Melissa Armo graduated from Gettysburg College with a BA in Philosophy and a minor in Latin and Political Science in 1994. She was employed by several banks and brokers in Pennsylvania, Florida, Arizona and New York as a mortgage broker for 17 years. She changed careers from banking to pursue a securities trading career in 2008. A self-taught day trader with over 10 years experience, Melissa especially is a trading strategy that focuses on shorting stocks that gap. Melissa also appears frequently on TV as a stock market expert. I'm going to watch Melissa on RT, America, Cheddar TV, CBS, Fox News, and Fox Business Network. Okay, Melissa, where are you broadcasting from today? Oh, really? First, first, cherry blossoms in Central Park have started to burst as a cute thing that Central Park Conservatory has re-contract where the trees are starting to blossom. Of course, there's an after that. Yes! We had some very significant data out this morning, which the market is reacting at the moment positively to. And of course, in a video, which is everyone's favorite Israeli today, which is why the market's up as well. So today, we're going to talk about what I do, what I trade, and again, how I make money in the market. So as John said, my name is Melissa Armo, I own my own company, which I started a long time ago now. So it feels like I've been trading forever, but I did do work just for a long time and I've been spending a lot of money doing that and it wasn't unlimited until it wasn't. And things changed. And one of the nice things we get about trading is that you can work from home, you can live anywhere. You can trade in a stock market from any country in the world. And specifically, what I focus on is not only momentum, but it's momentum in gaps. This is me. And again, if you have questions after the presentation today, you can call me at 99-322-GAAP. You can email me a real person and I will answer the phone or you can leave me a voice call.  You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or Skype. And I've been putting a lot of videos since on YouTube, not just stock trading videos, the room, I've been taking the room, but also things about New York. I'm going to take some videos today of Sherry Lawson's essential park and I'll post them on YouTube. So it's nice to know, to get to know the person that you're going to go learn from. Again, I'm a real person. I live in New York City and I've been here for a long time. And one of the things, again, about trading is you can live anywhere. So I choose to live in New York. I don't have to live in New York. I have people that are all across the world right now trading. Of course, the time presentation for me to trade, 9.30 Eastern time, the time zone works for me. It's difficult if maybe you're very, very far away. You've got to get up early. But then you can go on to another job or go back to bed. Do whatever you want to do. And I'm seeing the questions here as we go along. I can answer questions as I'm talking today. But getting back to what I was saying, I love what I do. Okay. If you don't love what you do, you're not going to have a happy life because you're going to do what you do for a living, to earn income for a long, long time, hours, hours, hours a day, and years, every year. So you've got to love what you do because the quality of your life is going to dramatically decrease if you hate your job and you wish and pray for the weekends or for the day to end at 5, 6, 7 o'clock at night whenever you're done. And the quality of your life increases dramatically to the better. Okay. If you actually love what you do. So I feel like I have two sides to me. I have the teacher person, the teacher Melissa, that teaches my class once a month. And then I have the trainer Melissa, which is like trading my training room. Today, for example, we shorted Boeing. We were ready and put some Boeing, the Boeing gap down today. We've been ensuring that that was a good trade. We got it in that quit. You could still be in the puts that I called in that. But again, the whole idea and the whole point of training is what? It's to make money. Whether you make money in five minutes or three minutes or two hours, again, I like fast trades. And we're going to talk about some of those today as well. So again, here we are. Hard to believe it's March. I can't even believe it. In a couple of days it'll be St. Pony's Day. So it's a good time to reflect, exchange of seasons, especially since we're starting spring. Where are you at for the year? Are you where you want to be for the year with your trading? Or do you want to make some changes? Again, this is a good time to reflect because you still have plenty of time left in the year to do a different strategy, change what you're doing, do something else. Maybe you're doing very well and you want to increase your risk. Maybe you need to back your risk off. Maybe the strategy you're doing is it working. And a lot of people right now are buying dips or buying the dip in the market, or buying the dip in strong stocks because relations to November, the market's been on a tear higher. Now, whether or not that last remains to be seen. Remains to be seen, particularly after Friday's failure in a gap up and the big, big sell-off that we sold just a couple of days ago. So it's been a very interesting year to trade. We've had a lot of opportunities. I put the stats in here for this year for the day trade room. And I risked an average of $3,000 per trade. Again, that is trades that are day trades on margin. Where I take the trade and I put it in a stop. It's a limit of our stop. It's a hard stop. I get it in and out. And if I get stopped, then I lose in the trade. I call the trades live in the room. So, so far this year, year-to-date, we're up $260,249. Again, I don't have the last two days in here. Actually, we did B.A. yesterday, too. So, we did B.A. today. We did B.A. yesterday as well. And then I have the options newsletter results for this year. Both of these stats are in here. I risked more for my options trades. I know you're talking about options earlier. I trade options in a very unique way where I'm just buying the call and selling it or buying the put and selling it. For example, in Boeing, I called the 185 Boeing puts. It worked. Okay, I called them actually yesterday. And the stock gap down as they fell through the strike and dropped and it's still lower. So, the way that I trade options is this fancy, fancy thing. I'm trading momentum in the option and in the gap. And so far, we've had a good start to the year with options as well. I'm up $675,000 to $780,000 for options. So, total year-to-date, not as if in the last few days, actually. It's almost a million dollars a year. This has been a great year. We've had a lot of opportunities. I'm going to talk about NVIDIA a little bit. Again, I know it's troubling today. I'm not in NVIDIA right now. I'm waiting and seeing with NVIDIA because, again, I'm not 100% about this market right now, but NVIDIA is very expensive to trade in. One of the things we're going to talk about a little bit is if you're selling it as a small account, okay, and you can't afford a margin account, trading options is a way for you to take one contract, for example, and something, and not have to worry about trading on a margin. Any questions, again, you can just put them in the run there. But getting back to what I was saying, you need your brain to trade. So, how do you make this much money in the market? How do you make any money in the market? How do you not lose, okay? You have to look for quality