We're going to go straight into our lunchtime session. And let me begin by saying that according to some analysts, U.S. policy priorities under the Barack Obama administration have shifted away from Europe, whether west-central or in particular central-east Europe. One therefore wonders what our keynote speaker does in all the spare time he has available. Joking aside, one can only admire someone who covers such an extensive and diverse area as Europe and Eurasia, especially during a time of such enormous flux both within these vast regions and in U.S. policy towards the numerous states and multinational organizations therein. Maybe we can compare it to a three-dimensional chess game. And our lunchtime speaker today, I think, will be admirably able to enlighten us on the current state of play, particularly on U.S. policy towards this region. Let me therefore welcome Philip Gordon, Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia. Just a little background on Phil. Prior to his current position, he was Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute. Before that, serving as Director for European Affairs at the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton, where he played a key role in developing NATO policy in the run-up to the Alliance's 50th Summit. He has also held teaching and research posts at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, and the German Society for Foreign Affairs in Bonn, amongst others. He has published a number of books on international relations and foreign policy, and we welcome him and honor to have him here at the center. Thanks, Phil. Janusz, thank you very much for inviting me here and for putting this on together with Slava Mir and the Polish Institute for International Affairs. Really appreciate the opportunity to be here. I regret I missed the opening panels, which looked very interesting. I actually spent my morning at the US-EU Summit, which was also relevant for much of the discussions here, not least because of the degree to which we talked about Central and Eastern Europe in the Eastern Partnership. And for the past hour, the launch of the US-EU Energy Council, which I think is also relevant for our discussions today. I've been a long admirer of the CSIS Europe program and Central Europe program, with which I have worked extensively in the past. Indeed, I remember a year or so ago being at this very podium, then speaking about Senator Obama's view of Europe and Central and Eastern Europe, and I'm delighted to be back now, less than a year into the new administration, to talk about our perspectives and accomplishments and the challenges that we face together in this part of the world. This is also a timely conference because Central and Eastern Europe is in the spotlight this fall, not only because of the many policy issues at the forefront, which I hope to discuss, including Russia and missile defense and NATO and the global financial crisis, but it's also in the spotlight because this year, of course, marks the 20th anniversary of the revolutions that toppled dictatorial regimes in the region and communism. As I believe you know, the Sunday Secretary Clinton will travel to Berlin for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall to join other European leaders to celebrate that anniversary, which set off such a positive domino effect throughout Central and Eastern Europe, liberating tens of millions of people. These events deserve to be recalled, not just to honor and celebrate those who took part in them, but also to learn the lessons about how to get rid of ideology and authoritarianism and to promote democracy, stability, and prosperity, a set of issues that is, alas, all too relevant for many other parts of the world today. The remarks I was asked to give are about US perspectives on Central and Eastern Europe, and that is what I will do. But I would like to just make one point about the overall focus of this conference, which is the question of whether US and Central and Eastern Europe strategic interests are converging or diverging. And let me say, and I particularly want to do so because I think it challenges some of the conventional wisdom and perhaps some of the views that were expressed this morning here, that I actually think US and Central European interests are converging and not diverging. And the main reason I say that is actually a consequence of the point or the reference I just made to 20 years ago and what has happened in Central and Eastern Europe since. That is to say that the democratic revolutions that took place in Central and Eastern Europe 20 years ago put that region on a path towards Europe and the West in terms of its values and institutions and economies and interests. And these countries are now very far along that path. In other words, we see increasingly Central and Eastern European countries the same way we see Western European countries, which is to say stable, prosperous democracies with which we cooperate extensively on a whole range of global interests. When you think about Central and Eastern Europe strategic interests, in other words, there are some particular regional interests, but what are the main ones? They include just as our own coping with the international financial crisis, succeeding in Afghanistan where we're fighting together, preventing climate change, improving energy security, helping to develop a democratic and non-threatening Russia, dealing with immigration. These are the questions the United States deals with. These are the questions Western Europe deals with. And these are the questions more and more Central and Eastern Europe deals with. Obviously, and I want to make this clear, we are sensitive to Central and Eastern Europe's enduring particular interests. Historical legacies do not quickly disappear and geography does not change. Central Europeans still face security threats that I think for understandable reasons are felt with more intensity than in the distant United States. Countries in Eastern Europe have been subject to energy cut-offs, cyber attacks, political pressure, and in the case of Georgia, the use of disproportionate military force by a large neighbor, that's all clear. But my point is these are not causes for a divergence in interest between Central Europe and the United States, because the United States strongly shares Central and Eastern Europe's interest and security from such threats and risks. And that's not only because of the rock-solid Article 5 commitment that the United States has with some of these countries, but out of our own interest. History has taught the United States that security risks in Central Europe are a threat to all of Europe and that the security of all of Europe is a vital national interest of the United States. So I see no divergence between Central and Eastern Europe and the United States when it comes to keeping the region safe from outside threats, whether they be political, military, economic, or in the area of energy security. So that's a broad overall point I wanted to begin with, and what I'd like to do now is turn to some of the particular policy issues that I think are relevant to the region and offer our, offer the Obama Administration's perspective on some of them. And I'd like to start with Russia. And I'd like to start with the President's thinking on Russia and what we're trying to do in a policy sense on Russia in ways that I think are relevant to the region. The President explained early on in the Administration and the Vice President articulated it publicly early on at the Munich Security Conference the way that we're thinking about Russia and relations with Russia. And that is to say, what we inherited was a poor and deteriorating relationship with Russia that we think served nobody. And President Obama thought it should be possible to pursue concrete cooperation with Russia in areas where we have come in interest, and there are some, while at the same time agreeing to disagree about other issues where we have different interests and without sacrificing any of our important principles or our friends. And that is what the President announced we would try to do as part of his foreign policy, it's what the Vice President talked about in Munich, and it's what we've been trying to do ever since. So there was a reset with Russia announced, but it came with the corollaries that were quite clear as well that we didn't accept the notion of foreign spheres of influence within Europe that we thought that democracies in Europe should have the right to join the security alliances of their choosing, and that we would not recognize breakaway regions like South Ossetia and Ambrosia. The President's summit in Moscow in July, I think, demonstrated how this can work. There were some concrete achievements. The presidents agreed on a start follow-on framework. They agreed on an Afghanistan lethal transit arrangement, which is just the sort of concrete agreement in areas of common interests that we were talking about. Benefits the United States because we have more diverse supply routes to Afghanistan. It saves us potentially a lot of money depending on how many flights there are to Afghanistan. We could save over 100 million dollars. And there was no trade off to get it because both countries have a common interest in succeeding. Military to military cooperation was reestablished to try to overcome some of the mistrust. And a bilateral presidential commission was launched with 17 sub-areas ranging from the environment to culture to allow us to pursue these common interests more institutionally. And the two countries agreed on a joint threat assessment regarding the ballistic missile threat, including from countries like Iran and North Korea. So all of that was in the basket of things where we think we can work together. But at the same time, the issue was clear, both publicly and in his private meetings, that our core principles still held and that we had some differences on issues like NATO enlargement and on Georgia and on democracy and human rights, which he talked about in his speech at the new economic school and in his private meetings with NGOs, civil society and opposition leaders. Secretary Clinton, as you know, was in Moscow two weeks ago and did the same thing. Pursued common interests where we have some and we want to cooperate like Iran, Afghanistan and start nuclear nonproliferation, but at the same time making clear our differences and our determination to uphold our principles. So in short, some have questioned whether this pursuit of a reset with Russia is a sign of a diverging strategic interest with Central Europe. I think not. I think a more open and trusting relationship with Russia where possible and the pursuit of common interests where possible is actually in the interest of both the United States and Central Europe. Let me offer a couple of thoughts on the issue of missile defense, which is also, I know, been a great focus of people in the region. And I specifically want to address this issue because I think there has been a significant amount of misunderstanding about it, especially when we saw signs after the Obama Administration announced its plans about how to pursue missile defense, headlines about sell-outs or betrayal and there's still talk, frankly, and no doubt there were some of it this morning. I'll just venture a guess from critics of the administration suggesting that somehow the missile defense plan was designed to appease Russia and somehow sold out Central and European interests in the name of a reset with Russia. I'll be blunt about this. I think that line of thinking is simply wrong. We've had a chance to explain the missile defense approach. We've had a chance to explain it publicly and to our friends in the region. I actually think that understanding of what we are doing is growing and we're getting to the point that we wanted to get to, which is people understanding that we think we have a better plan to protect Americans and Europeans from a growing threat from nuclear proliferation and ballistic missiles, but also a better plan to enhance and encourage strategic cooperation with our Central and East European partners. That's the part of it that I think there has been a lot of misunderstanding