Okay, so welcome to the September 2017 Professional Trader Webinar Series with Bookmap. Today we're going to see Jason Love present. He's from the Oil Trading Group. He primarily trades oil, as you can imagine, but also the ES and some other instruments as well. He's a trader of 10 years of experience. He started the oil trading group about seven years ago, and he focuses primarily on controlling risk. So excellent stuff here, very disciplined trader, and that comes along with some of the past of managing a 300 group call center and also being in the Navy, in the military, and he's a family man as well. So risk disclaimer, let me go through that as well. Trading futures involves substantial risk of loss, is not suitable for all investors. Past performance is not indicative of future results. And then just a bit of info on Bookmap. If you guys are interested, there is a free trial you can see here. Just go to bookmap.com and you'll find the pricing tab there. You'll see the 14-day free trial. You can follow us on Twitter and then just reach out to us at support at bookmap.com. Okay, and I have a bunch of links here for Jason as well. I'm going to put all of these into the chat for you. So just wanted to let you know about his oiltradinggroup.com, his Twitter feed at Oil Trading Group, his YouTube page, lots of great videos up there. He has a free trial as well. Don't worry, I'll put the link in. And then his trade of the day videos. I might want to check those out, some great stuff going through specific trades that he took during the days, okay? So without further ado, let me flip it over here to Jason. All right, let me see if I can get this screen set up here. Hang on a second. All right, I trust you can hear me okay and hopefully you can see the screen okay. Yes. See all the above. All right, very good. All right, well, thanks for that introduction, Bruce. Probably more fair than I deserve, but I appreciate it nonetheless. All right, so it's good to see everybody in here today. The topic of today is going to be yes, there is a day trading holy grail. It really does exist. We've all been told that there is no trading holy grail and I may be losing some of you already just by telling you that. So just bear with me here. There is, I do think there is a holy grail in trading, but it's probably not what you think. So again, let me get this set up here. All right, so we can see okay and let's get started. All right, so first of all, thank you to Bruce and Bookmap for allowing me this forum and opportunity to speak here today. Also thank you to the attendees for taking your time today and spending it with me here for the next 45 minutes or so. So here's what's on today's agenda. First of all, we're going to talk about who the oil trading group is. That's me. I'll talk to you about my trading philosophy. We're going to talk about our trading approach and our tactics that we use. I'm going to talk to you about Bookmaps role in what we do every single day and then we'll go through a question and answer session. So if you have questions and you may along the path here, you may have questions that need to be answered. I would ask that you save those towards the end. You could type them in the question box. We'll come back to them right at the end. But I think for the sake of just for flow and those kinds of things, if you could just save those to the very end, that would be awesome. And I appreciate it. All right, so who is the oil trading group? Well, again, as Bruce told you, my name is Jason Love and I'm the founder and lead trader here at the oil trading group. We were founded in October of 2010 when I recognized that there was a need in the space for some day trading, education, chat rooms, those kinds of things. And so I'm going to share with you just a quick story. So my background, as you know, as Bruce said, is I was the vice president of a 300 seat call center. Before that I was in the US Navy. And so as part of this process, discipline and processes and those kinds of things were instilled fairly heavily in me. And so I began trading. I was laid off, actually, this call center job. And I was actually the guy that had to lay himself off, which was an interesting experience. Without getting into too many of the gory details, we were a travel call center and right after 9-11, travel was something that people were less excited to do for the obvious reasons. And so the travel market sustained a bit of a dip. And so I was responsible for laying myself off. And so I ended up saying I don't want to be in a position where I'm working for the man ever again. And so I began this process of trading and I traded for a few years and I started out in the currency markets. And long story short, the currency markets didn't fit my personality very well, right? They're open 24-7, well 20, what is it, 24-6, really? And they're just open nonstop. And there's always action in the overnight sessions, Asia, London, and then of course New York. And it just didn't fit my personality very well because it was a little bit too unstructured. So I did like day trading and I ended up getting, moving over into trading oil. And I got into a couple of rooms and I'm gonna tell you a quick story, one of the rooms that I was in, the guy would pop this carbonated soda, that sound, that familiar sound that we all know, right? And so I'm a diet Dr. Pepper guy, I don't drink coffee. And so after a day or two in there, by the way, I would hear this pop sound every 15 minutes or so for about four hours. So four an hour, that was four hours, that's 16. I finally got up to courage and said, hey, I'm diet Dr. Pepper, what kind of guy are you? And he said, oh, he laughed at me. He said, that's not diet Dr. Pepper, that's Coors Light. And so he was popping Coors Light every 15 minutes for four hours. So 16 beers into the morning, he was not available for questions as you might imagine. So I moved on to another room and this guy was a singing clown in his part-time job and he would sing and he would post things that weren't true. And it was just a big mess and you guys are familiar with some of that stuff that goes on in the industry. So that's what prompted me to start the oil trading group. Fast forward, about five years later, book map came out, I don't know exactly when they came out but I found them. And I've been using book map for almost two years. And so it is a nice complimentary piece to what I do and we're gonna talk a lot about that here in a few minutes. We have an online presence here at www.oiltradinggroup.com and as Bruce has shared with you, we have Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Vimeo and he'll put those links, yeah, he's already put a lot of those links into the main chat window. All right, so the other thing that we're kind of proud of is we've helped dozens of our room members become funded traders. So if you're familiar with who Top Step Trader is, we are a partner with them as well. Top Step Trader is right now the leading firm in providing trading funds for traders. And just this month alone, we put in these five, we put in five, these are screenshots from guys that have made it through trading combines just here in the last month, whoops, I'll come back here. All right, so that technology, give me a second here guys, all right, we'll do this again, I wanna show you this. All right, so I'm gonna try to zoom in on this one more time. Okay, all right, so you really can't see the numbers here.  So if you're familiar with the way Top Step Trader combines work, they give you check marks when you complete certain benchmarks and you can see here, this person with all his check marks completing the combine, this one's a little bit easier to see, this person was on a $50,000 combine, they made $3,100 in basically took them nine days to complete it and we have had five in the month of, really the month of August, we had five traders that were part of our group that made it through the Top Step Trader combine. That's a really cool thing because now when we start talking about risk here in a few minutes, they're not risking their own capital. So we'll come back and talk a little bit more about that in just a moment. All right, so a test. We all like to take test, right? So I'm gonna ask you here, what is the difference between this potential loser, losing trade on the left and that potential winning trade on the right? What is the difference, right? Well, obviously there is no difference between these two trades. And so as day traders, right? As day traders, we don't know the difference between a winning trade and a losing trade before price either hits our target or our stop loss, right? So every trade that we get into, it's either gonna work or it isn't. Regardless of the probabilities, the back testing, the forward testing, all of the things that you may have done to get to that point, right? There is no difference between a loser and a winner when you get into that trade. You don't know until that trade goes through. So what does that mean? Well, for me, it means what you cannot control is less important than what you can control, okay? So let me say that again. What you cannot control is not as important as what you can control, all right? So let's talk about what that means. Start over here on the left. Here's what you can't control. You can't control price action and you can't control the outcome of a trade. You can't make it hit your target. You can't make it do the things that you hope it does when you get into that trade. Here's what you can control. You can control when you trade, when not to trade, what you trade, when you exit your risk. You always know the worst case scenario when you're entering into a trade, right? You have control over that. You control what tools you use. You control how you feel about whether or not something's going to work or it isn't work based on what's happening around you. And you also control your learning process, right? So on the left, the things you can't control, but they're not as important as the things that you can control here. When you control these things on the right, those things on the left don't matter, all right? So we're gonna talk about risk, why risk is important. Here's why understanding risk is important. The reason it's important is because you can control your risk, right? You are the person that controls it. I'm gonna just show you this graph here. So this is the impact on your level of risk per trade. So if I zoom in here, yeah, let's see here, we're gonna try it one more time. All right, so we're gonna zoom in to here for a second. All right, so if you look along the bottom, along the right, this is the number of trades you can lose before in net trades you can lose before you get to a zero balance. And across the bottom is the percentage of risk that you have on a particular trade. So along this axis here to the left, these are marked off in four trade increments. So zero, four, eight, 12, 16, 20, right?   