Good afternoon and welcome to today's energy seminar. Again, I'm going to have somebody other than me introduce the speaker. So I'm very excited today to welcome our speaker, Jay App, but I'm going to have my colleague in the new department of energy science and engineering, Anash Asavido, who's an old colleague of Jay's that Carnegie Mellon introduced him today. Anash, as you may know, is one of the world's experts in energy system modeling and more recently has led the way into the diversity, equity, and inclusion dimensions of energy system operation. So Anash. It is such a pleasure to introduce Professor Jay App, who is a professor both at the Tepper School of Business as well as having an appointment in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. More than a colleague, Jay was also my professor during the PhD years and I was very frightened of him, very afraid, because his very sharp mind and questioning would make anyone kind of shiver. There is no person that I'm aware of that knows more about the electricity industry. It has been always a pleasure to learn from Jay. He has a PhD in physics from MIT, 1976. He also was an astronaut and worked for NASA for a long time, so you may have some questions about that too. And with that, I welcome you, Jay, and we look forward to your seminar. Anash, thank you so much. It's always terrific when people that you've known as students feel much better than you do as professors, and there's a couple of those in this room. And that's just terrific. So thank you, John. Thank you, Anash, for inviting me here. We're going to talk today a little bit about electricity and gas system as well. So most of you know that the U.S. electric power system is powered by about 20% coal. When I started it was 50%. I didn't do all of that. And now about 40% natural gas, 20% nuclear, and about 20% renewables, although large hydro is often not considered to be a renewable. And I spent about 15 years of my career looking at the mathematical characteristics of renewables to figure out how to reliably integrate those into the electric power system. In the last few years, I've been thinking a lot about the other 80% or 85%. Because renewables we all hope will grow, but any of you who know Vokov-Schmiel's work know that they're not going to grow by next weekend. So we have a lot to do with the reliability of the rest of the power system if we're going to keep the lights on. So what I'm going to cover today are basically a couple of things. One is what we've learned about the reliability of electric power generators and a little bit about the Texas blackout that happened 21 months ago and how the power grid could better provision reliability reserves so the lights don't go out. And second, some available data on the natural gas grid reliability. Spoiler alert, it's not nearly as good as the electric power industry. I'll talk a little bit about what we know about the reliability of gas pipes and gas-fueled generators and then what we've learned about the dependence of the gas pipelines themselves on electricity. Okay, so let's dive right into electric power generation reliability. We've been able to make some big advances because a group called the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, NERC, has required that every generator of any size over about 20 megawatts, that's not wind or solar, report any type of failures that they have to NERC and it turns out that the largest electricity market in the country, PJM, has required that for a bit longer. So we had a fairly short data set from NERC four years initially, then six and then we had almost a quarter century of data from PJM. But the NERC data set covers 85% of all of the generators in North America and it's been critical to understanding some of the reliability issues in a way that just wasn't possible before. Because this is being recorded, I put up the references here so you can play back the tape and see what they are. The initial work on the NERC and PJM data sets was done by our PhD student, Senate Murphy, in cooperation with John Moroff from NERC and a brilliant econometrician, my colleague at Teprphila Soul. We published those after some difficulty, as those of you who tried to do it, in Applied Energy back about four years ago for the initial stuff. So what are these data? Well for all of the eight regions of the reliability areas in the U.S., the North American Electric Reliability Council defines, we have three types of failures for every generator. There's first what are called unscheduled outages, the whole thing breaks. The second is it fails to start, start failure. And the third is a derating, well what's a derating? Well, if you have let's say a coal generator, it's probably supplied by three mills that mill the coal from fist-sized things down to coal dust. If one of those breaks, a third of the plant capacity doesn't work. So that's a derate. Natural gas, even wind turbines and solar rays, everyone, what's a derating in a solar farm? Well, one of the inverters might break, right? So that's a derating. And the relative size of these things varies from place to place in the West, what's called WEC, the Western Electric Coordinated Council where you are, in the lower right of this diagram, about three quarters of all of the megawatt hours that were lost, the whole thing just broke. About 2% they didn't start, and about 20% were derates. Now that derating percentage can go up to 35% in some of the areas. So we have these data for every single generator, any place in North America. For decades, starting in the late 50s, people have been fantasizing about trying to do probabilistic risk analysis and provision of reserves by doing what's called a Markov model. Markov model is not any fancy math at all. It's just you have probabilities of transitions from a working condition to a partially broken condition or a fully broken condition, vice versa. In this simple model, you'd have six transition probabilities, right? Until now, people have had absolutely no way of determining quantitatively what those transition probabilities are. So we now can, and that's very useful. I'll give you an example from our first paper on this. These are histograms, notice the semi-log scale here, vent duration versus count for generator outage duration in hours along the horizontal axis for all of the nerc regions. They're quite different for various reasons. But from that, you can determine, for example, a mean time between failures, and you can break that down to coal generators or natural gas generators or hydro or nuclear, if you like. And then you can have those transition probabilities. We can also get the mean time to recovery of these generators because we know when it fails, we know when the next shows up working, right? So these data are now available. And that's very useful for trying to compute what's going on. We can aggregate those data into time series as well. And so here's one for the area in the mid-Atlantic states. Reliability first corporation is PJM, the same area in the mid-Atlantic. And the blue line at the bottom is the failures to start over the four years of these data. The red one is the partial failures, green is total failures, and the black is just their sum. So you can do that. Now, these data are really high resolution. They're hourly. Well, they're supposed to be minute by minute, but when you look at it, nobody really records it except once an hour. So anyway, they're pretty high resolution, hourly data. And you can see things like this big spike that was a very cold weather event that was turned by the TV weather people, the polar vortex, right? And the polar vortex in January of 2014 knocked out 22% of all of the generation in PJM, big event. Right over into some of the other regions as well. But this is the kind of stuff that you can do. And so here it is for all of the regions. So down in the west, in your region, you can see that an average of 4% or 5% of all the generators are broken, and it never gets much worse than that. But look at one panel above it, and there's RFC. Those are the data I just showed you. It gets to a maximum of 22%. The others regions are in between. And so if you are trying to figure out how much extra stuff you need to keep spinning to keep the lights on, these data are really important to you. And it differs from place to place. They're not the same. So if generators are, failures are time dependent, why? What affects them? Well, people have speculated since the early 60s that environmental conditions can cause generators to break. Seems reasonable. But it turns out it wasn't until this event that I just talked about, the Polar Vortex in 2014, that anybody bothered to plot generation failures against temperature. Or in the case of the PJM report, they did it against windshield. And they got it, you know, that's a pretty decent correlation. And so that goes down to about minus 20 degrees, in this case Fahrenheit. And things sort of break, right? So we had data for PJM that was 23 years long. It turns out that the six-year country-wide NERC data just isn't long enough to get good statistics. But the 23-year PJM one was, and it covers 1845 generators in PJM for, as I say, 23 years. So what I'm going to show you for six different generator types. Let me say what those six are. There's combined cycle natural gas units, the efficient ones. They're combustion turbines. They're basically jet engines that we use for peaker plants and for some other reasons. Then there are diesel plants, hydroelectric plants, nuclear, and steam turbines that are basically coal. So the dashed line here is what happens if you don't take temperature into account. So for gas plants, hydroelectric plants, and nuclear plants, basically 3% of the capacity is broken at any given time. For coal and for diesel, it's more like 10%. Now, when you take temperature into account, this is what you see. This is at median load. Nothing special is happening with the load here. And look at what happens at low and at high temperatures. And so everything, except for nuclear, exhibits this smile. And it should be a frown, right? Because stuff is breaking. Nuclear has the problem at high temperatures, presumably because the cooling water isn't so cold. That's why you have to derate the plant. I will get to one nuclear case. This was in PJM. In the Texas Blackout, one nuclear plant failed because of instrumentation as it turns out. But in PJM, they hadn't seen this. But for all the others, it goes up and up. And it's not a small amount. So here's a combined-cycle gas plant. Average one is broken 3% of all capacity or 3% of the time. But when it's cold out, and that's not very cold, that's minus 20 C, five times that many plants break. So nobody has ever looked at this before. So you've got to, when you come up with new data, be the most skeptical person around of your own data. So we said, all right, what about load? Maybe the load is just higher there. So let's look at it, not just at the median load, but at 90th percentile load. Yeah, the things look the same. Loads not. John, if you want to scoot over here, okay, okay. I'll try and not stand in the way. So load wasn't a problem. What else might be the problem? Natural gas wells freeze up. They did in Texas 21 months ago. And so maybe it was all for the natural gas plants just that they couldn't get any gas. So these data now with uncertainty bars are all of the events that affected gas plants over those 23 years. And these data have the same data only we excluded ones where the plant couldn't get any gas, which they tell us in this big data set. Looks basically the same. It's a little better. Looks basically the same. All right, so what else might you think? Well, how about old plants? The old plants ought to break a lot more than the new plants. Great idea. It doesn't work. So these are decades plant to plant. The lowest ones are the 1980s. And the highest ones are just the decade later. And the 1950s units are hanging in there pretty good. They're the red dots. So it wasn't that. So something out there is really happening. So what? How do we relate this to grid reliability? Well, it turns out that every single grid operator does the math to