about. Again, I think in the time since the announcement we've had plenty of opportunity to explain this, to underscore that the factors driving this had to do with the intelligence, the realization that Iran was moving forward very quickly on short and medium-range ballistic missiles, a threat already to Europe, including Southeastern Europe and soon to Central Europe and then soon thereafter to Western Europe, and that to us it didn't make a lot of sense to deploy 10 interceptors against ICBMs that didn't exist while leaving these countries vulnerable to a threat from dozens or hundreds of short and medium-range missiles that do exist and will soon exist in much greater numbers. So that was the critique of the old plan and the reason for exploration of a different one which was supplemented by technological developments, namely success in the development of this standard missile 3 technology which is what the new phase adaptive approach is going to be based on in phases that will lead ultimately by 2020 to a very significant capability to deal with both short, medium and longer-range threats. And then finally, in addition to intelligence and technology, it was a policy decision. We wanted to cover all of Europe and we wanted to do it together with NATO rather than simply bilaterally and that is what we're working towards as well. So frankly, we think it's a better plan on every level to defend Americans, deploy to American forces and our allies in Europe and as for the speculation on Russia of which there has been a lot, some have criticized us for doing it for Russia, some have criticized us for not doing so for not trying to negotiate or bargain something and that I would just simply say the reality is that Russia was an ancillary point to the points that I just made. The decision was made about how to best protect America, its allies and its forward deployed troops and the reality is we didn't know how Russia would respond. It was always an open question whether Russia would decide that this was more in their interest in the previous plan. They might have decided otherwise we had no control over that. As it happens, they have been largely positive about it, which is also okay. Just because the Russians aren't criticizing it doesn't mean that it's a bad plan. Let me also reinforce the point about cooperation with Central and Eastern European allies because I've had conversation with some friends in Central and Eastern Europe who said actually prior to our decision who were saying we actually don't believe in missile defense we don't think it's necessary, we don't think it will work but we really want you to go ahead with the plans with Poland and Czech Republic because they wanted strategic cooperation with the United States, which is fair enough but the point I want to make here is in the new plan we think we have just such strategic cooperation with our partners in Central and Eastern Europe. Much of the focus has been on Poland where the decision was made of course not to pursue previous agreement on ground-based interceptors but think about the current agreement or what is on offer from the Obama administration. It was an offer, a right of first refusal to Poland for whose cooperation we were grateful in the previous plan to deploy SM3s if it so chose. It was an agreement to move forward with the Patriot anti-air system that needed a more robust version that had been previously on offer and a decision to move forward with all of the strategic dialogue and defense cooperation groups that the Bush administration had agreed with Poland in the final year. So if someone can explain to me how moving forward in basing missile defense interceptors moving forward with all sorts of strategic dialogues and moving forward on Patriots is somehow walking back from strategic cooperation I would like to hear it because we in fact think it's moving in the opposite direction and we have also with the Czech Republic engaged in serious discussions about how they might be involved in the new plan and about moving forward with our strategic and defense dialogue with the Czech Republic and finally the new plan will offer other opportunities for Central and Eastern European countries and all NATO allies to be involved in what will be much more NATO-ized missile defense plan. In short, far from abandoning Central and Eastern Europe this phased adaptive approach to missile defense should be a sign seen as a sign of enduring commitment. Let me say a word about our perspective on NATO and how it relates to the region. We think that NATO enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe has been a historic achievement of Democratic and Republican administrations since the end of the Cold War. I'm proud to have been involved in that process earlier in the Clinton administration and to continue the process in the Obama administration. In 1999 we, of course, welcomed in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary to the alliance. Since then, under the Bush administration, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia have all come in and Croatia and Albania in 2009. This really is a historic set of achievements that have contributed to stability and prosperity throughout the region, and we believe that the door to NATO enlargement must remain open. Applicants need to meet demanding criteria, but if they do, they should be free to fulfill their Euro-Atlantic aspirations just like those who preceded them. There's also the issue of NATO's strategic concept, which, of course, is being revised this year for the first time in 10 years. And there's a great debate about whether the focus should be on Article 5 or if it should be on global engagement or on new threats. And our answer to that question is simple. It needs to be all of the above. It's not a choice between focus on Article 5 or focus on global engagement. Obviously, Afghanistan is important. The alliance is at war. We're at war there together. There are more than 30,000 European troops as part of ISAF, including many troops who are making important contributions from Central and Eastern Europe. That is a core part of what NATO does for a century. But that doesn't mean that Article 5 doesn't remain central, and we need to make that clear in the strategic concept and in the reality of what we do on the ground. President Obama has said that NATO must have contingency plans in place to deal with new threats wherever they come from. And that task needs to be reflected in the strategic concept and that's what we're seeking to do as it is revised. Let me just mention a final issue because I want to make sure we have more questions and comments, which is the wider Central and Eastern Europe neighborhood. I mentioned that this morning and yesterday in the extensive discussions as part of the USEU summit, the Vice President, the President, and today at the State Department many of these issues were discussed, stability in Ukraine, prospects of engagement with Belarus, the hope to integrate the Balkans into Euro-Atlantic institutions, our desire to bring stability to the Caucasus, and in the course of these discussions we expressed our very strong support for the EU's Eastern partnership, which is in many ways a Central and Eastern European brainchild with the Czechs, the Poles, and together with the Swedish presidency providing resources and engagement with Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. We strongly support this. It is a reflection of a process that we think needs to move forward. The extension of democracy and stability to Central and Eastern Europe, as I said previously, was a huge bipartisan success over the past 20 years, but that process is not yet complete. And we look forward to working with our partners in Central and Eastern Europe and throughout the EU to bring those countries in the Balkans and in the Eastern partnership closer to Euro-Atlantic institutions if they so choose. There are many other issues that we could address. I haven't said much about the economic crisis that we have been working together with our partners to deal with, and the US has contributed to tackling through our stimulus plan and support for international financial institutions. We could and should talk about energy security, which is another central concern of the countries in the region, and I'm happy to discuss any of these in the discussion period. But here in conclusion I would just say that I think and I hope that the perspectives I have offered on the issues I have addressed, Russia, Missile Defense, NATO, the neighborhood underscores my initial point, which is that US and Central European strategic interests are deeply entwined and converging. Thank you very much. I look forward to your questions. Okay, thank you very much, Phil. Phil can stay for about 15 minutes, so we'll have time for some questions. Let me jump in with the first one and let me just say that actually surprisingly enough, Missile Defense was not mentioned that much this morning. We didn't really discuss it in any detail and I don't think anybody realistically or rationally views the new system in a negative light. I don't think so. The question I have is in terms of the positioning of planning and positioning of the system that's now on the table, what role both will Central-East Europe play, but also will Russia play? Because there is a possibility and I think it may already be happening, that Russia may well start to criticize the new system, not because it's a threat to Russia, it's a Russia strategic arsenal which has never been the case even with the Bush system, but because it may deepen military and security cooperation between the United States and the Central Europeans. So what is the role of Russia in this? It's a good question. What are the other levels of that? First, as I said, we didn't know how Russia would react even to this system. It is quite plausible that Russia's main objection to the Bush administration's plan based on ground-based interceptors had less to do with the technology and the type of interceptors than with the places that it was being planned to deploy. And so one wondered what if you proposed deploying a different missile system in the same places? And essentially that's what we've done because we made clear from the very start that we would go to Poland and express our gratitude for the previous cooperation and express an offer, a right of first refusal to deploy the new technology. It was quite possible that Russia would just simply say the same thing. We're not going to accept anything deployed in former Warsaw Pact countries or in Central Eastern Europe. They didn't and as I said that's fine with us. If this removes, if this facilitates cooperation with Russia on other issues we're certainly not going to complain about that. At the same time we're going to, and the President has made clear that what he was doing was deciding on a missile defense system best place to defend Americans and their allies. So we'll see as it develops it's possible that the Russians will over time raise objections, but that's not going to determine the decisions that have already been made or decisions that we made in future which should be driven by how to protect Americans and their allies. The other point I would make about Russia is we have said that we remain open to a missile defense cooperation with Russia. We think Russia is also threatened by nuclear proliferation and ballistic missiles. And there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to work together on missile defenses that would protect them as it contributes to the protection of Europe as well. Great. Thanks very much. Let's start with the question. Lukash was first. If you could reintroduce yourselves to the film. Of course. Lukash Kulesa, Polish Institute of International Affairs Warsaw. And the question is about one thing that you have not mentioned in your introduction which is the Russian proposal for the new security architecture in Europe, so-called mediatives proposal. And we hear from Moscow that 2010 could be the decisive year to move forward with this issue. Of course, also taking into account the fact that Kazakhstan would be chairman in office at the OSCE and the core process is