There is the chat. There, you can see the chat. Oh, you found it? Got it. Okay. Yeah, so if you're ready, I'll go ahead and start the recording and you can get started. All right, I'm starting it. Good morning, good books here for 2020. So thanks so much for having me, David. And good morning, everyone. I'm here in New York. It's a beautiful day cold, but I'm gonna talk today about how you can make money and earn a living at trading stocks. Specifically day trading stocks. And specifically, I'm gonna talk about 20,000 a month, but you can make way more than this. Obviously, it depends on how much you risk per trade. So every trade I take has a stop. That's a day trade. And if I do an option trade, I have a set risk.  So whatever risk I put on, I let every trade play out, okay? So know that. And we're gonna talk about some options trades today and we're gonna talk about some day trades as well. One thing I wanna say, excuse me, before I continue the lecture today is that today's trade of the day, which I didn't have time to stick in the webinar, was Boeing, okay? We shorted Boeing today and I actually called Putz and Boeing yesterday and the stock gap down today and it had a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful move. So Boeing still looks lower to me. I thought Boeing was lower in December of 2019 and I was right and that stock is collapsing, okay? So there's a little stock tip of the day. Boeing is a nice short, okay? So let's get started here. So the question is, can you make real money in the market? 20,000 a month, 20,000 a trade. Some people aren't even making 20,000 a year, which they'd love to be making because some people are losing in the market. The answer is yes, you can make real money in the market, but you have to have a strategy and you have to have a specific thing that you're looking for and not only that, you can't deviate from it. You can't, you have to hold the conviction. I was talking about this in the trading room this morning. If you have a bias, you hold it, you hold the conviction. Boeing is a good example. I held the conviction in that, knew it was lower, okay? Sometimes I'm early when I do my trades, I'd rather be early than late. So long story short is, you can make real money in this market. The only thing that's stopping you is you. As you make money over time, even if it's 100, 200 hours a day though, your confidence fills. And as you do that, you also get better and better and better in the strategy. I find that a lot of people don't have a set strategy that they have confidence in. And a lot of people also change your mind really nearly about what they're doing all the time. But you can make real money in the market. You have to be serious about doing it. And if you're doing it consistently, that's where you're gonna see the box. That's where you're gonna make the money. There are billions and billions and billions of dollars in the market. Can we always hear about people making fortunes in the market? How do they do it? If they're not one-shot wonders, okay? They have a strategy that they consistently follow that works that they don't deviate from. Well, it's great to have one big train sometimes that falls out of the sky. For me personally, it's focusing on the system and replicating it. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. And every once in a while, then a big one just falls in your lap, okay? But it's over the course of time, over the course of years, okay, that you can make a lot of money. So the key to day training stocks successfully really is to trade a system that is reliable. And not only that, that makes sense. So I'm looking for institutional buying and institutional selling. And that's what you're saying in Boeing today. You're seeing institutional selling. I happen to see it a long time ago, okay? But it's institutional selling. If you can learn how to spot institutional buying and selling, guess what? You can make money in the market as an individual, as a trader with a small account or a medium account or a big account, okay? Doesn't matter. And I can see everyone's questions. If you have questions as we go along here, just let me know. But success or failure of you, your personal trading journey has a lot to do with the quality of your system. Because no matter how good your money management is, you will fail and lose if you do not have a good system. If you go long a stock that is falling, you're going to lose. It doesn't matter how good your money management is and vice versa. For another words, if you were a long Boeing today, you would be down. You would be losing. You wouldn't want to be in long that stock today, okay? So the quality of your system has a lot to do with your success or failure. And sometimes, and I've talked to a lot of people since I've owned the Stock Switch for the last eight years, people blame themselves and their own lack of money management for their own losses or failure. While it's true you do need to have money management, that's just like trading 101. You still aren't going to make it or make money if you don't have a good system.  If you've been beating yourself up about your losses, maybe it really isn't you. Maybe it has nothing to do at all with you. It has to do with the system that you're using. Or if you don't even have one, that would be problem number one, okay? So what kind of system makes sense? Again, to me, it's looking at the institutional moves. It's control, okay? To me, what makes sense is a system that looks for who's in control. It's the consistency is going for the control side of it. For me, I tell that in the gaps. I look at gaps, okay? And you need a system that offers the consistency so that you can trade every week, every month, every year, no matter if the market is bullish or bearish. Right now the market is bullish. We're still in an uptrend. It remains to be seen if we will break that trend or not this year, 2020. I don't know, okay? I am watching it. But I look for gaps. And I'm gonna go over in a chart here what a gap is in a minute if you don't know, but very quickly I'll tell you. A gap is a difference between the close and the open. Gaps tell you where the big money, where the institutional money is going to go. And then you look and you trade it once you read it and see it for consistent profits. And the main reason why traders really, I feel are all over the place for the results is that they lack this consistency in a strategy. You cannot go long and short the same stock in one day and say, well, I have conviction. That makes no sense. Conviction is conviction. Either the stock is lower or it's higher. You can't believe it's both, okay?  And that's what obviously everyone's goal should be is profit, money, being successful, okay? But there's only ever one person, one control in any given charge at any given day. It's either the bulls or the bears, okay? And you have to find the control, spot the control and go with the control. So for me, I look at the gap and I get up in the morning and I rate the gap and that's how I determine the control. My system is called the golden gap system. It's a rating system. It's a 26 point checklist that tells me who is in control. So I saw very early on who was in control of Boeing. It was the bears. Maybe certain days you may have thought that the bulls were in control, but they weren't, the bears were really in control, okay? And today I think it's very easy for people to see that point at the chart but I saw it before the sell-off today. Well, it's had other sell-off days though. Your strategy needs a big account. Is that right? No, I didn't say that. When did I say that? You don't need a big account. You can risk $100 per trade and trade my system. Your account size should go with your risk. If you have $5,000 in a proprietary day trading account, you can't risk $5,000 in one trade. That would be crazy. You should risk about 200, 250 per trade, okay? So your risk has to do with the size of your account. You do not need a big account to trade my system and in fact, if you do options, you don't even need a margin account to trade my systems. You could have a regular cash account but again, your risk per trade has to do with how much cash you have in the account. If you have an options account with two grand, you can trade my system. But you can't risk $2,000, which is your entire account in one trade, okay, Alan? But I never said you need a big account. And you don't even need a big account to make 20 grand a month. Your average risk per trade, if you wanna earn 20 grand a month, would probably should be around 1,000, 1,500 per trade. Per trade, okay? Do you understand what I mean when I say that? That means if the trade stops out, how much would you lose if you risk 1,500, $1,500? But you don't need a big account. I'm not sure what you mean by big but I'm guessing 50 grand minimum. But no, you do not need that. Now, if you're talking about retail firms and margin, if you wanna open up an account at a retail brokerage firm, you need 25,000 minimum and your margin is four to one. If you open up a profit account, you can open up a profit account with as little as $2,500 and your margin will be 10 to one. And you'll have 25,000 in margin to short stocks or buy stocks is a danger. But again, that's not a big account to me. There is no such thing as a hybrid bear in my mind, in my stock swash world. I think like someone that would be managing a fund. Actually, I've done that with these calls I've made this year so expertly. This has been a big start to the year for 2020. I'm really in the zone right now of looking at things as if I was managing a lot of money and as if I was managing money as a fund. Which if I have time, I'll talk about that at the end in reference to the market. But you don't see hedge funds going long and shorting a stock the same day. No, you don't. So in my mind, that type of thing doesn't exist. Theoretically, could you go long into a rally on short covering and Boeing today and make some money? Yes, would you do that with 100,000 shares? No, so why would you do it with 1,000? That's dumb. If the momentum is to the downside in Boeing, then you're looking for a short setup when it sets up. That's what you should be doing.   