Conversely, if you're risking 10% of your account on a trade, right, right here at 10%, then you are risking, what is that? You can lose four, eight, 12-ish somewhere between eight to 12 trades in a row before you blow out your account. So a lot of things that, what I see it happen in our trade room is, and we had to make this adjustment over the years, I used to trade four lots in the trade room in front of people, right? And so what would happen is people wouldn't understand what the risk parameters were.  And so my broker with my $5,000 balance will let me trade four contracts, right? So what would happen is I would lose, and I would lose again, they can't trade four lots anymore, right? And then I would be back to where I could, I hit that one winning trade that erases all of the losing that goes on, and yet they were standing there not able to do anything with it because they had over leveraged leading into that. So again, understanding risk and controlling risk is the most important thing that you can do in trading. Everything else takes care of itself, but managing and controlling your risk is the most important thing that you can do. All right, so I'm also gonna talk to you about the importance of a good rate of return. So if you take a look at this graph here, if you look here to the left, this is outstanding, hang on a second, guys. You saw the PowerPoint presentation, just bailed on me, give me a second here. Sorry about that, we'll get this right back up. Okay, nothing like throwing your rhythm off a little bit, right? So we'll try this again. All right, so if you take a look here at the value of a good rate of return, okay? If you are at a 70% win rate, you don't have to even be a one-to-one risk reward in order to get past break even. If you're at a 30% win rate, or in this example, 28%, then it's required for you to have a two-and-a-half-to-one risk-reward ratio. So understanding how your risk-reward ratio relates directly to your win rate is going to be key to your success. We talk about this all of the time in our chat room, right? We talk about the fact that if you're the type of trader that, by the way, we advocate holding on for bigger targets, if you're the type of trader, however, that takes, you are trading two lots and you take one off at 10 ticks and then you let the other one run, right? If you're that type of trader, then the question that I ask is, when you take a stop, when you take a stop, are you mitigating the loss? Meaning, if you have an 11 tick stop, are you taking one off at five ticks and the other one off at 11 ticks? And invariably, the answer is no.   So if you're not able or confident to hold on for those bigger targets and you're the trader that likes to take one off at 10 ticks and then let the other one run, it's okay if you do that, obviously, but you have to understand how what you were doing there impacts what your bottom line is. So if you haven't done the math to say, I take one off at 10 ticks and that happens X percentage of the time and then that other runner averages seven ticks, right? Sometimes it goes 20, sometimes it goes out of break, even plus one, right? Somewhere in that mix. If you don't know what that number is, you're not doing yourself a service. And the second thing is your win rate has to go up dramatically. So isn't it better, my opinion, to not have to win 70% of the time in order to be successful? Wouldn't you like to get yourself to a place where if you want 28% of the time, you still could win and you could still be a profitable trader. Those are the kinds of metrics that you need to be thinking about or you should be thinking about as you are managing and planning out where it is that you're taking your profit targets, et cetera. All right, so that's the importance of a good rate of return. There are two paths to risk reward success. Path number one, you have a high win percentage, okay? And a low risk reward ratio. So if you have a high win percentage and a low risk reward ratio, you could still be successful. However, if you have a low win percentage and a low risk reward ratio, you're not going to be profitable. On the other side, if you have a high win percentage, sorry, if you have a high risk reward ratio and a low win percentage, you're still going to be consistently profitable. And if you somehow get yourself up to 70% win rate and a two to one risk reward ratio, three to one, four to one, et cetera, then at that point, that's where the magic happens. That's where you're blowing the lid off of it every single month. The point is, the point is this, that if you have the proper risk reward ratio in mind, you don't have to win as much. If you have a one to one, then you have to win a lot more in order to be successful. And again, the way that I see the world, I would rather be able to be wrong a lot and still be right in the end, right? That's the way I would like to, that's the way we approach what we do in here, not that we try to be wrong a lot, but if you are wrong, right? And I'm going to show you some examples of this in a few minutes, but if you are wrong, it's okay if you can eliminate those losers with a single winner, right? The mistake that a lot of retail traders make is they have a good day, good day, small good day, small good day, good day, good day.  All right, so understanding risk reward is the holy grail of trading. So I started off by telling you that there is a holy grail of trading and understanding risk reward and how it affects your trading. And this topic is way deeper than I'm going into it here today. I'm just giving you the foundation of what we look at so that I can then begin to talk to you about how we incorporate our book map into this. So understanding risk reward is the holy grail of trading, right? So the components that affect your equity growth is your win rate, that's your distribution between wins and losses, your rate of return, which is how your winners offset your losers, and then the size of your losses and winners, right? That's your position size. What is your size of your winners versus your losers? If you get this formula tweaked and right, nothing else matters in your trading and here's what I mean by that. You can trade any system in any program as long as you're managing risk properly, but once you enhance it with the proper tools and the proper knowledge of tactics, this will make a whole lot of sense and it will really impact positively overall your trading. All right, so how do you start doing this, right? That's the question, how do you start doing this? Well, one of the things that I used to do when I was the VP of this call center at the beginning of every year, we would have a goal setting process and it was in this goal setting process that we would talk about what does it look like when you're standing at the top of Mount Everest, okay?  That's your vision. That is why you were doing the things that you were doing, okay? You have to have a strategy to get there. So if you're the kind of guy that likes to go out on Friday, guy or gal likes to go out on Friday night and you have a few cocktails and you get home late, you stop by your favorite fast food joint on the way home at two in the morning after you've had an all night kind of fun with your friends, well, that's not getting you to standing on top of Mount Everest. That's not gonna help you climb the mountain, right? So you have to have a strategy to do that, eat, write, exercise, do all those kinds of things. Your tactics to get you to the top of the mountain or the things that you do every day to help you. I'm working out, I'm taking mountain climbing classes, I'm getting into environments where it's low oxygen, you get the picture, right? I'm learning how to set up a tent, I'm learning how to deal with the cold, I'm buying the equipment. Those are your tactics to get your strategy, which gets you to your vision of standing at the top of the mountain, right? So this is how you go about accomplishing this. Your goal, your strategy, your tactics, it's a top-down approach and your tactics are all aligned with your goals. So I'm gonna put it this way. Your vision is the why you were doing something, right?  The what is your strategy? What am I doing to get to my vision and how are the tactics that you employ to get there, all right? So what does this have to do with book map and a webinar? The underlying thing that we're all trying to do here is we're all trying to become consistently profitable. That's our vision, that's our goal. We all wanna be consistently profitable. That's why we are doing this, right? That's why we are trading. The what with the strategy is your strategy. What are you going to do to be consistently profitable?  The tactics are what get you there. The tactics for us at the old trading group, determine market direction, identify your decision points and have book map manage your risk reward, right? That's it. Your vision, consistently profitable.  