going on. My question is, what's your assessment of the current state of the discussion and what do you think would be the future of this whole idea? Needless to say, when the Russians are talking about the Helsinki 2 or Helsinki Plus it implies that we have a very bad situation in Europe and we need to secure what we have and we have two blocks, as strange as this may sound. So what's your assessment on this one? Thanks for raising that important issue. We have said from the start when the Russians first raised this that we remain open and ready for serious European security discussions with all countries across Europe including Russia. If they have issues that they want to discuss we don't want to reject anything out of hand. We are open to dialogue and discussion. Institutions can always be improved. There was a war in Europe in 2008. Nothing's perfect and we should remain open to serious dialogue. That said, we also made clear that in terms of institutions in Europe we already have some pretty good ones, not just NATO and the European Union but the OSCE and in terms of Russia's pitch to have a comprehensive security dialogue, well that's what the OSCE is for in part. And we have insisted that that discussion take place within the OSCE which is a comprehensive organization and everyone gets a voice and that's where we should have this discussion and that's where we have had this discussion. We have also said that in terms of principles for European security we also have some pretty good ones of those too. And many of them are enshrined in the Helsinki Final Act. Non-use of forest or spectrum borders, territorial integrity, sovereignty, resolution of disputes and we don't really see the scope for inventing new principles and we're skeptical about the need for a treaty enshrining new principles which would of course be difficult to enforce even if you could negotiate and ratify it. So that's where we are. We have also insisted that the Russians keep wanting to talk about hard security which is fine. We need organizations and institutions to talk about hard security. There is a CFE, an existing CFE treaty from which they have suspended participation and we'd like to see them come back into implementing the CFE treaty in terms of hard security. But we have also underscored that European security is not just about military issues and hard security, it's about human security and things that happen within borders and that's another of the great merits of the OSCE is that it recognizes this and it focuses on the human dimension of security and what happens within borders and we don't want to decouple those two. We're happy to talk about all aspects of security but we don't want to abandon those important dimensions in the OSCE and go off and have some other discussion. So these discussions do go on at the OSCE we're happy to continue that process but we do remain skeptical about the prospects for a treaty and we think there are already some pretty good institutions and principles and we should get on with the business of improving those institutions and implementing those principles rather than trying to invent new ones. Thanks very much Charles, I saw you next. Thank you Phil I was very pleased to hear what you just said a second ago about human security. For most of the people of Central and Eastern Europe the question would be all but irrelevant. They're not concerned about NATO they are mildly concerned about Russia but they are concerned about our domestic issues such as the growth of intolerance the extraordinary effects of that intolerance on the Roma growth of anti-Semitism etc. My question is aside from OSCE is there anything in a bilateral way or through existing institutions actually some innovative way by which we could influence the course of politics in these countries. I realize this is not particularly the forum where you would discuss intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states and I don't ask you to do that but in general terms is there anything that you're thinking about that might help the situation there? It's an interesting question Charles your first point on discourse my first point which is that increasingly Central and Eastern Europe faces similar challenges to Western Europe and OSCE these issues that you mention of democracy and intolerance and internal struggles are not unique to Central and Eastern Europe look at Western Europe on some of the same questions look at OSCE whereas I don't fair enough to say that the citizen issue of NATO in Article 5 is less relevant although I want to underscore I still think that these issues are relevant in the region and certainly leaders and even publics pay attention to them increasingly you're right the day to day bread and butter issues are these others we're certainly not in a position to lecture on these things that was again the point I made that we all are facing similar challenges to improve democracy, multi-ethnic societies and tolerance all I can say is we need to do that together I don't know if there are any special initiatives but that's what the European Union is good at that the OSCE plays an important role in the human dimension and we need together as true partners with similar values continue to focus on how we can improve our societies in the United States in Western Europe and Central Europe my name is Tudor Ulyanovsky from the embassy of Moldova and thank you again as Secretary of State for your support for our country especially after the elections that we had and even at the highest level including the Vice-President Secretary of State and yourself of course just two questions to issues the first one is related to the Vice-President Biden visit to Europe especially his remarks in Bucharest that the US is supporting the Euro-Atlantic aspirations of countries including like like Moldova when they are ready when at the same time having in mind your previous remarks with the strategic patients for Georgia and how do you think that the best reaction of countries like Moldova should be on receiving these positive signals of course encouraging signals in the context of a more assertive Russia if it's clear and the second issue is with regards to the larger European security context and happy that you mentioned the CFE treaty just in general and you what are your expectations of the upcoming December OSEE Ministry of Conference in Athens thank you okay well first well thank you and thank you for being here and for your comments Moldova one of the things I learned or discovered or experienced in my six months or so in office is there aren't a lot of a lot of more challenges than sort of things that we can celebrate and yet Moldova is actually in that latter category we were delighted to see free and fair elections take place and the government come to power interested in joining Europe and the West and emphasizing democracy and the values that we share and that's why we have indeed gone out of our way to try to underscore that and applaud what took place in Moldova and make sure that others see it as well because this is really what it's all about it's the demonstration effect that yes actually if you do the right thing and you embrace democracy and respect human rights there are rewards for doing so and we're going to do all we can to bolster and support the new government in Moldova financially and politically to demonstrate that it's important not just for Moldovans but we hope it will also be a message to others in the region because as I said there is still when you look out at countries that haven't or haven't yet joined the EU Ukraine, Belarus, Bosnia, Serbia Caucasus others they need to see too that there's a reward for this there's a benefit from doing the difficult work of overcoming ethnic divisions, accepting rule of law and again I applaud what Moldova has done and we're going to do everything we can to continue to support it and I think that that message is relevant you talked about strategic patience and the lessons that other countries can learn there are positive consequences for doing the right thing and that's the story of the past 20 years and we need to continue to make it the story of the next 20 we're looking forward to the OSCE summit our ministerial in Athens Secretary Clinton believes strongly in the OSCE she wants it to she wants American engagement with the OSCE to expand she unfortunately missed the last ministerial meeting because she broke her elbow so this will be her first opportunity to go and work on the issue she cares a lot about and it's a great platform for her because she has long underscored and emphasized the importance of the human dimension of security trafficking human rights and the OSCE summit in Athens is going to give her an opportunity to underscore that of course we're going to participate in the corporate process and talk about broader security issues but I would underscore that what we're looking forward to is going and emphasizing the human dimension and Athens will provide an excellent opportunity to do that would you say a few words about Bosnia what do you think what do you think the danger is an explosion well just to clearly address the last point I don't think Bosnia is on the verge of an explosion we experienced obviously terrible developments in Bosnia prior to the Dayton Agreement and you never want to be complacent because you never know but that's not what we're thinking about when we look at Bosnia today and yet what we are seeing when we look at Bosnia today is at best stagnation and at worst regression in terms of its political development and it's relevant for the discussion we just had of positive consequences from doing the right thing and negative ones from failing to do so and I'll be blunt that's really the message that the United States and the European Union together in the form of Foreign Minister built and Deputy Secretary Steinberg who've been to Bosnia twice now in the past month that's the message they carried with them they brought because we saw this stagnation and the political prospects of the country and because we feared that with elections coming up next year if we didn't take some initiative now we would miss another opportunity and an electoral cycle it would be set back even further United States and the European Union together and it has to be together because if we're divided on this then the message to the parties isn't clear enough together we would come to offer a package a reasonable package and indeed a modest package that would allow them to fulfill the conditions to transition from the UN Office of High Representative to a European Union Special Representative and what does that mean and why does it matter it means that they can get on the starting line for membership in the European Union and that would require them fulfilling those final conditions resolving the issue of how to divide up state property and taking modest steps of functional government that could as I say get on the starting line for membership in the European Union one thing that all Bosnians can agree on and they disagree on many things is that they want to be part of Europe and we should do all we can to help them on that path ultimately the choice is theirs and that's the point I made about positive consequences and negative consequences other Balkan countries are on that path some of them are further along than others the agreement between Slovenia and Croatia today or yesterday depending on what time zone you're in that process is moving along for at least one of them and others are on that path too and in many cases they're doing the right things and our message to Bosnia was they can also be on that path but they can also be left out I mean this the choice really is up to them we hope that they will agree to this package so that they with the rest of the western Balkans can start moving towards Euro-Atlantic integration and we're doing this very closely with our European partners very last question lady over there please grab a microphone because Phil has to run in a couple of minutes hi I'm Susan Cornwell with Reuters this morning the Polish Foreign Minister said that Central Europe needed some strategic reassurance and he talked about this recent Russian