and volunteer work. Issued in August of 2018, this satellite account handbook updates the 2003 UN handbook on nonprofit institutions in the system of national accounts. Bringing this earlier handbook into alignment with SNA 2008 and ESA 2010 and extending the coverage to certain related cooperative, mutual and social enterprise institutions that collectively have come to be referred to as social economy institutions. In addition, it incorporates the guidance provided in the ILO International Labor Organization, manual on the measurement of volunteer work. Taken together, these nonprofit or social economy institutions and volunteer activities are often referred to as the third sector or the third or social economy sector, which we have abbreviated as the TSE sector. This set of institutions and behaviors has been handled in a somewhat awkward way in the SNA, obscuring what turned out to represent a quite sizable economic element in countries throughout the world. This element has attracted increased policy attention in recent years, which is why this satellite account handbook has been created. The workshop we are launching today will fall into seven distinct sessions covering seven distinct topics. Session number one will take account of the background of this handbook. The statistical revolution that has been underway for the past 20 years bringing the third or social economy sector into view. Session number two will focus in on the institutional units that make up this satellite account and try to explain how they relate to the rest of the units in the SNA. Session number three focuses on volunteer work, how to define it, how to value it. Session number four focuses on the issue of classification. What are the institutional units and what are the workforce paid in volunteer elements and how can we classify them? Session number five focuses on the data elements for the institutional units. Mainly they are the traditional target data items used in SNA. In session number six, we look at the target data items for the workforce components, both paid in volunteer. And then in session seven, we go beyond the traditional focus of SNA and look at the impact of this TSE sector on our society at large. So let's turn now to the first of these sessions focusing on the background of this new TSE sector handbook. Because it turns out that we have been through a statistical revolution in this field, putting the third sector for the first time clearly on the economic map of the world. By way of background, it's important to note that up through the 1970s or 1980s, this third sector was largely ignored in our statistical system. But in reality, this sector has been going, undergoing very significant growth. We're familiar with the for-profit sector, of course. We're familiar with the government sector, but there has emerged during this period a very significant civil society sector, a third sector. The problem is that there's been little clear sense of this as a coherent sector and therefore it's been obscured. It's muddled in a whole bunch of conceptual ambiguity. There are diverse types of entities that make it up, which make it difficult to really define it with precision. The legal treatment of this sector has been awkward in many, many countries. Without a clear legal structure, it's often difficult to understand what this sector consists of. There are very cultural traditions that have been driving the variations in this sector. And then all of this has led to a multiplicity of terms and concepts, nonprofit sector, charitable sector, social economy sector. These are all terms that in various parts of the world are used to describe this same phenomenon. And then complicating things even further has been the treatment of these institutions and activities in the SNA. It turns out that the SNA structures work pretty well for corporations. They're in two sectors that are pretty clearly identified. It works pretty well for government units. There is a special general government sector that more or less captures all of the relevant units. Households too have their own sector. But when it comes to the nonprofit institutions, they turn out to be scattered throughout almost every one of the sectors of the traditional SNA of the core accounts. And worse yet, once they get put into these other sectors, they disappear from view except for a very small fragment I referred to as NPISH. And those of you who are statisticians will know NPISH stands for Nonprofit Institutions Serving Households. So what has been missing is a coherent concept that will bring these very institutions into view and identify them as something with enough commonality to be considered a identifiable economic sector. And so our metaphor for the work that I'm going to describe to you today that our center at Johns Hopkins has been very much involved in carrying out is a pair of glasses. When I take my glasses off, the world gets very blurry. I can't make out the reality that I'm looking at. The reality is there. The problem is in my eyeglasses that I just can't bring them out of the background. I put on my glasses and things that were always there but were invisible to me become much more clear. And that is what the work that we've been engaged in and that is captured in these in this new statistical handbook is attempting to do to bring a set of concepts around this third sector interview so that we have a way to see this sector much more clearly and then capture it in our economic statistics. Now to get to this point, we had to take four fairly distinct but overlapping steps. We began with a research effort called the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project. It began in the late 1980s and its goal was to analyze the commonalities among these nonprofit institutions in different parts of the world despite the cultural differences despite the legal differences and to bring them into focus for the first time. We began this project very modestly with eight different countries many of them in Central and Western Europe but some also in Central Europe and in the developing world and in Asia and Latin America. We ultimately grew into a very massive project involving 42 different countries representing every single continent in the world every single religious tradition or every major religious tradition and every major region of the planet. And our goal was to identify as I said the commonalities among these types of entities to which we could apply this term the third sector or the TSE sector. And this basic definitional task probably took us about a year and a half in the project because we had to reconcile many different conceptions in many different countries. And we ultimately came up with a conceptualization built around five key concepts. First of all, and we did this in a bottom up fashion that is we asked all of our colleagues in these different countries we built a huge research apparatus with local associates and additional researchers in each one of the countries in which we worked. We also worked with local advisory committees to make sure we were touching the reality in a coherent