get our day kicked off here. We have Melissa Armo as our first speaker of the day. Melissa is founder and owner of thestockswush.com. She also appears on TV often as an expert stock market analysis. So perhaps you've seen her commentary. And so Melissa, we're happy to have you here with us today. This morning, good morning to you. And I'm gonna let you go ahead and take the screen and get started. Good morning, I can. Wonderful, let's see if I can project my screen. Let me know if you can see. Picture the Empire State Building there.  I can, yeah, it looks good. Wonderful, let me just see if I can get the chats over here in case I have any questions. Okay, great, thanks so much for having me. Welcome everyone. It is a beautiful day in Manhattan. I live in New York City. For those of you that don't know, I trade the stock market. And as Marissa said, my name is Melissa Armo and I started my own company a very long time ago. I've been trading out for 15 years, which is hard to believe, but time really flies when you love what you do. So today we're gonna talk about shorting, we're gonna talk about trading, we're gonna talk about making money. And the market is right on the cusp as we're talking about the market here today. Had a rally for the last couple of days, but there's so many things going on in the market right now. So it's been very, very interesting to trade. And again, one of the things that I like to do is to talk about the market, because even if I'm not trading the market every single solitary day, some days I do, some days I don't. I like to look at what's happening. Because I talk on TV, I really do need to know what's going on in the world. And of course that plays a large factor in what's going on in the market as well, in the market reactions. If you have any questions, you can plop them in the room, in the chat. I can see them as we go along here today. So welcome everyone. We're gonna get started. This is me, if you haven't seen me on TV. If you have questions, you can always email me at the list of the stockswish.com or call me at 9 to 9, 3200 GATT. You can also go to www.thesoxwish.com and look at any products or services I offer. And again, I appear on Fox News, Cheddar TV, CBS News, and pretty much every national channel, even News Nation, which is a new channel. If you don't get it, you can request it where I talk about the economy and also the stock market. So training is a great job. It's a great job because it has lots and lots of freedom. For example, this is a picture I took actually yesterday of Central Park when I was on a walk. It is a beautiful fall day in New York. I'm gonna go for a walk this afternoon. I have the ability to do that. Why? Because I train. So when you are slaving away and working a job where you're working for someone else, eight to 10 hours a day, it really, really can be a drag on you. And I did that. I did that in my mortgage career for about 17 years. And it really got to the point where I was so stressed out that I really needed to find a new career. But I wanted something that had unlimited income potential. And the nice thing about trading the stock market is, trading the stock market has unlimited income potential. The only difference between making a little bit of money or a lot in the market is that you have to know what to do. And again, it assesses how much you're risking and portraying what you're looking to make. So we're gonna talk today specifically about how you can be successful. So you can get to this point in your life. But I'm really, really grateful that I was able to figure out what I know right now today. Because again, going back 15 plus years ago, I would still be doing mortgages, which is, as you well know, mortgage rates right now are over 8%. So again, all of this is affecting the economy. All of this is affecting what's going on right now in the stock market, banks, interest rates, and of course what's gonna happen going forward into the fall for the close of 2023. So when you trade, okay, when you trade, you have one goal, all right? That goal is to make money. And again, people are sitting behind a computer when they trade. And I think sometimes people forget, yes, they know they're doing it to make money, but sometimes people just make poor decisions, not realizing how critical every single second and every single minute is when you trade. Because if you press the button and make a mistake, you can lose. But if you do the right action and you take the correct risk and pick a good trade, you can make a lot of money. So again, the goal is to make money. While trading is fun and reading charts is fun and going to webinars like today is fun to do.  So when I started out trading, I was not profitable. I took one class. I did not learn how to trade and make money in that class. However, I did learn a very basic foundation for technical analysis, which I then took and was able to create my own system, which took me three years. And during that three-year process of trading, losing, making money, losing, I created my own system, which I'm gonna talk about with you today. But I knew that it was possible to make money in the market because I did have some huge trades in that first three years. And I said, I know there's something here to it. And the big trades I had were shorts. And of course we're gonna talk about shorting. Now we can go back and forth. And again, we only have an hour here today or a little bit less than that about where this market's headed for 2023. If I have time, we will talk about that at the end. I have my thoughts on that. But anyways, every single thing that's happening right now in the market really is driven by what the Fed is saying and interest rates. And for what I do, I'm a short term, which would classify as a short term trader, meaning I'm in and out quick in several minutes of the day trade. Or I'm doing weekly options. And weekly options, that's short. Okay, that is short. Now they have shorter term options. Now we have daily options. I'm not trading those, but you could do QQQ and spy calls and puts that expire the same day. I am not doing those. I am not calling those in my options newsletter. But I actually started that really this year. That is added and contributed to the volume and volatility actually in the market. That's something new. But I think even one week of an expiration of an option actually a short term. So again, training, don't get confused with trading and investing. Training is we're in, we're out. We're in, we're out. We're chunking and out. We go in, get the move, get out. Go in, make the money, book it, get out. So that's what I'm doing. Long-term investing is something very, very different. So I have my thoughts on where the market's going again in the next couple of months between now and the end of the year. But then I also have my thoughts on long-term. So again, long-term is long-term investing. We're doing what I do is short-term trading, okay? Which is basically what you could do if you want to do it for a job like I'm doing. Because again, you have to get the money out quick. But the fact is you can be successful trading. So I have a YouTube channel you can go to. It's the stocks wish on YouTube. This is a video that I did with one of my students. Her name is Jackie. She's been with me for quite a long time. When she started out with me, she had two nursing jobs. Then she quit one of the jobs, went part-time as a nurse and then she quit that. So she's basically retired now, trades every day in the room. And she's a great example of someone that came into trading with very little knowledge. I trained her and again, she was working two jobs and she wanted to get out from under that. And of course she's very happy to be out of the industry she's in right now with everything that's happened the last few years since COVID. So she has a great success story, but the fact is she's a regular person, okay? And I want people to know that you can be successful trading.  You can do it, okay? I try to do my best to teach people and hone it down. But there is people that I've taught that are successful that never traded in their life before they came to me. So I want you to know that it is possible. And I think a lot of people get caught up in trading for a number of years, they're losing money and then they start to lose confidence in themselves and then also confidence in the market that they can even do it. But I'm here to tell you that you can do it. So the fact also is that most people find success illusive in reference to trading and why? Because they're gambling, because they're gambling because they're looking at this endeavor, training, taking the trade, putting the trade on, the idea of making money, again, they're looking at it like everything's gonna go to the piggy target and everything's gonna be huge and you're gonna take a trade like many of the Reddit traders that did some of those early on Reddit trades that ended up skyrocketing and then a lot of people jumped in late and they lost and some of those trades are still down even today. So it's trading is an action that you're taking every day. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, when I trade, okay, where I'm taking an action and I'm getting in to take the trade and I'm getting out to book money. You have to look at it and think about it and really go after it like it is a job. Even though you're sitting at home and you're working for yourself, which is great, you have to take it that seriously and a lot of people look at it as gambling, especially people that are doing the side.  This is not gambling, okay? And I get this question all the time, can trading make you rich? Yeah, if you're good, you know what to do and if you're risking what I call an advanced trader risk, but you gotta be good, you know? So I think it's a lot better off for people to look at it in the way that I was describing earlier, where they're chunking it out. You know, when you think about, okay, $500 a week comes down to an average of $100 a day, that's two grand a month, that's 24 grand a year. That's good for a part time job. That's extra money that covers the cost of high inflation, higher interest rates, which people are paying for things, whether you're buying a car or have credit cards. You know, people can hone it down and break it down for what works from then. And as you get good and as you decide to progress and you build your account over time and you're getting better at trading your risky more money, then you can move to the next level and become more successful. So many people, again, think about trading as something that they're doing that it's gambling and it's just not. And really you gotta be honest with yourself and assess that situation for yourself when you're in fact taking the trades. But the fact is you need a system to make money, okay? If you don't have a system and a strategy to make money that consistently works in under any market conditions, you are not gonna be successful. One of the things that people do, and you've seen this in the last couple of days, is people bought the dip in the market. Market dropped, rallying, Friday, and it's carried through. Again, I'm here with you today right now, so I'm not gonna be able to see where we open at 930. We were up, we were down, we were all over the place this morning, but a lot of people think buying dips is a valid strategy. It is not, okay? It didn't work at all in 2021, okay? Market fell. 2022 was a year where it was back and forth. I mean, 2021 it worked. 