Okay, now that I've laid the groundwork, let's talk tactics for a few minutes. So the first thing that we like to do is we wanna determine what we assume the direction of the market is going to be on the day because we all wanna get on the right side of the direction. And so let me try this. Whenever I try to use zoom in here, okay, here we go. So the question I always ask is, is this a bull market or a bear market, right? Bull market or bear market? Well, invariably you're gonna say, well, Jason, that is a series of lower highs and that's a series of lower lows, low, lower, low, lower low. This is clearly a bear market. We're gonna be looking for shorts all day because this is a bear market, right? Okay, so I'm gonna ask you this. Is this a bull market or a bear market? Well, now you would tell me, well clearly, higher highs and higher lows, okay? Well, this is that same level, this is that same run that I just showed you on the previous slide, 5021 to 4870 low, right? 4870 is the low, 5021 is the high. That's the same run. Now are you telling me that this market on this small pullback was a, we're in a bearish market? No, we're in a bullish market with a bear pullback, right? This is a 60 minute chart, that previous chart that I just showed you was a one minute chart. So when you understand direction, the way that we look at the world, we look at these on higher time frames. We look at 60, four hour daily charts, right? That's gonna help you clear out the noise on the wiggle waggles that go on as it relates to direction. So one of the things that I get when I get new visitors or new guests with me here today is why did you go short when the market is clearly going long? Well, yeah, it may be on your 400 volume chart or your two tick chart or your two rinko bar chart, right? It may be long, right? It might be long, but on those micro time frames, you're gonna see that direction, at least as we see it and the way that we trade, we try to determine the direction of the market on the higher time frame. So tactic number one, to get you to your strategy, to get you to your vision is determined market direction, okay? Tactic number two is to identify decision points. Decision points are those places on the chart where the market is likely to react, meaning it's either gonna go long or it's gonna go short. Now you're gonna say to me, well, you could rotate around, sure. But at some point that market's gonna move away from that in one of two directions.  And again, while these are times when these types of, there are times when these types of levels, and I'll show you here in a minute, are hit to the tick, these areas should be considered zones of influence more than surgical precision. So you may say to yourself, well, if it breaks the trend line here at 5820, then I need to get in there. Well, it may go up above that trend line and come back down and test it and go back up. And really the new break point is where it went up before, but maybe it stopped you out on the way down. You have to understand that these are zones of influence, previous session high. You may say, I wanna get short at the previous session high and it gets to within like on the CL, the zone around a previous session high would be 10 ticks on either side. So it may go six ticks away from that zone and then sell off and you missed it because you are not interpreting that it's a decision point is an area of influence more than it is an actual to the target to the tick precision. I'm gonna show you that. I'm gonna show you how that worked here today in a real live example of what we did in the trading room two hours ago. All right, so we have what we call market maker levels. These are dynamic support and resistance levels, decision points, if you will, that are based on previous price action and time cycles and they provide the structure within the structure. I was fortunate enough to be given this trading system by a 30 year veteran floor trader. Again, he used to trade this information in the S&P pits and this system has now been modified for electronic trading. And I use these levels on the CO and the ES. And while I don't personally trade other markets, our students, and there are many of them in here today that are regular, our regular room members, we have had these students adapt this material to successfully trade the bonds and some forex markets. So again, no matter the market, this trading system, these decision points can be adapted to your favorite market. Again, why is this important? These are all tactics, a structured approach to get you into a position where you can make a decision to trade, right? Tactics to get you to your strategy. All right, so let's talk about book map. Our tagline, if you will, here at the oil trading group is solving the trading puzzle. And we use book map extensively to get us to that point. So again, solving the trading puzzle, I've been using the book map for two plus years in my trading room as we just talked about. Book map is a Ferrari, but sometimes I drive it like a dump truck. I mean, here's what I mean. I have a lot going on in the trading room, right? And so if I wanted to get down into the millisecond about what's being traded, if I wanted to get into the dirt, nitty gritty, the very infinite, intimate details of what's happening inside of the market, and Bruce does this for you every week when he goes through his webinar, then I could be doing that, right? If I wanted to see candlesticks on there, if I wanted to see how volume is being distributed across highs and lows, how it's being distributed in terms of Delta, I could put volume bars and pie charts and dots, and I could do all of that stuff that would give me a lot of information. But for me, because I've got a lot of other stimulus and things going on, I have broken it down into a really simple way to look at it. I drive it like a dump truck sometimes, even though it's a Ferrari, right? So if you can take this tool and you can get as intimately familiar with it as you want to, and you can use it to make your decisions in a very granular type way, right? But I'm gonna show you the way that I use it in here today and the way that it's been effective for me. All right, so book map is flexible and powerful enough for your risk profile. So again, we told you there were two paths to risk reward success.   I'm gonna take this and take it and take it and you trade all the time and that's your thing. Book map is powerful enough to support you in that endeavor. I like to hold on for targets. My average winning trade lasts over an hour, and I'm a day trader, right? I don't hold anything into the overnight positions, but my average trade when I win lasts over an hour. The reason that it does is because I'm holding on for larger targets, but book map is powerful enough and flexible enough for me to be able to use it in that way.  So again, book map is an integral part of how I manage my trades. I use book map to cut my losing trade short and let my winning trades run.  Then I'm gonna break down one of the trades that we took in the room today. All right, so first thing before I do that, here are my book map settings. I get asked this a lot, how do you set your book map? What does it look like? Well, here it is. I use the same thing on the ES as I do on the CL. The only difference is if you look here where it says minimum to max size, right? I filter out the order book to only see on the CL, I only wanna see orders of 25 or greater. So as they aggregate all of their algorithm aggregates that and publishes it here in this price ladder, I only wanna see things that are 25 or greater. On the ES, I look for trades that are 250 or greater. So any trade that comes in that's 250 lots or greater as aggregated together by the book map algorithm, that's what I use. Otherwise everything else is just the same. All right, so first trade I'm gonna talk to you about was September 8th, okay? First trade I wanna talk to you about was on September 8th. I'm gonna zoom in here. This trade, see if I can get this done here. Okay, so this is right out of my trade review spreadsheet. If you don't have a journaling program or software, I like trade review. There's Edge Wonk and there's a few others out there and there's many others. But this is the one that I particularly like to use and so I upload my trades into this so I can kinda take a look here. Couple things I want you to notice, obviously, the trade that I'm gonna show you is a $1,700 winner on two lots, not four lots or six lots, on two CL lots, it was $1,700 winner. I took one trade at average volume is two lots times two, right?  And then you can see here was 8.50 a contract and the winning trade lasted for about two hours, okay? So this is a trade that I'm gonna show you here. So we talked about decision making process, right? We talked about determining direction. We talked about identifying decision points and then we talked about how BookMap helps you get into that opportunity. Okay, so this maroon line right here, okay? This maroon line right here is one of my favorite retracement setups. So when you look at this from a higher timeframe, the market came in, rallied up here and pulled back into our favorite retracement zone where we were looking to get short. That was at 48.11. Once I was in and the trade BookMap told me where to put my stop, right? Told me that that was gonna be a good place to get in. Told me where to put my stop. Then it just simply becomes looking for where it makes sense to take your targets. So for example, we have a system that goes along with these levels where we were looking for a target down into this zone down here, right? And I'm gonna show you how this all played out here in just a minute. But we had a target down into this zone. I think that was at 48.13. That was our target. The market comes down, gets to within a couple of ticks of it, then pulls back and takes me out on a retracement. And then I think the next bar comes and takes me all the way into the target. But it still, it was a $1,700 trade on two lots. This is the way that we got into it. So if you think about, there are direction of the market, there are decision points, and then there is your risk management as controlled by how you look at things with BookMap. That is, and then once you're in it, then you cut those losers short when they're not working out and you let the winners run, right? So here is the way that this exact trade looked on BookMap, okay? So I got short, here was that sweet spot, two lots, 49.11. My stop was right here