way. And this led us to these five key attributes that became the defining features of this nonprofit sector that we started out working on. First of all, we focused in on organizations but a very sociological view of what is an organization did not have to be legally ratified. It simply had to exist as a set of activities that had a degree of structure to them. They had regular meetings. They existed over time. There was a leadership structure to them. These were the concepts. So they could be informal organizations but they had to be organizations. Second, these institutions were defined as being private. That is to say they were institutionally separate from government. They were distinct from the institutions of the state. And in that sense were private. Thirdly, very significantly, we focused on institutions that were nonprofit distributing. The term that's frequently referred to them is that they are nonprofit institutions but that's a little inaccurate. They're allowed to earn profits. What's disallowed, not allowed is the distribution of those profits to a set of investors or managers or participants or other stakeholders. They were nonprofit distributing and any profit they earned had to be reinvested into the organizations. The fourth feature was that they were self-governing institutions. They were not controlled from the outside. They were governed by their own internal processes. And then finally and very significantly, they had to be voluntary, non compulsory. People couldn't be required to be forced to belong nor were they clans in which people were born into or casts or any of the other structures of society in which people were not given any choice but rather are by law or by a condition of being part of a family or a cast automatically members of the institution. This project spanned a number of years and came out with a number of very striking findings. Four of those findings were particularly striking to everybody that heard them. First of all, we discovered that this was an enormous economic presence in countries throughout the world. In the 41 countries in which we were able to generate financial data on these organizations, it turned out that if you put them all together, all the organizations and the people working in them together, they would represent something bigger than the all but five of the countries of the world. In other words, if we thought of them as a nonprofit sector land made up of only nonprofits, they would be the fifth largest country in the world ahead of Russia, ahead of Germany, ahead of France, ahead of Brazil and behind only the United States, China, India and Japan in terms of their economic scale. So this is a very big sector, one that needs to be brought into focus because it is a substantial economic presence. The next thing that we discovered is that some of our popular beliefs about these organizations and where they exist turn out not to be true. In the first place, the America frequently thinks of itself as the only nonprofit sector in the world. But as you can see in this chart, the United States falls pretty far down below many other countries in terms of the scale of its civil society or nonprofit sector. This is measuring in terms of both paid and volunteer workers. The ones that are ahead of it are many of the European so-called welfare states. But what this chart shows is that the nonprofit sector is a very big actor in the Western European countries representing in the Netherlands close to 16% of the labor force in Belgium, 13% in the United Kingdom, 11%. And so what we learned out of this research project was that Europe doesn't have a welfare state, it has a welfare partnership linking the state and its funding to this nonprofit set of institutions. Then a third key finding I had to do with the surprising role of volunteers. We measured the amount of volunteer time, converted that into full-time equivalent workers and came up with a conclusion that 44% of the workforce of this nonprofit sector turn out to be volunteers. Which means that we needed to measure not only the workers but also the people who were volunteering and making contributions to the economy but without pay and as volunteers. A very striking reality that the volunteer component is almost as large as the paid worker component. Out of this first step of this research project came a whole host of products. We produced a whole set of general overview documents and books. This is one example of one of the books that we produced. We also had an entire set of books produced by Manchester University Press focused on our project, one in each country. So we had the 12 different volumes that represent the portrayal of the nonprofit sector and all of its glory in a number of countries around the world. These books were widely disseminated. The results of the project were distributed through various conferences around the world and were brought to the attention of policy makers. And it was that information that we then began to knock on the door of the statistical authorities, particularly the United Nations Statistical Division. And we went to work with them and basically said that we think that this sector deserves to be treated more prominently in the SNA statistical system that these are now buried in the SNA statistics that each country produces on their economy and that we needed to do something to bring it into better view. And this then led us to the second step which was the creation thanks to the willingness of the United Nations Statistics Division to allow us to work together with the authorities that oversee the SNA and with statistical agencies around the world to produce a handbook on the treatment of nonprofit institutions in the system of national accounts. So what did this new handbook on nonprofit institutions which was issued in 2003, what did it do? A number of key breakthroughs, five of them in particular. First of all, it called for the creation of satellite accounts on nonprofit institutions. Satellite accounts are as you all know as statisticians are efforts to pull out of the existing SNA data a spotlight on particular components of the entire economies that are somehow not as clearly portrayed in the core SNA system. And we basically got the green light to create, to recommend the creation of satellite accounts on nonprofit institutions. The second thing that this handbook did was to adopt our CNP project comparative nonprofit sector project definition of what an NPI is. There was five key characteristics that I identified before. Thirdly and very significantly the handbook incorporated the concept of measuring volunteer work as part of the SNA. This was a very significant breakthrough as some of you who are familiar with SNA will know because SNA did not do a very thorough job of focusing on and highlighting the work of volunteers. Fourthly, a little more technical. The handbook acknowledged that although nonprofit institutions are sometimes put into the market economy into the corporate economy one of the two corporate sectors financial and non-financial they also have non-market output which should be captured. This