OK, let me know if you see my screen. I can see your screen. I'm going to go ahead and let you go. I'm going to get out of the way. It's your turn now. As Jeff said, I'm so happy to be presenting here today. This is my first presentation for 2023. So happy New Year, everyone. It's hard to believe. Tomorrow is the last day of January. This year already, I feel, has gone so fast. And of course, it's been a really good year so far to trade the market. The market is falling today. It is earnings season right now. We have many, many, many, many, many companies that report quarterly earnings. And when they report earnings, they tend to gap. So the one thing that's interesting is that when stocks gap, I look to rate them. And I really prefer to short. So we're going to talk about gaps today. We're going to talk about shorting. And we're going to talk about the market. If you have questions, you can plop it in the room and ask me if you have any questions. Sean's asking about my new apartment. I'm in my new apartment right now. It's fabulous. That's all I have to say about that. So as I'm talking to you right now, I'm looking at Central Park. It really doesn't get any better than this, people. But I've worked very, very, very, very, very, very hard to get to this point. And in fact, I said to some people a couple of days ago in the class, I said, if you could have everything you want in five years from now, or eight years from now, or seven years from now, or three years from now, if you could make all your dreams come true, would you do everything that you needed to do to make that happen? And the thing is, I think many traders are short-sighted in their goals. They want everything now. They want everything yesterday. We have to be committed to our goals and committed to our dreams to be able to make them happen. We can have everything we want right now, right this second, right now, tomorrow. Everyone wants the big trade, the huge trade. It's going to make up all the losses they ever had from the market. And they're going to make millions of dollars in a month or a week. It's just not reality. That's not how life works. But I will tell you from my own personal experience how life works. If you are committed to your own goals, if you are committed to your trading, and if you are committed to your own success, you absolutely can be successful trading the market, and you can be successful as a trader. Again, sometimes things take longer than we think. But if we continue on the path, we go through the ups and downs, you can get there. And again, I think a lot of traders tend to jump around too much as well. They'll do a strategy for a week or a day or a month, and then they'll quit. You can't jump around from thing to thing to thing. If you want to be successful, you have to stay and stick on one thing and get really good at it. So again, about 15 years ago when I started trading, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I learned basics of technical analysis, but I didn't learn how to make money in the market. So I ended up teaching myself with that basic foundation of technical analysis, my own method on gaps, and that is what I started to do, but it took me about three years to figure out my system. And now I've been teaching people how to trade my system for 10 years. So again, if you're committed to your goals, if you're committed to your dreams, you can get there. So keep your eye on the ball. That's the best thing I can say to people. And since we're starting now at 2023, and it's early in the year, you can set goals for yourself between now and the end of the year. So set the timeframe for yourself. Say by the end of this year, I wanna make this much money trading. By the end of this year, I wanna be trading full-time, be able to quit my full-time job, or whatever the case may be. And again, start out with goals that are realistic, okay? And then you can get there. You can get there. So let's get right into it. We're gonna talk to you about shorting for fast profits. And the reason I like to short is exactly the title because you can make money shorting fast. Why? Because panic comes into a stock or the market very, very quickly. Today's a great example of that. The market gap down today, we're selling off. We're probably gonna sell off here into the close. I'm not looking right now, but I know that we're red. And again, we very likely could be down tomorrow morning as well. We have some data out tomorrow morning. It's not till after the open, but we're probably gonna be down tomorrow, gapping down tomorrow in the market since we're falling here into the close. If you have questions, you can email me at melissathestalkswitch.com. You can also call me at 929-3200 gap. And you can follow me on Facebook, YouTube, or Skype. For those of you that don't know me, I appear on Fox News, CBS News, News Nation. And I talk about the market and I talk about economics and I talk about the things that are happening in the world. And that has given me a lot of great experience as well. So although a lot of people left New York City, I did not. Again, one of my dreams was to live in New York. And I do believe that New York City will come back. So I decided to stay in New York. And again, appearing on TV has been one of my dreams as well. So stay true, okay? To your dreams, if this is something that you wanna do, no one said it was gonna be easy, okay? It doesn't have to be crazy hard, but you may have some ups and downs, all right? So can you run a living in the stock market as a professional trader? The answer is yes, but you have to know what to do. That's a big part of it. So it's a new year and that can mean a new you. It can mean a brand new you for trading. You can make more money this year than you made last year trading. So it's time to go for it. Again, commitment is part of it. Learning is part of it. And keeping your eye on the ball. So I have in here last year's results for the day trader run a live day trading run, Monday through Friday. That opens at the morning at nine a.m. and we start trading at 9.30 a.m. This was the results for last year, $651,079. I did move last year, Sean mentioned he follows me, so I took a few weeks off. So I would have made more last year if I hadn't moved, but I did need to take some time off to move. Either way, it was a good year. Now again, like I said, I focused on shorting. So most of these trades, the ticker symbols are all here, are shorts. Some of the trades we did were longs, but actually I prefer to short.  When you're in and out of a trade fast, then you don't have to worry about market news or data. The Fed rate announcements, all of that stuff. You can book the money very, very quickly. So this is with an average day trade risk. These were trades on margin of $2,800 per trade. You can risk less. You can take a hundred share lots if you want to. How much you risk has to do with the cash size of your account. Everyone says, well, I need a lot of money to trade, especially if I'm gonna trade equities or trade on margin. You can train with small size and still make a profit. You have to know what to do. Some can have a million dollars in the bank, but if you don't actually know what to do, guess what? You're gonna lose that million dollars. So having a lot of money doesn't necessarily equate to you being successful. Okay. You wanna help me feel a little bit later. I'm hearing someone talk, Jeff. I thought they made a, I'm not kind of in the backyard. Yeah, I said. I'm not in the backyard. Hello. Jeff, are you there? Can everybody hear me? Cause I was hearing people talking. I hear the talking stop now. I'm gonna keep going. Hello Melissa. Sorry, we have a mic over here. I'm sorry about that. I'll be quiet now. So empower yourself today to trade the market. And that's what we're gonna talk about. So let's talk about confidence. Trainers lack confidence in their ability to train well. They lack confidence in their choices of what to train. Lack of confidence is usually result of lack of knowledge. In general, there's a lack of confidence in traders across the board. This is something that I think people can work on and can improve on. So it's time to get confident. Confidence in yourself. And not only that, confidence in your ability to train, okay? So what gives you confidence? How are you gonna get there? How are you gonna do it? Information gives you confidence. And then that confidence helps you make money. And again, as a trader, what's the information that I have? What's the information that you have? We have charts. It's live price data. Again, how do I make trading decisions based on technical analysis, which is looking at past price data to make decisions on future price movements in the stocks and the market? I just told you earlier what I thought was gonna happen today, that we would close near the lows, that we would close and drop off today into four o'clock and that we're probably gonna gap down tomorrow morning, okay? So how am I predicting all of that? Well, I'm reading it in the price action, okay? So you don't have access to research reports. You don't know what the Fed is gonna say exactly and Wednesday they're gonna raise rates, but we don't know their statement. We don't know how the market's gonna react to that because we don't know what they're gonna say. We don't have access to that information until it comes out, but when it comes out, we can see the price reaction and then we can make decisions based on that information, based on looking at criteria that I look at in the daily chart. And again, this is what I do in every given day, okay? So you can alleviate anxiety up trading by learning what to do and learning what to do is important, all right? So you can't expect to go into the market, trade blindly, make money without having a system or a strategy or having any idea what to do. So if you wanna make your trading dreams happen, you have to learn a successful strategy first and then the money will come. It's not the backwards way around, okay? And again, what happens with a lot of people and they struggle with this is that they start out with all these high hopes that they wanna make all this money, they end up not knowing what to do lose and then it becomes very difficult for them to move forward and they lose confidence, they lose conviction and then they never really get on the right path.  