2022 it didn't work because the market fell. Market power trended in 2021. So you could have bought every single dip in something that was stronger week and then in 2022 it didn't work. 2023 it's not working, either why? Because some things are falling, some things are rallying. Market fakes higher, market fakes lower. Again, we started out the year up for the year if you go back and look where we are right now. Will we hold that for the year? I don't know. The Dow didn't, okay? The Dow went negative on the year in the last month. So again, people think that buying the dip is a system or a strategy to trade. And if it was that easy to trade, then no one would ever lose. Anyone could do that. Anyone could buy support and say, oh, if that was it, we just buy support everywhere and we would never ever lose. So again, think about it rationally how that's not something that works consistently. So you have to again hone it down into a way where you will say, wait a minute, wait a minute, let me figure out what I'm gonna do here that I can duplicate every single solitary day or most days out of the month, okay? Some days are slower than others that you can find a good trade.  Most of these are shorts because I'm mostly short, which we're gonna talk about. This is a day trade result so far year to date for the live trading room. I run a live trading room where I call the entry, the exit and the stop, 450,001 so far this year to date. Okay, and obviously I'm not running my room today, I'm not trading today. I have an assistant that is doing that today to help me out. But we've had a good year so far. We're on pace this year to have and close out the year. Very good, airing season begins Friday. The banks start to report which promises to be a very profitable time as well. I put the results in here for the options newsletter. I have an options newsletter. I risk more for my options, okay? So again, if you wanna do options, we're gonna talk about them a little bit too. If you wanna do day trades, you need a margin account. You do not need a margin account to do options and your risk for your options, whether you take a beginner risk or an advanced risk should be based on the size of your cash, your cash account. But you can open up an options account with $2,000. You can't risk $2,000 on one trade. You would have to risk a smaller amount if you have a starter account and beginner account. But so far we're on pace to be good for this year with everything even as choppy as sometimes the market has been so far this year. So what is my system? I've been talking about this here. I've been telling you that I like to short I trade gaps and I trade gaps based on institutional money and I prefer to short. So I have a niche where I am shorting. Now you can short, okay. Here is one of the options trades that we did. This is the options newsletter. This newsletter gets sent out in live time. You take the trade when you get it. I sent this out on the 13th run, 10, 15 in the morning. I bought the QQQ puts a 372. So a put is a short, okay. So if you do not have a margin account, you can buy a put. So I'm buying puts and then I'm selling them when I'm exiting the trades, okay. And we did do the market a lot. In the month of September, it was falling a lot. So 913, let's look here at the chart. 913 was here and then we got this drop. So I just want to show you where we were here. Did the 372s and we got the drop in here. So that was the week again that the Fed, this was the Fed day here, market gapped up and fell reversed gap down here sold off. So that was a really, really, really, really, really nice flush if you want to call it or sell off of the market on that particular day but we were in it early. We were in it early, okay. I was in it even before that meeting. So the cost was of this trade was 350. If you did an advanced trader risk of 25 contracts, you could have made $25,000 on this trade. You could have made even more, okay. I get this question a lot. Is this the best exit? No, I look at it and I assess and I try to get the best exit I can. There's times that trades continue further but I typically am not always wanting to hold my trades to the very last day if I'm up but this was a return on investment of 286%. If you have a beginner account and you risked 1,050, did three contracts, you could have bought one and spent $350. You could have made three grand on three contracts. This is one of the reasons why people again, people are always like, oh, I need so much money, I need this much money, I need this much money. No, you could focus on options, open an account, two grand, five grand, 10 grand, something like that. Again, I don't have any problem with people risking $1,000 per trade with a $10,000 account. Okay, if they know what they're doing, they're following me in the newsletter. This is a way to build your account, okay. And again, this is taking the trade and letting the trade play out. I'm going back here to the chart and letting this drop, giving it a chance to work. And again, that's very, very important because a lot of times people take trades, they don't have any conviction in what they're doing because they really don't have a system. If they're down in the trade, then they quick kill it. Or if they take a trade and they're up, then they quick it out a little bit if it starts to go against them. And people never really get the profit. They never have substantial trades like this. They really never have trades that really, I could say the word run. I said, let it run, let it go. When you're following institutional money, it will take you where it needs to go. Again, if I take a trade and it loses, and you'll see that in the stats going back, I go bust in the trade, okay. So I just lose in my options. I take the trade and let it play out. If I do a day trade, I have a stop in my day trade. I take it, I put the stop in it. Again, I'm calling that live in the room.  I'll take another trade, okay. But your risk basically is your stop in an option. That is the way that I look at it. And again, any questions, feel free to write them in the room. Getting back to what I was saying here though, gaps are based on momentum, just like you saw in that move in the cues. It went boom, and it went down, and it had a flush. So if you decide to come and learn from me, and learn what I know, do what I'm doing, it's gaps are based on momentum, momentum, momentum, momentum. We also did a different strike. Again, this was going into the following week, so we were ready in the one. Then we did a lower one. We did the 370 puts, and I called this late. I called this late actually. This is late for me to do a trade here, almost three o'clock on a Monday, but I saw we were dropping. I did the 370 puts for that same expiration, the 22nd. So again, what day was that, the 18th here, okay. And then boom, and then we got the drop, and then we just did a lower strike. Again, that's something that I also do if I see somebody's continuing down. This was cheaper, $2.60 for one contract. But you know, that is a good price. That means you could have bought one and spent $260. Again, got the drop, fell, sold off, after the Fed got down, and then this was a 342% return on investment trade. Profit 31,150 on 35 contracts. If you did four, again, keep your riskings similar. 1,040 sold at 1,150. Profit 3,560, 342% return on investment. This was, we've been so successful reading these moves in the market to the downside. And again, the reason is because of my strategy, which I'm gonna talk about here in a little bit, but I'm just showing you here some trades.  You will get some big winners, okay. They will cover the trades that you lose in and then you have profit going forward. That's why you don't have to be piggy in every trade because you are gonna have some winners just for the result of the fact that you're in the trade in the first place. Because this here, again, no one could have predicted this reaction here from the Fed because on this particular day, if anybody was training, if you remember, what happened was the market was up. So before drone pals started talking, market was up higher, okay.  Then it got down and here is the money. Here is all the, you know, that is the panic that I'm shorting. And again, I've put as a short that I'm shorting into to get the profit. So again, what is momentum? Momentum is a big move with volume. So every single stock that we trade or every single ETF that we trade, everything we trade, we're trading stocks that you know of. We're trading the market ETFs because they have volume, they have momentum. That's how you're gonna pay two, three bucks for something and then have it fall off a cliff. Otherwise, if you're doing penny stops with a little bitty, bitty, bitty and you're never really getting anything, okay. You're never really getting anywhere with it. But going back to what I was saying, anyone could do this. Jackie's a great example, but I could give you mine examples. Trading requires a positive attitude. And I think, unfortunately, when people start to trade and I get it, people start to train, they're not doing well, they lose money, that's typical, that happens to everyone. Like I said, it happened to me. And then they start to go negative in their head, but they trade every day. Don't risk your money in the market. If you don't think you can be successful, you must believe that you can do it. That's not enough, but you have to have a positive attitude because you're working against yourself. You're actually working against yourself. And you've got plenty of other people working against you. I mean, quite frankly, the economy's working against you right now too with higher interest rates. So don't work against yourself, have a positive attitude. It can't be intuition, no. I don't use intuition. We're gonna talk about my system here a little bit. Oliver, we didn't get to that, but good question. So in order to become successful, you need a system and a niche. So while I have a good intuition, quite frankly, Oliver, the reality is I do not make trading decisions based on my intuition. I make trading decisions based on a system that you can follow. We were talking about this the other day because someone mentioned Kramer to me. Kramer is someone that has it. He's on TV as a very successful television career for the last 25 plus years. You couldn't follow what he does. You couldn't say, I'm gonna take this trade and Kramer's gonna take this trade. That's not the case with me.   So I actually have a structure in a system that you can learn and you can follow. Someone like Kramer doesn't. Kramer goes by feel. He says, well, I read this and I read that and based on this and that. Again, the problem is with analyzing, something like, we're getting into earnings season, you wanna analyze what the report is. Citibank reports Friday, I think. That means nothing because quite frankly, Citibank could have a positive report and get down and fall. It could have a negative report in rally. You can't even make decisions like that anymore. Again, maybe 30 years ago you could have. But you can make money in the market. People do it all the time. Not everyone does because they don't have a strategy and that's what we're gonna talk about today. So my system is based on gaps. How do I make the pick? I have a rating system and this is what you'd come and learn from me, Oliver. I rate it. I have a 26 point rating system. If the gap rates 20 points or more, I take it in the direction of the gap. I prefer it as short. I will go long, but I prefer to short. So that is the structure. If I get a gap and it rates 15 points of the 26, I'm not doing it. I'm not going long. And if it's down, I never go long and gap down. And if it gaps down, I'm not shorting it if it doesn't rate over 20. So that's the structure and that is how I'm making the picks. And that is how I'm figuring out whether or not something's gonna get bought, move higher or fall and drop, okay? So again, we were talking about gaps and if you're new and you don't know what a gap is, let's go over what a gap is. You know my system is proprietary, yes. And again, it's a paid class that if you came and signed up, you'd sign up for. Can I give a brief summary of the difference between the gaps info available versus your system? I don't know what you mean by that question. Gap info available? I