And ultimately, you're just paying commissions. If you're out of places, it'll charge us commissions and you're just racking up losses. You'll never get the big move. You'll never get the momentum. The momentum in Boeing today, we shorted it around 274. The stock dropped down to 268. That's momentum, a $6 move. You think my training, if he is expensive, it's not. Allen's already on to my cost of my class. It's $69.99, it's $7,000. If you could learn something that's gonna teach you how to trade for the rest of your life, to be honest with you, Allen, it's cheap. So, and the cost of my class has been following me, has increased every year and there's a reason for that. People are making a lot of money with me. So, I have to disagree with you about that. And someday I won't teach the class. So, I would take advantage of it when you can, while you can. The idea of me running the hedge fund and starting a hedge fund is not out of the woods. I just wanna let you know that. Although I love, love what I do. I absolutely, absolutely love what I do. When I call stocks like Boeing and the market, the way that I've been calling it too, I say to myself, gosh, I should be making billions. So, that's pretty much where I'm at with it. And as far as you personally, if you are committed to trading, you will pay the cost of my class. If you're not committed, you won't. And if you don't have the money, then my suggestion to you is same. A lot of people do cheap class, cheap class, cheap class, cheap class, and they lose money in the market over the cost of years. And I'm talking about people just in general, not just my class, other classes. You get what you pay for, that's what I say. And you have to be invested in this and committed to do it if you wanna do it. When people come to me and they pay the money for my class, they're committed to learning it.  My time is very valuable. I wanna take my time, my time is valuable. I'm spending my time with you here today. I'm answering your questions, take advantage of it. Ask me questions that you wanna know or charts that you want me to know what I think about. Don't lose this time with me. My knowledge and skill set is valuable and it's worth something. You're lucky that you're here with me today.  Okay, getting back to what I'm saying. Let's talk about having a niche. So for me, the niche is the gap. So gaps are created with large institutional money. That's what makes the gap. It creates it, it fuels it like a fire. Like you're burning a fire, okay? The professional gaps that happen and play in and stocks are formed by one thing and one thing only, large institutional money. Therefore you need a way that will help you pick the direction to play the gap and then confirm that the large money will flow with it. By having a formula to rate and qualify the gap, you get confirmation and conviction that the large institutional money is on your side. When you have institutional money on your side, you don't have to think that hard. You don't have to do anything. You don't even need to take 5,000 shares or something. Like I said, you could have taken a thousand shares of Boeing today and made six grand in the call I gave.   You have to spot it. You have to get it at the right time, which is what I focus on in the morning and then you play it and then you act and you're ready, okay? And I prep in the morning, the pre-market and also in the post-market. To be honest with you, I've been looking at the market at night, late, late at night and also sending out some videos to my subscribers in the last week, ever since Monday and week ago through last night, I've been watching the market late that's been telling me a lot about what's gonna happen, what's coming up, what's gonna happen the next day and what is coming up like I'm talking about today, tomorrow and next week. I can see that, I can tell that because we're in a volatile period right now. Don't think that it hasn't ended. It is just begun. So gaps are an event and they create a sense of urgency, like panic, like we saw the market sell off last week. When people are down, they panic and they sell. That's what created the solve that we had Thursday last week, for example and then the gap down Friday morning. And so an action is forced by participants of the stock and this is why gap trading is incredibly powerful.  So if you don't though, you have to trade with that money because that's the money that moves stocks, that's the money that moves the market. So predicting events beforehand and in the moment for profit is key. So here's Boeing. So let's just go over this right in here. So anyways, I knew this was gonna fall today. So I called puts in this yesterday but again, I called a lot of puts in this and in the last year we shorted this many, many times. But anyways, long story short, this was a nice short today. Stop close here last night, boom. Gap down here this morning, fell.  That's the best way that I can describe it. It did die, it is dying, it's the death could continue. And this I felt like this back in December 2019 in here even before the coronavirus hit everybody. And then we did sell off here. This is into the Christmas holiday. Oh no, this was January. This was December, I thought we were lower. Then we sold off into here in the January. Then we rallied and again, we didn't go long this ever in here and then we dropped off here. This is late February and then we fell and this was with the market and everything else. Now I use hot com, yes. I've been with them for a million years Alan. Anyways, let's talk about a short squeeze. What is a short squeeze? A situation in which a heavily shorted stock or commodity moves sharply higher, forcing more short sellers to close out their short positions and then adding to the upward pressure on the stock. A short squeeze implies that short sellers are being squeezed out of their short positions, usually at a loss, okay? A short squeeze is generally triggered by positive development that suggests that stock may be embarking on a turnaround. Although the turnaround in the stock's fortunes may only prove to be temporary, few short sellers can afford to risk runaway losses in their short positions and may prefer to close them out even if it means taking a substantial loss. So you saw this at various different times with the market in the last couple of months. Again, this is something else that I'd like to look at too but I gotta be honest with you, as far as going long and short, which I can do, I prefer to short. I prefer to short more than anything else, okay? Like this Boeing chart right here. I love shorting. Now, can you guess why? Because selling happens fast, selling happens quick. And if someone sent you, would you rather make money fast or would you rather make money in a couple of days, you'd say, no, I'd rather make money right now today. I'd rather make money today by four o'clock. I'd rather make money in 30 minutes rather than wait until Friday. That's what you would say, anybody would.  Now again, I do go long. I'm very, very picky about my longs but I do prefer to short, whether it's for options trains, which I would call puts, or whether it's for day trains, which we just short like the Boeing, okay? So anyways, you have to look what's happening in the daily chart. I look at the daily chart and that's how I determine the direction of the gap. And I look at it and I say, okay, how is this setting up? Where is the big money going here? And a lot of people buy support and short resistance as a strategy. While sometimes that works, that does not work consistently as a way to make money in the market, okay? If it were that easy, everyone would always buy the 200 per moving average or the 50 per moving average in any chart that was in an uptrend, okay? It's not that easy. It's not that simple to see it, okay? It's the gap. It's always the gap. Is there a gap every day? For the most part, we're getting into the end of first quarter earning season now. The earnings are sporadic. Costco is tonight. I'll be watching that. I don't know what it does. I'm not calling any trades in it till I see what it does. It's probably going to gap. I don't know if I'm gonna play it. I don't know which way it's gonna gap. I haven't rated it. I can't, the stock didn't report, but it will tonight at five o'clock. But anyways, in non-earning season in between, there are gonna be some days once earning season stops before the second quarter, then there are times where we may have days where there are no gaps meet my criteria. And I will look more for longs and shorts on those days when we're in between the periods. During first quarter, second quarter, third quarter, fourth quarter earnings was four earnings seasons a year. There's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of stocks that are