figure out how much extra generation they need to sit around in case of emergencies by assuming that the plants fail independently. For all of the mathematical optimizers in the room, I'm not going to show any equations. This is IID. That's what they assume. Independent identical distributions. Well, we see correlated outages happening in every single NERC region, even when you exclude big storms. Correlated outages in the longer PJM data set are there even when accounting for peak load, for natural gas availability, and for generator age. So correlated outages ought to be considered in defining resource adequacy requirements. Which brings us to 21 months ago, Texas. Yes, sir? Are we allowed those questions? Why not? Physical equipments or maybe the personnel doesn't want to go out because it's cold. Ah, good question. So it's not so much the personnel. The physical equipment can absolutely cause this. I have been at a natural gas plant that has a big three-story high air filter, where it's sucking all the air that it's going to combust. That thing throws up in the winter at a gas plant that I went to. So some of that happens. Sometimes the natural gas wells as I'll get to freeze up. But there's lots of things. And let me show you in Texas what happened. All right. For those of you who were not paying attention because it was in COVID, this is an outage map. Terrific website, poweradders.us. This is an outage map on the 15th of February 2021. Texas was basically out of power. That wasn't the only place out of power. The cold weather moved east a little bit and then there were some random places. But Texas was basically out of power. So Texas' generation mix in the four year before that was about half natural gas, about a quarter wind, about 20% coal, 10% nuclear, a little bit of solar. So what broke on those three days? Well, 15 gigawatts of natural gas. For those of you who don't speak gigawatts, 1,000 megawatts, a large nuclear plant is about a gigawatt. ERCOT's got 107 gigawatts of capacity or dead at the time of the blackout. So we lost 15 gigawatts of gas, 4 gigawatts of coal, 3 gigawatts of wind. The blades can ice up or the gearbox can freeze up. So a gigawatt of solar and a gigawatt of nuclear, which turned out to be instrumentation. That upper picture is actually instrumentation at a nuclear plant that happened to make it through. So, why? This is a temperature anomaly map on the 15th of February. Apologize, this is in imperial units, degrees Fahrenheit. Right, but it's great website, climatereanalyzer.org. And so, white is like 25 or 30 degrees below normal Fahrenheit temperature. So it was cold throughout much of the greater Midwest, the Great Plains States. And it was pretty cold in Texas. You who were paying attention because you didn't have anything better to do during COVID, to Governor Greg Abbott may have heard him say this was unprecedented cold weather. Don't blame me. Well, so here was 10 years earlier. This was 2011, same map, same scale. And while it didn't affect East Texas so much, New Mexico is not so far from Texas. And it was even colder there in New Mexico. Not only that, here's the map from 1983. Much of the country was fairly cold, including parts of West Texas and much of the Great Plains States and parts of the area near where some of us live or used to live. This was not unprecedented. But Urkot's highly paid, I suppose, consultant looked at this and their report, very comprehensive report that they did in 2015, six years before the blackout, looked at these events and blew them off. So here's a quote from their method section. The weather here was given equal probability except for 2011, which was given a 1% probability, right? One in a century. Okay. They obviously didn't think too much about the 1983 one. And just four weeks before the blackout, they came out with another report and again, they did not consider temperature in assessing the generator failures. So what is a professor with a terrific Ph.D. student do, writes an op-ed for the Washington Post when this happens. So absolutely unbelievable student called Luke Lawvin, who's now at NREL, and I wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post that talked about this. But we went the first. In 2011, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, FERC, had done a report and said, you know, this is what a gas wellhead looks like in Texas. It gets cold in Texas. It got cold in 2011. You don't need to leave one protected like that. This is what it looks like up in the upper Midwest, that's silvery stuff is insulation, you're all engineers. You understand that? You inject methanol into the wellhead and you can keep it from freezing. They didn't stop there. They said, how much does it cost? So this table says it basically costs capital expense of something like $30,000 a wellhead and something like $10,000, $13,000 a year and you keep it operating when you do that. So for active wellheads, not a little but not a lot either, and you can do that. You can also do it with conveyor belts for coal plants, a website of a company that sells that stuff. You can do it for wind turbines. It's not only the blades, you can buy heated blades, but it's the gearboxes that can freeze up. You can buy cold temperature packages, but Canada got really surprised a few years ago when it went down to minus 25 and the wind turbines shut themselves off because that was their lowest rating and the software, which I think one of my former students, Steve Rose, wrote, shut them off. They didn't buy the cold weather packages. That was a reliability concern, which they weren't aware of. So here was our op-ed titled something provocative and I'll read you a quote from it. But the math that all grid planners use has the same fatal flaw. It overlooks the tendency of plants to go offline in clusters. When I say fatal, we didn't know but a couple of deaths at the time. There were 200 confirmed deaths due to this outage and if you use what was done during COVID, which is excess deaths, it was 800. So everything's got to be okay nearly two years later, right? Here's the Austin newspaper. You can all read the headline. And it was based on FERC's winter energy market and reliability assessment that basically said they did some paper studies but they really haven't done pretty much. So it happens, you know, three times in 40 years. It's not probably going to happen this year, but it might. So how should we really procure reserves? Well, there's Luke Levin and Senate Murphy and our student Brian Sergei, all three of them now at NREL, National Renewable Energy Lab, and we did a series of papers and we asked basically, hey, is it possible to procure less reserves? Well, less? We should be procuring more. No, PJM has for years way over-procured their reserves because their CEO, Terry Boston, very conservative engineer, they're then CEO, and Terry put his thumb on the scale and basically said, now, how shall I procure more reserves? But they do it basically all year round. And so we did a model of PJM, very simple reduced-form model, five regions, six transmission lines, but every generator there, something that's easy enough to do. And we said, well, suppose you procure reserves week by week or month by month or season by season, which is what we recommend, procuring more reserves when it's cold or when it's hot and less reserves when it's not cold or hot will save you like $17 million a week, cold weather weeks. So we've testified to PJM and so forth about this. Maybe when you're my age, they'll do that. So we'll see, but it's certainly feasible to go do that. All right, so now let's talk about the gas grid in the second half. Let me just ask you, since I wanted to go through this, then there'll be 10 minutes at the end for questions. I loved your last question. I'd love to hear that. All right, so this is what I mean by the gas grid. These are all the pipes in the U.S. that are bigger than 12 inches. That is the gas grid, including a bunch of gathering lines for the wells out in the Gulf there and some out to California. Notice you are not that well supplied with gas, right?  So that's the gas grid. These are the natural gas plants which are largely located along the big pipes. That's just EIA data for where those are. All right, so what data are out there that people like you and I can use to assess the reliability on the gas side? Well, there is, as Adam knows, some truly awful data out there, okay? FERC requires a bunch of forms, one of which they've recently abandoned Form 588 that should capture all the gas outages but the requirements were lousy and they've since dropped it. They do require reports of service interruptions and what are called force majeure. Force majeure is a legal term that basically means our contract is null and void because God did this. Okay, the thing broke. That's a force majeure event and it usually means something really bad happened. So those are somewhat useful. An organization called PIMSA, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration does require you to report if you have a release that killed somebody that caused more than $50,000 worth of damage, not released gas, or that released more than 3 million cubic feet of gas. So I don't know what that is in kilograms, Adam, you can probably do that, but it's a lot of gas. A fairly decent sized gas generator, 200 megawatt generator consumes nearly a million cubic feet per hour. So that is a lot of gas that's way too high a limit. These are basically not useful. So what about states? So there are some states specifically Wyoming that requires reporting of everything and puts it out on their website. That's terrific. Some other states do a few other things and that's great. Only three states require the pipeline operators to report pressure drops, which are bad because you have a big gas turbine going around if the pressure drops a little, it's going to automatically cut off. And the thresholds are really variable. All right, so what is useful? What is useful is that pipeline companies maintain websites that you can scrape the data from. Most of them don't archive the data, so you have to do it in real time, but some of them do. And I'll give you an example. This is the transco pipeline that runs, well you see where it runs, and these are the gas plants, the circles denote the size along the pipeline. And we, by which I mean my student, Jerry Freeman, looked at these pipeline websites for what are called operational flow orders. And OFO basically says there's an imbalance between gas being supplied at one end and taken out at the other end, something's wrong with technical definitions. But we found there's basically 10 of those a year and of the 35 and the three years we examined, six of them had coinciding power outages from the big data set, the GADS data that we looked at. Almost 300 power plant failures happened during those six events. So you can buy gas in two ways. You can buy it on the spot market or you can buy it with firm contracts. The interesting thing we found is that 14 events at four power plants failed while holding firm contracts. It's like being on Southwest, you can be A2 in the group, but if the plane doesn't go, you still don't go. Okay, so we wrote that up. Here's the paper by we, I mean Jared, and Michael Dworkin, who was the chair of the Vermont Public Utility Commission and then chair of the Environmental Law Department of Vermont Law. So what do we really need? What we said in our article was we need consistent reporting standards for pipeline events. And we were quantitative about that and these numbers aren't interesting to anybody but a specialist, but we were quantitative about it. And we said these data ought to be collected by somebody like NERC, a federally-chartered organization as opposed to being totally scattershot like now. A National Academy's report, the most recent report on the electric power system chaired by my colleague Granger Morgan with some people on here that are all familiar to many of you, picked up that recommendation and said Congress should build on the example it said in the electric power system when it established an electric liability organization and ought to do that. And last year, just about a year ago, the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's Energy Subcommittee, Bobby Rush, introduced a bill to do just that. Now, no bill ever goes any place the first time it's introduced, but we are hopeful that in the next Congress that may go someplace, especially if there's another blackout. Okay, so despite the limitations, if we work hard we can learn some things and I'll tell you a little bit about that. Here's a paper. John Mora at NERC and Jared Freeman now at the Pacific Northwest National Labs were on this paper.  