don't know. I don't know what you mean by that then, Kat. When I first started training again, a very, very long time ago in 2008, there was very little out there about gaps that made any sense. Nowadays, it's pretty much the same old thing. Most people do gaps for gap fills. That does not consistently work as a profitable strategy. While sometimes gaps do fill themselves, that they're not made with institutional money, number one and number two, they do not consistently work as a way to train. Okay, what is a gap? A gap is the difference between the close and the open. Simple. Okay, let's just talk about this one here because we were talking about this one. This is the spy. So again, this was the day the market gap up, fell, boom, closed. Closed at four o'clock eastern time, then gap down. So a gap is the difference between the close and the open. Simple, right? But how do you know that this one is gonna fall? How do you know it's not gonna rally? How did you know this one wasn't gonna rally so you wouldn't go long? And how did you know this one was gonna fall? Now again, we were already short here. So we were already playing this down when this sell-off occurred and this guy here. We were ready in the puts. But anyways, whatever number this closed at, this open at a lower number, and that is what a gap is because we have a four o'clock close and we have a 9.30 open every day. This is, we're on September. This is the month of September here. Whoever said that, right? We're on, this was the Fed meeting reaction. This was a Wednesday. This was a Thursday. So again, what is the gap? This is Oracle. Stop close to your gap down, fell, okay? This was an earnings gap. We did puts in this, okay? Again, closes at one price up here, 127 and change. Open at a different price down here, fell, dropped. Again, I will rate this gap. Go through the process, make a determination if this is going to fall. It did, and we shorted it. So again, that's how you make money. Also, this is the momentum. The trading room is only accessible to people that do my class. You cannot sign up for the live trading room unless you are a student of my class. If you wanna try out for the trading room for the next two days, Thursday and Friday, you can email me at Melissathestockswish.com if you are interested in taking the classes month. Otherwise, you can't join the room separate. Every single person that's in the room knows how to do this, knows how to rate the gaps themselves. Do I at times get into the gap before a gap happens? No, but there are times I'm already in it because it already happened. I don't know if that makes sense, Derek. No, I'm not doing anything in the pre-market. I'm trading after 9.30. You cannot trade options in the pre-market. That's number one. Number two, I'm day trading on margin, on a four to one margin on the open. If you're trading the pre-market, you're basically on cash or two to one margin. These are, the gap is already, the gap is happening in the pre-market. So I am sometimes in trades, okay? And then I get a follow through gap, Derek. If I think that's what you're meaning, but I'm not predicting the gap, if that makes any sense. But I might already be in it because it's already going because I'm trading momentum and I'm already in the move. Does that make sense? So anyways, I focus on the fast moves. I focus on the volatility. Sometimes people are scared of volatility. Volatility is a great thing if you know how to trade it. And again, I'm looking for the momentum. I wanted to go fast, quick, big. So again, if someone said to you, okay, well you can make $1,000 in five minutes or $1,000 in an hour, what would you rather? I'd rather make this $1,000 in five minutes.  This is, you know, it's taken me a long time to get to this point in my life. So many people want everything yesterday. That's not how life works. I love to say, bing, bam, boom. You know, yeah, you're gonna come to me if you wanna do my class, you can do my class and you can take my trades and follow my trades. Are you gonna have a learning curve? You might. I don't know each person until I get to know you. But I am here to help you if you have questions, if you don't know what to do. And the benefit of following me in the live room, getting my trades, me calling the trades live and taking the options and getting the newsletters is it will make it easier for you to make money and you will still have questions, but it will make the whole process a lot less stressful for you because you have someone to go to, to ask questions and to follow on a daily basis. Somebody emailed me the other day, well, who runs the room? Who does this? Who does that? I said to me, I do it all. I do it all, okay? And even the gentleman that's helping me today, he really doesn't work for me. He's a friend that I got to be friends with who did my class 10 years ago. 10 years ago he did my class. And so he's the only one that I trust that would call good trades, but he came to me as a client and we ended up getting to be friends. And at the end of the day, so sometimes he helps me and fills in, but I taught him how to trade. And then we got to be friends.  And that says a lot about the sustainability of the system as well. I did have the stats for the year to date above. I can go back to that at the NX, where we are for the year. Right, that's right. You don't wanna make sense. You wanna make dollars, that's the whole point. The class is live, live online. You must be there present and you wanna be to get the information, obviously, if you're paying for it. So again, getting back to this, the key today trading stock successfully is using a system. So why are people mostly not successful? They don't have a system. Sometimes people think they have a system, like I was talking about earlier, buying gifts. That's not a system. Because if it was that easy to trade and no one will lose money, just like people have moving averages and indicators they wanna look at. If it was that easy to say, well, if this intersects this one, then we'll go long today. No one would ever lose. That's just not reality. So again, what is the other thing you need to be successful? You need a niche, okay? So if you wanna trade like everyone else, you're gonna have the same results, which is a lot of people struggle. And unfortunately, that adds into the negative feedback that people have, but I'm telling you, you gotta move forward. You gotta get over that. Get over the hump. And you do something different. If you always love to go long, go short tomorrow. Do something different, okay? You don't like exercising. Go out for a walk for an hour. You never ride a bike. Get on a bike tomorrow, Sunday. Do something different. You ever read a book in a year? Pick up a book tomorrow, tonight. Go out to eat. Have a glass of wine.  Do something different.  Sometimes just doing something different in your life just breaks up the monotony, gets the energy moving and allows money to flow into your life. And when I talk about money, I mean success. I mean wealth. I mean real, real money that you can build over time. Again, I've been doing this for 15 years. 15 years, okay?  It's so easy for her. I've been doing this for a long time. When I started, it was not easy for me. So because I understand that and I understand what people are going through, that's what helps to make me a good teacher to help people as well. Because I have the empathy for people to help them and understand what they're going through to get to that point. But you still have to do it yourself. You're still the one that has to do it. You're the one that has to press the buttons. And you have to decide if you want to come to me and learn from me, that's your choice too. Because you're going to pay me for the class if you want to come and learn from me. Let me see if I answer all the questions. Okay. So anyways, my system is a 26 point checklist. So again, I'd go through the shorting. We did BA. This was a while ago. But this was a nice move. We didn't get this whole thing by the way, but we did do this. Stack close here, gap down, fell, boom. So we got this. And then look at this. I watched it. I saw it. And then we just, we didn't do this whole thing. It kind of just went. We were in other stuff. But look at the sell-off in this. Again, institutional money sold BA, sold it off. Again, I'm doing weeklies. But really I could have done a longer term. I could have done a leap. Okay, a leap is a long-term option. Or we could have even done a swing trade short in this. I mean, look at what that did. But again, we've been doing the market a lot, particularly August, September, all right. And it's been having some beautiful, beautiful moves to sell-offs. You could say because of the economy. You could say because of this, because of that. Mostly it's based on the flood and interest rates, but really it's the gap that I read and rate that helps me determine that something is going to drop. So again, how do you make money shorting? You make money when the stock price drops. That's it. When the stock price drops, you can short it. If the stock is at $10 and it drops to $9 and if a thousand shares, you make $1,000. Again, someone mentioned earlier, we're not, I'm not trading for pennies. I'm trading for dollars. A dollar, $2, $3 more depends what we're doing, okay? I think it's more economical nowadays. Even though we are sometimes shorting the market on margin, it's cheaper to buy a pet, for example, if you're shorting the spy right now with the price of the market. And it's been that way really the last couple of years. But again, we are sometimes day trading the market on margin. But anyone can short. As long as you have a account to set up to short, anyone can short. And again, you can set up a cash account that's not on margin as an options account and buy puts. So the concept of shorting is so, so powerful. Why? Because of the panic that comes into a stock and people dump it and they sell it and it goes fast and pushes down. Again, there's absolutely no emergency whatsoever at all. If you're not long this market right now, if you're not, there's no emergency for you to go long. You're like, well, I'm gonna wait and see what happens with this and the Fed, if they raise rates, the geopolitical issues that are going on right now, you say, well, I'm gonna wait it out. There's no emergency. If you are already on the market, that's a different story. And if we have another Fed rate hike or somebody gets on TV and says, we're gonna do this, do that for 2024 with rates, the market could sell off like a hot cake or another bank will go under. Something like that happens between now and the end of the year. We started out the year with that problem. So again, then you would sell. You panic, you're already long. So you see the difference between the concept of shorting is so, so powerful. And then again, at the speed of it, and I'm just giving the explanation for why, why shorts move so fast is because of the panic. Anyways, this is one week of trades here. I could have pulled any week. I could have pulled last week too. I took off on Friday for the long weekend. But this is a whole week of day trades in the room. One of the days, one of the weeks, we Monday was no trades. This was an average week because it was a slow week. We didn't have any really massive, massive big trades. And one day we didn't trade. Tuesday we made 39.65. Wednesday, 3,200. Thursday, 25.50. Friday, 22.50. So my average risk in my day trades, again, I call it an advanced trader risk, is around $2,800, $3,000 per trade. So again, you're looking for trying to get one to one on every trade that you take. So Monday we didn't do any trades. This was 8.21, 8.22. We did DKS. Again, this was a gap. Stop close here, gap down. Open, dropped, fell. This is a daily chart. This was August 22nd. Entry was 1.15.95. Again, I call this in the live room. 1,300 shares is a good size of risk, particularly at this price point. Exit 1.13 is my target. Boom, dropped, got out. In, got out. Again, 39.65, it's a good trade with that risk. Here's the one minute. So again, we're talking about fast. We're talking about sell-offs. This is it. Stop close here, gap down. Open, we shorted it, got the drop, got out. Boom, done. Go for a walk in Central Park. Again, Michael's asked me about the stops. I teach all of that in the class. Day one of the class is you learn the 26 point rating system. Day two is you learn all my entries. I do six different entries and you learn all my exits. So that's a whole Sunday of a class of eight hours. 