gapping. So it's very easy to find things to do or a lot of things to do. For me personally though, earning season does have the best moves and the biggest moves, so we focus on those. But I will do things in non-earning season. I will do non-earning scaps. And if there's nothing on a Monday, which is typically the slowest day in the market, that's okay. I mean, if there's nothing one day, then that's not the end of the world. Your idea is to trade quality, not just to trade for the sake of trading. What about the spy? My bias on the market is that we're gonna sell off. That's my bias on the market. I didn't do any day trades in the market today, but my bias on the market here is that we're gonna have a drop coming up, if you wanna know. If we have time, I'll talk about that at the end here. Just remind me. Anyways, let's make good choices when we trade. You work hard for your money, so you want quality trades. This is the exact point of what I was talking about about not going long and sure of the same stock. And so having good choices, part of it is for me the prep work in the morning, okay? I get up, I get ready in the morning, and I figure out what I'm gonna do, and that's that. Someone's saying I'm very young. I, thank you. I don't know what to say to that. I've still been doing this for 12 years, so it's a long time to do one thing. Anyways, the system I have tells you how, what, and when. How do you make money in the market? You trade a strategy and system that's profitable. For me, it's golden gaps. It's a highly profitable strategy because they focus on large momentum moves to trade. What stocks should you trade? For me, it's stocks that gap. They have to rate 20 points or more per my 26-point system, so they don't have to get a perfect score. 20 is the cutoff. 17, 18, 19 is the 50-50 chance of losing or failing or working. So I tend to only do them 20 or more. And anything under 17, you shouldn't do. I always trade the gap in the direction of the gap. So when do you trade them? Early in the morning, into the open, when they set up and trigger in the first 30 minutes of the day. So that's what I'm looking for the setups. If I don't get a setup in the first 30 minutes and I don't do anything, okay? But anyways, this kind of trading is highly, highly lucrative. Can it be duplicated over and over? The answer is yes, all right? And so you're looking for it. Here was Google. We're gonna go over a couple gaps in Google. What is a gap? Again, I was talking about this earlier. The gap is a difference between the close and the open. This is Google. This is a daily chart. This is back in the middle of February. Stock closed here, 1480, gap down. Open down here, run 1420. Stock closed here, gap down. This was last week, okay? When we started out the week, I think it was. Then it gapped up. Closed here, gap up, opened at a higher price. So closed here, opened at a higher price, fell. Then it closed here. Then it gapped up at a higher price. Rallied, dropped, fell. Closed, neutral. Then it closed here, then it gapped down. This was Thursday last week. Then it sold off, okay? Then it closed here. This is Thursday. Then it gapped down on Friday morning. Then it rallied all the way up. And this was Friday into the close of the weekend. Then it closed here. Then it opened at a higher price on Monday. Then we rallied. Again, this is Google. Then it closed here. Then we gapped up. This is Tuesday, fell hard on Tuesday. Couldn't hold the gap up Tuesday. Closed here, gapped up Wednesday, rallied. Then we were selling off. I was telling you, I look at stuff at night. We were selling off really hard last night, like way late past six o'clock. And then we gapped down this morning, okay? And I clipped this like at 10, 15. So anyways, long story short, I just went over all the gaps that happened here in Google. There were gap ups, there were gap downs, okay? So let's talk about some options trades that I called. Sometimes, I'm very good at reading market direction. I will call a wave of trades on the same day. Again, someone was asking about the size of your account.  Then you do two. You do what you can afford, okay? Someone's talking to asking me about investing. My class is $69.99, it's seven grand. You have to pay for the class in a credit card. As far as opening up an account, you can open up an options account and you can trade my system of using options. We're gonna go over this Amazon option here or you can day trade it. You can day trade options or you can do equity trades on margin. You have to call a broker to set up an account. I'm not a broker, I would contact your broker to find out how much money you need to set up a margin account if you wanna do options or if you wanna day trade, okay? But your risk per trade has to do with your cash, not your margin. So for example, say someone gives you $100,000 a margin at a prop place or retail place. Your risk per trade still has to do with the cash that you're risking, okay? Does this make sense? All right, let's get back into the ones that I called here from last Thursday. So I called the Amazon puts because I saw the market was going to fall, okay? Thursday into Friday. So I called the Amazon puts, this was kind of late in the day, 145. I called the 1925s and this fell and gapped down Friday morning. These were expensive. One of these cost 5,000 in Amazon, okay? Two contracts cost 10,000. It ran well over 100. 110 and the profit was $12,000. Very nice trade. On options trades, I'm looking for anywhere from 50 to 100% return on investment. In this case here, this was more than that, why? Because I called the trade late in the day and then it just gapped down. So the stock gapped down through the number. So in this case here, you would take it on a Thursday, hold it overnight into Friday morning, you get up in the morning and you're up. I love those trades. Those are great, great trades, okay? For a $5,000 account, can you still make 20,000 monthly? Well, let's see, Alan, I answered that question earlier. In order to make 20 grand, you're gonna have to risk approximately $1,000 per trade. So do I think you should risk $1,000 per trade, cash risk if your account has $5,000 in it? No, you'd be risking 25% of your account in one trade. So the answer or 20% of your account, I'm sorry, in one trade. So the answer is no, you cannot make $20,000 a month with five grand. What would be a normal risk? Like I said, $250, okay? Well, can you eventually make 20,000 a month and grow that $5,000 account up to 10,000? The 10,000 account up to 20,000? A 20,000 account up to 40,000, yes. If you don't take too much risk, like risking 20% of your account in one trade. Is that understandable? If you have a sad amount of cash, you have to make that money work, okay? And you must figure it, if I call 10 trades, eight of 10 trades are gonna work and two of 10 trades I call are gonna fail. So you need to account for that, which is the exact reason why I said you wouldn't risk all of your money in one trade. These are very common sense things, very, very common sense things, okay? I just said that Alan, it's about an 80% win ratio. Okay, let's talk about Boeing. This was last week and actually you still could have been in this trade. I thought it made sense to get out of this because of the gap down here from Thursday to Friday. But if you held the Boeing puts that I called last Thursday through today, Boeing went to 268 and some change this morning. You could have taken this trade last Thursday at 11 30 Eastern time. I thought it was a good exit on Friday. You could have got out of it and sold it for 19, probably was $15,600, 217% return investment, but the stock today went to 268 at the low. So you could have taken the trade last Thursday and held it for a week. Now I typically like to take something and get the roll over and take it right away in 24 to 48 hours if it's going. But this right here is a good example, one that continued. You could have taken half of it out on Friday and you could have held part of it for the week. But I call so many trades that when you're up, especially something like this, we're up over 200%, I really think it's important to book the money. Okay, this was a good one here. I called the Tesla puts at 10 o'clock last Thursday. I called the 700 puts. Again, this was out to this Friday, but again, beautiful move, cost of these. Tesla really, really, really, really moves for those of you that have ever played this. Stock was cost 20 bucks for one put. Three, risk was 8,400, sold at 92. This is a big move. This might have even gone over 100 that day. I don't remember. But anyways, 19,200 again, returning investment, 229%. This is taking it Thursday, getting out on Friday, taking it Thursday, getting out on Friday in the morning. Okay? So these are options trades. And the reason it makes sense to do these stocks I'm talking about, Tesla, Boeing, Amazon as options is because Tesla's $700 or some dollars a share. Because these are expensive stocks to trade as equity trades. Now Microsoft, you could have done either way as an equity trade last week, or you could have done it as a put. I called the puts in this, the 162.50 puts. I called this in the pre-market Thursday morning when I saw the market would collapse. And Microsoft did as well. This didn't collapse as much as some of those previous ones, but it was still a nice treat around. 