is the output that is supported not by market sales which is this feature that is fundamental in the SNA but by charitable contributions, by volunteer effort and by all these other informal means that do produce output but that's not captured in the core SNA. And then finally, as you'll hear later the handbook on nonprofit institutions in the system of national accounts adopted the classification system that we developed for nonprofit institutions and there we had developed something that provided more detail than the standard industrial classifications and we call this the international classification of nonprofit institutions. So this was a very significant breakthrough in 2003 and then it was followed up when 2008 SNA and the 2010 ESA were adopted and when a revision was brought forward of the ISIC International Standard Industrial Classification went through its own revision which came out also in 2008 it's called REV4 and so we had two new general statistical manuals the 2008 SNA and it's next of kin the 2010 ESA and the ISIC REV4 and what did this do? Well it added further authority to what the 2003 NPI handbook had already achieved first of all actually it did five things it reinforced the call for nonprofit institution satellite accounts essentially it endorsed what the 2003 nonprofit institution handbook did put forward secondly it called for the sub-sectoring of these different institutional sector accounts that had within them both NPI's and non-NPI components and it basically said let's shine a spotlight on the NPI components let's separate them out let's distinguish them in our data so that we could compare the role of nonprofit institutions and non-non-profit institutions this sector or sub-sector was sufficiently important to the economies of our countries that it deserves separate treatment in the data that is being produced under the SNA system the third thing it did was to have a complete chapter on NPI's within the core of the SNA system and therefore added a chapter to the books that came out reporting on the 2008 SNA that had a dedicated chapter on NPI's the fourth thing it did was reinforce the need for coverage of volunteer work in other words it called for improvement the treatment of volunteer work in the SNA and then finally it adopted most of the innovations that we had recommended of the classification system for NPI's made them core parts of the SNA and ICIC classification structure by providing more detail on the kinds of work that these institutions carry out all of this then led to a significant effort at implementing this new 2003 NPI handbook and many countries jumped into the task and here's some examples of four of eight of the 30 or so countries that already began to produce satellite accounts on the nonprofit institutions following the recommendations of our NPI handbook and they were all over the world they were in South America they were in Asia they were in Western Europe a very significant outpouring of interest in capturing NPI's in the SNA structure but this wasn't the end of our journey and these were two of the four steps that have made up the statistical revolution but we were on a roll the next step was to take it on the task of measuring volunteer work statistical agencies came back to us and said okay you have two documents they call on us to measure volunteer work the definitions of it around the world are very strained and very diverse we don't know what to do and what's more we're not quite sure how best to value it we need to have some international standards and so with that charge we went to knock on the door of the institution that we felt would have the most interest and most responsibility for capturing data on volunteer work and that was the International Labor Organization the ILO what we realized was that the SNA was not doing a terribly good job in capturing volunteer work first of all this work comes in two different forms some of it is based in organizations and some of it is direct citizen action not mediated by organizations and the SNA treated those two types very differently so far as organization based volunteering is concerned SNA basically said okay we'll measure we'll measure it at cost well that was a bit of a cop out a bit of a little trick the volunteer work is not paid and therefore it does not cost anything the cost of volunteer work is zero and so by announcing that it was going to be valued at cost the SNA essentially decided that it would not be valued at all and therefore all the organization based volunteer work was simply overlooked in SNA and then so far as direct volunteering is concerned that is that done by individuals but not mediated through organizations the decision was to base it on production on output but for not all volunteer work done directly produces outputs, produces facilities and therefore it does not quite have a production cost because some of it is producing services and here the SNA basically took another out and has not measured service volunteering at all essentially assuming that it is worth nothing but of course most of volunteering is probably service oriented and not facilities production so what we had in the SNA was a real mess in terms of the measurement of volunteering and it was with that an attempt to unravel that mess that we approached the international labor organization and what we ultimately were able to do is convince them to allow us to produce a manual on the measurement of volunteer work using the same approach that we used to create the NPI handbook that was issued by the US statistics division in 2003 we formed a technical advisory group made up of statisticians from around the world we ventilated the ideas throughout the entire SNA statistical system and we ultimately came to a conclusion that in this case was approved initially in 2008 international conference of labor statisticians and ultimately further validated at a 2013 session of the same international conference so out of this came another official document this one an international labor organization document published in 2011 a manual on the measurement of volunteer work and so what did it do again five key points it gave us a consensus definition of volunteer work and in particular it focused on both organization based volunteer work and direct volunteer work and this was a very significant breakthrough because many of the countries or the few countries that were measuring volunteer work tended to focus on the organizational base volunteering but not to consider the direct volunteering and we said both needed to be considered the second thing that it did was to endorse the idea of using labor force surveys or other household surveys to capture this volunteer activity and so the surveys as many of you will know are the most powerful statistical surveys that exist around the world they are so important that they are almost consistently carried out unlike some other social surveys but at any rate we got commitment to do surveying of volunteering and to do it in a household fashion and so that's what we looked at in the labor manual the concept here was that we would integrate