military exercise and said that he thought maybe there were six American soldiers in Poland so I'm just wondering how you think you can provide Central Europe with this strategic reassurance can that be done with more military hardware installations, exercises or how I think we have to do so I mean if reassurance is in the eye of the beholder if people say they need to be reassured then they need to be reassured and it's our job to do what we can to reassure them I don't think it's simply or even mainly a military question the military side is important and that's why I mentioned our military and strategic cooperation and that's why I mentioned missile defense and other aspects of military cooperation but I don't think that's the core of it I think that Central Europe wants to know that we care about the region we're integrated with the region and we define it as part of our interests again that's the first point I made and I said that we do to Central Europeans to know that the United States is paying attention values the partnership and we can always do more and I think that was the message the Vice President carried with him when he went out there a couple of weeks ago and it's a message we are going to continue to carry and it is one that as I said the cycle of 20th anniversaries provides us a good opportunity to do so because we can talk about what we have together achieved how important it is to us how it can be an example to others and we are going to work we realize that there's a perception out there because the United States is appropriately focused on Iran and North Korea and Afghanistan that Europe or Central Europe doesn't count as much as it used to but I think the President has been to Europe more times in his first year than I think any previous President Vice President going out and all of us are going to continue to show up to demonstrate that we see Central and Eastern Europe as a core part of our alliance and a very close partner of the United States That's a good note to finish on Thanks very much Phil, great job


What's up, everyone? It's your girl, Kenzie here from Layton sports cards and I'm ripping 2022 Bowman's best baseball hobby eight box full case break number 10.  Oh with the Royals Andrew st D-backs Anthony K Cubs Brian C a's Gregory M with the oils and Dodgers and Brewers Enh Mariners Jason G Padres and Mets Jeremy W Rangers Jonathan L Reds Joshua B with the Red Sox Angels White Sox and Giants Keith H Astros We have Matthew M pirates Matthew K Yankees Max T Blue Jays Michael W Marlins Min Kuké Rays Nicholas J Nationals Raymond R Rockies Roy K Braves Ryan You got two Ryan B's Ryan be Guardians Ryan be you twins Steve are Phillies Thorpe W Tigers and wing s Cardinals. All right. Good luck everyone. Thanks again for the fill Let's see a super here There you go mark. Yeah Got some nice nice workies for sure. That's a decent price. What were they like 70 bucks or something like that? Eight boxes you fresh cakes. Good luck. Good luck. Good luck on-card autos. Let's see a super Got De La Cruz and wonder fraco rookie refractor. Hope everyone's having a great Saturday. Thanks for tuning in to the stream We've got a Cole young as our first auto Mariners Cole young UFO refractor of a Cooney, Jr. And De La Cruz rookie refractor Trout stop Brooks Lee. You've got atomic of Salvador Perez Royals and a Cooney, Jr. refractor Ryan refractor Luba. We've got a Kumar rocker green auto to 99 Ego Rangers nice Kumar 33 of 99 Marcella Meyer We've got lava of Brooks Lee to 199 on the aqua aris Ricky burger water of will pay Christian Hernandez refractor tovah. I got a Jackson holiday refractor Jose Ramirez a refractor of Henry Davis and Chariot atomic rookie fire of Mackenzie Gore Cower Colson Montgomery Shay we've got rookie or sorry not rookie refractor auto of a Castillo for the race Vladding on the UFO refractor Aaron Cal Raleigh, we've got global impact I cut Juan Soto Joey Vada, Julio Rodriguez rookie base Well, we've got masterpieces rookie of Bobby way, Jr. Royals Jayce Young Jayde Martinez Last back here Anya base Alonso. We've got refractor auto of Luis Gonzalez for the Orioles Luis Gonzalez Green Royce Lewis rookie to 99 and Simon one refractor. Yes. I'm good. Ricky's a For sure. I love box number two You know, we are all full for the daytime breaks For Sam will be live tonight at five got air refractor Henry Davis. Have you by this? more group breaks tonight at five with Sam Lando Julio Rodriguez rookie base. We've got atomic rookie Shane boss on the fire Coloss in Selbro Perez For Peña, we've got a one-bin show auto for the Cardinals one-bin show Rather cool here. I might shout on the UFO Miranda.  We've got Tamar Johnson and Elijah Greene So you Jackson holiday. We've got refractor auto of your on D at De Los Santos your Danny De Los Santos Pirates Purple rookie wander Franco nice when they're raised 196 of 250 And a wander auto out of the last case here. I mean Mercedes refractor Rice and Stott will be on the water refractor and JC on refractor Maggie you've got Gavin Cross refractor Oscar Coloss refractor Tovar Wreckley a Danny DeAndreid auto for the twins See if the twins are gonna heat back up there like four or five out of the last Ray Christian Hernandez UFO refractor and Boba Shett. I really want to pull a super Mackenzie Gore Lawler Arias. You've got atomic rookie a brace and stop Philly's and George Kirby Ricker refractor The white ink. Yeah, those were nice. I like elements. That's a fun product Bobby with junior rookie It's hard though with what only like five cards of box Jackson holiday and refractor of Shohei Ruhon Jett Merz. We've got a yasser Mercedes another twins hit there It's a nice looking autograph Green rookie mini diamond Mackenzie Gore that is 90 of 99 and Jarendre ran work your refractor That will do it for a box number two box three Yeah, nice looking penmanship. Hope everyone's having a great Saturday Anyone do anything fun this weekend? I got to get packing. I packed like three boxes And we're supposed to be moving starting to move on Tuesday And I absolutely despise moving. It's so just strenuous You've got torque rookie air refractor of Lattie junior packing everything up moving it unpacking it putting it We're supposed to go to Mark Johnson and Julia Rodriguez rookie refractor But it is worth it. It is worth it really looking forward to the house I've got Bobby with junior rookie and we've got a Luis Mesa for the blue James Jay's out of there Brady house UFO refractor and Pete Alonzo. Um, we have some up for Personals or we did at one point global impact die cut refractor Garrett Cole Jeremy Penny a rookie refractor sometimes they're thrown into Mixers as well mark. Yeah, no more renting on your cruise. We got a Bobby with junior on the bowman masterpieces Gavin Cross Jake Burger rookie refractor. I Know I saw it Timmy. Oh my gosh, it's such a sick card Rio we've got green of Henry Mendez for the Brewers 21 and 99 It's Mendez there And purple Lattie junior out of 250 Right now castle refractor Yeah, yeah, so a force force of saying we got a Bobby with junior on the earth rookie refractor Gutierrez crazy Shield Simon one we've got Elijah green on the atomic masterpieces Jackson holiday, Brian Acuna refractor Crews we got a wonder Franco Ricky weeks refractor auto for the Astros Tyler Whitaker astros UFO of Ricardo Cabrera Machado refractor we Bob Acuna. We've got Oscar Coloss on the mini diamond White Sox the 299 Atomic Mookie Betts has refractor Are we to me? Oh rs Montgomery and Corey Seger Last five box three as Cara, we've got a Eddie's Leonard auto for the Dodgers last team snake, and I believe here Dodgers and Green rookie redemurs to 99 angels refractor Jackson holiday So for Mars, how's it going box for? Two million drips. Geez, Timmy How's your thumb not fall off from that? Let's heat up here. Let's see something big Shet Coloss. We've got O'Neill cruise water Matt Olson Tony we've got atomic Joshua Benz on the UFO for the Cardinals Chariot Gavin sheets rookie refractor Poor cookie base. We've got Anthony Gutierrez for the Rangers on the autograph Texas UFO of Bryce Harper on her green rookie refractor Rizzo Melendez. We've got mini diamond Joey Votto for the Reds Global impact die cut of Ronald Acuna Jr. Freddie Freeman refractor Miss to Mark Johnson Tati. So you've got Acuna and Bryce Harper refractor Buenos we have Henry Mendez Brewers doing well so far this break the 34th auto there Purple Rappy Devers for the Red Sox to 250 Brian Hayes refractor You know Abrams buzz. We've got air say a Suzuki Ricky Dustin Harris Green Gavin sheets. Matt Olson. We've got Colson Couser Colson Couser cross Harper Freeman a yes and more bell Rangers also doing well You like some teams go on heaters in the in the cases of a caro on the UFO refractor Valera your team hot you're hot Cross Harris Hayes, we've got atomic Raffy Devers and one so cool Jeremy Penya bowman masterpieces refractor Jace Young and Elliot Ramos refractor judge Elliot Ramos. We have a Jordan Wicks auto for the Cubbies A nice one here. How about an orange Brian Acuna? That's gonna be 16 of 25 Minnesota staying hot That is Ryan B. There you go, Ryan This orange Acuna Aaron judge refractor All right second half of the case here. What do y'all think about the? Panthers and bears trade Trading up to get that number one pick. I don't feel him being released. Oh, it's kind of a shock He'll get scooped up though. I'm sure Even to the Steelers I wish I'd be pretty cool as long as we can build around pick it Chisholm. We've got Alvarez on the air refractor Chisholm, Jr. Get some O. Lyman That's for sure Sure as Thomas we've got De La Cruz Steven quander if you refractor And there's a link for the break schedule if anyone's looking for we got a Taj Bradley auto for the race All filled up for the daytime breaks, but plenty of spots remaining with Sam tonight UFO blaze Jordan refractor Nicola Dolo Let's get his stuff filled up so he can walk in Walk into work and all his breaks be filled. That's pretty pretty dope. Raleigh.  You've got Marcelo Meyer and Contreras refractor Burger Jeremy Pena. We have blue Hendry Mendez. That one is seven out of 150 for the Brewers Milwaukee Eaton here Got him Gregory M. There you go, Bray Jace Young on the Aqua Lava that one is 144 199 Detroit and Montero refractor rookie as Mount Castle. We've got mini diamond Yordon Alvarez Strauss rookie of CJ Abrams Water and yellowish when you've got atomic global impacts die cut of Khalil Watson Brooks Lee and Christian Pasha as Jack Swincey rookie auto pirates Swincey and UFO rookie refractor Bobby Whit jr. Swincey rookie refractor Sweet holiday atomic of Maggie Cabrera Cal Raleigh rookie refractor Oscar Coloss James Wood refractor last back here Last five That's we've got hey Valera on the insert auto 91 of 250 guardians very nice hit Cleveland That is going to Ryan B. Congrats on that again 91 of 250 or hey Valera Very nice Blue rookie of Cal Raleigh to 150 and Christian Santana refractor Heck yeah, that's nice. I will nag that one. Sorry box six sports we have on today Maybe some college basketball For opening day mixer. I'm sure they're probably our Mars I'm sure they're probably be one more John saying we've got fire. I'm the Kenzie Gore rookie refractor Acunia jr Of what I'm not sure But rich usually puts together a nice mixer Stella Meyer we've got a jc young refractor Lou Bob Yo, we've got a Niko Kavadas for the Red Sox Kavadas UFO refractor Jordan Lawler arias rookie and then green sheets global impact Dai cut Nolan aeronado Jordan Hayes Got Deila Cruz Royce Lewis Cross we've got a Curtis mead auto for the race Curtis mead And aqua lava for the marlins jessism jr. 199 the caro refractor There's some really nice mixers going tomorrow night with force for Sunday fun a basketball and football mixer You know soda we've got earth, uh, luciano Bass on schism. We've got global impact. Dai cut atomic of Armando Cruz Marcella Meyer Ellie Deila Cruz refractor No, the blue auto of denser guzman that is eight of 150 You go angels On the dg Uh, Jeremy Pena a UFO rookie refractor kuma rocker refractor tarot patrice. We've got gold chris sathean vaccaro 11 of 75 Washington That is nicolas j Nice one there Beautiful the caro We'll mag that uh, bruxley atomic and pool host refractor Yeah, heroin. Yeah, I think dj morrow will be a good fit there for sure Yeah, let's you got Elijah green bowman masterpieces, uh, bruxley and brennan marsh Brawley sewinsky. We've got a drew gilbert auto for the astros And blue rookie brindalea cruz. Here you go marlins 55 or 150 Last card is a seya suzuki rookie refractor I think so, um I mean, i'm a stealer fan and like I I definitely liked playful like his rookie year He had a decent rookie year, but he just wasn't ready for For all the limelight, I guess you could say And then especially after that one game I forgot who we were playing but he wanted to celebrate his first down rather than get back to the line because we were on a time crunch He wanted to yell at everybody else.  