She sent me for a bio was, what's the difference between a novice trader and an experienced trader? Well, Melissa almost says an experienced trader knows that having advanced technical skills can make a huge difference in making or losing money, and it ultimately comes down to a full comprehension of price and how to utilize the reading of the price for profit. Are you with us, Melissa? Yes, I am. Can you hear me? I can see your screen. Now we need to unmute. Muted. They're unmuted. How about now? Can you hear me? Yes. Welcome to the webinar. Thank you for coming. Thank you for having me, Sherry. I hope everyone's doing well out there and staying safe wherever you happen to be. And today, yeah, I'm going to talk about gaps. I'm going to talk about price. I'm going to talk about trading. And I'm also going to talk about making money, which is everyone's favorite topic and even volatility, because right now the market rallied and now we're falling. And it's a very significant week for the market for two reasons. One, Microsoft reports tonight and two, Amazon reports tomorrow night. And both of these things could affect the market. We didn't have any follow through in the spy in the last 24 hours higher. And we got very close to getting up over the level of resistance and back to new highs. So this will be interesting to see if we can do it this week. There are longs that are trapped. There are people short this market betting that it's lower. So it's a very good time to be trading right now. If in fact, you know what to do. So what do I do? I read gaps and I read price action in gaps and I own the stocks. Wish I started the company 10 years ago. And I've been trading since 2008. If you have questions, you can email me at unless at the stockswush.com or you can ask me here. In fact, let me make sure if I could see if there's any questions in the chat. Let me just see where it is. Okay, I do see the chat here now. And if anybody has any questions, you can just plop them in the room and I want to answer them as we go along today. So volatility is something that if you know how to play it, you can make money on. And so I'm looking for the volatility that's happening in the gap. What is a gap? The gap is a difference between the close and the open. The US stock market closes every day at four o'clock and opens the next day at 9 30am Eastern time, five days a week. Okay, so I'm looking for that trading action that happens in the post market and the pre-market period because there are people that trade that I don't trade that, but I watch that level of trading. Another earnings that's out tonight that you're going to see post market trading in is Tesla. That's a big watch for tonight. Although I don't think that that's really going to be affecting the market. But getting back to what I was saying, I'm looking for opportunity as an active trader. I'm always looking for opportunity and volatility creates opportunity if in fact you know how to play it and it can really get you out of a rut. You could be going for a while pretty much scouting, making five cents here, 10 cents here, 25 cents here, and not really getting any big moves. The benefit of volatility is that you can get big moves. The idea is to spot it first and then play it in the right direction and how do I do that? I do that by seeing the gap. So for example, I'm not in Microsoft, but it reports tonight. It is going to gap. I don't know if it gaps up or if it gaps down, but it is going to gap because it has earnings and it's going to move. So once I see that, I have a system that I rate it to determine if I'm going to go long or shorted tomorrow, for example. And again, tells us the other one that's out tonight too. So what creates volatility? The volatility that we as traders want to play and make money on, well, there's several things. Could be news events, could be, and we've had a lot of these this year, particularly with COVID, could be earnings like I'm looking for in some of the things out tonight. So that's what happens. Something happens that's unexpected that turns the stock or the market, for example, in an unexpected direction. The idea is being able to spot it before it actually moves. And how do I do that? I do that by seeing it in the gap. Okay. Now, what am I looking for in the gap? I'm looking for power money. I'm looking for institutional money, big money, big professional traders, hedge funds, large traders. I'm looking to see what they are doing with their positions. Are they buying? Are they selling? Are they shorting? Okay. So I'm looking to spot institutional money in the gap, not retail money in gaps. Very often that money is incorrect. And that's one of the reasons why many, many traders lose. Okay. So sometimes I may see something that an institutional money is doing in a stock, take a position, be down, actually be down in the position before it goes, before I'm up, and then it goes. That happens sometimes when I do option straights. Okay. The previous rep was talking about taking overnight trades and having margin calls. I never put myself in that position why if I do an overnight, I'm in an option. What is an option? An option has a fixed risk. You pay the cost. The most that you can lose at an option is the cost of the trade. If you take one contract and it costs a dollar, that's all you're going to lose. You can't lose any more than that. Okay. So I don't do swing trades on margin overnight. And the day trades that we do are equity trades on margin, but we're flat by four o'clock every day. The fact that people take trades overnight and people take swing trades overnight and they take them on margin, and they do get margin calls is one of the other reasons why sometimes the gaps that I happen to play on go so well because people are upside down from a gap that happens in the morning. Again, could be a gap up, could be a gap down, and then the broker forces them or exits the trade and they have a margin call where they have to put up money. So if you're wanting to be conservative, how do you do that when you're trading to be, I call it like the insurance, you put in a stop. So you have a limit owner stop if you day trade and the stop is essentially what the cost of the option is if you do an option trade. Okay. And again, if anybody has any questions, you can plop them, pop them in the rim in the chat. So I look for institutional money in the gap. And that's what I do. So if you're here, maybe you're here to learn a little bit about more what I do, or you need a system to trade, which I think is very important, a system or strategy, and you're looking for something to make money on a regular basis. This is a big problem for traders. They are all over the place. They'll go long, they'll go short, they'll do trend trades. They will do all kinds of different things with different indicators. Okay. I don't use any fancy, dancy indicators in my trading. It's really just reading the price action in the candlesticks, which I look at Japanese candlesticks. And my method has about an 80% win ratio. All right. So I'm looking for institutional money, and then I'm capturing those moves in a small time period in on the debt. If I'm day trading, if I'm doing an option, I might do an option for a day trade, or I might take an option where I hold it for a few days. Okay. I'm usually looking for 50 to 100% return on investment, but I'm always looking for institutional money. And institutional money is in charge. It's in charge of the market and stocks at all times. Even if you think it's not there, it is. Okay. So a big flow of money going in a certain direction is what moves the market, stocks, and creates momentum. And this, again, was back to the volatility part of it. That's how you're making money as a trader, where you can short 500 shares as something, get a dollar drop, and make $500 in five, 10 minutes. That is what I would call momentum, for example. Okay. We did snap today. Snap drop, snap gap down, snap was a short. You could have done it as a put, but actually it was a better day trade, where you would have done it today on margin. But anyways, I'm looking for stocks and gaps that create momentum and sense the trend in charts with what? Institutional money. When you're looking for institutional money, you're really reading the side of the power in a stock. You want to be in the side of the power in order for you to make money trading. And that's how it's going to be a lot easier for you as one individual to make money. Okay. Cause you're never going to move a stock either up or down, no position size that you could take, whatever do that. Institutional money is in charge of the market and stocks at all times. And I can't stress that enough. And people, people very often don't understand what I mean when, when I show this in a chart, and we're going to talk about some charts here today. But becoming a successful trader and investor requires becoming a specialist in defining where the institutions are buying or selling a stock. Learning advanced technical analysis is required. And this is what I focus on. So it's chart reading. It's price action. That's what technical analysis is. It's past price data that I'm looking at to determine future price data. I'm reading price action in charts. That's it. I'm not going to read the earnings reports or look at the fundamentals of Tesla or Microsoft or Amazon when the earnings come out this week. I'm going to see what happens in the price action to make my trading decisions, whether I'm going to go long or short it. Okay. So I don't look at fundamentals. If you like fundamentals and that backs up, you're reading that the technicals fine, but you got to be very careful because the technicals, what's happening right now in the price, super seeing the fundamentals. Okay. I remember we're not long, long-term investors as active traders. As an active trader, you're in, you're out. You're in, you're out. I call it chunking it out. You're taking a trade, you're pulling money out of the market. You're booking it. You're using your money to take another trade. You're pulling the money out of the market. You're booking it. Okay. Or if the trade loses, you're killing it. Okay. Comprehending how to redefine a trade with this power, this institutional power will