But we could do things like, here's the four years in PJM and there are something like, I don't know, 17 pipelines and we found the plants on each pipeline that were out of gas because the pipeline didn't supply them as a function of time on those. So that's the kind of work that you can do if you carefully put this together and what this new organization should be doing. So here's what we found. The first thing is the big pipelines are really pretty reliable. Only 5% of all of the times that gas plants went out because of no gas were due to something breaking on the pipeline. No more than 5%, and I'll tell you in a minute that it could be less. Second, gas shortages caused correlated failures, a lot of power plants together with both spot and firm contracts. The spot guys did worse, but firm wasn't firm. And interestingly enough, the folks who played in the spot market in parts of the Midwest and the mid-Atlantic could have kept their power plants going if they had held firm contracts in those days. So I'll show you some more details quickly. These force-major events caused a maximum of 5% of the megawatt hours lost. And I say a maximum because what we did was we took the force-major event on a long pipeline like TransCo, and we said, if it happened any place on the pipeline, the gas plants, even downstream and upstream, were affected. It's probably less than that. My guess is somewhere around 3% of the megawatt hours. The second was here's the firm and the spot market plants. Notice out here in the West, here are you guys, that these are the gigawatts that were lost due to reported fuel shortages, and the firm plants make up the bulk of those. Spot market plants still do it. It's different in different regions, mostly because who buys the spot market contracts. And it's not just the plants that run once in a blue moon, the peaker plants. The horizontal axis here is the capacity factor, the percentage of time they run. And these are base load plants, shoulder plants, peaker plants here. Out here in the West, the red ones are the firm contracts, and so it happened to every kind of plant out there. But there was available pipeline capacity in many places, and we'll get into how we did it, but there was basically space in the pipelines to move the gas. But was the gas to be had? Well, I work in a business school, so I look at prices, and the prices were pretty modest during these times. So they would have been driven up. There's this half-baked law of supply and demand. It's just a theory, kind of like an evolution, right? But they were quite modest prices, so there was gas to be had. And where would we have gotten that gas? Well, it would have come from commercial and industrial customers, which were affected by the power plant outages anyway. So they couldn't actually use the gas in many cases. So where were they? Well, the shaded areas here, not all of the country, but in certain areas there was gas capacity, and it could have worked. What about New England? As Daniel Webster said about his college, it's a small region, but there are some who love it. New England has only two pipelines coming in that still have gas. It had a third one from the Sable Island Field in Nova Scotia, but it's not working anymore. So it's got all of gas comes in from two areas here. And it loses gas quite frequently. So we said, how long are these outages? They're not very long. Most of them are less than a day. There's a few long ones. Given that, you can supply them with, we thought of two things, and Adam told me about a third one today. The two things we thought of were on-site compressed natural gas and dual-fuel oil. Many of the plants already have dual-fuel oil. Adam told me that there are people taking CNG tankers in and hooking them up to the pipeline in there. That could have worked too. But here's the cost. If you wanted to mitigate, let's say, five gigawatts of power, it would only cost you a penny a kilowatt hour for oil and for on-site CNG a little bit more, a few cents. But it's perfectly possible to do that. Finally, and I'm going to go a few minutes over if that's okay, what about the effect of electricity on the compressors that are necessary to overcome the frictional losses in the pipelines? So we have a very good student called Sean Smiley, who's just about to finish up. He came to us from the natural gas industry up in Canada, and so he's been working on this problem. A compressor station has a big compressor. Well, it could be electrically driven, or it could be driven from the gas in the pipeline. Many of them are this way. There's a few of them that are electrically driven for various reasons. First, about 10 years ago gas prices were really high. Second, if you put these in an urban area, you don't want the pollution. Now, there are also auxiliary systems, and these auxiliary instrumentation and so forth do have backup power, usually from natural gas if the electric power fails. This has caused a lot of confusion. Two of the big Department of Energy National Laboratories have screwed this up. They have said that any compressor station that has backup power for the auxiliary loads has electrical power, and so they come up with something like a quarter of the stations have electrical power, that isn't the case. These are way, way too big compressors to have backup power. They're 20 to 80 megawatts. You're not going to get a diesel genset doing that. So what we found when we looked at it closely was that a maximum of 10% of the stations and about 15% of the size of the compressors are electric or stations that have both electric and gas covered. So here's where they are. The yellow are ones that have more than 20% less than 100%, and here's our friend the TransCo pipeline, and here's some others. So some of them are mixed, and some of them have an electric station, then a gas station, then an electric station. These are every 100 miles or so. So what? Well, we did hydraulic modeling of a really simple system, the pipeline going into Florida from the west, and it has a few stations. This one's about half gas, half electric. This one's all gas. This one's mostly electric. This one's about 40% electric. So we said, what happens if you take out the electric stuff and just one of those, two of them, three of them, just one of those stations causes an outage larger than the largest nuclear plant in Florida. And they don't think about this at all. How could these stations lose electricity? There's never hurricanes in Florida, anyway. Okay, so we have reason to believe that that actually caused part of the outages during the polar vortex. Two of the stations that we identified as being electric did report outages at the time of that polar vortex. So this isn't just theoretical. Okay, so let me just summarize what we've learned so far. First, you can now use probabilistic methods to estimate reserves. Second, the grid operators ought to do it seasonally. Third, we don't know squat about the gas grid. The U.S. really needs some good standards and a NERC-like reliability organization. Large pipelines aren't bad. They're fairly reliable. We know absolutely nothing about the gas distribution system. A firm contract isn't firm, but firm contracts could have helped power plants in the Midwest and the Atlantic. New England can probably afford oil or gas or these tankers as backups. Adam tells me they're using the tankers injecting right into the pipelines. And electrical outages can cripple the whole pipeline system in ways that really aren't being accounted for. So, Inej and John, thank you very much and be happy to answer questions. Thank you. Thank you, Jay. That was terrific, educational and entertaining. I'd say on behalf of the audience. Well, it wouldn't be entertaining if the lights didn't stay on. Yeah, I'm surprised you didn't arrange that. But there was a question right here. Any questions from the audience? Got the brown blazer in the red. Yeah, and then there's one back here. Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. I mean, I'm a geek, so I love this stuff. Yeah, me too. My question is about the weekly procurement that you described. I think it's a clarification question. Are you thinking about this as a different type of capacity markets? Ah, interesting. So we don't really propose weekly. We did it so that we could do the net social welfare and weekly increments. We propose seasonal, just for a year. And yes, they'd be not only a capacity market, but ancillary service for spinning reserve and non-spinning reserve mostly. You need some capacity, but it's mostly the spin and non-spin reserves. Hi. So thank you so much. It was a great talk. I would like to get your comments on, in one of your conclusions you say that we need to prepare a little bit more for the reserve when we don't have like the gas outputs with the new regulations and everyone trying to move out from natural gas and try to incorporate renewable energy how you see the reliability of those resources in the energy. So it turns out it was only in the last three years that NERC required wind and solar to report to this big database. And so out of the half a trillion records that our student, Senate Murphy examined, there was nothing about wind and solar in there. That's really fertile ground. We know very little about what the specialists call availability. That is, you go buy a wind farm and three out of the 20 turbines won't be turning at all. Well, they don't get the crane out there just for three turbines because it costs $100,000 to get the crane on site. So what's the real availability look like? Those data are just really hard to get. And I hope that somebody in this room will get them because that's going to be absolutely critical. How often did the inverters fail in the solar fields? Why do they fail? We don't know that. I think it's a great new thing for somebody to do. And we're starting to get those data. Yeah. Can you hear me? Thanks for the talk, Jay. I'm curious if you see any evidence of cascading failure between the two systems. So Texas, for example, was there any evidence that hydrogen compressors were driven off-line thus causing feedback? Because a big fraction of the gigawatt outage was on the gas plants. Do we have a sense of whether there was a bounce back between the systems? We did a FOIA Freedom of Information Act to try and get those data and we were stiff-armed so far. But in PJM and the polar vortex, the next last slide that I showed, we think we've got pretty good evidence that that happened.  But the next outage that happens, hopefully, you or one of your students will be on top of that and be able to answer it. Thanks, Jay, for the great talk. My question is around you mainly focus on like generation plants and stuff. Do transmission lines also have the failures or are they less significant compared? I didn't see a lot of data on the transmission lines. There was a huge ice storm that took out parts of Quebec for six weeks and parts of downtown Montreal for two weeks. About 20, 22 years ago, why did it happen? Because ice four inches thick coated the transmission lines.  So absolutely they do. And the data are out there. There is an analogous thing to GADS called TAUS, the Tee for Transmission. Nobody, including people at NERC, has ever examined the TAUS database. You should do it. Last question. I guess based on the Q&A I would add eye-opening to the many adjectives I used to describe your talk. That was just fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. And come visit us often. You're semi-retired, I guess. Yeah, semi. Yeah, lots of time to come out here. And it's much warmer here. Thanks once again. Thank you, John.