138% return investment, cost was four bucks. One contract would have cost you 400. Is that something you can take with a $5,000 account? Alan, yes. And guess how much you would have made? You could have sold in for 9.50. So you would have made what? 550 bucks, risking 400. Taking a trade on a Thursday and exiting on Friday. What's wrong with that? Nothing. Then all of a sudden, your $5,000 account is 55.50. Okay? And that's how you grow a small account. Not by taking extreme risk.  You chunk it out. But you should do that with a big account too. With a big account, you should chunk it out. Apple was a good one. Apple, I called again, 8.14 in the morning in the pre-market. I rated the gap in Apple last Thursday and saw the market would drop and had 100% conviction that everything would drop with the market, which it did. Apple puts, I called the 270s. Again, they were out until this week, but it was last Thursday. They cost four bucks. You could have sold them for 16, huge trade. Big move in Apple, a 300% return investment. Really, really nice run. Drop down on that. Again, you have to wait until the open to take these trades, but I see them very early in the morning. Okay? So, why is my system really reliable and consistent? Because of the power of money. Because power of money in the market and in stocks is created by institutions. They set the tone for stocks move on the day. And for the trend overall, long-term trend, okay? Daily trend, long-term trend.  Do you know what I'm saying? If you have to think like you have a lot of money. You can't think like you don't, okay? Make choices that are quality, quality choices. Quality choices. I find for some reason it's reverse, reverse. You would think that if someone didn't have a lot of money to be extra careful. I find that in teaching people, it's a reverse. People that have a little bit of money are not careful. That makes no sense to me. Again, use common sense when you trade. Power of money sets the trend, makes the trend and changes the trend in charts. If you're not trading in the side of power of money in the market, you're gonna have a hard time seeing lasting and consistent profits and success in your trading. I have a friend. I'm not gonna say what stock it is. He's long a stock. Stock's in a downtrend. He's in it overnight. He's in it as a swing trade. He's in it on margin. And I'm like, and he's up in it today. I said, get out. And he's like, no, it's going to boot, to boot, to boot, to boot. I said, whatever, I'm gonna be right. He shouldn't be in the trade. He is up in the trade. He should take his money and run. He's in the wrong direction overall, but because he's up, he thinks it's gonna keep going forever because it's in a downtrend and it's a long way to go up if it wants to go up. But the fact is that the control is not on the side of the bulls. It controls on the side of the bears. So long story short, many people trade on the wrong side of stuff and you can make money trading on the wrong side of stuff, but not consistently. It's the consistency that's gonna keep you in the game number one. Keep your cash, grow your cash, and enable you to do this for a living if you want to and take larger risk, okay? That's the only way you're gonna get anywhere with it. And you'll be very, very discouraged if you lose over the course of months and weeks and years. And I've run into a lot of those people. I get it, but they're doing the wrong things. So I can't feel sorry for people when they do the wrong things all the time. So you have to learn how to read and trade on the side of institutional money. Institutional money is in charge, in the market, and stocks at all time. And even if you think it's not, it is. Even if you think it's not, it is. Sometimes something can go the opposite direction of something. There were days that bowing rally, but the control had never flipped. You wanna win trains, da, da, da, da, da, da. What makes me different from others? I only trade gaps. Many people that trade gaps don't trade them the way that I do because I created my own system and don't know how to trade gaps. So that makes me different. I have a niche. I'm sure there are other people that trade this market that find power money. I'm sure that there are. I never said that I was the only person that knew how to read power money, Alan. There are people out there that are making money in the market. You may know some of them. You may know none of them. I don't know. But as far as on a practical level, one of the reasons I'm successful, on a practical, practical level, I read gaps and that directs me in a rating system that I personally created over the course of three years, 12 years ago. And that tells me how to read the market, which is why I read the market so accurately, and stocks. So on a practical level, I have a system that you can come and learn from me that I've been doing for a long time. So I'm successful because on a practical level, I have a system that you can learn from me. That's on a practical level. On a totally, totally non-practical level, I have a gift to read charts. I see things before a lot of other people do. Sometimes I cannot explain them. I do the best I can to explain them. I think the trades I've called this year from January through February in Tesla, which made everyone's year that took those trades. The Tesla trades I call this year made every single person's year on my options newsletter that did the trades. I have a gift and it's been developed over time because I do nothing but this. That is on a non-practical level and that's not something that I can convey to you. So I have a skill set. Some people are good at playing an instrument. I'm good at reading price action, buying and selling. So it's a skill and that's on a non-practical level and that I can impart to you. But on a practical level, you can take my class and learn it and join my group and get my calls and benefit from learning the practical and impractical things of being around me. And I think the more that people train with me, they, their confidence grows as they make money and then they start to see things as well. The nuances that are in specific charts. Okay, like Boeing for example, I knew that was still lower even when it had the rally earlier in the year. Okay? And that will help you stay in the right side of trades when you gain confidence because sometimes you may take a trade and you may be down in the trade before it goes profitable in your direction. What you don't wanna do is kill it, flip it around because then inevitably it will go in the direction that I originally said. So that's why I'm talking about don't flip things. You have conviction in one direction or another. And that's again, something that you can learn over time which you gain through confidence. And there's nothing like growing your account whether it's by $200 a day or $500 a day or $1,000 a day, your confidence grows as you're making money. It's very hard to grow your confidence when you're losing. In fact, when you're losing money, the worst thing about losing money besides the money that you lose when you take trades and lose is that your confidence goes straight down. Like your confidence, like as if you were jumped right out of the building out of my window, you'd hit the pavement. That's what happens to people's confidence when they lose. No, the tuition is one time for my class, you learn it. You wanna join the trading room, there's a monthly fee or an annual fee or the newsletter is an annual fee, but you learn the system in one class. Getting back to what I was saying here, Alan's the only one asking questions. This business is a day trader, you cannot lose a lot. It sounds like common sense, but the fact is you can't, you can't because eventually you're gonna run out of money if you keep losing. So you have to win more than you lose. You gotta win more than you lose. The amount that you win and then the number of times. The number of times is really, really important. What do I mean a high win ratio? That's the only way to consistently make profits. And again, this helps your confidence too. So you have to win more times and you lose and that means you have to be right a lot. You have to be right a lot, all right? And again, this is something that people struggle with when they train and you can't question it, all right? If you know what something will do in a stock before it does it, you can make money and you can make a lot of money. And that's how you can replicate it, okay? Like I knew Tesla was gonna have a move that was very bullish before the move happened and we were in it very, very, very, very early this year, okay? So again, I tend to see things early. That's better than seeing it late. So sometimes I'll call a trade, we'll be down in it until it goes and then it ends up being a huge trade. So I always tell people, don't kill them. You put the stop in if you're in the day train or you take the risk for the option and you just, you gotta let that suffer play out because sometimes I see things very, very early. That's just me, okay? But it works. So again, it's better to be early than to be late because sometimes you don't know something. When I, as soon as I see it, I wanna do it because it could happen like that. You know what I'm saying? So you gotta get in it. Anyways, the Golden Gap Rating System is a 26 point checklist and measures gaps of rating them in the daily chart to find stocks to trade that number one, have a high probability of directional bias for the entire day, preferably a big move on the day, again, preferably. Early confirmation of the bias and the move between 9, 30 and 10 a.m. Eastern time which we got today in Boeing and precise entries with follow-through and a good risk to reward and a good target potential which obviously Boeing had too. Let me see here. Someone's asked me about the thought process. I'll pull up some charts if we have time here at the end but as far as my point system, I wouldn't go through that here today. That's the meat potatoes of the class. You'd learn in the class which is 14 hours. But I'll pull up something here if we have time today and just look at something. I'll look at the market. I wanna look at the market here when we're done today and I'm gonna try to get through this. But with this zoom, I can't flip back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.  