So the fact is that, and this is very, very important, many stocks in any given day have no strategy to trade as a day trade, okay? So you have to know that. Remember, trading is not long-term investing where you trade the trend. Learning what to do saves you money in the long run and on top of that, it saves you time. So even though there's an investment to opening up an account, you have to deposit money in an account to go through the process to actually risk money to trade. There's an investment if you wanna sign up for my class, you must pay me for the information and the time to take the class, that's an investment too. But in the long run, it pays off because it saves you time. As I said earlier, it took me three years to figure out my system. So the idea is that you learn from me without it taking you three years, okay? And for me, there was a process where it was many, many, many, many ups and downs of trading and losing money within that three years. I didn't develop my system trading on a demo. I did it with live cash and that was difficult, but it gave me a feel for really what worked and what didn't work. So that was important for me to really see to get the system down pat and to get the system right. So one strategy is all you need from the market. And again, I said this earlier, people flip-flop back and forth from too many things. Back and forth, back and forth, they wanna do Bitcoin, they wanna do futures, they wanna do options, they wanna do equities. They're doing all kinds of things all over the place. Just stay with one thing. Every day when I get up, I'm looking for a bullseye. I wanna hit that bullseye in and out and done. Like we did IBM last week, we shortened it, it worked. We went in, we took the trade, we got out, we made money, we were done, okay? That's literally how simple it should be for you each and every day. Again, this doesn't mean that every trade that I take wins. Some trades I take lose, but that is part of the mix that I assess in the risk. It's called calculated risk when I'm making a decision whether I wanna take the trade or not. So of all the trades that I take, say I take 10 trades, two we're gonna lose. I know that from assessing my system. And eight should be your expectation we'll win. So I have about a 77, 78% win ratio of my system that you wanna take the trade and you take the risk and you put in a stop. So looking for the bullseye is your goal and your aim. The faster again you can make money, the faster you can be done every day, the better off you're gonna be. Let's go over here, a very basic definition though of gaps, I've been talking about gaps. I'm gonna explain to you what a gap is. This is a chart of the QQQs. Now what happened back in here? And again, let's just go over what a gap is. A gap is a difference between the close and the open. So this was the market. It closed here at one price at four o'clock and open at a different price here at 9.30. So what happened on this particular day? The market gap down and fell, okay? This red bar depicts selling. It also is a gap down. Now I'm gonna show you another gap. Again, I prefer to short, okay? But this was a long where you could have gone long where the market and the QQQs closed at one price at four and open at a higher price. That is a gap up, okay? So this is a bullish gap and this is a bearish gap. Can you short of a bearish gap? No, can you go longer a bullish gap? No, can you short of a bullish gap? No, can you go longer a bearish gap? No, so I have a criteria that I utilize every single morning to determine if I look at the gap down, can I short it? Will it fall through? Will it go lower or is it gonna flip? And again, many traders think that gap fills work, they don't. While sometimes something will do what you wanna say, fail the gap. That does not work consistently, okay? So the success of myself and my traders and the people in my group comes from the consistency in the system. It's looking at the criteria and doing the same thing and looking for those same things. It's no one to look for, which many people don't, okay? I do all of my work in my pre-work in the pre-market in my analysis.  I'm gonna get up, I don't know where UPS is gonna gap, I'm not in that trade right now, but I'm gonna analyze it, I'm gonna see if it's gapping, I'm gonna see if it's gapping down or up, okay? And then I'm gonna analyze it to determine if in fact I wanna trade it and if in fact I wanna short it, okay? And any questions in here, let me know if you wanna plop them in the room. So again, let's continue talking here about what is a gap. A stock gap for the opening price today is different than the closing price of yesterday's trading. A gap is a break in price action from one day to the next, simple, okay? But again, how do you know which gaps to do? How do you know what charts to do? How do you know what stock to do? Many, many I'm getting given days, anything goes with the market. So you can't always do Tesla every day or Apple every day or Microsoft every day because they're not gonna work. And many days they're gonna go, what, with the market? And again, a lot of days the market has been tricky, not just in the last month, but really in the last year, it's tripped people up. A lot of people do not expect the market to fall the way it did in 2022. And then by the end of the year, everyone was shorting, shorting, shorting, shorting, shorting everything. We had a very bearish month in December and everyone was to go long. Now everyone's saying, oh, it's it, we're high, we made the low of the year, do. Again, it's about assessing the gap even in the QQQs, even in the spot, which I'm saying that's what I mean by the market, it's the market ETFs. It's about assessing what it's doing on that particular day in the gap, okay? So this was Tesla just back here from December. We did this a lot. We did this a lot in the month of December. One, it worked. Two, it got sold off and it fell, okay? So institutional money was dumping Tesla during the month of December. You could even go back to say that was happening in September. Again, here was a gap. Again, this is back 2022 where Tesla closed your gap down, fell. I don't remember when it came out that he was buying Twitter and all that scuttle, but you could say there's many, many reasons that this was happening, but at the end of the day, again, the fundamentals don't matter to me. It matters when I see the gap. So this was a good gap here. You can see it. Again, this is a daily chart. So my focus is on gaps and specifically on bearish gaps. And my specialty is that right now, everyone wants to short everything since 2022. Is that the right thing to do? No, again, like I said, because in reality, the market is still in an uptrend. So in my analysis, I'm telling you, despite the fact that we've been shorting and sometimes we've shorted the market, the reality is that the market is actually still in an uptrend. It never went in a downtrend. Not according to me about how I determine trend analysis. So might we go in a downtrend this year? Maybe. I don't make trend decisions based on percentages. Like many people do on television, I do not. So I don't say, oh, it's 20% down there for it's in a downtrend. No, okay. And so the market actually held the uptrend. Even in 2022, even with the selling, I will go long in uptrends. I will go short in uptrends. I will short stocks in downtrends and I will go long stocks in downtrends. It has nothing to do with that. When you're an active trader, which is exactly what I am, I'm trading the weekly options. I'm trading the daily trades in and out between 9.30 and four and particularly just in the first few minutes of the day. So I'm not looking to long-term invest in any of these things. I'm looking to get in and out, chunk it out with money, with profit. So if you kind of learn from me, you're gonna be an active trader which you're chunking it, chunking it, chunking it. You're chunking it in and out. $1,000 here, $2,000 there, or $500 here. That is what you need to do where you're trading on an active basis, not long-term investing, or really not even worried about what the long-term trend is, okay? Any questions here so far? So getting back to what I was saying, keep in mind, don't trade without a strategy. Don't take ideas from strangers. Get to know someone first. So some of you here obviously have been following me, you do know me already. Love you do not. I always suggest if people go to my YouTube, subscribe to my YouTube, watch some of the videos, watch me on television, get to know me first. Part of hiring someone and deciding that you wanna learn from them is actually seen. Okay, is what this person's saying make it any sense? And then establishing the trust level to that person where you're understanding what you think that they're doing, that this is a concept that you can learn from them that maybe you wanna trade it. Again, don't short everything. It's very important to know that. You can't even do that even if the market turns. Even if the market would go bearish, you can't short everything. You can't short everything even though it's not gonna downtrend. You can't short everything in Tesla. Look how Tesla flipped around as well, okay? How do I know what stocks are gapping? Well, finding gaps is easy, Brian. That's not the process I go through. It's not about finding them. You can find gaps in any scanner. That's something that Jeff can talk to you about. I'm sure he has some type of setup for a scanner to find gaps. Finding gaps is easy.  It's qualifying them to find the good ones, the good ones. Because again, there could be thousands of things that gap every day. It doesn't mean they're all good because they're not, okay? Finding them is easy. Qualifying them and determining which ones are gonna work and which ones are gonna work big and go in the direction of the gap and figure out the direction they're gonna go. That's where the analysis comes in. That's where the learning process is. Finding them is easy. And Jeff can talk to you about that when we're done. So anyways, the question is again, what do you do? When you've got the market in the sideways range, again, it's still an uptrend, but we're basing out sideways. What are you gonna do? You have to focus on specific stocks that do not need the market so that if the market falls, you don't care. If the market rallies, you don't care either, okay? Because if you need the market for your trade, you know, good luck, all right? While I'm very good at reading the market and I get it right a lot, I don't get it right every day. I gotta write today. But you know, this is one of these things that you have to look at what's really going on in the overall chart and say, I'm gonna do something specific. I wanna do something like, and again, I'm gonna go back to IBM's example. IBM didn't need the market. It fell, it went, boom, that's it, okay? You don't wanna have to worry about the market or being able to read the market or the trend of the market in order to make money as an active trader every day because it's gonna be challenging to you. And for many people, that is exactly one of the reasons that trading is challenging for them. They need the market and their trades and they can't read the market right. So let's get back to shorting. Shorting is happening fast, quick and less chance for hiccups as the day goes on. Again, many of the economic news comes out either in the pre-market, so we already see it, already got the information, already see it. I'm accounting for that in the gap when I do the rating and then later, I'm already in it and I'm already out by the time the Fed talks or anything else after 10 o'clock. So the idea of not having the hiccup of the data to mess up my trade is important as well. So why do I like to short? Well, one of the benefits of shorting is I have an inch. So for those of you again that have a volume and you know that I short, you know I've been doing this for 15 years. Again, I don't know why traders prefer to go long but it will always be the case that more traders prefer to go long than ever short. Why? Because they understand the concept of buying low and selling high because people like to trade their IRA and they can link along with their IRA but you can buy a put. You could buy a put. So you can do that. And again, you have to talk to your broker about it wherever you have your IRA but you can't outright short equities in an IRA. As far as shorting, I have an inch to do this so that gives me an edge for other retail traders that are out there because I know what I'm doing with this. Finding an edge will help you put you and set you apart from other people that are trading. That will help you make money. It's capitalizing on the moves. And for me specifically, it's also capitalizing on the moves, getting in really quickly. So when I take a trade in the morning and I short, I'm getting in the one minute chart. I'm getting in very, very, very, very fast and I have to know what I'm looking at before the market opens in the pre-market. Now here's the chart of the QQQs. This was back on the 