trades, and you have to use your brain. Because if you're someone that's been trying to do this for a while, and you've been wanting to do this, the fact is, you can very easily turn on the television, and all of a sudden look at something on the TV and say, oh, this person says this, this person says that, and it turns out not to be true. Same thing with the economic day. People look at the economic day and say, wait a minute, wait a minute. And on Friday, we had the unemployment number, and it was bad, and the market action made new highs or first before it fell. And I said in the trailer on Friday, when Mark was up, and it was first trial, and he said, oh, this is a win that everybody thinks. The idea that the unemployment rate could tick over 4%, this calendar year of 2024, is actually a sign that we could be going into a recession, such a good thing. And obviously then the market ended up falling, there were other reasons the market fell on Friday too, but the fact is, think about what you're doing, and how do you do that? Make the choices, because you can listen to one person one thing, another person say another thing, and come up with different conclusions all day long. Again, somebody tried buying the eight today, even though he shorted it, somebody's buying it, and it's dropping, okay? But someone's buying it today. It's slower. So the fact is, you need to understand why you're doing it, and use your brain for what you're doing. So that's a minimum kind of size for your strategy.  I would risk more than $200 per trade, so that you're not doing a big deal if it costs $15 or $20 or one big contract. If you're going to trade on a margin, you have to have $25,000 at a retail broker to get forward on a margin, or you can go prop. At a prop account, you can probably put up a prop account with $2,500 or $5,000, and then you get 10 to one. So you can go anywhere in trade, anywhere you want, but the amount of money you risk per trade has to do with how many contracts you take or share. So you can trade my strategy with any size, but in order to make the kind of money that I'm making here, you have to risk XYZ amount, and I told you 3,000 for the day trades, eight for the options. I have some people that are risking more, and actually two people emailed me two weeks ago who did the Amazon. The one guy risked over $10,000 in Amazon. He was down before it went. I said, well, you really risked a lot in this. He ended up making out, we made money in trade, but again, the thing is you have to look at your risk and not only just your cash, you have to say, wait a minute, do I understand what's going on, or am I okay with this? Sometimes I call a trade, and the trade is down before it goes. Now BA was an example yesterday. I called the BA's. BA opened, dropped, fell. BA was up, then it rallied, closed near the highs, okay, with the market yesterday, and then all of a sudden poof today, it was up all this money because it got down and it was to destroy. Should we get options or something that can be volatile, but that's all the profit is. That's all the money is. That's how we made all the money, the ones that we were in the Dividea. And again, I know people going along to Dividea today. I don't think it's the right timing for that. I don't think it's the right timing for that yet, and I wouldn't be surprised if it flips around quite frankly, mainly because of the market as well. So the minimum size account is 2,000 for options, 25 for day trades, but your risk still has to depend, Joseph, on the cash that you have. I hope that answers your question. And it's how you make money in the market. Use your brain, think about what you're doing, don't risk too much money, get out when you're up, don't hold everything to a P-target and have a set strategy that you use every single solitary day that is absolutely nothing to do with the market. So a lot of people right now are fat and happy and think that they're brilliant and they're making a ton of money because the market's running, you're buying everything and then some. It's not the last. Mark my words, it's not the last. In fact, I would be surprised, and I'm not saying it's a set of fiction, but I would be surprised if the market set the high for the year on Friday and some of the indices Friday marching. I don't know. I don't know. But I would be surprised. So when the market's trending, you can go long, lots of things. You can buy every dip and make money. When it's not, you can't. Most of the life of the market, that's not the case. So again, you have to have a strategy that you make money consistently in any market environment, in any market condition, no matter what the market's doing. And quite frankly, no matter what stock's doing either. So again, we're out of trend-treating. I'm looking at the gap which we're going to talk about a little bit here, but I'm not looking at the market and saying let's go long this. Let's short this. Let's buy the dip. I'm looking at something and saying, who is in control of what's going on right now? Who's in control? VA? The bears. The bears are in control. It's selling up. So again, it's determining the control factor. It doesn't matter what the market's doing. It doesn't matter. Really, the reason, again, it could be a fundamentals. It could be a plane crash. It could be earnings. It could be whatever. Okay. It has to do with the control factor of who's controlling the stock. Oh, here's the Amazon. We're just talking about this. So this was the Amazon gap. Stock was here gapped up. Rallying went long on Amazon. So who is in control of Amazon? The bulls. The bulls are still in control of Amazon. I didn't look at this today. It doesn't matter. I know the bulls are still in control of this stock. Okay. Here's another one we did in our event. We did this one on Friday the 8th. Shorted it. Stock closed here. Gapped down. Open fell. I did this as a day trade that I did not put on Friday. I didn't get this all the way down. Again, someone asked me in the other webinar I did last week and said, well, do, do, do, do, do. Were these the best exits? We showed the results. No. I don't always get the best exits. Absolutely not. In fact, we went on eBay and it just kept going and going after I got it. That was a haul. We did hauls on eBay. It just kept going. This kept going after I got it. Your objective is to make money. Your objective is to have more winners and losers. Your objective is not to hold everything to the best price that you can get out of it because you're going to fail if that's your objective. It's impossible to do that. What you can do, what is not possible, is predicting that our bell will fall, that the control is to the downside on this particular day, and that you can short it and make money. And again, if you're trading and you want to ship a thousand shares and it drops a dollar, what is that? You're up a thousand bucks. Again, same thing if you want to buy ten contracts, which is essentially a thousand shares, drops a dollar. You'll be at whatever you're up to and how fast it goes. It could be any sense, it could be a dollar. Sometimes options don't move exactly penny for penny like a day trade. But it's going to be a beautiful guess. And my focus is what? It's gas. So for those of you that never heard of the gap before, what is a gap? It's not a gap to the opening price today. It's different than the closing price of yesterday's trading. A gap is a break, in price action from one day to the next. So everything closes at four, o'clock eastern time. Everything opens the next day at 9.30. Weekends of