I think we're gonna have time because it's only 11.40. Doop-a-doop-a-do. Okay, we were talking about making money trading, being consistent. We talked about that. The reigning system looks at 26 points. Talked about that. And again, I'm choosing the direction. I do it all in the pre-market. I never skip it. As long as I've been doing this, I don't skip it. I always sit down every morning or rate what I do. I get up super duper early. I'd say you gotta give yourself at least an hour but as soon as I get out of bed every single morning, the first place I go is my computer to look at the market. And I say, okay, what's going on today? What are we doing today? And that's what I do. And you just get in a routine about it. And again, I'm in New York, I'm in Manhattan. So I'm in the same Eastern time zone as the market but you can make it work no matter where you live. You can trade from anywhere in the world, okay? But you gotta make the time zone work for you because we wanna be in stuff in the morning. And the pourings tell you where the money is flowing and it matters because that's how you know whether to take something long or short. So what do you need to make trading work? Number one, you need a strategy. For me, it's gaps. Take a look here at this BYND. This was earnings, stop close to your gap down, open rally, boom, you shorted it. This was last week on Friday, yeah, it was Friday, the 28th. Entering this was 90, 10, short, 1200 shares, stopping this wasn't small, 92, 10, this was an equity trade, risk was 26, 40, exit 85, 28, again, momentum. You see this? Boom, boom, it was almost a $5 move, 1200 shares, profit 5784, beautiful move. Beautiful move to the downside. Market gap down and rally, Friday remember, a BYND was a short fell. We got the move, it was a fast short and it was a great trade into a Friday. So my strategy told me, what are we gonna do today? And I saw the BYND, it had earnings. I rated the gap, the gap rated that it was going to continue lower and fall, fell in the gap. And I said, this is gonna keep going and it did, boom, and we shorted it. Now, this was another trade that I had called last week, another Apple 275s. Again, you can do these as options if you have a cash account and not margin or you can do them as day trades if you want to just short them. But anyways, cost of the Apple 275s was five bucks, 15 contracts was a $7,500 risk, sold at 16, profit 16.5. Do you have to have the money to do this? Yes, if you do, can you do it? The answer is yes. But if you had one contract, you would have risked $500 and guess what? You would have had still a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful trade. One contract would have cost you $500 and you still would have made over 1,000 bucks. Nice trade, okay? 220% return on investment. So you don't have to risk a big amount but if you can afford to, then you can because obviously you make more and over time as you grow your account then you can risk more. And I also tell people to look every quarter. So we're getting into the end of the first quarter. Some people are doing really, really, really well. I said wait until the second quarter. Wait until the next quarter to increase your risk. Wait until earnings season begins for second quarter. I also called the 280 puts again. This was at 812 in the morning, Thursday. They cost more because this was closer to strike seven. This was out till Friday, this Friday too. But again, this gap down Friday morning fell, sold it for 20, 13,000 profit, 186% return on investment. This is the number that you wanna look at because again, one contract was $700 but you still could have sold it for 20. Okay, so you could have made 1,300 bucks on one contract. That's a nice trade. And here I called a couple apples called the 282.50s. Sometimes I do that, like I'll call a couple and then you could take it out, take it out or I'll call it boom, boom, boom or if I see it's gonna fall into the strike, I'll call them in a row. This costs eight, sold at 24, 16 grand, 200% return on investment, nice trade. Again, called them all Thursday morning. Then I called this buy 300 puts. This was a really nice trade. Costs was five, sold at 17, 18 grand, 240% return on investment. I think it's okay to risk more on the options or the overnights. That's me personally. I think it's okay to do that because you can get really big moves and stuff overnight and then also you have the protection which your only risk is the risk in the trade. 650 was the cost of the Boeing 290s I called. Again, early in the morning, Thursday morning, gap down, fell. Again, the fact that I still could have been in this, I don't even know what these were today. This is 290s, but again, the stock went 22 points through this, which it just collapsed. I mean, it went farther than it had even last Friday but again, this was a great trade from Thursday to Friday, 238% return on investment. And I called the Q's to 10. These were all Thursday to Friday. Like again, I saw the market was gonna fall on Thursday. I called trade, trade, trade, put short, short, short. So it's again, it's as many trades as you wanna do is as much risk as you wanna put on. Cost of these was five, sold at 12.75, 11,250. 150% return investment. I call the diamonds, which is the ETF for the Dow. Again, these weren't cheap, but they rock and roll. 675, sold at 17. Again, on the gap down that occurred in Friday morning, but you take it in the morning on the Thursday. This was the 27th. And I also called the 295 Boeing's, but again, Friday was a great exit. But these were nine, sold at 26. Again, it's collapsed, collapsed almost 30 points through that number there. Tomorrow was the expiration date. Return of investment, 189. The 297 50s I called as well. These were all Thursday Boeing's. I call them boom, boom, boom. Cost was 10, sold at 24, 11,200. Return of investment, 140%. Again, this is one day and the 300 strike, one, two. Again, this went 32 points through it actually since today. Cost was 11, risk, 7,700, sold at 30. I should look up what this was today. Profit, 13,300. Return of investment, 173%. Again, I like the fast trades, but you can hone some of these if you want to. Now let me just see if there's any other questions. Sometimes it depends if I have too much going on, if I have a TV spot, sometimes I'm in cheddar on the open, sometimes I'm on radio, if I put an order out, but I might have to adjust it anyway. So even if I put an order out that I wanna get filled into the open because you don't get filled until after the open, then I might have to adjust it anyways if I'm on radio or something else. If I'm just running the room regular, I usually estimate where I want it and then move them or I just wait and take them as far as orders go. It depends what's going on with my schedule. How much does the class cost? It's $6,999. Would they have to do the class? They'd have to do the class before they join the live room. However, you don't have to do the class if you want to do options. You can sign up for the options newsletter separately. So that is up to you. You can go to my website, www.thesoxwish.com and see the upcoming classes I have going on and these subscription services.  So I knew 100% that phone was gonna go to 270 today and then it broke that. Okay, all right, so anyways, I look at gaps. I've been talking about this. You need a method and structure to enter and exit the picks. Here's what we did today in Boeing. So Boeing closed here last night around 283, boom. Opened here in the morning around 275 and change. Open, fell, dropped. We shorted this aggressively and it worked and then it collapsed. So this is the move that you want to get and we got it, okay? You coulda got out of it here. You coulda got out of it here. You coulda got out of it here. You coulda got out of it here. You could still be in it. So the reality is that this sink, like you would never have gotten. We almost shorted the high of the day in this. Like we couldn't have gotten a better entry in this. So I mean, it just collapsed. I knew this was gonna go, so we did it and you put the stop. I'll go over this later in some kind of email. I didn't have time to put the numbers in but this was a beautiful call.  So again, selling, who's in control? Remember we're talking about power money, institutional money, who's in control? I saw here in the pre-market that the bears were in control. So what did the bears do?  