17th when we fell. Again, the pre-market, we were up, then we flipped, then we dropped. So this is a 15 minute of the market where you can see where we actually fell off a cliff here. What are the red bars here in the chart depicting selling? So again, fast moves can happen quick. Why panic? There's no panic if I say, oh, this is a good buy. You're like, well, maybe I'll think about it buying that stock. Maybe I'll think about that one. Maybe I'll think about it. Maybe I'll think about it. If you were ready long something, then all of a sudden we're down. You will panic. You absolutely will. And then you'll be forced to make a decision like everybody else is that's in the stock. So again, panic is very rare to the upside. Panic buying is something that's very, very rare. You do have panic selling that comes in in stocks and that comes in a lot on a regular basis. So what am I looking for? I'm looking for institutional money. Are they selling? Are they buying? Are they buying the stock? Are they selling the stock? Are they shorting the stock? I'm looking to trade with institutional money, which is big footprints in the market, or stocks, big positions. And again, we're trading big stocks with volume, no penny stocks, no cheapy things, okay? So this one here we did, it was a long, again, it was a bullish gap up. It wasn't earnings. Stock was here, gap up, rallied. This was Morgan Stanley. We did it back in here. It was the middle of January a couple of weeks ago. What happened? We did calls in this and we also went long it, okay? And it worked. So again, this got bought with institutional money. You can see the price here were closed the night before at four o'clock. It was around 91 and change. And then it gapped up here and up in over 96, okay? So this is a nice gap up. So my system allows me to develop the all of the information that I have that I look at in the morning to see that this is not gonna fall, that this is not gonna drop, that this is not gonna fill the gap, that it's gonna get bought and it's gonna move up. And it did. And it ran all the way up and went all the way up to 99. So it was a nice trade. So we went long this, okay? So institutional money bought MS. Again, we talked about Tesla. Institutions were selling MS. They, I mean, not Tesla. They've been selling Tesla. Again, stock closed here, gap down, fell off a cliff. Again, December, the month of December specifically there were many gaps in Tesla. Many of them we did. Here was one even in the beginning of 2023 that we shorted that red bar with Tesla closed here, gap down, fell, okay? So institutions were selling Tesla. Institutional money was selling Tesla, we're shorting it. What's institutional money? It's big hedge funds, big professional traders, banks, big money in the market. So when you can find that power, it's very easy to make money if you can trade with it. You don't wanna trade against it. Again, if you trade against it, you're gonna get hurt.  And you don't wanna lose. You wanna make money. That's the whole point, okay? So if you can learn to spot institutional money and trade with it, it's gonna make your trading life so much easier.  So if you have a thousand shares of something and it drops $2 and you're short, how much are you gonna make? $2,000, okay? So it's the same concept. Add the size, get the right entry, get the move. We want big moves, $1, $2, $3, $4. So we're capturing these moves in a very, very specific entry in the one-minute chart but I'm looking at the daily to make the decision, okay? The 15-minute chart which gapped up. Well, I'm just showing you. I'm just, I didn't do anything here. I'm showing you this. I did not short this because this gapped up. I'm just showing you here the panic that came in and stepped in here and how it reversed. I did not short this day, this trade. In the 17th, we gapped up. So I just said I don't short gap ups, okay? I was showing you the panic, the sell-off that happened there in the 17th and how fast it can come in because we were up and we were green, okay? But no, I did not short the market on that day. So a big flow of money going in a certain direction is what moves the market, stocks, creates momentum and then sets the trend in charts. When you're looking for institutional money, you're really reading the side of power in a stock.  Institutional money is in charge of the market and stocks at all times. Even if you think it's not, it is, okay? So this is what trips people up and they say, oh my gosh, and again, we don't know what the Fed's gonna say on Wednesday.  If the market goes gangbusters to the upside Wednesday, I won't be surprised. If the market falls off a cliff on Wednesday, I won't be surprised.   So you have to know that there is a way that you can actually trade it successfully, consistently because if you don't believe that, you'll have to change your attitude about that right out of the jump, okay? So no one's rigged against you. The system is what it is. That's why you have to count for the fact that some trades will lose, okay? But the reality is that so many people get so upset because they say, oh, I thought this was gonna go one way and then it went another way. No, you didn't read it right. You didn't read it right in the first place, that's why, okay? So it's about finding the footprints of power. It's very important to find this power because the power has the ability to pay you and then whether you have a large risk or a small risk or small account or a large account, if you get the momentum and you get the big move, you can make money. And that's how you grow a small account into a big account. And that's how you grow a big account into an even bigger account. So for me, it's about one strategy to trade that focuses on spotting the institution of money and one focus, which is on gaps. Now, we did do this. I have this in here, but this is a call. We went long Tesla last week. I said on Thursday, I mean, on Friday to get out of this before the end of the day. I said that before the market even opened. Did I know it was gonna go to 180? No, but I knew it was gonna have the move on Friday. And then I also knew that going into the weekend is not a good idea to hold something like this. It ended up going way more than I thought. Sometimes that happens. But I called the 155 calls on Thursday. It took until Friday to make the move. So it popped on Friday. And again, this wasn't long. Technically, could you still be in this? Yes, do I think anyone still should be in this? No, okay. Again, when you take a trade, you take the trade, you get in, you get out. Sometimes an option to take 24 to 48 hours. Sometimes they go the same debt. This could have gone on Thursday. The day that I called it, I sent the trade out at 8.27 in the morning. So I have an options newsletter. I sent this trade out in Tessa. And this was the result. $8, I didn't think that was crazy expensive for this. You could have done a higher strike. And again, one contract would have made you $1,700. You could have had a better exit than this. I didn't hold it all the way up to 180, just so you know. But the return in investment was 213% if you had a good exit on this in the afternoon, even before it ran all the way up into the clothes. And if you risk 10 contracts and risk 8,000, which is an advanced trade or risk, you could have made 17 grand in one trade. This is what makes it valuable to trade and why it's important and here's the bar. So here was Tessa. This closed here, gapped up. I called the trade in this day, then it ran up on Friday, boom. So how am I trading options? I'm not doing any tricky option strategies. I'm trading the momentum and trading the gap. We're doing calls and puts on the options letter. For the day trades, I prefer to short, okay. How did I know what would gap up the next day? What stock and what are you talking about, Sean? I don't know what chart that was about. What stock are you talking about? And any other questions here? So again, this was a nice option and you could have gone long that on the day on Friday. But that got bought on Friday, on Thursday, again, by institutional money. Will it follow through? Not if the market falls, but that remains to be seen but everybody should be out of that trade anyways, okay. So it's about spotting power of money and then you get in and then you get out. Tessa, I called Tessa on Thursday. I didn't know what Tessa would do on the earnings. I didn't call the trade until Thursday, but on Thursday I did see it and I rated it and I saw it was gonna run up. So we did it and that's that. On this day, I didn't know what it was gonna do. It could attend. You don't take a trade, you don't guess where it's gonna gap. I'm not guessing the gap. I'm seeing the gap. Then I used my system to rate it in the pre-market or the post-market. Like I just got done talking about UPS. UPS is gonna do something. I hope, okay. I don't know where it's gonna gap. I'm not gonna get any trades in that. I'm not gonna take any trades in that until I see it. Then I'm gonna rate it. Then I'm gonna determine if I'm gonna short it or go long or do nothing in it. It may be a flop, okay. Netflix was a flop. I didn't trade that. It was not a good gap up and hardly went anywhere and then it put it off. So I don't predict the gap itself. I wait to see the gap. Then I rate it using my point system, okay. Does that make sense, Sean? Anyways, gaps are created with large institutional money. That's what makes the gap in the first place. So gaps are an event. They create a sense of urgency. Hurry, hurry, hurry. Buy it, sell it, short it, dump it, get it. Tessa was a bot, okay. Thus an action is being forced by participants of the stock. This is why gap trading is incredibly powerful. Trading gaps is a powerful and profitable way to trade because you're trading on the side of power and money and that is important. So I developed a system where I find gaps and I rate them using a checklist. They have to be qualified. You can't just, again, do everything in the direction of the gap or vice versa. And this is what confuses people about gaps and then they tend to shy away from them but really they're very profitable if you know how to trade them. Very profitable. Again, to be able to make a 200 some percent return and investment in 24 hours is a great options trade. Many people are scalping options, making pennies. No, we're near that type of ROI. So I have a checklist where I go over it and I evaluate it, okay. Now, like I said, I do prefer to short. This was Goldman Sachs, okay. This was a couple, this was two weeks ago, whenever it was, this is a one minute chart. Again, why do I like to short? Because you see this here? Again, a stock at this price that fell off a cliff. This is one of the things in here when you look at this. Again, fast moves happen, quick, quick, quick. You could have got in, got out. You could have got in, got out. You could have got in, got out. There was a million plays in this in this particular day to the downside. And again, they went fast, fast and big. Two, four, five, six hours in a day. To be able to have something that moves this big, you wanna be able to get in it and again, get out. And again, whether you do it as an option or where you do it as a day trade, that's up to you. If you don't have a margin account, you can't afford a margin account, then you do it as an option, okay. Or you sign up for the options newsletter. Was the cost of the option on Friday higher for Tesla than Thursday? Yes, because it already opened, it opened up on Friday. Yes, look, this was higher the next day. So the answer is yes. So getting back to the benefits of shorting, okay. There's just so many. Again, I do go long, I do make money doing calls, I do make