Act is a cyber underground where we dig deep to find out how cyber security touches all of our lives every day. Today we're going to talk about the deep web, the dark web, and the mysteriousness of what can't be found and then found on the deep web, mysteriously enough. And today we have a special guest star with us, Mr. Gordon Bruce, also known as Gordon the Texar. Welcome. Nice to be here. We're doing the dark, like how are you doing? Since we're doing the dark web, I thought I'd come in car meat or something so they wouldn't know who I am and what it really is. I shouldn't have told them who you are. I got my hands on you. You're blown. I'm blown. Gordon, you have a great show. This is a spinoff of your awesome show. This is Frazier off the Cheers. That's right. I'm Frazier. I'm proud to be Frazier. It's a good show. You were the original Cheers or Hibachi talk and you just moved to one PM on Wednesday. Two PM on Wednesdays. Two PM on Wednesdays. Two PM on Wednesdays. Old slot as of the 19th. As of the 19th, you get the old one PM on Friday slot. Right. So have fun. Thanks. I like that slot and I like shifting things around. So Wednesday is going to be interesting. It just messes up my Sunday because now I have to get the show ready on Sunday.  What's coming up next week for you? Oh, we got a guy coming in talking about document management and a few other things like that. So document management got some holes in it. Yeah, if you use Microsoft's tools, open Active Directory, one of the biggest holes in the system. Hunt hole. I've heard a lot about that. Yeah, we're going to talk about that. Interesting stuff. One of the reasons why I got out of that business is just... Passing the holes? Yeah. Passing the holes. Three ring binder holes. You're right. Yeah. So I got that happening next week. So we're good. So next week on this show we're going to be talking to somebody from HMSA, from the cyber group over there at HMSA. And we've learned how seriously they take cybersecurity at HMSA, which is our Blue Cross Blue Shield vendor out here. Yeah, that's our man. And so on this past show we had, Huala Grivi was our guest in the past show. And me, he does HIPAA compliant email encryption and HIPAA compliant document management and HIPAA compliant forms. So have HMSA watch that show. It'll be a good one for them to watch. I will. Maybe they actually will learn something. I don't know. I'll be kind. They may watch the show and say, sorry, we can't make it at the last minute. Actually, I sent a list of about 15 questions and they said, well, we can actually answer the top three and nothing else. And nothing after that. It was like talking to the NSA. The big guys. It's challenging. That's doing these shows. It's challenging to get the corporate guys in here. And they want to see the script. And they want to see what happens on every minute. And our shows don't work that way. And I wish they did. I wish I was more professional, but I'm not Stephen Colbert. I can't pull it off. Well, my standard line is this is not CNN. This is not CNN. This is how we do it. This is how we do it. That's a good one. Well, tell me a little bit about yourself so my audience knows who you are. Why are you the Texar? Well, why I got the name the Texar. So I've been in the tech industry for 50 years. Wow. It's been a long time. 67. Do we have tech back then? Well, we didn't. Was it tech? We didn't. Actually, kind of not. It was tech. There wasn't even a courses at school that had degrees. You can get a certificate. Wow. There was no degree courses or anything like that. And so most of the classes were offered at night. No curriculum dedicated to that. There was no curriculum. They were like little add-ons, because no one thought that there was going to be an industry. And how wrong can you get? Yeah, I know. I remember my dad saying, this is a fact. These computer things. This is going away. And that was in 1982? Yeah. No, they were already there. In 1967, when they put the first large IVM mainframe at the corporation city of Toronto, they put it in a big glass facility right at the entrance of the city hall. So you could see that they were now here. Ooh, where tech people are. Tech people are behind this glass wall and so on. So I've just been in the tech industry a long time. I got the tech start handle when I did my eight years of service, community service with the city and county. So when I got. It's all like it's part of your probation. I've always, everybody should do it. I think everybody should do. Probation? Yes, in government. Two years of probation in government. The draft was great, but I think two years in government to help pay for your education would be a great thing to do for students to come out and do that. That eight years I spent of my life in government as the director of IT for the city was a huge awakening. It didn't pay squat, but it was a great, great awakening. Got to know how government worked, or doesn't work. Got to understand the ins and outs of all the various divisions of government and things like that. So it was a great period of time to do that work. So when it was announced that I was going to be the CIO, one of my buddies around town said, oh, now you're the tech star, and that handle just stuck, and that never went away. So that's my shtick, and I'm going to stay with it. I like it better than maybe like Forrest Gump, and that would have been a terrible one. That would have been awful. I don't know how that would do tech though. I think that was rude. Well, tell us a little bit about what you know about the deep web and the dark web. And the upfront web. Yeah, and the upfront. Well, let's talk about the regular internet first. So that's an interesting juxtaposition, maybe it's a good word for it. Do you think back to when the World Wide Web started to get its goings, and if you think before that? Now, I was using the internet in the 70s. It was called Plato, P-L-A-T-O. That's back to ARPANET. ARPANET, you got it. So I was using that back in those days, and it was not screens. It was a teletype machine that you were.  Yeah, just a dumb. It wasn't even a terminal. It looked like a typewriter. And so you would type things in, and then you get the stuff coming back. Chatter, chatter you hear in the old movies, things like that. So that was when it all started. But you know, and you know this better than me, when the internet started to take off, and the World Wide Web got formed, then you started getting to the internet. And I remember I was working for a company at the time, and I built a website for the company, and they said, we don't need this. Why do we need this? This isn't, this is. This is silly. Yeah, this is superfluous. It's non-sequiturized. What are we going to use this for? And they're a large real estate company. And so just think about it, the real estate industry is going to be cut as a result of the internet. Yeah, everybody looks to the internet first when they're looking for a house. Sure, I mean, it was the first thing I do. I go to you when I'm looking for something, I go to YouTube. I check there. That's my first search engine right now is YouTube, which is owned by Google, or Alphabet or whatever they're called. Well, yeah, I think it's Alphabet. Alphabet. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, so you think of, so when we do a search on World Wide Web at Bing or Google or wherever, that's you're hitting that top layer that I'll call it the somewhat fresh layer of the internet. That's 5%. That's the fresh powder of the snow on the internet. So when you get responses back there, you're getting 5% of what's actually out there. Because they filter it. I mean, they being the Googles and the Bing's and so on. They filter that content to limit you from seeing other things that are in the deep and in the dark web. Well, websites do this too, right? With a robot.txt file that they can add to their main directory that says, exclude these directories.  But Google doesn't do that, right? So you only get what people want you to see. You only get what people want you to see and what they want you to see. Yeah, that's right. If you look at it, it's all the freedom of the internet. Well, Google can say what you can and cannot see. Microsoft can say what you can and cannot see. So they're doing their form of editing and filtering and things like that. But there's a lot more to it, as you and I both know. I mean, you get to the next level. There's a lot of things in the deep web. And the deep web, in a lot of ways, is Department of Defense. Safety for our nation, all of those kinds of things. So that stuff, when Google goes, oh, US Air Force, they say, oh, let's show you all the bases. And let's do a Google map on it. And we'll show you all the plane routes and the layouts and all this kind of stuff. We'll go to every single directory in the website, and we'll fish out everybody's name and everybody's rank. Who's rank and whatever. So there's all of that kind of stuff that's going to get stopped. And that's the beauty of that layer. But you think 95% of what's on the web, we do not see. That's deep. And John Q. Publix does not see. That's deep. That's the deep web. And that deep side is kind of interesting. But to get to the deep side, you have to have a different browser. You can't use Internet Explorer. You can't use Chrome. You can't use Firefox. They do the same kind of editing or filtering. You have to take one like Tor. Right? And you know that one? For sure. Tor. It's the most popular because it's probably one of the easiest to install in years. It's the easiest to install. And interesting about the Tor browser, which you can download. You can take Tor and go and download it. Now, don't be careful with what you do. Now, once you download it, you will reap the rewards of what you've just created. But you can download the Tor browser. And now that doesn't have the filtering that was there before. Now, the interesting about the Tor browser, that was military grade. The military created Tor browser. And so with that, when Publix, it became a 501c3. So the Tor browser is a 501c3 nonprofit, just like ThinkTech, that people fund to keep it going. What interesting is, is 80% of the funding for the Tor browser comes from the US government. What does that say? So what does that say about Tor? What is that telling us? What is that telling us? And I just want to really go like when a missile is launched in North Korea and happens to crash, I go, hmm, never stuck in it? That's right. It makes you stop and think. Why would that explode right there? I mean, there's a lot of different ways that we're fighting these battles now and such. Oh, World War III is going to start with cyber. Yeah, absolutely. It hasn't already. Right. We might not even know it. We might not even know it. That's what we don't know. But that's the other part of the deep web, is the fact that we've all been hacked. Anyone sitting at home right now thinking that you have not been hacked? It's a dream.  