market is closed. So in between there, trading goes on. Here's another one we get. This is real quick. This was a bit of a go back in the middle of February. Step close to your gap down. Close up here around 94 and change. Gap down in the morning. And open around 77 and change. So who was in control of the real quick? The bears. So you would have shorted this. You shorted it. You could have ought to put. I didn't do it, but you could have. And then guess what? Fell again. Boom. So this is what happened here. The bears took control of it. And they sold it. And they dumped it. Or they shorted it. Or both. Okay. The nice thing about shorting, and what I like to focus on shorting is to get moves to the downside. Quick, fast and big to get panic. I will say one thing. It's very rare to get something called panic vine. You did see that in the video. You saw that in the video a couple of weeks ago when everyone thought the video was done and it couldn't keep going. And then it did. And people were shorted the video and they got rolled over. And they lost. Okay. The video wasn't done. And then it ran up again. Long story short. Panic buying happened in the video. That is very rare. Usually you have panic in selling. Okay. Which is why I prefer to short. So I have an issue that I'd like to short. It's about how you shorting and making money shorting in a market that's trending higher and making new highs. Because I'm focused on this particular stock and I'm focused on the control. And yeah, I do go along well and long like I said in the video. We did the big options. But the fact is it's so much easier to make money so quickly doing short. Okay. And so I made an issue in that. Also I find administrators prefer to go long. They don't understand short. So again, if you understand what's really happening in a short, okay. You can make a lot of money and you can make it fast. And again, we're shorting. And you're shorting the selling. Now how do I do it? How do I figure it out? How do I make the prediction? How do I see where the control is cited? Again, to the upside, to the downside, I use a rain system as a checklist. It's a 26-point checklist. This is what I teach in my class, which I teach once a month. So I teach people the checklist. You can do it yourself. So I'm gonna ask you today if you hold anything back. No, I don't. I teach you in the class how to do it yourself. The fact that I've been doing this again for a very long time since 2008, the benefit of training with me in my room is if I achieve things, one that reached 22 points and another one that reached 22 points, I can narrow it down to the one that's gonna be the better of two. Or sometimes I see where something's gonna have a bigger target, like VA, like I said yesterday in the room. So that's the benefit of training with me. It's a sixth sense and it's an intuition. One of the biggest mistakes I think traders make is they jump around from thing to thing to thing. And I think weeks like this and webinars like this are good for presentations for people to come. Listen to a lot of people and then grab onto something that you think makes sense to you and then you run with it. Because when you're trying to do too many things all at once, you never get good at anything. And that is the biggest mistake the traders make. When I started training, I didn't want money for us to short and it was also a gap. And then I said, there's something to this and I wanna do it and then I decided to focus on that. I never spent my career jumping around from futures to options to day trades to swing trades to fore or to Bitcoin. I never did that. You waste a lot of time doing that. And again, one of the benefits of coming to presentations like this is the center of this whole week is that you listen to lots of people and then you hear a little bit about this and a little bit about this and a little bit about that and then it allows you to say, wait a minute, I think there's something here that makes sense with this thing and then you gotta run with it. Because if you don't, you're gonna be all over the place. You gotta kind of throw yourself into whatever strategy you wanna do because the key is to get good at it. Now you gotta have something that works. That's obvious no matter what, but you still have to get good at what you're doing. And in part but also it's connecting with the person, connecting with the teacher, connecting with the mentor, if it's someone that you can relate to, if you understand what the person's saying. But anyways, the rating system helps me determine who is in control. It's like, use my brain to rate the gap in the morning could be 6 a.m., could be 7 a.m. I try to do things early. I could rate stocks at night. Workable was the gap up last night after hours. I didn't rate it by solid. We did not play in workable. That's another reason the market was up to day two. But again, this is all done, everything before the market even opens. I know if I like something, I know if I don't like something or if I wanna do it or not. Now here's a B.A. chart. This isn't today's, but this was back from actually just Friday. Hard to believe now. Where B.A. is at. This was Friday's close. A B.A. was there. No, this was 1.30 in the afternoon. It was around 1.98 a.m. to change. You can pull that up and look where it is right now in the 80s. Anyways, I did trade this before that. On a 2.9, I called the B.A. 205. It expired at 2.23. Let's look at 2.9. Here is the B.A. Show me your chart here. So we bought the post, put the chart, boom. And again, this was a trade. Cost of 250, advanced trader risk. Again, I'm risking around 8,000 to 8,750. Bought it, sold it, done. Boom. Again, you can put the order out to put a sell order. You don't even have to watch it if you don't want to, but I do a chart in the letter. Four contracts for 1,000 risk. This is a good way whoever's asking about the minimums. You could take a $5,000 account, for example, or six or seven, risk $1,000, you can see how you can really add on your account. You can make 20% of your account with one trade like this. This is a nice trade. This is not what I would consider a big trade. This is just a trade that we did, that went, and worked. And you have to think of it as, you know, do it get out. Do it get out. Chunk it out. You're trying to make money as many... Every time you're in a trade, you're up and you have the risk on it. Could be a big trade, could be an option. Again, could be an option you're holding every night. That money's being sucked up that you have in the risk plus the profit if you're up till you get out. You know what I mean? So if you're going to trade your $1,000 and it costs you $1,000 to take it, you've got to really believe that trade's going to keep going because you really get $2,000 at risk. That $1,000 profit plus the $1,000 that you risked to trade. And if you would book it, you would have $2,000 back in your account. And that's really how you have to look at it. Again, it's taking it and getting out. Taking another good trade. Then getting out. That's active trading. Again, this is, I'm not swing trading them. This is active trading. Even the actions I'm doing in the week, please. I'm not doing the daily inspirations. I don't think those make any sense. Even if I think something's going to move in the day, I don't do this. I always do the Fridays. And it's getting like, that's what I was saying about the fundamentals. I was going to go to some lecture by a bank actually Friday. And I'm going to about what's happening with real estate and interest rates. We're still in