in this gap, right? I don't like to do much over 11 tick stops. By the way, for me, that's about 0.44% risk on 11 ticks on two lots. So I told you at 1%, you could have 100 net losing trades in a row. I'm at 0.44% risk, right? On a particular trade, on this particular trade. So 49.21 was the stop. You see here, I could have put it up a little higher above this band of liquidity, this area of liquidity. But what I did is I parked it right here at 21. That's 10 ticks away. I said, well, if it's gonna go, it's gonna go. If not, I'm gonna get out and we'll retest what happens here. But here's the other thing that I saw underneath it. I said, look, if you get into this position here, it's one of our favorite retracement setups and we don't get through this band of liquidity. If we get up here through 20, then it's likely to test up here and I'll get in if it comes back down. But look here, it was clean and clear. Once you got down through about 40, was that 49? So once you got down through 49, it was clean and clear here underneath you. Now, I'm gonna show you a video. In fact, I'm gonna pull it up here right now. Okay, and I'm gonna talk to you about this video. This video's posted on our website. It's in our trade of the day videos. We record these types of things. So this is a recording. I'm gonna let you listen to the first part of this. I'm gonna put, so I'm gonna have to, sorry, I'm gonna tell you in advance, I gotta do a little bit of Southern engineering here. I'm gonna have to put the microphone in front of the speaker so that you can hear the audio here. Then I'm gonna pull it back and I'm gonna start, I'm gonna walk you through what my thought process was as this trade was actually taken live in our day trading chat room. So I'm gonna put the microphone in front of the speaker and then hit pause and we'll come back and resume it. There's seven, eight, nine, 10. I am in at 11. My stop here is 22. The target is somewhere between 57 and 44. Okay, so we're gonna start there. I'm gonna turn the music off here and then I'm gonna, that was me, by the way, live in the room, telling you exactly how it was that I got in and where I got in. So what, just to go back and recap here, my stop actually was 22, not 21. 4911 was the entry. This yellow price right here, this is where the price was and then this is where the stop was. So if you take a look back here, again, same thing I just showed you. This is the actual tape of the trade when we did it in the room. Right up here, 22 was the stop. I may have had it, could have had it back, but I definitely wanted to get below above 15, 17 and 20, right? So I was parked right up here in this area and what you can see here is just how clean it was underneath you once the trade got active. So I'm gonna turn this on. Remember, it's a two hour trade. This video is two minutes. It's gonna go way faster than what it actually did in the trading room. It's gonna go super fast, okay? So I'm gonna have to talk through this thing fairly quickly, but I took two hours worth of trade because nobody wants to watch a full link motion picture of a trade, right? So I took it, cut it down, I put a little music behind it, but you're gonna get the idea here as we go through it. So again, we're in right here and you can see it's just kind of rotational around. You can see our market maker levels here on the left hand side of the screen. This little brown area right here at 4809 was settlement from the previous session, right? And so here we are. It's just kind of rotating around. I've got a stop up here at 22. The volume and liquidity rather, the liquidity was holding in that area, right? So now we begin to start to move, showing you some other tools here. Beginning to start to move. The liquidity is still down here protecting zero zero, but that's something that we expect to occur around the zero zero level. And I want you to look at how quickly that tape is moving there on the right hand side. Once we got down here to 10 ticks, I moved the stop to break even for a risk-free trade. And now what we are talking about in the room is that if we get down through this 95, 94, this thing is going to unhook. So now we did get down through it and you can see that my stop here is at 91. If you look back up here, we have liquidity protecting you all the way up to 90. So 91 was a 20 tick stop, 20 tick trail stop here at the point, right? And so you can see that this thing is continuing to move to the downside. You're knifing through all of these levels underneath you. We came down here to 97, sorry, to 48, 57. And you can see how BookMap is identifying the place to put the trail stop, 86 here, sorry, 67. You see that I said, we were talking about the fact that the market comes up through that area there and then I'm moving the target down because it was getting aggressive on the push down. But again, you can see here, again, you see me moving the target down. We came down here to 26. We were looking to reach out to 13 on this particular trade. We come down to 28. My stop here is at 41. You can see the liquidity here at 39, 38, 36 protecting. That's where my trail stop is now at 31. Mark comes down to 18, 17. Now I'm just in not give it back mode, right? And at that point I get taken out for 172 tick trade or 85 times two lots. So again, that happened, all that happened kind of fast but here's the bottom line. We had the direction identified for that particular day. We identified a decision point and we put a small stop on it. We put a 10 tick stop. Then we said, if the market's gonna go, we're gonna use the BookMap to show you how to manage it, right? We've got a target way down there that we think it's going to hit but if it starts to pull back against us, we'll get out. If it starts to pull back against us, we're gonna get out. And sometimes it does take you out before it gets to your target. In fact, it does that quite a bit but even if it had taken me out along the path, this was an eight and a half to one risk reward trade. Eight and a half to one risk reward trade. Even if it came back and took me out at seven to one or six to one, it's still a massive trade. And how many losing trades and days can you have if you have a $1,700 winner? How much losing can you have and still be okay? A lot, right? You can still have a lot. All right, so that was September 8th. I'm gonna show you another trade here. Really? Give me a second here. It's not liking this. Give me a second here. Let me reopen it. Sorry, guys. I'll get it reopened here. And we'll come back down. Sorry about that. You're watching live coverage of me working through my PowerPoint. Okay, here we go. All right, so we're gonna close that. And this was the September 8th trade. Okay, so let's go to the next one here. Here is a similar type trade on September 5th, okay? So if you wanna zoom in on that, this is 132 tick trade. This was on September 5th. So September 8th, we had a $1,700 trade on one lot, or sorry, two lots in one trade. This is the September 5th. This was 132 tick trade. And again, same idea, right? We had an entry level right here at 48.01. And again, I'm gonna play this video for you. We had an entry level at 48.01.  These are your decision points. And these are our targets. And we use this 12 tick stop below the structure points here. And this is how Bookmap help you determine what to do in this instance, okay? So 48.01 is right here. So what I want you to see is, Bookmap showed you how the market comes up into this 48.15 area, pulls back down as we were getting into the open, found support here, right? One, two, three, four bottoms. You had liquidity parked underneath you here, right? This is liquidity parked underneath. We had a level at 48.01. If you go back up, we had a level in the direction of this moving average along, in the direction of this moving average, right? So you had this long here. Bookmap told you that there was a line of congestion right around 90, 89, 88. In at 01, 12 tick stop down here at 89. If we got through this down and through this 90 to 89, broke this structure here, Bookmap gives you plenty of notice that if this area breaks, that it's pretty clean underneath. Yes, you can say, well, there was a lot of liquidity up above you, right? There was a lot of liquidity up above you, but this was an area of rejection that a lot of times looks to get traded again. And we got in, right? And so let's do this. Let me show you the trade again. Let me show you this trade here. Okay. Give me a second. We're gonna turn that here. See if I'm gonna... Hang on a second here. I wanna make sure that this gets caught up, okay? So this is that trade, and I'm gonna put the microphone over here for you again. Here we go. Go ahead and put a long on here at 48.01. So if you look at that price ladder, my stop here will be 12 ticks to 89. And my initial target is gonna be up here to, I got hit, but no fill, by the way. My initial target is going to be up here at that 63, okay? So I am filled now at 01 long, 48.01 long. Okay. So you kind of heard me walk through it. So one thing that you'll notice here too is sometimes I say my target's at a certain level and then it'll change as we get into the trade because if the trade wants to let you win more money, more ticks, right? If you look at it in the form of ticks versus money, if the market wants to let you win more ticks, who are we to argue with it? So what I'll do is, depending on what the book map is telling me and how aggressively we're getting up through it, I'm gonna look to potentially do a bigger target, right? How many times have you gotten into a trade that you say, man, I took it at the target and it just had so much more left in it? That happens a lot, right?  