have a huge positive impact on your profitability as a trader. So elevate yourself, your trading and your profits to a higher level of consistency and success by learning how to read the footprints of institutions trading in the market. And again, this is a very interesting time right now considering what the market's been doing. I mean, you know, you have a lot of longs in the market, but you have a lot of these other indices that are not matching up. The Dow or the diamonds looks right now very different than the QQQs. Qs look different than the spy. The banks and the financials are part of the spy and that's been one of the drags on the spy this year, 2020. So if you learn how to read the footprints of big position players before the momentum occurs, you could take the position in the right direction and get out after the move happens for profit. Okay. But you have to understand how to trade this side of power and you need to know how to find it. It is very important to find it because that power has the ability to pay you. And not only that, the market has the ability to pay you. It's just that many people don't know what to do. It really does have the ability to pay you. And in these times right now where people are working from home, you know, it's a great time to jump into day trading because if you're working from home, you also can trade at the same time when you may not be able to if you were back at the office or back at your normal job. So, you know, it's a good time to get involved and get into it this year, 2020 with the way people are working from home. So knowing how to read what institutional money looks like is essential to becoming a successful trader and you can win big trading on this side of power. So, I say focus on one thing. I typically like to do one stock a day, one trade a day. Okay. But I also focus on one strategy, which is only gaps. I'm not doing a million different things. Okay. I called my strategy golden gaps because it's like finding gold in the market because I'm looking for one thing that's going to have a particular move in one direction and I never flip-flop it. But again, for example, we did the snap today. Snap gap down, snap rate of goods, snap was a short. So, this was something that you could have played as a day trade and been out in the first hour of the day. It was a gap. Again, what is a gap? A stock gaps from the opening price today is different than the closing price of yesterday's trading. A gap is a break in price action from one day to the next. Simple. Okay. That's what it is. So, here was an example of a gap last week in Netflix and actually Netflix gap down today as well. Okay. And I called a put in this, in this too. So, here's the Netflix. Again, what is a gap? This is a daily chart. Stock closed here the night before, had earnings gap down. Close the night before around five, twenty-eight and change. I think it was open in the morning here, well under five hundred. I think it opened like a four ninety and change. Four ninety-two, four ninety-three. I forget what the exact open was. But the stock gap down. So, closed here on Thursday night, had earnings, boom. Gapped out in the morning here. This is Friday morning, open fell. And again, this is falling right now. So, we did a day trade in this. Entry was four ninety-four eighty. We shorted it, put the stop. Again, a stop is like the insurance. It's a, you put it in. If this would have gone over this number, we would have lost. It did not. But the fact is you must protect yourself. So, you protect your accounts. You protect your money. Okay. Share quantity three hundred. Risk was thirty-two ten. Exit four eighty-eight, fifty. This was a nice trade. Again, short on the day. Getting it out on Friday. Profit was one thousand eight hundred ninety bucks. Okay. And actually, I had a higher expectations. This would fall more. It's following through today. So, we'll see where really where Netflix goes here today. And again, I had called to put in it. So, we'll see if this gets some some momentum today and if this really starts to get going. But this was a gap down. So, I saw this at night on Thursday night and I saw it in the morning on Friday and I said this is lower now. Again, there are gap ups. There are gap downs. What's a gap up? This is a gap up. Stock closed here. Gapped up. This, I don't remember the reason for this but this was from the ninth to the tenth. This gap was earnings. This was something though. This might have been with the market. Might have been news. Anyway, stock closed here at five ten. Open here at five twenty. You could have gone long here. This was a nice move up. So, you would have bought the stock here. Here was a short. But, what I do is figure out which way to play it in the morning in the pre-market before nine thirty. Okay. Not every gap up though follows through higher. And not every gap up is along. And not every gap down is a short. Here, for example, is a gap up. That was not a long. The next day after this one, closed here, gapped up, sold off. So, if you went long here, you lost. Okay. So, I rate the gap using a rating system of the daily chart to determine in the pre-market or you can do it in the post-market if you see it at night where the stock is going to go on the next day or if I'm doing an option in the next week to two weeks. I usually do options out within one to two weeks. Any questions here so far? But, golden gaps have huge opportunity because they spot power money. For example, what was happening there in the Netflix? Netflix had selling. Okay. Netflix made new highs last week. Netflix then had selling on the gap down. Again, what the earnings said fundamentally, I don't read. I don't pay attention to. I wouldn't even have time to do that. So, how do you find golden gaps? You can scan them in the morning. You can scan them at night to find them and then you rate them. And I usually make a small watch list in the morning. Could be five, ten things that I go through and rate. I go through a checklist. I have 26 points. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. I rate them all and I qualify them. The checklist tells you what to look for in the price of a stock to determine is the selling going to continue or is the buying going to continue? Okay. This is very important. And again, not only that, is it being bought by institutional money or is it being sold off by institutional money? Okay. That is what you want to play on. Not what retail traders are doing because it's institutional money that moves the market. And that's one of the reasons why you had stocks like Tesla go like crazy and Apple went up to the 400 level because institutions were buying it. So there's only one thing that can move the direction of a stock. It is power money and not a little bit, a lot. Power money is in charge. Power money is in charge of the stock's direction. Trends are set and moved by the power money people, which there's a lot of in the market. Okay. Again, funds too, all of this. And gaps happen in the market on a regular basis. Again, I don't trade that after hours but a lot of people do. Some gaps are better than others. Some gaps are nothing gaps and some gaps are very powerful displays of institutional money. The most important gaps in the market are gaps that signify a change in direction or a bigger move in the same direction. Either way, either way, understanding which gaps are meaningful and which gaps are not meaningful in the market will help you denote what to do and when a change is occurring. That is how you know when the power money will flow to you to pay you. So I use a 26-point checklist. That's how I determine what stock I'm trading and in what direction. And that tells me where the power money is going. Now let's look at a chart here of Tesla. This is a good example. What is happening here? Or again, this is out tonight so I don't know what this is going to do in the earnings tonight. But I do want to point out what the stock did in the last couple of weeks in this month of July. The stock got bought. What happened here in this? And I had called some calls on this. I'm going to go over one of the trades here in a minute. The stock closed here, rallied, closed here, gapped up, rallied, closed here. Again, this was back in whatever the date is here. I think this was the first of July. And then just ripped. Okay, this was like around 1100 and then gapped up one morning like over 100 points. Then after that it continued another 100 points, rallied up to 1400 and then it continued again here and look what it did here. So from this initial gap, July 1st, okay, this is at 1100 to this day here, which was the 13th, the stock went up to 1800. Now you might not have gotten this whole thing. I really, I thought this was a good exit here in this day to be honest with you. It ended up gapping up here and went to the dream target, which was 1800. But the stock went 700 points within that two-week period. So this is institutional money and it bought this stock. Now again, I don't know what happens on the earnings for this, but I'm telling you, you know, this is a great example of power, okay, and specifically, you know, power money because look what it did. I mean, this is just phenomenal. And as one trader you could have traded this and made money. Whether you did it, whether you held it, whether you did it again and again, okay, it was a great move. So this was one that I called in it and it was a, again, that was that day the green bar. This was a one day off, but it ended up following through. We did the tests of 1420 calls. They were expensive, but it was a great move. This is taking it on the Friday and ending the Friday. The stock went to 1800. It was, I never went back and looked to see what this was worth then once it got to that point because I got out of it Friday, but this was a sick trade no matter what you did with it. This was a cost of $43 for one contract. So if you bought two, it was $8,600. If you bought one, it was $4,300. And then this is exonerated on the Friday in that green solid bar. I'll go back in a minute. You could have sold it for 150. Profit was 21,400 in one day. You could have made 249% return investment and in one contract you could have made 10,400 with a 249% return investment. If, and