a very high-interest rate environment. And you look at it and you say, well, wait a minute. They said they're going to lower rates. Now, someone I've heard on Bloomberg this morning said, no, no, no. They may not lower rates at all this year. Well, that's really going to recap on the market if it turns out to be true. That will really actually create a sell-off in the market. Because the market's expecting the Fed to lower rates this year. I don't think it's going to be as much as they say. I don't know if they will at all. But the market will react if they don't. You can't rely on the economic data even if fundamentals make decisions. Very many times you have, and I don't know what Orville said, but you could have good data, and then the stock falls. You could have bad data and the stock rallies. You say, well, sometimes it doesn't make sense. And then they're revising the data as well. And so that's going to become a problem too. And then you say, wait a minute. You can't even rely on what's going on here. This is actually going to happen. And that can play a havoc. And we have a on-your-long-term portfolio if you're trying to make decisions what to do, especially with your retirement account. You think the market's going to keep going. And then what if it happens and it doesn't all of a sudden? Now when we're talking about gas, let's look at another one here, PANW. Stock falls through a gap down. Again, this was expensive. We did a trade in this short of it, and it got in and got out. This is a big move. It was 54. 16 was a profit in this. I was 37. 20. I only took 600 shares. It was expensive. The stock was big. But it had a big move consistent with the price of the stock. So this is all relative. But it was a nice gap. Stock closed here at 4 o'clock. Opened in the morning down here at 9.30. I rated it. I said, wait a minute. Who's in control today of the PANW? Is it going to flip rally? I said, no. It's going to drop. We shorted it. It's going to drop. This was 221. That was our price. Here's a beginner risk or smaller risk. 1,200 again. You have to have a margin account to do this. Or you could have bought a put. I didn't do a put in this. But you could have done a put in this. If you didn't have a margin account. And again, you could have made 1,820. You risked 1,240. That's a good trade. How do I figure it all out? I rate the gap. I get up in the morning and I rate it. And I never, ever, ever skip up and go in the day. I plop this in here. I don't know where BA is right now. Because I'm talking to you. But right before I came on. I put the chart in here. You can see what we did. So yesterday, stock closed your gap down. Open dropped. Stock closed your gap down. Open fed. Yesterday, couple of BA's. So we'll see where this goes. Different strengths and different dates. Again, I don't know where this is. But this has nothing to do with the market. This is completely on its own. And again, that's what you really want. Because if you're trying to predict what the market's going to do on any given day. I mean, good luck. I'm good at the market. I'm going to keep accusing us fine. But honestly, I get a certain point last year. Then we stopped. Then the market started having a leg up. Then it continued. Then I mean, what are two trades in the market this year? If that. And then I just laid off of it. Again, people, the market keeps going. People keep buying every day. At some point, again, it's all going to come together. And it may not play out the way that people think. You're starting to see the signs of that now, even with the discussions. And even with the data, like I said, that ticked up last week. And probably will hit over 4% this year. I don't think it's a win for the economy. I just don't see it that way. So we'll have to see how the market sees it. But you weigh the pros and cons every time you take a trade. Every time you've got to put the odds in your favor. That's what you're trying to do. And again, you can date trade options. You can take options and hold them during the week, please. Ideally, I'd want a trade to go on 24 to 48 hours by doing an option, but it could be a couple of days. Again, it worked out well. We took the yesterday. You could get out of the today. You could still be in it. You know what I mean. So again, date trades though. I'm in and out in a couple of minutes. My name is Melissa Armoio, stock swush. But thank you for asking. Here was the Tesla. Here's another one we did. Tesla, I call on 220, the 190. This was tight. I called it on Tuesday to expire on the Friday. It worked. These were cheap though. They were really, really cheap. $1.75, 6 contracts cost $10.50. Again, 129%. Let's see what this went. I call the 190, 220. This was back here. Oh, here was this. Stock closed here. Gapped down. Open dropped. Take it over. See? So again, sometimes I'll call it above the strike, where the strike is a target. Actually, that was the case yesterday where I said the 185. And sometimes I call it at the money, and then I'll put up the target in the letter where I'm going to get it down. Again, that was another short. That was Tesla. Any questions here so far?  I wasn't happy with the last couple years that I did mortgages. When I started my job, I liked it. It did nothing to me. It did nothing to me at all. And it made the case for you. Sometimes things change. You know, people are working from home now, so they have time to trade on the side. And they kind of have the ability to do it. People are working from home, but it doesn't necessarily mean they're making it any more money or working less hours. You know, some people are actually working more hours with the work from home thing, quite frankly. The idea of becoming successful and working for yourself is very biting for a lot of people, but you have to plan it and actually make it happen. And again, if you're big by the market bug and you want to do this and you're someone that's very independent minded and thinking, you can do it. You may have goals for yourself that you want to make this much money, make this much money a month, but you've got to start somewhere. You're not going to make any money if you don't know what to do. And if you know a successful strategy, you're going to lose. So then you're going to get really upset, frustrated, and quit. You don't want to feel like that. It's not impossible to do it. I'm teaching people that are brand new, totally generous, never trained in their life, and some people have been training longer than I'm alive, quite frankly, who have just been looking to train and don't have a strategy, and they need something to do. I'm curious when your final option to play with the time of your charts, daily? The daily. Easy question. And again, I'm rating the gap with the daily. The daily chart. As someone who's listening, you can only trade today using one chart from down to the rest of your life. It would be the daily chart. Every single thing you can get off the daily. The entry, the exit, the target, the entry, the rating of the daily. You've got to have the daily chart up. That's all that matters. When I'm holding it down, which I'm going to show you here, some day trades we did a little bit last week. That's just because I'm trying to minutia down to maximize my size in my day trades. Anthony's asking about percentage winners versus losers. I had the stats at the beginning go back. We're averaging this year. Again, it changes the values week for week. Around 72% for the day trades. About 75% for options so far. So again, say if you're taking 10 trades, you have to figure 7 