this module into these other surveys into the labor force survey or into the household surveys and so we provided a convenient one and a half page survey instrument that we thought could capture much of what we needed to know that was not already in the labor force or other household surveys the fourth item very significant that you'll hear about later in our sequence of these workshops was how to value the volunteer work that was going on and our basic concept here was to use a replacement cost valuation replacement cost basically says you value the work of the volunteer at the cost of a replacement worker so you figure out what that volunteer does what kind of work you find the wage that is paid for that volunteer effort that activity in the country and you apply that wage to the number of hours of volunteer work in that particular activity so the replacement cost valuation and all of this was as I said formally confirmed as an activity a form of work by the 19th international conference of labor statisticians another key step in the construction of this statistical revolution so that then brings us to the final and fourth step and this step involved broadening of our conception of the world and it also connected to the sustainable development bolts that were under development as you may know by the United Nations to guide the international community in the period from 2015 through 2030 and what emerged in that effort to create these sustainable development goals was the recognition that this sector that we were focusing on called it the civil society sector which is one version of the language that's used to describe it or the social economy sector or the third sector reports coming out of the UN and this happens to be the report of the secretary general who wrote this whole concept of the sustainable development goals and in that the secretary general wrote that the 2030 development agenda needs civil society to serve as a participant joint steward and powerful engine of change and transformation and went on to praise volunteerism as another powerful and cross cutting means of implementation so this was further validation of the importance of this sector and of the need for countries to develop meaningful data on them using these new statistical handbooks and the EU Council made similar comments there the focus was on the social economy which is a somewhat broader notion than nonprofit institutions European statistical authorities Eurostat etc to consider developing and implementing satellite accounts on the social economy and this in turn motivated us to see if we could bring the social economy into our work as well and to add it to the nonprofit institution and so we began to think about what makes up the social economy and whether we needed to broaden our concept as many people in Europe were suggesting and we came to the conclusion that first of all it's true nonprofits are not alone there are other institutions that share with nonprofits three core features that are very important to the nonprofit institutions but also are important to these institutions but they are private so the concept of being private, privatism they are not part of the state and they are different from other parts of the private sector the second concept is that they have a public benefit focus so if the privatism idea differentiates them from the state the public benefit focus is on business entities and then finally the third key element is free will these are all institutions that people choose to be part of without compulsion they are not born into it they are not forced to do it by law they are freely able to take this on so this became then the charge for the fourth concept is how to bring in the components of the social economy that go beyond nonprofits but share with nonprofits these three features of privatism, public benefit focus and free will and it turns out that there were several kinds of institutions that fell into this common concept we had to identify what those features were, what the manifestations are and what kinds of institutions and we concluded there are really four identifiable clusters of potential third or social economy sector manifestations there for sure are nonprofit institutions we had already established that they make up what the Europeans at least were calling the social economy a little different but they share these three critical values and then there's this whole new world of social enterprises or social ventures these are public benefit organizations that nevertheless utilize the market to carry out their purposes they build enterprises but the enterprises are not profit-maximizing enterprises they are social purpose enterprises and then finally the fourth component is all of the volunteer activity individual activity without pay for which there are many different terms but we use the term of volunteering as a collective to refer to them we turn to the SNA and ask how does it treat these institutions a very interesting thing emerges it turns out that the same thing is true about these new institutions these additional ones as was true of the nonprofits that while the SNA structure of sectors works for corporations and government it doesn't do such a good job for these other entities and so it does okay for households too but when it comes to NPIs as we've already seen they are in almost all the sectors so once they get assigned to a sector they disappear as nonprofits but the same thing is true of cooperatives and mutuals they're in several different sectors and the same thing is true of social enterprises they are some of them are non-financial some of them are financial corporations some of them end up in fish some of them are NPIs and when they are put into these other sectors the same thing happens they all disappear from view they're in the statistics but you can't see them you can't measure them you can't understand them and so and then one more complicating feature about these other types of entities is that while some of them fit into something we could call the third or social economy sector not all of them do and therefore we had to make divisions between the in-scope and the out-scope cooperatives for example and the in-scope and the out-scope mutual associations and the in-scope and the out-scope social enterprises and so we had to find dividing lines a very difficult idea in the world of SNA but a very critical one for our preservation of this central concept in more detail was a much more complicated concept of a TSE sector it included most NPIs but it didn't include all social ventures it doesn't include all cooperatives and it doesn't include all activity without pay there is a line that had to be drawn and the circle reflects that line it essentially is all of the components that truly do meet a set of key criteria that we're going to spend a fair amount of time defining in a little more detail essentially we had to develop two sets of defining features operational features one of them for the organizational components or the institutional unit components and the other for the volunteer components of this sector so