823, Footlocker, we did two, looks kind of crazy, but it actually worked. Entry was 15, 25. I took a lot of this, this was cheap. Risk was 2,800, eggs of 14, 85. Again, you know this stock. This stock, if you know it, this is a big move actually for Footlocker, the price it is now. I remember trading Footlocker years and years ago. This stock has dropped. This stock has fallen. Again, nice gap down, dropped. We were short in the tail, got in, got out, boom, done. Here's the one minute. Again, fast, we got it, got out. Go for a walk in the park. 824, we did DLTR. This was a really good one. And again, I could have held this, I could have held this and made thousands more, but I like to do the morning trains. Entry was 129.90, 1,500 shares. Exit 12820, again, looking for a dollar plus. My first talk was 128, I got out. But look where it went. Stock closed here, gap down, open, dropped. This is the daily. Here's the one minute. This was insane. This was completely insane. So I obviously could have held this even more. I could have held it all day. I just, I think it's a lot easier to hold options than day trades. So I don't hold my day trades. So I play the morning of the day trade and I get out. But again, the whole concept, this is panic, fear, fear creates selling. We did Marvell. Stock closed here, gap down, open, dropped. Shorted it to 5410. 2,500 shares is a $3,000 risk. This is on margin. Exit, 5320, again, close enough. Trying to get a dollar 90 cents, close enough, out. 2250. And again, I'm calling these exits in the live room if you're there. So that was a, this was, you know, again, another one that went really, really quick. This was earnings. This was an earnings trade we did. This is a late earnings trade. Again, this quarter earnings season starts Friday. Stock closed here, gap down, open, fell. We got in and out. That was a good trade. Again, I'm trying to fill this in the morning. The first half hour of the day, the fast trades, the quick trade. So again, it depends. You could risk more. You could risk more than $3,000 a trade. You can risk whatever you feel comfortable risking based on the size of your account. But it's all about getting the momentum. Okay, it's all about getting in and getting out of the right placement. Shorting gives me an itch, though. It absolutely does. And people get scared, they panic, they short. Most traders, most retail traders prefer to go long. I don't know why this is other than the fact that people just understand the concept of going long more than shorting. So people, they gravitate towards the concept of going long or buying low and selling high and they get that or they don't have their account set up to short with their broker. But the fact is you can buy a put and have a cash account, an options account. You do not need a margin account to do options. So you can actually learn how to do this and do it. And it's something that, again, most people will always prefer to go long. It's just the way that it is. But when you think about it, and again, you understand it and you assess it, you can say, yeah, this makes a lot of sense. I can understand that. I can see why the moves go fast. This was another one we did Friday the 15th. This was a put. We did the 442 spies. This was so cheap. This was the biggest trade that we had in last month. Why? I was early. I was early in this with the sell-off. Great price. Cost was $1.25 to buy one put of the spy, 440 tunes. And again, sold at 10. This is an advanced trader risk, 87.50. This was a 700% return investment and this trade continued even the last day. But this was an insane trade. And if you took a beginner risk in this, I'm gonna show you the beginner risk before I go to this, you could have risked $1,000 and made seven grand on this trade. So when people tell me they need this much money and this much money, you need money to trade and you need to know what to do. You can have some with a million dollars or they don't know what to do. They have no idea how to train. They have no system. They're gonna lose it all. So knowing what to do is more important than having a big account and I cannot stress that enough because if you have a small account you really need to know what to do. You can't afford to lose, quite frankly. So this was an awesome trade. So let's go back and look at it. This one here, 18, no that was a 15th, I'm sorry, 442. How many red bulls? I never had a red bull in my life because I think it has sugar in it. I do drink coffee in the morning. I do drink coffee in the morning. You have to have a certain account size of day trade options. You need $2,000 to open up an options account. If you want to day trade options you can open up an account as a cash account, John. A cash account will allow you to be in and out of trades without having the requirements of a margin account with $25,000. If you don't know anything about that, John, then you need to contact your broker and ask those questions. You do need $25,000 at a retail broker to take margin trades where we were doing like the Marvell. If you're taking 2,000 shares of something otherwise you're gonna be restricted and I'm not sure what the restrictions are. Five trades in eight days or something like that. But you can be active in an options account if it is set up correctly, John, with less than $25,000. Yes, you can. It's called a cash account and you must contact your broker about that. I'm not a broker. So you need to talk to your broker. Let me just see here. I think that's it. Okay. How long does it usually take after you're open for option prices to adjust to the gap down? If you mean, first of all, you can take a trade. You can wait a couple of minutes if that's what you mean.  Okay, where were we? Here, 440, okay, 915. Here. Closed here, gap down, fell, boom, drop. So again, that was the one that we were in very there early before, okay, before the Fed. And again, the trade was never down. The trade was never down by the time that I called it. So you could have held it. You could have got out of half. I mean, there's just so many, you could have done whatever you wanted to. It was never down. There was nothing to do. Again, this is a great example of letting something work. I said that earlier. Let trades work. Part of the reasons that people don't let trades work is they're so scared that they're gonna lose. If you're scared, you're gonna lose in a trade. Number one, you have too much risk on the trade. Or number two, you have no idea what you're doing. If you have 100% conviction in your system and your strategy, you will not be worked up and mad and upset and scared and stressed out and panicking and worried if you're in a trade and it's negative. Or you have too much risk on, okay? So how do I find the best short stale? How do I make the picks? I use the rating system. Someone's asked me about this earlier. I think it was Oliver. I happen to have a good intuition because I do. It's something that I've developed as a human being on this planet. But that being said, I also have only done gaps for the last 15 years. And this is the only thing that I will ever do because I don't need to do anything else. I'll just add more size to my positions. So the fact is that when you wanna develop your intuition, particularly in reference to trading, you need to stay and do one thing. Oh, you're never gonna get good at it. If you can't focus on one thing, then you're never gonna get good at it. And that is another problem or what I've noticed, I should say from teaching people for a very long time is a mistake that they make. People wanna jump around from thing to thing to thing. And they never develop that sixth sense. They never develop that intuition because they honestly just don't stay doing one thing. I've been doing gaps for a very, very, very long time. So, yes, I do have that extra oomph, but that is something to do with the system. That's me. That is the benefit of trading with me though. I will tell you that. There's a trading video that's on my YouTube channel, Other Room. You can go watch it. It was a couple of weeks ago. The market, we were short. We were in a trade, we were short. I said, stay with it, stay with it, stay with it. We're gonna drop 100% convictions, stay with it. It was, I got it on video. It was a huge day, the market fell. And we were down in the trade until it went. And it was huge. And if you killed it, you didn't get the money. Again, the whole idea is you gotta know what to do. If you know what to do, you will let trades play out. I'm doing the weekly inspirations. Do I have a trade inverse that ETFs know, but you could if you want. I don't feel the need to do that. You're wishing all your trades worked. Well, not all my trades worked. That's impossible. I don't think that's like a ridiculous statement, Sean. If your expectation is that you're never gonna lose, this is the wrong business for you. You have to account for the fact that some trades will lose. So why do you think I put a stop in? So, I mean, if every trade I took worked, I would never need to use a stop. That's not trading. If you're looking for something that you're never gonna lose, trading is not for you. Trading involves risk. When you take a trade, you have to assess your risk. Some trades I take lose. However, more trades I take win than lose. So that's why I do it, and that's why I make money. You have to assess what you have and make a determination. So if I take a trade and it loses, I feel pretty confident the next trade is gonna work. And that's how you move forward. Again, that's how you have a positive attitude, which unfortunately a lot of people, like I said, don't because they don't have a good system. So let's get back to this. The golden gap system follows large institutional money. Gaps are created with large institutional money. That's what makes the gap in the first place. So the professional gaps that happen and play out in stocks are formed by one thing at one thing only, large institutional money. Therefore, you need a way that will help you pick the correct direction to play the gap and to confirm that the large money will flow with it. So by following the 26 point rating system, you have a daily blueprint to follow to pick the best gap. The system is a blueprint to help you pinpoint institutional money in a stock, in the gap, in the market. And again, it is about taking calculated risk. No system has 100% wins. But if anyone says that, they're full of it, okay? Some trades are gonna lose that you even take with me. You have to account for that. You want a system that has a good high win ratio and then some trades will go very big. The fact is that if you're not somebody that's a risk taker, trading isn't for you, trading isn't for everyone, because some people can't afford to take risks. But if you have money and you love doing this and you wanna work for yourself, it's a great job. That's my whole point from the beginning. How many trades a day do you take in the system? It depends how many good gaps we get. In non-earning season, if we not as many gaps, we're not as active. Earning season begins Friday, typically stocks do gap on earnings. I don't know if they're good or not till I rate them till I see them. Again, I told you the banks start on Friday, but I don't know if they gap up. I don't know if they gap down and I don't know