I mean, once you get into the deep web and once you get into the dark web, we can find anything and everything we want. Now, the deep web also includes what a lot of people call OSINT, which is open source intelligence, which is everything about you and I that's been on the grid and indexed on the deep web somewhere out there. And once you're on the deep web, you can find it all. I would imagine there's an index of my birth certificate somewhere. There may be an index of some criminal record or something if someone's thought was taken away. All of that could still be out. Sure. Anything indexed is forever. You can't take it away. You can't take it away. You can delete it off one server. It's on two orders, but it's on the others. 50 others. So that's the part about the deep web. So it's kind of fun in some ways, because I use both the deep web and the regular web. Because I'll be doing some research and searching on something, but I want to see what happens when I go to the Tor browser and be careful with my inquiry when I'm asking. So it's kind of clear. I'm not misinterpreted. So as I said, very politically correct wording it. You have to be careful. One letter off. Well, or even just turning a couple of words around and all of a sudden it can be different results and misinterpreted. And next thing you know, those kinds of things are happening. So I do that from time to time just to see what other papers come up. And that's one of the other things that's interesting. You can do a Google search on Bing or a Bing search on Google and get certain dot papers, right, writings. I can do it in the deep web and I get others with more detail in it. Or even some things that are actually redacted documents that came from other locations. Not illegally, but they are out there, but not normally the kinds of things that the main browsers would put up. And unfortunately, on the deep web, some people are in charge of servers where they post information and they have no idea it is a web server. And that file system they just dropped that file into is actually published somewhere on the deep web. And people can actually access this stuff. And that's where you get all these scan documents or the old microfish documents. Someone says, oh, I'll just hand them over to that file server. And it turns out to be a Apache web server and they didn't know it.  So a great example, so you may have someone that says, oh, every year I get my tax returns and all my files scanned and at the local shop down the street. Oh, and that's stored on the printer. And that guy's computer. And on their server, and then they say, then they give you the DVD, their CD, whatever, say, here he is, but all of your documents just got put there. And if that particular server is exposed, they may end up in the deep web. It doesn't have to be a server. So on the internet of things, especially, I don't know the name, which kind of printer, but many printers have a hard drive inside and a little file server and a web server that sits on that printer, especially the commercial grade ones. And you scan documents and it gets cached there. And it stays until you wipe it out. And if you don't know it's there, you never wipe it out. And so your documents at wherever, I'm not gonna say which tax place, but if you go to a tax place and they scan it, it's on that, and there's not a lot of security on those machines. Once you're inside the first layer of security in any network, that's an available resource. You can go get it. And that's why I tell everybody, you've been hacked. You don't, and what was the latest one just kind of digressing a little bit. So Orange is the new black TV series. The guy hacked the series and put it up on the internet. So you can get that series now on the internet. He told Netflix, I won't put it up if you give me, pay me a bit going ransom. They said no, and he put it up. So now they're going, wait, how did that get up there? Because we have all these security stuff in place. It was some small graphic artist company that do the final little touch-ups on the... Post-production. Post-production stuff, do the little two-person shop that got it off there. So you put everything in place, but that one little thing where you handed it over to the guy around the corner. And it's always a human.  Yeah, it's a human first. We gotta take a 40-second break, so we'll be back very soon. Hi, I'm Carol Cox. I'm the new host of Eyes on Hawaii. Make sure you stay in the know on Hawaii. Join us on Tuesdays at 12 noon. We will see you then. Aloha. Match day is no ordinary day. The pitch, hallowed ground for players and supporters alike. Excitement builds. Game plans are made with responsibility in mind. Celebrations are underway. Ready for kickoff. MLS clubs and our supporters rise to the challenge. We make responsible decisions while we cheer on our heroes and toast their success. Elevate your match day experience. If you drink, never drive. You're watching Think Tech Hawaii, which streams live on thinktechhawaii.com, uploads to youtube.com, and broadcasts on cable OC-16 and O'Lello 54. Great content for Hawaii from Think Tech. Welcome back to the Cyber Underground. I'm your host, Dave Stevens. And this is the Texar Gordon with me here, talking about the dark web right now. We went through the regular web, the deep web, and now we're into a portion of the deep web called the dark web. Right. And we talked about Tor. There's a couple other ways to get to this place. And I wanted to talk about the dangers and freedoms related to these other ways. FreeNet is one of them. FreeNet is another application you can install on your computer. You can get to the dark web. Here's the caveat. With FreeNet and another one called I2P, a portion of files that are stored on the dark web will be encrypted and stored on your hard drive. You allow that to happen. Now it's encrypted, so the theory is if you get caught with those files there, it's encrypted, you never knew what they were. I'm not sure that would stand up in court. So I'm really not into making that kind of a risk in my life. That's not a good risk assessment. In my opinion, I would never use those personally. I stick to Tor. Now there's another one that I kind of like and you can use Tor on this other one. This is Tails. Yes, I was reading about that just today for this show. Tails has been around for a little while. It's becoming more and more popular. You can run the whole thing off a USB drive and then you can put Tor on it and you can make it persistent, which means it's a mini computer and it has storage with it and will save your changes every time you take it down. The thing is, like on my MacBook Pro here, I can put this Tails USB drive into my USB port and boot to that Tails drive as the entire operating system and none of my other computer hard drive is even touched or indexed or mapped or anything. I'm in my own little bubble. And then I go browse the web and they can hack away but it doesn't affect my personal files. Yeah, they're just hacking away at a device. I'm basically part of the internet of things and I can browse that way. So Tails is not the easiest thing to install on a USB drive. You have to make it bootable and then you have to put this OS on there but there's plenty of sites that will step you through each part of the process until you get the final product. And if you actually do that, it's nice to have that in your pocket.  Which is why I don't think that's what I mean. Just think of the television, right? That television is already cooked up to their payment processing system. So you go in there, you can just hack into that TV and get to their payment processing system. People's credit card. They get their credit card? Oh yeah, so you know what? I can book movies on your credit card. That's right. Actually, I could book movies for you on your credit card that you never do. You were gonna watch. What was that hack going on just a little while ago where people were calling in and saying that they're the front desk and they want you to verify some information because your building is not going through. So people confirm their credit card and their CCV number on the back and their name and their zip code and all that. Just a random person on the phone because they spoofed the phone number as being from a hotel front desk. It's that easy. Hotels are wide open. We've had someone in the tourism industry on our show talking about the hotels and how they are one of the largest exposed entities because of all the services they try to provide, right? They're providing them services. The smart TV, the wireless access, the easy checkout, ordering food online, all this kind of stuff. And that just opens up all the kinds of things. My convenience negates security. I mean, you have to, it's a delicate balancing act. You can't have fully both, right? You can't lock yourself away, but if you want convenience, you have to take some of the risk. What are you going to do? I know, so I don't stay in hotels. What's hiding on the dark web? Okay, so the dark web is kind of interesting. And this is my personal opinion. Like, the dark web is a bad place, but it's not as big as the media has made it. I think the media, and why is the dark web such a popular media thing is because it's media. It's got excitement in it. Well, it's not a story unless it's big. It's like, it does all these kind of great, crazy things. So there's one, one of the famous ones is Silk Road. Now, Silk Road was a drug distributor. So you could go online and you could purchase your illegal drugs online and then they would be shipped to your home or wherever after you paid the fees and stuff. Now, the thing about Silk Road that made it interesting is the fact that their customer service has ranked one of the best in the world. So you got, wait, I'm doing it as an illegal business of selling illegal drugs around the world. You gotta have customer service, baby. And my customer services is ranked up there with Amazon and eBay, except better. Oh my God. And because they had all the blog, they had these whole blog things, right? So, oh yeah, I got this. It said what it was. It came in the three days.  