far as the organizational components and we will be going over this in much greater detail as we get through the other workshops on different days I'm sure many of the key defining features are the same as for NPIs they're organizations they're private institutions they're self-governing they're voluntary not compulsory but when it came to the final criterion relating to profit distribution we had to make some adjustments because cooperatives as you know do distribute some profit mutuals do distribute some profit social enterprise do distribute some profit to investors we re-adjusted this non-distribution constraint and imposed one that was a bit relaxed and we said that there had to be a significant limit on the distribution of profits and we ultimately set that limit it is about 50% of total profit accumulated had to be kept in the organization and not distributed to stakeholders and this became the test for what was the dividing line between the in-scope and the out-of-scope components and the same thing had to be done for what we call the individual action components these were the volunteer efforts and here we define the volunteer efforts that was in scope as having to be primarily for the benefit of others not oneself it had to be carried on for a meaningful period of time this is true of all activity in the SNA and in the ILO employment world it had to be not for pay certain reimbursements of expenses were okay but pay for the activity was forbidden in order to meet the criteria that we had to meet the criteria was forbidden in order to meet the criteria of our satellite account that this was work normally was it not carried out for oneself but it wasn't carried out for the people inside one's household so it was differentiated from household work or family effort and then finally like nonprofit institutions it had to be a non compulsory so out of this came our new United Nations satellite account on nonprofit and related institutions and volunteer work handbook call your attention to the download information about this handbook if you have not put your hands on it already and begun to study it you can go online and get the online version what did it do first of all it broadens the coverage it includes not only nonprofits and foundations but also cooperatives some cooperatives not all mutuals again some mutuals but not all social enterprises again not all of them but some of them and then direct volunteering that had been ignored in certain other statistical work done around the world so where do we stand one other thing that this handbook does that is unusual is that it introduces a method to measure the impact of the TSE sector on the sustainable development goals and so we think that this is a unique and important breakthrough for SNA that it creates a win-win partnership for statistical agencies and third sector actors and governments many countries have a huge and in scope TSE sector that's going unrecognized in the national statistics many governments are actively seeking partnerships and recognizing that the sustainable development goals will not make headway without engaging them but how can you engage them if you don't know how many there are what they do what their scale is what the capabilities are out so this has become a sector of enormous interest but the TSE sector has been largely invisible in the existing national account statistical system complicating progress major in scope entities are buried in other sectors we've seen that some of the units are missing volunteering has been out of bounds so there have been significant problems with our statistical system in capturing this sector we think that there would be enormous gains achieved by bringing the sector into better view and that the statistical system itself would be better off having these entities revealed in our core statistics major in scope better data would help foster and promote partnerships the statistical machinery to do this is already in place so the data is in place so we're talking about rearranging data not creating it anew and our statistical agencies are needed now to help get this machinery implemented and so we would appeal to you all to join us we are more than willing to be of help to you and doing further training and providing technical assistance we're already working with a number of countries to help them apply and implement this handbook it's not a simple task but it is relatively easy to do once one buys into it please contact us if we can be of help but you may also want to sign in and listen to the additional workshops that we have planned so thank you very much for your attention and for joining you for the second session of this workshop that will be set up in your country thank you


Hello Earth citizens. In this video, I will show you a 10 minute routine to sense energy in between your hands to quiet your mind. This exercise in brain education is called Jigam. Jigam translates to stopping emotions, stopping your thoughts that prevent you from feeling your own energy. This exercise is actually taken from the book Connect by Ilchili. I'll drop a link in the description below on how you can get a copy for yourself to follow along and read more about pineal gland meditation. So let's get started. First sit in a comfortable posture with your legs crossed like this or if you have some tension in your hips then please sit comfortably on a chair with your feet flat on the floor parallel not pointing out or pointing feet parallel on the floor straight in your spine.   Now open your eyes and first we will activate some energy in our hands so that we can feel it in between our palms relax your wrists relax your fingers and tap the tips of your fingers together so don't make it tight like this so it's not like this relax your wrists relax your fingers and tap for one minute as you tap don't forget to breathe many times you might catch yourself as you move your body you tend to stop breathing don't let yourself stop breathing keep breathing each movement with the intention to relax relax relax relax if you have the hang of this movement down you could even close your eyes to become more sensitive to the sensation you are causing in your fingertips a couple more seconds and stop great now same thing keep your your hands fingers wrist everything relax and now shake your wrist side to side wrist side to side keeping your fingers relaxed you will feel them flailing around a little bit relax your fingers hands wrists as much as you can and here to breathe you might feel some tension in your shoulders if you do exhale out even if you don't feel tension in your shoulders make sure you're breathing so one more minute here you got the hang of this close your eyes so you can focus on the sensation in your body a few more seconds and stop great and now last one rub your palms together palms together for 30 seconds a couple more and stop now bring your palms very close almost touching but not quite bring your mind to focus in the space in between your palms do you feel some tingling do you feel some magnetism do you feel some warmth you might even feel some coldness too