This time, we're going to look at conditional operation. These will give us the ability to implement things like if statements. And as with the arithmetic instructions, there are a number of instructions that the machine actually provides for us. And then there are a number of common pseudo instructions that most assemblers will accept as well. In general, these instructions compare the data in two registers to see whether they're equal or not. Our pseudo instructions will allow us to do things like say, is data in the first register larger than the data in the second register? But we'll also see how we can do those comparisons ourselves. This type of instruction gives us a way to transfer control. By default, our assembly language will just start at the top of our program and run each instruction in order until it either runs out of instructions, which case would crash, or it gets to a system call that says quit the program. Our branch instructions will give you a way to say, okay, maybe I don't want to run this next instruction. Maybe I want to skip down several instructions. Maybe I want to go to a different block of code. Maybe I only want to run this block of code if something specific has occurred. For example, if I'm using the branch equal instruction, it will skip to whatever line of code I tell it to go to. If the value of my first source register is equal to the value of my second source register, but otherwise, it's just going to go around that next line of code. This is something that's important to remember about assembly language. As I mentioned before, we have no abstractions here. So the language doesn't have any formal concept of blocks. The way we're used to, we can't say run this block. If this is true, otherwise run that block. All we can do is tell the machine, go to this line of code and start running it. We will have to delineate blocks of code on our own. If we don't provide specific instructions to delineate those blocks, the machine will just keep running the next line of code. So creating an if block is really simple. If we only want to run some block of code, if A is equal to B, we might say branch not equal AB and if. So then if A is equal to B, then it will just fall through and run this block of code. Otherwise, when A is not equal to B, it skips to the end if label that I've got. Then, if A is equal to B, then it runs all this code. It fails this test, so it runs all this code, and then just keeps running afterwards. If you were hoping it had an else condition there, it doesn't know anything about that by default. I would have to add that functionality in as well. So if I do want to have something like an else condition, I'm going to need that jump instruction. This will allow me to get to the end of my if block and say, okay, I don't want to run this next block of code. That's what happens in the else condition. So instead, I want to jump over all of this code to the end if. Now I might have branch not equal AB, else. Here's all my if code, have my else label with the else code, and then the end if label at the end. That way, if A is equal to B, I run the if block. I get to that jump label. It tells me to go to the end of the if block altogether, then I would continue running my code from there. If A isn't equal to B, then I skip over the if block, I run that code, and then continue running as well. So these branch and jump instructions are really going to help us implement what we're used to for any of our usual conditional operations, if, if else. And a little bit later, we'll look at how we can use that to build loops even.


The whole lot of things being said about golf, what is unique about the game is, if you play any other game, the ball is coming at you from different angles, velocities, spin. Here it's just sitting. You've got to hit a sitting ball. So, one important thing is whatever you do, it's just you. There is simply no other factor involved. That's what makes you look so dumb, that's what makes it so challenging, interesting and exciting, because just to even understand the limitations of just being able to hit a sitting ball, just a sitting ball. And the possibility is also this, whoever is the world champion right now, if you or me play a game with him, we may beat him on one or two holes, which you can't do in any other game, in any other game. If you try to play soccer with Messi, you won't get to touch the ball at all. Even if you try to play cricket, they can bowl in such a way that you'll never get to touch the ball. This is one game where you can play level with the top, whatever the top, you can play level with them at least in sparks. If not, the only thing is they got consistency, which you may not have because you're not putting the same amount of time and whatever. So the most significant aspect for me was, one thing is you can play this game without injuries, which is important for me. I played all kinds of games, but it became important to play game without injury because 365 days I have a schedule. Injuries are something that I can't, it's a luxury. I can't afford. That's one thing. But once you start playing it, there are many intricacies. One of the most important and significant things for me is, for me, right from my childhood, the geometry of the existence has always been the most important part. And when I say geometry, if I look at a tree, well, I see the colors and stuff, but for me, the most exciting and the first thing that I notice is the geometry of how it stands. In nature, unless some kind of integrity of geometry is there, nothing stands by itself. The whole system, yeah, the whole system of yoga is just this. Just getting the geometry of this human system right. Today there is a whole science called the constructional theory where they've gone about pointing out how whether you take an atom or a human being or a grasshopper or an earthworm or the cosmos, at the most fundamental level, the design is common. From that common design, it is evolved into such complex possibilities, but the fundamental design is common. In all this, geometry is the thing. In golf, as in yoga, geometry is most important. You don't know how to stand right, you may take years to just stand right. So I've never taken a lesson. I've never been on a driving range. I'm doing quite good. It's basically geometry and your ability to gauge how things are, the terrain, the distances, and exerting the right amount of swing and force. So for me, that became the most important factor. I thoroughly enjoy the complexity of geometry involved, and unless you figure the geometry right, you will miss your three-foot putt.