money going long sometimes, like I did with the MS, but I prefer to short because of the fact that it gives me a niche. Many traders don't know how to short correctly. Again, we've had a lot of opportunities in the market in 2022, too short, we will have more this year. Today was another example of one. And it's something that if you just go to the long side, you are not gonna benefit from all the sell-offs that stocks have or the market has and the fast moves you can get to the downside. So again, even if you like to go long, if you don't know how to short, you're really missing out on a lot of opportunity that the market has to give in stocks as well. I think I answered the question somebody asked me about the cost of the option Friday. Yes, it was more expensive, but that's why you take the trade of the day that I call it. I called the trade at 8.30 in the AM. That means you take it into the open in Tesla. You don't take it the next day. Whoever asked that, Hernandez. I don't know why you'd wait till Friday. You wanna get the best price you can, if you can. All right, so I'm calling the trains early. So if you didn't make money in 2022, you didn't know how to short. I mean, this is a chart of the market here from last year. So we started out the market in 2022. We made brand new all-time highs in the spine. We did it in the Qs, but we did it at the beginning of the year in January. First day of the year, then we gap down, then we fell off a cliff. And again, there were many times that the market tried to recover last year and failed to do it. And it was a difficult people for people that went long last year because they kept thinking the market was gonna make moves up to the high and it failed to do it. July was a rough month for people. Really, people just thought for sure the market was gonna make a recovery. And even at this point, I mean, again, we're looking at five and look at 1,000 charts here. We weren't, I mean, it wasn't possible to think we could have recovered last year by the summer to the end of the year, but we didn't do it. We just didn't do it, okay. Again, this year remains to be seen, but we played as we see it. I'm not worried about predicting six months from now, six years from now. Who cares? You gotta make money right now. That's the name of the game as a trader. If you don't make money today, this week, this month, you're not gonna be in this game for long, all right? So what happens six months from now? It's like try to predict, okay, who's gonna win the presidential election in 2024? You don't even know who's running. How can you have, it's like, you don't even know who wins the nomination on either side, let alone who's gonna win the race. So don't just think about things that are out of your control that have no relevance at all and you don't even need that information. Just do what you know today to make money today to be successful right now to improve the quality of your life and your trading today. That's what you need to live in your own little bubble, okay, just like me. So I teach a system, it's called the Golden Gap. The Golden Gap 26 point rating system pinpoints the direction of power of money by rating price, okay. So I'm looking at price, I'm reading price. That's what I do in the pre-market and as I've been talking about all day, many traders go long, many traders don't know how to trade gaps so they shy away from them and shorting.  That's why you have a lot of people that are very wealthy in reference to trading and investments in the market and then you have a lot of people that lose. It's a zero sum game. When you make money, you're taking it away from somebody else. Could be your next door neighbor. This isn't Mr. Mr. Nice Guy, okay.  This is you go into the market, it's the smartest person that wins. It's the most aggressive, the most intelligent, the richest people that get it and you gotta understand that if you're with institutional money, if you're with that big money, those are the people that have the insider information. Those are the people that are paying 500 grand for a research report, which you're never gonna do. That they know X, Y, Z that the Fed's gonna say and this, that thing and the other thing and you darn well know that they probably know what the Fed's gonna say. So look for what's gonna happen in the next 24 to 48 hours in the market. I will say that. So many saying about ES and NQ. I don't look at those, I don't trade those at all. No. So I trade the market. Sometimes I trade the Dow, which is the diamonds ETF. And we've been talking about this. You must have an edge. Okay, this is you. You will be a lot happier if you have an edge and you're gonna be a lot happier if you're making money, okay? So success requires a plan, a plan of action to get there. So my plan of action is my 26 point rating system. I think Sean mentioned this earlier. Hopefully Sean one day will learn it. So I go through, I rate the gap. I'm looking for 20 points or more, that's the cut off. If I get it, I take it in the direction of the gap. And again, checklist work.  If you're doing your, if you have an accountant, a CPA, and they're doing your tax return, they go through the checklist, boom, boom, boom. The checklist helps you keep on track to get the job done right, okay? So it is a plan of action. It's not, let's trade on the fly. That's not gonna get you what you need. You shouldn't be risking money on the fly. You shouldn't be trading anything on the fly. You shouldn't be taking blind ideas from strangers at webinars like this. You're listening to what I have to say here now to see if anything I say resonates with you. You can't just take blind trading ideas from people that you don't even know that are strangers. You don't know why they're taking them. You don't know if it's a strategy. You don't know if it's no strategy. You have to have some thought process and the decisions that you're making, okay? Don't risk money for risk sake. Everyone that puts money into the market should have a plan of action and a checklist. On a professional level, all high income career field specialists have checklists. And again, that is a good idea. That's where you want to be. So I'm just gonna go through one week of trades here. I could have put last weeks in. I just didn't have time. This is one week of golden gaps that we did in December, the last week of the year. And again, I closed the room for Christmas and New Year's, but we made $23,445. This was day trades. And again, we had a winning week last week as well. But this was Tesla in December. I talked about the fact that we were doing this a lot. This was a really nice gap. We shorted it at 175, 20, got out. Boom, 170, 165. Here was the gap. Stock closed here, gap down, fell. Again, the red bar to picks the selling, and we shorted this. With a $2,900 risk, you could have made $35,50. You could have taken 500 shares. The idea is to get the momentum. The idea is to get Tesla. The idea is to know this is gonna fall before it falls. Again, I'm not predicting the gap, but I get up in the morning and I see the gap and I rate the gap and I know it's gonna work. And then we do it. And we do it into the open. We did go along this one here. I'm showing you, we went long CVS for a little tiny, tiny bit. This was on the 13th. Again, looking at this, it's kind of funny because it really didn't go up that much in here, but we pulled money out of it. It closed here, gapped up, and that doesn't look like much of anything at all, but it was not much to do that day. And we went long. So you could have risked $3,000. I mean, 1675. We went out really quick. Sometimes I've made a amount of trades in five minutes. Six minutes, 10 minutes. As fast as I can get in and get out, I can. But this was one that we went long. And then on 12, 14, no gaps met my criteria. We didn't do anything. That's another important thing. Follow the rules. Don't trade when somebody doesn't meet your criteria. On the 15th, we did the QQQs. They had a beautiful gap here. Again, December was a nice month to short the market. And again, when I said the market, it could be the Qs. It could be the spy. It could be the diamonds. Again, we did the Qs. We shorted it at 280 to 10, got out of 280, 45, boom. If you risked $2,800, it could have made $3,300. If you risked 1,000, if you risked 500, whatever you want to risk, again, while you say, well, this is pricing, fine. You could have bought a put. Could have bought the 280 puts, okay? Do what works for you. So this closed here, gap down, fell, boom. This was on the 15th. Again, how do you make money? Short it. We shorted that. Then we also did the Qs on the 16th. We did the Qs here. Entry was 276, exit was 27310, almost pulled $3 out of it. It kept going. This day kept going. So I didn't get a lower-the-day exit in this, and I didn't get a lower-the-day exit in this. I didn't get out quick. I didn't get out quick. Okay, that's my moja. But if you want to hold things, I think it's a lot easier to do them as an option. But this was a nice strain because we almost got $3 out of it. With 2300 shares, you could have made $6,600. And again, there are $6,670. If you don't want to take this trade on margin because of the cost, okay, you could have bought a put. You could have bought, like, for example, the 275 put. So if I'm calling this entry in the room, you could buy the 275 puts, okay? And I'm just giving you ideas here. And then you can get in and out of the put as a dang trade, all right? We also did the spy. Again, close to your gap down, fell. Another nice one here, pulled, just a beautiful move. 385.25, shorted it, exited it, 381.50, in and out. We did the market quite a bit, actually in the month of December. Prop of $8,250. Again, this is pricey if you're on margin. If you don't have the cash size account, take less size or buy a put. You could have bought the 385 puts. Easy, okay? Again, it's the idea of getting the direction right, of getting the pick, of picking the right stock or tickle symbol. Again, this is an ETF in the market of the S&P, but it's the idea of knowing that it's gonna go down, getting it aggressively, getting out of it with profit, and then getting the momentum and the move, okay? Which is what I really focus on doing every single solitary day. But for me, it's about the time that I spend trading versus the analysis. So in the pre-market, I'm working, working, working hard, and I'm spending all this time figuring out when I get up and very little time trading. So the more time I spend figuring out what to do, the more money I usually make, and I don't have to spend that much time trading. Whereas many people, the opposite. They spend very little time preparing in the morning what to trade and a long day trading and stressing themselves out of what to trade. I'm the opposite, okay? The more time you spend preparing and figuring out what you wanna do, focusing on the chart, focusing on the gap, making the pre-market decisions, the more money you're gonna make in the day, the easier it's gonna be for you to trade in the day and the best chance you're gonna have for success because you're not gonna be all over the place stressing yourself out, trying to make last minute decisions, chomping at the bit, again, not being prepared with what you're doing. So when you go to trade, you really should have a high winning strategy, number one, good money management, number two, and a good mentor to follow. If you have these things, then you're gonna make it. Again, how long it takes you to make it is up to you. I do my best to help people teach them, review stuff with them, but again, this is an individual thing. You have to be an independent minded person if you wanna trade, because again, this isn't giving money to somebody and investing it for you. This is you wanna do it, but it's fun. It's fun to trade, the room is fun. I try to make it as fun and enjoyable as I can. Making money is fun, okay? And the faster we can make it, the better. So for me, it's all about the fast trades and really chunking it out, which is about income generation, which a lot of people need. We're in a situation right now. Some people think we're gonna go into recession. Some people think inflation is curbing off. Whatever you think, things cost more now than they did 12 months ago or 24 months ago. Times have changed, okay? So you have to think about yourself. You have to make do.  