We've got a moonyos on the mini diamond dodgers Water rookie refractor julio rodriguez chris Bryant Um, I don't I don't think so remarks Montgomery cheerio Montgomery and torque rookie refractor. He's decent, but I don't think he's any jalen hurts Tina, so we've got we've got gold lava auto louise menza. That is 37 and 75 blue jays The couple hits this case UFO refractor joshel bags and mj melinda's rookie refractor wander franco rookie base Hernandez one global impact die cut refractor of henry davis and anthony rizzo cunha de la cruz. We've got james wood masterpieces valera and tamar johnson refractor yep Maybe in that case, uh a cueva on the auto for the rangers in your cueva And we've got aqua lava rookie of george curvy 56 of 199 Mariners pate space refractor Yeah, so do the steelers yordan. We've got jordan luller water refractor henry davis But we've got we've got pretty good, uh spots in the in the um draft kuma rocker there is like a Dimple good to go the word dimple in that card Rangers we'll send the box Pretty obvious one Munoz refractor Cool host we've got a artega auto for the giants It's got a nice looking autograph too Giants UFO refractor uh posei remos marcello meyer and sozuki got atomic mic trout And shane boz rookie refractor The green josh low merenda a eligie green And cj abrams rookie refractor You're already giving up on uh Rogers should we have here atomic auto to 25 rain donkahn for the dodgers There you go last team mojo there LA that is gonna be greggory m having himself a break Nice hit there gregg Oh, wow What a box here And we've got golden jr. Beautiful wit Sick Very nice hit there a little dust right here Um, I'll have christian wipe that with the microfiber before we put that in the mag for you Congrats on that right by his like right me right there's a little tiny piece of dust Tyler mcgill rookie refractor Oh, what a box there the uh pack honestly that was yeah That was the same pack the atomic auto and gold wit Wow All right last box of the capes Yo cabrera, we've got a showtime on the mini diamond angels rookie refractor water uh puli rodriguez royce lewis Montgomery akunya refractor the carol Juan martinez we've got a tray sweeney refractor auto Yankees uh the carol ufo refractor josh robinus Ayla cruz we've got a wander franca rookie base Fernandez global impact die cut refractor rookie cj abrams ellie delacruz Arias Luba akunya. We've got a colton calcer refractor and kumar rocker Lewis yordan. We've got a jose aramos auto for the dodgers And purple jackson chario. That is one 180 of 250 nice one they have brewers And albert puho's refractor All right second half here Second mini box carol. We've got jordan lullar on the water refractor brandon marshy refractor Lewis kumar rocker atomic global impact die cut uh mickey cabrera tigers Jayce young tigers as well and say a suzuki refractor rookie Mars we've got auto of james wood for the pod race James wood ufo blaze jordan refractor Poppy bias randa pares baez. We've got atomic of jake burger rookie white socks Salvador pares refractor Sadie's green josh low. We've got a uh delacruz and jose maranda. All right last pack here Jayce young believe this is our auto Let's see right there. You got a green mini diamond of christian hernandez 53 of 99 and josh low rookie All right last hit here of the break. It looks like a gold lava This is 25 of 75 of tyler wittaker for the astros Nice some solid colors coming out of this case very nice All right, give me one second here and we will do a recap So you had the orange to 25 brian akunya for the twins Our base autos james wood podricks hosay ramos dodgers trace weenie uh refractor yankies artega giants quiva rangers drew gilbert astros Curtis meade rays cavatis red socks suanski pirates taj bradley rays jordan wicks cubs morabelle rangers hendry mendez brewers anthony goodierre as rangers Then we had eddie's lennard dodgers refractors tyler wittaker astro louise meza blue jays mercedes twins the andreid twins uh dalo santos refractor pirates win uh won bencho cardinals louise gonzalez refractor orios casilla refractor rays col young mariners blues to 150 denser guzman angels and a hendry mendez brewers greens to 99 kuma rocker rangers hendry mendez brewers gold lavas the 75 tyler wittaker astros a louise meza blue jays and the atomic to 25 of rain doncan Dodgers and our max cards We had the horre valera that is 91 out of 250 for the guardians A gold lava the 75 christinian vecaro nationals And a gold rookie to 50 of bobby witt jr. Congrats again casey great case there. We've got number 11 coming up in just a bit Thanks, everyone


Welcome to Access to Trader, the number one community for those who are committed to taking control of their trading in order to achieve success, profitability, and longevity. Thank you for joining us. Here's Dan Shapiro to help you find your edge, master your process, and own your future. Hey guys, good morning everybody. Welcome to another edition of the AccessToTrader.com weekend update show. Hope everybody is having a great start to their weekend. Again, hair is getting longer, shaving not as frequently, but again, we're all still here at the end of the day. It's all about health and again, if you think about what's happening right now in the world, all our expectations and fantasies really need to be curbed down. And that's what we've been talking about kind of on a daily basis, just really appreciate life. And if you go back a couple of days, the governor of Georgia made a decision. They're going to reopen things up for business as of yesterday. All you can do is say a prayer. All you can do is say a prayer.  Even though everything quote unquote is open for business. Again, this is my opinion. I think it's incredibly negligent.   It's just one man's opinion. So please stay safe. So let's talk about the market. Very, very aggressive week. If you are a beta trader, and this is what we do, incredible ranges. Usually, again, these things have very, very big aggressive ranges with this type of market, with the increasing amount of short sellers. And again, this is not a market that's supposed to make sense. We've been talking about this now for weeks. You almost have to feel bad for the natural bull seller. Again, I trade ranges. I've been coming in flat every day for a very, very long time. And it doesn't make a difference to me. As long as I can grasp market sentiment, I don't care if I'm wrong in my initial opinion of what's going to happen in the market. I'm just going to wait for things to play out. Long, short doesn't make a difference.  You almost have to say a prayer for the perma bear.  We have basically a standstill economy. You had 25, 30 million people maybe by now that have filed for unemployment, jobless claims exploding through the roof. You have housing starts way down. Again, who's running out right now and buying a house, right? You can have automobile sales and everything is completely standing still. You have this whole buildup in supply of oil and the oil market this week. Just the front end, I believe it was the front end of the June contracts was down 30% just for the week. And if you thought things couldn't get any crazier, you saw on Tuesday that WTI expiring May contract went negative. Again, you trade long enough. I guess you see everything. So it actually went negative on the day, which is the most unbelievable thing you can do. And with everything going out, with still everybody on the lockdown, for the exception of Georgia, the market is amazing. The market is absolutely amazing. And if you took all the headlines out of the way and you were just kind of stuck in a box, which were kind of are in our homes and just kind of looked on the surface of the market and the indexes were unavailable to us, right? News was unavailable to us and we're just looking based on price action. You would think we're in the most rabid bull market of all time. And the key is when all this first started, people just kept on really asking me all the time, what's the difference between 2007 and 2008 during the mortgage mess and this? And my first initial answer was, well, we knew what we were up against during 2007, 2008. We knew what happened. We knew what led us to that point and everything was scary because the financial markets were collapsing right before our eyes. But at least we can go outside. We can go to a restaurant. We could go to a bar if we wanted to drink. But life was normal based on every little thing that we take for granted now. And you fast forward now to look at the market that we're in. The market that we're in compared to what we had. I didn't have a great year in 2007 because we couldn't figure out what to do. We were lost. We really couldn't figure out. By 2008, we started figuring things out. By 2009, November was the generational bottom of November of 2009. But this market, the market kind of fixed itself within the first two months. And you're seeing ridiculously aggressive bull market action. People in 2007, 2000, nobody was chasing anything. There was nothing to chase. Now you have stocks like, for example, not that I was playing this thing on Friday, but you have stocks, for example, like an MESO. Again, anybody who chases a stock here, figure out even the trading aspect, it basically shows that there is no fear. Even though we're all stuck at home and this is not the third, you can tell the level of aggression in this COVID-19 market versus the lack of aggression during the mortgage crisis. And if you look at the technical scoreboard with everything that's going on, it's amazing. And I said this on Friday. It feels like a meteor would have to hit the earth, wipe out half the population to get a downtick for the bears. It's the most unbelievable thing I said, unbelievable thing we're seeing. But this is just the reality. The market is acting incredibly well. Beta is doing fabulous, right? That's the best way I can say it. But I think the most important part of what we saw came Thursday, kind of just to show how strong this market is. If you guys remember, and I talked about this on the Thursday night video, just in case you guys didn't see the video, if you guys remember a couple of weeks ago, not a couple of weeks ago, about a week ago, Gilead had a really, really had a huge flow of, I believe it was, the April weeklies, this was last week, on Friday or Thursday, we had a huge amount of activity of the Gilead 8,590 calls. And this is when the stock was at what, 74? And people knew. People knew they were about to release something or leak something, and there was a hope that finally the headline came out, not directly, I think, from Gilead, whatever the case may be. I don't even remember, all the way back to Monday. But the point was, the market rallied like 7,800 points on the merit that Gilead was going to be the white knight. They were going to save the day. They were going to have the formula that cured this whole thing. And the market exploded that day. And came Thursday, there was an early release of some data. It wasn't from Gilead. It was a premature release, that's what she said. From Gilead, and it basically said the initial trial, they didn't use the word fail. I don't want to use the word fail, but it didn't live up to the whole magic bullet. Everything was going to be fine, save the day scenario. And the Dow went up that day from up 300, and it went red. It went on a day, and instead of tanking on the news of a failure, of a failure that really got