if they're gonna be good gaps until I rate them and I won't know until Friday morning in the pre-market when I get up. But earning season is the busiest, busiest time. There's four quarterly earnings season in order to train and those are the times that we have a lot of things to do. So I will do five options a day if they're there. I will do 10. I'm typically doing one day trade though, a day per day. How long did it take for me to realize I had faith in my system? It took me three years to figure it all out. So anyways, I'm looking for the 26 points. You follow the system. The reigning system is a checklist. The checklist tells you what to look for in the price of the stock to read direction, to correctly know which stock to short and when you follow the system. It's based on common sense. Like I talked about this whole idea of shorting and the panic. This is, it makes sense. Okay, you're shorting the panic. Now again, I get this question about small accounts where talk about this, a put is a short. You buy the put, you sell it. You can open up a cash options account if you have less than $25,000. If you don't know how to do that, you must contact your broker, okay? This was another spy trade we did here. I see what time it is. I'm just gonna go quickly through this. We did this on the 13th. We did the 445s. This was this, this was the same sell off. We just did, I was just doing multiple strikes. Sometimes if I see something good, I'll do, I'll just keep doing different strikes and take it all the way down to get the big move. And again, this was another nice trade that she could have taken and bought one for 300 bucks. You know, it was a good trade. Anyways, what should you expect to earn an average of one to one? And then I wanna talk briefly about this. I did an email the other day when I was writing about this because I was thinking about talking to somebody. I'm sure you've heard the same. Pennywise pound foolish. Far too many traders think like this. What do I mean? They get out of trades with pennies because they're worried about losing dollars. They take cheaper price stocks because they think they will make more money trading low float stocks because they could take size. You know, 5,000 shares or something. So they wanna trade something that's worth a dollar. It's a bad idea. They pay for bad and inexpensive classes or subscriptions because they wanna use their money to trade instead of paying for quality education. Again, someone that has a small account, they really can't afford to lose. So it's even more important for that person to get an education and follow someone. And again, people go to subscription services for free in trials and they take trades blind, have no idea what they're doing, no idea what the strategy is and they lose money. And people won't trade expensive stocks because they think they're like something like this, fine. They say, well, that's too expensive. I don't wanna take 50 shares of that or I don't wanna take 100 shares of that. And then they miss out on huge moves like we've seen in the market. And also people put the majority of money in a trading account. It's been very little in education when it should be the opposite. You should spend more in education and quality education and subscriptions to get the trades to maximize your current cash if you have a set amount. This is just one of the general things I've noticed again. I've had the business for 11 years now that I've been teaching people. I've seen it all. And people even with a lot of money act like this. Pennywise and pound foolish. So think about this as food for thought. I'm describing you, Alex. Well, again, do something different. Do something different like I said earlier. Do something different. Starting today, break up the monotony of move the energy in your favor. What is money? Money is energy. That's what it is. When you're attracting a lot of money into your life and you're successful, things are working great. If you're static and not willing to spend and you're tight with your money and you're worried about your finances and you're in fear about money, how are you allowing the flow of success and wealth to come into your life and opportunities? You're not. You have to open yourself up to the possibility of opportunities and you have to be willing to spend money to make money and that goes for paying for classes and it also goes for taking trades and taking risk. Sometimes if you're willing to take risks you have no idea how great things can be. This isn't about taking risks for risk sake. This is about taking calculated risk, okay? That is where you have to use your head, okay? And again, here are a few questions. But you need a plan of action to train. For me, it's a 26 points. It has a high probability of directional bias for the entire day. I'm looking for that. A big move, early confirmation of the bias between 9.30 a.m. and 10 and precise entries will follow through and a good risk to reward potential. So if you come and wanna learn my system you would follow it with me. It's a 26 point professional gap rating system. The purpose of the system is to help you evaluate which gap to trade each morning using a checklist. The checklist tells you what to trade and when. And again, using the 26 points which is following the institutional money. But this is again, you learn it and you could do it yourself.  So the class is called the Golden Gap course. It's a class on how to find, pick and play professional bearish gaps. I prefer to short. We mostly short. And again, you can buy puts. The class tuition is $69.99. Class for October only at three more classes this year. October is 21st and 22nd, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern time classes online. You can be anywhere in the world and take it. And I'm doing a fall special only through this Sunday. Sunday is the 15th. If you sign up by Sunday, you will receive the stocks for show live trading when free through the end of 2024. That's great. That's a huge offer. The options newsletter, this is basically all my trades for the rest of 2023 and 2024. And you look at the market report for the rest of this year and into the end of 2024. Same price of the class. Everyone pays the same. It's $69.99. The deadline for this special is the Sunday before the class, which is 10.15. And again, like I was saying, proper education is important. I think what happens is people take classes that are not good, then they get down in education again. They go negative. But the fact is there is some good education out there. My class is 100% worth it. And you're going to learn a lot. It's like somebody said it's a, this is somebody's had a long time ago, that my class is like a fire hose because it's so much information in two days. We have a one hour break for lunch, but it is full on, you know? So you will need your red bull whoever said that, you know, you will need your red bull to listen to me talk for 16 hours. But it will be well worth it. And again, I'm trying to do specials like this to help people, the support of taking my trains, even if you're new, it really, really helps. Any questions at all from anyone? Yeah, if you want to trial for the room, email MelissaTheStocksWish.com for Thursday and Friday. Tomorrow's Thursday, Friday. Again, if you're interested in the class, email me for a trial. The special ends Friday. Any other questions? The stats you're talking about for the year? This was the, here was the room, wrote stats and here's the option stats. Training room is run by me five days a week and will always be. Again, someone had mentioned to me on an email, do I do everything? Yes. I mean, again, I invented the system, but I didn't invent it to teach anyone. I invented it for myself. And I think that's one of the reasons it's so good. I didn't do this with the thought process of ever starting a business or ever teaching anyone everything I know, but I started to run a room and I realized I had a voice and then I liked talking and then that's how it developed into me appearing on television and so on and so forth. Like I said, go out into your day today. There's one takeaway. Stock Swish Show, tip of the day today is, break up the monotony in your life. Do something different today. And open yourself up to the possibilities that you can be successful and you can attract wealth and success and prosperity into your life because that's the only way that it is gonna happen. All right, thank you so much, Melissa, for being with us. Thank you.


So, this panel is about business transformation. And these are two of our friends, two friends of mine. And as a nine-year-old that's the same age as my nine-year-old, and they play together. And so that's how we actually know each other quite well through that. They have the same birthday, so we've even shared birthday parties. But, beyond that, Jonathan was a prior son President and CEO did that through its transition as it got acquired by Oracle. So, some interesting stories on that sort of transformation. And Jonathan started a new company called CareZone. And I've been able to watch from the sidelines how CareZone has developed and have learned a tremendous amount watching how Jonathan's navigated creating a new business to meet the needs of a community. And to watch how it went from a different initial idea to one that's much more powerful. So thrilled to have him here. And then Victoria Hale, too. I think many of you may know Victoria. And by the way, Jonathan sits on the MTM advisory board. Victoria sits on the CTSI board. And Victoria started One World Health. So One World Health is a, say, non-profit company, basically. Is that fair to say? Pharmaceutical company. Non-profit pharmaceutical company. And was started with some great ideas and some initial core funding from Gates and then has evolved over time in terms of its business model. Victoria, once it was running beautifully, she left and went to Gates for a little while and now has started a new company, also a non-profit pharmaceutical company, called Medicine 360 that's working on products for reproductive health in women. And Victoria has been very useful to us in thinking about models for, you know, where did non-profits belong? Where do for-profits belong? How can they work together? Where are those gaps? And thinking very creatively about those boundaries. So I'm thrilled to have them here and we're going to just talk about, they're going to tell us, give us some insights and then we're going to just chat about business transformation and how it might be useful to us. So thank you guys for coming. All right, so again, thanks you guys. Did you both get lunch? We did. We've been bed and watered. Yeah. Okay, good. So I thought it would be good to start by just giving each of you a chance to sort of tell your story and pick whatever, I mean their story, your whole stories are too long, but pick the key parts that might be informative to a group that's thinking about how to move from a more entitlement based approach to one that's built more on a sustainability model. So I don't know, Victoria, do you want to start? Sure. It goes first or it comes from who you are as an individual, right? Where your spirit is derived from. What your character is about. And I learned pretty early that I'm quite entrepreneurial. I'm quite spirited. I'm quite opinionated and I want to, I love making medicines, but I want to do them in the way that I want to do them. And I spent a lot of time looking for outlets for that and didn't find what satisfied me, which was to provide important medicines for people who otherwise are not big targets, right? Big customers to use your words. And to figure out how to get to them. One way to do that is to do it through a nonprofit model where you have different drivers and different outcomes. But there are limits to that model. As you know, you're in an academic center and nonprofit institutions. For-profit pathways are limited