I know already, when I heard this right here, you know what I'm saying, when I heard that right there, I knew already, y'all, y'all, you niggas, look, you niggas is different. So what is the thing when I hear the music, I say, well, how does the process, because it seemed like you reaching back and getting something from the old and kind of metal to the new.  That's crazy. I used to ask him to just ride, like, you know what I'm saying, listen to music. He used to have a system in the car and Pollock and Drop It was definitely one of them songs that was playing and tripping. That was a hot song. That Intrepid or that green car you had. The Jeep. Yo, that Jeep, yo. That's how I went down. Man, hey, when I heard it, I said, man, that boy got something right there, man. Hey, and it seemed like making that beat. Oh, I'm talking about where I got the sample. Like I reached back for the sample like back then, but I made the beat out here. Yeah, yeah. It was me and D-Mack. D-Mack. I talked to him night before last night. They supposed to be on Sunday. Yeah. So how did you and D-Mack come up with that? Was your in college or something? Yeah, we was in college. I heard about it. See, I'm researching like crazy. I want to know. So D-Mack, can you, what was the process for y'all working together and how does that work? Oh, man, I just met him at first. He was rapping on my beats. I met him at Digital University out here in Dallas. I was out there like with Max, I think, just up there just making beats. Y'all have made it. I really, people know about you talking about going up to H-Town, pulling girls out of different situations where you can put the spotlight on them because of the work ethic that you've had and the way that people have recognized you guys already. So, I mean, Sergeant B, Sergeant J, that's a household name. Niggas know, especially now. And we popping them off right here first. So, one last thing y'all did a interview together. No, we ain't never do that. That's what I'm talking about. Boss talk 101. We wanted to break the mold on everything. Don't get it twisted.  So, you do beats, too, right? I used to. You used to. So, you just deal with straight artist development and recording and engineering mixing and all. So, when did you switch from just being a rapper to doing all of that? Well, from rapping, I really started with the DJ and I started throwing parties. So, I was like, well, instead of just rapping and waiting to get a show, why don't I just throw my own show? Yeah. And I performed at my own show. So, I used to bring artists down and I would open up for them. All in one. Yeah. So, I get the hold, though, and then I just break the artists off with they look, you know, 1,000 or 2,000 and we going home with 6,7000.  Like, you're attracted to a lot of women. That's rare. Yes. So, that's something you got to deal with. You got to deal with that. You just getting started, baby. Yeah, man. Yeah, you locking in early, too? Yeah. I'm good. Like, I ain't even worried about that. But you seem so chill.  I think he's sneaky. That nigga sneaky. I think he's sneaky. That's what I'm talking about. Sgt. Villa ain't going to let me down. He going to tell me the truth. You sneaking around doing something. And so, how did she, how did she, because DJ Juice was on here and he told me how that process went with him. And I got to get through this fast. But how did the process go with you and Smitty? How did you, did you just do it up on the caption that, hey, man, you say we want to work with her? Nah, like, I met Smitty through my brother. Okay. My brother was telling me I need to work with her, but I wasn't really paying attention to her because I was, I already had like a female I was working with that I was like just really focused on. So I was like, okay, whatever. You know what I'm saying? Because he already had brought other females to me. Okay. He was like, you need to work with Smitty. I was like, okay, whatever. You know what I'm saying? So like, she booked a session with me and that's how Let Me See It came about. Wow. She booked a session with me because Juice told her she need to work with me. With you. And my brother was telling her she need to work with me also. That thing happened. Well, the site for the girls, they came up with it. They sell. They came up with it. And then they came to me to record it. And then I put the order together, you know, mixed them out to record it and had to work with all seven of those girls. Really? And they all from different places. Yeah, in East Texas. But in East Texas, but from different, you know, I'm from East Texas. So long view kicking it with Mount Pleasant, kicking it with Paris, kicking it. That's a deal. That's a stretch. Mm-hmm. So when I seen that, I'm like, okay, somebody had to organize this. How did they come up with putting themselves together like that? Or who picked who would be on the song? It was those girls. So it was already done. When they came to me, they was like, we trying to do a site for, we trying to, we picking you to record it.  So they came to the studio in half. Like I was already working with two of the girls. You working with which one? I was working with Smitty and Journey. I was already recording. Smitty and Journey. But it's another one told me she coming to see you Sunday. Oh, really? The rest of the girls are coming? No, it was her name. She my cousin, actually. She hit me up. I'm like, damn, that's crazy. But he didn't know she was right. Man, I didn't. And I don't want to mess her name up. She was the second one, maybe? You can't remember, can you? Yeah, it's hard to remember. Yeah, we getting old. I'm getting old. I'm hard. All of them was hard. But she just hit me up. And I listened to some of my music, too. Bria. Okay. Bria, that's my little Kenfolk. Man, shout out Bria, man. I gotta shout out. She did a thing, you know. Like I said, how do you work with any of them? Because you do artist development. Yeah. So when you working with them in the studio and stuff, you try to give them some game on how to do this and how it can come across better? Yes. The one with that listen. Yeah, I know it's hard. It's hard because they think, hey, I got it. Some are easy to work with. Some are hard to work with. Not those girls. Because those girls, they was all good. Easy to work with. But like, if some artists, they got a big head. And you are.


The following is a presentation of TFNN. The Trader's Edge with Steve Rhodes. Toll free at 1-877-927-6648. Or internationally at<PHONE_NUMBER>. The Trader's Edge. Now, Steve Rhodes. Good morning, folks. Good afternoon, depending on what time you're listening to the show, this is Steve Rhodes. This is the magical Monday, December 23rd edition of today's Trader's Edge show. I'm recording it live between 8 and 9. So if you're listening at 1 o'clock, try to make this as pertinent for you as I can. Right now, we've got all of the futures contract. U.S. equity futures contracts are trading to the upside. Look, this hour, it's all about you. So I'd love to hear from you if you're up early and listening in,<PHONE_NUMBER>. That's one way to get in touch with us. See us another way. If you can't call in, you can always send me an email. But do it early, Steve at tfn.com. Inside the subject heading, please put radio show question. Of course, in our Tiger's Den, well, any ping will do. So let's go ahead and get this show started. It's going to be a very light trading week, obviously. Market hours tomorrow. You get the market closing at 1, opening back up on Thursday and Friday. But it's going to be light trading out here. So let's go get started on this magical Monday. Of course, this is Tiger Financial News Network. I'm Steve Rhodes. Welcome to LUS Show. Trying not to sneeze here in your ear. Excuse me. Sorry about that. Anyway, let's go take a look at the markets right now. As you can see, you've got the equity futures trading. The upside Dow was up 58 points. S&P up about six. NASDAQ 123 Russell up two points out there. Overseas last night in Asia, markets were mixed. You had the Shanghai off about one and a half percent, 44 points to the downside. The Hank sang up 35. That was a little over one-tenth of a percent. Flat market in Japan and Nikkei up four points. The Australian 200 down 31 or about a half a percent. And the DAX right now is trading up 10 while the FTSE is up 39 points. You've got gold up four bucks, silver up 13 pennies. Lightsweed crude is flat. Natural gas down 11 cents. Gap to the downside off about 5 percent right now. T-bonds are up four ticks. The 30 year, that is the 10 year is flat as we speak. US dollar index trading up about eight pennies. OK, so no questions in the QGS yet. We've got Jay who's got the grits ready to roll in a little fish. And had some fish tacos last night. As a matter of fact, Jay still eating some of that fine product that I caught last Sunday out there. Let's go take a look at the markets out here. I know one of Jay's questions would be, hey, are there any new profiles? Let's begin there and take a look at those. Here are four daily equity futures contracts. And we can see the blue lines out here are the daily TAS market profiles. And no, nothing has formed out here. So what are these profiles used for? They help us as guardrails in essence to identify support and resistance when you're not posting. Well, Jay, thank you for that. Let's get the guys in the den. They're here early. They have not apparently posted my chart. So guys in the studio, please, please, please get those up. And then we'll go to as soon as you got that going, then we can go to Isaac in New York. But I don't want to, you know, if I can't answer Isaac's questions by showing them what's going on, that's not going to help. But we do have a caller who's calling in about gold and silver. Let's go to him. Let's go to Isaac. Thanks for calling. Thanks for holding. How are you today? Hi, I'm fine. Good morning, Steve. My question to you is like this. I see you have on your newsletter you have that silver is a TD eight count today. I don't know what the little asterisk is next to it. But my question is two-fold. Both gold and silver have had the last 10, 12 days. It's very, very tight and small range. Does that play a role in when you calculate a TD nine count that it's really easy to actually stop moving up and it wouldn't be valid because it's such a small range or it doesn't make a difference. So the answer to your question is no. The TD nine count is just simply taking a look at each bar's close and comparing that to the prior bar, to the close of the bar four bars earlier. So again, let me state that. So in this case here, are you watching us on Tiger TV? I think we've got everything posted now. Okay. So if we, this is the daily timeframe chart that we're taking a look at. And December 12th was bar number one. And the reason that it was bar number one is that close was a close above the bar four bars earlier. So we just count four bars earlier, one, two, three, four. We can see that the fourth bar was December six. And that's when price was pushing lower, close lower. And so therefore it gets a bar of a count of one. On that second day, small body candle, as you said, but still that close was above the bar four bars earlier. And so it's just simply a method of being able to say, Hey, do we have, does the market, does the market generating successive closes where that close is above the close four bars earlier today? Looks like it will be bar number eight out there. I think you might have been looking at was it the weekly chart? I think it's the weekly chart that is. Give me a second here to pull