Silk Road actually followed up with them to find out what they did wrong. Well, these are actual business people, but they see the greatest profit in something that's illicit. Something else illicit. So, and the US government got wind of it and started looking at it. Now, the guy that, it's interesting, the guy that founded Silk Road, his sense, his life in prison without parole. That's one of the strongest sentences ever given to someone for doing something like that. And the reason that he had three things. He had cyber, he had drugs, and he was using the US Postal Service to distribute his medical products. So, he got, I think, they really nailed him. Without parole. Yet, every couple of years, Charles Manson is in the news because he's up for parole. That's right. So, you go figure that one out. I gotta figure that one out. Lobbionco versus Silk Road. So, he got nailed pretty damn good on that one. Now, there's another one that's out there, and this one's never been proven or disproven. You can actually hire a hitman. Oh, the assassination market? Yes, you can go in there and you can actually order a hitman. Supposedly, no one's proved it or disproved it. Right, we've never gone to prove this.  We've never done the research. Average price is about 10 grand. Okay, again, I've only heard this, that it's crowdfunded. That's also... You can get a lot of people saying, that guy needs to go. Yeah, and they'll do crowdfunding and they'll use Bitcoin or Crypto currency to do the form of payment.   That's kind of interesting. And then you get to some, there's some real sicko stuff out there. Surely not. Human being is a terrible thing. And that's the ones where you gotta be real careful because by accident, when you're in the deep web, you could get pulled over to that side where you don't wanna get pulled over. Those links are included in the legitimate links that you're looking for. That's right, and you don't know by looking at them because of the way that they're displayed, whether they're as legit as you were hoping they are. This was part of my ethical hacking class. I had them go onto the dark web. We installed Tor on Kelly and we did a virtual machine and we isolated it from the host machine. So, they're safe. And I said, I want you to go find the website to an activist or a whistleblower. They're gonna be on the deep web somewhere. They're probably on the dark web. I want you to find them. Edward Snowden's there. Go find those people and see what else you find on the way. And the reports they gave me were stunning. Some of the things they found, I mean, some of the kids in shock. It's pretty creepy. It is pretty creepy. Now, there's also a positive side to the dark web, which I find was very interesting. Many of the media have whistleblower sites in the dark web where you can go in and if you've got someone that you wanna do a whistleblower on, you can drop your documents or whatever is it you want to do into their sites that you will not be tracked because of the way you've come in through Tor. They don't know it's you. No one will ever know it's you. And you've just done a whistleblower on somebody and just dropped it into the Washington Post, LA Times, New York Times and dropped it in there. So they're using the dark web to help them to get news and protecting their sources because they can say it came from an anonymous source and I have no way of knowing who they are. But you can follow up by getting multiple sources from the same place. I don't know how valid that is or if that would ever stand up to the real scrutiny. Well, if you think about... It's a good source though. If I'm a journalist, I'd be looking there. Yeah, it's a source. It starts, it raises the flag and then you decide whether or not you want to take it to the next level. It was kind of like the Watergate, right? Okay, we should maybe investigate this further. Or it's like... I'm hoping for another Watergate. Well, I thought we had that with Hillary, you know, since I'm a technical standpoint. I'm thinking there's something bigger on the horizon. Could be, could be. So that's another part that's in the dark web that I find intriguing because it's being used for, or attempted to be used for positive reasons. So, but again, I would, I would just caution people that, you know, when you go, if you decide you want to load the Tor browser or whatever you want to do, just be careful when you're in there. Tor's okay. Now, the way it works though is that you have a number of hosted servers that are randomized. You get an encrypted link to the first host an entry point into the network. You're bounced around randomly. Your packets are bounced around. And then when you exit to your final destination, from your exit point of the Tor node to your destination, you are unencrypted. So even if you are on the Tor network, you should go to an HTTPS site for that final encryption security. Otherwise, from the exit node to your destination, you're exposed. And by the way, everybody, you're exposed. Anyway, it's just gonna happen. Every device out there on the internet tracks a little bit of your activity and keeps a little bit of your information in cash or router tables. If you go through a bastion host, those things can keep cached files for quite some time. You leave... Smart TV. Smart TV. You leave footprints no matter where you go. If someone wants to dedicate the resources to find you, they'll find you. There's no anonymous. So just think, if you walked into a department store and they've got cameras, they got you. Yeah, they got, that's it. You're done. You're already on there with facial recognition and all the things that are available today. I mean, you're there. So, I mean, maybe we should all be wearing burkas. I don't... How do we stay safe? How do you... Let's take 30 seconds and just say, how do we stay safe? How do you stay safe on the dark web? It's like anything. Well, first of all, to stay safe on the dark web, just don't go to the dark web. That's the first tip. That's the first tip. Second, if you want to go to the deep web, there has to be a real compelling reason. Very compelling reason. And maybe you're doing research, or you're in other areas. Stay at the bad sites. Yeah. Because people can track you. Right. Don't even enlarge your browser to the maximum width, because then people know your maximum screen resolution and they can see how many times they come back. They'll do key loggers on you and all that wonderful stuff. Well, we're gonna have to wrap this up. Okay. This is so interesting. I want to do a whole series of these shows on the dark web, where we really get into the nitty gritty and tell people what's really out there and show them how dangerous this really is. Thank you for being on the show. My pleasure. Thank you so much. You talk. It's on Wednesdays at 2 p.m., right? That's right. Wednesday at 2 p.m. And come back here next Friday at 5 p.m. The following Friday and every other Friday will be at 1 p.m. Aloha, everybody. Stay.


Hello, everyone. Today I have Jerry McGinnis, who is a former partner at KPMG and the author of a new book called Advice for a Successful Career in the Accounting Profession. This book answers any questions you have as an accounting student starting your career all the way up to if you'd like to be in a partner. Today Jerry is going to talk to us about his experience and what he can share with you, either as a CPA candidate, a future CPA partner, or a current accounting students. Jerry, thank you so much for agreeing to have this interview with us. And please, if you don't mind, could you tell us a little bit more about your background, about yourselves? Sure, Mansur. Thank you very much for having me and delighted to be with you today. As you mentioned, I'm a CPA by background and training. I did spend my career with KPMG in the Philadelphia office. I was on the audit side of the house, so eventually I became an audit partner serving clients in a variety of industries. My particular area of focus was emerging growth companies, technology companies, many of whom have raised venture capital and eventually went public so very interesting area. But later in my career, I did have the opportunity to get into some leadership roles with the firm. So I spent six years overseeing our audit practice in Pennsylvania that included our offices in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Harrisburg. And then eventually finished up my career for the last eight years as the office managing partner of the Philadelphia office. And that role really gave me an opportunity to work with our advisory and tax professionals as well as our audit professionals, and really have a lot of involvement in the community. Interacting with our clients, prospective clients, the marketplace, one of our core values at the firm was to try and get back to the communities a little bit so we did a lot of charitable work. Since retiring from KPMG a few years ago, I've had the chance to get involved on a couple boards. So I'm serving on the board of a public company, technology company as their audit committee chair. I'm also serving on the board of a mutual fund complex in the asset management space, doing some nonprofit board work