again, when you look at these, sometimes when I call them in the letter, this is the gap options letter I have, if it's outside the parameters for the cost that you want to spend, you could always take it up because something doesn't have to go through the strike in an option as long as you get in the right direction for it to work to be profitable. So you could have done even the 1440s, 1450s here and paid less. But this went the following day like crazy birds and the problem here, which I thought, I thought this was a great exit buzz, was through the weekend. So this was Friday. This was Monday. But then on Monday it went all the way up to 1800. That was insane. So that went almost $400 to the strike. And you have stocks that do this all the time. I was just talking about this in the day training room this morning. Again, I'm looking for volatility. I'm looking for momentum. I'm looking for big moves. I'm looking for institutional money. I'm looking for the good gaps to get moves like this every single day when I get up and every night. And this is how you make money as a trader and really get somewhere where you grow your account by doing these types of trades. Okay. You've got to be, you've got to know how to look for them. You got to know how to spot them. You got to know how to find them. Okay. But in this case here, again, beautiful move in one day. Now, we did another one here. Again, Apple went to the Dream Target 2, which was almost $400 it got up to. And this side think has earnings next week or the following week. I have to look up the date for this. But anyway, look at Apple. This is a daily chart of Apple ever since the low down there in March. Apple has just gone straight up. This black line here is the A-peer move in average. The stock is hugging the A-peer move in average. It's not even touched the 20-peer move in average, which is a blue line. This stock is so, so, so strong. I would, I would qualify this as it's in a power trend actually. So, Apple is in a power trend up. Again, I don't know what the earnings happen when this comes out either, but we did calls in this. We did the 400 calls on Monday, July 13th, ran straight up. I'll go back and show you the chart in a minute. The cost of this was very reasonable. $325 for one contract in Apple. If you bought two and spent $11.812, you could have sold them for $750. Again, 100% is a good goal. This was 131%. You could have made $1,000, spending $812 in Apple. I'm going to go back and show you this here. And again, if you did an advanced amount, you could have bought 25 contracts for $81.25 and made $10,625. This is in one day. Now, this was on the 13th. Let me show you. It was here. Stock closed here. Stock gapped up. I called the trade in the morning in the pre-market. Rallyed. You got out. That's it. You do it. And sometimes I send the trades out early, like 9 a.m. Sometimes I send them out right before the open. You take the trade when you get it. Again, this is the options newsletter. This was a nice trade. Ideally, I like when these go immediately in the first day. Sometimes they do take a couple days, but this was nice and Tesla was nice to go right away. Anybody have any questions here so far? So you really, you got to think intellectually when you're trading. Like what are you doing? Why are you doing it? Like a lot of times people just take trades and they're like they have no idea what they're doing it. They don't have any conviction. They don't even understand what they're doing. You know, they see something on TV or get an email about something. They just take a trade and they have no understanding of the strategy. They don't have any strategy at all. And you really have to think. And I don't care if you're risking $800 or $8,000. It's your heart or money even if it's a dollar. And you need to know what you're doing when you're trading. So I have everything situated before the market even opens. I know if I like anything if I'm doing anything or if I'm not doing anything. Okay. I know if I'm doing a day trade. I know if I'm doing an option. I know what stocks I'm watching. I know how they rate. I'm looking for the directional power of the money where it's going to move. And I'm also looking at whether I have the market's help. Okay. I also look at the market and I read the market and see where the market is going too. So I look and say who's in charge? Who's in charge? The bulls or the bears? Here was another one. This was Wells Fargo. This had earnings last week. Who's in charge of this? The bears. The bears are in charge of WFC right now in the daily chart. I'm not in any trades in this right now, but looking at this, again, who's in charge as far as the power of money and Wells Fargo? It's the bears. What about Goldman? Who's in charge in Goldman? The bulls. The bulls are in charge. Again, these are the banks. And this is Boeing. Another beautiful, beautiful, beautiful chart that we've shorted a million times in 2020. Who's in charge and Boeing in this stock? The bears. The bears are in charge. The stock is not moving higher. Okay. And again, I'm talking about institutional money. You may have a temporary rally or a green move on the day from retail traders buying it. But the bears are in charge. Okay. At least for now. So once you know how to do, once you know how to trade, it's so easy to make money, but you have to know what to do and you have to have conviction. And this doesn't mean that every trade that I take wins. Some trades lose. That's part of trading. But more trades that I take win than lose. And that is when you get to the point where you have the confidence to do it. You have the conviction to do it. And that helps you then make money. And not only that, it helps you put on more risk and it helps you take trades like something like the Tesla. You know, that would be on the more expensive side and really put your money on the line to get somewhere with it. If you want to trade effectively, you cannot go with the crowd of day traders. Why? Most day traders lose. And one of the reasons that they lose is they're not focused and they never really get good at doing one thing specifically. So I've mastered gaps. I'm very good at doing it. I do it in a very unique way. A way that I personally created a very long time ago. And at the time that I created my system, I did not realize that I could do it for overnight and I didn't do options at the beginning of my career. But I got into them as the years went on when I realized that many of the moves that I was taking would follow through for longer term trades and that I could capture larger moves by doing options and more specifically in expensive stocks that I would never day trade. Like we're not going to day trade on equity a stock like Amazon or something like Tesla. It's just very expensive. Now let's talk about day trades here. If you do want to do day trades and if you do want to trade a margin and again I use stocks and I'm flat every day by four o'clock. This is CCL. We've done this a lot this year too. What? This is a short. Who's in charge in this chart? It's the bears too. Okay. So we did a short in this. It was 716. Entry was 1610. Boom. Stock was 1650. 40 cents is a really nice stop. 6,000 shares. Risk was 2400. Boom. Exit 1580. That's a trade. That's it. 30 cents for the 40 cent risk is a nice trade. Okay. In something like this that's that's pretty cheap or in the less expensive side. 30 cents is 30 cents and you can swap on the size in this. Okay. So this was this day here. Stock closed to your gap down. Boom. Shorted it. And again you can do a put in this some of these puts have been very cheap and they don't move as well as I think the equity trades but you could have done a put in this. Again here's the one minute chart. Stock closed to your gap down. Boom. Here's the short. Get the drop. Boom. Again time of the day is 930. Stock drops in the first half an hour hour of the day. We take it. We get out. That's typically what I'm looking at doing as far as day trade goes. So I try to day trade and be done in the first half an hour of the day. First hour of the day if possible. Sometimes we take a trade and we're out in five minutes. Okay. But in an ideal world I don't train day trade all day anyways even though theoretically I could I like to make money in the morning and be done just take it and be out and that's one of the things that's my edge as well. I'm very good at reading the open. I'm very good at reading the post market pre-market and the open in the first five minutes of the day from the time the market opens at 930. Today I could tell that we were going to fall. We rallied. We tried to go green. We were green at one point. We rallied. I knew we were going to drop and break. It took a while but the market was not along this morning even when it was green it wasn't along this morning. Okay. Look who's in charge. Particularly who's in charge on the day. Okay. Now this was another one here we did. The QQQs. This was a short. We entered 257.66. Stop was 258.75. If you join the live trading room I call the entry call to stop. Sheriff's was 2500. Risk was 27.25. This is a nice trade. This is a nice move. Again why? Stop. For the Qs this was a good stop. I know this is a little pricey. Again you could have done puts in this. It was a short exit 255.80. $4,650 on the day and again this is more than one amount. Okay. Oh. 235. Okay. I didn't know what time because I started late. 235. Okay. Thank you Sherry. Anyways. Here's the Qs. This was on 716. Here's the drop. Short it. Boom. Get the drop. Okay. This was the 716. Actually here it is. Here I blow it up. So this this is the market. This is a Q. Sometimes we do do the market as a day trade. Close up here the night before 265. Boom. Open down here in the morning 258. So again short it. Get the drop. Boom. Boom. Okay. Again first half an hour, first hour of the day. So opportunity sets up daily for the most part. There are days sometimes there are slow days but you know most of the days we're done in the first half an hour, hour of the day. Somebody has a question. I just don't trade stocks that don't have volume other than that. No I'm not looking for volume. No dark pools don't affect anything for me. I think that was the only question I see there. Apple. Okay. Entry. 