The bulls aren't in control here. The bears were in control here. That's why this sold off, okay? Now also you need to have goals. Your goals should be per day per week. Some days you want to have a trade like we talked about. Some days you'll have three trades, okay? Some days you have a really big day. Some days you have a small day. So I think it's good to look at goals per week and per month and that's how you get to the annual goals. But it's a reliability in the system, sticking with it, staying on top of it and obviously money management. And again, some of these things to me are just so 101 trading, 101 common sense 101 but I think people do need to be reminded about their risk. I use stops. They're limited order stops. If we had reverse today, we would have gotten stopped out. I can tell you that I would have retaken it if we had gotten stopped out. We didn't but I would have went right back into that puppy. I believed in it. I believed in it full force. And I'm very much like this with my trading. I'm very deliberate. Again, I don't waver. I'm very black and white about it. This is a long, this is a short. Either work or it doesn't. That helps me, okay? It helps me make more money and it's something that you can learn from me as well. So you've got to get the proper education to trade and I would seriously think about that. When you're choosing what to do, you have to say, okay, does this make sense? What this person is saying? Because if it doesn't make any sense to you, then why do you think it's gonna work, I guess? I use very few indicators. Just a couple of things. A lot of people use all kinds of indicators and I think it's a mess because a lot of people don't know what they mean and a lot of them don't work. Just using indicators work, like buying something like I said of the 200 per moving average, then no one would ever lose in the market and consequently then no one would ever make a lot of money. So the people that make a lot of money have a structure, have a system. It gives them an edge to profit and they also have goals. Now, while you may not have liked my answer, Alan, as far as taking a $5,000 account and making 20 grand in a month, you may have not liked that answer but it was an honest answer. It doesn't mean that you can't make 20 grand a month eventually but you've got to grow that account first and you've got to learn what to do and sit down and write a business plan. How are you gonna get there? How many months is it gonna take you to get there? It's not gonna take you that long if you do the right things. If you do the wrong things, you'll never get there, quite frankly. So I teach a class, it's called the Golden Gap course. It teaches one solid strategy to trade gaps effectively but reading the side of power and charts. I teach supporting resistance which a lot of people misread as well. Teach it in gaps. I teach a more proficient advanced way to read charts and technical analysis. It's technical analysis and gaps and the course teaches how to get conviction you're trading in the market as a source of wealth by trading with the side of power for consistent profit. You can get wealthy in the market if you know what to do. Many people fail because they don't know what to do and they have limited funds which they use in excess to try to make jumps and leaps and bounds without thinking about what they're doing or having a good strategy. Just like I was telling you about my friend, he thinks he's gonna make a million dollars in this stock that's in a downtrend. He happens to be up in it right now but he's gonna lose all the profit if he doesn't get out of it soon because there's a higher probability that that stock is going to continue lower than it is and it's going to continue higher because the trend in itself is to the downside. So trading is about looking at probabilities. That's why I use the rating system. It's high probability or low probability. Okay. Anyways, you have to start somewhere. You make $1,000 a month before you make two. Make $3,000 a month before you make six. That's how you grow your account. That's how you get somewhere and you've got to focus on quality. So put a plan of action in place. If you wanna do my class, the bullish class is next Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, March 9th, 10th and 11th. The bearish class is March 21st and 22nd. That's the classes for March for this month, okay? And I don't have the class dates set yet for April because April with the holiday with Easter I have to look at the calendar. I only do the bullish class though once a year. So we'll just be next week during the week for the bullish class. The bearish class I do each month. It teaches a 26 point rating system to trade the stock each day and how to read institutional positioning in stocks. And you're really gonna learn a lot about gaps and you're probably gonna unlearn some of the things that you think you know, but aren't working when you come and learn what I know and how I look at things. And it's really about working smarter, not harder. 2020 has started off extremely well. I'm very focused. It's been an active year. I probably between the day trading room and the options newsletter, I don't even know how many trades have color done this year. It is, I have been more active this year in 2020 than ever. I guess I'm very motivated to make money this year. So I guess that's probably why. And I think you have to be one of these people that is in the crowd and I'm looking out and saying, you know what, I'm going for it. I wanna make this work, I'm gonna do it. So I'm offering a special. It's through tomorrow, Friday, March 6th. If you sign up for the bearish class or the bullish class by tomorrow, then you get the newsletter and the trading room free through May 31st, Memorial Day weekend. So that's a good offer. And you normally pay for both. If you're interested in what more information or even wanna trial for tomorrow, for one day in the room, email me and Melissa at thestockswish.com. My class is a two day course, it's 14 hours. The bullish class is during the week, so it's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, spread over three days. And the bearish class is two days. Okay, so these are the days. Again, email me and Melissa at thestockswish.com if you wanna sign up. There's no prerequisites for the options newsletter. It's an annual subscription. I have no trials for that letter and there is no monthly subscription, okay? It's a one year letter. For the trading room though, that you have to do one of these classes in order to join. Option trading.  This bowing looks really good. Look at this. And so does the mark. Oh my gosh, look at the market. I'm gonna be right in the market. Oh my gosh, this is so good. The market's lower, people. Oh my lanta. And we rallied over the high since I was talking and we're still, we're gonna fall. Here, hold on. How do I put this up? I think I screwed this up here now. I have to press stop. Then I have to press it again.


Hi there, my name is Jeremy Howard. I'm a data scientist at the University of San Francisco. I specialized mainly in medical data. And recently I had the opportunity to present to a group of, I think, entirely or nearly entirely epidemiologists at the World Health Organization who were looking at guidelines for mask wearing. And I've had a lot of interest expressed in in seeing the slides and the arguments that I put up to the World Health Organization in that. So I thought I would share them with you here today. So I am part of an organization called Masks for All, which is a group of volunteers. We're all scientists from many different areas of science, many different parts of the world. And we've all spent a lot of time studying the science around community mask wearing and trying to communicate that to the public and to policymakers such as the World Health Organization. The World Health Organization has recently released some guidelines that have recommended using cloth masks in public or non-medical masks in public. And we would actually like to see them go further with their recommendations and make them stronger and change them in some ways. But perhaps more importantly, one of the things I really focused on was a need to change the kind of evidence that epidemiologists tend to look at for public health interventions like mask wearing, governments and obviously in this case the World Health Organization. So the WHO actually sponsored a study which was what's called a meta-analysis where it's basically a study of other studies. So this is the one here, true at our which was published in the Lancet. And what we realized is that actually this review, which the WHO used quite heavily, has a bunch of problems. The first most obvious ones is that outside of hospitals, they only actually looked at three studies. So that's what they call non-healthcare settings. And in fact two of those studies had major problems. The first is that this one here, Laos et al, actually is not a study of community or household use of masks at all. It was actually a study of the use of masks in hospitals during hospital visits. And then the second study with a big problem is Tuon et al, which actually showed that in this case out of the nine groups that wore masks, none of them got sick. But it was so underpowered. There were so few people in this study that the review used a number here that basically claimed that masks make you more likely to be infected, not less likely, even though actually nobody got sick who wore a mask in that study. Basically because there were so few infected people in the study overall, it was kind of a statistical aberration as it were. So the only one which really studied community mask use was this one Wu et al, which actually the number they used includes families where some people weren't wearing masks. So if you just actually include the ones where they were, there was