are going to work. 3 could lose. Offices are in there in the stats. Because one strategy you want to focus, and how do you do that, you've got to figure it out. What makes sense? To me, gaps made sense because they had big moves. And when I started trading, my risk was $150 a trade. So I wanted to do something where it was going to have a big move. Because I know if a thousand shares is something that's short of it and it dropped $2, I could make two grand. Otherwise I need to take 2,000 shares of something, or 5,000 shares of something that's scalp would get 25, 30 cents. So it was just made sense to me to do something that moved big. And when I started looking at gaps and analyzing gaps, I said, wait a minute, wait a minute. When I look at the chart, gaps move big. And then that's how I kind of gravitated to it. And again, I gravitated short because it goes quickly. So I was like, gaps, gaps in the chart will show a price action in a chart. And that you can believe is not about the Fed, or wondering what they're going to do, or what anybody says on TV. You know. And of course, you can see we're being trading right now. Gaps have large moves. Gaps can move up, or gaps can move down. Some of the biggest moment moves are in a daily chart, come from a gap. Again, this is a more bell, this is a big move. I did not hold this all the way down. I also didn't do a put in it. I caught up. I did it. We already had enough things on it. I didn't want to go into the weekend with something new. But this, this you put above a put in and it dropped. But getting back to why, what makes it power money? Power money is what moves stocks. Power money is in charge. It's in charge of the stocks direction. And trends are set to move with the power money people, which is a lot in the market. The other thing I want to add, I just thought of this too, the New York Community Bank almost went under in the last two weeks. I'm sure some of you saw that. There's another regional bank to go under this year. That's not crazy. It almost actually happened. And again, if Steve Mution hadn't bailed out of that bank, which is probably a good deal for him, there's something else to that story, which I'm going to read the details up. Again, your real estate has taken a hit. Okay, it's going to come back. New York is a great investment long term for anyone anywhere. But I have a feeling that a lot of those loans are commercial properties. They're commercial loans where they have the real estate and so they ended up buying into the community bank. But if they hadn't, that bank would have gone under. That would have retapped up in the market in the last few weeks. And the financials as well. So that's another thing that's just like kind of moving out there. The longer that they continue not to lower rates, they're not having rates, but they have a lower rate. And with all the money that's invested in these long-term bonds that banks have in, and because this is the longer rates stay out long higher, the worse it is for banks particularly not to these long-term bonds. So it's just, you know, you've got to learn how to short. I mean, if you don't know how to short, you're going to miss out when the sell-off comes, or even days when you have the sell-off. Maybe it's just one example of that today in one particular stock, which happens to be a good one, but there will be a time to mark it as well. But if you think about it logically, you're like, okay, wait a minute, wait a minute. Who is in control? If you get an understanding who's in control, then the idea of making money doesn't sound crazy to you. If you train on the side of the control and say, wait a minute, wait a minute, then I can make money doing this, and then it can be easy for me. But you have to understand and pick and choose the right things to do, because it's not about doing everything.  But, again, people don't understand that. So when you think about it, the control, the control, train on the side of the control, then you can wrap your head around doing it. And I think a lot of times people have these ideas in their head, they want to make $100 a year, they want to make $200 a year, they want to make this, they want to make that. Listen, if you're losing, make $500 a week. Make $100 a week. I mean, just start small, because if you're losing, anything that you make in the next five days or even tomorrow is good, because you've got to turn the negativity around if you haven't been successful. And remember, training is en gambling. My training room is closed off where people can't chitter chatter in the room. I'm in control, I run the room, I'm the boss, I'm in charge. When we're training, we're focused, we're making money, we're in and out, and we're done. Training is en gambling. And you can say this is fun, it's fun to do and talk to people and stuff like that. That's for different forms and other things. When you're training, you're risking your money, you can't look at it like a 50-50 crash shoot. Go to Atlantic City, go to Las Vegas, have a good time, go out for a nice meal, because when you're taking a train, you have to believe that that train is going to work. And again, I'm not in the video. You know how I look at it right now? It's a 50-50 crash shoot. I don't know if it's higher if it's going to tick up and go over the highs or if it's going to fall tomorrow but it's going to be tight. I'm waiting on that. I'm waiting for the confirmation. The confirmation. And how do I know? I don't know when I see it, but it wasn't today. So theoretically, yes, you could have gone on to the game today but I think it was the train. No. Even if you're up. But the fact is you have to look at things and say, wait a minute, I've got to see this thing, this thing, this thing, this thing, this thing, this thing and then if I see them, then I do it. Okay? Because if you're 50-50 then the answer is no. Don't do the train. Okay? Anyways, what do I teach in the class? The checklist? The 26 points? That's what I do when I make the decisions whether I want to score a BA or not even do it at all. And again, that's how I know the direction the stocks are going to go. I'm looking for the momentum. I want to have a big move. And again, the whole benefit of training is to have the fast trades in the morning which I like to do. It's about working really smart or not harder because, again, I spent a lifetime of career recharges where I was working seven days a week and I was working more than 50 hours. I don't want to do it anymore. You just get to a point where you say, wait a minute, wait a minute. The idea of making a couple thousand dollars in a couple minutes is great. It's good. And then I'm making the bigger moves in the actions which I'm holding overnight. So a big flow of money going in a certain direction is what moves the market stocks and creates momentum and sets the trend in charts. I'm looking for the institutional money. I'm looking for the side of power. And that's who's in charge of the stock in the markets at all times. This is last week's trades which I'm going to quickly go over. These are only the day trades, not the options. We did deputy day on Monday. We did target twice. I took a stop. We took it. JWM, we did. Which was the short. This is Nordstrom. CM was the short. MRFL. And I'm going to quickly show you some again. But now, which was the 3,000 dollars. You could have made 21, 3, 8 last week.  