that up for you. Let me pull this over because I think what you're referring to with regard to silver. I'm not sure, but let me just pull it up and make sure out here. And so what Isaac's talking about are these, this is not the, I grabbed the wrong one. Sorry. This is actually for the cash indices out there. But let me pull over the one that's got the futures contract. And this is folks, this is my one of my market analyzers. That way subscribers like Isaac understand what is going on inside the market. As soon as I can. So I think what you're referring to over here, so the stars. So let's take a look at the stars. What are the stars mean out here? Right now I'm just looking at the equity futures contracts out here. The stars are a way of telling us that the nine count or the eight count, whether it's the upside of the downside is a valid count. And what I mean by valid count, Isaac, because I mean that the high of this pattern is either on bars eight, bar nine, or the bar following nine. So in the case of the NQ, as an example, it right now on a weekly basis shows bar number one. That's, and you've got a star next to it. So that's telling us that that is actually bar number 10 that has made the high. And the star is telling us that the pattern itself is valid out there. So with regard to the stars, does that help you with regard to the small body candles? It explains what the stars are. The question is, it doesn't bother you the fact that the ranges have been so narrow, let's say, for example, in silver. Well, it's not just silver that the ranges are narrow, but does a narrow range... Well, you're asking the question. So can it give me a feel for your perspective and where you're coming from? It sounds to me like... The silver normally trades, let's say, in a 30 cent range between the high and the low every single day. And let's say the last week it's just been ranging, let's say, seven or eight cents. The fact that we've gone up and the actual net change in the whole, let's say, nine bars, let's say, 12 cents, should that, might that play a role in the fact that even though it's sitting in nine counts, it doesn't... It'll give us less of a reason to expect, to suspect that the market is making a short-term top. I guess I don't have any experience that I can share with you that says that small-bodied candles are going to have any meaning with regard to the pattern. You know, here is the silver futures contract. This is using my synthetic version. We're about to go to a hard break. So what I want to do is be able to come back to this set of charts out here. But to answer your question, small-bodied candles don't bother me. But let's come back and discuss silver with Isaac and anything else Isaac that you'd like as well. Steve Rhodes with TFNN, we'll be right back. Global financial markets such as stocks, ETFs, commodity futures, and forex. Heated by Steve Dahl, Taz understands that in today's technological world, the use of top-flight software applications and technical analysis expertise is essential to successful trading in today's market. You also gain access to the webinar that Steve Dahl and Tom O'Brien just hosted, the best way to use the Taz Profile Scanner to profit. This webinar archive is available for all subscribers immediately upon signing up. 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Check out the new TFNN.com now and experience all the upgrades. TFNN.com educating investors. 8-7-3-7-6-1-8. Welcome back, folks. 8-18 in the morning recording the show live this morning between 8 and 9. Thanks for listening and we're on the line with Isaac in New York. So, Isaac, are you looking to go short silver or are you long? I'm actually looking to buy, but I'm curious as to because I know that the TD9 count is going to have a cell signal, so I'm concerned about it. I know that we're coming into an illiquid period in the market, but if I'm taking that into account, I'm definitely going to put on a smaller position and I'm worried I'm concerned about the TD9 count. And is your you want to purchase over? Is this for a longer term type holding? No, it's actually quite a short term. With the holidays coming up, I'm not sure at all whether I should take it or not and that's what I'm concerned. Yeah, so holiday trading is definitely because of the lack of liquidity, as you pointed out in the market, it's always a bit of a tricky situation. First, let me just give you the bigger picture on silver here, even though you did mention short term. But as long as I've got the monthly timeframe chart up on the screen, one of the other benefits of that TD9 count, Isaac, is that it provides us with a breakout and a breakdown area. That is the higher low of that nine count. So when we take a look at a monthly timeframe chart on our screen, we can see that both at 1840 and at 1957, but right now at 1840, that's a significant resistance level for silver. So on any move higher, you must be aware that that 1840 has acted as a nice resistance level out there, and then until silver were to close above that, would there be any kind of a potential breakout on a longer term basis? So silver has not broken out by any stretch of the imagination. I believe that silver will go ahead and follow the price of gold and that you will see both gold and silver lower coming into the following year. But that's because of the patterns that are out there inside of gold. If I look at the weekly timeframe chart here for silver, you can see that it formed a nice roge momentum indicator bottom back in November. But when it did top out here and twice it did this, it created at its highs these TD9 count patterns. Now this is the weekly timeframe chart out here. And so the first time that I'm looking at was back in February of this year that led to a move lower right into support. So remember, when we take a look at those TD9 counts, they help us to identify breakout support. Those would be the red lines on my screen and then breakdown resistance. Those would be the green line. So closing above a green line here as silver did back on July the week of July 26 out there suggested that silver would continue to run higher to where? Well, 1752, that was its next breakdown area. Price gets above that and it doesn't top until it creates that TD9 count out there, creates a nice little shooting star. Price on the weekly basis below Stevie's green line, which is 1750. This would say that any countertrend rally could or should stop at that 1750 level out there. Now if we go take a look at the daily timeframe, so we start to get back towards some shorter term timeframes out here. Today would definitely not be the day or tomorrow would definitely not be the day. And Wednesday will be Thursday now would definitely not be the day to take a long trade in the silver. The reason is, so if we take a look at silver on the daily timeframe, what you'll notice is that when it did top, it was on bar number eight of the TD9 count. So this is on the trading day of September 4. Price does what? Moves lower into the support level of the breakout area, 1724. Finally breaks below and closes below for a second time on November the 8th out there. So closing below support or closing above resistance two times in a row suggests to me that the breakout or breakdown move is in fact real out here. And silver starts to stretch itself and move lower on December the 6th and December the 9th out there. Never making a bullish reversal pattern. That's with the roads momentum indicator aspect. That's really one of the key levels. Now the reason I said that you would not want to enter into a long trade on silver today is because today on the daily base is going to be bar number eight. And that is at a, so bar number eight can be a top. Isaac just as it was a top back on September the 4th out there. It could also be bar number nine or bar number the bar following nine bar number 10. That's why I said for the next three days, I think silver is off limits unless we were to see some type of breakout that's going on. So trading above, let's say on a daily basis, the TD nine count green line out there, which is not what we have. So I would rather see you buying silver if it had a TD nine count to the downside or some other pattern or a test of support, the breakout support. But it doesn't. And therefore I don't think it's a it's a wise trade to go along silver. Now if you're going to get to some really short term timeframes out here and this chart, by the way, it's on my screen. You've got a 60 minute and a 240 minutes on the 60 minute prices below the bottom of the profile out there. Let me give me a second here to punch up silver on my short term. 15 minute chart for you. I can bring up anything. So let's just go here. We'll take this 30 minute timeframe chart. Let me switch this to a 15 minute timeframe chart. My oscillator and change line, the little green or red line is squiggly now. And the reason that it's squiggly is because it's still set to a 30 minute timeframe. So let's not pay attention to that. But on the 30 on the 15 minute timeframe, this shows that prices moved all the way back earlier during this 15 minute cycle has gotten back to a key level of support. That's at $17 and 30 cents. So that 1730 was set up by the low of the most recent TD set up nine count to the upside. So what price has done so far this morning on a very short term basis is pulled back to support. Now it didn't get right down to support at 1730. The actual low so far this morning. This is the March contract out here for silver. The low there is 1732 versus 1730. Now, I don't know if price is going to get back down there. You've got a bullish reversal candle. It looks to me like, okay, that little short term low from a 15 minute basis is in. And now what I'd be looking for, let me change the oscillator and change line just so we're looking at an accurate. Depiction of what's going on here. Let me change this to 15 minutes will take just a second to do that because that's going to be potentially your first level of resistance. If you are long, let's say you took the long trade right now, what you're looking for your resistance areas are going to be 1737 1739 and 1741. If price can close above those areas and where price should get to it be 1746. That is the high of the most recent TD set up nine count to the downside. What question next for you know, that's pretty much sums it up and it gives me everything that I needed. Oh, perfect. Thank you very much. Well, when I can do that, that's a good thing. So thanks for calling in and glad we're going to give you what you were looking for. You got it. Thank you. You bet. Have a great day. I was Isaac in New York support. Now, now silver, here's the other side of it. Here's the daily timeframe. You can see price above the daily profile. So if so forget about the short term, not that I'm going to ask you to forget about the short term. But if price could break above that break down level in the 15 minute timeframe chart that would then say, OK, well, maybe silver is going to move up to in the 1766 ish type area. That's the center of its bearish structured weekly profile out there. OK, so we're just about to go to another break. Of course, I'm recording this show live between 8 and 9 in the morning. It's 8.26 out there. Currently we've got all of the equity futures. They're trading to the upside. Now equity futures up 58. S&P up 6 and a half. NASDAQ up 24. Russell 2000 up a couple of points. Spotball utilities, by the way, at least it was before. Let's go check in on it. It is also trading higher. It's up by seven pennies right now trading out at 12.58 out there. And that's the