390. Stop is 387. 80. This was a long. Okay. This was the day that we went long. Shares 1200. 2640. Exit 392. 366. This was a day that it almost went to 400. This was a day trade. So you could have actually held this even all the way up. I think it was 398 which was insane. So I held the option. I didn't hold the day trade. This was good money. This was a nice day trade. This was quick and out in the morning but the option and the day trade were on on this day. Now here's the daily. I mean now the one minute. Here's the one minute here so you can see this. So we did it, got in, got the rally up and out. But look where it went. So like we got out of this in the morning really quick here. It was a nice trade. But look where it went. It's crazy. So this was just really nice call. But again here's the gap. Stop poster the night before gap up. So in the morning in here I called the option and then I liked it as a day trade. So we did it right of ways. Got the rally. Now I don't do this but what you could do is you could put the stop at break even and then see where it goes or you could move the stop up. I typically don't do that. I just take it and get out. But this was this was one where it really went all the way up to the dream target. So you know you can earn money trading. A lot of people don't because they don't know what to do but you can learn what to do or you can create your own system. But it took me three years to create mine. So the benefit of coming to me is it shortens the learning curve for you. You just pay me for my information and my time to teach you okay. But for me myself I'm so glad I figured this out. It was a really long road but now that I know how to do it trading is a lot easier for me now that it was 10 years ago. And over the years I've gotten better at what I'm doing because my confidence has increased and I've been talking on television as well and that helps too. And one of the things that I talk about a lot on TV is the overall market. The market is tricky to read. I don't get it right all the time but I get it right a lot. And I think that you know in these times when you're looking at specific trades the best thing you can do for yourself is to train trades where you don't need the market. And unfortunately many traders don't do that. They need the market and the trades that they trade even if they're trend trading something they need the markets help that day to make any money. And if you don't know how to read the market right then you're going to lose more than you win. So it's better off finding something that's specific to that stock, to that stock symbol rather than following the market because the market is tricky. Now if you want to trade for a living you have to have some kind of plan of action and getting back to what I was saying about working from home. This is a good year where people can start to dip into it and transition if this is really what you want to do. When I decided I wanted to do a different career was doing mortgages I found out about trading and I did both while I created my system until I was making enough money to quit my mortgage shop. And again that took me three years. But for you the learning curve should be much much faster because you're going to learn my method from me if you want to come and do that. If you want to consistently make a lot of money in the market the only way that will happen is if you have one a high winning strategy, two good money management, and three a good mentor to follow which just just helps. Okay you can be in the day training room with me after the class it helps you to take the trades and get the calls but you learn everything in class that you trade my system by yourself. And again I focus in the morning I think that is just such an important time to see what's going to happen on the live day. And one of the benefits as well as trading is that you can do it from home and in particularly where I am I live in New York City and Manhattan. I mean you know many of the businesses are having people work from home. I mean and so this is this is a new new world that we're all living in here right now. So if you want to learn my method I teach it in class it's called the Golden Gap Course. The Golden Gap Course teaches a 26 point rating system to find the best stock to trade each day. The course also teaches you how to enter and exit the stock on the day. The course teaches price analysis and technical analysis on an advanced level. Okay and that's what you'll come and learn from me. It's a skill like juggling.  Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday over time. It teaches one solid strategy to trade gaps effectively by reading the side of power and charts, reading supporting resistance to take positions in the right direction and again you will focus on technical analysis and gaps and I will teach you how to read the market which is very important in particular like even if you have something like a 401k or you're managing your IRA some people are trading their IRA. You can do that too. You can buy options in an IRA and again you can contact your broker and find out more about that as well but trading is about chunking it out. It's not long-term investing. This is getting a move and exiting it. Okay, somebody's asked about a large account. I'm sorry I'm just seeing these questions here now. I think I might have missed somebody. Would you need a large account to do what you're doing? No, you can trade a small account. It depends how much you risk though based on the size of your account. For example if you have an options account the minimum to open up an options account is $2,000. So, you know, you can't risk $8,000 then in a trade an apple then in that. So, you're the number of contracts and what you what you can trade then is based on the size of your cash account but the minimum to open an options account is $2,000. For a day trading account at a retail broker you need a minimum of $25,000 and the margins four to one or you can go to a proprietary day trading account with a minimum of $2,500 and the margin is 10 to 1. So, it depends on the type of margin account that you go to the type of broker but you do not need a big amount of money to day trade or do options. Your risk though will be associated with your cash balance. Make sense? Sorry. Um, does everybody hear me? No, it just happened there. Anyways, you have to have 100% conviction when you're trading. I say empower yourself to trade. I teach a class. It's online. It's called the Golden Gap course. It's a full two-day course on how to strategically find, pick, and play stocks at our professional bearish gaps. Class is online and again you can be anywhere in the world to take any. You can be anywhere in the world to trade the US market which is really nice as well. So, I'm running a special for Christmas and July special through this Sunday. If you sign up for the class in August, okay, you sign up. It's pay half now, half later. You do day two first which would be August second and you do day one then which is in two weeks then which would be August 14th or August 15th.  So, you're trading and learning all at the same time. Class tuition for the class is $69.99 or you pay for the class up front get the two months in the room and do the whole class then that first weekend in August. And as far as the options newsletter goes, if anyone's interested in this as well, I'm doing pay half now, half later for this too. So, it's pay $34.99, $50 and then in 30 days you pay the rest. You get one year subscription of the newsletter. You would have gotten the emails. The emails are traded to you. You would have gotten the Apple trade, the Tesla trade, and this price for the year is $69.99. This is not the class. This is the options newsletter if you just want to trade options. And this is for anybody that wants to do the options course which actually for July it's tomorrow. So, if you want to sign up for this, you'd have to sign up today or you do the one next month. You get two months free of the GAP options newsletter and the course. It's a half day course. It's 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. July 23rd which is tomorrow. It's $2,500 for this class. It's a half day course. So, any questions from anyone who'd been anything here at the end? I see it's $2.35. Oh, thank you so much. And I just dropped those questions in there because I was afraid that they were going to lose their context. So, thank you for taking them on the fly. Okay, thank you. Is ready? Did I get them on? Yes ma'am, you did. I usually hold them all till the end, but I just felt for context they needed to come right then and I don't like to interrupt your presentation. We really appreciated that and thank you for joining us.