whatever you have focus your attention here if it's hard to focus with your eyes open please close your eyes and feel the sensation in between your palms and now with this feeling in between your palms open and close your palms as if in between your palms you have a set of lungs that breathe in and expand and contract as you exhale it helps if you sink your breathing with this as well so you literally are breathing in and exhaling with your entire body not just your chest but with your entire body in and out and again here if it's difficult to focus with your eyes open please close your eyes but imagine the movement of your hands mimicking a set of lungs expanding and contracting expanding and contracting now if you've got the hang of this energy try to make your movements a little bit bigger until the movement surrounds your entire body can you still feel the energy in between your palms if you've lost the sensation don't worry go back to the first place and focus on the space in between your palms or you can do the tapping again to get the sensation back but if you still can feel it imagine this energy surrounding your whole body and use that energy to create a capsule around your body a capsule of bright positive light and focus on the feeling of your palms around your body everybody carries an electromagnetic field you know that feeling when you feel a little off or that feeling where you feel bad after you fought with somebody that means your electromagnetic field has been broken and this is a great exercise to repair that now bring your hands closer together make your movement smaller back to the center and feel the energy in between your palms if you're very sensitive to energy you might feel like there's a round ball of energy you are carrying in your hands there's no right or wrong answer the important part is is that you stop your thinking brain and switch to your feeling brain you feel the energy in between your palms focus on the sensation of pure energy running through you and through focusing on that sensation of pure energy flowing in your body you will be in the present moment quiet your thoughts connect your body and brain together and feel deep rest peace bring your palms together in front of your chest close your eyes one more time take a deep breath in and exhale one more time deep breath in and a sigh could you feel the energy in between your palms you did a great job you might feel very very subtle small energy now but if you keep practice it will become bigger bigger more defined more defined and you will feel the benefits of focusing on energy sensation to quiet your chattering thinking mind to experience a full one hour brain education based class please visit a local body and brain yoga studio near you


What's up Navigation Traders? Today is Friday June 22nd. Welcome to this week's video update. Hope everybody had a great week of trading. Let's jump right in. Starting with the trades on Monday the 18th. We did a rolling adjusting trade in the Euro 4 slash 6E. So we're just under we're at 18 days to expiration. So just as we teach once we get under that 21 days to expiration when we're trading uncovered positions like strangles and straddles. We like to roll that out to the next expiration cycle. And in this case price had come down testing our downside short strike and so we needed to roll our calls down as well. So we just did that all in one swoop. Now remember when you're trading options on futures you don't have the rolling functionality like you do on regular equities where you can just do it in one one roll. So in this case we bought back this strangle and then we sold out the new strangle with the adjusted strikes as well. And so we bought back July one and then resold this in August with the new strikes. And so what that looks like now is let's go to the analyze tab and you can see with this up move today price has come right back into center. So we're up a little bit this and actually after after adjustments we're basically at about break even. So just holding waiting for some more implied volatility to contract some more time to pass before we take this one off. If it does if price does go to one of these break evens more than likely we will add another short strangle assuming implied volatility stays relatively high which right now it is at the 55 and that's 57 60 range on the indicator. So we'll see what happens next week. We'll continue to manage that as needed. Next trade was a closing adjusting trade in wheat. So we closed out the call vertical side of our iron condor because price had breached our downside break even. And so if we take a look at wheat we're actually hoping to get out of this trade but unfortunately price came down came through our break even so we just closed that out still holding the put vertical side and then we also put on another full iron condor late last week to collect some more credit and just to continue with that adjustment. And so you can see that one's still fairly centered and a little bit of up move a little bit more time to pass before we can book anything there. So looking for a little bit of upside in wheat at this point. Next trade was a closing adjusting trade in EWW which is the Mexican ETF. So we had two different strangles out we closed this one out booked almost 50% of max profit and then we're still holding our other EWW trade which oh I'm sorry actually that was another alert so we entered a new one so let's let's just finish on EWW here so um then what we did up here was here it is so we closed out the uh the adjusted one which which happened to be a straddle so we closed that out ended up booking a nice winner on EWW and if we go to the closed trades because that was that's when we fully closed that out so here you can see open this up started on 425 had to make a few adjustments couple rolls ended up booking a nice profit of 308 on that and then the uh the strangle that I showed you was was later in the week on the 21st which was yesterday on Thursday we opened up a new strangle because IV percentile popped its head back up at the 91 level on the indicator and so that's the one that you see here is this is this new strangle so still holding that still very centered nothing to do there let's go back to the order here um so that was the closing trade in EWW then the next trade was we uh a closing adjusting trade in EWZ so kind of a similar situation we had two different positions on an EWZ booked this one for over 35 percent of max profit just had that on for 11 days and then uh the next alert went out was an opening adjusting where we opened up a new strangle you know EWZ the next day in August because IV popped up again at that 93 level so if we take a look at EWZ now we've got these two different positions this is the one uh from the alert that I just mentioned still very centered nothing to do there and then we have this adjusted one uh that's still in July which we've still got 29 days in July so nothing to do here yet except for weight you can see price has moved considerably uh outside of the break even after the adjustment but remember after we make an adjustment we