This was deputy day. Stock closed here. Gap down. Open shop. We shorted it. Again, this is a day trade. You would have had to have a margin account called this trade lie in the room. Again, you could have held it longer. It came all the way down. You could have put it fell. But we did that on Monday. Then we did target. I stopped. The first trade was a stop. This was a long. Because it was actually a good gap. That was on Tuesday. Then we did it again. Then we did the add. Then it worked. And I had a really good move in this with the add. That was on Tuesday. JWM, I got out early. 18 was my target. Sixth sense of the target. Out. That kept going. I could have made more of this. Went all the way down to 1750. That was Wednesday. Then Thursday I did see it. This was crazy. But it worked. Stock closed here. Gapped up. Rally. Shorted it. Got the drop. This kept going. This came all the way down to 51. We did a good thing on this before it bounced. This was going to profit on that, too. And then I did the Marvell which I got out at 1775. Which is funny because it came all the way down. It came all the way down here and sold up in the market. But I hate to trade all day Friday. But I could have made a heck of a lot more in this. But that was a good trade, too. Do I have a set pool of stocks in your watch list that you follow? No. Is there a method or scanner or news that directs you to a particular stock to follow? No. I just look at what's gapping. Is there a method you use to find the gaps? Yes. The 26 points that I teach in the class that I go through manually when I look at the chart after I find a list of stocks that are gapping that I read them. But do I trade the same thing every day or look at the same bucket? No. I just showed you everything here. Everything here is different. Completely different stocks. Tomorrow I'll get up and do something else. The only reason I did BA today and yesterday was, quite frankly, we're at the tail end of earnings season. I could have gone long Oracle today. But I said, ugh. And I wasn't crazy about the market today either. And I really wasn't crazy about Oracle. But I tend to go to the short side first anyways. And I saw BA. We did BA two days in a row. Why? Because there wasn't a lot to look at. We're at the end of earnings season. Actually, somebody mentioned KSS in the room. I like BA better. I don't know if KSS worked or not. BA was my top watch today. But for the most part, no, I look at a different thing every day. I have no idea what we're going to do tomorrow or the next day or the next day, but we're at the end of earnings season. So earnings season is the busiest time to trade and the busiest time to get gaps. And that starts in April. The end of earnings season is retailers. That's why we saw Nordstrom. That's why we saw Coles this morning, you know. So again, and Target, Target, which was last week. So there's something I'm sure we're going to have Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. But it's not like I'm spending hours reining things. No. And I don't look at the same things every day. But I have something that's on my watch list. Like NVIDIA was my watch. I said, we're going to get it. We're going to get it. We're going to get it. And we played it, played it, played it, played it. Friday morning, we were in calls. I said, everybody get out of this today. And it was over on Friday. I mean, that was it. It was done, you know. It ran up to 975. I had called 900 calls on that. It was an insane trade. But it was very, very expensive. It's very, very expensive. You have a small account. You couldn't have done that trade. So it's an active letter, the options newsletter. If you don't do every trade, it doesn't matter. Because I'm calling so many trades. But that was something where I happened to watch NVIDIA. But do I watch NVIDIA every day now? And we didn't do it today. So I look at something different every day. Because I look at something different that's capping. And I never know. And again, we're getting into next two weeks, whatever we get. Then we have the Easter holiday. Then we come back. And then poof, earnings season starts. It's April. And then it's going to be busy trading, spring trading. Then the Fed's going to have another meeting. And they're going to talk more. And we'll see where we go. And you're going to have a lot of volatility in the market, particularly either way. There's people that are short the market right now. I'm not. That think it's lower, especially after Friday. Then there's people that are going along the market or think the market's higher. They're buying the dip today. That's not 100% either. So again, we're going to see increased volatility here. I mean, it could be even before Easter, actually, in the queues in the spy. Anyways, the name of the game, though, is chunk it. Chunk it out. And how do I use this method? I use the rating system. So it's all in the daily chart. But the key to getting big trades is momentum. When I trade, I'm looking for momentum. This gives me an edge. It will give you an edge. Momentum trading is one of the most profitable and fastest ways to make money trading. Again, you could have had one contract and made great money in the BAs. But if you had a way more, you see what I'm saying. So you make more money when you add size, but you can't add size if you don't know what you're doing. Even if you had $500,000 in an account, it doesn't mean you're going to make a lot of money. If you don't know what to do, you can lose $500,000. You know how many stories I've heard from people over the years since I've had the Stock Switch business that I've been teaching people? Somebody told me a story. This was like January. Somebody told me they lost $700,000 last year. I said, oh, my God, that's insanity. Well, why wouldn't you stop? You have to look at yourself in the mirror and say, wait a minute, I don't know what I'm doing. And you know what? There's no shame in that. You say, I have to do something different. And again, change in seasons is a good time to do that. You need your money to trade, whether it's small or medium or large. People think they need a lot of money in order to be successful. No. You can have a small account and build it up and be successful because there are people that lose a lot of money and have a lot of money and don't know what they're doing and then they're working to fund their trading account losses. That's crazy. That's crazy.  If you know what to do, you can make money with small, medium or large risk. And again, you got the rest of the year.  These enormous moves happen in one direction and happen fast. Momentum trading can be very profitable. But again, what creates the momentum in the gap? It's buying or selling of institutional money. Gaps happen in the market on a regular basis. However, some gaps are nothing gaps. I don't necessarily trade every gap in the direction of the gap. Again, like I said, nobody had gapped up today. We didn't go long yet. So I have to read it. Understanding which gaps are meaningful and which gaps are not meaningful in the market will help you to know what to do. I want to change the curry. So there's no second guessing. If it rates 20 points or more, I'm taking it in the direction of the gap. If it doesn't, I'm not. That's the rule. If it's 15, 16, no. I don't have to second guess myself. I go with the rating. I got to get the setup. I wait for the setup. I get the setup into the open. I take it. If I don't get the setup, I don't do it even if it rates good, okay? And then you don't have to second guess yourself. Then you're not trading on the fly. Then you're not listening to what, you know, they're saying on Bloomberg or whatever. Because the fact is, again, you're not going to get a hundred percent confirmation with anything with that. And some trades will win, some will lose. And in the end, you're going to lose. You need to have more winners than losers. Do I just follow the price action? Yes. Yes, I do. No, I don't have all these indicators. No, I don't. No. If I took everything off and just, actually, if I could trade and read the tape. Actually, when I used to go to Fox News all the time, which I'm doing the sky pits now, but when I used to go to the green room, I didn't have, I didn't have my charts with me and I would have to go on and they'd throw me a topic and I'd have to talk about the market. And I was just reading where the market was trading at. I had no charts. I didn't have my computer with me in the green room. And I had to say, okay, well, I see where we're at now based on this, blah, blah, blah.  