danger sign right now in the marketplace. There's several of them. But one of those danger signs is this pattern, which is a rising spot volatility mix on a closing basis. That's the bottom panel and rising price in the S&P 500. And that just says caution. Will Robinson. Well, and all of us will be right back. Since 1984, Basil Chapman has been using the Chapman wave methodology to advise traders of his expert market opinion. While originally hand drawing charts from the late 1970s into the 1980s, Basil noticed that prices under most circumstances virtually always had a certain number of legs to the upside before declining sharply. Later, Basil found that computer software which included the standard market technical indicators enhanced the degree of accuracy in calling price turns as well as market trend calls. Thus was born the Chapman wave sequence. Using the Chapman wave methodology along with other indicators, Basil Chapman advises his subscribers of his expert market opinion each market day with his opening call newsletter. Right now you can get a two week free trial to the opening call, Basil's daily trading newsletter, by visiting the front page of TFNN.com. Cancel at any time during that trial and pay absolutely nothing. Get your two week free trial to Basil's newsletter, the opening call today by visiting TFNN.com. The path of least resistance is David White's daily trading newsletter. And if you're looking for active trading ideas, then now is a perfect time for a 30 day free trial to this powerful daily trading advisory service. David uses his years of trading experience to offer his subscribers his trading ideas each morning in his path of least resistance newsletter. Using a combination of equity trades along with options, David keeps his subscribers up to date with all pertinent market information with intraday afternoon updates when warranted. Don't miss out on this great chance to get a 30 day free trial to David's daily newsletter, the path of least resistance with no obligation to pay anything. David has been delivering solid recommendations for his subscribers recently and if you'd like to see the type of newsletter he delivers every morning, then visit the front page of TFNN and you'll find the path of least resistance under trading newsletters. For all the details and to start your 30 day free trial today, log on to TFNN.com now. TFNN is excited about our new software charting program The Art of Timing the Trade Charts. In collaboration with Tom O'Brien and using his best selling book The Art of Timing the Trade, your ultimate trading mastery system, David White has programmed an outstanding piece of software that will complement any trader's methodology. Using this first of its kind program, The Art of Timing the Trade Charts allows you to scan thousands of stocks for Fibonacci formation setups, including guardleys, ABCs, butterflies and much more. The Art of Timing the Trade Charts is designed to help you when scouring the markets for stocks just beginning to form the trading patterns that many investors spend days, weeks or even months searching to find. And right now we're offering licenses available at only $79 a month. We are so confident that you're going to love this new charting software that will even give you a 30 day unconditional money back guarantee. Don't miss out on this incredible new piece of software. Get your copy of The Art of Timing the Trade Charts today at www.TFNN.com This segment is brought to you by Think or Swim. For more information, just click the Think or Swim banner on the front page of TFNN.com Welcome back, folks. A quick review of what we just looked at during that last segment out here. So we're taking a look at Silver. Isaac was looking at Silver. We take a look at the daily time frame chart out here. We can see that Silver is going to form or should form a nine count today. The last time that Silver formed a high was on bar number eight. That was back on September 4th. And my suggestion to Isaac was this is not the day, nor would it be tomorrow nor would it be on Thursday to enter a long trade into Silver with that potential topping signal in place. However, Isaac was a shorter term type trader. And so what we did was we took a look at the parameters he requested which was for a 15 minute timeframe to assist him. And here what we've got is support and resistance. Support being 1730. Nine count breakdown. Resistance being 1746 out there. And so that was the review. We've got a request to go take a look at an individual equity. That individual equity is ticker symbol ICLN. This is from Mike H. Mike writes in and says could you please review ICLN for an entry point if you think it's a long candidate. Think intermediate to long term perspective. So here's what we know. So now is not the time to also enter into a long trade for the S&P Global Clean Energy Index Fund. The reason is because well Friday was bar number eight. Today may be bar number nine. We won't know until the close. Today's close must be above the close of bar number five out there. Bar number five by the way that close is for you to be watching is 1158 today. And the reason is because you can form one of those TD set up nine counts. Now it wouldn't be shorting this equity as a result of that as we speak. But now it's not your entry point. Of course we're asking for an entry point. The question is, does this form a TD set up nine count top? And if it does then where is price going to pull back to? And we'll want to take a look at the profiles at that stage right now. There's a bullish structure daily profile. 1146 would be an entry point or 1151 would be a potential entry point and a pullback. But then if it's a top, those areas are likely to fail. Not guaranteed to fail. And it's not much above where it's trading right now. So why not enter it now? Because we really need to see what happens if this does form some type of top. And how do these key levels of support hold? Because price could pull all the way back to where it had broken out, which was at 1097. That was its previous resistance level. So for ICLEAN, now you also mentioned intermediate term. So if we're going to take a look at intermediate term on this or long term on the weekly chart, first we can see prices above the weekly and the monthly profile. So everything is looking good there. And on the weekly timeframe, all we can see is prices moving higher doing a less relative energy. That itself is not a reason to take a short trade just as a cautionary type signal out there. As far as the weekly chart, I'm just trying to figure out where the wave counts, where we might be, letter number F, that's going to be wave number six. That's going to be out there. I think you just have to respect the daily timeframe out here, Michael. And wait to see if this does in fact top and then we'll see how it's pulling back with volume, without volume, and so on and so forth out there. So thanks so much for writing in and happy holidays. Let's go to Brent in Martinez, California. Brent, thanks for calling. Thanks for holding. How are you today? Good morning, Steve. Can you hear me okay? Can hear you just fine, sleepy eyes? How are you? I'm doing good. I'm doing good. Did you have a nice weekend? I did. It was very good. How about you? Excellent. Yeah, you know, we've got some nasty weather kind of flowing through the area. So it's not your ideal Florida weather, but I think we'll have in a couple hours. So that'll work. I can wait. That's good. I had a question about this overall markets and your seasonal work specifically. Yes. And my question was if I'm understanding correctly, so what you've been saying. Oh, here recently that if we were to make it to the end of the year, continue with this uptrend. I know you're cautious, you know, looking at things that give you caution, but if that were to transpire as opposed to us having some kind of big correction before we get there, that would be more bullish going into next year. Is that correct? Can you restate that last, that last? Just if we don't have some kind of big correction between now and the end of the year, it's going to be more bullish for the market in 2020. Is that correct? No, that's not my take. So part of my take would be, so let me just see if I can find, if this will open up for me, I hope that it will. And I want to just punch up the seasonal pattern out here. Here we go, just give me a second here. I should be able to do this here. Let's see, slide show from the current slide. So folks, what Brent is referring to here is the annual seasonal cycle. And so what we do know is right now, the markets are moving higher. On a seasonal basis, this is over, this is a study over the last 86 years out here. The Dow will typically form some type of top in early January. Now the day is in this cycle over the last 84 years. The average has been January 6th, but it doesn't have to happen on January 6th. It could be January 3rd, or it could be January 15th, or it could be, so sometime in January, we would expect some type of seasonal top, which would then pull us down into the 30th. That would be the normal thing. With so many topping signals that are out there, Brent, my concern is, and I don't know what the magnitude, let's say a top does form, or at least a short term top does form. Then the question becomes, what's happening on the longer term chart? So how do I get the monthly chart out here for you? I know one way to do it. So let me take a look at the S&P 500 as an example. So this is going to take just a moment to get to pull up as well. So here's the monthly timeframe chart for the S&P. I need to make one change to this chart because price is still moving higher, doing less relative energy. But I've got this set so that it doesn't pick up that signal until the bar, no, I don't have it on the bar closer. That's interesting. That's really interesting out here. On my other charts for the long term, must be the futures contracts that are showing. Well, let me pull up the Dow. Actually, I should stay with the Dow anyways because we're taking a look at the seasonal pattern with the Dow. So give me a moment here to do that. So up will come the Dow. And so what we've got going on here, Brent, is December so far is a relatively small-bodied candle for the Dow out here. And price is moving higher, doing less relative energy. And so let's say we get some type of pullback in January. The question is going to be, what's the bar look like on a monthly basis as we come into that end-of-the-month area? And is price trading below Stevie's green line, which right now has a Friday's close. This is a monthly chart with 27907. So because the bar is small, the body of the candle is small, it makes it easier to form some type of bearish reversal candle. So if we do get a bearish reversal candle and we do get a close below Stevie's green line out there, that could be a suggestion that there's a larger retracement that would be underway. Is that kind of... And then when I take a look at the weekly time frame chart here for the Dow, the Dow is forming on a weekly basis. Last week was bar number nine of a TD-9 count. We know that this week could be a higher high that could then set up that potential top. So we want to watch the weekly as well. So the weekly's got a potential TD-9 count top. The monthly's got a potential roads momentum indicator top. And then we get back from this break. This is a daily time frame chart for the Dow and see what we see. Okay? That sounds good. Thanks, Steve. Perfect. Perfect. You bet. We'll be back with Brett in Martinez, California in just a few minutes. If you are in the CD market and looking for a secure investment, the Tiger First mortgage program may work for you. The security for these first mortgages are building lots in the Tax Opportunity Zone in St. Petersburg, Florida. The Tax Act of 2018 set up tax-free zones across the country where you can build and hold for 10 years and pay no tax on the profits, which makes these lots valuable. The investment is anywhere from $30,000 to $75,000. The interest paid is 7% yearly paid on a monthly basis. According to bankrate.com, the best rate for a four-year CD in the country as of February 20th is 3.1%. A $50,000 investment at a normal four-year CD rate of 3.1% would give you income of $1,550 per year, or $6,200 over the four-year period. 