want to check out how much premium is in that untested size so if we click off the puts and just check on the calls you can see we've still got a lot of premium left in there for the profit line to reach that that expiration line so still continue to hold that you know if we get a bounce back obviously that's a good thing if it continues going lower we'll continue to roll these calls down lower probably go inverted and then once we get under 21 days to expiration we will roll that whole thing out to August and just to continue to be mechanical with our adjustments there next trade was an opening trade in EEM so we sold a strangle in EEM IV percentile got up to 79 so this one is still pretty centered got a little bit of profit there already but not enough to take off yet so we'll just continue to watch that next trade was an opening adjusting trade in corn so we had one iron condor on in corn price came down and so we just went ahead and added another one to collect more credit and kind of widened out our overall position so if we look at corn we've got this iron condor on here with three contracts can see we got some profit there not enough to take off yet and then the other one is with two contracts and I like to I like to vary the number of contracts a little bit just to make it easier to keep track especially if you're in the same expiration cycle in this case August and so this is the one that's kind of hanging out near our lower end of our range but still well within our range nothing to do there yet except for weight and maybe look for a little bit of a an upswing in corn before we manage that one at all next trade was an opening trade in fxi and I went ahead and did a butterfly here just a tighter I wanted to do something to find risk if I did a normal iron condor then we're not collecting enough credit because fxi is only a 40 some dollar symbol so you just don't collect enough credit so we went tighter and ended up doing just a butterfly ivy percentile get up to that 60 level remember we managed these at a lower percentage then we do our iron condors and strangles about 20 to 25 percent is what we'll look for and fxi moved down right after but it's kind of come back now and it's it's it's well within range so just waiting for some more time to pass in fxi we take a look at at the chart it's had a steep drop down which is obviously what pumped implied volatility up and so we're not just waiting for it to kind of settle down in a range here mix trade was a closing trade so we bought back our strangle in zn which is the notes ivy percentile contracted down to the 13 level had to make a few adjustments on this trade but ended up booking a nice winner if we take a look at the remember we look at tlt for the indicator because it does not it's not accurate on the actual future and you can see implied volatility now in tlt very low so we'll wait for that to come back up before we enter any any new positions in the bonds or notes or tlt or anything like that next trade that eww already mentioned that one uh mentioned both of those eww trades and then uh we had a we had a post earnings most of the earnings announcements already done for the quarter but a couple stragglers and kr kroger had a had an earnings announcement and and they had a it had a huge move up so just like we teach in our earnings course on the lesson on post earnings trades short uh short puts and short put verticals on post earning trades if price if price opens up above the expected move then we look for price to stay steady to higher so we like to sell puts or sell put verticals in this case we sold a put vertical and um and so if you take a let's take a look at at kr because we actually took this trade off just one day later for a profit so we put it on down here and as we had hoped and expected price continued higher now right after i sent the alert out um anyone who's in this trade could have actually gotten out at actually much better prices than us so you know that's just part of the game sometimes you get filled at better prices sometimes not quite as good but all works out at the end uh and if you're still holding this at this point you're you're uh you're doing even better so nice trade there we were able to get out for a uh nice profit booked over 45 percent of max profit in less than 24 hours so that was a that was a nice easy quick trade so those are all the alerts let's go over some of the other positions that we have uh oil big move up today up over four and a half percent if we take a look we had rolled down our calls and adjusted the strangle now prices come all the way back so sometimes you get whips out on these a little bit but still continuing to manage and we will look to potentially add another piece to this to collect more credit extend time on this one if needed if it bounces back and gets more recenter we'll just continue to wait until we need to close or roll yes we've got two positions on we've got our long put vertical which we're just holding for that short bias some short delta in our portfolio so just need a little bit of downside movement to benefit that and then we've got an iron condor here which uh get a little bit of down move should be able to close that piece out and we'll continue to uh extend duration maybe add another iron condor out in august next week depending on where implied volatility is but look for that next week natty gas we've got an iron condor got a little bit of profit there not enough to take off i mentioned corn i mentioned wheat uh apple so we've got this long put vertical also holding for some short bias short delta in our portfolio and start got a little bit of downside this week so that helped could use some more and we'll probably continue to to roll this once we get closer to expiration but we'll see what happens we may just may just end up closing it out depending on where things are depending on where the rest of our portfolio is dia we've got an iron condor on in dia and then we also have two sets of short call verticals which we're holding for some more short delta so you can see we've got some profit there just could use a little bit more downside to benefit that whenever eem ewewewz fxi iwm we've got an iron condor here could use a little downside to benefit that piece and then we've also got a short call vertical that was previously from an iron condor you can see prices just right outside the range there could just use a little bit more downside to benefit that and then the cues we've got a couple short call verticals here as well for that short these were previously part of iron condors which we've continued to roll and just looking for some downside there and then the same with xlk got a little bit of downside here could use a little bit more to benefit that so right now where we stand on our ratio we always talk about this ratio between our theta and our short delta when we're selling premium like this and doing these range bound trades it makes sense to carry short delta in our portfolio because the velocity of a down move a lot of times is more fierce than that of an up move also when prices move down in equities that also creates a spike in implied volatility so to protect ourselves we keep some short delta so right now we are at about two to two and a half to one on our ratio meaning we have about two and a half times the amount of short delta then we do of theta and that's right in line where we want to be kind of in that one to one or one to five at the max is the ratio that we like to look at we're about one to two and a half right now so perfect and we've got a good good variety of symbols I'd you know I'd love to put on some more positions in the next week if we have some opportunities but we've got a good diversification with the euro oil s and p's nat gas corn wheat some individual stocks apple the dow emerging markets mexico brazil china small cap technology so got a good variety some good uncorrelated positions which is what we like to always have and so we'll continue to manage those as needed everybody have a great weekend and we will talk to you next week