as well and some consulting work. One of the things that's really been fun for me is I've been helping out the accounting program at a local university near where I live in Southern New Jersey called Rowan University, and I support their accounting program as an executive in residence. Absolutely. Absolutely. And now it's time to give back to the community as you mentioned. I mean, your book, it's a roadmap. I read it. It's just take your step by step, why you want to start a professional accounting all the way up how to succeed in the real world. So if you don't mind, I'm going to be asking you about the book itself. I want you to emphasize, I mean, we can, I wish we can go over the whole 16 chapters, I believe. Absolutely, but you were close. Yes. How many, 17, 18, 18, 18. But I want to go through it. I want to focus on the main points. And the first one is, a lot of people who are listening, they may not be accounting majors. They might be business students who end up on my YouTube, trying to learn financial or managerial accounting. Plus, why accounting is a good major? We're both biased, obviously, but you are approving success story. You are a former partner at KPMG. So please go ahead. Yeah, thank you, Mr. Great question. And actually chapter one of my book is entitled Why Accounting is a Terrific Profession. And in there I share, you know, that people talk about the financial rewards and the ability to make a good living and that is certainly true. But there are many other aspects of the accounting profession that are terrific, right? It's challenging, interesting work. You have a seat at the table, whether you're an outside auditor or you're the CFO of a company. You're literally in the boardroom as important decisions are getting made at companies of all sizes. It could be a Fortune 500 company. It could be a family business. It could be a nonprofit. But accountants are at the table. Warren Buffett, the famous investor, famously said accounting is the language of business and it's true. So if you want to be on the leading edge of American business, I can honestly say there's no better profession than accounting. And many accountants I've known, folks who have started out in accounting, majored in accounting, have branched out and done other things in their career and risen into senior level leadership roles in the C suite of all kinds of companies. They sit on the boards of public and private companies. In the book, I tell the story of my friend Ed Hamway. Ed started with one of the larger accounting firms as a staff auditor. He eventually left and joined an insurance company. That insurance company was involved in multiple business combinations. They eventually became Cigna, a Fortune 50 company, and Ed became the CEO of Cigna, leveraging his accounting background all the way. You know, if nothing else, you know how to read a P&L, right? And if you're managing a business, that's a skill set that's pretty important. Absolutely, absolutely. And we need to account in all industries, whether it's sports, software, real estate, pharmaceutical, technology, it doesn't matter. You can have that seat on the table if you are part of the accounting process. You always have to start as a staff and move up. Now, many students, they also finished their accounting degree, but they don't go for their CPA. Could you explain the importance? Why go for your CPA? Yeah, you know, this is good. This is chapter two of my book. You know, it's entitled, Is the CPA path the right path for you? Can I try and address that question in a very objective fashion? It may not be the right path for everyone, but for many it is. And as you alluded to, I have a bias.  There are many other great designations out there. If you're going to be a management accountant, perhaps a CMA is a good path. If you're going to be an internal auditor, perhaps you want to pursue that internal audit designation. There's forensic designations. There's all sorts of designations. I actually described them all in the book, just so students and readers understand the many options they will have with an accounting degree. But my end advice to the reader is become a CPA, maybe combine it with another credential. So if you're in management accounting, CPA, CMA. But the reason I believe the CPA is kind of the gold standard, it's well recognized by not just people in business, but the layperson on the street kind of understands the importance of the credential. Over a long career, most individuals will make more money. They'll be offered better promotions when they transfer jobs, they'll have better opportunities with a CPA designation and it's a hard test. You know, it requires a lot of work, but it's an investment in your future. And in my case, and I think the case of many others, the return on that investment is substantial over a lifetime. Absolutely. Absolutely. I always remind my students at the end of every recording, you're going to have to study for two to three years and it's going to pay you different for the next 40 years.  Not that those are important in a sense those should not be your motivation. You should have internal motivation, but if those are your motivation, passing the exam, even though you don't know what you want to do for now, you will figure it out later because the CPA will open many doors for you. You talked about the CMA, the CIA, the CFE. Yes, being a CPA, you can do all of those, but if you went into that industry a little bit more specific, if you want to be an internal auditor, then you will combine your CPA with the CIA, with your CPA, with the CMA. Another question for you, this may sound very simple, but I want to make sure you clarify it for us. You put it in your own terms, the difference between public accounting and private accounting case. Yes, it's a great question and one that many students who are new to accounting or taking that first accounting class or maybe thinking about accounting often ask. And the simple way I think to answer the question is, if you are in public accounting, you are doing work for a client or multiple clients, right? You're providing a service. It could be an audit service. It could be a tax consulting service. It could be an advisory service, but basically you're working for the client. Your firm is sending the client a bill for your time. If you're in private accounting, you're working for a company, right? So you're the CFO or the controller or the management accountant or the staff accountant. You might be preparing the financial statements as opposed to the public accountant is going to come in and audit the financial statements, providing that service to the company. So briefly in public accounting, you know, there are many paths you can take. You can be an auditor. You can be a tax professional. You can be an advisory professional. You could do that at one of the big four accounting firms or you could do that at a regional firm, a local firm. There's a lot of great firms out there of all different sizes. That's something, and you alluded to this earlier in our conversation, Mansoor. If you're in private industry, and you like technology, right? You could go be an accountant or a CFO for a technology company, or you could work in the fashion industry, or I describe in the book. One of my best friends is somebody who loves sports in general and baseball in particular. He leveraged his accounting degree and his CPA to become the CFO to fill up your fillers, a job he loves. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I would like to add one more point. Basically, if you're a lawyer, okay, you could work for one particular company that's private accounting, or you can work in a law firm where you service many clients. So when you service many clients, that's what public accounting is. I know because many students, they have a confusion about this. Now, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to ask you another question that's student related. I know you're very involved with the students. And what advice would you give to students who are entering the profession as a staff accountant? Because, you know, there's a high turnover. But what advice would you give them to kind of stick to it and succeed in this career? Because you went through it. Yes, it's a great question. And I would say, number one, don't necessarily believe all the quote unquote worst stories you hear about the horrendous hours and the busy seasons and working around the clock. I mean, I talk about this in the book and I try and give a very handed view. I was in the profession 36 years. So I certainly understand what busy seasons are all about. And accounting is a deadline driven business. So that is going to entail overtime. At times that overtime will be substantial. But it's generally limited if you're an auditor to a certain kind of window of about six to seven, eight weeks during that busy season, kind of from mid January to mid March. So at that time of year, most companies have calendar year in so they're all getting their audits done, a lot of the tax works getting done. The rest of the year, there can be times where you will be asked to work overtime, maybe your clients doing an IPO or working on an M&A transaction, but it's not a steady constant long hours throughout the rest of the year. Most importantly, all the firms have become much more aware of the importance of work life balance. So they have all sorts of programs and initiatives to kind of balance things out for their younger professionals. So I think it's gotten a lot better than it was maybe when I started my career. A couple other quick things in terms of advice for students, get your CPA early. The best time to do it is right after you get out of school. Start studying that summer. You may not be starting your job to the fall. It's a great opportunity to kind of get it knocked out or major portions of it knocked out. Life doesn't get any simpler as you get older, right? Your job becomes more involved after a couple years you're supervising other people, more responsibility. Maybe a boyfriend, girlfriend enters into the mix. So you're never going