incremental steps towards that process will get you where you need to go because success typically breeds success. Excellent. We have a one last question and that question is coming from Marcus. And I'll try I'll try something that I'm trying to experiment to see if it will work now. Are we able to bring Marcus live or Marcus, are you able to maybe come live and share your question? I can read it as well, but just checking with my my team here if we could let Marcus ask the question directly. It is a test here. So if it doesn't work, I'll just read the question. Sure, I'll bring him up. Okay, Marcus, can she speak now? Okay, Marcus said to read. Okay, good. So let's let's move on. The question that Marcus had was to what extent do you involve your customers in your transformation journey? I think that's for the way I would look at that is we want to be a resource to our customers to help them with their transformation journey. Certainly, we can share our own experiences to our customers to be able to help them be more successful. But ultimately, when we want to implement our process or when we help our customers implement our platform, or when we help our customers think about how to better activate their strategy within their organization, we want to get to know you because every customer is unique. We want to get to know the things that are important to your organization, the challenges that you've had and collaboratively together, we can come up with a way to help you as a customer on the transformation journey, which is the most impactful for your organization. Really, there's no two organizations that are alike that will also have similar challenges and similar problems. But we want to make sure that again, we're a resource to our customers to help them through that process. Wonderful. And I mean, this is just great. I'll just show one example in terms of practical one also as part of the Santa Clara Medical Center case that is a future in the Brightland Transformation Compass. They were trying to see how they can improve patient flow for patients coming in and how they can improve patient flow. And they did in terms of track patients and try to see where were the bottleneck, where were the challenge. And they soon found that one of the challenge to facilitate patient flow is when the patient occurred, where do they go after? So let's say we got the treatment, but where do we go? And they've soon found out that many of the patients actually didn't have a place where to go. So then for them, it was better to stay as opposed to go. So what they did then is looking at downstream, trying to find places where they can actually help or places where they can bring people after they've done the treatment is done. So that was quite insightful in terms of them following the full journey to understand where the challenges are, where the pain point are, and try to address them. They also look at in adjacent industry. They did look at the airline industry, you know, when you would see planes coming to the gate and leaving the gate and so on. So they were using it elsewhere as a mechanism to help them improve flow in the hospital. Last but not least, they also look at hotels, you know, the hotel change rooms and cleaning rooms and so on. So they use that to also information where the practices in the hotel to actually help them here. David, thank you so much for taking the time to provide us these insights. And thank you also to the participants for the engagement. I mean, we had about 90% of people who answered the poll. And we are really looking forward to continue to engage our participants, the audience regarding the importance of not just thinking, but actually also doing and driving the result. And the importance also for the strategy that we have, what we can do to digitize them and make us getting real tight data on which we can act. And I think you've said this stage, you made the case for it. And I hope more and more organizations do do embark on it. I'll give you the closing word if you have any final thoughts to share with the audience. But big thank you to everyone. Thank you, Tairu. I just want to say I really appreciate you having me on today.  And I wish you all the best of luck on your own strategy journey. Excellent. Thank you. And take care, everyone. Have a good one.


These are a couple of plots showing some information about human use of energy and economy. Use of energy per person per year is on the bottom, zero, not using any, over to using a huge amount, and this amount is about a hundred times more energy used outside the person than inside. And what you'll notice is this is economic activity, how big the economy is, how many dollars per person per year, and poor people don't use much energy and rich people use a lot of energy. Now you might first think that that means that rich people are just wasteful, but what you see above is how much energy is needed to generate a dollar of economic activity and there just isn't much relationship there. So it's not that rich people are wasting more energy, they get as much activity out of a barrel of oil as poor people do, they just generate way more economy and so you use more energy when you're rich basically.