Okay. So same thing here, I'm gonna walk you through this process. So again, if you look down here 93, 92, 91, 90, right? All this down here, our stop's right here at 89. And so what we said was that if we get down through this zone here, then we don't wanna be in it anymore. So what you saw me do is right there was maneuver that target up a little bit. And so this video is about two minutes as well. So we'll get through it here. But again, what I want you to see is there was nothing telling me to change my stop and opportunity. So the market begins to rally. We have a resistance point right here on the left at 07. We talked about that. The high on the day is 15. You had a line of liquidity up here. If you could see to the right, there was 321 short and immediately we just blasted off up through it. So now I'm having trouble. Now this is sped up again. But I'm having trouble keeping up on where to put my stop. But we got it down here at 19. Because again, if you look here, there's a line of liquidity at 20. We're using book map to tell us, hey, if we break that point, we don't wanna be in it any longer. Our target was up there at 48.71. Market's rallying up through. We're moving our stop here to 41, right? So if you look here, 40, there's a line of liquidity here. Now we're at 46 on the trail stop just in this area behind this line of liquidity here. And we're just managing to try to hang on to our target, right? 57, you've got a line of liquidity up here at 70, right? And we're moving it through. We get to 66, 67. We get to 70 and I say, you know what? To heck with it, I'm gonna take it out. We got to within a tick of the target. And so again, that was how, I know that's fast, okay? And our website is littered with these types of videos on it. Our website is littered with these types of videos. So if you wanna see that more slowly and hear all the commentary that went into it, that's, you can do that on the website, okay? So that was a trade on the eighth. That was a trade on the fifth. And now I'm gonna show you what we did in the room here today. Now this one was not the Herculean move that we hoped for, at least not yet, right? And for those of you that are regular room members, you'll know what I'm talking about here in a minute. So we had our market maker levels that formed up this morning. I'm gonna turn off all these others just so as it's to not be confusing. And one of the things that we talked about is hit, kick the signal, right? Here's your DS signal and pay the target, okay? So the target down here was 40, in the room I told them the target, initial target was gonna be 49.98 but that we could reach out all the way down to 49.50. Now we got into this trade up here this morning right around, we got in it right around the open. We got in at 67. And so I'm gonna show you where we put our stop. We got in at 67, we had a 10 tick stop. And here's what book map looked like this morning when we were there, okay? By the way, here's why I get in at 67 versus this 75 market maker level. I'm gonna turn on the secondary levels here for a second, okay? You're London range high and there's a whole philosophy around this London range high was here at 70. I tried to get in at 69, I got hit but no fill. I tried to get in at 68, I got hit but no fill. And then eventually I said, you know what? I wanna get in because I don't wanna miss the train and I got in at 67. So this is really fresh for those of you that were in the room here today with us. And so we said we had a line of liquidity and a known resistance point up here at 76. My stop was at 77. My stop was at 77. And so give me a second here, let me get the book map back out. Let's see here, give me a second here guys, okay? So here's what the book map looked like at that time of the morning, okay? Book map at this time of the morning, right here. You see this line of liquidity right here at 75. My stop was at 77, I got in at 60. I was trying to get in at 69, 70. Lots of liquidity here, it made a lot of sense for me. Look, if it comes up and takes me out at 10 ticks, it's 10 ticks. My target on this thing was 49.50 today. Now we're not there yet, 49.98 was the original target. 49.50 was gonna be the final target today. But look at where we are here. The low on the day right now is 40, is this, it's down here at, low of the day is 49.83. Remember, we were in from 49.67, right? That's where we were in from today is 49.67. That's where we got into, we got protected here. We talked about this in the room this morning. We were protected from being stopped out by two ticks because of what book map showed us in relationship to our market maker level decision point, right? And so takes me out at 10 ticks, it's okay, right? We throw it back, it's not working. We throw it back. The market's giving you feedback. Our target was 110 ticks down the road. Now I eventually end up getting stopped out on a pullback at 40 ticks times two lots. I get stopped out on this pullback right here. On this, we rallied up here. Yeah, we rallied up right here. I ended up getting taken out on this pullback right here, right? And then the market continues to unwind down below here. So if you sign up, get on our email list. I'm gonna put out a video probably today, maybe tomorrow about this. But the point is that was in real time in our trading room today. And I'm gonna start wrapping this up so we can get to some of these questions here. All right, so again, we have 200 plus Trader Today videos on our YouTube channel. Check them out. Subscribe, you'll get notified by YouTube when we put them out. We also do this on the ES. So I'm gonna run through these really quickly. We had a known area here. And again, these videos for these trades are on the site. We had a long here based on our levels here, Market Maker level 23, 19 quarter was the long 23, 21 quarter. You can see here was the area of liquidity and how that line supported. And your target at this daily structure target was right up in this area where you had a line of liquidity. That was an ES trade. Another CL trade. Same kind of idea. You had a short here at 5309. That was the short right into this band, this small band of liquidity. The stop was above this known resistance area on your book map band of liquidity. It also happened to be this peak high above this swing high. So that makes a lot of sense. And then your target, which was a two and a half to one risk reward ratio was right down into this known decision point underneath you there. And same type of idea here. We get short with the stop just above this area. You could see the liquidity that was pulled here. The stop was above this big band of liquidity here. And then your target was here at 5335 down into this zone here. So again, that's, it's really not that difficult. We find decision points on the chart. We try to get in line with what the bigger picture direction is. And then we use our book map to hone our entries and exits. And if we're losing, we throw it back like that fishing tournament, right? Not big enough, throw it back when it's not big enough or it's giving us the feedback that the trade's not working. And you can see it clearly on your book map. When the trade's not working, you throw it back. And then when it does work, you don't cheat yourself out of it by cutting them short. You try to let them run as long as possible. All right, so here we go, let's recap. The key to being consistently profitable, this is your vision is managing your risk. That's the holy grail. And there are two paths to doing that. You can have a high win rate or you can have a high risk reward rate. We've chosen the path of high risk reward because I can lose a lot, I can be wrong a lot and still be okay with a few nice trades. The way that OTG achieves our objective is simple. We cut the loser short and we let the winners run. That's the way that we try to approach this. And then finally, we use book map as one of our primary tactics to achieving this strategy and ultimately the goal of becoming consistently profitable. And with having said all of that, I'm gonna go through the questions here, Bruce, if you're there. Yep. That's us. Okay. That's it. Fantastic. So yeah, so you want me to kind of go through them or do you want to go through them? I don't care either way. As you wish. I mean, we can start off with the top, I guess, mm as you originally started off like why primarily oil? And that's a really good question. So if you remember that my history was with the forex markets, that's kind of way I started trading. Forex is full throttle, 24-6, London, Asian, New York session, I was up all night. I used to have a laptop next to the bed and it would ding at two in the morning and I would be in a trade and then I was up all night and it was just not right for my personality. I'm the kind of person that's gotta watch their trades and gotta look at them and all of those kinds of things. And so when the market is active like that, it just doesn't suit me well. Oil, you get everything you need to get done between eight to 1030 in the morning and you're either gonna win what you need to win for a day, you're gonna lose and you need to stop and all of that can happen in about a two and a half hour window. So for my personality, it's a better deal. And that's why oil. Okay. Also mm followed up with, is oil less manipulated than stock indexes? Well, you know, I try not, here's the deal. I try not to get a hung up on manipulation and what a certain news event's gonna do. I just, I don't worry about any of that because you can drive, you can literally drive yourself crazy trying to wonder what the impact and the manipulation and who's pulling the levers and who's handling the marionetta string, marionetta? How about marionette strings? We'll say puppet, handling the puppet strings, right? We don't know who's doing what and where. The only true thing that we know is what price is doing, right? What is happening? It doesn't really matter to me why it's happening, right? Up, down, sideways, I just wanna know what the price is doing and that's where Bookmap comes in to really help you with that. It can tell you where the money is coming in and that's all you really need to know. You don't really need to know why. And even if you didn't know why, you may not be right at that moment. You might not be right five minutes from now, right? If you think about who you're competing against, the deep pockets, the people that have access to resources way beyond anything you'll ever be able to come up with, why try to fight that? All we're trying to do, we're not trying to catch it from 110 down to 26. We're not trying to catch those types of moves. We come in every day and we try to, like your dog does when you're having dinner at the table and he sits under the table and he's just waiting for something to fall to him. That's all we're doing.  