My guest is Amam Chukwoka for Senior Consultant Tech, Baal. In Africa, the tech ecosystem has experienced impressive growth and is evolving rapidly. There is a high level of optimism about the potential that the continent has to offer by harnessing the strength of its largely young, rapidly growing and technology-savvy population. Now, Nigeria is one of the continent's more established start-up ecosystem with firms like InterSwitch, dating as far back as 2002. Orbeach, the growing tech sector in Nigeria's economy and significant private funding secured by African tech start-ups over the years, the tech sector is grossly underrepresented in the Nigerian capital market. Would African capital market follow the same path to advancement through tech ecosystem development? Like I said, I have Amam Chukwoka for Senior Consultant at Tech, Baal, joining me right now to discuss with them. Many thanks for being a part of the show. Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. It's our pleasure. Let's talk about tech in Africa as a tech ecosystem so far in 2023. How far have we come? Let's just fill the pause. I would say that African tech ecosystem has not been entirely moved from the funding winter or funding play-to, as they call it. 13% decline in Q&Q globally meant that for us in year-to-date, we've seen more than 50% decline in VC funding. We've also seen fair share of layoffs in year-to-date. Two examples are laser pay, 54 genes. Aside from layoffs, we've seen not layoffs. I mean, I meant shutdown. Laser pay, 54 genes. These are classic cases of shutdown. For layoffs, we've seen a lot of them. Sadly, we've seen... I think 54 genes also laid out before they shut down. For us, unfortunately, we also had to lay off some of our employees. We've seen this layoff, of course, but the big tech players... What's actually the reason for all of these layoffs and shutdowns? As I said, restitution and funding. Startups are trying to prune down on their expenses and their overhead costs. I mean, having done a lot of things internally to manage the credit squeeze, sometimes it's almost inevitable to let people go. For us, it was a sad situation, but we saw firsthand what these other tech companies have had to endure letting some of their critical employees go. I mean, globally, as I said, Africa will not be immune from the rest of the world. Africa is just a tiny piece in the global VC funding. The squeeze is not out of nowhere. Essentially, if we look at the lag effect of the Russian-speaking world and the energy crisis that followed, it would also add to that the SDB, Silicon Valley collapse that also sent a severe shock throughout the startup ecosystem. In Africa, again, it's been the year of the first half of the year that's been had queues here and there. And also part of African economy like Nigeria also had elections. So the combination of these factors would make venture capitalists look at Africa with some level of caution. Let's leave that for one moment and talk about tech in Africa specifically. One would have talked about the growing population of Nigeria specifically with two young people being involved and being very tech savvy and Nigeria would have actually taken its place of pride as it were in technology. But it's still Africa is still left behind when we talk about technology. What's going on? That's an interesting question I will say. I would go a little bit technical on that. When you look at the entire tech ecosystem or technology or innovation in general, you'd understand that the dynamics is one of, should I say, imitation. It's something called imitation dynamics. Africa gets to copy from the West. We did not create AI for instance. So we've had to learn this technology and then apply it. In that sense it's safe to say that technology here is a, we have had to depend essentially on our absorpting capacity to absorb these technologies. So that means that we have to wait for this technology to come and then we learn and then we adapt or we adopt. For the, looking at the social dynamics, for instance as you mentioned, young people, it's been a learning curve for these young people who initially have studied something else and now they're having to essentially move towards learning technology or studying technology. I think it's going to, it's not going to be immediate before we begin to see, before we begin to resemble the rest of the world. I think I would not say, I would not dismiss the effort that Africans or African economies have made. It's been, it's been tremendous over the last couple of years. I think the future of tech in Africa is really promising. So it's promising. That's a very good one. Let's talk about venture funding for the tech ecosystem. So for what I saw, for the figures I saw in the race for West function, I just printed ahead in the second quarter of this year, leaving other Africa's big four countries, Kenya, South Africa and Egypt on the troll. Is that really still the case right now? I think I would correct that stat a little bit. I mean, it's not our numbers. In Q1, I think Q1, Q2, 2023, Nigeria has always maintained the third position. I think the drastic change was Kenya that pushed up from I think $40 million to $420 million. But Nigeria would be somewhere like in third place. Well, I think the change for Nigeria is when you look at yet with the change, when you add together Q1, Q2, that pushes up to second place after South Africa. Okay, I don't know, but it just based on the statistics that I have really because it does do startups operating in the energy, fintech and logistics sectors. It met at the frontrunners in Q2. What is the position as we speak? I mean, I would say since 2019 or so we've had fintech. Fintech is always the downing of Vizing. But that changed last quarter Q2 where we saw energy startups getting most of it. I think about 400 and something. What did they do differently? I would say for instance, you can look at, I think critical for it would be the Russian-Ukrainian war and the energy crisis that ensued. So I think it made, I mean Africa is energy rich. So I think it made VCs begin to take interest in energy companies in Africa and it's not globally we are moving towards renewable energy and clean tech and all of that. So I think it's essentially time for, I mean this time favors energy startups. I mean they've not always been somewhere down below but, you know, fintech has always had the most funding. But now we're seeing, we're beginning to see, there's no promise that energy tech or energy startups would always, you know, would continue to get the most part of VC fund. That might change. It might go back to VC. We are about to look at the numbers for Q3 and we would have more information on that. Okay. In our state of tech reports in Africa. Okay. Let's still talk about the Africa's tech market, the three P's as it were and how they've been able to influence the ecosystem. Specifically, let's talk about the pricing, the people and power. So far those three factors combined, how have they influenced the Africa's tech market ecosystem? The pricing, power and people. I'll start with pricing. Okay. Africa, we are price sensitive. Essentially because, you know, the general income level and, you know, inflation and all of that, you know, macro dynamics coming into play. Technology is not always cheap or doesn't come cheap at least at the beginning. So you'd see Africans or consumers responding to, you know, the price dynamics or the price implication, you know. Take for instance, 5G technology. We have 5G already in Nigeria in some of the African markets in Tanzania. In Uganda it was launched, ETEL launched 5G a couple of months ago. MTN also, MTN and ETEL actually got 5G license. So it's all operational there already. But you don't see much of, you don't see much of, this switch is not, even from Nigeria, you know, it's not, you don't see many people already acquiring 5G devices, you know, 5G Wi-Fi or 5G enabled phones. These are very expensive. I think last year also Elon Musk launched the, I mean, how far we've not seen much of that in Africa. Only very, only handful of people have, you know, adopted that technology. I think in terms of politics or power, I think African governments cannot entirely remove themselves from, you know, these waves. We, it is important that, you know, the consumer market, African consumer market gets some type of enablement, you know, to not miss out on this technological drift. Okay, fine. I know sometime this one time, take a bow is convening the most audacious players, founders, and of course business leaders on that ecosystem. So tell us more about it and what we are supposed to expect from that. Yes, it's the moonshot conference. Moonshot conference, or moonshot conference, take a bow is trying to do the most. We are trying to shake up the tech ecosystem. Take a bow we are doing the impossible. We are pulling together all industry players across, you know, the tech value chain. We are doing this over two days, 12 to 13. It can't be, you can't match it right now. But then again, I want to really understand exactly what it is going to bring to bear with all the big players or what are the changes that we are supposed to see in the ecosystem and how it will impact on Africa. We are bringing 50 speakers from across the board. The conversations would be moderated by experts. The topics are spread across five content tracks. We're looking at the future of commerce in Africa, for instance. We're looking at emerging technology, Web3, AI. We are looking at creative economy and happy startup, first of all. Aside from that, we are having work for TC, Battlefield, where we would, where technologies across Africa would come out and showcase, sort of like compete for the most and then the winners would get 2.5 million. So it's going to be really, really massive. So for startups, what are they likely to gain from that? The opportunity to network, to meet VCs, to see what other startups are doing as well. Get the opportunity to look internally and learn from the conversation and see what you're doing wrong and what you can improve upon and all of that. So I think it's going to be really, really impressive for startup founders who are also going to be there in their numbers and also government. We have the Minister of Information also coming. So it's really, really important that startups are not left behind in this. Ali, this is happening here in Lagos? It's happening here in Lagos. Okay, so 12 to 13 Lagos and the Munchen Conference is happening and it's actually a big one for the tech ecosystem, not just in Nigeria but for Africa. But is it open to every Nigerian, everyone to just come in to learn something? It is open to everybody actually. We have a student ticket here. It's open to everybody. We are not letting, I mean it's unrestricted but there is a ticket price that you have to pay for it. Alright, so once again as we round off right now in as much as Nigerians should be looking out for the Munchen Conference, what's the future of the technology and the tech ecosystem with fintech and all of that hold and sway? What's the future for Nigeria, let's say in the next five years? Because we are actually set by 1060, 30 independents. One would think that would be completely independent when it comes to technology. I don't necessarily think that technological independence or should be the goal or is the goal. I think it makes sense to keep learning and I think it makes sense to keep learning. It makes sense to have research institutions in Nigeria. I think we should have that link from universities or from research to applied. I would say in general that the future of tech globally is automation. We are going to see that also play out in Africa. As I mentioned, it's been an imitation dynamic. We are going to see automation in for instance logistics. The logistics sector is also another sector to watch out for. Especially looking at the FCFT. Thank you very much for your time and for the useful insight that you have shared on the show for today. Thank you for having me. That's as much as we can take on the show for this morning. My name is Justin. I'll give you business insights. We'll return to your screen same time tomorrow. Bye for now.