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To obtain a Perspectus or Summary Perspectus, please contact Direction Shares at<PHONE_NUMBER>. The Perspectus or Summary Perspectus should be read carefully before investing. An investment in the funds is subject to risk, including the possible loss of principal. The funds are designed to be utilized only by sophisticated investors such as traders and active investors. Distributor, Four Side Fund Services, LLC. Welcome back, folks. 8.42 in the morning. We're on the line with Brent in Martinez, California. And we're discussing the Dow, the seasonal patterns. The seasonal pattern, typically the Dow will form some type of top in the early first week of January, and then markets move lower into the end of January. Now, the concern, and I was certainly more concerned last week on Thursday because of all the signals that were out there, Friday's move higher negated a number of the daily signals. It did not daily roads momentum indicator signals. It did not do that in the Dow. And the Dow is what we're really referring to. Now, the reason why these roads momentum indicator signals are so important, folks, it's a five-step process. So my lines start to begin drawing. We're looking just simply at a bar chart right now. And as we take a look at the bar chart, it just allows me to show you a little bit more data. So going back into September of 2018, you can see that the roads momentum indicator signal identified a nice top out here back in the early part of October of 2018 and a nice bottom into October 29th. That led to a nice little rally. We've got a top that formed out here in April. That led to a bottom that formed in June, a top that formed out here in July, a bottom that formed with these signals in August. And now we have a topping signal in place here for the Dow. So with regard to the Dow, everything is in... So if price continues to move higher, with less relative energy out there on a daily basis, you'll have a topping signal. We've got the TDE nine-count pattern on the weekly and on the monthly. The bar is so small that it should be easy to create a bearish reversal. Canada on the month is not over. It's only the 23rd out there. But we shouldn't see substantial moves to the upside, typically during the holiday period out here, Brent. So I don't think the markets are going to get wildly ahead of us. With regard to the Dow itself, you know, here are its weekly and its monthly horizontal trading ranges. Let me see if I can add the daily here real quickly, just to look at the next possible area of support. Did that do it? No, that didn't do it. Let's see if this does it here. If this gets me the daily out here. So actually, you know, the Dow Equity Futures contract is really above resistance, and price could run up in the 29-5-ish area. But am I confusing you? Because I don't want to do that. I'm a little... No, it's just slightly. I mean, I kind of get what you're saying. It's going to depend on how the charts develop over the period of time. But I guess, yeah, I'm going to go back and look at the archive and... But continue. No, it's just that there are so many weekly potential topping signals, monthly potential topping signals, a daily moving up into a period of time where we should see some kind of a top has me a bit more cautious, but I don't know what the candle formation is going to be, right? And so we're just simply going to have to come back to that. But those candle formations could, on the longer-term chart, really set up something that could lead to a market that moves lower. Beyond. Beyond the typical cycle. A little more bearish. What's that? You seem like it might be a little more bearish, potentially, just depending on how it pans out here. Yeah. It's because of all those patterns that are present at the moment. And then taking a look at those patterns and saying, okay, how difficult would it be to create a bearish reversal candle on the monthly timeframe chart for the Dow? And when I take a look at it, the answer is not difficult at all because the actual body of the candle, let me just put that monthly chart back out here, just isn't that wide. It's, you know, I was talking to a subscriber earlier this morning. We were looking at Silver and he was referring to small-bodied candles. What a small-bodied candle in essence does is, in this case here with price moving higher, just makes it easier to create that bearish reversal candle should it form. So, yeah, I'm a little bit more cautious that the markets are actually overstretched in setting up because everybody is looking for the other side, is looking for the bullish side out there. And I'm just saying not so fast based upon the pattern signals and what it would actually take to get the Dow to say, hey, I want another nice pullback here. Yeah, that part I do fully understand. I mean, that you've explained, you know, in a way that I definitely get it. So, I appreciate it very much, Steve, just have a Merry Christmas and enjoy the holiday zero. Yeah, after the Christmas and going into the New Year here. You bet, you too. And thanks so much for being up early and calling us. That's 5.47 in the morning, folks. That is the early bird that catches the worm out here. Let's see what's going on here in the pre-market. See what we can see. Looks like ITCI that's intracellular therapies closed at 12.44 on Friday. Right now, that's trading out at 24. That's a double out there. So, that's a nice move. You've got surrepti-therapeutics. SRPT is the ticker symbol. Close at 126. This is now trading out at 137, but just trading with inside its daily profiles out here. Close above 138.79 would be nice and bullish for it. Tesla, which closed at 405 is trading at 413 out here. So, it is extending its gains. The high on Friday was trading at 413 even. You're trading at 412.70, the last trade that fired off out there. So, that's what's going on to the upside to the downside just to get UNG. So, I think here, I believe I've got a question let us come in about UNG. Let me go back to that and see that is Clinton. And Clinton, what's your line on UNH, not UNG? So, let's go take a look and he's referring to Stevie's red oscillator and change line. So, when we take a look at UNH, that is United Health. United Health price is trading below or close below, it looks like on Friday. Was this Friday's scandal? Yeah, it was. Close below Stevie's Green Line. It was 293.67. So, this would suggest that as long as price stays below 293.67 that Stevie's Green Line, that price would pull back to the next level of support Clinton. And that level would right now have to be the top of the daily profile. It would be 283. You asked about Nike. NKE is the ticker symbol. So, let's punch that up on our screen. And what Nike did on Friday was Nike pulled back to test Stevie's Green Line. That was 99.23 out there. And so, this remains in bullish configuration. You did have a bear candle that formed on Friday. There is an A to B equal CD. This is a small one, but it looks like this. Let's draw it and this is coming off the low from November 6. That's your A point, your B point, November 19. Your C point, this little hammer candle down on December 3. So, this made a 1 to 1.618 A to B equal CD. Did that with a confirmed bearish reversal candle. So, in the case of Nike, if you were to see a follow through to the downside of that bearish reversal candle, but more importantly, a close below 99.23, that would then signal to us that Nike is getting ready to pull back to the 94.68 level up there. So, Clinton, that's what I would be looking at for those two specific instruments. Hope that information helps you out. So, as we go into this break here before it looks like we would get to the two-minute wrap. Let's take a look at the equity futures again. They are trading to the upside. The Dow is up 55 points. That's the Dow Equity Futures contract. The futures contract for the ESMini is up about 7. The NASDAQ up 28. The Russell up a couple. The ESMini right now dealing with an area of resistance. That resistance being it's horizontal trading ranges. The daily and the weekly are about the same level. This is the ESMini equity futures contract. This is the continuous contract. 32. 42 is a resistance level. 32. 62 is the monthly horizontal trading range boundary line. That's probably it for the rest of the year. That 32. 62 area out there. Steve Rhodes with TFNN. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. You can listen to TFNN live on your mobile device 24 hours per day. Go to tfnn.com and hit watch Tiger TV. That's tfn.com and hit watch Tiger TV for the latest market information. Welcome back folks, so we were talking with Brent about the Dow just the markets in general out here. So as we take a look right now, you got the S&P futures up by 6 points. A little over 6 points out there. Spotball at TildenX six pennies out there.  Again, Brent, we come back and everybody else out there, will we pay attention to the fact that right now a little subtle pattern out here, a little subtle pattern that you and I have seen before. We know that these patterns, when they do confirm, and by confirm we need to see some type of bearish reversal candle out here for the S&P 500. So the top panel of our chart is the S&P cash, and the bottom panel of our chart is spot fix. The yellow line out there is a 50-day exponential moving average, but what's really important is December 16th, and the closing price of the spot ball atyonyx at that stage was $1,214. Right now the spot fix is trading out at $1,257. So we've had the S&P 500 moving higher at the same time that the closing price of the spot ball atyonyx has also been moving higher. Now this pattern can be negated by the spot ball atyonyx closing below $1,214, but we don't have that pattern right now. What, and marked on my chart out here, are other similar type patterns that have led to either market retracement or market to deep enough market corrections out there. So it's one of those other patterns very subtle, not too many people, very few people that I know of follow this specific pattern. I know that listeners out there do because we know how important it is to pay attention to it. So that's what I see in the overall markets. With regard to this morning out here, it's 8.56 in the morning. If we take a look at the 30-minute chart here for the Dow Equity Futures contract, it formed a TD setup nine-count top for the short term. Price right now is testing Stevie's green line. It's right around $26.529. If price is able to close below that, expect the Dow Equity Futures contract to pull back to $28,480, $28,486, or $28,497. Those would be its downside targets. If it can hold that, it's just nothing more than a normal retracement. Folks, have a Merry Christmas, have a safe and happy holiday, and I look forward to seeing you on Thursday of this week. Take care.


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