And so to really understand why the steak was cooked and how it got to the table and the farmer that fed the cow that got it there, it's all neat to kind of know that. But at the end of the day, that doesn't help you when the steak falls to the table and you're trying to fight the other dog to get it.  I like the analogy. Thank you. Let's see here. Just to let you know, Jason as well, I mean, here at Bookmap, when you're in the trial, there's actually, they're daily webinars. It's not weekly, but I just wanted to let you know that. Sorry, yeah, yeah, sure. Yep, sorry about that. No, no, no problem. Let's see. Okay, now some questions about recording. We got that. Okay, so actually this is a really good question and I've answered it, but I just wanted to verify with you. So you're using CQG data, is that correct? Yeah, it's the continue on data feed from CQG. Okay, so CQG as well as Rhythmic, they offer a complete depth of market for ComEx and NIMEX and then Rhythmic also offers it for CME. So Bob was asking about the clean clear liquidity example below down at lower levels. That it was that way because that data was not refreshed and there was no understanding of what was down there. That is actually not the case any longer depending on your data feed. So great stuff is much more transparency for us as traders. And those areas like 10, 20, 30, 50 cents out, even a dollar out, those are updated live. So those are live levels now. Well, and here's another thought to that point. Let's say it wasn't, and that's fantastic news, but let's say that it wasn't, okay? You don't know what's down there, but at the time that it was printing down in that zone, it was clean, right? And so the same argument could be made that, you know what, you can't, let's say that this is the case here, let's go back here, okay? Right up here, well, we're nowhere near that, right? When you're down here at 52, that's what the residual imprint was up there. There is a strong likelihood, at least what I've seen, that that is gonna reappear when you get up there, right? If it's there once, it's likely to reappear when it gets there. Just like if there's been nothing down here when you've been here in the past, it's likely not to be there again. Maybe that's the wrong way to look at it, but from my perspective, that's what we look at and that's the way that I see it. If it reappears and it begins to react, then we react along with it, right? We start to react with what's going on. So once you're, but once you're in that trade, once you're in that opportunity, wherever that opportunity is, the 10 levels around you are accurate, right? You could say that for 100% certainty that the 10 levels around you are accurate. And up to 15, and like you just said, your functionality is included, 50 cents to a dollar down below, which just makes it easier. But when you're in it at the moment, you've got your risk-reward set. You kind of know what's gonna be happening based upon the way that you expect things to work out and the book map is sharpening that pencil for you. Exactly, exactly. Okay, let's see here. Some corrections, actually some of your traders here we're talking about 50 cents, 50 cents, I'm sorry, $50.67, not 49.67. So actually- Oh, today? Today. So you were misquoted by a buck. By a dollar. What's a dollar among friends, right? Yeah, that's right. It was 50.67 today, that's right. Yeah, you're cutting yourself short on that. Maybe they were paying attention today. Let's see. Okay, Jeff has a question here. MM is also asking about, is it possible to get into your room for a trial? And yes, MM, I can answer that one for you. It's looking the chat there in the chat box and you should see all the links there and the free trial is, link is in there as well. Let's see, Jeff's question to you. Why would you take a stop on today's crude short when on the pullback liquidity on bookmaps started lighting up at the 50, 45-ish area, which was a confluence area for the VPOC, first hour, prior days, range, lovian, et cetera. Do you ever add on what seemed ripe to add on to the short, but maybe only if you scale out? Okay, so why did we get out? Well, we were in at 67 and the question that we don't know the answer to is even though liquidity started lighting up around an area that was 55 to 59 was the volume weighted average price at the time today. And so, do you really wanna go down from 67 down to 07 and have it retrace all the way back and take you out at break even? And the answer for me is no. So you would turn a $1,200 trade into a break even plus one or plus five trade, right? So maybe you make a hundred bucks. And so at some point, you have to sharpen the pencil as you get into it. You have to say to yourself, well, how much of this am I willing to give back? I'm unwilling if it went $1,200 to give back 1,100 of it. So that's the first answer. The second answer is if you consider what was happening, there was some uncertainty in the market because Trump was speaking today, right? Also you have the FOMC is meeting today as well. And so if you think and take those into consideration, we had settlement around 35. We had the ETH session open price was at 38, I believe. And so these are areas on your chart that if you say, gosh, if we get past some of this and it starts to gain momentum, I really don't wanna be in. And in retrospect, it's really easy to go back and turn around and look behind you and say, 54 would have held, you'd have still been in that trade, you'd have been up 1,000 bucks. But you don't know that when you're looking to the right and into the future. And so it's all about what is your decision in the moment and what type of risk reward you're looking for and those kinds of things, right? That's just, it's easy to go. And I'm not being critical here, by the way. It's just easy, always easy to go back and look over your shoulder and say, man, we shoulda coulda, right? But it just doesn't always, it just doesn't always work like that. So one of the other questions was, and let me see if I could figure this, let me see if I can pull this up. The other question was, do you ever look to add to the position? And the answer is yes. I do like to add to positions, all right? So let me see if I can get a chart out here for you. I wanna show you this, if I can get this thing to pull up here, hang on. Let's see, where is this chart at? Okay, well, I know where it is. I think it's here. Okay, let me do it this way. I'm just gonna take, we're gonna change the instrument on this platform. We're gonna go drawing tools. And I just wanna show you the answer to this question. Do I ever, do I add to positions? And the answer is yes, but not recently. And here's why. We'll go into, we'll stay in the continuous contract here. This would be fine. All right. Okay, so when you add to positions and you hang on for long targets, what happens is you end up with a lot of breakeven trades if you're in a choppy conditions where the market is not being favorable to your ad, right? So if you look here, this is a, let's go, we need this on a daily chart here. Sorry about that. Give me a second, Bruce. A daily chart and click apply. Okay. So when you look at this chart here, we did a lot of adding in this run right here, right? And then this one, and then this drop. But right here, adding to positions, this is really choppy conditions here right now, right? And so if you look at it, our average daily range on the CL, our average daily range on the CL right now is like 120 ticks, right? When it was in this area, it was like 200 ticks, right? And so it's easy to add to positions here because you know the market is trending, right? But it's not trending necessarily here in these zones. So we do add to positions. We just haven't been doing it recently because if you're in, let's just do simple math. If you're in at 20 and you added zero zero, your trail stop is now at 10, right? And so that brings your average in way down. And if you get one of these pullbacks that takes you out of breakeven before it goes, then you get two lots times 10 ticks versus two lots times 60 ticks. And that's the basic answer. The market conditions have to be right and they just haven't been right recently in my estimation. Okay, let's see here. MM is asking all sorts of questions about your trial, the hours, how much it costs. Let's see. So do this, get, MM if you'll throw your email address in here or your phone number, we can give you a shout and talk to you about all those questions. It might be easier to get those questions answered like that or if you just want to send an email to jasonatultradinggroup.com, you can do that also. And we'll get you in contact so somebody can get all those questions answered. Okay, and just a question here about the, recording, so all of the ProTrader webinar series is recorded, it'll be on the homepage of our YouTube, but there's a playlist as well. It's just gonna be on the homepage for a week or two and then we'll just take it off but you'll still have access to it in the playlist, okay? And then let's see, Jason, do you have any links to those webinars that, or I'm sorry, those trades that you had earlier that you were showing from your trade of the day out? Yeah, so in those links that I sent you, there is a category on our website. So you have to click the, okay, let me just see if I can pull this up really quickly. If you were to visit the website here, let me get that pulled up and I'll show you exactly how to get to it. Here, I'll put the link here into chat right now as well. Yeah, that'll probably be easier, I guess. There you go, trade of the day videos. Yep, that's it, trade of the day videos and there's 10 videos to a page and there's 21 pages worth of videos to watch. So that will help. Okay, let's see here. I think that's about it. Gokul is asking about, does these indicators work with trade stations? So I don't know if he's talking about your proprietary indicators. Gokul is one of our members so I'm gonna assume he's talking about your stuff. Ah, okay. Bookmap is actually a platform. So it's just like Ninja Trader, although we do connect to the API of Ninja as well, as well as the API of TTX Trader Pro and Trader Workstation from Interactive Brokers. But all you need is a data feed from your data provider and just like any other platform and you're up and running in Bookmap. Okay, let's see, icebergs with the iceberg indicator. Ah, okay, so Marco is asking, how do you trade with the icebergs and iceberg indicator? So iceberg orders, I don't do much with them but I just like to know where they are because I don't do a lot with them. It doesn't say, oh gosh, there's an iceberg order. I gotta get out, right? Because they happen all the time. It's just really frequent. And depending on the size of the market that you trade, like if you're trading the ES, it's there all the time. It's just the mental note that I make and observe. So I do a lot of talking in our trading room very much like what you saw when I was kind of recapping through those videos. That's the way I trade. And so whether I was running a trade room, which I do it out loud or I was sitting here in my office by myself, I would be doing it in my head.  