From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hello, welcome to the CUBE Conversation here. In the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto, California, I'm John Furrier, your host. Got a great conversation with two great guests, going to explore the edge, what it means in terms of commercial, but also national security, and as the world goes digital, we're going to have the deep dive conversation around how it's all transforming. We got Keely, Vice President of Booze, Allen's digital business. Keely, great to have you. John Pisano, principal at Booze Allen's digital cloud solutions. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having us. So one of the most hottest topics, obviously besides cloud computing, having the most refactoring impact on business and government and public sector has been the next phase of cloud growth and cloud scale. And that's really modern applications and consumer. And then here for national security and for governments here in the U.S. is the military impact. And as digital transformation starts to go the next level, you start to see the architectures emerge where the edge, the IoT edge, the industrial IoT edge, or any kind of edge concept, 5G is exploding, making that much more of a dense, more throughput for connectivity with wireless. You got Amazon with snowballs, snowmobile, all kinds of ways to deploy technology. That's IT-like and operational technologies. It's causing quite a cloud operational opportunity and disruption. So I want to get into it. Let's, Key, let's start with you. I mean, we're looking at an architecture that's changing both commercial and public sector with the edge. What are the key considerations that you guys see as people have to really move fast in this new architecture of digital? Yeah, John, I think it's a great question. And if I could just share our observation on why we even started investing in edge. You mentioned cloud, but as we've reflected upon kind of the history of IT, if you take a look from mainframes to desktops, to servers, to cloud, to mobile, and now IoT, what we observed was that industry investing in infrastructure led to kind of evolution of IT, right? So as you mentioned with industry spending billions on IoT and edge, we've just feel that's going to be the next evolution. If you take a look at, you mentioned 5G, I think 5G will be certainly an accelerator to edge because of the resilience, the lower latency and so forth. But taking a look at what's happening in space, you mentioned space earlier as well, right? And what Starlink is doing by putting satellites to actually provide transport into space. We're thinking that that actually is going to be the next ubiquitous thing. Once transport becomes ubiquitous, just like cloud allows storage to be ubiquitous, we think that the next generation internet will be space-based. So when you think about it, it won't be connected servers per se, it will be connected devices. So that's kind of some of the observations and why we've been really focusing on investing in edge. I want to come back to that piece around space and edge and bring it from a commercial and then also tactical architecture in a minute because there's a lot to unpack there, roll of open source, modern application development, software and hardware, supply chains, all our core issues that are going to emerge. But I want to get with John real quick on cloud impact because you think about 5G and the future of work or future of play, you've got people, right? So whether you're at a large concert like Coachella or 49ers or Patriots game or Redskins game if you're in the DC area, you've got people there of congestion and now you've got devices now serving those people and that's their play. People at work, whether it's a military operation, you've got work, play, tactical edge things. How is cloud connecting? Cause this is like the edge has never been kind of an IT thing. It's been more of a, you know, bandwidth or either telco or something else operationally. What's the cloud at scale, cloud operation impact? Yeah, so if you think about how these systems are architected and you think about those considerations or the key kind of touched on, a lot of what you have to think about now is what aspects of the application reside in the cloud where you tend to be less constrained and then how do you architect that application to move out towards the edge, right? So how do I tier my application? Ultimately, how do I move data and applications around the ecosystem and how does, how do I need to evolve where my application stages things and how that data and those apps are moved to each of those different tiers. So when we build a lot of applications, right? Especially if they're in the cloud, they're built with some of those common considerations of elasticity, scalability, all those things. Whereas when you talk about congestion and disconnected operations, you lose a lot of those characteristics and you have to kind of rethink that. Key, let's get into the aspect you brought up which is space and then I was mentioning the tactical edge from a military standpoint. These are use cases of deployments, you know? And in fact, this is how people have to work now. So you got the future of work or play. And now you've got this situational deployments, whether it's a new tower next to a stadium. We've all been at a game or somewhere, a concert where we've got five bars and no connectivity, right? So we know what that means. So now you have people congregating in work or play and now you have a tactical deployment. What's the key things that you're seeing that's going to help make that better? Are there any breakthroughs that you see that are possible? What's going on in your view? Yeah, I mean, I think what's enabling all of this, again, one is transport, right? So whether it's 5G to increase the speed and decrease the latency, whether it's things like Starlink with making transport and comms ubiquitous, that tied with the fact that ships continue to get smaller and faster, right? And when you're thinking about tactical edge, those devices have limited size, weight, power, conditions and constraints. And so the software that goes on them has to be just as lightweight. And that's why we've actually partnered with SUSA and what they've done with K3Ss to do that, right? So I think those were some of the enabling technologies out there, John, as you've kind of alluded to, there are some, there are additional challenges, right? As we think about it, we're not, it's not a simple transition in modernization here, but again, we think that this will be the next major disruption. What do you guys think, John, if you don't mind weighing in too on this, as modern application development happens, we just were covering cloud native con and Kubecon, Dockercon and containers are very popular, Kubernetes is becoming super great. As you look at the telco landscape where we're kind of converging this edge, it has to be commercially enterprise grade. It has to have that transit and transport, that's intelligent and all these new things. So out of open source fit into all this, because we're seeing open source becoming very reliable, more people are contributing to open source. How does that impact the edge in your opinion? So from my perspective, I think it's helping accelerate things that traditionally maybe may have been stuck in the traditionally proprietary software confines, right? So within our mindset at Booz Allen, we are very focused on open architecture, open based systems, which open source obviously is an aspect of that, right? So how do you create systems that can easily interface with each other to exchange data? And how do you leverage tools that are available in the open source community to do that? So containerization, right? It is a big drive that is really going throughout the open source community. And there's just a number of other tools, whether it's tools that are used to provide basic services, like how do I move code through a pipeline all the way through? How do I do just basic hardening and security checking of my capabilities, right? Historically, those tend to be closed source type apps where today you've got a very broad community that's able to very quickly provide and develop capabilities and push it out to a community that then continues to adapt and add to or grow that library of stuff. Yeah, and then we've got trends like open ran. I saw some ground station for the AWS just starting to see Starlink you mentioned. You're bringing connectivity to the masses. What is that going to do for operators? Because security is a huge issue, right? We talk about security all the time. Where does that kind of come in? Because now you're really OT, which has been very purpose built kind of devices in the old IoT world. As the new IoT and the edge develop, you're going to need to have intelligence. You're going to need to be data driven. There is an open source impact key. So if I'm a senior executive, how do I get my arms around this? I really need to think this through because the security risks alone could be more penetration areas, more surface area. Right, that's a great question. And let me just address kind of the value to the clients and the end users. In the digital battlefield, it's our warriors, right? To increase survivability and analytality. At the end of the day, from a mission perspective, we know we believe that time's a weapon. So reducing any latency in that kind of observe, orient, decide, act, noodle loop is value to the warfighter. In terms of your question on how to think about this, John, you're spot on. I mean, as I mentioned before, there are various different challenges. One being the cyber aspect of it. We are absolutely going to be increasing our attack