to have more time than you have right now getting out of school as a student. You may think you're busy, but trust me, you're going to get a lot busier in the years to fall. So get the exam early. It's a key success factor. Another thing is, I tell young professionals, ask a lot of questions. You know, that's how you learn. And sure, do your work trying to understand something you're working on first. But if you're struggling, ask others for help. Another tip, ask for feedback and ask for feedback on a regular basis. Most companies, firms have formal mechanisms where they will review you once or twice a year and give you formal feedback. That is far too infrequent. Ask for feedback on a regular basis from your supervisor, your clients, your coworkers. That'll help you get better sooner, quicker. That's it. Read. You know, reading is becoming a lost part. I talk about this in the book. Successful people read. Nowadays, we get a lot of our information from these devices, text messages, social media, nothing wrong with that. But we need to sometimes get a little deeper beyond the surface and read more substantively. So I tell students and young professionals, read the Wall Street Journal, read other business publications, be informed that will be a huge boost to your career. Yes, Wall Street Journal. I love it. Yes. A few things I just want to agree with everything that you said, but I always tell the students and everybody who's listening that it is tough. I always seldom expect the worst. And it may not be as you said Jerry, but I always prepare them for the worst. It may not be, but always prepare yourself for the worst. And another advice I can give them is find a good mentor. Find someone who is competent, who's willing to help you and meet with them on a regular basis, weekly basis, pay for their lunch, take them out for happy hour, talk to them, have a list of questions. Don't bother them all the time, but have a list of questions and from week to week or month to month, that list will decrease and you will start to help other people. So find a good mentor. I cannot emphasize this enough. And as Jerry said, the CPA work is no two days are the same. You have to figure things out for yourself. And oftentimes, Jerry, you know this, that you as a partner, you may not know the solution for an issue and the staff will have to figure it out.  So just be prepared. It's a rewarding career. Every time you learn something, it's not that it's not you learn it and you're going to throw it away. You're going to learn it. It's like you acquire the weapon for your next battle. And that arsenal would increase over time and you become a very powerful professional. It takes time, but that's how it, that's how it works. Well said. Thank you. Thank you, Jerry. In chapter 15, you talked about character traits that can help you succeed. Could you choose two or three of them and just any two or three you would like to because I, you know, I, I love them all and emphasize them any two or three. Sure. Yeah, happy to do it. So I'll start with attitude. I really do believe your attitude can be either an asset or a liability. And I've met a lot of young professionals that unfortunately it's a liability you know they, they seem to always have an issue a concern a problem to complain about. And listen, we all have bad days. Don't get me wrong. I sometimes have those days where you need to pull off some steam but generally having a positive attitude having a constructive attitude. If you see there are issues or challenges maybe think about what is the solution what can I do to improve this situation as opposed to it's so it's so unfortunate I've been placed in this situation. I think in any profession but certainly in accounting resilience and mental toughness are important traits. You're going to have some challenging days it can be a demanding profession, whether you go into public accounting or private accounting, and sometimes things aren't going to go so well so being able to kind of mentally work through that and stay positive really important traits. And you're right, I list 10 or 12 things in chapter 15 but in the interest of time I'll just hit one more.  And that takes work whether it's studying for the CPA exam or doing a good job once you get out into the profession. I'm not afraid to work hard. Again, don't believe all the eight hours a week all year round. They're missed in my mind, but you are going to have to work hard. Absolutely Jerry I would like to add a small experience that I used to utilize. I used to visit the office I work in a medium, I would say medium CPA firm but not the second company in Bethlehem. The office on Saturday off season, just to look at the prior year paperwork to learn it takes time to learn it's you have to make the investment and there's no substitute for hard work you don't have to be smart. You don't have to have a high IQ, as long as you are willing to put the time and learn. Yes, there is going to be a struggle challenges. This is how you grow it's like a growing your muscles, you got to work it until it becomes stronger. And these days, especially now in February people are very busy during the tax season. And I'm sure some of them will be listening to this what could you give them I know there's a one whole chapter about avoid burnout and this is what I stopped with your chapter 16. Could you give them some tips please because they're studying for the exam. They could be taken a course or two they can, you know, maybe studying for the exam internship and something else so what would you give them what what advice. So again, you're right I have a chapter devoted to how to avoid burnout and it's so important I mean I think there are a lot of professions and occupations where burnout happens you know whether it's police officers firefighters frontline responders, people in the medical profession but certainly it impacts the accounting profession. There can be some long hours as we talked about in busy season there can be stress if you're facing a deadline. Number one being organized right and kind of understanding looking out seven, eight, 10 days ahead what deadlines are coming up, not realizing the night before you have a big test oh my gosh I've got to study that just increases your stress and anxiety so being, being organized being prepared, doing a little bit at a time, rather than studying eight hours the night before how about we study one hour each of the eight days before that might greatly increase your odds of being successful. I think getting appropriate amount of rest right getting your sleep at night incredibly important getting your exercise eating right these are all things that when you're under pressure stress working long hours sometimes suffer. But if you make them a priority that can actually help you kind of deal with some of those pressures that might otherwise create burnout. So just self care right. Exercise sleep diet, these things are really important and lastly, you know no matter how dedicated you are no matter how much you love your job. It can't be all about accounting right. You know, after an eight or 10 hour day and reading accounting textbooks that's not great you're going to burn out. So have interest outside of work, maybe it's sports, maybe like to play video games, maybe like to hang out with your friends but whatever you do that helps you get some downtime and recharge your batteries. Make sure you do that on a regular basis, even during the most busy times. Find that hour or two where you can take a break and when you come back, you'll be refreshed you'll be recharging will be much more prepared to not suffer burn out. Absolutely Jerry and I cannot emphasize being organized I know you have one whole chapter about being organized. I will always tell you know my students my followers have to to to do list one a daily to do list like every day. In the morning I'll prepare my to do list I'm going to have to do this this this and that and kind of keep myself accountable and believe me guys it helps tremendously. It keeps you organized and on track also have long term goals, but also short term goals as well so you can stay organized until you have long term goals. I want to talk to you about the importance of giving back and many of the students who are listening they may not be they may not relate to it. Nevertheless, I want to plan that seed that given back is important I believe in given back I figured out given back by accident when I started my YouTube channel where I was given and I wasn't aware of it I was I thought I was just teaching my students but I was not aware that other people are watching and benefiting. And I, you know, I enjoyed the given back now it's a good feeling so I want you to kind of just plan that seed in those future CPAs future successful accountant that what does it mean and you can start to give back today, volunteer by volunteering but please go ahead. Sure now it's it's a great question and it's important and I would argue you're never too young to start giving back right you might be two years out of school. Maybe you're in your first role where you're supervising other people. Those other people are going to come to you they're going to have questions they're going to need help. You're going to be busy doing your own work. And the only thing to do is to give them the short answer kind of blow them off right, but if you invest the time to sit with them help them work through their issue address their concern you're not only helping them, and we'll feel good about it. You're helping yourself right because you're helping yourself become a better leader a better supervisor a better project manager. If it goes on maybe you're six years out your manager right maybe there's an opportunity to join a nonprofit board and get back to an organization that you care about that you support. It could be a little baseball team it could be the Red Cross it could be the Boy Scouts or the Girl Scouts. My work my advice is find something that you really believe in their mission, but they love accountants right because they have financial statements they