It's important to know, hey, we've been down there four times and every time we've come down there, there's been support, I need to tighten this stop up. But if I just see it once or twice, I make a mental note to be prepared if it comes down there again and I see it, but it's not real actionable. Like it's not one of those if then statements. If this happens, then I do this. It's not like that. It's more, I need a little bit more salt in this or a little bit more pepper. That tastes pretty good. It's that kind of thing that goes through my head. It's not an if then statement. Excellent, excellent. Okay, I think that's it, Jason. I think that's all the questions that we have here. Okay, so what I would encourage, if you mind if I do a shameless plug here. If you're interested in anything you've seen in here today, obviously we encourage you to get the book map so that you can play along with the home version while you're in there with us. That's a joke, but we do encourage you to get the book map. But if you'd like to take a free trial with us, you can sign up at our website, onetradinggroup.com. While you're there, we're gonna make you a one-time offer of some really cool stuff, really cool trading stuff, 47 bucks. You get a few extra days in the room. That trade that was $1,700 that I showed you, that setup is included in the $47 package. And so you can get a couple of extra days in the room and you can get that cool setup. So even if you walked away, if you spent $4,700 and you figured out a way to make $1,700 with it because that was the setup that I showed you in that trade with book map, it's well worth your time. So, alltradinggroup.com, sign up for the free trial. You'll be taking a page where we'll tell you, hey, you can get this idea here for 47 bucks. Again, you get some extra days in the room. You're gonna get a spreadsheet that's gonna show you kind of a risk reward. It's one of the things that we build, our whole risk reward principles around. And then for $47, I'm gonna give you a setup. And as traders, I know we all like new setups, right? And that setup is the one that if you can still see the screen here, let me just pull back here just a little bit, I'll pull this back. So on September 8th, this trade right here that we kind of detailed in here, this horizontal line, this tan horizontal line that went for $1,700, that's the setup that I'm including for 47 bucks. So yeah, other than that, Bruce, thanks a lot. I appreciate it. Excellent stuff, Jason. Just, I love the way you control the risk and it's just so important and you do such a good job of it. So if there's no more questions, then I think let's just, we'll wrap it up. I've put the links in there for Jason. If you need to get a hold of Jason, all sorts of different links from website, from the trial and his trade of the day and YouTube and Twitter there, okay? So other than that, we'll catch up with you guys tomorrow. Now Jason's webinar today was at 12 p.m. Eastern time. The rest of the week, they're gonna be at 11, okay? So 11 a.m. Eastern time. I just wanted to remind you guys about that. Other than that, thanks a lot, Jason. Just great stuff. Yeah, my pleasure. And again, thanks for the opportunity to talk to you guys. And again, we certainly appreciate you guys listening and participating here today. Okay, everybody. Take care and we'll catch up tomorrow. Thanks, guys.


Hello. It's been a long time since the Little Red Schoolhouse was an institution of learning, but here it is, a symbol of the way things used to be. It was basic instruction with no frills, it was cheap, and for those times it was fairly effective. Well, we've come a long way since then, and times are changing. But in one way we're moving toward the kind of instruction that might have been done in the Little Red Schoolhouse. Individualized instruction. Because of the small numbers of students and their varying ages, instruction in many cases had to be individualized, especially if the school had only one or two students per class. Later schools became consolidated and students were grouped according to age and taught the same things at the same time, regardless of their aptitudes and learning needs and desires. Today, advances in instructional technology have enabled us to individually teach large numbers of students on a cost-effective basis, tailoring both method and context to individual differences. The instructional systems development concept is learner-oriented, requiring instruction to be centered around what the student needs to know and be able to do. Individualized instruction as we know it today is promoted by the ISD process and takes advantage of the fact that different students learn not only at different rates, but in different ways. During the next few minutes, we will further define individualized instruction and examine some planning considerations in doing so we will show how individualized instruction can be applied to typical Air Force instructional programs. Wait a minute. I've been developing these programs for years. I know there's a great deal written about what individualized instruction is, but it seems to me that moreover it's what it isn't and not what it is. How about telling me? Better enough, individualized instruction means many things to many people, but perhaps a definition by Dr. Robert F. Maeger noted authority on instructional design explains what we mean. He says that an instructional system is individualized when the characteristics of each student play a major part in the selection of objectives, materials, procedures, and time. One does not simply say that a system is or is not individualized, however, for it's not a black or white matter. Rather, one tries to identify the nature and degree of individualization. Of course, the nature and degree of individualization will vary from course to course, depending upon various constraints, some of which we'll discuss later. However, we have learned that through accurate definition of learning objectives based upon real-world requirements, instruction can be designed so that materials, procedures, and time can be sufficiently individualized to meet the needs of most students. You're putting it in good words, but it's still kind of vague to me. How about showing me what it is? Okay. Why don't we visit some Air Force bases and you can see for yourself how and where individualized instruction is being used. Within the Air Training Command, many types of courses are in progress, including aircraft maintenance training. When we revised this course, we used the ISD process. First, we identified the job tasks which required formal training. Then we translated these tasks into instructional objectives. Next, we developed teaching learning activities with the needs of the individual students in mind. For example, we developed a fast-track for the more capable students. In addition, we developed taped slide lessons to individualize subjects such as hydraulics, electrical principles, and landing gear systems. During the entire process, we kept two key questions in mind. What will the graduate be required to do on the job and how can we best accommodate individual student learning differences? In this carol, the student is learning some basic information about aircraft maintenance. When you watch him studying like this, individualized instruction looks easy, but there's more to it than meets the eye. In designing this type of instruction, several considerations must be made. Student factors such as prior experience, prior knowledge of the subject matter, and reading level should be considered. Take reading level, for instance. Properly designed texts can help the student who has a high reading level and would rather read. Audio tapes are helpful to those who tend to learn best by listening. Other students may profit more by a taped slide presentation where instruction may be seen and heard. Other student factors to consider include aptitude, motivation, and rate of learning. Once course planners decide which of these their course can accommodate, they can determine how to individualize the instruction. In other words, decide what management approaches will be used to present the instruction. These approaches include self-pacing, modular scheduling, and multiple tracking. In the biomedical equipment repair course, the instruction is self-paced. Our goal is for each student to progress at the rate which is best for him. This method of training provides a high degree of student motivation and is very effective. It also provides a high degree of individual assistance required by the student to successfully complete each training objective. In self-paced courses, entering students are often pretested to determine if their prior knowledge or experience will allow them to skip certain segments of instruction. Once instruction begins, each student's work is