basically a 70% reduction in risk in the households that used masks. The study also looked at mask use in hospitals and this is the table that they included. But actually only three of the studies in this case were of COVID-19. And in fact, I should mention none of the studies in non-healthcare were of COVID-19. They were all of SARS-1. And the three healthcare studies of COVID-19 actually showed over 95% decrease in risk amongst those using masks in healthcare. But they basically did the statistical analysis in a very strange way, maybe not strange, very common way, but not really appropriate for this, which is that they assumed that SARS, MERS and COVID-19 all had the same profile in terms of what do masks do. And as a result, they gave these three studies really low weights, 0.9%, 0.9%, and 1.7%. So even though the risk reduction from using masks for COVID-19 in all three cases was huge, those studies were basically ignored in this meta-analysis. There is one analysis actually of wearing masks in households for COVID-19, which is this one here. And in this case, there was about an 80% reduction in risk in the households that wore masks. So that's good. It's a pretty strong study. It's not huge. We would love to see a bigger version of it, but it's a start. The problem is though that for all of these kinds of studies, they're very hard to interpret because when you're trying to say what's the impact of wearing a mask on transmission, if I wear a mask, my hope is that if I'm sick and I don't know it, that I won't pass on that sickness to other people. So how do you know if me wearing a mask stopped other people from getting sick? You don't really, right? Because people who come across me wearing my mask will have come across lots of other people as well. So if they do get sick, was it because a sickness got through my mask? Or was it because they came in contact with somebody else who was sick? Who knows, right? So the only way to study that properly really would be to actually have like 50 cities where everybody in those cities were told not to wear masks and 50 cities where everybody was told they have to wear masks and then get compliance to work and then compare them. And that would be basically logistically and ethically impossible. So in fact, the epidemiology and evidence-based healthcare communities have started to realize it, well, I shouldn't say started to actually for decades have realized this, but have particularly been talking about this as being an issue for COVID-19, which is that population health interventions, like tell everybody to wear a mask, end up being implemented as natural experiments and their evaluation is more complex than a randomized controlled trial. That's just the way it is. We can't hope to find an RCT, a randomized controlled trial for a public health intervention like this, because it's just not ethical or logistically possible to do. So that was in BMG Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health and Pillar West Medicine, Trish Greenhalsch said something similar, upstream preventative public health interventions aimed at supporting widespread and sustained behavior change across the whole population, like masks, rarely lend themselves to a controlled on versus off intervention design, randomized controlled trial style design. So the reason I pointed this out to the World Health Organization was to kind of say, look, these are the kinds of studies that most epidemiologists are used to studying that you all want to study, but they're just not going to happen for this, right? And so you actually have to look at a wider field of evidence. So this is what we did. We being this group of 19 scientists, including epidemiologists and biostatisticians and aerosol scientists and sociologists, lots of different folks, we all got together to study the evidence across a much wider evidence space than just traditional epidemiological evidence. And so we ended up with I think 155 references might even be more now. And that became the most viewed paper ever of any kind on preprints.org. And you know, one of the things we looked at in this paper is that we now have a lot of these natural experiments, which is that over 80% of the world now lives in regions that require masks. Furthermore, in countries like, for example, in the US, over 70% of the population has to wear masks in the US because of state or city specific mandates. But back in early to mid March, only 10 countries required masks. So this change means that we can actually look at kind of the before versus after effects of what happens when countries bring in or when in the case of the US, for example, states bring in mask requirements. So paper from Lefler et al looked at nearly 200 countries. And you have to be very careful, right?  They might have a lockdown at around that time, they might have school closures at around that time. So statisticians have to use multivariate analysis to try to account for these confounders, which Lefler's paper, for example, did they looked at 10 different policy health interventions or the ones tracked by Oxford across as well as lots of demographic, geographic and so forth confounders as well. And they found that countries that did not wear masks, when you look at kind of the number of days since the start of the infection or the outbreak in that country, after a couple of months, they had huge outbreaks normalized per million population. Countries where masks were required within 15 days of the initial infection had basically no infection at all. And those that required them in the first 16 to 30 days had a bit of an outbreak, but they quickly got it under control. So this is a super interesting data, obviously. And we see something very similar in a paper by Leeuwen Wayby, which is this one here, which is that mask mandates in the US, very similar result, are associated with a two percentage point decrease in COVID-19 growth rate, two percentage points a day, that's enormous after 21 days after signing. So they guessed that by late May, somewhere around 200 to 400,000 cases had been averted. So these are often called ecological studies. And they're super unpopular amongst many in the epidemiological community. There's this idea of this thing called the ecological fallacy, which many people misinterpret as meaning you can't generate any understanding of population behavior or the underlying individual behavior of those populations by looking at population data. But actually data scientists and statisticians and machine learning folks have actually been studying exactly that for many, many decades. And in fact, there's another paper called the fallacy of the ecological fallacy, which is to say basically the ecological fallacy is this kind of grab bag of multiple different issues, which for which there are ways to deal with them. So we should be very careful not to throw away these vitally important studies as vitally important information, because it's really the only kind of data, direct data that we can get about the impact of these population health interventions. We can, however, get lab data. And in some ways, this is kind of the strongest and most obvious, because you can actually literally see here's an example of somebody speaking.  And thanks to the use of this laser scattering chamber, we can actually see them. Normally you can't, they're too small to see. These can be around 10 microns in size in terms of what's visualized here. And you can see here, they're holding a paper towel over their face, just a normal paper towel. And when they do, almost all of the droplets are blocked, looks like just two got through. Now, of course, you can see he's holding it quite carefully here, which obviously, if you're using a paper towel or a cloth mask, you want it to be as nicely tightly fitting as possible. But the basic idea is that, yeah, you know, as you would expect a physical barrier blocks this physical thing, which is the droplets that transmit the virus. So we can very directly see the way a mask does, in fact, stop this vector of transmission, this key vector of transmission. So why do we focus on speech droplets? Well, the reason we focus on speech droplets is this is a respiratory infection.  