need your help and expertise, and getting involved in organization organization like that is a form of giving back but it can also help you develop your leadership skills. Maybe you'll have an opportunity to serve on the board of that organization and get some governance experience. So, the most important thing I could say though man sir is whether, whether you're helping in the community or serving on nonprofit board or coaching you sports or helping your younger colleague at work. There's a tremendous sense of satisfaction from helping others that's been my experience and actually giving back can be very rewarding to the person that's doing it so it's kind of a win win situation and that's why I definitely encourage folks to begin doing it early in their careers. Absolutely and by by by supervising other you are really as Jerry said you are helping yourself. You know how to teach being a good leader being a good teacher that's going to pay off down the road so I cannot emphasize that enough myself as well. One more thing I would like to like you to talk about that's in the book, having a value creation mindset. No, it's a very important topic and you know really the, the simple way to translate having a value creation mindset is think like an owner right pretend it's your business. You're not just showing up to check a box and putting your hours what would you be doing to serve that client better to get that new client to to sort of help develop your college differently if it were your business versus you were working for somebody so having a value creation mindset is all about getting up every morning thinking about how can I make my firm or my company a better place how can I increase its value. I can assure you if you do that consistently throughout your career, people will notice and you will be rewarded with raises promotions opportunities. That's certainly one of the best investments you can make in the future. I want to mention one other thing briefly man so that you didn't ask me about but it's just so important to any business profession professional and particularly accounts. And that is the importance of ethics and integrity right. We sort of take those things for granted. But but I've seen many cases in my career where people had ethical lapses and it really hurt their careers and hurt their futures and so being ever mindful of the importance of acting in an ethical fashion with high integrity and building trust. Those are critically important things for any young professional to think about it and absolutely accounts. Yes, you could always find a job. If you lost your job but once you lose your integrity, it's done. You can always find a job but you cannot find your integrity again. And as you were mentioning, you remind me of Jim Rohn saying work on yourself, rather than on your job and by doing so by product you will benefit your company. I love Jim Rohn. I listen to him so he always says this work on yourself and this is why work on yourself treat each job each assignment as you are the owner, because in a public accountant you are actually the owner they want you to do they want you to be the owner. You just have to prove yourself. So when you think as an entrepreneur, your motivation totally changes and this is how you have to do it, especially in every field, but especially in public accounting. What can we find this book? What can students users find this book? Sure. Thank you for asking me. So it's available on Amazon. If you just Google the title advice for a successful career in the accounting profession or my name, it'll pop right up. It's also being carried in a couple hundred retail locations around the country here in the US, Barnes and Noble stores like that. Wiley is the publisher, so it's available on their website. It's also been released in Canada. So I think anyone anywhere in the world can get it through Amazon. That's probably your best bet, but those are some other stores. And it will be listed in the description below on YouTube if it's on LinkedIn and the description above. And I'm going to also post your LinkedIn profile if you don't mind, as well, in case anybody would like to connect with you. Any last word, please, Jerry. No, I would just like to thank you for having me today. It's been great to talk about some of these topics. I think they're incredibly important to young professionals and young accountants and those thinking about the field of accounting. As we talked about, it's a great profession and, you know, I created the book really to be a resource to some of those folks. So I hope they find it helpful. Thank you very much for your time, Jerry. And it's a pleasure hosting you. Thank you everyone and stay safe and stay motivated and study hard.


What's up navigation traders? Happy Friday. Today is Friday, April 6th. Hope everybody had a great week of trading Volatility is here, and it looks like it's here to stay so always makes our trading a lot more fun a lot more opportunity Before we jump in just want to make a couple quick announcements We are working on several things to enhance your members area one of which is a just kind of a more robust updated Watch list that will be part of your members area So as things change as we add or need to delete possibly Symbols from that it'll always be up to date as opposed to the PDF version that you have now There's a couple couple different tweaks and changes, but we'll also have a little bit more robust individual stock list The each of the each of the strategies has a very specific specific set of symbols So there's very specific symbols that we trade on strangles But some of them we may not trade for iron condors due to the low price of the of the underlying symbols So a lot of the core strategy watch lists are not going to change much But we do want to provide a little bit more robust Stock watch list to choose from for some of your more directional plays So look for that coming We've got a ton of other stuff coming out that we're really excited to share with you and I'll keep you posted on in the coming weeks but let's jump into the alert for the week and Starting with Monday the second So the first trade we did was an opening trade in IWM. So IV percentile Still nice and high at that 96 percentile So we wanted to continue adding new positions selling some premium You can see here IWM Trade is still very centered got a little bit of profit, but not not enough to take off yet So we'll continue to monitor that one Next trade is a rolling adjusting trade in IYR. So we had a short strangle. We rolled that from April to May We just kept kept the strikes exactly the same here. So we didn't change our strikes and You know, this is our typical You know, just a mechanical way to adjust when we get under 21 days to expiration We roll this out. It reduces our risk. It reduces our what's called gamma and That only April only had 18 days to expiration. So we wanted to to roll that out. So if we take a look at IYR now You can see We're still very centered now in in that position got a little bit of profit So just we're about break even on the trade overall Maybe you got a little bit of profit, but just waiting for some more before we before we book that one Assuming it stays in our range Next trade was a rolling adjusting trade in FXI So we had a short straddle. It's originally a strangle had been adjusted into a short straddle And we rolled that from April to May We made a tiny tweak and we just rolled the call down From 50 to 49 to collect some more credit get a little bit closer to price so we now have the minus 50 minus 49 calls puts and calls in May and Then we also have another our other short strangle in May as well. So let's go ahead and take a look at those Those positions here. Here's the here's the full strangle that we have not adjusted yet Got a nice little profit there not enough to take off yet on these strangles We like to get at least 30% of max profit if it comes quick if not, we'd like to wait for 40 or 50 percent and then that That roll from the alert rolling to May looks like this So this has got given us a little bit of long Delta meaning we need this to go up to benefit this piece But that's okay because we've got other short Delta positions that helps offset and balance our portfolio And I'm going to go over where we're at on our Delta here after we go through all the trades to make sure That that makes sense. I get a lot of questions about short Delta and how to hedge and There are a couple really detailed videos that we've we've produced that are in our blog One is how to trade options like a professional The others the other is how to Delta hedge your portfolio So if you look through the blog you can find those videos and that helps you get an idea of how we manage our entire portfolio Using Delta and we beta weight that to SPY Which in thinkorswim, I'll show you how to do that to SPY if you're in tasty works your positioned deltas are automatically Beta weighted to SPY already. So I'll get to that in a minute. Let me get through the rest of these trades And then we'll jump into that Next trade was a rolling adjusting trade in XRT. So we rolled our short straddle again It was once originally a strangle, but we adjusted into a straddle So we adjusted that from April to May kept the strikes the same So still at the 46 strike and then we also have a another piece of that trade in XRT as well So very similar Could use a little bit of up movement and S'more theta decay to to benefit this piece of the trade the 46 straddle Then if we check off that and we check on our other piece We've got a we've got a strangle. So got a little bit of profit just waiting for some more time to pass more theta to decay next trade was a rolling adjusting trade in DIA, so We rolled one of our short call verticals from April to May and then we adjusted our strikes down, right? So remember we've got this We've got this down move in the market. So We want to keep this short delta in our portfolio So we had a big a big profit on this piece of the trade And so we just simply wanted to roll our strikes from 247 to 50 down to 236 239 By doing