as well. So my journey has been for more than 12 years now to create something that is neither of those. To state and demonstrate to others and bring others along to say that we have some false dualities and false dichotomies. That we actually don't have to choose between what is a nonprofit and a for-profit. That's IRS's categorization of it and it's tax law and it's complicated. But we as individuals, if we're really about our mission and our purpose, then the exact dimensions and characteristics and structures of our business model are something that we can figure out as we move along. That they're really part of our toolkit, this business model structure. And that we should keep our eye on what is our real goal, our real purpose, our real mission. And then figure out the business as we go along. And hire some really smart attorneys who are willing to be on the edge and you have to have some money for that. So not to settle, I suppose my, I'm not sure that was a story, Clay, but it's an invitation and an inspiration and a calling to say don't settle for what are the obvious, right? Structures and boundaries that breaking through and creating a middle space, let's say, or a space that's just outside of those two is something that's very important to do. And just because you talk to lots of people and none of them tells you that that is possible doesn't mean it isn't true. It just means it may be a little lonely for a while. Great, thanks. Well, that's a far more profound answer than I'll provide. So I've only ever been in the for-profit world. And for me, and I think one of the things that's very motivating in being able to spend time with folks like you, the most successful businesses that I've ever been a part of are those that marry an individual's passion with a market opportunity. And the good news is your market opportunities to go save lives, that's fairly motivating. You don't find that frequently in the for-profit world. And so what I've spent my career trying to do is, one, recognize that very early on when I was a part of a little startup. And then through successive acquisitions or just being a part of a new organization, just consistently realizing that the most productivity tends to go along with really smart people who are highly motivated by what they think is a great outcome, not just simply a financial outcome, but whether it's a spiritual outcome or an environmental outcome or a health outcome. And that's kind of led me to what I do now, which is I was walking along with my 11-year-old, who Clay also knows, who is not to be blamed for the apparent injury to his left arm. And he asked me, you know, a couple weeks ago, Dad, if you could have any job, what would you do? And I looked at him and I said, I would do what I'm doing right now. I mean, every day I wake up, I love what I do and I'll tell you a little bit about that at some point, I'm sure. And his response was, no, seriously. I mean, if you get any job. So I think it's very important to, you know, that's a part of personal sustainability, which is, no matter what you're doing, if you care a lot about it, the economics tend to work out. You tend to figure it out because you're so passionate about it. The odds are good you've done a good job on behalf of your end consumers. And, you know, to what Clay said before, capitalism has this really neat way of kind of resolving loss of conflicts because they come down to, is there any value in what you're doing? And if the answer is yes, then you'll find a way to catch it. Yeah, well, you make a really interesting point about people being motivated by what they do. So on the faculty side, we are actually in some ways competing with the standard vision of what faculty members should be doing and what many of them are motivated to do. So in essence, each one acts, you know, you've got your little lab and acts like its own little isolated startup with it setting its own goals and all of that. And what we're asking people to do is step out of that and think about, well, how can we make the whole ecosystem better for not just you, but all these other faculty at the institution so it's interesting because that complicates, you know, how we engage. We have to bring something else too to say, okay, this, and I think that's too why we focus on creating transforming models too of support. It's not just about providing a service, it's about how can we do that better and create a model for the world in doing it. Yeah. But if there, yeah, I mean, it gets... But I think one of the, so when Minnie and I were talking yesterday, I think one of the complicating things when you're talking about business models specifically is business models are rarely something you want to, you know, delegate to the leaf nodes because then you end up with how many people are in the room, 150 or so people, and you end up with 150 business models which is completely un-understandable to your end consumer. On the other hand, ideas around business models are something you want to collect from the leaf nodes because they know most about what the end value is and they can articulate in ways that maybe the trunk of the tree won't understand and create ideas and create opportunities. So I think that the concept you were talking about before of having to develop new business models and think creatively about how you do it, you know, in some sense you want to do that all the time, but on the other hand, when you actually make decisions on how you'll do things differently, you probably don't want that to happen 150 different ways or you'll end up with chaos. Right, yeah. Can I add as well, in my experience, it's not just people inside an organization such as this who would want to do that, your goals would be that, but there are philanthropists as well and funders who want to do things differently. In the global aid community, there's quite a bit of frustration with how many resources have been applied to problems in global health and how little real forward movement or success or change there really is. So there are many, let's say, beginnings of acceptance and understanding of what that means. So what do we do about it? And one of the major initiatives that I believe is coming forward is a belief that aid itself and charity itself creates some problems and alters the environment that you intend to move in one direction. And it disturbs natural social entrepreneurs that are there and other dynamics. So thinking about models that we build is not just something that we should do and sustainability, but that funders are already thinking about and understanding and obviously people who we intend to benefit are as well. They're living in. You've obviously been very successful at bringing together philanthropists or other foundations, whatever, into your vision. So do you want to just talk about how you began that process? Where did you even start? Was the nugget of the idea yours? Was it changed in any way through your discussions with others?  What did you give up in taking their money? Yeah, so at One World Health we worked primarily on three programs, one in Leishman Isis, one in malaria and one in cholera. And they were about $50 million each, so $150 million total. That's a lot of funding first. So initially it was, well, we'll give you a little bit of money and we'll see how it goes. So nine grants in total to that amount. By the end, really, I had given up some autonomy and governance in the organization. That was something that I knew would happen at that level of funding that I think is appropriate to happen. One thing that I didn't want to give up to look inside myself, take some time off and understand what would be next for me is control. I can say I'm a very controlling person. I know that about me now. And I have a vision and I bring a team together as you do in corporations and you want to empower them to really move forward and learn. Actually, so change that strategic plan that was the basis of this first or the funding that you have. So moving with change and taking funders with you, balancing control and control of what? Is it control of the details of every day and stepping forward? Or is it control of the larger vision? And who is leading and who should be empowered? Whose voice should be the loudest? It's something that we all need to understand and accept and you make deals. There's a quote that's often heard in my household which is there's a fine line between helpful and controlling. I wonder who says that in your house. Both of us. I mean, having gone through I'd never raised money in a private company up until very recently, up until about 60 days ago because I'd been in a little start-up that had we had no choice. We had no money, no one would dare give us any money and so we had to figure it out on our own and we had lots of sacrifices and that ended up working out very well but it was definitely slower and harder and there was a whole lot of learning that went on and I then ended up being the leader of a big public company and public financings for the most part are very straightforward, they're very transparent because there's a market. Everybody knows what the price of money is and you have lots of people bid on supplying you financing and there's not a whole lot of change that occurs in general in large public financings. There are when you go public and then for the first time ever I just went through the process of raising money for a start-up and it was fascinating. I suspect it's not dissimilar to raising money from foundations which is there are lots of egos involved not just your own. Your first pitch is your worst pitch so don't set up your best opportunity as we did. And you learn a lot about yourself and you also see where those individuals are going to want to play a role and again I mean this quote just kept bringing through my head as I was listening to these people thinking wow you really want to be helpful and translation, you really want to be controlling. But in a way as victorious that's a healthy thing because often times they can be helpful and you can find other very interesting feedback or input or ideas that you wouldn't have had on your own. Very interesting. I mean the other place where that plays out for us is how we work with the other existing organizations within the institution that are funded through the chancellor's office or the schools and we have to think carefully about how we work together when is there a you know and usually the answer is that the sense of controlling is overblown that working together you benefit much more than you do and I think you can also tend to filter out the folks who really are going to be kind of negatively controlling they tend to surface fairly quickly and in some fairly obvious ways and you just say well thank you very much for your interest you're not you know although you were among the pool of highly qualified candidates you weren't the top. Right. So John I think you're what you went through with care zone is instructive you know where you started with that idea for that company and how it evolved over time and why it evolved over time to what it's become. So first of all the care zone is a web service and it's designed for all of you when you when it comes time for you to take care of your parents or take care of your children where do you do that today probably wouldn't want to do that on Facebook and if you're like me you're doing that through emails and Google Docs and trying to write stuff down and stuff in your desk drawer but if you have someone in need in your house or in your family where is it that you create a profile manage documents about them information about them contacts if you have to share them with somebody keep track of what medicines they might be on or what therapies or keep a journal and that's basically what care zone is it's a private place to take care of somebody and it was born because I had a child 11 years ago who had some