So you can make more money by getting a second job or you can curb your whole life situation and spend less. I don't like that idea. So the idea is to earn more. How are you gonna do it? You can trade the market. And the nice thing about trading is you can do it part-time while you're working and delve into it to transition to doing it full-time if you want to. So empower yourself to trade the market. And that is my best advice to you. Empower yourself. Think positive. It's the beginning of a new year. If there's any time to do it, it's now. So I teach a class once a month. It's called the Golden Gap course. It's a 26-point rating system to find the best stock to trade each day. I focus to the short sign. The course also teaches you how to enter and exit the stock on the day. The course teaches price analysis and technical analysis on an advanced level. So it's a two-day class. I just did a January class this weekend. The next class is at the end of February. And I do it once a month. Class is online. It teaches you how to find, pick, and play stocks that are professional bearish gaps. So if you're interested in the next class, it's February 25th and 26th, nine to five, starting Sunday. Class tuition is $69.99. Class is online. You can be anywhere in the world to take it. And I'm doing a special till February 1st. If you wanna sign up for the February class, okay? You can receive the trading win free to the end of 2023. This expires Wednesday, February 1st. So you have today, tomorrow, to decide. And if you have questions, you can email me. If you're interested, you can email me. And I'd be happy to answer any questions for you. Anyone of any questions I wanna go over with right now before Jeff pops on here. I think I answered Brian's. Sean, do you have any other questions? Where are we gonna close here today? Are we gonna close down, like I said, an hour ago? Listen, if anyone has any questions, you can email me at melissathestockswitch.com. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much, Jeff, for having me. Happy New Year. Have a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful week. All right, thank you very much for coming, Melissa. It was good to have you. Thank you.


Well, let's do some Python marker. All right. So a little bit of reminder, I put this in the chat. Don't forget, Scott, tomorrow at 9 AM, a central time, Bluetooth app development with Circuit Python. Do check that out. We have a bunch of stuff. Let's see how many are left. 90, OK. You guys are ticking down. Yep, tick, tick, tick, tick. Our Circuit Python on a hardware newsletter. We do this every single week. Some Pi 5 details, some Raspberry, sorry, some Circuit Python 8 updates. Yeah, we're going to go for 9 out of us. Yeah, I was about to say 9. Yeah, numbers. Well, we'll do the 8s while we prepare for this. Yeah, so Circuit Python 9 is coming, but we have the 8 to 7 release. There's a couple more boards. Some really neat projects this week. This is MicroPython Calculators. Really cool. We're going to start adding some of the 8-of-3 Playgrounds. These are notes, guides that anyone can make. We'll talk about that later on in the show, but we're going to have that in the newsletter since there's a lot of Python-based ones. And then check out just the menagerie of projects. Hackaday, a site I counted a million years ago, have nothing to do with now, but I like seeing things that's why I started the site. This is the type of stuff I wanted to see. They have a Hackaday badge for SuperCon, and you can do MicroPython stuff. It's a cute looking badge. I like the little joystick. There's a screen on it, and I like seeing my logo. My logos. I like the combination of big and small buttons. I like seeing it. It still works. And it works great on a round display. Yeah. So check out all the projects and more. However, this week what we're going to talk about is there's a bunch of stuff going on in the world of Python. So we've got the virtual environment usage, and then on Playground we also have the comparing the GIO stuff. Which we don't want to talk about first. I don't know. Do you want to just talk about what the issue is and then instead of being jerks on GitHub or social media, we're just going to help solve it and do good done production? That's our idea. So what it is, that's our idea. It's our day. Well, we're also going to hang back. Basically, as a bookworm, which is the latest release of the Raspberry Pi operating system, which is also going to be the it's going to be the operating system that's required for use with the Raspberry Pi 5. They've changed. Debian has changed to how they do Python package installation, which everyone always makes fun of Python packaging. Because they're using Python as part of the operating system and utilities, they don't want you to be able to mess up that install. And so instead of letting you just do pseudopip and install into the root or main site packages folder, they're kind of requiring every user to make a virtual environment that will then keep all your packages in your home directory, for example. And this is technically correct. You technically should do that. It is the right thing to do. It's not very punk. And we're kind of punk. And we're still kind of investigating, you know, even that's the right thing to do to have a virtual environment. There's about a decade's worth of Raspberry Pi tutorials that don't. And don't talk about that. And nobody's going to go and update all of them. Like, we're happy to update all of the Adafruit guides. But there's just no chance that every Instructible and every Hackster and every Element 14 and every blog post is going to be updated. A lot of people use PIP. And what you're supposed to do is set up your environment beforehand. So, you know, I think there's some discussion about it.  We haven't yet decided what we're going to do because it's a big decision. We don't want to make decisions and then take it back. There's a couple of things. One, we could just tell people, hey, just disable this inability and just like install pseudopip anyways. We could have our Blink-a-script automatically set up your virtual environment in your bash profile. So, it always gets configured when you start up. We could update every tutorial to say, hey, you know, here's what your virtual environment should be and you'll just have to turn it on before you begin. There's no real right answer. It's definitely going to be a bit of a mess. We kind of want to see what other folks want to do because each one has pros and cons. And honestly, I just can't make that decision right now. I'm just a little too tired with the baby. So, to that end, we have a guide that Carter wrote. I assume to write it. And Carter's one of our best guide writers for beginner topics about virtual environments and how it affects the Raspberry Pi specifically. There's lots of guides about virtual environments, but because you might be using pseudo to do NeoPixel stuff in particular, it's important to kind of know the intricacies of setting up this virtual environment. So this guy talks about that and specifically talks about how to do it with pseudo and what doesn't work and what does. So the answer is no answer, but we at least have a guide that we can reference to. So thanks, Carter, for writing it. Yeah. So we'll see how things go, but generally speaking, maybe our community, which I think is pretty big can kind of set a good example.  So I would just say, especially for open source maintainers, a lot of people are demanding. There's mean people, they're like, do this now for me. They're basically like, I wanna speak to your manager and treating us and others like customer service. It's the type of person that if you're at a restaurant and they're yelling at the wait staff, like no one likes that.  I think we're just gonna try to figure out what's the best thing we can do. So we started writing guides. That's what we always do. Like when it's open. I'm just exploring what we need to solve this. Because I was like, I don't know how it like, this is even with NeoPixels and Pseudo and how is that gonna happen? So we have, so we got that. And then did you wanna talk about this other? This other stuff here? Yes, sorry. And then on the other side, we want to make sure that Blinka, so one of the really good decisions that we did make, that's like some decisions I'm putting off and some decisions I made that I'm glad I did. So having Blinka as our interface library so that we can have the CircuitPython API available on CPython, the Raspberry Pi has been a really good idea because historically we, a very, very long time ago before Blinka, we used RPY GPIO for all of our Raspberry Pi GPIO toggling and tweaking. And turns out that as with the Raspberry Pi 5 because of the new RP1 chip, GPIO zero, sorry, RPY.GPIO no longer works. And it's unclear if they're going to update it to work. And so because we happened to have been supporting Blinka and other single board latest computers and those were using LibGPIOD, which is the new kernel module that is recommended for GPIO interfacing, we already had support for LibGPIOD in Blinka and Melissa was able to turn it on fairly quickly in a day, not in like weeks. And so Blinka has been updated to use LibGPIOD. One thing that I didn't notice a while ago was that GPIOD was not as fast as memory mapping, which RPY GPIO does. Memory mapping is always going to be the fastest, but it requires permissions and it's like kind of dangerous and you're like prodding memory and it's like you're kind of poking into somebody's brain. And so I asked Melissa, could you please check GPIO zero, which is kind of like the official Raspberry Pi GPIO interface library for Python and the GPIOD Python bindings and compare them. You can scroll down and she did a great job and keep going, keep going, keep going and even posted up the Sele outputs. So basically it turns out that GPIOD can go up to about like 550 kilohertz toggle speed. The up and down is going to be 280. So you double that to get the toggle speed because there's two toggles per frequency. And then on LibGPIO, it's in GPIO zero, it's about 200 kilohertz. So you're going to get like about three times speed with GPIOD, 600 kilohertz is pretty good actually, considering it's going through this like secondary chip, 600 kilohertz. It's not fast enough to do neopixels but you wouldn't do that anyways. You would use like the PIO sub capability but basically just documenting this and if other people, because I knew somebody was going to say, hey, why don't you use GPIO zero? And it's like, have documentation now. So what we're doing is documenting. Yeah, so that's what we're doing while people are just robbing insults at each other about all this stuff. So that is our Python on hardware, lots of stuff going on as you can tell. Yeah. So just stay tuned to all of our documentation updates, stop by the shows. We'll tell you what we're up to. But that's our plan is to just do great documentation and great products and... Oh, there's a little bit of a rant. Yeah, whatever. Sorry, it's okay. I'll keep going. We send out this newsletter every single week. Adafruitdaily.com. It's a completely separate website because we hate spam even more than you do. And you can sign up there as nothing to do with your Adafruit store account. You can subscribe on, subscribe anytime. You don't even have to subscribe to the newsletter. You can look at a standalone page that's a permalink that doesn't have any tracking. Oh, so it's a github. It's on github. It's an RSS feed. Wow. That's someone saying that like tracking, it's like we have every way for it to be the best privacy saving way. We have to use tools like MailChimp that send out things and there's links that you can't stop tracking. We have other ways to read the newsletter. My favorite is some people like, oh, what's so hard? Why can't you just send out a couple hundred thousand emails? I'm like, have you actually tried some more than a thousand emails? It's really hard. So that's why we jump through all these hoops.  You can just go to the page and we've been de-googlifying. Nothing against Google. Well, besides some other, I do have some Google issues. But you can just go to Adafruitdaily and you can just read it every single week. We have the link right here. Yeah, it's cool. Okay, it's great. Okay, anyways, that's the newsletter.