this, we keep that short delta in our portfolio We extend the time being in this trade and we collect some credit for doing so So if we take a look at our DIA and actually let me go back real quick because we had back to back very similar trade So we had two different Verticals one with four contracts and one with three We're keeping these separate just because we place them on as as different trades So we are keeping their strikes just one point different. So you can see this is at the 247 250 This is at the 248 251 We roll this to 236 239 And we roll this to 237 240. So just one strike different That's really more for just tracking purposes more than anything. We could have rolled all these into one trade But we like I said, we entered as Separate trade so I want to keep them separate for tracking. So if we go to DIA to show you what that looks like First of all, we've got this other iron condor on here that that's pretty centered nothing to do there yet And then the two Short-call verticals the one with four contracts. We'll look at that one first You can see, you know, we had after we after we rolled the trade. We did have a little pop-up in price So it's not quite in our range But now with this big move down today, it's coming back and almost back into our range So just continue to need a little bit more down movement in price to benefit that and then very similar for the one with three contracts Oops wrong one. So just need a little bit of more a little more down movement to benefit that piece Okay, next trade There's an opening trade in the tenure notes for ZN so looking at the implied volatility remember, you've got to use the ETF TLT to get a decent reading on the implied volatility indicator and that popped up to 77 on the percentile And so I mentioned that you could as alternate trades You can do a strangle or an iron condor in TLT the notes the bonds All of those kind of are very highly correlated symbols. I like to do that. I like to do the ZN It's a very efficient use of capital because it is a futures contract ZB is a little bit bigger So if you wanted a bigger position, you could use ZB if you wanted to use a an ETF You could also use TLT in this case. I just prefer using ZN Because it's kind of right in the middle gives you a good bang for the buck So if we take a look at that position Ford slash ZN kind of spread this out a little bit better so you can get a better idea of where it's at It's still very centered. I got a little bit of profit there, but not enough to take off So just waiting for some more time to pass there Next position was in EWZ. So we sold some more premium in EWZ open up a new trade a short strangle One of the other questions I get a lot is, you know, can I do an iron condor? The reason that we use naked positions strangles straddles in some of these lower price symbols I mean remember this is only a forty some dollar ETF so when you buy the wings to define your risk You're collecting much less credit, okay? So with these lower price symbols sometimes it you're just not collecting enough credit to make it worth the trade To make it worth the risk and the transaction cost now tasty works Is has worked to make that a little bit better because the transaction costs are much less of a factor because of their competitive zero closing cost But you know if you're in thinkorswim or some other broker. I would I typically do not trade Iron condors and symbols this low if you were gonna go a little bit closer to the money like a butterfly Then it can make sense to define your risk But if you're doing a kind of a wide, you know 20 delta where you're selling 20 delta on each side I like to do strangles because that way it gives you a good bang for your buck And you're not You're not limited on that on the credit like you would be on an iron condor so you can see here we did three contracts and Collected, you know, three hundred and twenty one dollars is our max profit if we would have bought the wings You know, we may have only collected a hundred or hundred and fifty on three contracts. So that that's kind of the difference Anyway, this one's still very centered nothing to do there. So we'll continue to monitor that Next trade was a closing adjusting trade in Ford slash ES the S&P 500 futures and so this was a an iron condor And with the down moving price price came through and breached our downside break-even point So we closed out the untested side just like we teach in our course Still holding on to the put vertical side And then we've also got our long put vertical and ES Which is just that that short delta trade a totally separate trade from the iron condor So if we take a look at ES Here is here's our short call vertical Excuse me. Here's our long put vertical that we have on for our short delta directional position So just looking for some more downside to benefit that piece And then our uh, here's the long Excuse me. Here's the short put vertical from that iron condor So prices bounce back up. It's in our range. And so still just continuing to hold this If the market does continue higher At some point we'll take that off If it does keep going To the downside we may either just close it because we do want to keep short delta But we'll see when that when that time comes And then the other piece that we have Is we've got another full iron condor, which is another alert Coming up, but I'll just go ahead and hit on it now We've got this full iron condor very centered nothing else to do on that piece Next trade was a closing adjusting trade in zs, which is soybeans And so we closed the call vertical side of our iron condor Because uh, very slimmer similar to the s&p's price breached our downside break even so we just closed the untested side Still holding that that put vertical and then we've got another full iron condor In soybeans. So if we take a look here This is our short put vertical with the up move in soybeans over the last couple days prices come back into range If we get a little bit of more up move into next week, we'll go ahead and close that out And end up booking a nice profit in that piece of the trade And then we've got this other iron condor here Where you can see we're down a little bit now the market's closed in soybeans So this may not be quite an accurate reading. I think the profit line would be pretty close to the zero line If if the market was open, so just can Excuse me So we'll continue to monitor soybeans as well Market's going to close here in about 20 seconds So you'll hear a closing bell here shortly Next trade was a rolling adjusting trade in apple So we've got this long put vertical in apple in apple And we just simply rolled this from April to May And we adjusted our strikes from 180 170 down to 175 165 And by doing this as you can see it's we're buying it because it's a long put vertical But because this is negative that basically means we collected a credit to do this trade So as price moved down, we're just kind of rolling it down Rolling it out giving us a little bit more time In the trade and to continue to keep that short delta It gets the apples down about two and a half percent today So it's come all the way back down back into our range So just looking for some continued downside in apple if we take a look at the chart You can see here if we just get a you know move down to 160 or so You know that's going to that's going to give us a nice little You know in a nice little profit position there and with the rolls and everything We'd we'd be able to book a nice profit But we'll continue to keep this on is just another short delta piece to our portfolio And then next trade was a closing trade in xle So we had a short strangle on an xle We went ahead and closed this book to profit of over 50 percent Of max profit in xle so that was a nice trade If we take a look at the chart of xle What you'll see is that you know it played very nice for us Just kind of stayed in a nice steady trading range Had a little bit of a down movement a little bit of contraction in implied volatility Which gave us the opportunity to to book that one One thing I wanted to point out about xle is that was in april So if we take a look at the april options we've we've only got 14 days now And so we and we took this off yesterday So it had 15 days which is which is under that 21 days where we typically like to roll Out to the next expiration cycle Now why did I give this one a little bit more time? The reason is is because we had a little bit of profit not the 50 percent that we wanted It wasn't testing either of our break evens The the theta the implied volatility just had not contracted at all So is still holding a ton of premium and so that's why I wanted to give it a few extra days Because we weren't being tested There was really no reason that that we needed to roll that yet we could have And collect a little bit more credit But instead we just held waited for some implied volatility to contract And and when the market had that couple days of an up move You know the premium got sucked out a little bit gave us that 50 percent of max profit and we were able to take that off So those are just some of the the little tiny nuances that that you only can get from from actually Producing trades. It's it's hard to Provide those type of details in the course, but anyway, I just wanted to give you a little bit more Inside on on why we gave that one a few more days as opposed to rolling it right at that 21 days to expiration Next trade was an opening adjusting trade in es So this is where we added another iron condor in the s&p. I already went over that one on the analyze tab And then we did another opening adjusting trade in wheat So if we take a look at wheat We've got If go to the analyze tab here, you see we've got this iron condor still very centered nothing to do there yet And then we did another opening trade. So we opened up quite a few positions this week And this one was in tesla. So this was when we had the uh, the couple up days in the market We wanted to add some more short delta. So we bought a long put vertical And as I stated, it's purely it really a directional play to add some