issues that my wife and I were constantly tracking typically in her upper right-hand drawer and then we'd be on the road and we wouldn't have access to it or then a caregiver, a babysitter would come over and we'd want them to have access there was no way to do that simultaneously I had a brother who has lots and lots of complicated health issues with his family and so we spent some time talking about it and it always kind of lingered in the back of my mind it would be great to go solve that problem but there was a much more immediate problem which is actually one of the first ways that I got to know Clay my wife invited one of her best friends to move into an in-law unit in our house she was going through a really hard time and she just needed a space to kind of get back on her feet she's 46 years old and a month after moving in she had a catastrophic stroke and she's 46 years old so I ended up talking to Clay about this on a no doubt at a birthday party and he said something which really struck me and my partner who had been trying to figure out how do we go start a business and he said you know the number one cause of stroke is you just didn't take your high blood pressure medicine and so Walter and I looked at one another and said surely we can make a difference with that I mean how hard would it be to remind people to take their medicines and bump up in adherence surely that would have a big impact and so we started actually working with Clay to figure out how we would go do that and for a whole variety of reasons that was a really good thing that we will again go back to it was just hard to wrap a business around it and so we took a step back and said let's go actually solve the broader problem first before we go you know set on the more narrow problem of now that we know what medicines you're taking how do we help you do a better job of staying adherent to them the grand shift for me was I didn't know anything about consumer marketing when I started Carezone I had nothing about it at all I've been running big enterprise infrastructure businesses and this was like trying to sell the moms over the web it's a very different world a very different set of skills but I care deeply about the problem everyone that works in our little company has a very motivating story about why they want to work here based on a problem that they're trying to solve with their families and if you've got that nucleus of power you can go do anything I mean I look at the team that we have now they're so productive and so fast and so efficient because they're all solving problems that matter to them and they know that will matter to others and so organizations change all the time I looked at Clay's slides from the back every leader has to put those slides up at some point it's time for us to change we're going to come back and he's probably going to give the same speech they would take a Colorado nothing about Colorado and change is just if only the world would stop changing then we wouldn't have to but change is it's an ingredient in life so you've got to take advantage of it good perfect sorry I'm distracted I just I realize I don't have a copy of the agenda so I can't remember when how much more time we have so thank you so you better keep this job so Victoria so you and I had a great conversation I don't know a couple weeks ago about the sort of dance that you play and I you know it got me thinking a lot about how we tend to work within sort of these expectations of what we are right so we're an academic center and so we do this but we don't do this we're a nonprofit you don't make money you don't pay people well could you just talk a little bit about that to this group because I think that some of the warnings that you put out there are worth us hearing and thinking through as well so we talked about a few things can you give me a few words to help me remember we talked about so many things but it was the issue of when nonprofits start to act in part like for-profits and the risks that come with that so in particular you sent me that book to read Uncharitable by Dan Pallotta is a great book we'll start with that about lessons that were learned through many of you will remember when nonprofits suddenly started to have very high level fundraising events, long bike rides or runs or these national days for breast cancer or whatever the organization that is responsible for bringing these forward was actually a for-profit entity and you can read the book but that was a no go not because it was illegal but because it didn't look good it didn't look good that a for-profit company should take a significant chunk of this 10 or 100 times amount of funding that the charity had before this event should take a big piece of that so how do you as a nonprofit address these market failures in the world or market gaps if you're not allowed to bring in the best consultants pay the best salaries retain the best fundraisers et cetera et cetera and we really need to ask ourselves how impactful we can be if we don't have access to the best resources which is what Jonathan needs to be able to have access to and has much more freedom I would argue to do and expectations therefore of you what are our expectations even if those are our boundary conditions and our limitations what are our limits of ourselves and what can society expect nonprofits to do and if we understand that there are limits with for-profits there are limits with nonprofits how about trying to take the best of both about trying to move forward in that way and this is where another issue that comes up is how many people can hold that in their head there are many people who are interested in hybrids there are many people who are interested in taking the best of for-profit and a nonprofit when it comes down to it it's really hard to do so there are issues with board management there are issues with funders One World Health helped to form a for-profit company that's spun out of UC Berkeley called Amras and One World Health was not allowed to have an equity position or to have a board seat in this company for reasons that we can talk about later if that's important just because of the view of what a nonprofit should do and what's reasonable it wasn't illegal but what it looks like this comes up a lot too at UCSF so we're definitely in the position now where we're creating entities that are that are better as for-profits and how do we manage that and we're pretty restricted by rules of the university in terms of how those handoffs occur but as we create a larger and larger variety of entities there's this temptation to manage them in-house and then how does that work if they're too successful and it's getting more and more complicated Yeah But I think the same actually occurs in the private sector as well because you have one business and then for whatever reason you end up with a whole series of assets which might be valuable but they can't be managed by the organization that's there because they don't fit into the strategic vision the worst of all possible worlds the success of that business would actually erode your relationships with your current customers I mean one way that a lot of companies are running into this now is they're looking at their patent pools and saying hey we got a lot of IP who would we use that against well jeez we'd use it against our customers Yeah So let's go spin off those patents Let somebody else do it Let somebody else do the dirty work Interesting You made the transition from okay let's solve the taking year any hypertensives to well let's solve this core problem of how we share documents in a private space for health you went back to people and you asked them what is it that you really need to you want to talk about that because that's something else that we don't do as much as we could So we you know my favorite answer to a problem is based on sample size one which is I go ask Sophie my wife and then she gives me an answer and that's our default answer unless we have data and that actually keeps decisions really really fast but I don't like those answers because they're sample size one and Sophie lives in San Francisco and I'll actually I'll give you a great example of this we're looking at ways to incent people to sign up for our service you can just go to carezone.com and sign up for the service and there's no billing right now and we were trying to figure out ways to do it and I said to Sophie hey Sophie if you sign up and recommend it to your friends how would you feel if we sent you five dollars for having one of your friends sign up and she said that's disgusting I would never do that that's the most offensive thing I can think of and well that's because she doesn't need the five bucks you go talk to somebody who might want the five dollars you'll end up with a very different answer so we try to make decisions based on data and not on Sophie and we try to be very clear we are doing one or the other but our decision process and one of the wonderful things about the internet is it enables you to connect with and talk to a huge population of people reasonably quickly and as we do that when you sit and listen to them they end up telling you personal stories and starting to articulate market requirements that they may not be able to describe in exact implementation detail we give you a rough idea of what they're actually looking to do and as that happens you know now that we're kind of this is one of the things that I love about a consumer business versus an enterprise business typically in an enterprise business if you want to get data from the marketplace you hold a golf event and you bring 200 CIOs in from across the world and then after lots of alcohol you find out with only those 200 people care about and unfortunately your market is 200,000 it's very difficult to gather data in our world we have 20 suggestions a day and we know what people care about so there's actually data that we can use to make decisions about how we run our business and that process that connection back to customers ends up being not just good in the instant but then when you do what your customers want they pay you more and they get even happier because we don't do 9 out of 10 things we think we ought to do we're not doing them we've only had resources and time to do one and so we get lots of feedback constantly about all the things we don't do but then we actually tell people we heard them and we say thank you for the feedback and it's like they're happier so that process of just listening and engaging is in and of itself very beneficial we've done that so we've listened to you all the people who come to our retreats but also the people who are engaged in CTSI so we have systems we set aside some of our resources to go to projects that are actually from anybody on the campus it just ends up that people who know us better tend to put those ideas forward but we don't often go down to the students and say what is it that you want sometimes we do that we get feedback from courses they're taking but not what's missing and we don't do that for participants in research how is your experience today we do that for patients but not so much so I think there are some lessons there to think about how we might expand the areas in which we get input well and I think to the extent that you have a broader audience than you could meet so if you're dealing with a thousand students or ten thousand students the odds are good you're not going to be able to touch or talk to every one of them but you know just again good news you have the internet too here right here we do just making it a core part of what you do that no matter what you've done the link is available to send you feedback even unstructured you just read through what people are talking about you'll learn things you never learned before yeah it's a great suggestion we do that for some of our internet properties I'm using that fancy word that I