It is now my pleasure to welcome Dr. Linda Darling-Hannond. It is such a pleasure to be here with the most important people in this country, and I'm so privileged to follow on the heels of Marian Wright Edelman's wonderful admonition and inspiration to us this morning to continue to raise the cause of children to the nation's attention. So I've been asked to speak a little about what we know that will allow us to act expeditiously in this field, and I'm going to piggyback on some of what Marian has already gotten us to think about. First I have to figure out how this keyboard works. There we go. And I want to point out that the challenge for us as educators in this era is a more complex challenge than it has been in the past, because in addition to all of the issues that are raised by the neglect of children and the growing poverty gap and income gap in this country, we're also being asked to teach young people in ways that were particularly reserved for a few in the past. The new Common Core State Standards, the Next Generation Science Standards, look for deeper learning for children to be able to apply their learning in more critical, problem-solving oriented ways. The kind of education that used to be reserved for the kids who were allocated to the gifted program or the advanced placement or the honors courses is now being asked for and expected for virtually all kids. And so it's a form of deeper learning that we need to be able to cultivate. And I want to start with a hopeful message that our students are capable of deeper learning when they are well taught. And I'll give you an example of how that can unfold. I am a former English teacher myself, so I like to collect examples from English teachers' classrooms of the kind of teaching and learning that many of us worry about. So I'm going to give you some examples of how children can illustrate for us the path to deeper learning in the teaching of the concept of metaphor. And initially, of course, we know when students encounter something for the first time, their attempts are more shallow. They are not necessarily fully understanding deeply what the concept means. And here's an example of the beginning of the process. He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree. Okay, there's the word as in there, but this is not yet an example of deeper learning. But here, with a little bit of work, we see a pace forward. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who also had never met. There's a glimmer that the concept is being understood. But with a little more work, a little more teaching, you can see progress being made. She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs. But don't give up. There is hope. There is the possibility of deeper learning, and we can see it here. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River. That's a New York kid, gotta be. So deeper learning is possible, and we can see how it unfolds.  Only one that had been left out so long and had rested shut. And this is one of my personal favorites. He was as lame as a duck, not the metaphorical lame duck either, but a real duck that was actually lame. So you know who this kid is, the one that doesn't want you to write cliche in the margins, right? She grew on him another favorite, like she was a colony of E. coli, and he was room temperature Canadian views. I think that's an example of deeper learning. The plan was simple like my brother-in-law, Phil, but unlike Phil, this plan just might work. A final example where you add a touch of irony to the concept of metaphor. Her vocabulary was as bad as like whatever. Our kids are capable of deeper learning. We are capable of helping them learn deeply, but there is a lot of work that needs to be done to help us get to the place where that will be routine and where the conditions for that kind of work will be in every school and every classroom. Much of the conversation around education these days is about achievement scores and rankings and among the things that we hear about a lot are the international assessments, the program for international student assessment or PISA, and the OECD countries participate in this survey of student learning. It is a little different than the test that we often give in the United States because two-thirds of the items are open-ended, requiring students to write a response that applies their knowledge to a new situation rather than bubbles in one answer out of five on a multiple choice test. And what I've highlighted here are the rankings from 2012. The countries that are in purple print are the ones that we're used to seeing at the top of these rankings, Singapore, Japan, Korea, Finland, Canada. The ones in red were surprises in the last round of PISA. Ireland, Poland, Estonia, and Vietnam also Germany had been doing much less well and regained prominence in the list. You can see that the U.S. ranks much lower at 21st in reading, 32nd in math, 23rd in science. And often these results are put forward as evidence that the U.S. system is failing, which I think is not the right inference to be drawing from the data. But it's also interesting to see what is happening in the countries that have over 30 years really improved the quality and equity of their outcomes. And I'm going to talk about both of those things. One of the inferences, however, that I do draw from PISA is that on average over the 12 years or 15 years almost that we have been implementing No Child Left Behind, we've seen no improvement in our average scores on this international assessment. So the theory of reform behind No Child Left Behind, which is simply to test and apply sanctions to the failure to meet expected targets on the test, has not proved to be enough to make a major difference overall in student achievement. In every one of the areas tested by PISA, math, science, and reading, we're a little further behind in 2012 than we were in the year 2000. However, if you look at how the U.S. does by poverty rates of schools, and this is the point that I'm going to just jump from Marion's talk and piggyback upon, in schools where less than 10% of the kids live in poverty, we ranked number one in the world in reading. In schools where as many as 25% of kids live in poverty, we ranked number three in the world in reading. Even in schools where as many as 50% of kids live in poverty, we are way above the international average. So our teachers are doing some things very, very well because in the high-achieving countries, all of the schools have fewer than 10% of kids in poverty because they don't allow children to live in poverty. And so we're being compared in this country against societies that are making the investments in children that are not being made here. And what we can see from this chart also is that the place where we have a real drop-off in student achievement is in schools where more than 75% of kids live in poverty. And I can say to you in California where over half of the kids in our public school system live below the poverty line. And many, many schools have 75, 80, 90, 100% of kids living in poverty that that is a growing number of schools in our country. And segregation, which has been increasing over the last 20 or so years, is increasingly layered on that intense and concentrated poverty. And that is the issue that we have to address is the concentrated poverty and segregation. Well, what do we find when we look at these high-achieving countries and those that have dramatically improved over a period of time, are factors that are associated with this high achievement? The first, and I just will piggyback right on the last talk, is the societal supports for children's welfare, including early childhood education. You find in these higher-achieving countries equitable resources with greater investments in high-need schools and students. In the United States, our highest-achieving state in New England spends $18,000 a kid. Our lowest spending state is at $6,000 a student. Within each of those states, the highest spending districts are spending three times as much as the lowest spending districts, typically speaking. So these dramatic inequalities in the allocation of resources to schools, which stand in the face of our rhetoric about equity, are not present in high-achieving societies that tend to spend the same amount and add money. They call it in Finland affirmative discrimination. They add money in schools that have more immigrant students, more students, from lower-income backgrounds. Very substantial investments in initial teacher education and ongoing support. If you wanted to become a teacher in Finland or Singapore or many of the other countries that are at the top of the ranking, Korea, you would come in to a teacher education program that was very high quality with all of the costs paid and a stipend while you go to school so that everyone is well-prepared and enters a profession which pays as much as the funding going to other college graduates without a mountain of debt. We have to address all of these issues. Schools are designed to support teacher learning as well as student learning. I'll come back to that. Students have equitable access to a rich thinking curriculum. We don't begin tracking in kindergarten and first grade as many of our schools do or in middle school as others of them do. They focus their assessments on performance assessments rather than multiple-choice tests. We are the only country in the world that tests primarily with multiple-choice tests or that tests as much as we do every child, every year. There are assessments periodically, maybe once or twice before high school with open-ended essays, oral examinations, even project-based assessments that teachers design and score and that are part of the teaching and learning structure. We know a great deal about what happens in high-achieving societies and we know a great deal about the specific things that could help us really master achievement. It's important for teachers to be able to speak to both the things that they themselves can do and I will talk about the teaching strategies component of this but also the context within which those teaching efforts can be the most successful. Early childhood education has already been mentioned and I'll simply point out that in the PISA data, the international assessment data, they've observed a huge performance advantage in societies that offer pre-school education and for kids who've had