the stock up in the first place, the market just kind of sat there and did absolutely nothing. And that's when you knew, if you weren't convinced that this was a strong sentiment by then, you should have been convinced when it didn't sell off on the news that it rallied the market only a week before. And that was very, very important. And come yesterday, again, they could have sold off the market several times. And if you look at the queues, especially towards the end of the day, you had this big rally, right? You had this really, really big rally towards the end of the day. And if you've been watching this broadcast now, even for the last several weeks, you know how important this 213 over-under number has been. Every time we reclaimed this 213, we ran. Every single time we closed below this 213, we started going back down. So the fact that you have all this negative news, all this stigma behind it, all these deaths, all these still cases that are, again, plateau, whatever the case may be, blow off top on the coronavirus, whatever you want to believe. You have everything against common sense and sensibility and logic. And we reclaimed the 213 level and we started rallying back, very, very aggressive. But I thought was also as equally impressive from the bullish technical side of it is, what we started talking about at the beginning of the start of earnings. So the question was, because all these companies were coming out with, well, coming out with basic news and dissemination of news saying that, you know what, a lot of us are going to cut back on forwarding guidance, cut back on any type of early release, not to the analysts, but kind of early release to what we expect our quarter to be. There was a lot of companies that turned around and said, well, we're going to use this as a safety vest. The fact that we're not going to provide forward moving guidance, I think it was a very intelligent move, incredibly intelligent.  And a lot of companies, I think most companies started kind of starting mirroring what Apple was doing to bring down expectations way down. So when they came out with their quarter, there wasn't nothing to be upset about. We get it, right? We get it. Our business is stopping. Our business is being put on hold. Our business is being cut. And you shouldn't have any expectations because, again, we're all in the same boat. So when earning season started, the question was, how was Wall Street going to react to companies taking down expectations?  Goldman Sachs came out with earnings. Citibank came out with earnings. Bank of America came out with earnings. You guys noticing the same thing, right? If you look at every single chart, it looks exactly the same thing. Not one of them sold off on earnings, okay? Because, again, Wall Street started doing something that we talked about prior to earnings, giving companies and giving America a mulligan, right? Everybody, a mulligan, everybody giving almost like a do-over and said, all right, as long as you're saying you're not out of business, as long as you're saying you're not going chapter 11, we'll give you a pass. And you started seeing that with the banks, which was very, very important. Because, again, think about it. Banks are going to be the most aggressive domino. Think about it, banks retail, right? Banks retail. And the next thing you know, we're kind of in 2007, 2008 again. So Wall Street started giving the banks a mulligan. And when Wall Street saw that, stock prices started kind of leveling out a little bit and started moving back higher.  And even IBM, if you guys remember the day before earnings on IBM, and this was right over here, and I said, IBM, never, never.  IBM never makes their quarter anymore. And again, they didn't make their quarter. And the stock gap down like $3, $4. And look what happened. They even gave IBM a benefit of the doubt. So IBM three days later, after coming out with earnings, and this was the earnings, three days later, they were higher than the highest close in the top of the range. So again, if this is a company that never beats their numbers anymore, there's no expectations in IBM. So they held up the banks, they held up IBM, and then Netflix came out. You saw this massive surge in subscribers. And again, that was understood. You had 15, 16 million additional subscribers that came into their business. Obviously, people are going to be stuck in. They're going to watch Ozark. Again, if you haven't seen Ozark, this is what you do. Start with season one. Thank me later. But again, the notion on the street was, well, now that Netflix had this magical run from $290, from $290 to $450, was the price baked in? Was the appreciation baked into their earnings? Again, we knew the earnings was going to be fine. It's not going to be horrible. We knew that they were going to have additional subscribers. Again, take away from their business model in the whole macro sense. We actually knew everything that was going to be seen. The question was, how is the stock going to react? And the stock really didn't react. Again, it had its first initial push to $480, and then it came back in. They tried to sell it off. But if you look at Netflix, again, the moral of the story is just like with the banks, just like IBM, they're giving Netflix a mulligan. And not because a mulligan of stock price. It already ran up. It already had its $250, $200 point run-up. The point that the market is telling you right now, sellers are comfortable. They're not obscene. They're not upset. They're comfortable at levels. And when the stock continues to get mulligans, and the street is now giving a macro mulligan to everybody, to everybody who is reporting, that is a ridiculous bullish sign. And you add that with the fact that they didn't sell off and kill the market on the Gilead news, on the Gilead news that the initial trial, I guess, didn't meet up to at least early expectations.  This week, coming up, you have the motherload of our earnings. You got Tesla. We'll talk about that. The greatest stock of all time. The greatest stock. I don't care what you feel about the company. If you trade Tesla, both long and short, the top five stocks of all time, at least for me, the top five are all Tesla. Then we'll squeeze back to everything else, just my little humble opinion. Whatever your feelings are about Elon and this, that, the other thing, that's a whole different story. I'm speaking from individual preference. This is the just absolutely greatest thing. We'll talk about the individual pivot on Tesla in a second. But you have Tesla coming out. You have Amazon coming out. You have Facebook. You have Apple. You have Microsoft. And a whole slew of other beta names. And oh, by the way, if you take that, if that wasn't enough for market sentiment, Intel missed their numbers, right? And what do they do with Intel? They took the stock to green. So we're setting up very, very aggressively to the upside. And again, is it possible something happens? Is another leg to drop? Do we go back to lows? Of course it is. It's the stock market. Anything's possible. Again, I'm just taking the data that's in front of me. I'm not trying to find something in this state that's not there. I'm just taking literally the data that I've seen, the data that we've traded on, the data that we keeps on reconfirming market sentiment, and we're giving the bulls the benefit of doubt going into next week. Again, if anything comes out new, we start collapsing, taking out lows. That's a whole different conversation. But for now, it's super bullish. We reclaimed the 213 area on the QQQs. And again, unless something materialistically comes out next week, and they start discounting bad earnings and we start rolling over, again, assume that the market will continue its aggressive way. If things turn, things turn very, very quickly. We will be prepared to the other side of the market. And by the way, the other side of the market is still giving you really, really great trades. And let's get to the pivots on Friday. Just a quick announcement. We've been showing these pivots. I try to put in, especially in the afternoons, I try to put in one or two pivots to the general feed, to my general feed. Just again, especially for new traders, just to show how aggressive some of this price action is. And I've been doing this for eight years. For eight years and all, on Friday, I put in that pivot of the 719, 720 pivot on Tesla when the stock was trading like 730. I said, that's the magic number. That's the number that's going to spark the stock. And the stock ran up into the 730s. So we've been doing this. I've been putting these pivots on my general feed for about eight years. OK, I think that's a pretty good sample size of what they can do. Starting Monday, I just made a decision. Starting Monday, everything will be on, everything will obviously be either on the private feed that you're seeing right here or in the live webinar. So if you want to jump into the feed, if this has been giving you incredible value over the years and you want to see these things play out like they do every day, OK? Just jump on the feed or jump on the live webinar. There's plenty of value and you're also getting all the workshops, all the PS60 workshops north of 10 hours of breaking down the process. So if you're interested, again, going forward, that's what it's going to be. So let's talk about Monday. BYND continues to be just a monster. Again, the whole premise of shortage of meat, that's what she said, continues for what God reason, right? Continues to surge the shares of BYND. And again, this is what started the day. BYND 107 rejected twice if we reclaims, can test pre-market highs. Again, experience only 50 cents of Max Payne. Because again, the last thing you want to do is get rejected the third time at 107. If you know that gets rejected, why risk more than you should? So 107, here's the 107 pivot. Phenomenal move. I mean, really, really phenomenal move. I got long on the 107 break. I just didn't get enough size, which is amazing, but it is what it is. So here's the two candles right here. 10690, 107, right? So it got rejected twice. Once it took out, the 107 started building. It just absolutely exploded. It went all the way down to 113. Again, congratulations to all you guys who caught that. BABA really didn't work that much. It didn't really work. Well, I mean, subjective, I guess. 20340, 203, if it builds below, can flush. Here was BABA. Didn't put up a big move at all. So here was the 20340. Only went down, excuse me, wrong stock. I knew it looked crazy. Yeah, so here was the 20340, right? Here's the 20340. Only went down to 20282 and then kind of reversed. Didn't really work. Only went down like 50 cents. Zoom, you know, Zoom was great. Zoom was really, really good. I caught this thing from 78 into the 80s. Nice move here. Again, there was a monster, monster announcement later. We'll get to that in a second. But Zoom, 17720, 17750 needs to build. Could see the 181 supply experience traders. Only, again, Max Payne, a dollar. Here was Zoom. I mean, fantastic move. Really, really fantastic move. So here was the 7720, right? Here's the 7720. And again, I like to enter it the whole numbers because I want to see them build. It took out the 7720. Again, there's no supply and demand and demand. Again, there's no random area where they stop and it traded right into the 181 supply. So really good trade there as well. Shop, again, shop, not a big move at all. Shop, 609 if it builds below can flush. And again, you're speaking from subjective. You know, you could turn around and say, well, you know, I took the 609 break and it went down to 605. And again, on paper, it looks good, right? 609 to 605, it was very, very strong. It turned around, started going higher as well. So again, if you took the trade, I didn't trade shop on Friday, but if you took the trade from 609 to 605, you made some money, God bless. Very, very strong name. I actually like it very much for this week if it starts confirming levels. This was the big move, okay? We've been talking about bowling for the whole week. The buyers were coming in the 130 weeklies, the 125 weeklies, the 120 puts weeklies, right? And it finally got killed. Bowing, this is what started the whole frenzy and we talked about the levels, right? We talked about 137 was the sneaky pivot. I'll show you why in a second. 