hear my folks use but not for others so yeah I'm sure we could do that much much more useful you can always ignore the advice but at least you have it and I imagine you too Victoria it's a similar you wasn't just your idea this is what we need so medicines 360 was born into a community a community with an anonymous donor a funder who funds lots of reproductive health and reproductive justice causes and organizations even policy work and one of the major takeaways for us is that this is really a different way of doing business and particularly after your medicines or technologies are developed there's marketing that is top down and we have the vision of what this market is and we're going to tell you and we're going to maybe even create a disease and then convince you that you need a cure for this disease it's something that the pharmaceutical industry does very well with contraception it's not a disease and we want women to seek what they want and through trusted community providers so partnerships with providers is the way all this is going to happen particularly in developing countries but even in the United States with the US public sector and communicating with partners even you talked a little bit about partners in terms of between schools or institutes but we haven't talked about the value we haven't named it you were speaking of it Jonathan but the value of how do you value those 20 people who gave you input last hour in our particular question that you asked how do you value and the ability to have an incredibly honest and open and trusting relationship with partners who are going to make all the difference in terms of really getting to vision and impact and then relationships with customers and you know end users as well so there are many types of engagements and information and many levels of communication that are all very valuable so how do I would encourage you to look at all of those different types and how do you value them and you may have been giving them away for a long time that's what you do and to revisit at this time is that really the best way to have impact the software industry has been great about giving things away and that's a beautiful way to launch products and initiatives and it's incredible but considering where we come from in academia and in science in particular share it all right we want replication we want it to carry forward I think sometimes we need to step back to these very basic assumptions and ask is this really should it always be like that should everything we do be like that what is value and is the greatest chance of achieving your vision and mission accomplished by giving it away or by selling it or by there's not just A or Z right what are the names for the ways in between yeah in fact you couldn't do what you do if you didn't sell the products of the work right no one would invest no one would produce the drug no one would distribute it so definitely in everything we do no matter how clear the mission is up front this is what we're trying to do ultimately there has to be some return to but to Victoria's point I mean it's not like the software industry happily went down the process of getting to new business models I mean customers didn't like it any change for the most part change is just hard change for customers, change for vendors you know take the time with really smart people and sit down and say let's go re-examine what value we actually think we're delivering who should be paying for it or where the natural you know who's getting the advantage you ought to be paying for who is currently paying for it and how do we begin to kind of move those things around again if what you're doing has value someone will pay for it's just a matter of you know identifying who it is when we told you guys that we were going to be talking about information you both bristled a little bit and said don't forget about your mission so do you want to just why did you have that we don't want to lose our mission that's crucial so where did that response come from what's the warning that we need to take away and we have to be mostly I mean we really have to be about our mission that's why we're here so how do we preserve that and still think about being sustainable so in the non-profit sector there's a phrase called mission drift and it is perhaps it's similar there you go you go where the money is and you deviate from what is your mission if your mission is large enough and perhaps it is here that it's an umbrella that can hold many different right specific objectives and targets and goals and programs with a lot of non-profit organizations that's not the case and you actually need to focus focusing while you're adhering to your mission is sometimes a difficult thing to do for many organizations that is many really end up out there and their effort to grow bigger thinking bigger is better rather than partnering so how often will you become big right we're at a university here that's part of the state of California you know how big is good and how big is not good right and how much is partnership if you're not going to get big how are you going to achieve your mission right and your vision is that through partnership what are the other ways to do it without becoming so big and therefore needing so many resources and perhaps needing to creep or drift with your mission I think in the private sector world it's a little bit clear because your principal objective is to maximize shareholder value and so you know there's rarely or that's not to say so when you're moving toward something because it's a bigger market for the most part you're going to look at scans at that and say that was done on the other hand there are all kinds of things and I guess my response to the kind of coming back to but what's your mission what is it you're trying to accomplish revenue generation is not your mission and I guarantee you in this room there are enough really bright ideas and really good services and great intellectual property that you could go set up lots of different entities they probably go make a lot of money they would alienate you from your core objective to violate all kinds of principles or brands that you hold dear so it's really trying to look at what is the objective you're trying to accomplish first and foremost and now what are the enablers you can use from the business model as opposed to what new business models could we come up with I mean the one that I've been spending way too much of my time on is patent litigation you all create intellectual property go create a bunch of patents you could sue a lot of people you could make way more than the 50 million just on one suit alone probably not really it doesn't help you progress your mission it might help you let's talk Eric we would stop being friends after that yeah I mean actually another good example so we at CareZone people share it's there I mean we don't have access to the data people are talking about the problems that their families have and every problem has some family issue one way or another it's just aging it's development doesn't have to be health related and we had a large medical supply company come to us and say hey you actually know among your customers the people who would be most likely to buy our supplies so why don't you just give us access to them and we'll pay you just gobs and gobs of money and that was like a five second conversation he's like you must be kidding today that would have meant a lot more money but you know that would have meant a lot fewer customers because who wants to share private family information with a medical supply company and a pharmaceutical company it's just that's not that's not how people manage their families yeah great well this has been a great discussion I want to open it up to to the audience and see if there are any questions out there yeah Eric yeah is he the lawyer? no he's not a lawyer he's a techie yeah I think we're about a few times either in finding a good source of income or having other institutions look at us and say hey oh you need to anticipate you need to know that it's going to happen and you need to plan for it and you need to manage it and you need to be thick skinned but have the organization above you in particular very welcoming accepting and supportive of regardless of the turbulence that you experience on this journey that this is where you need to go but you have to know that it's going to come because you're leading you're on that leading edge and I guess I'd give you a related answer so we're about to go off and do a bunch of hiring and I've been in a very big organization and I'm in a very tiny organization and the person who's going to go off and do some hiring is like well I'm ready to go I got the ideas of who I want to hire and I got some money I'm going to go make it happen I said no actually I want you to write down based on what's on the wall I'm going to hire everyone in the company so they know what our values are so we know who's going to fit and who's not going to fit and they're like well why do we want to waste the time doing that it's like well if you don't have your values well understood now then you're going to end up with a banner ad for a medical supply company on a UCSF property and that's probably not going to fly because that starts to stay in your brand so I would number one hope that you ruffle some feathers because if you're not then you're not pushing hard enough because I don't think you want to ruffle the ethics feathers you don't want to ruffle the business practices feathers and there's all kinds of feathers you want to leave just let them lie but I would hope I would motivate you to go ruffle feathers that's where the fun comes in look at that he's upset he must not want to pay for what he's getting for free and there are communities of social entrepreneurs who've been trying to blend the worlds of for-profit and non-profit and make things happen that are in the same place so you're not alone doing this but going to a different sector perhaps for lessons learned and communicating and spending some time hanging out a little bit getting to know each other sharing you're not alone we're not alone sorry not to over answer the question but one of the hot things right now in the VC community are double bottom line businesses and they're the businesses that are doing good for the world and are going to do well by their shareholders and one of the financiers who joined us we picked him because of that so all of his portfolio businesses are things that are good for the planet and they'll be wildly successful so I think you are highly aligned already just a question around this hybrid model for Victoria so private for-profit firm is responsible to accountable to its shareholders and non-profits accountable to benefit a defined community so how do you define accountability in the context of a hybrid who do you actually who are you accountable good question that's how you set it up so medicine 360 is a 501c3 organization and we've spun out and fully own a for-profit entity a C-corp correct it's a wholly owned subsidiary when we get to 49% we take investors for partial ownership then we have an issue cross 50% what does that mean so right now it's pretty clean there are more complex models so the answer is our parent is the non-profit organization and we have a for-profit below it as the child but we're partnering with a for-profit commercial entity to market our product in the United States and managing that medicine 360 as a non-profit we'll manage that and partner to the after for details okay great good well this has been a great discussion thank you very much these are sort of not things we normally talk about in the script and perspectives that we don't discuss we don't think about so I really appreciate you all enlightening us about this and I hope you all I certainly learned something I hope you all did too so thank you very much for coming