pre-school education, there's a 53-point advantage in mathematics and if you control for socioeconomic status and other variables, that advantage is still there. And in the societies that are doing best, those students who have the least family income are much more likely to get pre-school education of high quality than in other societies. So it's an area where we know what to do and we need to begin doing it. We know that early childhood pays off. The social benefits of high quality early childhood education are estimated anywhere from four to ten dollars comes back to the society in the form of reduced grade retention, special education placements, higher graduation rates, less incarceration, lower levels of adult poverty for every one dollar that's invested. And so we need to continue to make that case. And the most successful programs have relied on very highly qualified teachers who have a bachelor's or a master's degree in early childhood education states that have put this in place, have underwritten the training of teachers so that they can meet this higher standard. Rich hands-on learning materials, language and print rich environments, creative play and engaging collaborative learning activities, parent outreach and education. I want to say a word about the evidence regarding the nature of learning activities for young children, but this also carries on into older age groups as well. We have this press to raise test scores in this country, and we test in a way that is a very remote proxy from the actual way that you would use the knowledge in the real world. Nobody goes to work and gets a multiple-choice test on their desk where they pick one answer out of five in response to a set of questions and turn that in and go home because their work is done. There is no work that looks like that. You have to find information, you have to apply it, you have to be creative, you have to work with other people, you have to figure out a lot of things. Well, it's really important that our education system not begin to emulate the doing of that kind of test-based activity in lieu of the real work of creative engagement, communication, collaboration, problem-solving, finding and analyzing information and so on. And in early childhood education we've had more and more pressure to have kids master basic skills in the way it's represented on the tests rather than engaging in play, engaging in inquiry, engaging in discovery. And what we know from research is that in fact the more kids get to engage in play and discovery and learning how to be social beings and taking care of themselves and cooking their food and serving it as they do in preschools in many countries and engaging in the arts and learning other languages which by the way their brains are completely wired to do at that point, to that extent they actually do much, much better in later schooling and life than when they get early academics in a very artificial way. So we're going to have to continue to raise these issues about what's the nature and quality of the education that we need for children to receive. When we went to Finland recently with a congressional delegation, the people were asking how does Finland do so well? Well, of course they take spectacular care of their children in terms of health and early childhood and so on. They're very healthy. They have lots of recess. They have lots of music. They have lots of play. And this is what the teachers talked about was that yes, we do academics and it's inquiry oriented and it's problem solving and everybody speaks three languages. It's a tri-lingual country as many other countries are. And in Finland that happens to be usually three different alphabets that the kids are learning in preschool and elementary school. And these kinds of things make a difference for your cognitive apparatus. We know that when kids are physically fit and get activity, they actually do better cognitively and academically. When you learn another language, it builds so many more neurons in your brain that they discovered that when they looked at Alzheimer's patients, people who actually had had Alzheimer's but were bilingual did not show the symptoms for five years later than other people because they had so much more brain matter that they could work with. So we have to really think about both when we educate kids and how we're going to do it so that we're building smart brains that we'll then be able to engage in the kind of cognition that we need them to engage in. The other piece that's so important is equity. And one of the things that the PISA results have discovered is that high performers in the world combine quality with equity. And what you don't find, if you look at that upper left-hand quadrant, that would be where you would find countries that have high performance but low equity.  You can see the United States is kind of lower in the basket of performance and equity. The other thing they thought is that equity and resource allocation is associated with achievement. If you spend more in schools on the education of children who have fewer socioeconomic advantages, you do better as a country. And those surprise arrivals to the top of the rankings that I pointed out earlier, like Vietnam and Poland and Estonia, did that by investing more money in the education of students with greater needs. And that is what shot them up in the rankings. So I'm just reiterating what Marion already said to us. But part of our agenda is to make funding more responsive to student needs when we think about both early childhood and we think about the way in which we allocate costs. I want to give you just a couple of pieces of information about this because since the 1980s, we've been hearing that money doesn't make a difference. That was actually an explicit messaging strategy that was adopted in the 1980s as many of the programs of the 60s and 70s that had reduced poverty, that had increased equity in schools, were being eliminated. We were being told money doesn't make a difference. We have a lot of evidence about how money does make a difference. When Massachusetts reformed its school system in the early 1990s and shot up to become number one ranked state in the country and has been at that, Massachusetts is in the house. Good to see you here. What did they do? The first thing they did was put in place a weighted student formula that put more money in the schools allocated based on poverty, English learning status, special education status and so on. And then they added standards and assessments which were more open-ended and preschool education and professional development for teachers and investments in teacher education. And that whole thing is what propelled a very complete standards-based reform forward. And economists who studied the system said it was that reallocation of school funding that was primarily responsible for the growth and achievement. Recently, just this summer, three economists put out a study which looked at the results of school funding reforms in the last 40 years in 28 states. And they found that for low-income kids who, because of school funding reforms, had 20 percent more spent on them each year from kindergarten to 12th grade. The adult achievement and income gap was closed. Was closed. So what you found was that these young people graduated at rates 26 percentile points higher than they would have, went on into college, went on into good jobs, avoided poverty, avoided incarceration and so on, at rates that essentially closed that gap. So money really does make a difference. And we just need to be versed in this literature so that we can begin to change the conversation about that. It is just not right that testing without investing is somehow going to magically cure the situation that we currently have in schools where kids are under-resourced in their homes and communities and in their schools at the same time. And you can see in New Jersey, is New Jersey in the house? No, no applause for New Jersey. That's just applause for New Jersey because they did this thing. I used to live in Philly and in New York, so I thought of New Jersey as the strip of 95 that goes between the two cities. But they, for 30 years, fought school finance reform. There was lawsuit after lawsuit. The city's Trenton, Newark, Camden, I taught in Camden, it was my first student teaching placement, had half as much money as Princeton and New Brunswick and so on. They fought it. Finally in 1998, after nine court decisions, Christy Todd Whitman, the Republican governor of New Jersey, put the money into the system to create parity between the low-funded and the high-funded districts they gave preschool to all of the low-income students in the, what they call the 30 Abbott districts. They did a lot of professional development and so on. And over 10 years, they cut the achievement gap in half and propelled achievement in New Jersey to one of the top five in the country. Number one in writing, 40% students of color in that state, more than a third living in poverty, but they demonstrated that by being smart about how to make those investments, and they partnered around, by 2007, Hispanic and black kids in New Jersey were outperforming the average kid in California. So that when you look at the differences across states, that's part of it. Now, what about our profession? What about the things we know about improving the quality of teaching? One of the things that we know is that teacher effectiveness has many components and that a number of large studies have found that student learning gains are related to teachers having a strong academic background, quality preparation before they enter teaching, certification in the field that they teach, experience more than three years, and national board certification. And in one large study in North Carolina where they were able to look at all of those together, each of them predicted higher achievement for kids, but together they accounted for more of the difference in student learning gains than race and parent education combined. Now, what would we want? We would want a set of policies where virtually all teachers have virtually all of these characteristics. But in fact, what we have is that some students are taught by teachers who have all of these features and others are taught disproportionately by people of almost none of these characteristics. And that's what causes the enormity of the achievement gap on top of these other factors. So as a policy matter, we ought to be articulating a set of policies which high achieving countries already have in place where all teachers come in with these characteristics and where we provide the recruitment incentives, the training opportunities, the mentoring that will keep people so that they do gain experience and stay for a career, the national board certification opportunities that will allow people to gain these skills. So that's a policy agenda that we need to be thinking about. If we don't do that, if all we do is focus on teacher evaluation after people get in the profession, we'll be building on a house of sand. If you got this right, if you brought the right people in with the right capacity and experience and support to develop skills like those that are tested in the board certification, then teacher evaluation will be about development rather than trying to figure out how to get rid of incompetent teachers. Still many things influence achievement. This is from one study, but there are several that find very similarly. In general, achievement is predicted by student background factors, about 60%. Teacher factors are about 8%. The studies vary between 7% and 12%. There are other school factors, and those matter as well. And if we want high levels of