I'm Jonathan Derby. I was the first president of ALT. In fact, the idea for an association for learning technology was mine. It came to me in 1992. At that time I was directing the Computers in Teaching initiative, which was a precursor of the Higher Education Academy subject centre network. It consisted of 24 subject centres, like the academies, each of which was seeking to support the innovative and effective use of technology in teaching in a particular subject. CTI Centre for Geography, Chemistry, English and so on. At one of our regular gatherings of CTI centre directors and staff, I put the idea to them that we might work together to set up an association for learning technology. The reason for this was that the Computer and Teaching initiative was funded by government as a short term initiative, three years. We had just come to a point coming towards the end of that three years and we had a review and were being extended for another two years. I was starting to feel how unsatisfactory it was that here was a community of people actively involved in learning technology, both the centres themselves and the people they worked with out in universities. And yet our existence, our very existence was at the whim of the funders and we could be gone the moment the funding ran out. I felt there was a real need to create something that would be both enduring and more importantly owned by the practitioners themselves. And in that way also create a forum, a place for the hard-won knowledge and expertise of those actively involved in this area to be exchanged. I have to say the proposal, the suggestion for an association was not well met by the Director of the Confucian Teaching Initiative. They thought it would be confusing, it would duplicate what they were doing and there wasn't a great deal of enthusiasm for it, but a few of them thought it was a good idea. So I moulded it over a bit more. Then a short time later I had a couple of people approached me, Graham Chesters from Hull and Gabriel Jacobs from the University of Wales at Swansea. They were editors of a journal that was in search of a home, it wasn't doing terribly well, it was on technology and education. And they said, look if you're going to set up an association, how about taking over this journal and making it the journal of the association, which seemed like a very good idea to me. But I was still worried because it's a lot of work getting something like set up and we weren't at all sure how we were going to manage it. Because clearly it couldn't be done at the cost of the work we were paid to do in the Confucian Teaching Initiative. And then a short time later I was at a function organised by BT in BT Tower in London and I happened to mention to someone from BT our interest in setting up an association. But the sticking point was what would really help it get off the ground and running quickly would be if we could employ someone to work on behalf of the association. But unless we had money in the bank to underwrite such a post for a couple of years it wouldn't be possible to do and I thought no more about it. And then a couple of weeks later I had a phone call saying, you know what you were saying about an association for learning technology would £50,000 help. And I said yes it would at that time, that was enough to cover salary for two years. And so at that point we rolled into action, we got advertising for points someone. I wrote to everybody I knew in our education who had an interest in or was involved in it and it was about 200 people inviting them to become founder members. And more than half of those who I wrote to responded and said yes they would like to and promptly joined. And then as those of you who saw Wendy Hall's presentation yesterday will recall it was launched at Cal 93, the Cal Conference in 1993. And from that point it went from strength to strength. We're particularly celebrating at this conference, the first conference which took place in September 1994, 20 years ago. Sorry that was 19 years ago wasn't it, but this is like our 20th conference. And at that conference we had just a little short of 300 people coming which was quite remarkable for a new association and a new world. And some of the objectives of the association were achieved very quickly. The establishment of a community that recognised itself and the creation of effective ways of exchanging ideas and knowledge between members of the association was something we were able to do really quite quickly. The other thing we were really keen to do though was to start to influence policy. At that time quite a lot of money from government was being put into learning technology initiatives, not only the caboose and teaching initiative that I was responsible for, but there was also the teaching learning technology programme. And that was trying to significantly improve the effectiveness of higher education by creating computer based tools for teaching large population first year subjects, so maths, psychology, chemistry, economics etc. And so this was if you like an attempt to lower the cost of higher education through use of technology, but nobody actually involved thought this was at all realistic as a target and yet the justification for getting the money out of government to fund this had been just that. So decisions were being taken at a senior level based on unrealistic expectations and very limited understanding of the technology and just what it was or was not suitable for. So we were keen that the association should start to influence policy, should be consulted by those at the senior level and that I think took another 10 years to occur, it was a long time before we really got to that point. So here we are in 2013, looking back over 20 years a lot has happened, but in some ways the questions remain the same, what are the best ways to use technology to meet the big problems and issues that we face in higher education. And there's a session coming up shortly at 5-12 where I and a number of other past presidents will be reflecting on the changes of the last 20 years and what the future holds for learning technology. So I hope you'll be able to join that session.