Just do an experiment. Whoever asked that, Michael, get rid of every indicator you have, except for price, which you could have, I use candlesticks. I use Japanese candlesticks. You could use lines.  And then I have the white background. But take everything off and see if you could trade. If you don't, that's problem number one because you're relying too much on these other things. If there was one indicator that gave you all the answers or any system that you could buy that you could just plug in your computer and go, boink, then everybody would be rich. Everyone would buy it. It would cost too much money. No one could afford it. That's just not realistic. Remember what I had earlier at the beginning?  You need your brain. What's wrong with that? That's actually fabulous.  You're going to make more money than some guy that doesn't use his brain. That's relying on indicators on a computer that he doesn't even know what they mean and couldn't explain on TV if they asked him what to explain it. If you know that you can use your brain to think things through and actually make good decisions, then you know you can have a leg up on the other guy. And that's good, okay?  Shouldn't be something that people get upset.  No, you want to use your brain. And that's why you want to keep yourself healthy. You know, I eat breakfast every day before I trade. I have at least eight hours of sleep every night. I exercise. All these things help you.  Yes, like I said, I've taught people. If you're new and you have to learn how to do the, you know, the platform thing, how to set it up, the broker will show you. They should show you for free. Do the trainings, watch the videos, whatever.  The problem is if you're doing this for a long time, sometimes you may have bad habits over those bad habits then. So it's, you know, everybody starts out fresh and new with me with it. They don't know what I know about gaps. So everybody's coming in the same way. You know, people that have been doing this a long time, they have other issues, even though they know how to place the trade and exit the trade and put the stops in. Now this was one of the video we did. It was back last Monday. It seems like a hard to believe now. We did the 860 strikes. And again, I didn't hold this trade. To think that I could have held this train, we bought the 860 strikes in a video on Monday. I got out of it way before Friday. The trade was up, but the stock went to 975 on Friday. That's not this where I got out. But again, it was one trade. It was good. It was a good trade. Out. $14 for one contract. That was so expensive. $1800 was the profit. But let's look here on the chart here on the fourth. Here. So anyways, I got in it out of this here. But look where it went. So again, it was a good trade. And actually, this was down slightly until it popped up here. But I did not hold that into the last day. That would have been the best, best exit. It wouldn't have made sense. Wouldn't have made sense to me. Again, to hold into the last day, you know, you're taking the chance the whole trade could go against you. But again, I'm trading momentum. I do focus on shorting. Why? Because fear and panic shorting into the fear and panic can be very profitable. And again, it gives me an edge because a lot of people don't short, don't tend to short. And again, the fact that the market's rallying has nothing to do with anything at all. BA is just one example, but I gave you other ones in here too. But every day I'm looking for stocks to trade that have, number one, a high probability of directional bias for the entire day. Big moves in the day. Early confirmation of the bias in the move between 930 and 10 and precise entries with follow-through and a good risk to reward, which is what I want. The 26-point checklist. A checklist is a plan of action. Everyone that puts money into the market should have a plan of action, a checklist. On a professional level, all high-income career field specialists have checklists, whether you're an accountant or an accounting season right now. You're doing your tax return. You have to have a checklist. You go through all the steps.   Having a checklist forces you to look at what you should be looking at in a chart and a stock to make the correct decision. And having a checklist helps assist you with directional bias. Having a checklist keeps you on track to reach your goals. And setting realistic goals also helps you, too. Because you don't want to waste time trading without getting anywhere. And again, I've had the business teaching people for a long time. And people following me since I started the business still have not signed up. They may follow me forever. They'll probably follow me until I retire or decide I don't want to do this anymore. But, you know, I think if you really want to do this and you want to take it seriously, you have all the opportunity in the world to learn from me, to train. The opportunities are there in the market. And it's motivating to do something new. And you say, this is exciting. I'm motivated to do it. Yes, it means using your brain. Yes, it means it costs you money to do it. Yes, it's a weekend out of your life. But you're going to take the time and investment in doing it for yourself. But you're doing something to better yourself. It's like if you're going on a diet or you're starting an exercise program or if you're starting a new job and that's how you have to look at it. Something that's exciting, not like it's work, something that it's going to help you, help you evolve in life, help you get somewhere where six months from now, 12 months from now, you're going to be at a better place in life. That's what you want. That's the whole point. Anyway, the Golding-Out course is the class that I teach. It's the strategy on how to trade gaps. The course teaches a 26-point rating system to find the best stock to trade each day. The course also teaches you how to play the stock on the day. The course teaches you chart analysis and technical analysis on an advanced level. This is a great quote from Warren Buffett. There's one investment that supersedes all others, invest in yourself. The time and energy and money that you spend in yourself and your training can pay off. If you get to the point where you're feeling worn down that you don't want to do that anymore, that's the time you should take a step back and just take a break from trading. Because you're not going to become successful if you're not willing to put the time, energy and money into training. Far too many people want to do it. It's too great of a career. The whole idea that you can make this kind of money, millions of dollars, you're hundreds of thousands of dollars, you're trading five minutes and be done and make