carefully monitored and evaluated to ensure that he is satisfactorily completing the objectives and moving along at an appropriate pace. Sometimes students need to be slowed down or speeded up so that they progress at a rate best suited to their learning abilities. Now wait a minute. You say self-pacing, but the student doesn't set his own pace at all. You do. Not quite. Both the student and the instructor set the pace. There are learning and motivational differences in all students. Some are fast learners, others learn more slowly, but may be just as effective. Some students are self-motivated. Others need external motivation. Through interviews and tests, we can often discover these differences and make appropriate adjustments by using modular scheduling, multiple tracking, self-pacing, and individual assistance. Modular scheduling or construction is the division of a course into small segments of instruction called modules. Each module supports one or more learning objectives and may be self or group-paced. Students are scheduled to receive only the modules they need. Pretesting and counseling will determine what modules they are allowed to bypass. This electronics program consists of a large number of self-paced modules. Here we see a student constructing a parallel circuit. Here a student is operating on a oscilloscope. At this trainer, the student is learning to operate the vacuum tube voltmeter. Since he had previous electronics experience, he was able to skip the parallel circuit module. Another management approach is multiple tracking. In this course, students are grouped homogeneously according to their projected learning rate, as determined through pretesting and counseling. They all complete the same learning activities, but each group progresses as rapidly as its abilities permit. Once management approaches have been selected, the delivery systems can be determined. By delivery systems, we mean the instructional media with which the student interacts. Perhaps the best type of delivery system is the real thing. A classic example of individualized instruction is the instructor pilot and the student pilot in the aircraft flying a mission. However, since aircraft operation is expensive and often impractical, simulation is used as a delivery system. Complex flight simulators allow pilots to rehearse and study many pilot tasks. They learn by repetition, without tying up an aircraft. In undergraduate and one of the advanced navigator training courses, individual station simulators will provide direct observation of each student by an instructor and still allow the degree of isolation desired in this training situation. Each student has an independent capability and may proceed through a mission in his own environment and at his own pace. While the instructor is able to observe and assist the student, insert equipment malfunctions, and assess student performance. Part task trainers are used in courses at Alto's Air Force Base, Oklahoma. In this case, the flight engineer is learning to perform checklist procedures. The use of trainers such as this one reduces the amount of time required and more expensive equipment or in the aircraft. Computer assisted instruction, or CAI, is another sophisticated delivery system which provides a massive information storage and presentation medium. A student sits at a computer terminal and responds to questions put to him by an electronic display. The student also can perform simulation and problem-solving exercises. An advanced CAI system is PLATO-4, seen here. Its potential will allow as many as 2,000 students to interact with 4,000 lessons. By touching the screen, this student selects an answer and receives an appropriate reply. Now let's move to some media commonly found in learning centers. As learning center manager, I have found videotape lessons to be a popular form of individualized instruction. These tape good sets are convenient, long-lasting, and relatively inexpensive to produce. But the important thing is that students learn from them. Multimedia combinations can also be effective. For example, students might get the basics from a text, then reinforce their learning with details from a tape slide presentation in the learning center. A delivery system that has been with us a long time, but is still popular and cost effective, is the instructor tutor. Instructors come in all shapes, sizes, and sexes, and depending on the skill of the individual can often be the most effective delivery system of all. Other types of delivery systems are motion pictures, television lessons, and lectures. All can be effective means of individualizing instruction. No way. You've made some good points, but lectures and movies are not individualized instruction. Well, I can appreciate your confusion, but it's easier to understand if you think of it this way. Group teaching can also be a part of individualized programs. Whenever two or more students are ready to study the same task in a similar way, such as through lecture or motion picture presentation or discussion, it is appropriate and cost effective for them to receive instruction as a group. Well, I think I know what you mean by individualized instruction. It looks pretty good, but there must be a catch. If it as good as you make it sound, why are all courses totally individualized? Well, there are times when the most efficient instruction is done by an instructor, teaching large groups of students. Since there are often constraints which limit the use of individualized instruction. For example, we must consider the amount of lead time available and whether or not the course content is constantly changing. If it is, will the audio-visual materials programmed instructional packages and so forth require excessive revision? Also, will additional equipment and facilities be required? If so, what will it cost? Will additional personnel be needed to operate an individualized program? What is the student load? Does it justify added expense? Do all of your course objectives lend themselves to individualizing? For example, some course objectives such as those involving leadership, management or human relations require group interaction. In short, will individualized instruction be cost effective for a particular course? Can it be shown that operating costs will be less in the long run or that instruction will be more effective and thus justify the added expense? In terms of cost effectiveness, when you're planning an individualized program and information is lacking, it may be advisable to start small. Listen to the course carefully before rushing into an all individualized learning system. Listen to suggestions from your students. Their point of view can be vital in the success of your program. One means of getting student input is through survey tests, which are administered to students before they enter a particular course. The pre-test should include items from course examinations as well as items surveying related abilities required in the attainment of course objectives. The tests can be used to determine how much students already know about the course content and what combinations of group and individualized instruction may be used. For example, if it's found that some of the students are proficient in some of the course objectives, it's likely that modular scheduling or multiple tracking would be effective. Remember that the cost and difficulty of preparing for, implementing and managing an individualized instructional system may be substantial. For practical purposes, therefore, instruction should be individualized only when there is reasonable assurance that the gains from doing so will outweigh the cost and difficulty. In Air Force courses that have been individualized, the results have been very favorable. Our data from courses using multiple tracking, self-pacing, and modular scheduling show that graduates perform on the job just as well or better than previous graduates. Additionally, they usually complete their instruction in fewer academic hours. For example, courses in medical services, aircraft maintenance, transportation, and ISD were able to decrease their course length by an average of approximately 20%. Here are two examples of the benefits to be derived from individualized instruction. When I went through Tech Screw, my instruction was self-paced, and I actually worked on equipment like this X-ray unit. I learned how to adjust and repair it at a pace that allowed me to make sure I got it right. As a result, I feel more confident in my job. When engine start, your crew chief has a far better view of the proceedings than you do, so if he should signal for an engine cutoff, do so immediately. If on the initial takeoff or subsequent touch and go, you elect to abort, your immediate action should be throttle's idle. I'm studying in-flight emergency procedures. With this sound slide program, I'm able to go over the material till I know the procedure thoroughly. I feel much more confident being able to review these steps till I'm totally familiar with the procedure. Individualized instruction, then, results from careful planning and decision-making. Valid constraints, such as cost and course characteristics, should be considered. But course designers, training managers, and instructors must continue to seek better ways to provide efficient, student-centered instruction. Both current and future needs must be considered when identifying and designing facilities, equipment, and instructional procedures. You should ask yourself what management approaches could be used in your course, modular scheduling, self-pacing, multiple tracking. Also, what delivery systems or media will be most effective? Will computer-assisted instruction and sophisticated simulator techniques be useful? Or can the course be made more cost-effective by using locally produced instructional materials? It boils down to a balance between individual learning needs and course constraints. What you mean is that you can make the environment for teaching and learning efficient and cost-effective, while allowing for individual student differences, right? I couldn't have said it better myself. Shall we?