teacher effectiveness, we need to be thinking about not just what we do to support the development of individual teachers, but teachers' peers, collaboration, other conditions of teaching work. We know that class size and curriculum matters, that student leadership matters. But I want to point out in particular the importance of the collaborative piece because in fact several studies have found that teachers who work together over a long period of time collaboratively in teams have a greater influence on the achievement gains in the school than what you could gain from individual teachers not working in that way. And so it's very important that as we think about the quality of teaching, we not just focus in on individual teachers, but we focus in on the quality of the collaborative environment that allows teachers to grow and learn from one another. We have evidence that when you use professional teaching standards to guide preparation, development and evaluation, teacher effectiveness improves. Like when teachers are evaluated by tools or instruments that embody standards, whether it's the national board standards in the case of that certification or on the job evaluation guided by evidence of standards about practice, that teacher effectiveness improves because if you get feedback about the things that matter in teaching, regularly you pay attention to those things if you can reach out to peers and other professional development that enables you to improve. We know that strong clinical preparation makes a huge difference that in teacher education one of the things that predicts greater effectiveness of teachers when they leave is that they've had very well planned student teaching and clinical preparation. And given the time I'm not going to go into all of that deeply, but I will say to you that one of the features of that are partnerships between schools and universities, professional development schools, whatever they may be called, clinical training sites where the teachers in the school have pledged to be part of the teacher education experience as a faculty writ large where the school of education like a teaching hospital is working closely on curriculum as well as engagement in student teaching where faculty from the school are influencing the courses in the university where faculty from the university and in the school and in those settings we found in studies that teachers feel better prepared when they come into the profession they go in and stay at higher rates and they are more effective in their early years of teaching so part of what we need to do is build that capacity expert mentoring and coaching matters and I will take a moment to show you some of the features that make a big difference in professional development. We've got to do this in a systemic way where we're pulling everything together from selection to preparation to induction, recruitment, professional development and we need to do that in programs of teacher education that really appropriately emphasize the learning of how to teach your content content pedagogy, attention to curriculum attention to specific practices in the classroom, all of those things predict more successful graduates of preparation. In order to get to that we're going to have to leverage a lot of change in teacher education. These are my people I work in the teacher education space teaching adolescent development this semester and what I know is that there are some very good programs that have really done tremendous work in collaboration with school based faculty and colleagues there are some places that are doing quite reasonable and helpful work and there are some places that should not be training teachers and we have to get serious about the bar for accreditation and how one has the privilege to train teachers I think that teacher education is sacred work in the same way that Marion described teaching is sacred work because we owe it to every teacher to give them the knowledge and skills to do the job that they want to do at the end of the classroom. That's going to mean we're going to have to be very engaged in strengthening accreditation, strengthening licensure. I'm a big advocate of performance assessments for entering teaching like a bar exam that really measures whether you can teach so that we can leverage the improvements that are needed there and I will simply point out that once you get there the induction also matters for effectiveness and ongoing work and we need we know that the effective induction programs have trained carefully selected mentors in the same subject area and grade level who can work on curriculum with their mentees they provide regular in-classroom modeling and coaching being able to demonstrate as well as to advise they engage in collaborative curriculum planning and teachers have other opportunities to engage in collaborative curriculum planning. Seminars on critical topics that reduce teaching load this is what induction programs look like in places like Ontario, Canada and other places and in some of our states relatively few of them do you see all of these things in place but when these features are in place teachers stay at much higher rates in the profession and are more effective and become more effective more quickly. We also know that quality professional learning matters and we know something about that professional learning. One study that looked at sort of the experimental blue I should say gold standard studies found that you get a very large effect on student learning from professional development that on average is 49 hours a year on the same topic and that one shot workshops have no positive effects on student learning whatsoever and we all know this because we've all said in those after school workshops so we know a lot about the nature of high quality professional learning opportunities that are really focused on the content and so on and one of the problems we see and this has happened under NCLB we have actually less of the sustained form of inquiry based collaborative professional development going on than we had in the year 2000 we've actually gone downhill whereas about a third of the teachers used to say they were in a collaborative learning environment and more of them said they were getting sustained professional development now it's only 15% of teachers reporting they're in a collaborative learning environment and more are getting PD that is the one shot variety workshops so we've got to be very aggressive and assertive about insisting on the right kind of professional learning. The TALIS study recently from OECD frequently teachers reported participating in collaborative practices with their colleagues the higher their level of self-efficacy and collaboration and self-efficacy in the literature are associated with greater effectiveness as well as greater job satisfaction and we know that the nature of that collaboration also matters and so we've got to become insistent on if we want to improve student achievement how are we going to do it it's got to be a part of the story. One aspect a very useful collaboration is teacher engagement with curriculum and assessment and with the implementation of common core state standards next generation science standards a number of states are moving and some districts are moving to reintroduce the kind of inquiry oriented performance assessments that you actually need to use to measure those standards and to develop those skills the kind that many places had in the 90s that are based in standards that are expressed in rubrics where we can give students really formative descriptive feedback that give them opportunities to revise their work when students have the opportunity to get constructive feedback not a grade but information about what they've done well and what they need to do next and revise immediately in any subject area the learning gains are so much greater the effect size of having that kind of formative feedback and opportunity to revise that dwarfs many other interventions that you could engage in in the classroom so part of the work that we have ahead of us as we're taking this move towards deeper learning is to move out the opportunities in the curriculum to go deep to engage teachers in developing the kind of curriculum assessment tools hopefully in the context of a new accountability system that is more focused on assessing for improvement than testing for punishment we need to have teachers involved like they are in other countries in evaluating student work together and scoring assessments to inform their teaching decisions how many of you are in places where that is beginning to go on a small number there is a lot of work to do to help policy makers understand what it is going to take to implement these curriculum and assessment reforms productively and I think that is something we have to put on our table I have heard stories of people trying to implement the common core with pacing guides which somebody just said yes which is completely at odds with the whole idea of helping kids find their way along the learning progressions to the goals that we need to help them accomplish you can't teach kids over their heads when they are falling behind and expect to build a house of understanding that is solid and that takes the scaffolded stair steps from wherever it is they are to where they are needed we are going to have to as members of the profession talk about what it means to teach developmentally to meet children where they are to use the learning progressions grade level standards as a goal but not a straight jacket and to make these standards work otherwise it is going to be another failed attempt at reform because those who implemented it didn't understand the act of learning and the act of teaching that you understand and you have to feel empowered to speak to what it is our children need so that we really do move from sort of the assembly line in your work to the quality work circle that will allow you to collectively help students learn and improve and so that teachers rightfully engage in the curriculum and assessment development work that is the domain of professional teachers I will leave you with a story that I find helpful to me when I think about the daunting task that is in front of us and it is the story of it's a story of collaboration it's about a teacher who has been committed for many many years to creating the kind of educational setting in which all students the fifth child as well as the other four can thrive and achieve but in era after era of reform with two steps back forward and one step back it became a little discouraging so her colleagues decided to help her get some additional support and they took her to a seance for advice and they looked to a higher power for some insight and advice about how to proceed and the teachers were very pleased to hear finally after a long pause John Dewey who had come to provide some insight and they said oh Mr. Dewey what can we do to really enact our commitment to children and to build the kind of schools that we want for every one of our kids and there was a pause and then the voice of John Dewey said well it depends on whether you want to do it the ordinary way or the miraculous way and the teacher said oh I'm a pretty ordinary person you better tell me the ordinary way and Mr. Dewey said well the ordinary way would be to wait for legions of angels to descend upon the schools and turn them into temples of learning and the teachers looked at each other and said it doesn't sound very likely that that's going to happen in the near term what's the miraculous way and John Dewey said well the miraculous way would be for the people to do it themselves and that's what you're doing and I thank you