One way for that to happen is sneezes. And we really haven't looked at sneezes much because that is a symptom. And so people who are symptomatic, hopefully, are staying home. Another is breathing. But breathing is mainly going to bring up very tiny droplets from your lower respiratory tract, which actually, it turns out, is something where the disease kind of appears later on, again, after you have symptoms. So what we mainly care about is the upper respiratory tract viral shedding. And this comes out in speech droplets. So this is why we're particularly interested in speech droplets, because these are the ones that people who are walking around don't even know they're sick, are ejecting from their mouth. So one of the key things to realize, this is not just for speech droplets, but particularly so, is that on average, a wet particle with one variant will be about 27 microns across, which is pretty giant compared to the size of the virus. But what happens is after it comes out of your mouth, it rapidly evaporates down to, in this case, it would be down to about five microns in size. There's a whole range of droplet sizes, but the key is that they will evaporate and become smaller. And so when they come out of your mouth, they're moving straightforward, straight into the fabric. They're pretty big. The atmosphere inside your mask is very humid because of your breathing. And so it hits then this large droplet hits the fabric of your mask and soaks into it. So it doesn't go through. And then once it becomes much smaller, after evaporation, if you're not wearing a mask, it can float in the air. And as it does so, it now also doesn't have that direct trajectory. So it's also much easier for it to squeeze through the gaps above or around your mask. So it's much easier to do what's called source control, which is blocking it on the way out. And this is why we focus on this idea. My mask protects you, your mask protects me. Now, some aerosol, some tiny droplets, maybe from breathing are also important in transmission. We don't really know for sure. We suspect maybe not so much for the folks that don't have symptoms yet. But even if the breathing droplets are important as well, we actually know from a study that the basic cloth masks are actually about the most effective at stopping both the direct coming through the front and through coming out the side's breath, because cloth masks can often be like larger cover more of the face. And there also can be more absorbent. So, you know, we shouldn't assume that cloth masks are less effective than other masks. Or most importantly, we shouldn't assume that they're not effective at all. The lab data we have suggests they are. And also remember that most of those countries that now require masks, which covers the vast majority of the world's population, aren't using medical masks because they're not available. So the results we're seeing in practice are from people who are largely wearing simple unfitted masks. So how long does that droplet cloud stay in the air for? Well, this study showed that when you again look at this laser scattering chamber, and you look at the speech droplets that come out, they after coming out of the mouth at minute zero, after about 10 minutes, about half of them have fallen to the ground. And after 20 minutes, maybe three quarters have.  So these droplets, if they're not blocked on the way out, they can actually hang around for quite a long time. A fluid dynamics study found something pretty similar about the effect of masks, which is that if you don't wear a mask, your droplet cloud can go out beyond two meters where else with a mask, it really is well contained. You can see with a mask, a little bit of it goes backwards, but the actual radius of the cloud is much smaller. So how much is this impact of the size of the rejection in size of the droplet cloud? So a study in physics of fluids found that the amount of reduction in size of the droplet cloud depends a lot on what kind of mask you're wearing. All kinds of masks at least made at least half the radius. But a stitched mask with cotton was the most effective in terms of getting it down to just 2.5 inches in this study. So one of the interesting things is that since a mask can make the droplet cloud smaller, that means that social distancing becomes more helpful, becomes more important because you're not as likely to infect somebody six feet away. Another reason that there's a great impact on social distancing is that a study found that people who didn't wear masks, people tended to stay closer to them than people who did wear masks. So in other words, when you see somebody wearing a mask, there's this conscious or unconscious thing going on where people actually keep their distance away from you more. I guess maybe it's this like reminder of like, oh, this is a pandemic. There's somebody in a mask. I should keep her a healthy distance. So that's interesting because some folks have claimed, including the WHO, that wearing a mask could result in less social distancing. But the data we have doesn't support that at all. It seems populations that wear masks have dramatically less transmission it seems that the effect on social distancing is much better because the reduced droplet cloud size and that people may even keep their distance more. In terms of children, which is particularly important right now, schools seem like a particularly important place to wear masks. It's somewhere where people talk a lot. And so therefore a lot of speech droplets in places like Sweden where they didn't close the schools, kids had just as high an infection rate in serial prevalence studies as adults did. So it seems like when you don't close schools, kids become infected often.  It seems that they just as often or maybe nearly just as often pass on that sickness to adults. And so for example in Victoria, the largest outbreak in the whole state came from a school in Israel. There was massive outbreaks around the country, both Victoria and Israel are both places where COVID-19 was almost under control and they reopened schools and things got totally out of control. And in fact, when you look at the viral loads in kids, they tend to be pretty similar to the viral loads in adults. So one of the things that we talked about is this idea of likely harms. The World Health Organization currently has a list of likely harms under the section around community mask use. So some of the likely harms that we've heard about a lot and seen in the World Health Organization's guidelines don't really seem likely at all. In fact, some of them seem like likely benefits rather than likely harms. For example, there's a claim that there could be an increased risk of self-contamination, but actually it's much more likely you would see a decreased risk.  And so there has been some studies of this. It does need more research, but the evidence we have suggests that maybe this is a benefit rather than a harm. There's also a claim in the guidelines that there's a risk of droplet transmission and a splashes to the eyes, which is true, of course, but that is not the result of mask wearing.  So it's kind of strange to me that there are these, you know, official health bodies like the WHO include these likely harms when they're not likely or harms necessarily or related to wearing a mask. It's really odd. I don't really know what's going on here. There's a claim often, including the WHO guidelines, that there could be or likely to be a false sense of security, but there's actually no data supporting that. And in fact, it was claimed over 100 years ago and it's never been demonstrated. So this is just this kind of speculative, well, maybe it might happen. So I think we've got to be very careful of when you see somebody saying here are some likely harms is to say, like, do we have any evidence of that? Is there any data to support that? Is there any lab evidence of that? Or is this just an assertion which somebody's just made up and could could the opposite be equally true? The other issue with the WHO guidelines is that it lists some suggested types or a particular type of mask based on a table of mask filtration levels. And actually, the advice is based on studies which don't use the right kind of approach. In particular, they look at particle sizes of 72 nanometers. Now that's very, very small, very small and much smaller than the five microns we talked about. And in fact, it's very hard to even come up with a droplet smaller than one micron that can both hold together at all and actually contain a variant of a virus particle. So the particle size that's being studied by in the WHO table is way smaller than we would expect to ever need to filter in practice, particularly for source control. So when it's coming out, as we discussed, it's larger than when it's coming in. So, you know, that's a much smaller particle than we actually think you should be looking at. Furthermore, they used a flow rate. So the amount of particle, you know, the amount of gas going through the machine that they were testing with was much higher than you would have in real life when you're kind of sitting or walking slowly or something like this. So in fact, the particle sizes and flow rates they used are based on the testing criteria for masks as protective equipment for healthcare workers, which is like worst case situation, not really that appropriate for community use. Also, they didn't actually test the best materials. And so there are actually tests of materials that you can buy from Amazon or the local shop or whatever, which are orders of magnitude more effective than the ones that they talked about and even recommended in their guidelines. So I think it's a waste that they're not actually pointing out that there are much better materials available. They also didn't touch on the best designs for ensuring a good fit. Again, I think that's a real shame. For example, this rubber mask brace or this approach I'm wearing here of just three rubber bands were shown to surpass the N95 fit test. So the kind of healthcare medical worker fit test in most situations that this study looked at. So there are a lot of crafters now working with great materials and great designs. For example, on Etsy, if you look for face masks with a multiple nose wire and an insertable filter where you can put these really great filter materials, there's over 69,000 different shops where you can buy these from kind of DIY crafters. So I think it's good. It would be great if public health bodies can try and provide this information about what are the best approaches and realize that they are available. Okay, so that's it for my little summary of what we talked about and what I presented to the World Health Organization on community mask wearing, and I hope you found that helpful. Thanks for watching.