134 was the previous day's low and 13290, that was the macro low. So 137 sneaky if it builds below can flush. And congratulations, guys. This is definitely the initial move of the day. We'll talk about Tesla in a second. So here was the 37, right? So here was the 37, okay? So here was the 37. It was these two channels, right? It was the highest candles into rising support in the 60. So 13712, you can see it, right? 137, so it gets destroyed, right? Absolutely destroyed. And then takes out the 34 from the previous day, right? 34 was the previous day's low, which was right over here. And then the next low was that 3290 was the macro low from a week ago. And this thing got destroyed.  Went from 37 to 28. I still think this thing goes lower. Is it going to go lower in a straight line? Probably not. But this thing has a shot to go all the way down to here to its April 2nd low of 120. So I know a lot of you guys still have a runner over the weekend. So great job. I mean, absolutely great job on Boeing destroyed. Netflix got absolutely manhandled. 424 keeps holding if it builds below can flush. Here was Netflix, right? So here was Netflix. Here's the 24, right here. All 24, 24, 24. Went all the way down to 415 destroyed. And it actually woke up later. Actually wound up putting a pivot. Never got filled. Never got even close to the upside. But, you know, it actually started waking up. And I thought there could have been a sneaky pivot up here. Obviously never got here. But monster move on Netflix. ZM perfect. Baba take on the way down. Beyond. I just wish I would have got filled on normal size. Which was good. Netflix flush. And I said, listen, great moves. I mean, absolutely phenomenal moves. There's nothing wrong with them. Here's the pivot I actually put back to the upside. Never got there on Netflix. And this is where we talked about, this is where we talk about this is the greatest stock of all time. So I actually shorted this thing in the morning. I shorted this thing in the morning. And it went down, it went down, there was a 703 pivot. I don't remember even if I put it on the, and it went down to 698, right? So I took some money on the tray there. And then I was waiting for that really hard confirmation of 698, which never came. And it started rallying and got very, very strong. So what happened was, Tesla just started sitting there, like literally sitting there, 713, 715. Then we started seeing some really good flow coming in. Notably somebody put on a ridiculous bet, I think it was like the 1,500 calls of like the January of 2022, some ridiculous bet. But again, it started getting stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger. And the one thing about Tesla, last Friday, there was that 714 pivot, that went to 740, okay? So we were watching this area here, and I go look, 719, if it builds, this thing can really wake up. And this is, again, this is why the stock is just a beast, just an absolute beast. So here is the 719 right here. Here is the 719 right here. It stopped here twice. It reclaimed, took out the high of the day and just absolutely exploded when it's highest, almost 731. That pretty much ended the week for me, that was done. I was done for that. It was a phenomenal move, absolutely phenomenal. I was very, very happy. And a lot of you guys caught this pivot, so great job there. The video, not a bad move. The first move was only like a dollar, 287 needs to build. Here was in the video. I know it went higher, but that first move was only like a dollar. So here was in the video right here, 287. Went to like 288, 27 before it came in. This move actually happened towards the afternoon. So again, nice little cash flow there. Like I said, take on the way up. But most important, again, most important, what I like about this tape is you don't need to overthink, okay? You really don't. You don't need to overthink. You don't need to try to rationalize everything. Just let things play out, because just as fast as there's a pivot, for example, on the trade that I took in the morning on ZM from this 78 level into the 80s, you know, at any second something can change and we were just sitting there and a squawk box broke the news that Facebook, right? Facebook was coming out with their own video conferencing. I think they said you could fit up like 50 people and I tweeted this out right away and I said, hey man, this is bad for ZM. I know a lot of you guys. I didn't trade this thing on the way down. I was already just dead tired by then. But moral of the story is you could see how quickly things changed and Zoom got destroyed. Absolutely destroyed. They'll actually be another pivot in this thing on the downside if it confirms for Monday. But again, going into this week, I want to give the bulls again the benefit of the doubt. I mean, look at some of these flags, man. Look at some of these flags. Look at the 60 minute view. Look how tight Amazon's getting, right? Look how tight this Amazon's getting. Look how tight Tesla's getting. Tesla is literally one channel away from just going bananas, okay? Absolutely bananas ahead of earnings. Even Netflix is holding up, right? And Netflix is even holding up here. And if you look at Apple, right? If you look at Apple, you know, Apple on its way to earnings, everything looks pretty good, right? Everything just, Microsoft is one day away from reclaiming the 75 area and moving higher. So things look good. Again, I know we have earnings coming up knee deep into this week. All the major hitters, Amazons, and your Googles and your Facebooks and your Teslas of the world and Apple and everything in between. So again, you don't need to overthink. You don't need to overanalyze, especially if you trade beta. You have such big ranges throughout the day. There will be opportunity on both sides. The most important thing is stay calm, stay, you know, again, stay patient. And the most important thing is stay in business. Again, for all you guys, if you want to join us in the private field or in the webinar, that's gonna be the only places we'll be putting these pivots ahead of time, obviously. Again, eight years is, I think, a pretty good sample size of what these things can do. So if you are interested, I welcome you on board. If not, guys, God bless.  And with God's help, I'll see you all next week. Take care, guys. Have a great... Congratulations for putting in the time to take control of your trading. You're one step closer to owning your future and achieving the success you desire. Want daily trade ideas directly from Dan? Straight off his personal watch list? Unlock our free PS60 vault, where you'll get nightly updates on pivot opportunities we're watching for the next day's session. Click the link in the description to get started today.


Good morning, cloud community, and a welcome back to Google Cloud Next. It's day three here in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada, and we've been covering all of the days here on theCUBE. My name's Savannah Peterson, joined by my fabulous co-host, John Furrier and Rebecca Knight. Both of you have just been absolutely smashing it this week. It's been a pleasure. How are you feeling? I'm feeling great. As you said, it's day three, the final day of the conference. There's still a lot of buzz and excitement on the floor here, so I'm feeling, feeling good. We got a great, great day of guests ahead of us. Yeah, absolutely. John, you feeling hydrated? Great, so good. Yeah, I'm ready to go. Good to do five days of this. Yeah, baby. Yeah, baby. We love this. We love it, I guess. Then, our fabulous SCTO box, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. We love having you back on theCUBE.  How's the week been for you? It's been great. Lots of good announcements from Google. Always good to see all the different companies and all the things they're offering, so it's been great all around. Did you have a favorite announcement? We, of course, box, you know, we deal in unstructured content, and so any time that you see these, like, model announcements, like from Gemini 1.5, we get excited. In particular, the token window size. Yeah. Million tokens, and the multimodal aspect of it, those are super exciting for us. What does that mean for box customers, then? So, one of the things that, whenever you're dealing with this kind of AI and you're dealing with it on your content, so like, you know, companies, they have marketing files, they have their contracts, they have their video, they have their images, like, all of these AI now, like in the last year or two, has been able to start to operate directly on the content. It used to be in the world of, like, ML or some of the older AI, you had to kind of structure your data first, and then you saw things like, you know, the big data revolution of, and the big AI, the revolution around how you did that. But now, you can actually start to have AI understand things the way that humans would. Yeah. And so that then changes, really, what people can do with their content overall. So for us, this is great, because that's what we do. You know, we have 100,000 enterprise customers, we store hundreds of billions of these files, we let people get anything you want to do around it, and now AI is a big part of that. So with the new token model, or with the new bigger tokens, we can do things now where let's say that you had a very long and complicated set of content. So one of the things that was hard before was like, I have these two contracts, and it's like, what's different about them? Because it used to be that the AI models could only look at them a little bit at a time, and they couldn't see all of them together. And so with the new bigger token window sizes, you can go through and spot things. This clause seems riskier in this one, or when you have this long marketing material versus this one, this one has a different tone than this one, and this area, you can change these things. So the AI basically got smarter in a way of being able to handle more context, and that's really powerful for a lot of use cases in the enterprise. Yeah, it absolutely is. My gosh, I'm just thinking about every time a contract gets marked up by a lawyer, you don't want to reread everything, you just want that eliminated. Such a simple business case, but so impactful. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Especially at scale. Absolutely. What else? So I was just going to ask you about your clients, do they have this understanding that they can now work with this unstructured data in this way, or is this something that you are helping them see and understand and say, there's so much more we can do here? I think it's definitely a little bit of both. Of course, every one of our customers we talk to wants to know about AI, and they want to understand really what is going to happen next. There's still definitely a world we see in many enterprise companies where they don't quite, they're surely not using it across their company's skill the way that we think that they could, because I think they're still learning a bunch of different aspects of what's possible. And in particular, one of the scariest things about AI for many enterprises is that how does data security work in this whole thing? So for instance, let's say that your AI and your company has access to your employee information, or it has access to an upcoming financial report that's confidential, like what happens if somebody else in the company is like, I want to know about the earnings for next quarter, like what happens? And so this idea of security and permissions around AI is really critical, and this has been holding a lot of customers back from just even embracing it, and certainly if they go to try to build stuff themselves has been a challenge, so this is why at Box we provide that kind of capability, and then we're able to help customers understand how to use it in a secure and safe way. And one of the things we've been saying on our analysis segments is, Google's got the full package coming to the table here, up and down the stack, performance, smarter software, more intelligent data, with BigQuery, vectors built in, all that good stuff. The question everyone's asking is, how do I operate this?  