surface. When we think about putting processing on edge devices. There are other factors too, non-technical that we've been thinking about as we've tried to kind of engender and kind of move to this kind of edge open ecosystem where we can kind of plug and play, reuse, all kind of taking the same concepts of the open source community and open architectures. But other things that we've considered, one workforce, as you mentioned before, when you think about these embedded systems and so forth, there aren't that many embedded engineers out there, right? But there is a workforce that are digital and software engineers that are trained. So how do we actually create an abstraction layer that we can leverage that workforce and not be limited by some of the constraints of the embedded engineers out there? The other thing is what we've been talking with several colleagues, clients, partners, what people are thinking about is actually when you start putting software on these edge devices in the billions, the total cost of ownership, right? How do you maintain an enterprise that potentially consists of billions of devices, right? So extending the standard kind of DevSecOps that we move to automate CICD to a cloud, how do we move it from cloud to jet, right? That's kind of what we say, right? How do we move DevSecOps to automate secured containers, right? All the way to the edge devices to mitigate, you know, some of those total cost of ownership challenges. It's interesting as you have software defined, this embedded system discussion is hugely relevant and important because when you have software defined, you got to be faster in the deployment of these devices. You need security because remember supply chain on the hardware side and software in there too. So if you're going to have a serviceability model where you have to shift left as they say, you got to be at the point of CICD flows, you need to be having security at the time of coding, right? So all these paradigms are new, right? And day two operations, I call it day zero operations because it should be never day two. You got to service these things. So software supply chain becomes a very interesting conversation, it's a new one that we're having on the cube and in the industry. Software supply chain is a superly relevant, important topic because now you've got to interface it not just with other software, but it's hardware. How do you service devices in space? You can't send a break fix person in space. Maybe you will soon, but again, this brings up a whole set of issues. No, so, you know, I think it's certainly, you know, I don't think anyone has the answers. We certainly don't have all the answers, but we're very optimistic, right? If you take a look at what's going on within the U.S. Air Force and what the chiefs, a software officer, Nick Shalon and his team, and we're a supporter of this and a plant owner of platform one, right? You know, they were ahead of the curve in kind of commoditizing some of these, you know, desec ops principles in partnership with the DOD-CIO, right? And that shift-left concept, right? They've got a certified and accredited platform that provides that desec ops. They have an entire repository in the Iron Bank that allows for hardened containers and reciprocity. All those things are value to the mission and around the edge, because those are all accelerators, right? I think there's an opportunity to leverage industry kind of best practices as well and patterns there. You kind of touch upon this, John, but these devices honestly just become firmware, right? The software just, you know, if the devices themselves just become firmware, right? You can just put over the wire updates, right, onto them. So I'm optimistic, right? I think all the piece parts are taking place across industry and in the government. And I think we're primed to kind of move into this next evolution. Yeah, and it's also some collaboration. What I like about why I'm bringing up the open source angle and I think this is where I think the major focus will shift to and I want to get your reaction to it is because open source is seeing a lot more collaboration. You mentioned some of the embedded devices. You know, some people are saying this is the weakest link in the supply chain and it can be short up pretty quickly, but this other data, other collective intelligence that you can get from sharing data, for instance, which hasn't really been a best practice in the cybersecurity industry. So now open source, it's all been about sharing, right? So you get the confluence of these worlds colliding all aspects of culture and dev and sec and ops and engineering all coming together. John, what's your reaction to that? Because this is a big topic. Yeah, so it's providing a level of transparency that historically we've not seen, right? So in that community, having those pipelines, the results of what's coming out of it, it's allowing anyone in that life cycle or in that supply chain to look at it, see the state of it and make a decision on is this a risk I'm willing to take or not? Or am I willing to invest and personally contribute back to the community to address that because it's important to me and it's likely gonna be important to some of the others that are using it. So I think it's critically and it's enabling that acceleration and shift that I talked about that. Now that everybody can see it, look inside of it, understand the state of it, contribute to it, it's allowing us to break down some of the barriers that Key talked about and it reinforces that excitement that we're seeing now. That community is enabling us to move faster and do things that maybe historically we've not been able to do. Key, I'd love to get your thoughts. You mentioned Battlefield and I've been covering a lot of the tactical edger on the DoD's work. You mentioned the military on the Air Force side, Platform One, I believe was from the Air Force work that they've done, all cloud native kind of directions. But when you talk about a war field, you talk about connectivity, I mean, who controls the DNS in Taiwan or who controls the DNS in Korea?  How about agility? I mean, tactical command and control operations, you got to, this has got to be really well done. So this is not a trivial thing. How are you seeing this translate into the edge and innovation area? You know, it's certainly not a trivial thing, but I think, again, I'm encouraged by how government and industry are partnering up. There's a vision set around this joint all-domain command control, JASC too. And all the services are getting behind that or looking into that and this vision of this military, internet of military things, right? And I think the key thing there, John, as you mentioned, is not just the connected end of the sensors, which requires the transport again, right? But also they have to be interoperable, right? So you can have a bunch of sensors and platforms out there, but if they can't, they may be connected, but if they can't speak to one another, right? In a common language, right? That kind of defeats the purpose and the mission value, right? Of that, you know, a sensor shooter kind of paradigm we've been striving for for ages, right? So you're right on. I mean, this is not a trivial thing, but I think over history, we've learned quite a bit. Technology and innovation is happening at just an amazing rate, right? Where things are coming out in months as opposed to decades as before, right? So I agree, not trivial, but again, I think there are all the peace parts in place and being put into place. I think you mentioned earlier that the personnel, the people, engineers out there, not enough more of them coming in. I think now the appetite and the provocative nature of this shift in tech is going to attract a lot of people because, you know, the old adage is, these are hard problems that attracts great people. You got a new engineering, SRE-like scale engineering. You have software development that's changing, becoming much more robust and more science-driven. You don't have to be just a coder as a software engineer. You could come at it from any angle. So there's a lot more opportunities from a personnel standpoint now to attract great people and there's real hard problems to solve. Not just security. I agree with that 100%. I would also contest that it's an opportunity for innovators, right? You know, we've been thinking about this for some time and you know, we think there's absolute value from various different use cases that we've identified, digital battlefield, force protection, disaster recovery and so forth. But, you know, there are use cases that we probably haven't even thought about even from a commercial perspective, right?  For us to kind of innovate based on this new kind of edge environment. It's a revolution, new leadership, new brands are going to emerge, new paradigms, new workflows, new operations, clearly great stuff. I want to thank you guys for coming on. I also want to thank Rancher Labs for sponsoring this conversation without their support would be here. Now they were acquired by SUSE. We've covered their event with theCUBE virtual last year. What's the connection with those guys? Can you guys take a minute to explain the relationship with SUSE and Rancher? Yeah, so it's actually, it's fortuitous. And I think we just got, we got lucky. There's two aspects of it. First of all, we are both, we partner in our, on the platform one basic ordering agreement. So just there, you know, we had a common mentality, right? Of DevSecOps and so there was a good partnership there. But then when we thought about, we're engaging from an edge perspective, you know, they're K3Ss, right? I mean, they're a leader from a container perspective obviously, but the fact that they are innovators in around K3Ss, right? To reduce that software footprint which is required on these edge devices. You know, we kind of got a two-fer there in that partnership. Awesome, John, any comment on your end? Yeah, I would just amplify the K3S aspects and leveraging the containers. A lot of what we've seen success in when you look at what's going on, especially on that tactical edge around enabling capabilities. Containers and the portability it provides makes it very easy for us to interface and integrate a lot of different sensors to close the OODA loop to whoever's wearing or operating that a piece of equipment that the software is running on. Awesome, I'd love to continue the conversation on space and the edge and super great conversation to have you guys on. I really appreciate it. I do want to ask you guys about the innovation and the opportunities of this new shift that's happening. The next big thing is coming quickly and it's here on us and that's cloud, I call cloud 2.0, the cloud scale, modern software development environment edge with 5G. Changing the game, Key, I completely agree with you. And I think this is where people are focusing their attention from startups to companies that are transforming and repivoting or refactoring their existing assets to be positioned. And you're starting to see clear winners and losers as a pattern emerging, right?  