short delta to the portfolio And if we look at take a look at tesla on the chart What we're looking at is okay, we had this huge up move the last couple days And looking for an opportunity in an etf or a stock and I just chose tesla because Because we we were kind of selling into strength right after we had a couple big moves I'm hoping that kind of reverses And and goes down a little bit and we needed short delta somewhere and so tesla is just it's as good as any It's not specific like I think that tesla is going to crash or you know, there's some issues specifically with the company It's just looking at it from a pure short delta play To blend into the rest of our portfolio And it was as good of an option as any Next trade was a and lastly it was a closing adjusting trade that we did today in wheat. So we had a An iron condor on booked Almost 50 of max profit on this piece of the trade and then we still have that other iron condor That I just showed you from a from a couple alerts previously So that's all the alerts Let's go back to the platform and take a look at some of our other positions I I love our mix of positions. We've got such a good diversified portfolio a good number of positions on right now We've got oil. We've got the s and p 500. We've got nat gas We've got uh notes, which is a Uh, you know an interest rate play. We've got soybeans. We've got wheat We've got apple. We've got the dow. We've got the mexican etf. We've got the brazilian etf the chinese large cap etf gold small caps with iwm iwr is real estate the cues primarily technology We've got tesla xlk, which is also technology xlu, which is utilities and xrt, which is retail So if we go through some of these that we haven't looked at first being oil So a big move down at oil. We we had a nice little profit in oil, but uh prices come down So we're about it even right now So we would use a little pop-up in oil to benefit that piece a little bit more contraction in implied volatility If we take a look at the charts of oil What you'll see is implied volatility Did contract and then popped its head back up a little bit today with the down move But we'll still continue to monitor that Whenever es natty gas so in that gas we've got an iron condor on here Which I was trying to get filled. We're almost close to to booking a profit in that one Uh, but we'll leave this over the weekend and hopefully get a little bit more theta decay potentially add another piece to this Uh early into next week depending on where everything is Whenever notes whenever soybeans whenever wheat Apple I went over that one dia already went over that one EWW the mexican etf got a strangle on here still well within our range got a little bit of profit not enough to take off yet EWZ kind of a similar story pretty centered Not enough profit to take off there yet FXI already went over that one We've got two pieces on there GLD the gold etf Got a got an iron condor just waiting for a little bit more Time to pass theta to decay could use a little bit more up move in gold to benefit that one whenever IWM whenever I IYR The cues so we've got a couple a couple pieces in cues So we've got a short call a couple short call verticals That were originally part of an iron condor and we're just holding on for some short delta You can see we've got profit in both of these But just continue to hold these for potential a little bit more downside and then we'll either close or roll those out Again, just like dia these are just one strikes apart to keep You know to keep for tracking purposes But very very similar positions in the cues I already mentioned tesla XLK this is another short delta piece we have on just a A long put vertical and by the way, I got a couple questions on this this week as well from members Why are you Buying long put verticals As opposed to selling call verticals when implied volatility is as high as it is And then here's the reason is Think about this typically when stocks go down implied volatility goes up, right? So if we're putting on a short position in an ETF like XLK for for example If we get a down move In the in the stock, which is what the position is anticipating You know, we're looking for down movement to benefit that position Well, if if stocks go down implied volatility is going to go up So that's going to slightly benefit a long put vertical More than it is a short call vertical Either one is is is completely fine We're just we like to we like to get every little edge that we can and if the implied volatility Benefits that slightly, you know, that that's why we're doing the long put verticals and some of these as opposed to short call verticals So hopefully that makes sense XLU we've got this short strangle here still very centered nothing to do there and then I already went over XRT Which we've got these two pieces on one a short strangle centered and the other the 46 46 straddle Just waiting on that one. So those are all our positions. Let's go over to the monitor tab I want to kind of give you guys an update on our short delta situation so Here's all our positions. I like to break these down by the expiration So you can see most of our positions are in May Which currently has 42 days to expiration So perfect time to be entering new stuff, which is partly partly why we entered a bunch of new opening positions this week And then and so all those are in may you can see some of the futures based on how their expiration cycles work are out in june So we're all in may and june and so what you'll see is In thinkorswim you check this box and you can say I want to beta weight All my positions now if I if I uncheck that and I don't have them beta weighted Then we're excuse me Then we're looking at all these different positions from s and p's to soybeans to wheat to you know all these different Etfs and stocks and futures And you don't and and each of the deltas is relative specific to that underlying symbol So you're kind of comparing apples to oranges to pineapples to bananas And so what we like to do when we beta weight our portfolio to spy Basically what we're doing is we're trying to get a little bit better idea of comparing apples to apples So if we look at our delta if we beta weighted to beta weighted to spy You can see if you add up all these ones in may we've got a short delta of just 24 And then in june we've got a positive delta of 53. So we're actually slightly Um long delta Now remember The s and p 500 is down over 2 percent today S and p's are down 58 the dow is down over 560 points. So when we started the day we had about Uh, we were short over a hundred delta Beta weighted to spy So Now we're actually a little bit long delta and that's just the nature of the game when you have these Range bound positions like iron condors and strangles and straddles and and things like that Your delta is going to constantly be changing based on where the market is So we had this big move down today. So it sucked up a lot of our short delta You can see we benefited because we we were up over 300 in the portfolio today But now we're now we're in a position where you know if the market does keep going down You know, we're going to have we're actually a little bit long delta. We're very delta neutral I mean, you're never going to be exactly delta neutral For very long But that that's kind of how we how we manage those so You know, if we get a little bit of a pop up in stocks We may look to add a little bit more short delta Now if the other piece of that is if stocks do move up next week We're automatically going to gain some short delta because of the nature of our positions So that's the whole game is you're you're you're just tweaking and managing and and monitoring your your overall delta position in your portfolio Just to make sure you don't get too short biased or you don't get too long biased Uh, as you guys know if you've been following us for very long You know that we like to have a little bit of a short delta position in our portfolio because If the market does, you know, have a major move down, you know The velocity of a down move like we saw in february Like we've seen a couple days In in march and like we're even like we're seeing today The velocity of a down move a lot of times is is more than that of an up move Now we've got some with the market being as volatile as it is We're we're getting some big big moves to the upside as well When that happens, it's typically sucking the premium out of our positions and that's when you'll see us Closing a lot of positions as they as they become profitable for us So I hope that helps, uh, you know looking looking into next week We will, uh, you know, we'll continue to to manage our portfolio And if we need to add some short delta or, you know, re you know, add some new positions to get that You know to keep that balance in our portfolio. We will go ahead and do that I anticipate, you know, and this is this is just kind of market awareness You know, I do anticipate the market continuing low or breaking through those february lows And so, you know, we do want to have some short delta I don't like adding short positions after we've already had big down moves But uh, but we may but we may have to to keep that balance in our portfolio where we want it So I hope that's helpful kind of walking through our thought process walking through our different positions Of course, if you guys have any questions Let us know we're really excited about, um, you know continued trading in the next week Implied high implied volatility is always a much more fun time to be trading so much more opportunity You saw our results from from uh, the month of march where our profits were Higher than typical and that's because when we put on positions when implied volatility is high We're collecting more credit our max profit is higher And so it's just a just a fun time to be trading so Welcome everybody who just came on board and you know, we're we're continuing to uh Manage these positions and I hope you are enjoying learning what we're what we're doing here because it's such a powerful way of trading Everybody have a great weekend. We'll talk to you next week