Because customers have Box, they have Google, so cloud has to have an ecosystem. What's your feeling of how to operate at cloud scale with ecosystem? Do they have the package? Yeah, so in general for me, when those customers ask these kind of questions, to me one of the things that a lot of customers are doing and should do right now is to pick their platforms. Who are they going to trust to not only give them AI capabilities right now, but also in the future? And of course, when you're looking at the infrastructure level, the AI model level, Google's one of the best. But also on top of that, we believe that you should be looking at ways to get fundamental capabilities in areas you care about from vendors that you think are going to be doing this well. So for instance, when you're doing AI on content, this is what we do at Box.  When you're doing AI across your, let's say your structured content, like there's other vendors that are really excellent out there. So we sort of see the world evolving where companies are not just going to use the AI capabilities of say, like an infrastructure provider like Google, which we think they will, but also in specialized areas that are complex, they'll be able to use different platforms. We're on structured content platforms, so this is where we focus our efforts. Awesome, and the other conversation that's come up, and this is more technical, I'd like to jump in the weeds a little bit, if you don't mind. ML Ops and AI Ops, pre-genitive AI was a big part of operating things. You saw Kubernetes containers that scale, orchestrating workloads. Now you got ML Ops changing with Genive, because the data's changing, the role of data, the software's in more and tells like I mentioned before, what is the new definition of ML Ops, or how do you operate the language models and the multimodal models? Because cross-modal reasoning is happening. Yeah, yeah, I think it is an interesting evolution that we're seeing from the world of ML Ops, which was very like structure data oriented into the world now of AI and the new large language models. And it's interesting because they're similar concepts in many ways, but at the same time, the way that the operating it works is just different. So for instance, one of the challenges that we often are worried about is, if let's say somebody is, you know, interacting with their content, they're asking a question. They want to know about it. They want it to ask a question. Like how do you know that what the AI is doing, which is very free-formed, very general purpose, is it right or wrong? And so one of the challenges that you have to face there is to try to figure that out.  That's not always possible when you have this very free-formed interactions. So one of the capabilities that you're seeing emerged from some of the AI Ops vendors, which we think is great, is this idea of trying to manage not just the more sort of academic ML capabilities, but more of like how to observe and how to manage quality overall. So for instance, the one thing that we do is that, if you want to know about like how the models are doing, you can ask a different model, like how did this model do? And you typically want to use different models, you want to use like different quality of them. And that is something that helps you then figure out whether or not the answers are good, because as a, like for us in enterprise space, it's not like you can have a human read these. This is confidential customer data. And so if you have another ML model sort of be able to evaluate that, that gives you a sense of whether or not you're helping your customers get the quality answers that they want. But so where is the human in that loop though? Well, so for us, the way that the human would be, they would be, let's say they have their content in different forms, they either need to structure it so they can get some key info out of a contract, they have a complex question for a complex document. So the simplest type of use case where they'd be like, can you help me find this info in this document across these documents? And then, so then they get the answer and then we cite it and like, you know, most companies should do that, I'll always tell you why the AI thinks what it thinks. But then like, so the humans get an answer and they can check themselves, but then as a vendor, we always want to ensure quality overall. And this is where the world of AI ops or in different techniques you can use to make sure you're giving your users and your customers the right answer rather than just whatever, like in the world of AI, of course, you have to worry about whether or not the AI is actually understanding the person and giving them the right answer. That's always a challenge with the large language models. I'm curious, we've had a lot of conversations about everyone applying Gen AI at scale, ish. It's kind of a proof of concept moment. 2024 perhaps being the year that we really make AI real. How do you prioritize within your organization which AI applications you're going to go after first? It's a good question because to the point, like it's historically in my experiences, it was always like by the time you got an interesting looking demo, you were kind of 80% of the way done with the software development. Like, and so then you're like not that far from being able to release something in production ready. With Gen AI, it's kind of weirdly backwards where you can actually usually get something that functions really well, like very quickly. And this I think has fooled historically people because they see these great demos and then they're like oh, I must be so close. But the thing that a lot of companies I learned over the last year is like you have to really spend an awful lot of time making sure you deal with the edge cases. This concept of hallucination, this concept of like making sure that you have quality responses overall. And if you don't worry about those things, then what happens is you have really cool demos and you release these cool things but then when people start to use it, they say like this doesn't actually work the way I want it to. And this will help forever be like, we don't believe the AI models will ever be 100% accurate, but you can get them to be much better if you do the prompt engineering, if you do the like retrieve augmented generation and you just kind of help them guide to exactly what the customers want overall. So for us, this is an ongoing march that we're going to see like use case after use case, capability after capability incorporated through the same pattern of test it out, see if it works, get some feedback and then be able to go and test the quality in production. What's the biggest shift you're seeing coming out of the show that's on your radar now that wasn't coming in? Is it the scale of multi-cross modal integration and reasoning? I mean, some of the things we're seeing, the mix between unstructured data and real time assembly. I think the world of multi-modal AI is going to be a big deal. It's funny because we even talk about large language models, you know, the language part is in there, but then now the large language models have image recognition capability. We as humans do this all the time. If you're reading something and there's a picture there, you sort of see both at the same time, you understand both. But today, most of the different AI has been on just the text. And so merging those together like a person would, I think is the next big thing you'll start to see, not just cool demos, but in production, people using them effectively. And so images, of course, are where there's a lot of really good production class models, but then on audio, video and other things so that you can get to the point where the AI understands things and can interact with well beyond just the text of it. That's awesome. And I think that's coming out clear. I mean, look at some of the tools. It's just getting easier. The question is, what's going to change for developers? If you get to look at this, besides some of the code assistant stuff, what's going to be great? Where's the change in the workflow of, say, a developer, obviously, security's baked in. What's your view there for the enterprise developer out there? I think, so there's a typical enterprise developer AI can both help you a lot, like you're saying with the code assist tools, and we've seen even a box, a lot of productivity benefits, but also in the world of like, you really have to kind of keep up with these latest trends because if you kind of stop for like, even three months or six months, like new models are released all the time, like new capabilities are coming out. And the quality just overall is increasing.  So I think one of the challenges to being a developer in the AI field right now is just to like constantly be trying to figure out the change in the situation. It's like different, like databases don't change that often, operating systems don't change that often. Nowadays, like every few months you're getting not only a new technology, but a new whole set of capabilities that you never had before. Well, I want to ask you about that because you are describing this landscape where the pace of innovation and change is dizzying. And that was one of the questions that we've had guests asking here at this table. Our enterprises, they want to innovate quickly. They wanted to do it yesterday. And so are the vendors, are the people who are able to help them get to where they want to be? Can they do that? Are the customers trying to do things too fast? I think the key will be to, I do draw some analogies in the early days of mobile, but also particularly cloud where like at some point, like you have these capabilities that are available to you as a service that are available to you in this quality production class way. And then so you can start to use those or one thing which we're constantly talking our customers about is like we've talked about before is should they rely on another vendor to provide it for them? And so like, cause anybody can take the off the shelf AI models and begin to use them for productive reasons. But at some point you start finding yourself recreating a bunch of capabilities that somebody else is offering you. And we see this all the time because one of the obvious things you can do with AI overall with on your unstructured content is ask questions your content, right? And for us, that's a key capability that we just provide. And then, but it's tricky, it's hard. How do you get it to work on spreadsheets that's different from images from different from different types of files? How you split it up? How you do the vector embeddings? How you take the database? How you do retrieve logman generation? And some companies are going down this path where they are starting to implement that and they can and for different reasons it helps them. But for us, we say not all like we spent all our time doing that. And so vendors throughout here are offering you these solutions and we think that you should consider always should you use those like for box, unstructured content that's what we do. All right, last question for you.  I think for me, what I'm interested in is when you start to see not only early use cases, not only early talk of this capability, multimodal, large context windows, but you start to see really big productivity and or streamlining business process benefits that are working in almost like, I hope the next time we come and tell you about all the big benefits, they're almost boring because there's a new thing coming out. So for me, the realization of a lot of the promise of AI is really what's going to happen now in the next, till the next time we meet. And excellent framing. Yeah. And this is fulfilling the promise that we've all been sort of expecting of AI coming in the last six months or a year. I love that. It's going to be actualized. We're going to make it real. Ben, thank you so much for being on the show. Rebecca, John, always a fabulous time. And thank all of you for tuning in for wherever you are on this beautiful earth. We're here in Las Vegas, Nevada. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.