That's the playbook. Some people are making it, some people are not getting there. So I got to ask you guys, as telcos become super important and the ability to be a telco now, we just mentioned standing up a tactical edge, for instance, launching a satellite, a couple hundred K, you can launch a CubeSat. That could be good and bad, right? So, you know, the telco business is changing radically. Cloud, telco cloud is emerging as an edge phenomenon with 5G, certainly business commercial benefits, more than consumer. How do you guys see the innovation and disruption happening with telco? You know, as we think through cloud to edge, one thing that we realize, because our definition of edge, John, was actually at the point of data collection, right? On the sensor themselves. Other definition of edges were a little further back, what we call the edge of the IT enterprise. But, you know, as we look at this, we realize that you needed this kind of multi echelon environment, right? From your cloud to your tactical clouds, right? Where you can do some processing and then at the edge themselves. Really, at the end of the day, it's all about, I think, data, right? I mean, everything we're talking about is still all about the data, right? The AI needs the data. The telco is transporting the data, right? And so I think if you think about it from a data perspective in relation to telcos, right? One, edge will actually enable a very different paradigm and a distributed paradigm for data processing, right? So, hey, instead of bringing the data to some central cloud, right? Which takes bandwidth off your telcos, push the process to the data, right? So mitigate what's actually being sent over those telco lines to increase the efficiencies of them, right? So I think, you know, at the end of the day, the telcos are going to have a pretty big component to this, even from space down to ground station, right? How that works. So the network of these telcos, I think are just going to expand. John, what's your perspective?    Now it's under siege with rapid innovation. Yeah, so I definitely echo the sentiments that Key would have, but I would also, if we go back and think about the digital battle space and what we've talked about, faster speeds, being available, you know, in places it's not been before is great. However, when you think about facing an adversary that's a near pure threat, the first thing they're going to do is make it contested, congested, and you have to be able to survive. I, while yes, the pace of innovation is absolutely pushing comms to places we've not had it before, we have to be mindful to not get complacent and over rely on it, assuming it'll always be there. Because I know in my experience wearing the uniform, and even if I'm up against an adversary, that's the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to do whatever I can to disrupt your ability to communicate. So how do you take it down to that lowest level and still make that squad, the platoon, whatever that structure is, you know, continue to survival and lethal. And so that's something I think as we look at the innovations, we need to be mindful of that. So when I talk about how do you architect it? What services do you use? Those are all those things that you have to think about. What if I lose it at this echelon? How do I continue the mission? Yeah, it's interesting. And if you look at how companies have been procuring and consuming technology key, it's been like siloed. Okay, we've got a workplace workforce project and we have the tactical edge and we have the siloed IT solution when really work and play, whether it's work here and John's example is the warfighter. And so his concern is safety is life, right? And protection. The other department has to manage the comms and so they have to have countermeasures and contingencies ready to go, right? So all this is, they'll integrate it now. It's not like one department. It's like, it's together. Yeah, John, I mean, I love what you just said. I mean, we have to get away from this silo thinking, not only within a single organization, but across the enterprise, right? You know, from a digital battlefield perspective, you know, it's a joint fight, right? So even across these enterprises of enterprises, right? So I think you're spot on. We have to look horizontally. We have to integrate. We have to interoperate. And by doing that, that's where the innovation is also going to be accelerated to, right? Not reinventing the wheel. Yeah, I think the infrastructure edge is so key. It's going to be very interesting to see how the existing incumbents can handle themselves. Obviously the towers are important. 5G obviously is much more, more deployments not as centralized in terms of the spectrum. It's more dense. It's going to create more connectivity options. How do you guys see that impacting because certainly more gear, like obviously not the centralized tower from a backhaul standpoint, but now the edge, the radios themselves, the wireless transit is key. That's the real edge here. How do you guys see that evolving? So, you know, we're seeing a lot of innovations actually through small companies who are really focused on very specific niche problems. I think it's a great starting point because what they're doing is showing the are the possible, right? Because again, we're in a different environment now. There's different rules. There's different capabilities. But then we're also seeing, you mentioned earlier on, some of the larger companies, Amazonas and Microsoft also investing as well, right? So I think the merge of the, you know, are the unconstrained are the possible, right? By these small companies that are, you know, just kind of driving, you know, innovations supported by the maturity and the heft of these large companies who are building out kind of these hardened kind of capabilities. They're going to converge at some point, right? And that's where I think we want to get further innovation. Well, I really appreciate you guys taking the time. Final question for you guys as people are watching this, a lot of smart executives and teams are coming together to kind of put the battle plans together for their companies as they transition from old to this new way, which is clearly cloud-scaled roll of data. We kind of, we hit out all the key points, I think here. As they start to think about architecture and how they deploy their resources, this becomes now the new boardroom conversation that trickles down and includes everyone, including the developers. You know, the developers are now going to be in the front lines. Mid-level managers are going to be integrated in as well. It's a group conversation. What are some of the advice that you would give to folks who are in this mode of planning, architecture, trying to be positioned to come out of this pandemic with a massive growth opportunity and to be on the right side of history? What's your advice? It's just a great question. So I think you touched upon it. One is take the holistic approach. You mentioned architecture a couple of times and I think that's critical. Understanding how your edge architectures will actually connect with your cloud architectures so that they're not disjointed, right? They're not siloed, right? They're interoperable. They integrate. So you're taking that enterprise approach. I think the second thing is be patient. It took us some time to really kind of, and we've been looking at this for about three years now. And we were very intentional in assessing the landscape, how people were discussing around edge and kind of pulling that all together. But it took us some time to even figure out kind of, hey, what are the use cases? How can we actually apply this and get some ROI and value out for our clients, right? So being a little patient and thinking through kind of how you can leverage this and potentially be a disruptor. John, your thoughts on advice to people watching as they try to put the right plans together to be positioned and not foreclose any future value. Yeah, absolutely. So in addition to the points that you raised, I would number one amplify the fact of recognize that you're going to have a hybrid environment with legacy and modern capabilities. And in addition to thinking open architectures and whatnot, think about your culture, the people, your processes, your techniques and whatnot, and your governance. How do you make decisions when it needs to be closed versus open? Where do you invest in the workforce? What decisions are you going to make in your architecture that drive that hybrid world that you're going to live in? All those recipes, patients open, all that. I think we often overlook the cultural people aspect of upskilling. This is a very different way of thinking on modern software delivery. Like how do you go through this life cycle? How is security embedded? So making sure that's part of that boardroom conversation I think is key. John Pisano, principal of Booz Allen Digital Class Solutions. Thanks for sharing that great insight. Key Lee, vice president at Booz Allen Digital Business. Gentlemen, great conversation. Thanks for that insight. And I think people watching are going to probably learn a lot and how to evaluate startups to how they put their architecture together. So I really appreciate the insight and commentary. Thank you. Okay, I'm John Furrier. This is a CUBE conversation. Thanks for watching.