several thousand dollars. So many people want to do that. I have a lot of friends that come and say, you know, one experienced my lifestyle, okay, well then you got to do it. Then you got to learn it. Then you got to do it. Well, well, then you don't really want it. You know, you have to put the work into it and it's not something like it has to take you forever. It's something that you can do. And again, it should be exciting to you to do it, to change your life and do something new. And you also need to get value out of your education because if you're wasting your time with something that isn't working and you've been doing it for a while, you got to be honest with yourself and say this strategy isn't working for me and then do something different. So the system I use to find the right gap each day is the 26 points. This is what you'll learn in the class and it's about empowering yourself to do it because you really want it in charge of your own life, you and only you. Even when you come to the room, I'm calling the trains, but you have to take the trade yourself. You have to get in, you have to get out, and you have to size yourself right too. And it's a complete system. Again, you will learn the entries, the exits, the targets, and the rating system in the class. So the class is called the Golden Gap course. It's a full two-day course on how to strategically find, pick and play stocks that are professional bearish gaps. Class is online. You can be anywhere in the world and take it. It's this weekend for March and the next class isn't until the end of April. It's Easter and spring break and lots of things going on. So I'm doing the class mid-March. It's Saturday and Sunday, March 16th, 17th. Class tuition is $69.99 and I'm doing a combo special, which includes the trends and the Golden Gap, which is three days of classes for $74.99 classes online and then I'm doing a special. It's the 40th anniversary of Merdyshire Road, which is actually my favorite, favorite show. There's a backstory to this. When I first started treating and I started doing well, Merdyshire Road was always on in the morning. I called my mom and said, oh my God, Merdyshire Road's on. I'm going to make a lot of money today. And I did. And I started to think that Merdyshire Road was like almost good luck. And so I love the episodes and it actually ran for 12 years and it's the 40th anniversary. So I'm doing a special this week through Friday for this class. If you sign up for the Golden Gap course combo, the training room is free through the end of the year. The options newsletter is free through the end of the year. The market report subscription is free through the end of the year. And the gap options course is free, which is Thursday, the 21st. So then you do four classes. This ends Friday. And again, if you're interested, email me at Melissa at the stockswish.com to sign up. I think I'm actually ending on time, even though I started a little bit late. Any questions from anyone? Is anyone there? Thank you, Kate. Thanks, Melissa. Thank you.


If you go to the gym or to the local library, they're almost always either empty or maybe have some people in them. And even on the times that the gym is full, it's with people who are maybe 1% of the population and on average 80% won't even come back. When the library is full, it's usually just parents coming to take some books or DVDs to their kids. In reality, the places that are usually full, the clothing shops, the malls, the Netflix, these are not the places you want to be at. The more full some place is, it probably means that it's not the place for you. The more empty a place is, sometimes the more hated, usually that's the place where you want to be.


Will DeFi change the world? I think so. For exactly the same reasons that cryptocurrencies that have certain characteristics that I care about are changing the world and will continue to change the world. So if you ask me what's special about Bitcoin, I will say, what is special about Bitcoin? How do I know that Bitcoin is special? Well, I mean obviously because it's Bitcoin. But let me explain my thinking. Why is Bitcoin special? It's special because it has certain properties. These properties come from decentralization. And I've characterized these properties with an acronym to help me remember how to evaluate if something is as special as I think Bitcoin is. And that acronym is RIPCORD. So I ask, is it revolutionary? Is it immutable? Is it public? Is it collaborative? Is it open? Is it resistant? And is it decentralized? Why is Bitcoin special? Because it is revolutionary, immutable, public, collaborative, open, resistant and decentralized. Not because of some magic incantation, but because of the properties it has. And so is something else also special? Well, it is to the extent that fulfills these characteristics.  The question we should have is, is it RIPCORD? So will DeFi really change the world? Well, it depends. It depends what kind of DeFi is and what properties it has. So if you want to evaluate a DeFi system, either the platform on which it's running or the implementation itself, a collection of smart contracts, a composed application, any form of decentralized finance, what are the questions you ask? I think we ask the same questions. Is it revolutionary? Or is it just doing the same thing we already do with the same power structure and architecture that we already have, enriching the same people who are already rich? Is it revolutionary? Is it immutable? Or is there a God mode that allows those who control it, if there is some organization or system controlling it, to change the past easily? Is it public? Can you audit what's actually happening in the system? Is it collaborative? Do its properties emerge from the collaboration of all of the participants? Do the participants have a say in the governance, in the consensus rules, in the mechanisms of the protocol? Is it open? Can anyone participate? Or does it require vetting? Does it require KYC, AML, documentation, identification, credit, ratings, jurisdictional controls? Is it resistant to censorship, freezing, seizing, and other problems like that? And finally, is it decentralized, from which all of the other properties arise? And so I can't say, will DeFi change the world unless you ask me which DeFi? But I can say as a whole, the principle of having finance that is decentralized and that actually has ripcord properties will change the world. Why? For the exact same reason that having a currency that has ripcord properties will change the world. And again, who's the world here? Not really most of my audience. See, the thing is, you already have CeFi. You have access to it. It's not as good as DeFi, but at least you have access to it. And so as always, for me, the audience that is most affected, the end user, the mainstream of this, is not someone buying a cup of coffee from Starbucks or even using DeFi to buy a yield farming Starbucks future on an equities market. It's whether the other six and a half billion can use this to participate in access to financial instruments, in access to investments, in the ability to raise capital as a startup founder, in the ability to escape and narrow constraints of a single jurisdiction and access the entire world of finance on an equal footing with rules that don't change based on circumstance or origin with neutral response from the market. And how world-changing is that? Oh, very, very world-changing. Thanks for watching. If you'd like to support me, please consider subscribing to my channel and supporting me on Patreon.com.